I shall argue that Behe’s Irreducible Complexity fails to invalidate a proper understanding of Darwinian evolution by natural selection by considering three ways in which evolution might adequately explain seemingly irreducible complexity. I shall then argue that even granting Behe the falsity of evolution is insufficient to establish an Intelligent Designer. Lastly, I shall couple Behe with Dembski’s argument for reliable empirical indication of intelligent causation, and show this strongest version of Intelligent Design to be a fallacious argument from ignorance at worst or most charitably understood as an ultimately unwarranted inference to best explanation.

φ

It should be noted that all Intelligent Design (ID) arguments are themselves components of an overarching argument for scientific legitimacy. That is, the aim of the ID movement is not only to provide arguments for the explanatory necessity of an Intelligent Designer but also to legitimise said arguments scientifically. As much can be said against the inclusion of ID, and as interesting demarcation in philosophy of science may be, I shall here solely concern myself with the philosophical validity and soundness of the former kind. Whether the arguments can be said to be scientific will take a backseat to whether they are right.

As per Dembski (1998) the two-pronged approach of the ID movement is the critique of Darwinism coupled with the provision of a positive alternative – i.e. Intelligent Design. If Dembski by ‘Darwinism’ does not mean ‘Darwinian evolution by natural selection’ (henceforth ‘evolution’) his allusions are utterly abstruse to me. However, this would imply that Dembski’s scientific literacy is wanting as attested by his claims that ‘[a]ccording to Darwinism, undirected natural causes are solely responsible for the origin and development of life’ and that ‘Darwinism [is] hopelessly entangled with naturalism.’ Neither, of course, is accurate. Evolution is concerned neither with the origin of life nor with ontology. Evolution merely states that those organisms or genes least likely to die in a given environment will therefore be the ones most likely to reproduce and eventually become quantitatively dominant. Evolution is silent on the matter of life’s origins and the existence of the supernatural alike.

Of course, natural selection is a natural cause but it is hardly ‘undirected.’ The natural selection of random mutations in a population is very much directed by environmental pressures. It is likely that Dembski meant to say ‘undirected by any intelligence’ but a simple thought-experiment wherein we imagine life originating from a supernatural agent who occasionally enjoys tinkering with environmental pressures, thereby obliquely directing natural selection, should suffice as a counterexample to Darwinism ruling out ‘the possibility of a God or any guiding intelligence playing a role in life’s origin and development.’ Indeed, human beings ourselves constitute guiding intelligences playing a role in life’s development – granted mostly through artificial selection but also occasionally through altering environmental pressures and thereby affecting the course of natural selection.

Having a firm conceptual grasp on evolution we may now turn to the first prong of the ID approach, namely the critique of evolution as championed by Behe, and see how it fares. Behe argues for an Intelligent Designer from a supposed deficiency in evolution to explain how certain biochemical systems came about. Behe attributes such systems the property of Irreducible Complexity; defined as follows:

A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

(Behe, 2006, p. 257)

The idea is that since evolution requires every mutation selected for to be of gradually increasing advantageousness to survival, and if it can be shown that a system loses its advantageous function by the removal of any of its component parts, then that system is irreducibly complex and cannot have evolved gradually. The astute reader might rightly wonder how a disproof of evolution in any way is proof of a designer or proof against all possible natural explanations whatsoever. However, my charitability is here curtailed by my incomprehension of Behe’s position. He seemingly thinks that irreducible complexity somehow constitutes ‘a purposeful arrangement of parts that bespeaks design’ (2005, p. 87). I can, at the most charitable, only see it as an arrangement of parts unexplainable by evolution but possibly by some other explanation. It could be either natural or supernatural and surely purposiveness has yet to be demonstrated either way.

I shall drop this for now. It is better dealt with in our later considerations of inferences to best explanation and in any case, as we shall see, Behe’s position can be strengthened by a symbiosis with Dembski’s. For now let us consider proposals as to how irreducible complexity might evolve after all. We said before that every selected mutation must be advantageous. This was a lie by omission. For ease of understanding evolution is often described in positive terms as selection for fitness. However, more accurate is the negative description of selection against unfitness, prompting the revision ‘survival of the fit enough.’ (Scott, p. 37) It is not ‘endorsement’ of advantage; only ‘censure’ of disadvantage and therefore mutations need only be fitness-neutral. Indeed, there is ample evidence that human beings have suffered neutral genetic drift resulting in losing the ability to produce vitamin C (as opposed to most other mammals) due to evolving in an environment with a ready dietary availability (Max, 2003).

This leads us to scaffolding. According to Michael Ruse the salient point ‘is not whether the parts now in place could not be removed without collapse, but whether they could have been put in place by natural selection.’ (2008) The oft-repeated analogy is that an arched stone-bridge is ‘irreducibly complex’ by Behe’s definition since the removal of any stone would collapse it. Yet we know it was not built instantaneously; rather onto supporting scaffolding later removed. Similarly a system might be irreducibly complex now, only due to past shedding of its reducible ‘scaffolding’ in neutral genetic drift.

Above: The removal of any arch-stone would result in collapse.

Below: After the bridge is built the scaffolding (brown) is burnt away.

Another closely related evolutionary path to irreducible complexity is improbable but possible happenstance. Suppose an adaptive ability requires two (or more) mutations in order to function and either mutation alone is useless. As long as mutation A confers no disadvantage it could still be acquired through neutral drift without mutation B, priming the organism for advantage if B should turn up later. One might be inclined to scoff at the improbability. However, this possible scenario has already been proven actual in an ongoing experiment by bacteriologist Richard Lenski, in which e-coli bacteria evolved the metabolism to feed on citrate. The improbability of such an event fades into mere rarity by the law of large numbers but is still rare enough to demonstrate the requirement of more than one mutation (Dawkins, pp. 116-133).

The final way in which evolution can give rise to irreducible complexity is cooption or exaptation. This is the commonest answer given to Behe’s favourite example; the bacterial flagellum. In the Dover Trial (Behe, 2005, pp. 80 – ) Eric Rothschild, attorney, continually mentions the type III secretory system as a possible precursor to the flagellum. We need not go into too much detail but the general gist is that even though the removal of any flagellum-part will cease locomotive function, partial flagella can still be put to some other functional use – e.g. secretion. Behe concedes as much yet nonetheless insists that even though the type III secretory system is indeed a subset of a flagellum – i.e. identical to a flagellum with parts missing – the flagellum is still irreducibly complex because said subset does not function as a flagellum.

Left: Type III secretory system. Right: Bacterial flagellum.

I make neither head nor tails of this insistence since evolution, to my understanding, implies no demand for specific functionality but as previously stated only selects against detriment. To make a silly but evolutionarily accurate allusion to Nietzsche: what does not kill you will make your descendants stronger if they can find a use for it – any use.

However, an argument for an intelligent designer – as opposed to against evolution – can hardly stand and fall at the failed or successive critique of evolution alone. From the supposed explanatory inadequacy of evolution regarding an unexplained phenomenon nothing else follows about what does explain said phenomenon. Conversely if an appeal to intelligence adequately explanatory of the phenomenon were produced nothing else follows about evolution.

QualiaSoup's explanation of what's wrong with arguments from ignorance.

Simply, evolution and intelligent design are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. If we had two adequately explanatory hypotheses for the same phenomenon we could strengthen one at the expense of criticising the other but Behe has made no headway in producing neither arguments for – nor explanatory adequacy of – an intelligent designer. The case for one is therefore not strengthened by his critique. Let us then grant Behe the falsity of evolution for the sake of argument and seek assistance from Dembski’s proposed demarcation between design and non-design.

Dembski’s argument is that the property he calls ‘complex specified information’ is a reliable empirical indicator for intelligent causation. To be honest no amount of reading has yet yielded me a clear understanding of Dembski’s concepts and I am not alone in my confusion. However, since mathematics and information theory are far out of my depth I defer deeper criticism to the equally puzzled Elsberry et. al. (2009). As far as I can gather we may strike ‘information’ from the property since, whatever it is, it follows from ‘specified complexity’ alone. According to Dembski Complexity ‘is a form of probability’ and specification is defined as ‘a match between an event and an independently given pattern.’ (Ruse, 2008) To the best of my understanding, it is a needlessly convoluted way of saying that non-arbitrary patterns are more indicative of design the greater their improbability of happening by chance.

At the risk of being uncharitable – and I make no pretension to correct exegesis – Dembski seems deliberately obscure for the sake of a cleverly disguised strawman. Evolution is not committal to but the rejection of improbable random chance in favour of probable non-random natural selection. Nobody is committed to ‘lucky chance’ and, as previously mentioned, the improbability of a specified outcome is indicative only of an explanation – not a specific intelligent one – even if we grant being ignorant of the explanation for the sake of argument. It should be clear now that design arguments are at worst fallacious arguments from ignorance and at best attempted inferences to best explanation.

Either they fallaciously argue to an intelligent cause of a phenomenon by appeal to our ignorance of its explanation, or – more charitably – they infer, from the premise that the design hypothesis would provide a “better” explanation for the evidence than would any other hypothesis, to the conclusion of its truth (adapted from Harman, 1965). However, such charity cannot stave off the resulting problems. First, the argument that theism cannot provide causal explanations (Le Poidevin, 1996, pp. 35-38) is easily adapted to ID since it scarcely meets the criteria of informativeness nor of generalised connection between cause and effect. ‘The flagellum was produced by a flagellum-producing intelligence’ explains nothing at all but merely asserts intelligence while said assertion was warranted only by its supposed explanatory adequacy. Moreover, there is no generalised connection between intelligence and flagellum.

Second, enumerative inductive inferences from a particular instance to a universal affirmative proposition are reliable if and only if the possible counterexamples to the proposition are exhausted. ID arguments construed as attempted inferences to best explanation argue from the single instance of a failed natural explanation to the failure of all other possible natural and supernatural explanations bar one. The ID proponent only escapes the argument from ignorance by committing an equally fallacious false dichotomy of ‘either evolution or ID.’ Granted, we might be hard-pressed to come up with an alternative natural explanation to rival evolution but that might just attest to the success of Darwin or the failure of our imagination. It is easier by far to go supernatural; if I am allowed to posit a flagellum-producing intelligence why not an unintelligent flagellum-assembling machine constituted by the Platonic ideals of cogs and springs running on steaminess? I fail to see why the eternal existence of such a Platonic Assembler should be any more mysterious than that of an Intelligent Designer.

φ

We have seen that properly understood evolution might produce seemingly irreducible complexity by way of scaffolding, possible happenstance by neutral genetic drift, or cooption – each of which is supported by ample evidence. Thus having met Behe’s objection we have seen that even granting the falsity of evolution makes no headway in establishing an intelligent designer since a disproof of the former in no way constitutes proof of the latter. We have then seen that Dembski’s empirical identification of intelligent causation by specified complexity verges on the incomprehensible and to the extent it can be understood and applied to Behe’s position makes ID arguments out to be arguments from ignorance at worst and attempted inferences to best explanation at best. Lastly, we have seen such an inference to best explanation as unwarranted since evolution and ID exhaust neither all possible natural nor supernatural explanations and thereby finally collapse into false dichotomy.

