Copyright © 2005 Bruce W. Hauptli

I want you to be thinking about what Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?"1 tells us about:

1. E.O. Wilson's overall "consilience project,"

2. inhabiting other lives, and

3. who we [or you] are. 

1. Wilson's Consilience Project:

As we have seen, E.O. Wilson contends that "the cutting edge of science is reductionism, the breaking apart of nature into its constituents."2  He contends that

outside our heads there is freestanding reality.  Only madmen and a scattering of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence.  Inside our heads is a reconstruction of reality based on sensory input and the self-assembly of concepts....The alignment of outer existence with its inner representation has been distorted by the idiosyncrasies of human evolution....natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive.  The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment.3 

     Ultimately, for E.O. Wilson, the goal of his project is to provide naturalistic explanations for everything—on p. 60 he calls this "total consilience."  He recognizes that some phenomena are so complex, or inherently probabilistic, that they may defy successful explanation as particular events in the history of the universe.  Nonetheless he says that the view that

...holds that nature is organized by simple universal laws of physics to which all other laws and principles can eventually be reduced" is the "transcendental world view [which] is the light and way for many scientific naturalists [and] (I admit to being one of them)…4 

2. Naturalism vs. supernaturalism:

E.O. Wilson's reductionistic consilience project is one version of an overall orientation I call naturalism, and today I want to argue that naturalists should not be thoroughgoing reductionists. 

     Naturalists are best contrasted with supernaturalists:

supernaturalists contend there is or are supernatural beings, things, conditions, laws, etc. which transcend the universe but interact with it (providing it with its being, meaning, purpose, or, at least, some of its character).  While some supernaturalists theorize about the nature of the relationship between the transcendent and the mundane, many pronounce the relationship one of "mystery" (and, perhaps, all or most should leave it at that). 

naturalists, on the other hand contend that "...there are no supernatural beings, that the universe is a closed system, that nothing that is neither a part nor a product of the universe can affect it."5 

     Of course there are naturalists who deny this.  Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, for example, contend that the scared is simply a [misleading] emanation of the profane—that our beliefs regarding it are like our beliefs about unicorns, witches, honest politicians, etc.  These naturalists would try to explain each alleged case of "hierophany" (the manifestation of the sacred in the profane) as a merely profane event.  Of course the transcendentalists can contend that Freud (and the others) merely suffer from "hierophobia"—the fear of (or phobia of) sacred things, events, or persons! 

     In the sense in which I am using the terms here, it should be clear, many of the foremost exemplars of the Ionian and Enlightenment Projects were not thoroughgoing naturalists. I will remind you of the citation I made to Galileo in my first lecture (from his "Letters on Sunspots"), and I will note that Newton passionately discussed the Epistles of St. Paul with John Locke, and held that God continued to affect the created universe after creation to counteract the force of gravitational attraction from causing all the stars to collapse together. Indeed, his heterodox (anti-Trinitarian) views of a deity were subject to some suppression.

     More importantly, for our purposes, let us consider Rene Descartes who offered three fundamental and distinct categories of reality:

the "divine" or transcendent category,

the mundane, and finite, mental category, and

the mundane, and finite, physical category. 

first, they both differed from the "divine" category in that they are categories of finite things.  The transcendent realm consists of one (and only of one) infinite (and perfect) thing.  The finite things differed amongst themselves however. 

The defining characteristic of the physical was "extension" (everything physical has a shape and location. 

The defining characteristic of the mental was "consciousness" [most frequently translated as `thinking' or, more accurately, but less frequently, as `experiencing']. 

     Within each "realm," we could make predictions as to what would happen given specification of initial conditions—one could predict how fast a ball would fall (given its weight and height), and one could predict that certain future experiences were likely to be pleasurable or painful given similar initial information).  Somewhat perversely, Descartes held that the mental world is better known than the physical one.  One of the fundamental problems of Descartes' view is that of how these fundamentally different orders of reality are able to interact.

