I’m led to think about Wittgenstein by a few recent comments from Thill, quoting a text called On Certainty. Readers might recall that in my most extensive reading of Wittgenstein to date – looking at the Philosophical Investigations – the main effect he had on my thought was to push me away from his thought and closer to the thinkers he disliked, like Plato and Augustine. But a brief look at On Certainty does even less for my estimation of Wittgenstein as a thinker.

The main aim of On Certainty, as I understand it, seems to be to dispense with the kind of doubt that René Descartes expresses in the Discourse on Method and the Meditations. In my own reflection on certainty I expressed sympathy with Cartesian doubt – but not with his solution, so that even “I think therefore I am” is uncertain to me.

But Wittgenstein wants to do away with all this. Some things, he thinks, simply should not be doubted: “Even if I came to a country where they believed that people were taken to the moon in dreams, I couldn’t say to them: ‘I have never been to the moon. – Of course I may be mistaken’. And to their question ‘Mayn’t you be mistaken?’ I should have to answer: No.” (section 667) Why? “From its seeming to me – or to everyone – to be so, it doesn’t follow that it is so. What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it.” (section 2, emphasis in original)

I don’t see how Wittgenstein can say it doesn’t make sense to doubt it. The Matrix gives a clear and graphic illustration of what it would mean to doubt our everyday experience, to show that the world could be completely other than we imagine. It’s not necessarily plausible; but what seemed hugely implausible or even impossible to past generations (the earth revolving around the sun, the adaptation of living species without the help of an intelligent designer) has turned out, as far as we now know, to be true.

While Wittgenstein isn’t thinking about the Matrix, he does seem to have some similar cases in mind. One might think here about possibly the most famous passage in the work of Zhuangzi, where Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly, wakes up, and then wonders if, rather than Zhuangzi having dreamed he was a butterfly, he is actually a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi. (I’m not entirely sure that this doubt is the real point of Zhuangzi’s passage, but it can be used to illustrate the point at hand, which is the important thing for the moment.) Wittgenstein isn’t much for such uncertainty based on dreams. Yet the very conclusion of On Certainty, in attempting to refute a position like Zhuangzi’s, seems effectively to defend it. Wittgenstein says:

I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone who, dreaming, says “I am dreaming”, even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream “it is raining”, while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.

Was Wittgenstein unaware of lucid dreaming? The existence of lucid dreaming, in which one is aware that one is dreaming but continues to dream, is well attested scientifically; I’ve done it once or twice myself. I don’t see how one can judge the lucid dreamer incorrect about the fact that he is dreaming. Section 383 says: “The argument ‘I may be dreaming’ is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well – and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.” I don’t see how claims made in a lucid dream are meaningless, given that the same words can be intelligibly recalled when the dream is over – is Wittgenstein turning to the juvenile habit, so endemic among logical positivists, of declaring “meaningless” anything that he does not wish to put in the effort to understand? Perhaps Wittgenstein has a different point in this passage; but then again, perhaps he’s just being willfully ignorant. The latter seems to be the case in section 108 of On Certainty, pointed to a while ago by Chris Mathews at Philosophical Misadventures:

If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it. For this demands answers to the questions “How did he overcome the force of gravity?” “How could he live without an atmosphere?” and a thousand others which could not be answered.

As we all know, these very questions were all in the process of being answered definitively right as Wittgenstein wrote, to the point that in 1969 – the very year On Certainty was published – Neil Armstrong did indeed walk on the moon. What might have once appeared to have been a profound aphorism turned out shortly afterwards to be just plain wrong. It wouldn’t surprise me if recent attempts at lucid dreaming wound up refuting the previous passage in the same way.

There’s plenty more to Wittgenstein’s thought than On Certainty, of course, and I’ll try to say more next time. But for the moment, I will note that I feel mostly certain that Wittgenstein is wrong in that text. The only reason I can find to doubt that he’s wrong is itself based on the fact that I disagree with him, and think that to a certain extent we can and should doubt everything.