Bibliography

• Behe, M.J. (2005). Dover Trial. [Court hearing transcript]. United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania with E. J. Rothschild. 19^th October 2005. Available at: http://www.aclupa.org/downloads/Day12AM.pdf
• Behe, M.J., 2006. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Free Press. Available at: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Black-Box-Biochemical-Challenge/dp/0743290313.
• Dawkins, R., 2010. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Free Press. Available at: http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolution/dp/1416594795.
• Dembski, W.A., The Intelligent Design Movement. Cosmic Pursuit. Available at: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/dembski/docs/bd-idesign.html.
• Elsberry, W. & Shallit, J., 2009. Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski’s “complex specified information.” Synthese, 178(2), pp.237-270. Available at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/a1l08u041t72m227/.
• Harman, G.H., 1965. The Inference to the Best Explanation. The Philosophical Review, 74(1), pp.88-95. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183532.
• Max, E.E., 2003. Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics. The Talk Origins Archive. Available at: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/molgen/.
• Poidevin, R.L., 1996. Arguing for Atheism: Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Routledge. Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arguing-Atheism-Introduction-Philosophy-Religion/dp/0415093384.
• Ruse, M., 2008. Creationism. In E. N. Zalta, ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/creationism/.
• Scott, E.C., 2009. Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction, 2nd Edition, University of California Press. Available at: http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-vs-Creationism-Introduction-2nd/dp/0520261879.

“I want to change the past,” Tina insisted. “What good’s a time-machine if it can’t even change the past?” The flickering lights on the head of Tina’s robot servant, Chipton, turned red in response. “Your request is irrational. The past is the set of events preceding the present. One cannot change a set while retaining its identity; it would be a different set. Your request is tantamount to a desire for an event to have happened and not happened at the same time.” Tina frowned and shook her head. “Oh, you and your cold, mechanical words! That’s most certainly not what I mean by ‘changing the past.’ I just want to live in a world where something else happened in 1921 – with a different set from ours if you will – what’s so irrational about that?”

φ

I shall disambiguate between three meanings of change; replacement, relational, and essential. I then argue that a simple branching model satisfies at least one meaning while avoiding the grandfather paradox. Finally I will meet the objection that branching doesn’t really provide the possibility of changing the past, by arguing it stems from an unreasonable insistence on essential change that should, for different reasons, not be open to Lewis and Inwagen anyway.

Given the esoteric nature of the topic, asking why we should bother is perfectly reasonable. Sider (2002) reasons that metaphysicians ought to make sense of what physicists take seriously and that time-travel has farther reaching implications for other related questions in philosophy. While Sider’s reasons are both commendable and legitimate, my concerns are nowhere near as lofty. I simply prefer consistency in my time-travel fiction.

It is apparently customary to start these considerations by pointing out that time-travel to the future is trivial. Just find a comfortable spot and wait. I would also surmise that by now (post-Lewis, 1976) time-travel to the past – although having to contend with objections from free will and massive coincidence – is unproblematic as long as we do not change the past. On Lewis’ account if you today set your time-machine to 200 years ago, before you left, our history already contained the fact of your arrival in 1810 and of your subsequent actions in the past. It follows that you cannot murder your grandfather prior to him conceiving your parent because we know that this is in fact not what happened.

However, while this deftly avoids paradox, it is rather unsatisfactory for alternate history buffs. Writer, Neil Gaiman, once wrote (1997) that the most important question in fiction-writing is ‘What if?’ While it can be quite enjoyable to read about a particularly clever time-loop, the main attraction of time-travel is undeniably the exploration of ‘what if you could make it have happened differently?’ Our mission is therefore to help Tina find a possible way to murder her grandfather.

Consider the statement ‘I want my president to be another person.’ It is immediately clear that what is desirous is some sort of change but what it would take to satisfy my desire is ambiguous. Most likely the first thing to spring to mind is:

• Currently Obama holds the title of president but I want it stripped off him and given to McCain.

I shall call this sort of change ‘replacement.’ However, perhaps not wanting Obama to be my president is not sufficient for me to wish the man stripped of his title and livelihood. Maybe what I meant was:

• Currently I live in the USA where Obama is my president but I want to move to a country so that someone else is my president – e.g. to France and Sarkozy.

I shall call this sort of change ‘relational.’ Then again, I might be a mad scientist (or philosopher) and desire terrible things done to Obama. Perhaps I meant:

• I want to change the very soul (or neural pathways, or whatever) of Obama so that Obama is no longer Obama but someone else.

I shall call this sort of change ‘essential.’ I make no presumption here that essential change of Obama makes sense or that my three sorts are exhaustive. I presume only that all three sorts of change are something we might mean.

When Tina expresses her desire to change the past Chipton interprets it as a request for essential change. Chipton understands Tina as saying ‘I want that particular past to both have and not have its essential properties.’ Sometimes we entertain mutually exclusive desires either because we haven’t thought them through or because we’re in two minds about what we truly want. However, assuming Tina knows what she wants and is well aware that a dead-alive grandfather is nonsense, Chipton’s is an uncharitable interpretation.

I shall return to considering replacement change and relational change momentarily. For now I shall propose, as a way to satisfy Tina’s request, the frequently referred to – and just as frequently dismissed – branching model (Lewis, 1976, calls it ‘branching time;’ Inwagen, 2010, ‘branching histories’). Let us first imagine branching without any added time-travel. Note that I shall be using verbs in my description but that this should not be taken to mean that the branching timeline is actually ‘doing’ anything. They are just for ease of description. We start with the standard timeline one might find in a history-book. For simplicity’s sake let’s suppose your birth as farthest left and your death farthest right. Feel free to add details in-between – first day of school, first kiss, this very moment, a year from now etc. The next step is imagining what-if’s and to bifurcate the timeline into a separate branch for each way it could have gone. For instance, imagine the line splitting into one go-to-school line and one stay-at-home line, etc.

If you kept dividing branches of branches for every imaginable possibility, this would fast become complicated. However, the general gist is quite sufficient for our purposes. Applying this to time travel we can look at the original timeline and suppose that a year from now you will travel back to the moment of your first kiss and stop it. Obviously future you was not originally present at your first kiss but just as there is a bifurcation between you going ahead with the kiss and you backing out at the last second, there is a third branch wherein past you was rudely interrupted in the romance by future you.

Hopefully it is clear how this solves the grandfather paradox. While writing this, the timeline just split into a branch wherein I kept writing and a branch wherein I was brutally slaughtered by my future grandchild, time-travelling from ‘down the line’ wherein I kept writing. This is fully consistent and both Lewis and Inwagen (op. cit.) have conceded as much (with Inwagen further conceding it as ‘real time-travel’ and Lewis being silent on that issue). However, they also unanimously agree it is not really a case of changing the past.

I can only make sense of the objection if I assume Lewis and Inwagen mean something like essential change. Although we should tread carefully to not belabour them with Chipton’s views as they are not necessarily committed to the same explication. However, we may now proclaim that while branching might not get us essential change of the past it will most certainly provide us with relational change. Just as I can move from the USA to France to change who the president is in relation to me, Tina can move from our branch to another to change the vital status of her grandfather in 1921 in relation to her.

It would seem the answer to the question ‘Is it possible for Tina to change the past so her grandfather died in 1921?’ is ‘yes, if we mean relational change.’ However, we can do better. I shall argue that whatever may be meant by change neither Lewis nor Inwagen can consistently raise the ‘not really changing the past’ objection against branching for separate reasons. Instead of focusing on what we mean by ‘changing the past’ let us turn our attention to ‘possibility.’

One theory we might hold is Lewis’ own modal counterpart theory, which “identifies possibly being F with having a counterpart—an appropriately similar object in another possible world—that is F.” (Sider, 2006) Applying this to our case what it means to assert the possibility of Grandfather being murdered by Tina in 1921 is that Grandfather has a possible world counterpart who is murdered by her in 1921. Possible worlds are not minutely analogous to temporal branches but they are sufficiently close to say that this is exactly what branches let us do. One might object that to use Tina instead of a counterpart-Tina is cheating, but since we are considering jumping branches with a time-machine I do not see why it should matter – if you must, simply pretend our time-machine has the side-effect of turning time-travellers into counterparts (whatever that means).

What’s interesting is that the objection against branching is directly analogous to the Humphrey objection against counterpart theory. So while we have Kripke saying Humphrey “could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world” (ibid.) against counterparts, we have Inwagen (2010) saying against branching that “on the branching-histories picture of “murdering van Inwagen when he was twenty,” I have nothing to worry about: you’ll get into your time-machine and vanish, never to be seen again, and my life will go on much as before.”

We can then borrow Sider’s reply that “according to counterpart theory, the property of possibly winning is the property of having a counterpart who wins” and say that according to branching Grandfather’s property of possibly being killed in 1921 by Tina is the property of having a branch-counterpart who is killed in 1921 by Tina. To mirror Sider’s ‘permanent bachelor’ class (2002) if you still insist branch-counterpart Grandfather is not the real one, it must be because you consider the property of ‘hitherto survivor’ an essential property. I shall not argue with that; the point is the objections against branching and counterpart theory ought either stand or fall together.

Inwagen’s past-changing model is a four-dimensional block growing in hypertime. Imagine drawing our history-book timeline from left to right. As you draw, the present is always at the tip of your pencil as past events are left behind farther and farther to your left. Inwagen imagines an Intelligence observing this block as it grows, watching a person enter a time-machine resulting in the obliteration of a large chunk of block. Imagine as you were drawing the line someone inside the line started erasing it backwards so that it could be drawn anew differently.

I feel Inwagen is doing some very clever misdirection. First of all, this would be begging the question against someone insisting only essential change can count as real change. Inwagen can borrow the identity of the block from its persistence through hypertime but his is still replacement change if we continue to view the block as a mereological sum – as was my understanding of the dialectic. Moreover, it is not clear to me that his model is significantly different from branching. Consider the following thought-experiment: when Inwagen’s block hypershrinks, the chunk, instead of being obliterated, is sliced off. The Intelligence can now either incinerate it or reattach it at a different angle from the point of divergence from the hyper-new outgrowth. We would then have two branches!

The difference between replacement change and relational change was obvious regarding Obama; less so when applied to temporal ontology. Why should it matter what happens to old branches upon departure? Again it seems to me the models should stand and fall together and that the benefits of Inwagen’s model are merely sleight of hand. Branching has the real benefit of allowing past-changing (at least provisionally) while not requiring hypertime and not making time-travellers mass-murderers.

I have argued that a branching model makes possible relational change of the past while avoiding paradox. While this might not satisfy Lewis and Inwagen, it should certainly satisfy Tina, who could live in a world in which she killed Grandfather in 1921. What more could she want? To insist it is not really Grandfather, is to insist 1921-surviving is a necessary part of Grandather’s identity. Not only is this a strange view of Grandfather but I have also argued that such insistence should be open neither to Lewis due to his commitment to counterpart theory – in which losing the election cannot be a necessary part of Humphrey’s identity – nor to Inwagen due to his hypergrowing block’s helping itself to non-essential change. If counterpart theory and Inwagen past-change are consistent then so is branching. If branching fails against the not-really-change objection then so, for the same reasons, should counterparts and Inwagen past-change. To boot branching allows a sort of past-change, lets us retain eternalism if we want, doesn’t require hypertime, and avoids mass-murder.

Mr. Strickland: No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley!

Marty McFly: Yeah, well, history is gonna’ change. (Back to the Future, 1985)

Bibliography

• Gaiman, N., 1997. Where do you get your ideas? NeilGaiman.com. Available at: http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Essays/…
• Inwagen, P. van, 2010. Changing the Past. In D. W. Zimmerman, ed. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Vol. 5. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3-28.
• Lewis, D., 1976. The Paradoxes of Time Travel. American Philosophical Quarterly, 13(2), pp.145 – 152. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20009616.
• Sider, T., 2006. Beyond the Humphrey Objection ∗. Available at: http://tedsider.org/papers/counterpart_theory.pdf.
• Sider, T., 2002. Time Travel, Coincidences and Counterfactuals. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 110(2), pp.115 – 138. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4321289.
• Zemeckis, R., 1985. Back to the Future, Universal Pictures

• Clip Art from: The Open Clip Art Library

Can functionalism ever escape Exotic Qualia objections?

