Posts
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Ethical Vegetarianism
So, a ten-thousand word dissertation required on ethical vegetarianism. I playing with 'Eating animals is wrong' as a stark thesis. Wrong why? Ethically, economically, environmentally, health-wise - take your pick. Quite how to fine tune the arguments into a structured, coherent and philosophical account, I am not sure.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
6 modules behind me
I just emailed my last essay - see previous post - and now I am free to embark upon my dissertation... I need to narrow the subject down, but am definitely going to do something in the 'ethical vegetarianism' arena. I'm not sure if the dissertation needs to be original research, or can be review of existing literature. Anyway, for now I have a lot of reading to start.
I'm also going to be a TOK Team Leader for the IB this exam session. So that will, no doubt, give me plenty to do. Not only marking, but supervising marking. The initial examiner training material is already available.
I'm also going to be a TOK Team Leader for the IB this exam session. So that will, no doubt, give me plenty to do. Not only marking, but supervising marking. The initial examiner training material is already available.
Does the Buddhist theory of no-self contradict the concepts of karma and rebirth?
In this essay I shall be looking at three central notions within the Buddhist tradition – those of karma, rebirth (or reincarnation, though a distinction between these terms will become apparent) and no-self. It has been traditionally hard for many Western scholars of Buddhism to come to terms with the relationship between these concepts, in particularly the rather intuitively contradictory notion of no-self. It is my aim to show that the no-self theory does not directly contradict the philosophy of karma and of re-birth, but can be seen to co-exist logically.
In the discourse between King Melinda and the Buddhist monk Nagsena , the king asks the monk how rebirth can take place without the transmigration of something. He asks, in fact, the intuitive question – if there is no ‘self’ existing, what is it which survives to be reborn in another life, and what is it that accrues either positive or negative karma and can be seen to be rewarded or punished in future incarnations for the actions of past lives?
I wish to look first at general Indian philosophical ideas about self and the early thinking behind karma and rebirth. I hope to be able to show how Buddha demonstrated that anatman can logically allow for both karma and rebirth.
At around the time of the Buddha, there were many philosophies of the self. The Upanishads put forth the self as a stable and constant substance – atman. This substance may change in terms of qualities over time, but not in quantity. In other words there is always just the one self behind the changing circumstances of each individual’s existence. I may grow fat and change my musical tastes, but the ‘me’ that undergoes these changes remains constant. Atman is an extension of this generally acceptable recognition of the permanence of self over time within one lifetime, to permanence of self over many lifetimes.
Buddha argues that this is a fallacy and there is no self. For Buddha, persons are composed of five aggregates – skandhas – physical and mental processes of which our experience of ourselves is composed. If there were such anything as a self, it would have to be in the five aggregates, but since these are, by their nature, impermanent, a permanent self is impossible.
“According to the Buddhist tradition, both physical and mental phenomena arise, exist, and pass away within a vast, interrelated network of causes and conditions. This continual process of arising, existing, and passing away is the process of dependent origination, one of the core notions of Buddhist thought. Buddhism argues further that all entities, events, and processes have no substantial reality outside of this dynamic matrix of dependent origination. So, things like chariots, pots, and persons are ultimately empty of fixed or intrinsic nature.”
This, clearly, is one of the biggest challenges for adherents of Buddhism – accepting the hugely counter-intuitive claim that no ‘self’ exists. One common argument put forth against no-self here is that the Buddha himself refers to a self in his own teachings. However, it can be seen that ‘I’ is merely a helpful designator. Gowans identifies a ‘process self’ to which he says the ‘I’ refers – but the very use of the word propagates the concept the Buddha is eschewing. That which we perceive as a self is merely a series of interconnected happenings, the skandhas. Gowans refers to these as a ‘nexus of processes such as experiencing, remembering, imagining and feeling’ – usually what we would come to accept as self-consciousness. Whilst ultimately there are no selves, the Buddha used references to a process self to make his teachings accessible to those still attached to a self of concrete substance. Other proponents of no-self theory suggest that it is possible to ‘eliminate the notion of the self and its identity, and yet on pragmatic grounds continue to permit the use of the language of personal identity.’
Perhaps the most famous non-Buddhist exponent of this conceptualization of ‘personhood’ is David Hume. He expressed it thus:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other ['perception' is here a general word for any mental activity] of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception… '[mankind] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.'
Hume’s doubts are echoed by a more modern Buddhist commentary:
Where is the self? Is it the totality of the body? Is it in the body at all? What is its relation to the body? As you read this - try to find it. Paradoxically while you will have little doubt about the fact of your existence, the precise location or mode of being of what you appear to be is very far from obvious. Similarly, if you seek to locate the roots of experience, whether of sensation, volition, thought or awareness, you again find yourself tumbling into an absence of certainty, into a great doubt.
Part of the issue is certainly our perception of self as continuous over time. It seems clear to me that I am today a very different person as a forty-four year old father of two, spouse, teacher, author to the person I was as a newly arrived University undergraduate. However, the very language I am compelled to use reinforces continuity, in that I am talking of ‘me’ in both cases. A less personal account would talk of there being a forty-four year old and there having been an undergraduate, without personal pronouns to confuse the issue. Hume directly says that all ‘nice and subtle’ issues surrounding personal identity are more to do with grammar than with philosophy – presaging Wittgenstein’s more radical approach. However, whilst it is very clearly true that these people are different, I think it would be absurd to claim that the former was not the latter in some sense. I cannot realistically claim to be a truly different person, as evidenced by ongoing legal trails of Nazi war criminals, for example. I would still be held accountable for actions carried out by my previous self. Raymond Martin suggests that there is a distinction between what Buddhists might accept and that which Western philosophers feel comfortable accepting in relation to an understanding about the self. He states that some Western philosophers - reductionists who hold a ‘metaphysical view that does not commit one to any particular normative theory or to any view about how on relational grounds personal identity over time should be understood’ - would be comfortable with the Mahayana Buddhist idea that the self is a fiction ultimately but that conventionally can be held to exist for pragmatic purposes. However, they might not be prepared to go as far as to accept that brains, bodies and associated psychological events are equally only conventionally real and ultimately non-existent. Philosophers such as Hume and, more recently, Derek Parfit (sometimes known as ‘bundle theorists’ for their idea, akin to skandhas or aggregates in Buddhism, that we are bundles of experiences at any one moment in time, rather than a conscious ego doing the experiencing) have suggested that what we call a person is firstly a series of thoughts, feelings, associations and other mental events which is, secondly, knitted together through a variety of causal events of which memory is one of the most important. For Parfit, selves are much like clubs or associations: ‘Does the Maryland Philosophy Club exist as a thing in its own right? The answer would seem to be no. For there to be a Maryland philosophy club is nothing more than for there to be certain people who have decided to associate with one another for certain purposes and talk about that association in a particular way. The club has no individuality or integrity in its own right…’ He is not denying that for conventional purposes one can talk of a club doing this, or supporting that, but that ultimately the club is only collection of essences, contingent for its identity upon causal relations. Hume clearly stated a similar view, referring to the soul as ‘a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocities of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic, in the incessant changes of its parts'. Thus it is that for Buddhists, the self exists as a collection of experiences but not as an enduring, unchanging atman as espoused by earlier Hindu belief and as commonly accepted in both secular and religious Western thought.
