... huzzah!
I would really appreciate constructive critical comments from anyone who is interested. The book is intended primarily for academic philosophers but should also mostly be comprehensible to non-specialists who enjoy my blog.
Each chapter of the book is mostly freestanding (most are based on previously published articles), so if you're interested, you can dive straight to the part that interests you instead of feeling like you need to read from the beginning.
Anyone who provides valuable comments will of course be thanked in the acknowledgements. Anyone doughty enough to provide comments on the whole book will receive a free copy of the published book, with my thanks.
The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about:
Thrice to thine and thrice to mine
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace! the charm’s wound up
(Macbeth,
Act I, scene iii)
Weird often saveth
The undoomed hero if doughty his
valor!
(Beowulf,
X.14-15, trans. L. Hall)
The word “weird” reaches deep back
into old English, originally as a noun for fate or magic, later as an adjective
for the uncanny or peculiar. By the
1980s, it had fruited as the choicest middle-school insult against unstylish kids
like me who spent their free time playing with figurines of wizards and listening
to obscure science fiction radio shows.
If the “normal” is the conventional, ordinary, predictable, and readily
understood, the weird is what defies that.
The world is weird. It wears mismatched thrift-shop clothes,
births wizards and monsters, and all of the old science fiction radio shows are
true. Our changeable, culturally
specific sense of normality is no rigorous index of reality.
One of the
weirdest things about Earth is that certain complex bags of mostly water can
pause to reflect on the most fundamental questions there are. We can philosophize to the limits of our
comprehension and peer into the fog beyond those limits. We can think about the foundations of the
foundations of the foundations, even with no clear method and no great hope of
an answer. In this respect, we vastly
out-geek bluebirds and kangaroos.
1.
What I Will Argue in This Book.
Consider three huge
questions: What is the fundamental structure of the cosmos? How does human consciousness fit into
it? What should we value? What I will argue in this book – with
emphasis on the first two questions, but also sometimes drawing implications
for the third – is (1.) the answers are currently beyond our capacity to know,
and (2.) we do nonetheless know at least this: Whatever the truth is, it’s
weird. Careful reflection will reveal
all of the viable theories on these grand topics to be both bizarre and
dubious. In Chapter 3 (“Universal
Bizarreness and Universal Dubiety”), I will call this the Universal Bizarreness
thesis and the Universal Dubiety thesis.
Something that seems almost too crazy to believe must be true, but we
can’t resolve which of the various crazy-seeming options is ultimately
correct. If you’ve ever wondered why
every wide-ranging, foundations-minded philosopher in the history of Earth has
held bizarre metaphysical or cosmological views (each philosopher holding,
seemingly, a different set of bizarre views), Chapter 3 offers an explanation.
I will argue that
given our weak epistemic position, our best big-picture cosmology and our best
theories of consciousness are tentative, modish, and strange.
Strange: As I will
argue, every approach to cosmology and consciousness has bizarre implications
that run strikingly contrary to mainstream “common sense”.
Tentative: As I
will also argue, epistemic caution is warranted, partly because theories on these topics run so strikingly contrary to
common sense and also partly because they test the limits of scientific inquiry. Indeed, dubious assumptions about the
fundamental structure of mind and world frame or undergird our understanding of
the nature and value of scientific inquiry, as I discuss in Chapters 4 (“1%
Skepticism”), 5 (“Kant Meets Cyberpunk”), and 7 (“Experimental Evidence for the
Existence of an External World”).
Modish: On a philosopher’s
time scale – where a few decades ago is “recent” and a few decades hence is
“soon” – we live in a time of change, with cosmological theories and theories
of consciousness rising and receding based mainly on broad promise and what
captures researchers’ imaginations. We ought
not trust that the current range of mainstream academic theories will closely
resemble the range in a hundred years, much less the actual truth.