3. Naturalism and Subjective Experience:

By adopting Descartes' orientation, modern science has made tremendous strides in understanding the physical "side of things."  Indeed, when we try to order the sciences in terms of their "successfulness," we can see that their degree of success seems to be inversely proportional to their distance from "the human"—the following "ordered list" is generally accepted: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, political science, ethics.

     Many adherents of the Enlightenment Project think that Descartes' radical separation leaves us with only a "misty," "non-quantifiable," "subjective," and illusory transcendental and mental realms which scientific understanding shows to be radically different from what people had traditionally thought.  Cartesian minds and the Cartesian deity are both impervious to the measurements of physical scientists, and are not bound by physical laws.  While the "Romantics" found such categories of reality more comforting than the cold category of matter in motion, they certainly did not develop a growing core of objective knowledge about the "mental" world which engendered consilient explanations and laws about mental and transcendent reality.

     E.O. Wilson recognizes that the "empiricistic" view which looks at the mind and the transcendent through scientific eyes seems inadequate to many people.7  He claims, however, that if the thinkers tempted by the mental (and transcendent) orders had only studied biology and experimental psychology, they would not have come up with the theories they came up with.  For Wilson, the ultimate explanations for mental and transcendental phenomenal are objective, empiricistic, and reductionistic—they "reduce" the mental and the transcendent to physical phenomena. In short, one of the primary motivations for the sort of reductionism we see in E.O. Wilson is the desire to avoid the "occult" realms of reality of which Descartes' divine and finite mental categories seem characteristic.

4. The Inherent Subjectivity of Our Experience:

It is at this point, however, that I find I must disagree with Wilson.  As Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be A Bat?" suggests, there are phenomena which can not be reduced in the manner which Wilson champions.  For the remainder of this lecture, I want to concentrate your attention upon one broad set of phenomena which, I believe, are inherently irreducible, but nonetheless utterly mundane.  I have in mind, of course, the familiar world of conscious experience in mind.  While I agree with E.O. Wilson (and Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and many others), that there are no mental phenomena without brains, I believe these phenomena are not explainable by appeal to biological, chemical, and physical phenomena in a manner which will allow for total Wilsonian consilience through reduction.

     At the core of this contention, of course, is the view so ably argued by Nagel, that the mental phenomena are inherently subjective and, thus, that they are wholly incapable of being reduced to the objective laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.

     Lets make certain we are on the same "wave length" here—I want to be talking about conscious experience:

DROP OBJECT MAKING VERY LOUD NOISE! 

I take it that you will all agree that in addition to a dropped object, floor, sound waves, neurons, and electro-chemical interactions, there was the experience of a somewhat shocking, auditory event.  Now note that our talk of all the elements on the list except the last one is capable of being put in the third person—we can say what needs to be said about sound waves, neurons, etc., by speaking objectively (in the third person).8 

     Now we can also speak of the noise in this manner—indeed I am doing so now!  I can speak of your experience, and I (and we) can do so in the third person.  In this "objective manner, we can speak about "Excedrin headaches," "puppy love," "Golden Panther Spirit," etc.  I can reach (and psychologists, music theorists, political theorists, economists, and others can do so even better) a level of objective understanding about human experiences.  Moreover, as we have seen, we can reach a very detailed, if very incomplete (at present) account of the underlying biological mechanisms which seem to be involved in one's having such experiences.  Oliver Sacks shows you something about this in the stories in An Anthropologist On Mars.9 

     However far we take such inquiries, however, one fundamental element of your experience will intrinsically resist objective treatment—the fact that it is yours (that it is subjective).

     A problem which arose with Descartes' "bifurcation" is, I hope, illustrative here—philosophers call it the "problem of other minds:" I have been speaking of your experiences, but, what evidence do I have that you have experiences?

Well, what evidence do I have that I have experiences?  [And what evidence does each of you have that you, yourself, has experiences?]

Can I ever have the same evidence in these two different cases? 