Karma and rebirth were around as philosophical traditions long before Buddhism. It was widely believed that beings died and were then reborn in some way. Human beings, and indeed all other living creatures, did not live only one life, but returned again and again to this world in an unremitting progression of death and rebirth. In India, this is known still as samsara, or “wandering” from one life to the next one. Initially, the idea of samsara may seem to be an opportunity, a possibility to enjoy some of the things we missed in this life or to make reparations (as in ‘Groundhog Day’), but in ancient India, samsara was an encumbrance. It was a burden to be escaped through one of two routes: performance of good actions (karma) in anticipation of a better rebirth or renouncing action altogether and bringing the cycle of death and rebirth to an end. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a sage named Yajñavalkya compares this series of human lives to the movement of a caterpillar from one blade of grass to another: “It is like this. As a caterpillar, when it comes to the tip of a blade of grass, reaches out to a new foothold and draws itself onto it, so the self (atman), after it has knocked down this body and rendered it unconscious, reaches out to a new foothold and draws itself onto it.” Karma was the universal law governing this rebirth – making sure that intention of actions was reflected in the outcome of future and present lives. Karma, then, determines where (that is, in which plane of existence) and as what (that is, what kind of being) a being will be reborn as. So whilst someone may have recently led a good and honest (or moral) life, they might still be reborn as a slug or into a lower plane of existence as the result of negative karma accumulated from lives previous to the last one. One question here might be why did the current life not reflect such karmic justice? Swami Shivananda states:
“If the virtuous man who has not done any evil act in this birth suffers, this is due to some wrong act that he may have committed in his previous birth. He will have his compensation in his next birth. If the wicked man who daily does many evil actions apparently enjoys this birth, this is due to some good Karma he must have done in his previous birth. He will have compensation in his next birth. He will suffer in the next birth. The law of compensation is inexorable and relentless.”
In some commentaries, it is suggested that this is a rather facile response which essentially explains any and all apparent inconsistencies in moral standing, injustices in the world and individual ‘luck’ and is, of course, empirically impossible to argue. Karma was certainly used historically within Hindu traditions to negate complaints about present-life situations. Laurence Mills suggests a kinder interpretation, however, arguing that teaching of re-birth gives value to life and brings a sense of justice to the seeming chaos of injustice apparent in the modern world. Rebirth, he argues, can explain why the evil seem to prosper and the virtuous may lead unhappy lives.
The central question, however, is not whether the teaching of rebirth offers moral succour to those in need (which well it might, much in the same way as the promissory rewards of heaven and hell in Christianity) but whether karma and rebirth can logically persist as doctrines in the face of no self. The Consistency objection certainly maintains that they cannot. If there is no constant and consistent self, what is it that karma affects? White frames the issue thus, paraphrasing Griffiths on survival after death: ‘Buddhist karmic theory is caught in a contradiction: in order to explain survival of death and re-birth, Buddhists have to suppose that there is an atman, but according to the anatman doctrine which they accept, there is no such thing.’ Additionally, if a person is merely a series of interconnected events and dispositions which are ever changing, then any karmic come-uppance will be affecting a different set of skandhas, or a different ‘person’. This objection was perhaps first enunciated by the Greek comic playwright Epicharmus. He tells of a debtor arguing to his creditor that, given the changing nature of the world, he is no longer the same person who borrowed the money and thus cannot be held accountable for its return. The creditor knocks the debtor to the ground and, in the face of the latter’s protestations, claims to be a different person to he that hit the debtor just moments ago, and is thus falsely accused. This tongue in cheek objection is actually very real – the implication of no-self on moral theory is potentially huge.
Two principal objections pertain to karmic morality. Firstly, it is clear from many sayings of the Buddha and later writings that all is suffering and that the suffering is felt at an individual level. It is the individual, a distinct person, who experiences suffering. Karmic theory would suggest that, since the person ceases to exist at death as no ‘self’ continues into a new body, then the person lumbered with serving the karmic death of the previous life is in fact a different person. This seems impossible to justify. A second objection relates to the very possibility of nirvana, or escape from the cycle of rebirth and death. Buddhist thinking has those born with heavy karmic debt to work through accepting their lot with resignation, happy in the knowledge that they are working towards a better rebirth. In reality, such compassionate understanding and acceptance of one’s lot might be harder to swallow, and resulting indignation and disaffection can only increase negative karma. As such, karmic debt can only grow for the vast majority of those unlikely to achieve enlightenment. Ernest Valea, in a paper on the logical contradictions within Buddhism, offers two examples from World War II to make these points. Firstly, he suggests that for an individual, such as Hitler, many lives would be required to pay off the karmic debt acquired. However, there would be no connection between the person of Hitler, and the child born with Hitler’s karmic debt. The child would have no awareness of ‘its’ previous monstrous crimes, and would live a harsh and cruel life. This procedure would repeat countless times as Hitler’s debt was worked through. In this entire regime of repayment of karmic debt, Hitler himself, who ceased to exist at his own physical death, repays nothing. In addition to this, each person living under the gloom of Hitler’s karma would undoubtedly feel resentment and indignation, thus increasing rather than decreasing the karmic debt. Valea goes on to discuss the plight of the Jews, suggesting that under karmic law, the genocide should not cause us to raise an eyebrow, as clearly they were being justly punished for previous bad karma; this line of reasoning justifies any and all conceivable crime. In a further twist, Valea suggests that the guards who killed the Jews would in turn be ‘punished’ for their crimes, and their executioners in turn would be ‘punished’ and so on in a never-ending cycle of karmic retribution. It is examples such as these which led Griffiths to call Buddhist karmic theory ‘morally repugnant’.