The problem is not merely a matter of some thinkers lying between ways of life – if, say, Mozi lies between traditionalism and libertinism, as Aquinas lies between traditionalism and asceticism. Schemes like this are (and probably must be) Weberian ideal types: the possibility that real-world examples will fall somewhere in between the categories is not just anticipated, it’s intended. The point is to have a universal heuristic to understand the particulars better, not to have a classification where one can file everything neatly into one folder or the other. (There is something rather Platonic about the ideal-type method, in that one never expects to encounter a perfect or exact manifestation of the category in the real world.)

No, the serious problem is more particular to the scheme, with its third category of “libertinism” encompassing those thinkers who do not embrace asceticism and whose critiques of tradition are relatively radical. Chinese tradition features many such thinkers – but, contrary to my category of “libertinism” as defined in the earlier post, almost none of them highlight pleasure as a (let alone the) central feature of a good life. The point ties back to a key feature of Chinese thought that I’ve noted before: subjectivity is not a major Chinese concern. And pleasure, whatever else it is, is a highly subjective feeling, especially to the extent it is taken as normative and valuable. A behaviourist could understand pleasure entirely in terms of neurons and pleasure-expressing reactions, but on such grounds it seems bizarre to take a utilitarian approach according to which pleasure is the good. If that’s all pleasure is, then why privilege this pattern of neurological movements over any other?

Mozi, the fierce critic of Confucianism, would seem like the most obvious example of such a thinker, going beyond these categories. Stephen noted that Mozi can be far more traditionalist than he appears, citing the ancient sage kings as justification just as the Confucians do – but he still criticizes the modes of life that people have lived in for generations. The Daoists, too, seem to advocate a worldly life that is neither traditional nor libertine.

I have very limited expertise in Daoism, so I asked Stephen what kind of life the Daoists endorse, if neither traditional nor libertine. He noted that they generally appeal to pragmatic efficacy, to sets of variously defined practical worldly goods, such as physical health or family relationships. And that point made me think I was right on track with my earlier response to him: we might just be better off classifying ways of life and even philosophies according to the classical Indian scheme of the four puruṣārthas!

Puruṣārtha means “human aim” or “human end.” There are traditionally said to be three, or four, puruṣārthas, and while they are referred to all over Indian literature, it is surprisingly rare for them to be theorized: one finds almost no discussion of why these are taken as the aims of human existence or what they add up to. They are probably discussed at greatest length in the Mahābhārata, but its accounts are not very systematic.

And yet I have often found the puruṣārthas to be a surprisingly robust account of the aims that humans seek, one that might even expand into a valuable cross-cultural classification of philosophies. In early texts the three puruṣārthas are: artha, worldly success at pragmatic aims such as statecraft and the acquisition of material goods; kāma or pleasure, especially but not only of a sexual kind; and dharma, adherence to norms of duty, especially as found in traditional texts like the Vedas. Later, in post-Buddhist times, is added the fourth aim of mokṣa, liberation or release from suffering.

If we apply this fourfold classification to the history of philosophy and the possible ways of life, we find mokṣa corresponding closely to what I have called asceticism: the quest for transcendence of the world, tied theoretically to the view that the world is a poorer or worse version of some higher and better reality. Augustine’s Christianity is a mokṣa philosophy. Dharma is traditionalism: the attempt to preserve the world as it is and has been, to “save the appearances” in theory and in practice, accepting common-sense ideas and carrying on the continuity of one’s community with children. Aristotle and Confucius are dharma philosophers.

What I previously called “libertinism” is divided: a kāma philosophy continues to take pleasure as the highest good, as do Jeremy Bentham or Epicurus. But an artha philosophy, while refusing (as a pure kāma or even mokṣa philosophy would) to take established tradition as the ultimate authority, also avoids identifying pleasure as a central goal of life, instead urging success at particular worldly goals that – while often urged by tradition – may nevertheless be directly at odds with tradition. If this categorization works, then John Rawls would appear as an artha philosopher along with Mozi and the Daoists.

The trick with the puruṣārtha approach may be at the level of theoretical philosophy. Asceticism as I described it is not just a way of life, it’s also a view of a higher truth beyond this world. Traditionalism is also an epistemology that privileges common sense and the wisdom of the ancestors. And libertinism privileges empiricism, a focus on the evidence of the senses in our lives here and now. It is in this respect that artha and kāma philosophies do not seem so different from each other.