Even the common
garden snail defies us (Chapter 9, “Is There Something It’s Like to Be a Garden
Snail?”). Does it have experiences? If so, how much and of what kind? In general, how sparse or abundant is
consciousness in the universe? Is
consciousness – feelings and experiences of at least the simplest, least
reflective kind – cheap and common, maybe even ubiquitous? Or is consciousness rare and expensive,
requiring very specific conditions in the most sophisticated organisms? Our best scientific and philosophical
theories conflict sharply on these questions, spanning a huge range of possible
answers, with no foreseeable resolution.
The question of
consciousness in near-future computers or robots similarly defies resolution,
but with arguably more troubling consequences: If constructions of ours might
someday possess humanlike emotions and experiences, that creates moral
quandaries and puzzle cases for which our ethical intuitions and theories are
unprepared. In a century, the best
ethical theories of 2022 might seem as quaint and inadequate as medieval
physics applied to relativistic rocketships (Chapter 10, “The Moral Status of
Future Artificial Intelligence: Doubts and a Dilemma”).
2.
Varieties of Cosmological Weirdness.
To establish that
the world is cosmologically bizarre, maybe all that is needed is relativity
theory and quantum mechanics.
According to
relativity theory, if your twin accelerates away from you at nearly light speed
then returns, much less time will have passed for the traveler than for you who
stayed here on Earth – the so-called Twin Paradox. According to quantum mechanics, if you
observe the decay of a uranium atom, there’s also an equally real, equally
existing version of you in another “world” who shares your past but who
observed the atom not to have decayed. Or
maybe your act of observation caused the decay, or maybe some other strange
thing is true, depending on your favored interpretation of quantum mechanics. Oddly enough, the many-worlds hypothesis
appears to be the most straightforward interpretation of quantum mechanics. If we accept that view, then the cosmos
contains a myriad of slightly different, equally real worlds each containing
different versions of you and your friends and everything you know, each splitting
off from a common history.
The cosmos might
also be infinite: There is no evidence of a spatial boundary to it, no positive
reason to think there is a spatial limit, and topologically, at the largest
observable scales, it appears to be flat rather than curving back around upon
itself. The tiny little 93-billion-light-year
diameter speck that we can observe might be the merest dot in a literally
endless expanse. If so, and if a few
other plausible-seeming assumptions hold (such as that we occupy a
not-too-exceptional region of cosmos, that our emergence was not
infinitesimally improbable, and that across infinite space every finitely
probable event is instantiated somewhere) then somewhere out there, presumably
far, far beyond the borders of what we can see, are myriad entities
molecule-for-molecule identical to us down to a tiny fraction of a
Planck-length – duplicates of you, your friends, and all Earth, living out
every finitely probable future. Furthermore,
if your actions here can have effects that ripple unendingly through the
cosmos, you can even wave your hand in such a way that a future duplicate of
you will have the thought “I’ve been waved at by a past duplicate of myself!” partly
as a result of that hand wave. (Here I pause in my writing to wave out the
window at future duplicates of myself.)
I won’t dwell on
those particular cosmological weirdnesses, since they are familiar to academic
readers and well-handled elsewhere (for example, in recent books by Sean
Carroll, Brian Greene, and Max Tegmark). However, some equally fundamental cosmological
issues are typically addressed by philosophers rather than scientific
cosmologists.
One is the possibility
that the cosmos is nowhere near as large as we ordinarily assume – perhaps just
you and your immediate environment (Chapter 4) or perhaps even just your own
mind and nothing else (Chapter 7).
Although these possibilities might not be likely, they are worth considering seriously, to assess how confident we
ought to be in their falsity and on what grounds. I will argue that it’s reasonable not to entirely dismiss such skeptical
possibilities.
Another is the
possibility that we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe,
embedded in a much larger structure about which we know virtually nothing
(Chapters 4 and 5). Still another is
that our experience of three-dimensional spatiality is a product of our own
minds that doesn’t reflect the underlying structure of reality (Chapter 5) or
maps only loosely onto it (Chapter 8 “The Loose Friendship of Visual Experience
and Reality”).