Much of the confusion here might be down to a Western conceptualisation of karma as having intent. It is true that karma – or action – is accrued by individuals in line with their intentions (so that unintended consequences do not attract karma). However, karma itself, the doctrine, is not some God-like figure passing judgement; karma itself has no intention and hence cannot punish or reward. These are ideas borrowed from a religious (with a capital ‘R’) understanding of justice. Suppose, answers Nagasena in conversation with King Milanda,
‘that a man were to set fire to a village by careless use of an oil lamp. Would the king find him guilty, or would he accept the argument, "The flame of the lamp... was one thing; the fire which burnt your village was another thing?”
"In spite of whatever the man might say, the one fire was produced from the other.”
"Just so, great king, it is one name-and-form which has its end in death, and another name-and-form which is reborn. But the second is the result of the first, and is therefore not set free from its evil deeds.” Milindapaiha p. 47 (SBE)
Buddha’s response to the kinds of objections raised by Valea is the idea of interdependent arising. All things – or processes – are directly in existence as a result of the immediately preceding state of affairs – or processes. The skandhas which make me who I am right now are such as they are because of the make-up of the skandhas which came before them moments ago – and so on into the future. Buddha, then, proposed a sequence of causality which ensures unbroken continuity from one state of existence to the next. My current set of aggregates or skandhas are the result of the previous karma accumulated by my immediately preceding skandhas. An example of this is also offered by Nagasena. He postulates a lamp burning all night. ‘Is it the same flame that burns in the first watch of the night, Sir, and in the second? ... Just so, O king is the continuity of a person or thing dharma maintained. One comes into being and another passes away; and the rebirth is, as it were, simultaneous. Thus neither as the same nor as another does one go on.’
Interdependent (or dependent) arising can also be used to contest the objection to no-self raised by rebirth. The objection is similar to that which arises in the case of karma. If no permanent self exists, and there is no self to pass on to a new life, exactly what is it that is being reborn? The idea of dependent or interdependent arising states that the skandhas at the time of death are causally linked to the skandhas which cross the threshold of death and in turn give rise to a new set of skandhas. If the validity of interdependent arising were to be shown as faulty, there would perhaps be a serious problem for the philosophies of no-self, karma and rebirth, but Gowans insists that the Buddha’s teachings, as and of themselves, do appear to be consistent and non-contradictory. Gowans states that ‘understanding {dependent origination} is equivalent to understanding Buddha’s teaching as a whole.’
There would appear, then, to be a number of misunderstandings which give rise to the conception that karma and re-birth are a contradiction to the notion of no-self.
Firstly, it must be understood that there is no generic one-definition Buddhist version of either karma or re-birth which one can encapsulate as discrete and hence attempt either to contradict or support. Whilst it would be an exaggeration to say that there are as many versions of Buddhism as there are Buddhists, there is certainly an element of truth to this line of reasoning. There are substantial differences between as well as within the major Buddhist schools – Mahayana and Theravada. Their versions of the karma and re-birth story are radically different. Hence the first major misunderstanding is that there is a single coherent no-self theory within Buddhism which can be contested. Much as one can quote-mine the Bible to find support for directly conflicting stands on any number of issues, so one can turn to ‘Buddhism’ and find the same. Mahayana Buddhism, for example, reinterprets no-self as ‘emptiness’ in a far more radical manner than the Pali Canons of earlier Buddhism. The Heart Sutra – a ‘clarifying’ summary of a wider range of Mahayana Buddhist scripts – states that ‘Form is precisely emptiness And emptiness precisely form’ and places such emptiness at the very centre of its philosophy. Not only is there no self, but the idea of emptiness expands to encompass all that there is, or rather isn’t, a pre-cursor of Kant’s noumena, perhaps, unknowable given our tools for knowledge. ‘This is the root of the Mahayana. So also, however, is the opposite realisation. If all form is precisely emptiness, emptiness nonetheless appears to us as form.’ Within the context of this greater understanding of no-self, the idea of karma plays a much diminished role. Although the term karma as used by Buddhists has the roots within the Hindu word interpreted most often as a form of destiny or duty, the Buddhist word is used much differently. Alexander Berzin describes karma under the Indo-Tibetan tradition as being ‘merely’ the impulse to perform an act – the mental urge to what he then terms as karmic action. These may even be what Western secular philosophy would term as ‘unconscious urges’. The results or consequences are only apparent if the urge, or karma, is acted upon. ‘…from the point of view of the Indian Mahayana tenet systems and all Tibetan traditions of them, except Gelug Prasangika, karma is exclusively a mental factor, an impulse. It is the impulse that draws us toward a specific experience or object. More specifically, it is the impulse that brings us toward an activity, whether doing, saying, or thinking something.’