So I’m not yet sure whether I think this classification is better than the previous one. It has the advantage of noting that goals of artha are often closely linked with dharma, frequently more than they are with kāma, as in the case of Mozi. As a result, it does seem to make better sense of Chinese intellectual history than the “three ways” classification – and the fact that an Indic scheme of categories is useful for describing pre-Buddhist China is itself quite interesting.

What then should we do about our impending death? The most common answers typically involve the supernatural, with belief in an afterlife. Christians will speak of an afterlife in heaven, Buddhists of rebirth. So all we have to do is be good in this lifetime (or ask forgiveness for our sins), and we’ll be able to continue “living” well after death. Such a view is comforting. Unfortunately, I don’t have any reason to believe it true. I’ve heard it argued that we really don’t know enough about consciousness to say that it ends with death. That may well be so. But we also don’t know enough to say that anything else happens to it, either – certainly nothing like the graphic hells that, according to Śāntideva, await those with sufficiently bad karma. In terms of any sort of survival of the self after death, it seems to me, the very best we can do is agnosticism, and perhaps not even that.

But if death really is – or might be – the end of each individual, then what? Well: I posted a little while ago about three basic ways of life, three orientations to theoretical as well as practical philosophy: the asceticism of most Buddhists, Jains, Advaitins and early Christians; the traditionalism of most Jews, Confucians and dharmaśāstra; and the libertinism of Marx, Nietzsche, Rawls, Ayn Rand and the utilitarians. Asceticism and libertinism can each take on more egoistic or more altruistic forms. Stephen Walker challenged the formulation somewhat, noting that Mozi doesn’t comfortably fit it; but a typology like this must necessarily consist of ideal types in Max Weber’s sense, giving us extremes within which real examples take a middle ground, and Mozi seems like an altruist who takes on some elements of all three basic ways of life.

My point here, however, was to be that these three ways of life each seems to have a corresponding way of death – an attitude toward death that does not depend on the supernatural. This is true whether they take an egoistic or altruistic form, for others must die as surely as oneself. The traditionalist would take the path most people likely take, seeking immortality through her children. This is the path the Hebrew Bible offers – progeny represent immortality. (Thus the now-shocking happy ending to the book of Job: he loses all his children, but it’s all okay in the end because he gets more!) By contrast the libertine, it seems to me, must follow Lucretius’s advice: do not fear death; nothing bad can happen to you. True, you won’t have any of the things you loved during life, but that won’t matter, because you’ll be dead. You won’t notice any of it.

And the ascetic? Most ascetic traditions do rely in some sense on the supernatural, but I’m not sure that they have to. I’m particularly intrigued by the approach to death in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy. Our selves are illusion in the first place; the true nature of the world is a simple oneness identical with all our selves, if we could perceive it. Indian gurus will sometimes leave the words for their disciples: “I was not born, I did not die.” This sounds somewhat supernatural, but I don’t think that it must be – at least not if we take “supernatural” in the standard sense of “ideas incompatible with the evidence of natural science.” The Advaita view is not falsifiable by empirical evidence, and is not supposed to be; arguments for it take place at the pre-sensory level of a priori foundations, of what makes empirical knowledge possible.

Now the idea of immortality through one’s children requires a bit more fleshing out, to the point that Job’s version no longer satisfies. The simple fact of having children does nothing to defeat death, for one’s children are not oneself. Children can only offer a sort of immortality because they promise what Freud (or his translator) called cathexis (German Besetzung): the breaking down of self boundaries, so that we come to identify ourselves with our children, and really come to see ourselves as existing partially in those children. It seems unlikely that this happened in Job’s case; if new children were as good as the old ones, he can’t have been that closely cathected with the old ones to begin with. On the other hand, cathexis alone isn’t enough; we surely cathect with our spouses or other romantic lovers, but they will only survive a few decades beyond us at most, and usually not that. Children, on the other hand, can pass on their own cathexis, a new identification with our grandchildren and their descendants.