4 ...if the facts of experience—facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism—are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism.  The latter is the domain of objective facts par excellence—the kind that can be observed and understood from many points of view and by individuals with differing perceptual systems.  There are no comparable imaginative obstacles to the acquisition of knowledge about bat neurophysiology by human scientists, and intelligent bats or Martians might learn more about the human brain than we ever will.10 

     What makes the case of subjective experience different (for, I contend, they are different)?  In the case of the transcendent (as least the sacred element thereof), transcendentalists point to the importance of hierophany (which he defined as the "manifestation of the sacred in the profane").  There are individuals who claim to experience this.  Not everyone has such experience, however, and thus talk of "faith" (and of "belief") becomes important in talking about the transcendent.

     In the case of your subjective experience, however, such talk is inappropriate.  It is more than merely "difficult" for you to seriously contend that you only have "faith" or "believe" that you have subjective experience.  Moreover, it is exceedingly difficult for one to seriously contend that others lack such experiences.  To see that I am right here, try (really try) to deny that others' experiences are real.  Look at the people around you and try to imagine that they were no more moved by the loud noise you recently experienced than the chairs they are sitting in.   Were you to think of others in this manner, then, perhaps, Shylock’s plaintive speech should ring in your ears:  

hath not a Jew eyes?  Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?  If you prick us, do we not bleed?  If you tickle us, do we not laugh?  If you poison us, do we not die?  And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? 10a

Just try, to continue, to imagine that no one else has any experiences—that only you can feel pain, pleasure, sorrow, lust, affection, etc.  I don't believe that you are capable of sustaining this mental picture for long (if you are really able to seriously entertain it at all).  But this means that you agree with Nagel, I take it.  You accept that there is something which it is like to "hear a noise," to feel pain, to experience lust, etc.  This experience may well require a brain, (as well as ears, floors, air, etc.) and only occur when certain physical processes also occur, but the experience itself can not be successfully "objectified."

     Of course, we will have to be careful with what we mean by "conscious experience" here.  In her "The Authority of Reflection," Christine Korsgaard maintains that:

a lower animal's attention is fixed on the world.  Its perceptions are its beliefs and its desires are its will.  It is engaged in conscious activities, but it is not conscious of them.  That is, they are not the objects of its attention.  But we human animals turn our attention on our perceptions and desires themselves, on to our own mental activities, and we are conscious of them.  That is why we can think about them.11 

     There are, undoubtedly, many other "levels," "gradations," "distinctions," or what-have-you, to our subjective experience.  I will not try to distinguish all the different sorts of things we might mean by "experience," but, for this lecture let me speak of all of them as if they were all of a single emergent type.  In saying that they are a specific type of emergent phenomena, I want to contend that, unlike some other phenomena, they are not reducible to that out of which they "emerge."

Here we need to contrast:

lightening which may be reducible to atmospheric electrical discharges, and wetness which may be reducible to the molecular (or molar) properties of H₂O, on the one hand, from

the experience of hearing Beethoven's "Fifth," or the pain which arises when a limb is severed without the benefit of anesthesia, or the emotion of love without which much of our lives seem pointless.

  Now I want us to be careful here.  We can, and do, as I noted above, speak objectively about others' experiences, feelings, etc.  Indeed, I have several times patiently explained to my children how they are wrong when they have said something like "I am in love."  Moreover, I contend, and they have reluctantly admitted, I have (sometimes) been right.  That is, I have been able to override their first-person reports about their first-person present experiences.  I suspect you have been in similar situations (with parents and with friends), and have sometimes had to admit that someone else knows better than you do what is going on within your subjective experience.

How is this possible?  After all, only you can have your experiences!  And if this is the case, then, how can someone else offer a characterization which is correct over and above your own?

     While I can't have your pain, I can imagine what your pain is like, and the better I know you, the more successful I can be in this activity!  Indeed, by reading novels, watching movies, discussing my feelings with my poker buddies, etc., I can become better and better at this activity.