Secondly, there is a tacit assumption, in much of the literature rebuking no-self as inconsistent and flawed, that the idea of karma is related to a theory of ethics. Again, the various schools of Buddhism have a wide ranging take on what karma is and is not. In the Theravada school, certainly as widely practised in Thailand, for example, karma is seen as reward and punishment – just dessert for intentional actions performed in this or a previous life. There is even disagreement over the impact of intentional and unintentional acts, as evidenced by the previous example of the inadvertent fire caused by the careless owner of the lamp. However, the Theravada school, though often proclaimed as the closest to Buddha himself, grew as a direct response to the status quo of traditional Indian thought and has been identified by some as being shaped to suit the existing hierarchical structure of the caste system, for example. Karma and re-birth together could explain the apparent inconsistencies of earthly existence as well as maintaining structures which society and culture deemed necessary. (Ananda himself drew together the monks of his time, openly chastising them for the creation of hierarchy and the attachment to ritual, telling them they were missing the essence of the Buddha’s message. ‘Thus it is said that in the early Sangha there was no hierarchy and locus of authority; while the leaders and older monks deserved respect and privilege in etiquette, they could only advise and instruct, not legislate or compel. The elders did not possess Episcopal authority; at best they were the chief teachers of the order.’ )
In subsequent more developed versions of Buddhist theory, karma plays no such sanctioning role. Karma can be likened to an energy flow, or a tide in the sea – it certainly causes effects, as a strong wind might fell a tree, but to speculate about the intention of the wind, or the concept of justice for the tree, is to impose another set of understandings which has no place in any meaningful account of karma. ‘…the whole idea of guilt and punishment… is alien to the Buddhist view of Karma. To say she deserved it implies there is somebody else sending punishment. Buddhism never says that.’ Damien Keown underlines this very clearly. ‘Karma is not a system of rewards and punishments meted out by God but a kind of natural law akin to the law of gravity...karma as a religious concept is concerned not with just any actions but with actions of a particular kind. Karmic actions are moral actions, and the Buddha defined karma by reference to moral choices and the acts consequent upon them. He stated, ‘It is intention, O monks, that I call karma; having willed one acts through body, speech, or mind’ (A.iii.415)’
Thirdly, much of the Buddhist tradition, being written hundreds of years after the Buddha, can be seen as open to interpretation. Buddha himself claimed to speak in languages suited to his audience, and much of what is accepted Buddhist lore can be seen through such filters. It is often claimed, for example, that Buddha himself remembered a range of past lives, recalling historical detail and an essence of himself in each incarnation. This would seem to directly contradict no-self and place an unsurpassable barrier to the understanding of the Buddha’s message. If the Buddha himself can recall past lives with biographical detail, then clearly something of himself has survived, to be re-expressed in each new life – that something is a self by any other name. However, seen in a light of parable, the Buddha’s stories of previous lives serve to underline and elucidate various aspects of Buddhist thought for those follower’s requiring explanations at such a level. One can see obvious parallels in the modern Christian debate over the literal interpretation of the Creation story versus the papal acceptance of biological evolution as fact. In much the same way, Tibetan Buddhism has clung to many images of gods and goddesses, which seems to be in contradiction to the accepted non-deity version of Buddhism favoured elsewhere. Monks within that tradition will answer clearly that of course there are not literal gods, but that the stories of the gods serve a function for those who require such an exposition of Buddha’s teachings. Thich Nhat Hanh makes this precise point: ‘When I read any scripture, Christian or Buddhist, I always keep in mind that whatever Jesus or the Buddha said was to a particular person or group on a particular occasion. I try to understand the context in which they spoke to understand their meaning. What they said may be less important than how they said it…But if we analyse their words to find the deepest meaning without understanding the relationships between the speaker and his listeners, we may miss the point.’ The personification of various Buddha traits is both a product of and a service to our innate story-telling nature and over thousands of years a blurring of lines between parable and reality is inevitable.
Thich Nhat Hanh cuts to the very heart of the Buddha’s message when he suggests that in effect, attachment of any kind is the thing which needs transcending. He says that the Buddha used no-self as a means to react against his epoch, and specifically against what he saw as the damaging notion of atman as adopted by the Brahman priests of his time. But, an attachment to no-self was equally an attachment, and the message of the Buddha was to free oneself of attachment, not to re-attach to a different doctrine. ‘…when Buddhists began worshipping the idea of emptiness, [Buddha] said, “It is worse if you get caught in the non-self of a flower than if you belief in the self of a flower.”
No-self was intended as an instrument of meditation, and those who have forgotten this confuse the means with the end (famously, confuse the finger pointing to the moon with the moon itself). Seen thus, as a tool to further enlightenment, no-self can be seen as in no way contradicting the contingent philosophies of karma and re-birth. Ajahan Jagaro discusses this concept of logical consistency in a speech to the Buddhist Society of Victoria in 1997. He emphasizes the lack of self as being the central point of karma – it is only when we accept no-self that we can possibly comprehend the orderliness and natural regime of karma. ‘There is no contradiction at all in the teaching of anatta and kamma. They flow together very well because of the law of dependent origination and the law of kamma. That is why it works the way it does, without anybody ordering it. It is orderly by its very nature…. It does not matter whether people have different religious beliefs, if they have the law of kamma by whatever word they call it, they can live together. It does not contradict with the law of anatta. Because there is no one driving, no one in the driver's seat, the laws operate and everything is orderly. No punishment, no reward, on favours, just orderly.’
All are intrinsically and essentially bound together in a fluid and at times subjectively interpreted, holistic view of personhood. The Buddha is often attributed with refusing to answer direct questions about the nature of existence. Many areas of Buddhism, perhaps most notably Zen Buddhism, focus far more strenuously on practice of Buddhism rather than its scholarly study and breaking down into logical perceptions. There are perhaps good reasons for this. At some level, accepting either existence or non-existence of the self can have dubious ethical consequences. If, as a result of physical death, the self continues on, then it seems hardly important what the body does. An unchanging and eternal self will not be affected by the actions of a mere body. Likewise, if with physical death the self ends, then there is no logical restraint upon actions of the body, as no sanctions can exist. Some ethical theorists suggest that morality requires such restraints, though perhaps a growing secular or even atheist movement might beg to differ. In the case where things exist through interdependent arsing, however, both absolute existence and non-existence are impossible. Perhaps then to seek answers to Buddhism’s apparent internal paradoxes is to miss the message. The Buddha famously gives the example of a man wounded by a poison arrow , who is desperate to know the source of his injury to the nth degree before allowing himself to be treated and so dies for the lack of the treatment he could have received had he simply let go of his questions. The Buddha left unanswered certain metaphysical questions because metaphysical theories are not useful, ‘not conductive to aversion, detachment, cessation, tranquillity, penetration, realization, and nirvana. There are repeated warnings about becoming enmeshed in views, or being fettered with views.’
Bibliography
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Parfit, Derek Reasons and Persons 1984 OUP
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Siderits, Mark (Ed), ‘Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions’ Seoul National University 2010
Siderits, Mark Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction Hackett 2007
Siderits, Mark, Thompson, Evan, Zahavi, Dan (Eds) Self, No Self?, Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions 2010, Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2011
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Crook, John ‘The Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra’ 1992 http://www.westernchanfellowship.org/lib/wcf////the-prajnaparamita-heart-sutra/
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In the discourse between King Melinda and the Buddhist monk Nagsena , the king asks the monk how rebirth can take place without the transmigration of something. He asks, in fact, the intuitive question – if there is no ‘self’ existing, what is it which survives to be reborn in another life, and what is it that accrues either positive or negative karma and can be seen to be rewarded or punished in future incarnations for the actions of past lives?