I suppose a similar kind of cathexis might happen in the attempt to achieve immortality through one’s work: artistic, scientific, philosophical, sociopolitical. If the creation one brings into the world is closely identified with oneself, and if it is everlasting, then it can similarly keep one around. But both kinds of cathexis face a similar problem: one cannot know at death whether the object of cathexis will survive. Will one’s descendants keep oneself alive, or will their bloodlines die out, as seems to be happening frequently in my generation where so few have children? Will one’s social accomplishments be toppled, will one’s artistic work fade into such obscurity that it is forever lost? (Woody Allen: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”) Lucretius’s comfort with nonexistence, and Śaṅkara’s identification with a unified cosmic Self, seem to promise a surer way.

Now what about the content of Speculative Realism, the ideas? It’s a difficult school of thought and I’ve only scratched the surface, by scanning of some of the websites. I am certainly not in a place to evaluate this emerging tradition’s arguments, not yet at least. But to help myself and others think through what Speculative Realism might mean, I’d like to try some preliminary comparison – what Charles Tilly would call “individualizing” comparison, the attempt to understand one phenomenon by drawing connections to others.

As I understand it so far, the most central idea in Speculative Realism is a critique of what the French Speculative Realist Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” I pinch Meillassoux’s definition of “correlationism” from Skholiast’s blog: correlationism is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” Correlationism is an idea associated above all with Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, according to which our knowledge is limited to categories of human thought; it is thereby anthropocentric, focusing epistemology and metaphysics too much on the human subject and not enough on objects in the world. (Thus Speculative Realists like Harman often refer to their thought as “object-oriented philosophy,” a philosophy focused on the objects of knowledge, as opposed, presumably, to the “subject-oriented philosophy” of Kant.)

The first comparison that came to my mind when I read about this was one that I doubt Speculative Realists would find flattering: Ayn Rand. Rand blames Kant for most of the perceived evils of contemporary society, including even its supposed irrationalism, going so far as to call the austere Prussian “the first hippie in history.” Why? Because, in a word, of Kant’s correlationism! What most irritated Rand about Kant was the turn toward the subjective, away from the objective facts of the world; from here, she thought, it was a short slide into Communism, sacrificing human beings’ rational faculties. The merits of Rand’s interpretation of Kant and of post-Kantian intellectual history are dubious; nevertheless it intrigues me that in some respect she has found an unlikely bedfellow in the Speculative Realists.

The second comparison is a bit more far-reaching, and I think more intriguing. The more I read about Speculative Realism, the more this thought came to me: the basic goal of Speculative Realism is to make Western thought less Indian and more Chinese.

A while ago I noted that South Asian and East Asian thought are in many respects further from each other than they are from the West, and I’d like to expand on the point in the context of Speculative Realism. A central concern, possibly the central concern, of Indian (or more generally South Asian) thought has been the psychology of the human subject. One begins with the suffering subject, already conceived in some sense as separate from the world, and then that subject tries to detach even further from the world. The Yoga Sūtras and the Jainism of the Tattvārtha Sūtra take us even further than Descartes: we are trying to become pure subjectivity. Even Pali Buddhism, focused on the subject’s unreality, nevertheless focuses its attention on the inner subjective world. Reality in the Pali suttas is composed of five “aggregates”; only one of these (r?pa, matter or form) is physical, while the other four are all primarily within the mind. I’m not sure that this all is correlationist per se, but it is anthropocentric and privileges the subject in ways the Speculative Realists seem to oppose.

Turn to China, on the other hand, and one finds a philosophy concerned above all with the outer world, one that often speaks of the exterior world in interior terms. The closest word classical Chinese has for “emotion” is qing, which has more of a sense of “disposition”: one’s emotions are imagined in an almost behaviourist way, based on the way that they predispose one to react in the outer world. I say “almost” behaviourist because there’s some dispute about how much interiority one finds in the work of thinkers like Confucius: Ted Slingerland has argued there is a little, while Herbert Fingarette has argued there is none at all. (On Fingarette’s account Confucius begins to seem an eliminative materialist like Paul and Patricia Churchland; and at least according to the “Pathfinder” list of links I found above, the Speculative Realists are quite sympathetic to eliminative materialism and its attack on subjectivity.)