I shall formulate a meta-argument encompassing all Exotic Qualia problems and argue that while Lewis and Horgan might successfully escape certain guises of the problem neither eradicates it completely. I then suggest the only promising defence of functionalism therefore is a Chalmers-approach.

ɸ

I take functionalism as the position that mental states are states that play a specific causal role in regards to their causes and effects, to other mental states, and to the behaviour of the individual.

In other, perhaps simplified, words what it is for an individual to be in a mental state, ‘pain’ being a worryingly common example, is for that individual to be in a mental state that for him fulfils the ‘pain-role’ – e.g. is caused by touching a hot stove, distracts him from other mental states, makes him go ‘ouch,’ and has the effect of him withdrawing his hand.

Opponents and proponents of functionalism alike seem to agree that functionalism’s biggest problem is qualia. I say ‘problem’ in the singular since I shall argue that it is really one problem in many guises.

‘Qualia’ is a peculiar word in that it is much easier to understand than to explain. To return to our previous example; aside from the mental state of pain fulfilling role there is also an immediate quality to pain, which is not to be found in an objective description of said role. In our example we offered a clinical description from a God’s eye perspective. Most likely our description would look quite different had the recipient of said pain been us. For one, we can imagine it would contain a significantly increased amount of profanity in addition to being first person.

We described pain from the outside looking in but is it not at least as legitimate to describe pain from the inside looking out? Although this might seem an odd way to do philosophy, given that the subject matter is the attempt to explain mind, we should hardly want to explain it away. While we want to explain how the mind works we should preferably also respect the fact that there is a very real way in which it is like something to be said mind.

The common charge against functionalism then is that it does not properly respect qualia. This is usually shown by imagining bizarre thought-experiments, which I shall refer to as Exotic Qulia – e.g. madmen who feel pain when doing mild exercise, people who see red when the rest of us see blue, zombie-people who behave exactly as we do even though they have no mind, or increasingly unlikely contraptions – an intricate system of pipes and valves mimicking the functions of a brain, Chinese people mimicking neurons by signalling one another via walkie-talkies etc.

Inverted Qualia; a common Exotic Qualia example.

It is interesting to note the difference in the bizarreness of these thought-experiments and its tendency to increase the longer they fail to persuade functionalists of their erroneous ways. However, there is a meta-argument against functionalism underlying everything from the Madman to the Chinese Nation Brain:

1.      If functionalism is true and inasmuch as A and B are functionally alike then A and B are in the same mental state.

2.      However, it is possible that A and B are functionally alike yet in different mental states (qualia).

3.      Therefore, functionalism is false.

(Adapted from Byrne, 2010)

I left out that A and B have to be in sufficiently similar situations; we do not consider the difference between A and B mental states relevant if A is skiing and B is leading an exodus out of Egypt. The rhetorical trick to this argument is to pick intuitively appealing examples of A and B and, depending on the level of bizarreness, perhaps one might want to substitute P2 with ‘However, even though A and B are functionally alike they are obviously different in mental states since B is possibly just any hunk of junk whatever (borrowed from Searle, Dennett, 1982)!’

The logically astute reader might already see something amiss in the argument. We cannot derive the falsity of functionalism from the possibility in P2 unless there is a necessity to be found somewhere in P1. Consider; if pigs are mammals, pigs do not lay eggs. However, there is no inconsistency in both positing the possibility of egg-laying sows while still retaining the factuality of pigs being mammals. One might wonder why I refrained from simply including necessity. Given that P1 contains at least two conditionals I am not entirely sure what the scope of the necessity ought to be. Perhaps I could work it out. However, all is moot when considering it is not obvious the functionalist should grant any particular necessity scope in P1 or any at all.

Indeed David Lewis states that ‘the concept of pain as Armstrong and I understand it is a nonrigid concept. Likewise the word “pain” is a nonrigid designator (Lewis, 1983).’ According to Lewis then, in all the possible worlds in which the concept of pain exists, ‘pain’ does not necessarily refer to the same bare-feel mental state – nor does it have to as long as it refers to the mental state that happens to be playing the pain-role. Should that not be the end of it? Is Lewis not free now to claim that while ‘pig’ could refer to egg-laying creatures in an imagined world in our actual world all pigs just so happen to be mammals?

If it were that easy there should be no reason for Lewis to be concerned with Exotic Qualia; yet he clearly is as evidenced by his claim that ‘[a] credible theory of mind needs to make place both for mad pain and for Martian pain (ibid.).’ A reason for his concern is found in the fact that he takes the possibility of Exotic Qualia seriously:

Nonrigidity might begin at home. All actualities are possibilities, so the variety of possibilities includes the variety of actualities. Though some possibilities are thoroughly otherworldly, others may be found on planets within range of our telescopes (ibid.).

Lewis then reintroduces our meta-argument in the guise of his hypothetical madman who feels pain (qualia) when doing mild exercise and responds to qualia-pain by thinking about mathematics. A note of interest is that while Lewis saw a boon to functionalism in its ability to account for the qualia of hydraulic-brained Martians, depending on pre-philosophical intuitions one might just as easily consider said Martians arbitrary ‘hunk-of-junk’ assemblages counting against functionalism.

Lewis attempts to account both for madman and Martian by combining the view that ‘pain’ is the mental state fulfilling a certain causal role and that ‘pain’ is identical to some matter of physics. Says Lewis ‘If the state of having neurons hooked up in a certain way and firing in a certain pattern is the state properly apt for causing and being caused, as we materialists think, then that neural state is pain. But the concept of pain is not the concept of that neural state (ibid.).’ Lewis could have avoided confusing me if he would just make a clearer semantic distinction between role-pain and qualia-pain. Lewis’ madman is in qPain even though he is not, relative to himself, in rPain because his neural pattern is the same as ours when we are in rPain.

However, it should now become clear that if Lewis takes seriously the possibility of Exotic Qualia, then we can just reintroduce the problem at the qPain level. Suppose the madman and I have identical neurological patterns. We are both in role-pain, we are both in neuro-pain, but who is to say whether we are both in qualia-pain? After all, the charge against functionalism was not that it does not properly respect neurology but that it does not properly respect qualia. One might be inclined to think that the thought of A and B being functionally alike as well as physically alike verges on the impossible – as some philosophers do (Byrne, 2010). However, if that is the case then a credible theory of mind should not need to make place for mad pain.

Terence Horgan sees the same problem as do I with Lewisian functionalism:

…it is just self-evident, I submit, that the qualitative content of Jill’s experience when she looks at grass is an absolute, intrinsic feature of her mental life – not a feature that is implicitly population-relative. There is, absolutely and non-relatively, something it is like for Jill when she looks at grass.

In other words, any fancy explanation involving rPain or even nPain does nothing to alleviate us of Exotic Qualia problems inasmuch as it does not tell us something convincing about qPain. As initially promising as Horgan’s criticism of Lewis is, I should say that in the end his solution does not differ all that much from Lewis. Horgan differentiates between phenomenal pain (qPain) and functional pain (rPain) wherafter he proposes an identity relation between qPain and ‘neurophysiological state-types’ (nPain) and that rPain should be construed functionally. I shall not get into too much detail here but suffice it to say that while Horgan might be successful in dealing with Inverted Qualia he himself admits that his theory is vulnerable to Absent Qualia objections.

The prospect of Martians who are functionally similar to us but who either lack qualia altogether or else have dramatically different qualia, raises with a vengeance the traditional problem of other minds. If partial functionalism is correct, how could we ever tell whether Martians have qualia?

Horgan proposes we simply ask the Martians whether they think there is more to mentality than is functionally definable and on the basis of their answer infer whether they have qualia. Inasmuch as Horgan is right in his assessment of his own theory’s vulnerabilities and asking is his only solution, I feel perfectly justified in proclaiming that Horgan makes no headway in defeating our meta-argument. The whole point of the ‘other minds’ problem is that zombies would be behaviourally, functionally, and conversationally indistinguishable from non-zombies despite it not being like anything to be them. A Martian zombie functionally inclined to do so would insist just as vehemently as anyone else that it has qualia.

I couldn't find Martian Manhunter as a zombie.

I have argued that neither Lewis nor Horgan manage to satisfactorily contend with the meta-argument and it is unclear to me whether mucking around with theoretical minutiae ever could. For this reason I find David Chalmers’ approach much more promising. In ‘Absent Qualia…’ Chalmers argues for what he calls the principle of organizational invariance; that experience is invariant across systems with the same fine-grained functional organization. In terms of our meta-argument Chalmers only concedes an empirical necessity to P1 enabling him to grant the logical or metaphysical possibility in P2 without any problem. If we are talking logical or metaphysical modality, Chalmers would deny P1 and affirm P2, whereas with nomological modality he would affirm P1 and deny P2.

Chalmers offers two arguments against the possibility of different Exotic Qualia following the structure ‘If x is nomologically possible then so is y, but we have good reason to think y is impossible, therefore we have good reason to think x is impossible.’ I shall focus on the Dancing Qualia argument since Chalmers deems it applicable to all Exotic Qualia. Suppose A and B are functionally alike but one has a usual carbon brain and one has a silicon brain. Suppose, for the sake of reductio, that A and B differ in their mental states. If that were true we could construct a series of intermediates between A and B that are gradually less carbon and more silicon. The implication being that the experiences of the intermediates would, without their awareness, become less A-like and more B-like – e.g. less red, more blue, or less conscious, more zombie.

Suppose now that we only turned part of A’s carbon brain into silicon but retained A’s original brain-piece as an inactive backup. Suppose we gave A a switch to flick between using the carbon and silicon pieces. A would then be able to flick between A-qualia and B-qualia at will but without ever being aware of any difference. Since we have good reason to think such a scenario absurd – after all, if such switching is possible how do we deny it happens all the time? – then we have good reason to think it absurd that functional equivalence between A and B does not nomologically necessitate qualia equivalence.

ɸ

I have argued that since functionalism cannot completely eradicate the meta-argument, the promising defence should be to deny the possibility of Exotic Qualia. Ideally functionalists should like to demonstrate a logical or metaphysical impossibility, not just a nomological. However, if mere conceivability is sufficient for affirming possibility (controversial) it is unclear to me how any theory could ever meet such a demand. After all, there is nearly no limit to what can conceivably be imagined and I doubt there is any logically necessary entailment between qualia and anything whatever. Chalmers, self-admittedly, does not give us a conclusive reason to deny Exotic Qualia but his reasons are good enough to let me sleep at night and at least he is on the right track. There is something to be said for a stronger Chalmers-type argument but regrettably it lies outside my capabilities.

Bibliography

Books:

• Lewis, David, ‘Mad Pain and Martian Pain,’ in Philosophical Papers, Vol. I, (Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 122-30)
• Chalmers, David J., ‘Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia,’ in Thomas Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience, (Ferdinand Schöningh/Imprint Academic, 1995, pp. 309-31)

Journal:

• Horgan, Terence E., ‘Functionalism, qualia, and the inverted spectrum,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 44, No. 4, June 1984

Magazine:

• Dennett, Daniel C., ‘The Myth of the Computer: An Exchange,’ The New York Review of Books Vol. 29, No. 11, June 24, 1982

Website:

• Byrne, Alex, “Inverted Qualia”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/qualia-inverted/>.

♦

I shall argue the Last Thursdayism objection against presentist truthmaking is inescapable; since it is a consequence of a sole existing privileged present – intrinsic to all presentisms – and not of any particular presentist truthmaker theory. I shall consider how the truthmaker theories of Rhoda and Cameron fare against the objection – the former because of its unique relevance to the objection; the latter because it is the most sophisticated presentist truthmaker theory.

♦

Presentism is the position that only the present exists. An easy way to understand this is that time-travel – of the meet-your-past-or-future-self variety – would be impossible since there would be no past or future to travel to (this might be simplified but this essay is not about presentist time-travel logistics and I’m only using them as a spring-board).