I wish to look first at general Indian philosophical ideas about self and the early thinking behind karma and rebirth. I hope to be able to show how Buddha demonstrated that anatman can logically allow for both karma and rebirth.
At around the time of the Buddha, there were many philosophies of the self. The Upanishads put forth the self as a stable and constant substance – atman. This substance may change in terms of qualities over time, but not in quantity. In other words there is always just the one self behind the changing circumstances of each individual’s existence. I may grow fat and change my musical tastes, but the ‘me’ that undergoes these changes remains constant. Atman is an extension of this generally acceptable recognition of the permanence of self over time within one lifetime, to permanence of self over many lifetimes.
Buddha argues that this is a fallacy and there is no self. For Buddha, persons are composed of five aggregates – skandhas – physical and mental processes of which our experience of ourselves is composed. If there were such anything as a self, it would have to be in the five aggregates, but since these are, by their nature, impermanent, a permanent self is impossible.
“According to the Buddhist tradition, both physical and mental phenomena arise, exist, and pass away within a vast, interrelated network of causes and conditions. This continual process of arising, existing, and passing away is the process of dependent origination, one of the core notions of Buddhist thought. Buddhism argues further that all entities, events, and processes have no substantial reality outside of this dynamic matrix of dependent origination. So, things like chariots, pots, and persons are ultimately empty of fixed or intrinsic nature.”
This, clearly, is one of the biggest challenges for adherents of Buddhism – accepting the hugely counter-intuitive claim that no ‘self’ exists. One common argument put forth against no-self here is that the Buddha himself refers to a self in his own teachings. However, it can be seen that ‘I’ is merely a helpful designator. Gowans identifies a ‘process self’ to which he says the ‘I’ refers – but the very use of the word propagates the concept the Buddha is eschewing. That which we perceive as a self is merely a series of interconnected happenings, the skandhas. Gowans refers to these as a ‘nexus of processes such as experiencing, remembering, imagining and feeling’ – usually what we would come to accept as self-consciousness. Whilst ultimately there are no selves, the Buddha used references to a process self to make his teachings accessible to those still attached to a self of concrete substance. Other proponents of no-self theory suggest that it is possible to ‘eliminate the notion of the self and its identity, and yet on pragmatic grounds continue to permit the use of the language of personal identity.’
Perhaps the most famous non-Buddhist exponent of this conceptualization of ‘personhood’ is David Hume. He expressed it thus:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other ['perception' is here a general word for any mental activity] of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception… '[mankind] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.'
Hume’s doubts are echoed by a more modern Buddhist commentary:
Where is the self? Is it the totality of the body? Is it in the body at all? What is its relation to the body? As you read this - try to find it. Paradoxically while you will have little doubt about the fact of your existence, the precise location or mode of being of what you appear to be is very far from obvious. Similarly, if you seek to locate the roots of experience, whether of sensation, volition, thought or awareness, you again find yourself tumbling into an absence of certainty, into a great doubt.
Part of the issue is certainly our perception of self as continuous over time. It seems clear to me that I am today a very different person as a forty-four year old father of two, spouse, teacher, author to the person I was as a newly arrived University undergraduate. However, the very language I am compelled to use reinforces continuity, in that I am talking of ‘me’ in both cases. A less personal account would talk of there being a forty-four year old and there having been an undergraduate, without personal pronouns to confuse the issue. Hume directly says that all ‘nice and subtle’ issues surrounding personal identity are more to do with grammar than with philosophy – presaging Wittgenstein’s more radical approach. However, whilst it is very clearly true that these people are different, I think it would be absurd to claim that the former was not the latter in some sense. I cannot realistically claim to be a truly different person, as evidenced by ongoing legal trails of Nazi war criminals, for example. I would still be held accountable for actions carried out by my previous self. Raymond Martin suggests that there is a distinction between what Buddhists might accept and that which Western philosophers feel comfortable accepting in relation to an understanding about the self. He states that some Western philosophers - reductionists who hold a ‘metaphysical view that does not commit one to any particular normative theory or to any view about how on relational grounds personal identity over time should be understood’ - would be comfortable with the Mahayana Buddhist idea that the self is a fiction ultimately but that conventionally can be held to exist for pragmatic purposes. However, they might not be prepared to go as far as to accept that brains, bodies and associated psychological events are equally only conventionally real and ultimately non-existent. Philosophers such as Hume and, more recently, Derek Parfit (sometimes known as ‘bundle theorists’ for their idea, akin to skandhas or aggregates in Buddhism, that we are bundles of experiences at any one moment in time, rather than a conscious ego doing the experiencing) have suggested that what we call a person is firstly a series of thoughts, feelings, associations and other mental events which is, secondly, knitted together through a variety of causal events of which memory is one of the most important. For Parfit, selves are much like clubs or associations: ‘Does the Maryland Philosophy Club exist as a thing in its own right? The answer would seem to be no. For there to be a Maryland philosophy club is nothing more than for there to be certain people who have decided to associate with one another for certain purposes and talk about that association in a particular way. The club has no individuality or integrity in its own right…’ He is not denying that for conventional purposes one can talk of a club doing this, or supporting that, but that ultimately the club is only collection of essences, contingent for its identity upon causal relations. Hume clearly stated a similar view, referring to the soul as ‘a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocities of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic, in the incessant changes of its parts'. Thus it is that for Buddhists, the self exists as a collection of experiences but not as an enduring, unchanging atman as espoused by earlier Hindu belief and as commonly accepted in both secular and religious Western thought.