Either way, though, the lack of attention to the subjective world in classical Confucianism is striking. Aaron Stalnaker’s comparison of Augustine and Xunzi is instructive here. Both Augustine and Xunzi are deeply concerned with the bad tendencies in human nature; but for Xunzi this remains almost entirely at the level of behaviour. Not for him Augustine’s pained reflections on memory, worrying that he still enjoys the memory of past sins even after he’s stopped sinning; nor Augustine’s worries that he still sins in his dreams. The problem for Xunzi isn’t with what we think and feel; it’s only with what we do. On a first glance at Speculative Realism, this Confucian world seems a lot like the intellectual world they’d like to create. Nor is the nonsubjective world of Chinese philosophy limited to Confucianism; Ch’an Buddhism itself attempts to decentre the subject in favour of the natural world (rather than the mental aggregates of Indian Buddhism).

I recall Harman once saying something on his blog to the effect that you could tell the essentials of any philosopher’s thought from that philosopher’s aesthetics; and the point seems very much validated by classical Indian and Chinese aesthetics. Anne Monius once pointed out to me that classical Indian aesthetics are extraordinarily anthropocentric. Until the medieval Indian Muslims, and perhaps even after that, one does not find any paintings or statues depicting the natural world by itself, or even at the centre of a picture. The centre of every art object is a human or humanlike being. The closest one gets to a painting of a nonhuman is anthropomorphic animal deities like the monkey god Hanumān. It is the human(oid) subject that matters. The most characteristically Chinese style of painting, by contrast, is the landscape, in which human beings’ presence is tiny. This is object-oriented art.

I don’t know nearly enough about Speculative Realism to say anything about whether they’re right. My sympathies usually lie with Indian over Chinese philosophy, and strongly against eliminative materialism; so I view this new tradition’s ideas with considerable caution. But I’m not trying here to engage with them constructively yet – just to see if I can get a first grasp of what they’re up to. And it does seem like the idea, put crudely, is to make us less Indian and more Chinese.

Then, the HMS Beagle made its famous voyage to the Galàpagos Islands, where Darwin observed his famous finches. A huge variety of birds, each on different islands and looking dramatically different, each well suited to the conditions of its own island – but they all turned out biologically to be finches, closely related to each other and to the finches of distant South America. It seemed needlessly complex to suggest that God would create so many different birds in so many different places and yet make them all part of the same family. A more straightforward hypothesis was that the different finches had evolved from a common ancestor, by natural selection. God was no longer needed as a scientific hypothesis – and hasn’t been needed since.

In retrospect, the point that God was once a legitimate hypothesis seems obvious to me now. But when I encountered it, it came to me as something of a surprise, because I’m so used to living in a world where any attempt to find empirical evidence for God’s existence looks like a desperate grasping at straws. The worst of these is the “First Cause” version of the cosmological argument for God’s existence, that you need to have something setting the world in motion. Even if that argument works, it proves nothing like the existence of any God that has been ever worshipped. A mere First Cause is no more significant than any other cause. If God is a mere Divine Watchmaker who sets things in motion and then goes away and is no longer involved – as this hypothesis would suggest – then the universe with him is hardly different from the universe without him. This is not a God that matters.

Rather, nowadays, if you’re going to get rationally to anything like the traditional Abrahamic God, you need to keep science at arm’s length. This is one of the beauties of Anselm’s argument – it has nothing whatsoever to do with empirical evidence, it is 100% a priori, and therefore natural science simply can’t touch it. If it is wrong, its wrongness can and must be demonstrated without reference to natural science. The same seems to be true for ibn Rushd’s First Explanation cosmological argument when properly understood, though not for First Cause arguments in the usual sense. For here the question is not “what caused everything?” but “how can there be causation in the first place?” It is an explanation going much deeper. Unlike Anselm, it doesn’t necessarily get you to an omnipotent or omnibenevolent God; but it does seem to get you to something like the brahman of Śaṅkara’s or Rāmānuja’s Vedānta, a cosmic principle underlying everything, and such a principle does a lot to change the way we see the rest of the universe.

To me it’s been clear for a long time that any attempt to find God must go a priori, must not try to look in the empirical world. But looking back on Darwin’s story, it’s easier for me to realize that many people don’t see it that way. And that helps me understand contemporary views that have always struck me as a little curious. Not just the intelligent design movement, but the arch-materialistic atheists of contemporary analytic philosophy, like Paul and Patricia Churchland, who look at neuroscience and conclude that consciousness and free will don’t exist. They actually think that consciousness and free will are empirical hypotheses whose existence can be refuted with empirical evidence. Once upon a time, they, like God, might even have been exactly that.