A worry for presentism is therefore that there are not enough existing things to enable saying anything true or false about non-present events. Usually we do not mind this regarding the future but we want there to be a fact of the matter about how much money our lazy friend loaned off us yesterday. However, if yester-friend no longer exists; if we cannot enter our TARDIS, go back, and observe ourselves handing over those hard-earned 20 pounds, then what makes our friend wrong to say he most certainly never received any monetary assistance, thank you very much? We should, want to say that there are facts about the present situation incompatible with his claim – he now owns 20 toy penguins from the pound store, say, which he would not have owned without our Samaritanism. However, who is to say he could not have come into possession of said penguins by other means?

Le Poidevin sums up this conundrum nicely in his book Travels in Four Dimensions:

[If] any number of pasts are compatible with the present state of affairs, and it is only the present state of affairs that can make true or false statements about the past, then no statement about the past is either true or false. What is now the case, as we might put it, underdetermines what was the case. So, to guarantee a definite truth-value to every statement we might make about the past (i.e. to guarantee that every such statement will be determinately true or determinately false), the presentist has to assume that only one past is compatible with the present state of the world: only one course of history could possibly have led up to this point (pp. 138-39).

The presentist faces the daunting task of collapsing all imaginable pasts into a single possible history using naught but her wits and present ontology. The core-thought is that facts need to be anchored to solid existence. There are various ways to explicate this truthmaking principle ranging from the nearly non-commital “truth supervenes on existence” to the immensely demanding “For all worlds w and v, and all propositions p, if p is true at w but not at v then there is (possibilist quantifier) some thing that exists at w and not at v, or vice-versa (Cameron).”

It is not within the scope of this essay to argue neither for the most plausible version of truthmaking nor for the correctness of the theory in general. Although it might be an option for the presentist to reject truthmaking altogether, I shall assume its veracity. Ideally a presentist apologist should want to tackle the strongest version of truthmaking (as does Cameron) and a presentist critic should want to derive a conflict from the weakest. Since I argue that the worry of Last Thursdayism arises from the privileged present and not any particular truthmaking theory, I invite picking whichever truthmaker is most comfortable.

[The Flying Spaghetti Monster] then spent the next ten to one hundred years painstakingly preparing the universe to appear older than it actually is (Henderson, p. 67).

Last Thursdayism is an internet mock-religion claiming the entire world was created last Thursday complete with a deceptive appearance of an older history. There are other similar hypothetical scenarios but ‘Last Thursdayism’ is especially evocative. I use the term in reference to any proposition about the coming into being of a deceptively young world at any arbitrary time (and by any means). Bertrand Russell was, despite a different context, particularly lucid:

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are called knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed (Russell, 1921, p. 159).

If we now couple Le Poidevin’s thoughts with Russell’s  the problem of Last Thursdayism for presentist truthmaking becomes immediately clear. If it is both true that “the presentist has to assume […] only one course of history could possibly have led up to this point” and that there “is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago,” then the presentist has already lost!

Now, obviously the presentist should say we were being too hasty. Firstly, the presentist might, as earlier mentioned, cast away truthmaking entirely. Maybe past truths are just primitive with no additional requirements. I take this as a matter of personal disposition and assume – just as brutely – that this is false. Secondly, the presentist could hold that Le Poidevin’s truthmaking is unreasonably strong or insist that what it truly means to state a truth about the past is counter-intuitively not to say something about what actually happened, since that is now lost to unreality anyway, but to say something about backwards extrapolation from our current state of affairs – i.e. relegate ‘past truths’ from the logical and metaphysical to the nomological. I shall return to this shortly.

Thirdly, the presentist could reject Russell. There is some merit to this but it is beyond me to argue for it. Perhaps a capable presentist could argue for the logical impossibility of creatio ex nihilo, the impossibility of a ‘batteries included,’ ‘straight out of the box’-ready world, and the impossibility of a mischievous creator. Interestingly enough this brings us to ‘fourthly.’ Alan R. Rhoda argues that God’s memories could serve as presentist truthmakers for the past. I must admit I am not impressed with the solution but since the Last Thursdayism objection is undeniably close to the possibility of mischievous theism (though it can work without) it would be benighted of me to neglect the argument that the very same deity’s memories could ground the truth of said subterfuge.

The reason for my reservations is that Rhoda’s solution is too dependent on one’s prior religious views. If God is already included in your ontology, great! Please apply its explanatory capacity to presentism (though what if God sprang into existence last Thursday complete with false memories?) Now, far be it from me to guess about a fellow philosopher’s religiosity but inasmuch as Cameron is not already a theist for non-presentist reasons, he should find the God solution unsatisfactory for the same reason he considers ‘The Actualiser’ solution unsatisfactory:

If I’m allowed to postulate whatever I like, with whatever essential properties I like, then of course for any true proposition I can always postulate some thing or things that couldn’t exist and that proposition be false. At its simplest, I can always postulate the fact that p for any true proposition p. Or I can postulate the existence of The Actualiser: an entity whose essence is so tied to actual truth that it would not exist were any proposition that is actually true false.

Cameron goes on to explain constraints on truthmaker positing, namely 1. Presentism, that “every thing that exists unrestrictedly exists presently,” 2. Realism about the past, that “there are true propositions concerning how things were, and the truth of such propositions is independent of our beliefs about how things were and our evidence as to how things were,” and 3. Present intrinsic nature, that whatever property of an object we posit to explain how something was, the property should also tell us something about how the object is in and of itself right now (paraphrasing).

To be fair to Rhoda, he champions God because “it is not vulnerable to the charge of metaphysical ‘cheating’ […]” since “there are many independent reasons for thinking that God exists.” Be that as it may, if we do not already accept any such reason, the God solution is cleverly disguised anti-realism, since there is no reason why ‘our beliefs’ should exclude God’s beliefs – does God remember the past because it is true, or is it true because God remembers it (borrowing from Plato, Grube, p. 12)? This returns us to ‘secondly.’ Relegating past truths to the nomological also constitutes anti-realism about the past, since it amounts to the truth of propositions concerning how things were being entirely dependent on our current evidence.

Cameron fares much better at attempting circumvention of the Le Poidevin-Russell prong and the careening into either anti-realism or the steep demand of collapsing all imaginable pasts into a sole possibility. To Cameron the truthmaker of past truths about an object is its distributional property – i.e. a property that says how the object is across a period of time. This enables Cameron’s ontology to accommodate objects with intrinsic natures at a time (the present) that are multiply realisable by contradistinct distributional properties. Quite a mouthful, but it means Cameron is free to claim that even though more than only one course of history could possibly have lead up to this point, it does not render ‘this point’ underdetermined with no true or false statements about which course of history is true, since ‘this point’ presently has a distributional property determining it.

Admittedly, this is clever truthmaking but while Cameron is clearly off the hook from having to collapse all present-compatible pasts, I shall still insist he has to collapse one. Cameron collapsed the pasts without really doing so. While we now can allow multiple possible pasts leading to an object’s present intrinsic nature, there must still be only one possible past leading to an object’s present distributional property. Cameron simply changed the compatibility condition. So in order to reintroduce the problem all we need is an additional possible past leading to the same distributional property.

Given a privileged present and present-exclusive ontology – with distributional properties existing solely in the now – Last Thursdayism is precisely such a possible past. Suppose God created the world five minutes ago. Could She not imbue an object with any presently existing property – even distributional? This is easier to consider in eternalism in which all times exist equally. God can at time t₅ create times t₁ to t₁₀, in which case an object at t₅ springs instantly into existence complete with its t₁-t₁₀ distributional property. This poses no problem for the eternalist, since she has no privileged present; for the eternalist there are truths about t₁ at t₅ regardless of reckless temporal ordering. The presentist, however, is forced to either retreat back to anti-realism, saying that truths about the past just are the distributional properties even if they just came about, or abandon present-exclusive ontology.

The Last Thursdayism worry, at its core, is that even though the present has something pointing at last Wednesday, it was never the case that anything before last Thursday can lay claim to having had the privilege of being present. Cameron can still insist that, no, if an object just came into existence it cannot have distributional properties extending beyond its genesis. Since its genesis is already past and no longer exists, I do not see why not; not without a much more thorough account of what they are. I know they are not the four-dimensional shape of a spacetime worm, I know they are not complex conjunctive properties, and I know they are fundamental and irreducible, but beyond that I cannot see how they work. How exactly do they get from existing solely at the present to saying about an object how it is across a period of time? If the answer is ‘they just do fundamentally’ then how is that different from rejecting truthmaking and backing primitive past-facts or primitive past-properties?

Since Last Thursdayism bears similarities to other fanciful counter-examples – zombies in philosophy of mind and Cartesian demons in epistemology – I propose, for future investigations, that the presentist look in the literature of those dialectics for a defeater of the objection.

♦

I have argued that presentist truthmaking cannot escape the Le Poidevin-Russell prong without lapsing into anti-realism, abandoning present-exclusive ontology, or resorting to primitives, since Last Thursdayism arises as a consequence of a privileged present and not of any particular truthmaking theory. I have argued that Cameron truthmaking initially fares well against the prong but ultimately either falls short against Last Thursdayism or is in need of a more thorough account of its distributional properties.

Note

In my essay ‘Spacetime Worms‘ I gave presentist undertermination of the past uncharitably short thrift. This essay is my attempt to make up for that.

Bibliography

Books:

• Henderson, Bobby, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, (London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2006)
• Le Poidevin, Robin, Travels in Four Dimensions, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)
• Grube, G.M.A., Plato: Five Dialogues, tr., second ed., (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002)
• Russell, Bertrand, The Analysis of Mind, (Forgotten Books: www.forgottenbooks.org)

Journals:

• Rhoda, Alan R., (Forthcoming) ‘Presentism, Truthmakers, and God’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
• Cameron, Ross P., (Forthcoming) ‘Truthmaking for Presentists’, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Vol.6 (2010)

♦

Except for the occasional sceptic, we all believe that things persist through time (Loux, Readings, p. 321).

Endurantism and perdurantism are the views that temporal persistence of a thing is respectively explained either by its existing wholly and completely at different times or by its having three-dimensional parts at different times, which constitute a four-dimensional whole – or ‘spacetime worm.’ Since these two views usually arise from two different temporal ontologies, namely that of presentism – only the present exists – and eternalism – time is a dimension on par with the spatial dimensions – I shall treat endurantism and perdurantism as interchangeable with their intuitively corresponding ontologies.

Since I am torn on this issue rather than trying to convince the reader I shall devote this essay on an analysis of why perdurantism, which is the view to which I lean the most, appeals to me but why I am still hesitant to embrace it fully.

Scientific Considerations

I should be a perdurantist because I believe that GPS is reliable and that the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old. The connection to persistence is not immediately obvious. However, both beliefs are reliant on Einstein’s theories of relativity. In his book, Parallel Worlds, Michio Kaku explains how crucial relativity is to the reliability of GPS.

…in order to guarantee such incredible accuracy, scientists must calculate slight corrections to Newton’s laws due to relativity, which states that radio waves will be slightly

shifted in frequency as satellites soar in outer space. In fact, if we foolishly discard the corrections due to relativity, then the GPS clocks will run faster each day by 40,000 billions of a second, and the entire system will become unreliable (p. 257).

Likewise other physicists will tell us that at least some of their methods for ascertaining the age of the universe (Kaku mentions three experimental “proofs,” p. 282) are derived from Einstein’s theories. Another iconic example of relativity impinging upon us is the famous experiment conducted by astronomer Arthur Eddington in 1919, which verified that the Sun distorts spacetime around it and thereby deflects rays of light as predicted by Einstein (French, pp. 44-45).