Karma and rebirth were around as philosophical traditions long before Buddhism. It was widely believed that beings died and were then reborn in some way. Human beings, and indeed all other living creatures, did not live only one life, but returned again and again to this world in an unremitting progression of death and rebirth. In India, this is known still as samsara, or “wandering” from one life to the next one. Initially, the idea of samsara may seem to be an opportunity, a possibility to enjoy some of the things we missed in this life or to make reparations (as in ‘Groundhog Day’), but in ancient India, samsara was an encumbrance. It was a burden to be escaped through one of two routes: performance of good actions (karma) in anticipation of a better rebirth or renouncing action altogether and bringing the cycle of death and rebirth to an end. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a sage named Yajñavalkya compares this series of human lives to the movement of a caterpillar from one blade of grass to another: “It is like this. As a caterpillar, when it comes to the tip of a blade of grass, reaches out to a new foothold and draws itself onto it, so the self (atman), after it has knocked down this body and rendered it unconscious, reaches out to a new foothold and draws itself onto it.” Karma was the universal law governing this rebirth – making sure that intention of actions was reflected in the outcome of future and present lives. Karma, then, determines where (that is, in which plane of existence) and as what (that is, what kind of being) a being will be reborn as. So whilst someone may have recently led a good and honest (or moral) life, they might still be reborn as a slug or into a lower plane of existence as the result of negative karma accumulated from lives previous to the last one. One question here might be why did the current life not reflect such karmic justice? Swami Shivananda states:
“If the virtuous man who has not done any evil act in this birth suffers, this is due to some wrong act that he may have committed in his previous birth. He will have his compensation in his next birth. If the wicked man who daily does many evil actions apparently enjoys this birth, this is due to some good Karma he must have done in his previous birth. He will have compensation in his next birth. He will suffer in the next birth. The law of compensation is inexorable and relentless.”
In some commentaries, it is suggested that this is a rather facile response which essentially explains any and all apparent inconsistencies in moral standing, injustices in the world and individual ‘luck’ and is, of course, empirically impossible to argue. Karma was certainly used historically within Hindu traditions to negate complaints about present-life situations. Laurence Mills suggests a kinder interpretation, however, arguing that teaching of re-birth gives value to life and brings a sense of justice to the seeming chaos of injustice apparent in the modern world. Rebirth, he argues, can explain why the evil seem to prosper and the virtuous may lead unhappy lives.
The central question, however, is not whether the teaching of rebirth offers moral succour to those in need (which well it might, much in the same way as the promissory rewards of heaven and hell in Christianity) but whether karma and rebirth can logically persist as doctrines in the face of no self. The Consistency objection certainly maintains that they cannot. If there is no constant and consistent self, what is it that karma affects? White frames the issue thus, paraphrasing Griffiths on survival after death: ‘Buddhist karmic theory is caught in a contradiction: in order to explain survival of death and re-birth, Buddhists have to suppose that there is an atman, but according to the anatman doctrine which they accept, there is no such thing.’ Additionally, if a person is merely a series of interconnected events and dispositions which are ever changing, then any karmic come-uppance will be affecting a different set of skandhas, or a different ‘person’. This objection was perhaps first enunciated by the Greek comic playwright Epicharmus. He tells of a debtor arguing to his creditor that, given the changing nature of the world, he is no longer the same person who borrowed the money and thus cannot be held accountable for its return. The creditor knocks the debtor to the ground and, in the face of the latter’s protestations, claims to be a different person to he that hit the debtor just moments ago, and is thus falsely accused. This tongue in cheek objection is actually very real – the implication of no-self on moral theory is potentially huge.
Two principal objections pertain to karmic morality. Firstly, it is clear from many sayings of the Buddha and later writings that all is suffering and that the suffering is felt at an individual level. It is the individual, a distinct person, who experiences suffering. Karmic theory would suggest that, since the person ceases to exist at death as no ‘self’ continues into a new body, then the person lumbered with serving the karmic death of the previous life is in fact a different person. This seems impossible to justify. A second objection relates to the very possibility of nirvana, or escape from the cycle of rebirth and death. Buddhist thinking has those born with heavy karmic debt to work through accepting their lot with resignation, happy in the knowledge that they are working towards a better rebirth. In reality, such compassionate understanding and acceptance of one’s lot might be harder to swallow, and resulting indignation and disaffection can only increase negative karma. As such, karmic debt can only grow for the vast majority of those unlikely to achieve enlightenment. Ernest Valea, in a paper on the logical contradictions within Buddhism, offers two examples from World War II to make these points. Firstly, he suggests that for an individual, such as Hitler, many lives would be required to pay off the karmic debt acquired. However, there would be no connection between the person of Hitler, and the child born with Hitler’s karmic debt. The child would have no awareness of ‘its’ previous monstrous crimes, and would live a harsh and cruel life. This procedure would repeat countless times as Hitler’s debt was worked through. In this entire regime of repayment of karmic debt, Hitler himself, who ceased to exist at his own physical death, repays nothing. In addition to this, each person living under the gloom of Hitler’s karma would undoubtedly feel resentment and indignation, thus increasing rather than decreasing the karmic debt. Valea goes on to discuss the plight of the Jews, suggesting that under karmic law, the genocide should not cause us to raise an eyebrow, as clearly they were being justly punished for previous bad karma; this line of reasoning justifies any and all conceivable crime. In a further twist, Valea suggests that the guards who killed the Jews would in turn be ‘punished’ for their crimes, and their executioners in turn would be ‘punished’ and so on in a never-ending cycle of karmic retribution. It is examples such as these which led Griffiths to call Buddhist karmic theory ‘morally repugnant’.
Much of the confusion here might be down to a Western conceptualisation of karma as having intent. It is true that karma – or action – is accrued by individuals in line with their intentions (so that unintended consequences do not attract karma). However, karma itself, the doctrine, is not some God-like figure passing judgement; karma itself has no intention and hence cannot punish or reward. These are ideas borrowed from a religious (with a capital ‘R’) understanding of justice. Suppose, answers Nagasena in conversation with King Milanda,
‘that a man were to set fire to a village by careless use of an oil lamp. Would the king find him guilty, or would he accept the argument, "The flame of the lamp... was one thing; the fire which burnt your village was another thing?”
"In spite of whatever the man might say, the one fire was produced from the other.”
"Just so, great king, it is one name-and-form which has its end in death, and another name-and-form which is reborn. But the second is the result of the first, and is therefore not set free from its evil deeds.” Milindapaiha p. 47 (SBE)
Buddha’s response to the kinds of objections raised by Valea is the idea of interdependent arising. All things – or processes – are directly in existence as a result of the immediately preceding state of affairs – or processes. The skandhas which make me who I am right now are such as they are because of the make-up of the skandhas which came before them moments ago – and so on into the future. Buddha, then, proposed a sequence of causality which ensures unbroken continuity from one state of existence to the next. My current set of aggregates or skandhas are the result of the previous karma accumulated by my immediately preceding skandhas. An example of this is also offered by Nagasena. He postulates a lamp burning all night. ‘Is it the same flame that burns in the first watch of the night, Sir, and in the second? ... Just so, O king is the continuity of a person or thing dharma maintained. One comes into being and another passes away; and the rebirth is, as it were, simultaneous. Thus neither as the same nor as another does one go on.’