We have been debating the extent to which truth can properly be understood as correspondence to reality. I think it generally can, but insisted that that reality should not just be understood as “outer” reality. Our understandings of our inner, subjective states can also be true or false in the sense of succeeding or failing to correspond to reality (as when we are incorrect about being happy).

Elisa continued this debate with a post on her own blog (as I’m now doing in return). She argued that the experience of pain is “subject-dependent,” and cannot be understood as corresponding to a reality beyond the subject’s own understanding: “No scientist could convince me that the pain I am experiencing is unbearable if I can bear it (and vice versa, different people react very differently to what seems to be the same neuronal stimulus).” I responded in the comments that we can indeed misjudge pain, like happiness; I mentioned a physiotherapist friend who gets frustrated when he asks people to rate the pain from a minor injury on a scale of 1 to 10 and they immediately say 10. Elisa replied as follows:

It is not fair to ask someone who has only experience of a feeble pain to collocate it on a scale from 1 to 10. She would, rightly, collocate her present pain on the 10th level, because the ’10′ as a level of pain sensation can only make sense in regard to the pain we have actually experienced. A child will say that 10 is the pain one experiences after a minor fall, a woman who has just given birth will describe the 10-level-pain as something different, but they are right in maintaining that the pain they are presently experiencing is the highest they have ever experienced. The physiotherapist asks them to conform to an objective scale, valid for everyone, hence his disappointment.

My response: the assigning of a level-10 pain can be erroneous. Suppose I get a minor muscle spasm that I think is the most painful thing I have yet experienced. I therefore rate it a 10 on the pain scale. The following week, I am stung by an Australian box jellyfish, which produces pain so intense that victims sometimes die simply from the shock of the pain. I realize then that what I would have rated a 10 wasn’t really a 10, more like a 4. I just didn’t know it then. I might have been justified in believing that the earlier pain was a 10, but my belief was not true. (Even the idea that it’s justified seems suspect, if I have some awareness of the kinds of pains other human beings have been in and some empathy towards them – I should know that there are others who have had pains like this, and additional pains more severe than this.)

A further example: suppose that I had been stung by a box jellyfish several decades before the muscle spasm – but so long enough ago that I had forgotten about it. In the ensuing decades I have had very little pain, so much so that the muscle spasm appears to be the most intense pain I have ever experienced. I rate it a 10. An old friend hears about this, and says: “That was a 10? Compared to the jellyfish sting?” So I reply: “Wow, I’d forgotten about that! Yeah, actually this is really more like a 4, not a 10.” It seems clear to me that I was wrong when I rated it a 10.

In both cases, my own opinion of the same subjective experience has suddenly changed. As a result of different information, I have now decided that my previous view was wrong. That means that if I am right now, I was wrong then, and vice versa. It is not possible for me to be right now that this subjective pain is a 10 and to have been right then that this subjective pain was a 4. I have to have been wrong about my own subjective experience; my own understanding of that subjective experience did not correspond to reality, and was therefore a false understanding.

In a slightly different direction, Elisa’s post also suggested a theology of mystical experience: rational disproofs of God’s existence do not change the fact that Teresa of Ávila had an experience of God: “What she cannot be mistaken about, I argue, is that she is perceiving God sending an arrow towards her hearth, etc. The theological side of this God is, in fact, not part of her sensation.”

But I think this is not true. Teresa is perceiving something that seems like God, looks like God, feels like God. But that doesn’t mean she is actually perceiving God. If I think I see a snake in the road, but on later reflection I see it turns out to have merely been a rope, then I did not in fact perceive a snake. I perceived a rope which I thought was a snake; I only thought that I perceived a snake. But I was wrong.

You say “experience and perception” presume consciousness. In that case, consciousness for you seems to be defined as any system of taking in sensory data, storing information about that data, and processing that information. Am I reading that correctly? We have computer programs that can do these things. Would they fit your criteria for consciousness. If so, cool! If not, why not?