The crux of the matter is that the results of relativity are seemingly so inescapable to anyone living in the 21st century that we all take them more or less for granted. Yet few of us ever follow up on this acquiescence by allowing it metaphysical ramifications. I should perhaps not speak so readily on behalf of everyone else. However, I – for one – am painstakingly aware of my own cognitive blind spots. To be sure, relativity is built around a four-dimensional model of space and time.

The salient question is to what extent it makes sense to ignore the connection between the results and the assumptions that produced them. Loux, while explaining that this connection used to be a common line of perdurantist argument, expeditiously diffuses it again in the same breath.

The claim is that the endurantist account fails to square with our scientific understanding of that world. The claim is that a four-dimensional picture of the world is implied by the physics of relativity theory. Since the idea that time is just another dimension on par with the three spatial dimension leads so naturally to a theory of temporal parts, the claim is that the only way of accommodating our scientific beliefs about ourselves and the world around us is to embrace a perdurantist theory of persistence through time. This line of argument was once quite popular. It is not, however, the one we characteristically meet in recent writings of perdurantists. In part, I suspect, recent perdurantists are sensitive to the very real difficulty of extracting an ontological theory out of the mathematical formalisms of physics; but the more central reason recent perdurantists do not rest their case on facts about scientific theories is that they are anxious to show that our ordinary, prescientific beliefs about the world are not, in fact, at odds with the perdurantists’ talk of temporal parts (Loux, Introduction, p. 243).

Now, I readily concede Loux’ point that it is problematic to extract ontology out of mathematics. I ought to clarify that I am not proposing the reliability of GPS as a persuasive argument for perdurantism nor do I pretend to understand theoretical physics. It is not within this essay’s scope to venture into the quagmire of scientific realism versus instrumentalism. And any philosopher worth her salt knows that one might arrive at a factually correct conclusion by valid inference from false premises. From the fact that certain assumptions make physicist’s numbers add up, nothing need follow about the veracity of those assumptions.

However, my proposal is that if I were to deny four-dimensionality on these grounds simply because I do not care for the metaphysical implications, while still happily retaining other fruits of relativity, it would make me hypocritical at worst and incongruously compartmentalised at best. As such, this is not an argument for perdurantism but an account of its pull on me personally. I feel I ought to accept it – at least tentatively – unless I have a particularly good reason not to, simply for the sake of intellectual integrity. How persuasive this is to anyone else depends whether the person in question shares a similarity in disposition.

Default Intuitions

Let us turn to what Loux’ central reason for casting aside the scientific argument for perdurantism. Throughout ‘Concrete Particulars II’ in Introduction (pp. 230-56) Loux consistently describes endurantism as cohering more than perdurantism with ‘commonsense,’ ‘intuitive conceptions,’ ‘prephilosophical beliefs’ etc. Taking this line of thought further in Readings (pp. 321-29) Loux states:

So endurantists take theirs to be the account of persistence that conforms better to our prephilosophical intuitions. Evidently, perdurantists agree; for whereas endurantists are content merely to state their view, perdurantists feel the need to present arguments on behalf of a temporal parts account of persistence.

This reasoning strikes me as all sorts of odd. An image of a boulder-pushing Sisyphus vividly springs to mind – wherein the very act of increasing his efforts immediately slopes the hill ever so more to his detriment. Surely, any endeavour of philosophy is wrongheaded if the act of arguing one’s view entails a proportional opposition of intuitive common sense. The game-breaking strategy would be to never budge an inch from offering only a ‘says me!’ in one’s favour, since anything more would constitute tacit concession of loss.

Nevertheless – burden of proof aside – it is not simply obvious that Loux is right about our intuitions. At the risk of committing armchair arson and becoming an ‘experimental philosopher’ I asked a few of my non-philosopher friends where they stood on the existence of the past, the present, and the future. While this can hardly be considered statistically significant the divisiveness of their answers was still astounding. The only consistent agreement was on the existence of the present – the oddest answer being the existence of present and future but not the past.

However, appeals to our shared intuitions – though illuminating – do not exert much toll when it comes to the fundamental structure of reality. I am not even convinced by my own intuitions. Although neither would they help Loux since they align themselves with perdurantism to a certain extent.

Past Events

I should be a perdurantist because I believe past events are a matter of fact. Intuitively once something has happened it stays happened. Even if no one remembers it and it imparts no influence on current events, there is still a fact of the matter. This to me can only be sufficiently accounted for by the reality of the past.

An obvious presentist contender would be a very strong determinism – i.e. A determined the occurrence of B, determining C etc. So even if A is long forgotten, we might be able to infer it. However, while determinism is intuitively understandable, it is not so obvious that backwards-working determinism makes sense in a universal context. Consider this by analogy of addition; while adding three to three strongly determines an outcome of six, working our way backwards from six is impossible. The outcome of six could not have been otherwise. But looking back from six we are unable to decide whether the correct six-producing mechanism was indeed three plus three and not, say, five plus one. It is hardly obvious that there is one, and only one, chain of events that could possibly have produced the current state of affairs of our universe.

Yet the mere conceivability of backwards determinism could still serve as a counterexample wedge between my intuition of past events and the requirement of perdurantism. Let us therefore, for the sake of argument, assume backwards determinism. Would that be enough to account for the factuality of past events? I would say no. To return to our alphabetical series, we can imagine that A occurred simultaneously with another event, A² – also producing a simultaneous B². However, at the advent of C, B² somehow failed to produce a C². No event in our second series ever had any interaction with our first series. Even given backwards determinism we would have no way of inferring that A² and B² ever happened.

Fatalism

I should not be a perdurantist because it commits me to fatalism. Now, it is a glaring omission that my preceding considerations said nothing of the future but – not unlike people – dwelt only on the past. Indeed, I am unable to intuitively commit to perdurantism based on the reality of the past because my intuition balks at the notion of an already existing future. Loux would have me believe that I could hold this view in unproblematic consistency.

Consider what we called the growing block theory of time. On that view, reality consists of the past and the present. What counts as the past and present is always changing, so the view is an instance of the A-theory; but as we have seen, the view endorses a four dimensionalist picture of what it calls reality; reality is a four dimensional block that is constantly growing. Within this framework, then, concrete particulars turn out, once again, to be spacetime worms. Accordingly, we once again have a theory of time that is not just compatible with perdurantism; the theory provides a natural home for that theory of persistence (Introduction, p. 235).

However, Loux might have failed to convince himself.

Endurantists will argue, for example, that the perdurantist claim that the spatiotemporal boundaries of a familiar particular are essential to it runs counter to intuitions we all share. We all believe, for example, that it was possible for Winston Churchill to have lived a day longer than he actually did; and we all believe that each of us could, at any time, have been in a place other than the place we actually were in at that time (p. 256).

I am quite convinced though that a growing block cannot be the case. A four-dimensional view of spacetime necessarily entails fatalism. The reason is that growth requires the very time we have done away with literally into empty space. When a three-dimensional block grows it is, according to the perdurantist, a progression through temporal parts of its four-dimensional self. The only way a four-dimensional block could grow would then have to be by progression through temporal parts of yet a higher fifth-dimensional self. One could argue for timeless change but I have no idea what that means.

I now face a dilemma of accommodating all my intuitions. I should not only have to spatialise time but I should also have to introduce yet another dimension – possibly even more. Alternately I could bite the bullet and accept a fatalistic universe – in which case I have no choice in the matter, so I might as well refuse. Incidentally Einstein seems to have taken seriously both the entailments of his theory and the stubbornness of his intuitions.

I am a determinist, compelled to act as if free will existed, because if I wish to live in a civilized society, I must act responsibly. I know philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crimes, but I prefer not to take tea with him

(Kaku, pp. 154-55)

A Multiplicity of Entities

In a past essay of mine about the teleological argument I said that:

Accepting the actual existence of many worlds in order to escape the existence of God seems arbitrarily discriminatory (unless you are a quantum physicist and therefore believe that there is bona fide evidence for a multiverse).

Similarly I was disinclined to arbitrarily discriminate against only one aspect of relativity – namely four-dimensionality – merely on the grounds of disliking the metaphysical implications. However, turning this on its head I should be disinclined toward perdurantism because it is quite arbitrary to continually populate my ontology with ever more dimensions simply to appease my gluttonous intuitions.

I have argued that my everyday beliefs and intuitions (layman’s scientific and prephilosophical) ought to demand of me perdurantism. However, I have also argued that perdurantism has counter-intuitive implications, which complicate my ontology to accommodate. Ultimately I should like some more tangible evidence of higher dimensions than intuitive reasoning and mathematical convenience before making a metaphysical commitment.

♦

Bibliography

Books:

• French, Steven, Science: Key Concepts in Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2007)
• Kaku, Michio, Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos (London: Penguin Books, 2006)
• Loux, Michael J., Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge, third ed., 2006)
• Loux, Michael J. ed., Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings (London: Routledge, 2001)

Websites:

• Experimental Philosophy website, <http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/ExperimentalPhilosophy.html>
• Sepahi, Sketch, Puddles, Black Holes & Fungi, <http://sketchsepahi.com/blog/archives/99>

♦

The defensibility of bundle theory depends on the definition. I shall flesh out a minimal definition and consider three objections, two of which can be handled expeditiously. The third I shall argue is equally a problem for substratum theory, after which I shall attempt a solution based on my own interpretive definition.

♦

Bundle theory is described as concrete particulars – ordinary objects – being constituted of properties. However, this is a broad outline and details vary between presenters. As such ‘bundle theory’ is more an umbrella term of loosely associated theories than a single well-defined theory. It is tempting, therefore, to assert that its defensibility is solely dependent upon – to borrow a phrase from Van Cleve – which ‘unpacking of the ‘bundle’ metaphor’ we are partial to (p. 28). While containing a grain of truth, such a blunt dismissal would nevertheless be premature. However, it is worthy of note since the dance between the theory’s detractors and proponents follows a general pattern.

Ideally detractors should wish to show that certain objections can be raised against any version of bundle theory. Since most are proponents of substratum theory, this usually pans out in attempts at required inclusions of bare substrata. These attempts consist of finding some feature of concrete particulars which cannot be accounted for by mere reduction to properties. The counter step is then taken up by the proponent of bundle theory; usually in an attempt to show that ‘Aha! You failed to consider this particular redefinition, which deftly avoids your objections like so-and-so.’

This makes the dance intricately interesting but unfortunately also renders a definitive analysis nearly impossible.

Sophisticated defenders of the bundle theory do not say that a thing is nothing but a bundle of properties; they say that it is a bundle whose elements all stand to one another in a certain very important relation. Let us call the relation co-instantiation (Van Cleve, p. 29).

The nature of this relation therefore takes centre stage in our considerations. The issue of defining bundle theory (and by extension its defensibility) is compounded by a further schism between realism and nominalism, which effects the applicability of certain objections. Loux, for instance, holds that the ‘Identity of Indiscernibles’ objection applies only to realist versions of bundle theory (p. 97). However, I am more interested in where the objections lead than in our starting point.

So returning to our important relation, it requires elaboration.

[…] however it is labelled, the relation is treated in the same way. It is taken to be an unanalyzable or ontologically primitive relation, but it is explained informally as the relation of occurring together, of being present together, or being located together; and it is always construed as a relation that attributes enter into only contingently (Loux, p. 91).

To make a recap of bundle theory then, it is the proposition that a concrete thing is wholly reducible to attributes and the contingent relation they share by mutual occurrence. In contrast substratum theorists agree with bundle theorists that a concrete particular is reducible to attributes and their mutual relation; they disagree about the ‘wholly’ part. Instead substratum theorists argue for the inclusion of a bare substratum, ‘that functions as the literal bearer or possessor of the attributes (Loux, p. 87).’ Allaire uses the example ‘this is red,’ which the substratum theorist would take as a subject-predicate proposition where ‘red’ refers to a universal property and ‘this’ is the literal exemplifier of that property (pp. 1-2).