Interdependent (or dependent) arising can also be used to contest the objection to no-self raised by rebirth. The objection is similar to that which arises in the case of karma. If no permanent self exists, and there is no self to pass on to a new life, exactly what is it that is being reborn? The idea of dependent or interdependent arising states that the skandhas at the time of death are causally linked to the skandhas which cross the threshold of death and in turn give rise to a new set of skandhas. If the validity of interdependent arising were to be shown as faulty, there would perhaps be a serious problem for the philosophies of no-self, karma and rebirth, but Gowans insists that the Buddha’s teachings, as and of themselves, do appear to be consistent and non-contradictory. Gowans states that ‘understanding {dependent origination} is equivalent to understanding Buddha’s teaching as a whole.’
There would appear, then, to be a number of misunderstandings which give rise to the conception that karma and re-birth are a contradiction to the notion of no-self.
Firstly, it must be understood that there is no generic one-definition Buddhist version of either karma or re-birth which one can encapsulate as discrete and hence attempt either to contradict or support. Whilst it would be an exaggeration to say that there are as many versions of Buddhism as there are Buddhists, there is certainly an element of truth to this line of reasoning. There are substantial differences between as well as within the major Buddhist schools – Mahayana and Theravada. Their versions of the karma and re-birth story are radically different. Hence the first major misunderstanding is that there is a single coherent no-self theory within Buddhism which can be contested. Much as one can quote-mine the Bible to find support for directly conflicting stands on any number of issues, so one can turn to ‘Buddhism’ and find the same. Mahayana Buddhism, for example, reinterprets no-self as ‘emptiness’ in a far more radical manner than the Pali Canons of earlier Buddhism. The Heart Sutra – a ‘clarifying’ summary of a wider range of Mahayana Buddhist scripts – states that ‘Form is precisely emptiness And emptiness precisely form’ and places such emptiness at the very centre of its philosophy. Not only is there no self, but the idea of emptiness expands to encompass all that there is, or rather isn’t, a pre-cursor of Kant’s noumena, perhaps, unknowable given our tools for knowledge. ‘This is the root of the Mahayana. So also, however, is the opposite realisation. If all form is precisely emptiness, emptiness nonetheless appears to us as form.’ Within the context of this greater understanding of no-self, the idea of karma plays a much diminished role. Although the term karma as used by Buddhists has the roots within the Hindu word interpreted most often as a form of destiny or duty, the Buddhist word is used much differently. Alexander Berzin describes karma under the Indo-Tibetan tradition as being ‘merely’ the impulse to perform an act – the mental urge to what he then terms as karmic action. These may even be what Western secular philosophy would term as ‘unconscious urges’. The results or consequences are only apparent if the urge, or karma, is acted upon. ‘…from the point of view of the Indian Mahayana tenet systems and all Tibetan traditions of them, except Gelug Prasangika, karma is exclusively a mental factor, an impulse. It is the impulse that draws us toward a specific experience or object. More specifically, it is the impulse that brings us toward an activity, whether doing, saying, or thinking something.’
Secondly, there is a tacit assumption, in much of the literature rebuking no-self as inconsistent and flawed, that the idea of karma is related to a theory of ethics. Again, the various schools of Buddhism have a wide ranging take on what karma is and is not. In the Theravada school, certainly as widely practised in Thailand, for example, karma is seen as reward and punishment – just dessert for intentional actions performed in this or a previous life. There is even disagreement over the impact of intentional and unintentional acts, as evidenced by the previous example of the inadvertent fire caused by the careless owner of the lamp. However, the Theravada school, though often proclaimed as the closest to Buddha himself, grew as a direct response to the status quo of traditional Indian thought and has been identified by some as being shaped to suit the existing hierarchical structure of the caste system, for example. Karma and re-birth together could explain the apparent inconsistencies of earthly existence as well as maintaining structures which society and culture deemed necessary. (Ananda himself drew together the monks of his time, openly chastising them for the creation of hierarchy and the attachment to ritual, telling them they were missing the essence of the Buddha’s message. ‘Thus it is said that in the early Sangha there was no hierarchy and locus of authority; while the leaders and older monks deserved respect and privilege in etiquette, they could only advise and instruct, not legislate or compel. The elders did not possess Episcopal authority; at best they were the chief teachers of the order.’ )
In subsequent more developed versions of Buddhist theory, karma plays no such sanctioning role. Karma can be likened to an energy flow, or a tide in the sea – it certainly causes effects, as a strong wind might fell a tree, but to speculate about the intention of the wind, or the concept of justice for the tree, is to impose another set of understandings which has no place in any meaningful account of karma. ‘…the whole idea of guilt and punishment… is alien to the Buddhist view of Karma. To say she deserved it implies there is somebody else sending punishment. Buddhism never says that.’ Damien Keown underlines this very clearly. ‘Karma is not a system of rewards and punishments meted out by God but a kind of natural law akin to the law of gravity...karma as a religious concept is concerned not with just any actions but with actions of a particular kind. Karmic actions are moral actions, and the Buddha defined karma by reference to moral choices and the acts consequent upon them. He stated, ‘It is intention, O monks, that I call karma; having willed one acts through body, speech, or mind’ (A.iii.415)’
Thirdly, much of the Buddhist tradition, being written hundreds of years after the Buddha, can be seen as open to interpretation. Buddha himself claimed to speak in languages suited to his audience, and much of what is accepted Buddhist lore can be seen through such filters. It is often claimed, for example, that Buddha himself remembered a range of past lives, recalling historical detail and an essence of himself in each incarnation. This would seem to directly contradict no-self and place an unsurpassable barrier to the understanding of the Buddha’s message. If the Buddha himself can recall past lives with biographical detail, then clearly something of himself has survived, to be re-expressed in each new life – that something is a self by any other name. However, seen in a light of parable, the Buddha’s stories of previous lives serve to underline and elucidate various aspects of Buddhist thought for those follower’s requiring explanations at such a level. One can see obvious parallels in the modern Christian debate over the literal interpretation of the Creation story versus the papal acceptance of biological evolution as fact. In much the same way, Tibetan Buddhism has clung to many images of gods and goddesses, which seems to be in contradiction to the accepted non-deity version of Buddhism favoured elsewhere. Monks within that tradition will answer clearly that of course there are not literal gods, but that the stories of the gods serve a function for those who require such an exposition of Buddha’s teachings. Thich Nhat Hanh makes this precise point: ‘When I read any scripture, Christian or Buddhist, I always keep in mind that whatever Jesus or the Buddha said was to a particular person or group on a particular occasion. I try to understand the context in which they spoke to understand their meaning. What they said may be less important than how they said it…But if we analyse their words to find the deepest meaning without understanding the relationships between the speaker and his listeners, we may miss the point.’ The personification of various Buddha traits is both a product of and a service to our innate story-telling nature and over thousands of years a blurring of lines between parable and reality is inevitable.