The answer to the question here is: absolutely not. Taking in empirical data and processing it, in the way that a computer program does, does not count as experience, perception or consciousness. Why? Consider dreaming. When we dream, we are not taking in any data from the observable world at all; but we are still perceiving. What a dream is, is an interior state. Of course physical changes occur in the brain when we dream; but a dream is necessarily more than that. To say a dream is nothing but those physical changes is to say not merely that the things we dream about do not exist, but even that the fact that we dreamt about them did not exist.

In the specific case of scientific knowledge: knowledge and understanding are themselves interior states, as dreams are. I think John Searle’s “Chinese room” argument demonstrates the point well. Suppose you had a computer program that could take Chinese characters as input and return other Chinese characters as output, in a manner similar to a more sophisticated version of the classic program ELIZA – to the point where a Chinese speaker couldn’t tell the difference between the program and a real person (i.e. the program would pass the Turing test). Not improbable. Here’s the trick: it’s also not improbable that you could train an English speaker to do the exact same thing, without ever learning the referent of a single Chinese word — simply learn which characters in which patterns to return based on which inputs, on the basics of pattern recognition. It would be very difficult to claim that such a person understands written Chinese; so why should we think that the computer understands written Chinese either? Understanding must be something more than behaviour; it must be an interior state.

It is these interior states of knowledge and understanding which science requires. If you program a computer to manipulate variables and record the results in order to test hypotheses, and the computer keeps doing this after the human race has died off, the computer is not doing science, because what the computer has is only behaviour, not knowledge, and science requires knowledge.

To deny the existence of interior states entirely would require that one claim that the man in the room understands Chinese despite not knowing the referents of Chinese words, and that the subjective perception of dreams does not exist beyond the movements of neurons. Such claims fly so clearly in the face of any common-sense understanding that the burden of proof must necessarily be on those who wish to deny them. On what grounds could we say that dreams don’t exist, or that the man in the Chinese room understands Chinese? It cannot be enough to say that claims about interior states cannot be empirically tested, since any requirement that knowledge be empirically tested cannot itself be empirically tested.

The objections to Slingerland were of two kinds. First, people misinterpreted him and objected to the idea of interiority (or consciousness), thinking that he was arguing for interiority himself, even though he repeatedly insisted he was only interpreting Confucius and didn’t believe in it himself. (I’m surprised how many people did that.) Second, people objected (roughly) that Confucius couldn’t possibly have believed in interiority, typically on the grounds that he was a lot smarter than that.

The big surprise, to me, was that nobody (least of all Slingerland) seemed to step up to the plate and defend interiority – to say that yes, there’s actually something going on inside our minds. That’s not exactly an unpopular view, after all – it’s common sense, as Slingerland himself was the first to acknowledge.

Now, of course, common sense is not always sensible – one of philosophy’s most important results is to push us past our everyday views and prejudices. Slingerland argued exactly this when I talked to him more at dinner: of course we think there’s something conscious going on inside our minds, but we’re wrong. We perceive consciousness, but we also perceive the earth as flat and the sun as surrounding it. And evidence from cognitive science, he claims, shows belief in consciousness or interiority to be as much an error as belief in a flat earth.

I replied that I don’t think this is possible. It’s not that empirical evidence shows us that consciousness exists. Rather, it’s the other way round. We need to assume consciousness – or at least something like consciousness, interiority, subjectivity – in order for there to be empirical evidence in the first place. Any sort of scientific experiment must necessarily rely on the evidence of experience and/or perception, and experience and perception presume consciousness. We might not require a single, unified self as a perceiver – Buddhists readily argue for consciousness without a self – but the perception itself has to exist, or it makes no sense to speak of anything being observed, in a scientific experiment or anywhere else. (Descartes’ cogito ergo sum doesn’t necessarily prove that Descartes exists, but it does prove that what we call Descartes’ thought exists.)

A scientific experiment cannot prove that the experiment being conducted doesn’t exist; if it does, it has contradicted itself and gone wrong. But the whole idea of an experiment is that the results are observed and perceived, which in turn requires (I think) that there is consciousness of the experiment. If the experiment claims to disprove the existence of consciousness, it becomes completely incoherent, and has therefore effectively proved – and disproved – nothing.