This might seem a bit puzzling and an uncharitable reaction is to dismiss it as an example of what Whitehead called ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Irvine; Loux mentions ‘it is raining’ as an example of a doerless doing, p. 93, though without referring to Whitehead explicitly).’ However, we would then fail to take into account what I consider the true motives behind each opposing stance. The motives of substratum and bundle theorists alike seem to arise from a disconcert with the opposed position rather than merely the merits of their own. A short passage by Russell draws upon the worries of both parties.

The continuity of a human body is a matter of appearance and behaviour, not of substance. The same thing applies to the mind. We think and feel and act, but there is not, in addition to thoughts and feelings and actions, a bare entity, the mind or the soul, which does or suffers these occurrences. The mental continuity of a person is a continuity of habit and memory; there was yesterday one person whose feelings I can remember, and that person I regard as myself of yesterday; but in fact, myself of yesterday was only certain mental occurrences which are now remembered, and are regarded as part of the person who now recollects them. All that constitutes a person is a series of experiences connected by memory and by certain similarities of the sort we call habit (pp. 42-43).

The crux of the matter is our intuitive conception of identity – in this case the temporal persistence of personal identity – which riles us ever more once we realise that some madman might include us among the concrete particulars to be dissected! And although the existence of bare particulars does not necessarily entail the existence of souls, it would be quite benighted to gloss over the similarities; one being that empiricists ought to find both equally problematic. On the other hand, whereas an ineffable anchor to some inaccessible reality is brutish, it is not desirable that the ship of Theseus dissolves into the ocean entirely – even if today it has a different mast than yesterday.

What we have just outlined is the temporal persistence objection to bundle theory, which features among five other objections in Van Cleve’s paper. However, Van Cleve readily abandons the first three at the advent of ‘co-instantiation (p. 29).’ The three objections left are: the temporal persistence, the essentiality, and the identity of indiscernibles objections.

I shall not devote much effort to temporal persistence. Firstly, as Loux points out, the objection does not arise for bundle theory alone, but is an instance of a more general principle (p. 93). Secondly, Casullo has, to my satisfaction, shown that by construing enduring things as a contingently related series of momentary things – a move available to both bundles and substrata – the objection is only a problem if bundle theory cannot account for momentary things (pp. 127-128).

The essentiality objection – if a thing were a complex of properties, those properties would be essential to it since it could not have different properties and retain its identity – is not dealt with by Casullo as much as accepted as not really a problem. Casullo maintains that the essentiality of properties is only true of momentary things and not enduring things, since the latter are a series of the former (p. 129).

One might wonder if this is not merely a one-step regression. I.e. if an enduring thing were a series of momentary things, would it not be the case that those momentary things were essential to the series? Casullo wants to deny this but it is unclear to me how he can, given the fact that he accepted the argument one step down, avoiding it only by moving up. I see only one way out of an infinite regress; instead of identifying the series primarily with its members and secondarily with the relation we must do the opposite. What gives Series A its individuated identity is not its constituent momentary members but its relational structure of an unbroken causal chain.

The upshot is that if we want to avoid a commitment to temporal instances – as a series of momentary things would demand – we could simply move back down and solve temporal persistence in the same way; albeit at the cost of having to reconsider most of our nouns as verbs. We could always rename it bundling theory if it is too far from its parent.

Last we come to the identity of indiscernibles objection, generally considered the strongest. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s definition is:

The Identity of Indiscernibles (hereafter called the Principle) is usually formulated as follows: if, for every property F, object x has F if and only if object y has F, then x is identical to y. Or in the notation of symbolic logic:

∀F(Fx ↔ Fy) → x=y.

(Forrest)

The objection goes that bundle theory demands the necessary truth of the Principle (PII) since two concrete particulars cannot possibly share all their properties without thereby being the same particular. However, PII is not a necessary truth because we can conceive of two numerically distinct particulars who do share all their properties.

There are many ways in which a bundle theorist might want to respond – some bad (as held by ‘A’ in Zimmerman’s imagined dialogue), some better (as held by Casullo). However, for the sake of brevity I shall not dwell on them. Rather I shall argue that the identity of indescernibles is equally a problem for the substratum theorist.

If we compare PII as expressed by Forrest in the Stanford to its Loux counterpart, it becomes immediately clear that something is amiss. Loux states the Principle as follows:

Necessarily, for any concrete objects, a and b, if for any attribute, Ø, Ø is an attribute of a if and only if Ø is an attribute of b, than a is numerically identical with b (p. 97).

Why have Forrest’s objects x and y been narrowed down from any objects to only concrete objects? Luckily Loux presents us with a retraceable line of argument.

(i)                  Necessarily, for any concrete entity, a, if for any entity, b, b is a constituent of a, then b is an attribute.

(ii)                Necessarily, for any complex objects, a and b, if for any entity, c, c is a constituent of a if and only if c is a constituent of b, then a is numerically identical with b (p. 98).

For convenience I have altered Loux’ (BT) for ‘bundle theory’ and (PCI) for ‘Principle of Constituent Identity’ to (i) and (ii) respectively. Now, (i) seems fine although Casullo suggests changing the necessity to a contingency (p. 131), which would render appeals to conceivable possibilities moot. Yet if we grant (i) and (ii), we should also grant Loux’ version of PII. However, my issue is with (ii). The specification of ‘complex objects’ effectively shields bare substrata from the onslaught of PCI but this begs the question against the bundle theorist. Bare substrata have neither attributes nor constituents so what accounts for their individuated identity? Both the original PII and (ii) – barring arbitrary exclusions – can be applied to bare substrata.

For any bare substrata, a and b, if for any entity, c, c is a constituent/attribute of a if and only if c is a constituent/attribute of b, then a is identical with b.

This holds true since for any given constituent or attribute any substratum will, in and of itself, only possess it if and only if all other substrata also possess it – i.e. no substrata will possess any whatsoever. This means there can be only one substratum. If all substrata are identical, in and of themselves, then Loux’ version of the PII applies equally to concrete objects of substratum theory.

My suggested solution is the same as the one I gave to the temporal persistence and essentiality objections:

A thing is a causal relation of a complex of properties.

I can imagine this would seem completely counter-intuitive to some. However, we are already familiar with at least some things, which we would describe like this. For instance vortices are not constituted by any specific constituents. Nevertheless we should not hesitate to speak of that particular vortex every time we saw it; even if it were to contain none of the same water molecules as last.

The way in which this solves the PII objection is that if we have a specific complex of constituents, there is no contradiction in imagining those constituents performing the qualitatively the same relational event today as yesterday. Neither is it contradictory to suppose that a specific complex of constituents could perform the same relational event twice simultaneously, though it does tax us with a higher level of abstraction. However, it should be noted that the phrase ‘the same relational event’ is misleading in the context of simultaneity, since unless there is a continuous causal connection between instantiations, they give rise to individuated concrete particulars – i.e. twin synchronised vortices.

If doing away with momentary particulars is cause for worry, they can always be reintroduced by a one-step regression as considered in the essentiality objection. I readily grant that a substratum theorist could easily adopt my solution. However, I see no reason to disturb parsimony by an unnecessary multiplicity of entities.

♦

I have argued that the defensibility of bundle theory depends upon the definition and considered three objections; temporal persistence, essentiality, and identity of indiscernibles. The first two were answered by a definition stressing the relation over the complex. I argued the third is equally a problem for substratum, suggesting the previous definition as solution usable by both theories, ultimately favouring bundle as more parsimonious.

♦

Bibliography

Books:

• Loux, Michael J., Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, third ed., 2006)
• Russell, Bertrand, ‘Do We Survive Death?’, Why I am not a Christian (Routledge, 1957)

Journals:

• Allaire, Edwin B., ‘Bare Particulars’, Philosophical Studies 14 (1963), pp. 1-8
• Casullo, Albert, ‘A Fourth Version of the Bundle Theory’, Philosophical Studies 54 (1998), pp. 125-39
• Van Cleve, James, ‘Three Versions of the Bundle Theory’, Philosophical Studies 47 (1985), pp. 95-107
• Zimmerman, Dean W., ‘Distinct Indiscernibles and the Bundle Theory’, Mind 106 (1997), pp. 305-9

Websites:

• Forrest, Peter, “The Identity of Indiscernibles”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/identity-indiscernible/>.
• Irvine, A. D., “Alfred North Whitehead”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/whitehead/>.

♦

Intention

I shall argue against single-mind solipsism and in extension the zombie hypothesis by inference to the best explanation.

Limitations of the Problem

Image by courtesy of A Tribe Called Möw.

The presupposition of the problem is that each person can only ever have direct experience of his or her own mind. Therefore, in lieu of any evidence to the contrary there is no reason to assume that any mind other than one’s own exists. I posit that there are only two ways that this could be the case. Either we must grant veracity to the zombie hypothesis or alternately to the notion of the outside world as a mirage, a dream, or something similarly illusory.

In this essay I shall take a non-illusory outside world for granted. Therefore, I will focus solely on it either being the case that other people do have minds or that they are zombies. I readily grant that an argument against realism would undermine my stance but it would fall outside the scope of this essay. It could be the case that only some people have minds, but since this also requires the existence of zombies I shall treat it as interchangeable with the idea that only one’s own mind exists.

I shall also take the word ‘mind’ more or less for granted. It is conceivable that no two minds are ever even remotely alike and that the word therefore is close to meaningless. However, to allude to Wittgenstein’s famous ‘Beetle in the Box’ analogy (Philosophical Investigations, 1958, §293) it is sufficient for the purpose of my argument that we should see ‘the box’ as containing something as opposed to being entirely void of content. That is, I am not concerned with what precisely – if anything – we mean by the word but just that there is some sort of subjective experience of qualia or internal conscious states present in other people as opposed to none at all.

The Zombie Hypothesis

By ‘the Zombie Hypothesis’ I merely refer to the notion that there are – or could be – entities that are ‘exactly like [me] in all physical respects but have no conscious experiences (Kirk, 2008).’ In this context I am arguing against, single-mind solipsism, by which I mean that one’s own mind is – or could be – the sole mind in existence. Full-blown metaphysical solipsism – wherein the existence of even a reality outside one’s own mind in general is brought into question – is another matter.

We are prone to argue by analogy that we can clearly see other people exhibit behaviour and presumable agency, which in our own case necessitates antecedent mental states. We therefore conclude that they, like us, must possess such mental states. The strongest objection against this is that we are making an unwarranted enumerative inference from a particular instance to a universal affirmative proposition (Blackburn, Problem of Induction, p. 184) – i.e. our behaviour is contingent on having mental states, therefore all such behaviour is a contingence of mental states. Furthermore, as the objection goes, it is not only an unwarranted inference but also a rather weak one at that, since our conclusion rests exclusively on a single, lonesome enumerative premise. This can be likened the conclusion that all aeroplanes are Lufthansa after only ever having seen one single aeroplane (Lecture 3, Lufthansa objection).

They are...eating...the captain!

Inference to the Better Explanation

However, the ‘Lufthansa problem of induction’ is hinged upon the twin assumptions that (a) there are numerous possible propositions, which could have been the case – i.e. a plethora of different airlines, which a plane could have belonged to, or a whole spectrum of colours a swan could have had – and as an extension of this that (b) we are indeed making an attempt at a sound argument for one of these uncountable propositions by enumerative inference alone.

Assuming outside-world realism we should be able to limit the possible propositions to only two – by the principle of excluded middle (Blackburn, p. 124) – and either assert the factuality of the other minds hypothesis or that of the zombie hypothesis. Any encountered non-illusory entity, which displays behaviour associated with agency of mind, must either possess such agency or be a zombie.