     Indeed, I have identified (in my imagination) with:

other men:

"my name is Bond, James Bond," and "Call me Ishmael...." [Herman Melville's Moby Dick];

with women (specifically with William's Shakespeare's Desdamona):

with madmen:

  "The horror, the horror..." [Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness]; and

with people of other cultures and nations. 

While I can imagine what it would be like if I were a spy, a sailor, a woman spurned by the man she truly loves (who falsely believes that I love another), etc., however, I never so completely identify with the characters in a play, movie, or book, that I "utterly loose myself."  Imaginative identification with other's (in regard to their subjective experiences) doesn't amount to becoming the other individual.  I guess it is along this road that madness develops, and I have a strong sense of self, and I hope you all do also! 

     Still, I would not want to be without this imaginative ability, and I would not want you to be without it (indeed, I have tried to make it so that you have to hone this sense by supporting the lower division required courses, which encourage you to study literature, the arts, and comparative cultures and genders), and, as I hint below, I believe this is important as it is here that we can strengthen our "moral sense." 

     Before I go in that direction, however, let me nail the central point down—the central point which I intended you to draw from the Nagel reading is that

while one may imagine what it is like for one to be another person, or even a bat, there is an intrinsic element of the experience of another person, or of a bat, which can not be successfully couched in the third-person discourse of objective scientific theory and explanation. 

if the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us further away from it.13 

5. The Importance of this Limitation On Reductive Naturalism:

The questions which now arise are whether the unreducible truths are important, whether there are other phenomena which also resist Wilson's reductionism, and what these phenomena might tell us about subjectivity and objectivity.  Here I can only give hints, because I have little time (and less knowledge).  First, in regard to the issue of the importance of this irreducibility, Korsgaard maintains that our consciousness of our mental activities:

...sets us a problem no other animal has.  It is the problem of the normative.  For our capacity to turn our attention on to our own mental activities is also a capacity to distance ourselves from them, and to call them into question....The reflective mind cannot settle for perception and desire, not just as such. It needs a reason.  Otherwise, at least as long as it reflects, it cannot commit itself or go forward.

  If the problem springs from reflection then the solution must do so as well.  If the problem is that our perceptions and desires might not withstand reflective scrutiny, then the solution is that they might. We need reasons because our impulses must be able to withstand reflective scrutiny.  We have reasons if they do.  The normative word `reason' refers to a kind of reflective success. 14 

The question how we explain moral behavior is a third-person, theoretical question, a question about why a certain species of intelligent animals behaves in a certain way.  The normative question is a first-person question that arises for the moral agent who must actually do what morality says.  When you want to know what a philosopher's theory of normativity is, you must place yourself in the position of an agent on whom morality is making a difficult claim. You must then ask the philosopher: must I really do this?  Why must I do it?  And his answer is his answer to the normative question.15 

     Such reflective consideration and identification with the lives of others can help us reflect critically upon our own lives (speaking here both individually and socially).  Consider here Oliver Sacks’ “Prodigies,” where he comments on follows regarding Stephen (a young autistic painter and patient):

finally, it was time for Stephen to choose a song he wanted to perform.  He wanted to do “It’s Not Unusual”…a piece on which he could really let himself go.  He sang with great enthusiasm….His entire autistic persona, it seemed had totally vanished, replaced by movements that were free, graceful, with emotional appropriateness and range.  Very startled at this transformation, I wrote in large capitals in my notebook, “AUTISM DISAPPEARS.”  But as soon as the music stopped, Stephen looked autistic once again.

  Until now, it had seemed to be part of Stephen’s nature, part of being autistic, to be defective precisely in that range of emotions and states of mind that defines a “self” for the rest of us.  And yet in the music he seemed to have been “given” these, to have “borrowed” an identity—though these were lost the moment the music ended.16 

…her inability to respond deeply, emotionally, subjectively, is not confined to music.  There is a similar poverty of emotional or aesthetic response to most visual scenes: she can describe them with great accuracy but they do not seem to correspond to or evoke any strongly felt states of mind.