Still another set
of questions concerns the relationship of mind to cosmos. Is conscious experience abundant in the
universe, or does it require the delicate coordination of rare events (Chapter
9)? Is consciousness purely a matter of having
the right physical structure, or might it require something nonphysical
(Chapter 3)? Under what conditions might
a group of organisms give rise to group-level consciousness (Chapter 2, “If
Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious”)? What would it take to build a conscious
machine, if that is possible at all – and what ought we to do if we don’t know
whether we have succeeded (Chapter 10)? In
each of our heads are about as many neurons as stars in the galaxy, and each
neuron is arguably more structurally complex than any star system that does not
contain life. There is as much
complexity and mystery inside as out.
I will argue that
in these matters, neither common sense, nor early 21st-century empirical
science, nor armchair philosophical theorizing is entirely trustworthy. The rational response is to distribute your
credence across a wide range of bizarre options.
3.
Philosophy That Closes Versus Philosophy That Opens.
You are reading a
philosophy book – voluntarily, let’s suppose. Why? What do you like about philosophy? Some people like philosophy because they
believe it reveals profound, fundamental truths about the one way the world is
and the one right manner to live. Others
like the beauty of grand philosophical systems.
Still others like the clever back-and-forth of philosophical
combat. What I like most is none of
these. I love philosophy best when it
opens my mind – when it reveals ways the world could be, possible approaches to
life, lenses through which I might see and value things around me, which I might
not otherwise have considered.
Philosophy can aim
to open or to close. Suppose you enter
Philosophical Topic X imagining three viable possibilities, A, B, and C. The philosophy of closing aims to reduce the
three to one. It aims to convince you
that possibility A is correct and the others wrong. If it succeeds, you know the truth about
Topic X: A is the answer! In contrast, the
philosophy of opening aims to add new possibilities to the mix – possibilities
that you maybe hadn’t considered before or had considered but too quickly dismissed. Instead of reducing three to one, three grows
to maybe five, with new possibilities D and E.
We can learn by addition as well as subtraction. We can learn that the range of viable possibilities
is broader than we had assumed.
For me, the
greatest philosophical thrill is realizing that something I’d long taken for
granted might not be true, that some “obvious” apparent truth is in fact
doubtable – not just abstractly and hypothetically doubtable, but really,
seriously, in-my-gut doubtable. The ground
shifts beneath me. Where I’d thought
there would be floor, there is instead open space I hadn’t previously seen. My mind spins in new, unfamiliar
directions. I wonder, and wondrousness
seems to coat the world itself. The world
expands, bigger with possibility, more complex, more unfathomable. I feel small and confused, but in a good way.
Let’s test the
boundaries of the best current work in science and philosophy. Let’s launch ourselves at questions
monstrously large and formidable. Let’s
contemplate these questions carefully, with serious scholarly rigor, pushing
against the edge of human knowledge. That
is an intrinsically worthwhile activity, worth some of our time in a society
generous enough to permit us such time, even if the answers elude us.
4.
To Non-Specialists: An Invitation and Apology.
I will try to
write plainly and accessibly enough that most readers who have come this far
can follow me. I think it is both
possible and important for academic philosophy to be comprehensible to non-specialists. But you should know also that I am writing
primarily for my peers – fellow experts in epistemology, philosophy of mind,
and philosophy of cosmology. There will
be slow and difficult patches, where the details matter. Most of the chapters are based on articles
published in technical philosophy journals – articles revised, updated, and
integrated into what I hope is an intriguing overall vision. These articles have been lengthened and
deepened, not shortened and simplified.
The chapters are designed mostly to stand on their own, with
cross-references to each other. If you
find yourself slogging, please feel free to skip ahead. I’d much rather you skip the boring parts
than that you drop the book entirely.
My middle-school
self who used dice and thrift-shop costumes to imagine astronauts and wizards is
now a fifty-three-year old who uses 21st century science and philosophy to
imagine the shape of the cosmos and the magic of consciousness. Join me!
If doughty our valor, the weird may saveth us.