As such, the crux of the matter is not which hypothesis we are able to prove conclusively and irrefutably by inductive reasoning. We are not positing an isolated enumerative inference, but rather we are making an inference to the better of only two possible explanations (Herman, 1965). Granted, the single-mind solipsist might still appeal to the metaphysical and logical possibility of zombies, and thereby insist that we cannot know with absolute certainty that other minds exist.

Burden of Proof

However, this sets a rather disingenuous double standard. Surely the hypothesis of other minds does not only share exactly the same metaphysical and logical possibility, it also happens to be a confirmed nomological possibility. If the scarce quantity of enumerative premises to support an inferred conclusion is truly a problem for the other minds hypothesis, then it is even more so for the zombie hypothesis, which cannot boast even a single observation of the proverbial Lufthansa plane. The sceptic of other minds could always retreat behind an infinite regress of possibilities with an ever-increasing unlikelihood.

Nonetheless, one must then wonder – given that the realism of the other minds position is the most reasonable explanation – how come the realist should perpetually bear the burden of proof in the face of a barrage of ever more unreasonable challenges set forth by the fertile imagination of the sceptic? I would surmise that at some point it would be more than appropriate to shift the onus onto the sceptic to show that her arguments from fantasy are also nomologically feasible.

Conclusion

If the single-mind solipsist is unable to provide evidence of either the actual existence of a zombie or the nomological possibility thereof, then it is unclear to me why the onus should be on the realist of other minds to provide good arguments for their existence. By inference to the better explanation we have no reason to concede the possibility that seemingly intentional behaviour could be caused by anything other than the antecedent mental states comparable to our own mind. Each of us knows for a fact that at least one mind exists, while zombies remain fanciful speculation.

♦

To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he’s a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic (Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1990, p. 97).

♦

Bibliography

Lecture handout:

Lecture 3: Other Minds

Journal:

Harman, Gilbert (1965). “The Inference to the Best Explanation,” The Philosophical Review 74:1, 88-95.

Books:

Abbey, Edward, Desert Solitaire: a season in the wilderness, (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1990)

Blackburn, Simon, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, revised 2nd ed. (OUP: New York, 2008)

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, (Blackwell: Oxford, 1958)

Web Pages:

Kirk, Robert, “Zombies”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/zombies/>.

By Heini Reinert

‘Once upon a midnight dreary’ on January 29, 1845, the immensely famous epic poem ‘The Raven’ was written and published for the first time in the New York Evening Mirror and was immediately well received by critics and pastime readers alike. Since then the popularity of this classic has all but diminished, as it frequently pays a visit to the odd English class or horror-forum and even to this date keeps spawning countless parodies and homages, spanning everything from guest appearances in The Simpsons, Mad Magazine and Batman to constrained writing exercises, computer terminological versions, an adaptation pertaining to Fermat’s Last Theorem¹ and numerous musical interpretations.²

The reasons for the poem’s ever-growing popularity and appertaining analyses are as many as would be expected from one such singular, yet seemingly all-encompassing piece of prose writing and indeed it caused Poe himself to opt for writing one such interpretation, albeit one that foremost focuses on a description of his own favoured method of authorship. The Philosophy of Composition therefore is a must for every Poe admirer, which is the reason I will mostly rely on it for this analysis.

Compositional Form

Since Poe believed that ‘the initial consideration [is] that of extent’, with that consideration I will also commence this analysis. ‘The Raven’ is a hundred and eight lines long spread out over eighteen stanzas with five lines in each.³ According to Poe this length has been specifically chosen so that the poem could be read in one sitting and thusly achieve the best possible effect whilst still holding the reader’s attention. The rhythm of the poem is trochaic – i.e. the feet are one long syllable and one short – and each stanza alternates between various metric styles.⁴

The tail rhymes consequently land on the second, the fourth and the fifth of each stanza, with the refrain also being a tail rhyme to the others. It should be noted out of interest that all of the tail rhymes in the entire poem end with the letters ‘–ore’, which I consider quite a feat to achieve in and of itself. In addition to these tail rhymes all of the lines, bar the refrain, include at least two internal rhymes and usually even more than that. On close inspection almost every thinkable poetic phenomena can be found, for instance numerous examples of alliteration, (‘Doubting, Dreaming Dreams no mortals ever Dared to Dream before’)

assonance (‘It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore –‘)

and repetition. (‘From my books surcease of sorrow – sorrow for the lost Lenore –‘)

The stanzas must be said to be consistent to the extreme, something that was, and still is, very rare and unusual even for Poe. Though it could be argued that the metre is not consistent, since it varies within the stanza, still I consider it consistent since it varies consistently throughout the stanzas. Poe states that every one of these compositional aspects has been consciously implemented in order to strive toward originality. A curiosity of composition, that cannot be seen when reading the poem, is that Poe wrote it backwards, starting with the climax and then working in the events leading up to it subsequently.

The main theme of the poem is Beauty illustrated through the sub-themes Melancholy and the Loss of a loved one. The justification of this by Poe is:

That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful […] the tone of its highest manifestation– and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.

In the poem Poe presents us with continual contrasts; between the joy of beauty ‘for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore‘ and the sadness caused by losing it, as Lenore becomes ‘Nameless here for evermore’, the contrast between the warmth of ‘each separate dying ember’ and the storm raging outside in the cold and ‘bleak December’ and the contrast between the optimism of once again clasping ‘a sainted maiden’ within ‘the distant Aidenn’⁵ with the overwhelming of the foul fowls denial of this burning wish with its ‘Nevermore!’

Textual Implementations

Intertextuality deserves a mention, in fact there is so much that it potentially deserves an entire and exclusive essay in its own right, but I will try to cover the basics.

The raven itself is a bird shrouded in folklore, myth and superstition. As a trickster that steals and releases the sun to the natives of northwest North America, it also created the world according to the people of Pugent Sound. Some believe it to be an ill omen, while yet others hold that it carries the souls of the dead to the underworld and in Norse mythology it symbolizes the Thought and Memory (Hugin and Munin) of Odin the Allfather. Poe chose it for these reasons and because it is a creature with the ability to speak and can therefore (mindlessly) repeat the one-word refrain over and over again, without challenging the suspension of disbelief, accentuating the protagonist’s self-torment to its outmost degree.

The bust of the Greek goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athena, upon the chamber door represents the protagonist’s academic background and intellectual inclinations. Chosen ‘for the sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself’, it also serves as a contrast to The Raven’s black plumage with its ‘pallid’ colour and as an additional way of contrasting the dual nature between the harsh scholarly logic and knowledge of the loss of a beloved (Pallas) and the self-loathing and un-tamed emotions (The Raven) this rationale causes in said protagonist.

Balm of Gilead and Nepenthe are hypertextual of The Bible Genesis chapter thirty-seven and Homer’s Iliad book No. four respectively. The Balm being a healing compound, carried by the same merchants to whom Joseph was sold as a slave by his brethren, and Nepenthe a drug or potion that would make one forget all sorrows.⁶ The protagonist believes that these will help him process the terrible loss, but alas it is to be – nevermore!

Pluto is the Roman God of the underworld and the protagonist believes The Raven to be from ‘The Night’s Plutonian Shore’, in other words a messenger from the afterlife, who will hopefully bring news about his deceased Lenore. Likewise the Seraphims, the highest choir of angels, represent the protagonist’s belief that The Raven is from the beyond.

And last but not least the character of Lenore herself, whose name means Light, is a meta- or sister textuality⁷ to Poe’s previous poem “Lenore”, (1841) where she also is dead.

Summarising Interpretation

The poem spans over a short period of time ‘in the bleak December’ where the narrator, whom we also recognise as the protagonist, has locked himself in his chamber with book upon book in an attempt to “intellectualise” himself out of his sorrow for his lost love, (and possibly wife) who has died previously. This room is his intellectual refuge, whence he considers himself safe from the ill weather outside, in this case symbolising his raging, uncontrollable and uncivilised emotions, which he as an orderly, academic man doesn’t want to confront.

However while he is busy in the endeavour of distracting his conscious mind from all of his inner daemons with his ‘quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore’ he starts to nod off, only to be awakened by a knocking at first thought to stem from the door. He deduces that it must be a late night visitor come to see him and quickly apologises for drowsing, but as he opens up the door he sees only darkness and nothing more. (I’d be spooked.) He sits down again and hears the knock again.

This time, fully awake, he has no problem in hearing from whence it came and proceeds to open the window. In flies a raven seeking refuge from the storm. After the initial shock he becomes amused by The Raven, which has situated itself upon a bust of Pallas, also representing his conscious and rational mind. He pulls out a chair and jokingly asks The Raven its name. Surprisingly it answers him with the word ‘nevermore.’ This triggers something in the protagonist and he now commences asking The Raven less and less commonplace queries

‘until at length the lover, startled from his original nonchalance by the melancholy character of the word itself–by its frequent repetition–and by a consideration of the ominous reputation of the fowl that uttered it–is at length excited to superstition, and wildly propounds queries of a far different character–queries whose solution he has passionately at heart–propounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture–propounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac character of the bird (which, reason assures him, is merely repeating a lesson learned by rote), but because he experiences a frenzied pleasure in so modelling his questions as to receive from the expected “Nevermore” the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow.’ (Directly cited from The Philosophy of Composition.)

At long last this culminates in the protagonist, who by now is convinced that The Raven is some sort of fiend sent to torment him, demanding that the bird should leave him alone in his sorrow and grief and take its beak from out his heart. But as the bird can only answer the one word it has ever been taught, the futility of it all is deeply tragic and nevermore shall his soul be lifted from out the bird’s shadow.

Since The Raven represents the protagonist’s inclination toward self-lamentation, the fact that it seeks refuge from the weather indicates that the protagonist himself tries to suppress his true emotions of outwardly directed anger and grief and as a result turns upon himself causing depression and melancholy. This clouds his otherwise so rational mind. It casts a shadow on and from the bust of Pallas, depression disguising itself as logic and rationality, making him want to forget his Lenore (quaff the Nepenthe!) altogether instead of remembering the joyous moments he must have had with her. Perhaps he even blames himself for her death with his clouded logic.

Many readers interpret the end that his soul shall never be lifted from the bird’s shadow again as an indication of his death, and as with all such interpretations there’s no definitive answer. I beg to differ though, as it seems far too easy. Assuming that The Raven does symbolise his self-lamenting inwardly based depression, his soul would be lifted if he died. The Raven describes a horrible state from whence there is no escape whatsoever – nevermore.

Epilogue

Three years after writing this poem Poe attempted suicide and in 1849 he died in a series of truly outlandish events. (Amongst other things wearing someone else’s clothes.) In the light of the fact that most of the people Poe held dear in his lifetime either abandoned him or died, it would be impossible not to consider that Poe must have been writing from own experience and even go so far as to extrapolate from this that the protagonist is, in fact, Poe himself. Both Poe’s mother and his wife, Virginia, died of tuberculosis. And Poe began drinking heavily after Virginia had started coughing up blood for the first time on January 20, 1842. I only hope his soul has been lifted from the shadow on the floor. And although he led a hard life, I hope he could have found consolidation in the fact that so many people enjoy the fruit of his career, just like Athens was named after Pallas Athena because the Athenians enjoyed the fruits of the Olive Tree she had given them.

2 Including one by yours truly.

3 Six if you count the refrain.

4 Which I won’t elaborate on because I promised someone, that this analysis wouldn’t get too nerdy, although I do suspect that bridge has been maliciously incinerated a long time ago.