  Temple’s own explanation of this is a simple mechanical one: “The emotion circuit’s not hooked up—that’s what’s wrong.”  For the same reason, she does not have an unconscious, she says; she does not repress memories and thoughts, like normal people.  “There are no files in my memory that are repressed,” she asserted….

  I was taken aback.  “Either you are incorrect or there is an almost unimaginable difference of psychic structure.  Repression is universal in human beings.”  But, having said it, I was not so sure.  I could imagine organic conditions in which repression might fail to develop, or be destroyed, or be overwhelmed.17 

Whether or not Sacks, finally, does evaluate the lives of his patients as these passages might suggest, it is clear that by imaginatively inhabiting the lives of others (both individuals and groups), we can come to critically reflect upon our own and, surely, respond to the evaluative questions which our self-consciousness raises.

     To the second of the above questions (whether there are other non-reducible emergent properties, Erwin Schrodinger's (the famous quantum physicist with the cat in the box) fantastic book What Is Life? discusses biological life from the physicist's point of view in a thoroughly non-reductive naturalistic fashion.18  I am tempted to claim that his treatment would have life itself be a non-reductive emergent property, and I am most tempted by this thought.  Of course, as E.O. Wilson would certainly point out that death may well be the "reduction" of life.  As I said at the beginning, I am a naturalist, and this means that while I contend that there are emergent phenomena which are irreducible, I believe that all the phenomena that there are are natural phenomena.  In other words, there are no supernatural phenomena (though there are certain, natural, human propensities to believe, hope, and experience illusions)—but that is a long story for another time.

Notes:

1 Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?", Philosophical Review v. 83 (1974), pp. 435-450.  A reprint version distributed to the class is referred to throughout.   Back

2 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (N.Y.: Knopf, 1998), p. 58 (of the paperback Vintage Books edition, 1999).  Back

3 Ibid., p. 66.  Emphasis added twice to passage.   Back

4 Ibid., p. 60.   Back

5 Paul Draper, "Darwin and Hume On Evil," work in progress, November 1998, pp. 12.   Back

6 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V, 166-7.   Back

7 Cf., Wilson's Consilience, op. cit., p. 270.   Back

8 The third person is the person used by a speaker in statements referring to anyone or anything other than himself or the one or ones to whom he/she is speaking (e.g., he, she, they).  In contrast, the first person is the person used by a speaker in statements referring to her/himself (I for the singular, and we for the plural), and the second person is the person used by a speaker in statements referring to the one or ones to whom he/she is speaking (e.g., you).   Back

9 Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist On Mars (N.Y.: Knopf, 1995).   Back

10 Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?", op. cit., p. 442; p. 4 of the reprint.  Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1986) provides an excellent treatment of Nagel's view of the nature of "objectivity" and "subjectivity." Back

10a William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice [1598], Act III, Scene II.   Back

11 Christine Korsgaard, "The Authority of Reflection," in The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O'Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1996), pp. 90-130, pp. 92-93.   Back

12 Shakespeare, Othello, Act V. Scene II, 58-61.   Back

13 Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?", op. cit., pp. 444-445, p. 5 of reprint.   Back

14 Christine Korsgaard, "The Authority of Reflection," op. cit., pp. 92-93.  The first emphasis is added by me.  Back

15 Ibid., p. 96.   Back

16 Oliver Sacks, “Prodigies,” in An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (N.Y.: Knopf, 1995), pp. 188-243, pp. 239-240.   Back

17 Oliver Sacks, “An Anthropologist On Mars,” in his An Anthropologist on Mars, op. cit., pp. 244-296, p. 286-287.  The tale originally appeared in The New Yorker v. 69 (1993), pp. 106-125.  Back

18 Cf., Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1992), p. 68.   Back

Revised on: Thursday, July 16, 2015

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