5 Don’t worry it won’t bite. It’s just an archaic way or writing “Eden” or “paradise”.

6 Ne-penthos translates directly from Greek to not-sorrow or no-sorrow.

7 Cf. Ann Jefferson. http://www.setur.fo/documents/20020911131457.pdf

♦

I shall argue that, while it might support the rationality of believing there is an explanation, the fine-tuning version of the teleological argument does not support the rationality of granting any particular explanation – e.g. theism – precedence.

Teleological arguments hinge upon certain attributes of natural phenomena being evidential of intentional purposiveness. Very crudely put; just as a painting must have a painter, so must the creation have a creator. Of course there is far between this simplistic reasoning and its more sophisticated kinship; most importantly, the replacement of question begging with a rationale for why said attributes are indicative of design.

One such common rationale is the improbability of an attribute emerging by blind chance as opposed to the greater likelihood of its emergence by conscious agency. This is the driving force of the fine-tuning version. The improbable attribute to be explained is the structured order of the universal laws. Particularly the emphasis is on their apparent finely tuned suitability to intelligent life.

When faced with this imposing list [of such “happy cosmic accidents.”], it’s shocking to find how many of the familiar constants of the universe lie within a very narrow band that makes life possible (Kaku, 2006, p. 247).

.

An existing universal lawmaker, who desired intelligent life, would be a perfectly reasonable explanation for why the laws allow it. Nonetheless, while certainly true, this immediately raises the question of why we should grant intelligent life the privilege of being such an end-goal. A much-used defence against the strong anthropic principle – stating that the universe had to permit the emergence of observers (Le Poidevin, 1996, p. 59) – is simply to turn it into a weak one. Perhaps most famously expressed by Douglas Adams:

[it] is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in – an interesting hole I find myself in – fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it! (Digital Biota 2, 1998)’

However, Adams’ quip contains more than the superficial banality of a mere weak anthropic ‘wherever you go, there you are!’ If the hole is analogous to the universe and its shape represents one possible permutation of its laws, then Adams is entertaining the notion of observer-emergence independent of any particular permutation – i.e. a puddle would form snugly in any hole. Granted, such speculation of alternative biochemistry – e.g. non-carbon based life – is unverifiable science fiction. However, while the atheist cannot claim hypothetical alternative life-permitting universes, neither can the theist claim its negation. Though the recent discovery of fungi living on gamma radiation (Calvo, 2002) leaves something to be said for the potentiality of unlimited strangeness in life, it is fair to say that the latter assumption might not be as speculative as the former. Then again, the former is not being used as a premise for an even more speculative conclusion.

By no means is the argument unsalvageable, however, since it is unclear why it should require the strong anthropic principle. After all, the improbable attribute under consideration is the ordered structure of the laws – not their alleged purpose. It is easily imaginable then that conscious observers are just a by-product of God’s true purpose for creation. Presumably if God desired a universe containing black holes then it would have to include matter dense enough to allow gravitational singularities and carbon-based life alike. It is perhaps not as intuitively comforting as to believe all to be for one’s own benefit. But who would presume certainty that a supreme being does not fancy black holes over humans?

Could we then explain the improbability of our universal laws by altering our newly formulated strong black hole principle into a weaker version as with its anthropic counterpart? It seems unlikely without invoking modal realism or fecund universes theory. Accepting the actual existence of many worlds in order to escape the existence of God seems arbitrarily discriminatory (unless you are a quantum physicist and therefore believe that there is bona fide evidence for a multiverse). However – as with our previous considerations of alternative biochemistry – it is not necessary to grant any veracity to these speculations. Their mere conceivability still acts as a wedge between the premises of the fine-tuning argument and its conclusion.

The theist could still insist on an inference to the best explanation. Yet it remains to be seen why God’s agency is any better an explanation than the rest. The accuracy of such an inference depends on our knowledge of (i) preferably all – or at the very least most – of the possible explanations and (ii) the conditional framework in which they are competing to assess them against. We do not know (i) because it could be almost any imaginable or unimaginable thing. Neither do we know (ii) because we are attempting to explain the origin of the very framework with which we normally assess such matters.

One could say that the best explanation is the most probable one. However – as Le Poidevin argues in Arguing for Atheism (1996, pp. 49-54) – this is amenable to exactly the same critique:

[…] if the probability of events is determined in part by the laws of physics, what can it mean to talk of the probability of the laws of physics themselves? (loc. cit.)

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After being stripped of the persuasive lure of appeals to design or probability, the fine-tuning argument is left to fend only with measly demands of ‘…but surely the universe did not originate arbitrarily? Why precisely these laws?’ These are perfectly valid concerns and few people think the universe ‘just happened.’ But atheism does not commit to that. It is disingenuous to present the issue as if one must either accept arbitrariness or God.

It is true that if God exists then the likelihood of a human existence is greater than not. However, as we have explored the same is true for any number of speculative explanations – with the added worry of those we have yet to think of. Inasmuch as the fine-tuning argument supports the rationality of any belief, it can only support that there is an explanation. To go from there to the assertion of God as the explanation to the exclusion of other possibilities is a textbook example of a fallacious ‘God of the gaps’ argument.

♦

I find it hard to believe that anybody would ever use the anthropic principle if he had a better explanation for something. I’ve yet, for example, to hear an anthropic principle of world history (Guth, Alan, cf. Lightman, 1990, p. 479).

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Bibliography

Books:

Kaku, Michio, Parallel Worlds: The science of alternative universes and our future in the cosmos, (Penguin Books: London, GB, 2006)

Le Poidevin, Robin, Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, (Routledge: New York, US, 1996)

Lightman, Alan, and Roberta Brawer, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern
Cosmologists, (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass, 1990)

Journals:

Calvo, Ana M. Et al. “Relationship between secondary metabolism and fungal development”, Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews (September 2002) p. 447-459, Vol. 66, No. 3

Web Pages:

Adams, Douglas, “Is there an Artificial God?” (speech), Digital Biota 2 (September 1998), URL = < http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/>.

Ratzsch, Del, “Teleological Arguments for God’s Existence”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/teleological-arguments/>.

Lecture slides:

Lecture 7: Analyzing Teleological Arguments.

Les hetta á føroyskum

♦

Explain either the temporal or modal version of the cosmological argument.  Then argue for whether it is or is not a sound argument for the existence of God.

♦

Intention

In this essay I shall argue that the modal version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God is either not sound or not a problem for atheism.

Briefly on the Concept of ‘God’

For the purpose of this essay I assume that by ‘God’ we mean a sentient entity in possession of all the classical omni- characteristics. However, it should be noted that any sentient force, which could be said to have brought about the world, as we know it, would do. Admittedly, as religious commentator, Alan Watts, says in one of his lectures ‘sophisticated Christians [...] think beyond images’ and ‘[do] not imagine that God is a cosmic male parent with a white beard sitting on a golden throne above the stars (Watts, 1996, p. 74).’ Suffice it to say that if by ‘God’ we do not even refer to a personal creator but something more ineffable still, then I take no issue with that other than on a trivially semantic level, and my critique ceases to apply. However, it also ceases to be a problem, since such sophistry is atheism in anything but name.

The Modal Cosmological Argument

I shall base my analysis loosely on the modal cosmological argument as it is presented in Arguing for Atheism (Le Poidevin, 1996, pp. 8-9). With that in mind I shall take some liberties of my own. These are intended as an attempt at strengthening the argument against my own critique and will hopefully not misconstrue it.

Arguably the question at the heart of cosmological arguments is ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ Modal logic is the study of expressions pertaining to necessity and possibility (Garson, 2009). That we are able to ask the question seems to imply that it is conceivably possible that nothing would have existed at all. Therefore, the fact that there are existing things, which do not necessitate their own existence, leads to the conclusion that their existence requires an independent, necessarily existing explanation. In my own words:

1.    Everything, which could have failed to exist, requires an explanation for why it does.
2.    Only necessarily existing things are self-explanatory.
3.    Therefore, there must be a necessary ultimate explanation for every contingently existing thing.
4.    (An inclusion I would rather avoid for reasons I shall make clear) ‘The universe’ is such a contingently existing thing.

Why the Concept of Causality is Irrelevant

In Le Poidevin’s rendition of the argument the word ‘cause’ is consistently used. I should like to abandon it in favour of ‘explanation,’ since the former is unnecessarily problematic. ‘Cause’ implies a temporally preceding chain of events. There is no reason to assume that creation from God’s perspective should be temporally situated at the farthest preceding event from ours. That is not to say God must have an entirely atemporal existence, as this too would be unnecessarily problematic. God just need not be located at the beginning of our timeline. Consider this by analogy of computer-simulations. It is entirely possible to program a computer to count numbers but start it off at say 354. From the programmer’s perspective the simulation began at some time – or perhaps multiple times in the case of repeated runs – on our timeline and began at 354 in the simulated timeline. However, for a hypothetical person living in the simulation it all started at zero. Or perhaps it stretches infinitely back into the negative integers.

The Universe

I have also sought to avoid mentioning the concept of ‘the universe.’ The word seems to be taken for granted. However, my intuitive understanding of it would wreak havoc on the cosmological argument. To me it just means something akin to ‘the set of everything there is.’ In this sense it would simply be ludicrous to insist that the existence of the universe requires an explanation, as ‘the universe’ is not an existing entity in itself but simply a word used to collectively denote all existing entities. Moreover, it would make no sense to speak of something existing outside of all there is. Clearly I must give the theist the benefit of the doubt and conclude that she means something radically different from what I do.

As with the word ‘cause’ I should like to replace it with something less problematic – but what? I must admit being at a complete loss. Supposedly we could replace it by ‘everything physical.’ However, this raises equally problematic questions as to what ‘physical’ means, and whether the fact that every particular physical entity is contingent – if granted – can be extended to physicality in general. Also it seems to beg the question to a physicalist, to whom the very idea of non-physical existence requires prior justification. Not to mention that it would invite a problem reminiscent of dualism’s mind-body problem (Robinson, 2008), in that it is unclear how something non-physical could explain physical existence.

A Face on the Ineffable

We could simply revert back to the initial question of why anything would exist at all. However, this would do the theist no favours since the modal cosmological argument is precisely an attempt to render this very question meaningless. If the ultimate explanation of all other existence itself exists necessarily, then there could not possibly have been nothing. The contingency of existence would therefore have to be localised and not applicable to all existence. Are we then speaking of different categories of existence? If so, how do we distinguish them?

The theist could still insist that the universe is contingent. I should then be very interested in learning what this intriguing word entails. However, I would posit that it poses no problem for the atheist. Atheism does not require one to deny the existence of everything other than the universe – regardless of what is meant by ‘universe.’

Conclusion

If the theist can appeal to the necessity of existence, then so can the atheist. Inasmuch as this is all the argument shows the atheist can simply refuse to acknowledge a personification of the ultimate explanation. It might be a sound argument albeit not one for the existence of ‘God’ as previously defined.

The theist would be required to justify that ‘God’ understood specifically as a sentient creator is, in fact, necessary. However, if such an ontological argument were to be achieved successfully, there should be no need for cosmological arguments.

♦

…if by ‘God,’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity (Sagan, Carl).

Bibliography

End-quote:

The quote is widely attributed to Carl Sagan and cited in numerous books, yet oddly enough never with the inclusion of a proper reference. As such I have included it by virtue of its own merits regardless of its dubious authenticity. A possible origin of the quote can be found in:

Sagan, Carl, Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (Ballantine Books, 1993, CA, p. 330)

Books:

Le Poidevin, Robin, Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Routledge: New York, US, 1996)

Watts, Alan, Myth and Religion: The Edited Transcripts (Tuttle Publishing, US, 1996)

Web Pages:

Garson, James, “Modal Logic”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/logic-modal/>.

Robinson, Howard, “Dualism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/dualism/>.