Thich Nhat Hanh cuts to the very heart of the Buddha’s message when he suggests that in effect, attachment of any kind is the thing which needs transcending. He says that the Buddha used no-self as a means to react against his epoch, and specifically against what he saw as the damaging notion of atman as adopted by the Brahman priests of his time. But, an attachment to no-self was equally an attachment, and the message of the Buddha was to free oneself of attachment, not to re-attach to a different doctrine. ‘…when Buddhists began worshipping the idea of emptiness, [Buddha] said, “It is worse if you get caught in the non-self of a flower than if you belief in the self of a flower.”
No-self was intended as an instrument of meditation, and those who have forgotten this confuse the means with the end (famously, confuse the finger pointing to the moon with the moon itself). Seen thus, as a tool to further enlightenment, no-self can be seen as in no way contradicting the contingent philosophies of karma and re-birth. Ajahan Jagaro discusses this concept of logical consistency in a speech to the Buddhist Society of Victoria in 1997. He emphasizes the lack of self as being the central point of karma – it is only when we accept no-self that we can possibly comprehend the orderliness and natural regime of karma. ‘There is no contradiction at all in the teaching of anatta and kamma. They flow together very well because of the law of dependent origination and the law of kamma. That is why it works the way it does, without anybody ordering it. It is orderly by its very nature…. It does not matter whether people have different religious beliefs, if they have the law of kamma by whatever word they call it, they can live together. It does not contradict with the law of anatta. Because there is no one driving, no one in the driver's seat, the laws operate and everything is orderly. No punishment, no reward, on favours, just orderly.’
All are intrinsically and essentially bound together in a fluid and at times subjectively interpreted, holistic view of personhood. The Buddha is often attributed with refusing to answer direct questions about the nature of existence. Many areas of Buddhism, perhaps most notably Zen Buddhism, focus far more strenuously on practice of Buddhism rather than its scholarly study and breaking down into logical perceptions. There are perhaps good reasons for this. At some level, accepting either existence or non-existence of the self can have dubious ethical consequences. If, as a result of physical death, the self continues on, then it seems hardly important what the body does. An unchanging and eternal self will not be affected by the actions of a mere body. Likewise, if with physical death the self ends, then there is no logical restraint upon actions of the body, as no sanctions can exist. Some ethical theorists suggest that morality requires such restraints, though perhaps a growing secular or even atheist movement might beg to differ. In the case where things exist through interdependent arsing, however, both absolute existence and non-existence are impossible. Perhaps then to seek answers to Buddhism’s apparent internal paradoxes is to miss the message. The Buddha famously gives the example of a man wounded by a poison arrow , who is desperate to know the source of his injury to the nth degree before allowing himself to be treated and so dies for the lack of the treatment he could have received had he simply let go of his questions. The Buddha left unanswered certain metaphysical questions because metaphysical theories are not useful, ‘not conductive to aversion, detachment, cessation, tranquillity, penetration, realization, and nirvana. There are repeated warnings about becoming enmeshed in views, or being fettered with views.’
Bibliography
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Martin, Raymond and Barresi, John (eds.), Personal Identity (2003) (PI)
Mills, Laurence-Khantipalo Buddhism Explained Silkworm 1999
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Parfit, Derek Reasons and Persons 1984 OUP
Rahula, Walpola What the Buddha Taught Grove Press, 1972
Siderits, Mark (Ed), ‘Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions’ Seoul National University 2010
Siderits, Mark Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction Hackett 2007
Siderits, Mark, Thompson, Evan, Zahavi, Dan (Eds) Self, No Self?, Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions 2010, Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2011
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Crook, John ‘The Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra’ 1992 http://www.westernchanfellowship.org/lib/wcf////the-prajnaparamita-heart-sutra/
D'Amato, Mario, Jay L. Garfield, and Tom J. F. Tillemans (ed) ‘Pointing at the Moon - Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy’ New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Scholarship Online. Oxford University Press. 23 May 2011
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Griffiths, Paul J. 'Notes Towards a Critique of Buddhist Karmic Theory', Religious Studies, XVIII, 3 (September I982),pp 277-91
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Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Woolf and the Meaning of Life
‘I very rarely think either of my past or my future, but the moment that one contemplates writing an autobiography - and I am sitting down with that intention today - one is forced to regard oneself as an entity carried along for a brief period in the stream of time, emerging suddenly at a particular moment from darkness and nothingness and shortly to disappear at a particular moment into nothingness and darkness. The moment at which officially I emerged from non-existence was the early morning of November 25th, 1880, though in fact I did not personally become aware of my existence until some two or three years later. In the interval between 1880 and today I have lived my life on the assumption that sooner or later I shall pass by annihilation into the same state of non-existence from which I suddenly emerged that winter morning in West Cromwell Road, Kensington, so many years ago. This passage from non-existence to non-existence seems to me a strange and, on the whole, an enjoyable experience. Since the age of sixteen, when for a short time, like all intelligent adolescents, I took the universe too seriously, I have rarely worried myself about its meaning or meaninglessness. But I resent the fact that, as seems to be practically certain, I shall be as non-existent after my death as I was before my birth. Nothing can be done about it and I cannot truthfully say that my future extinction causes me much fear or pain, but I should like to record my protest against it and against the universe which enacts it.
‘The adulation of the deity as creator of the universe in Jewish and Christian psalms and hymns, and indeed by most religions, seems to me ridiculous. No doubt in the course of millions of millions of years, he has contrived to create some good things. I agree that 'my heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky', or 'the golden daffodils, beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze', or 'the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way'. I admit that every now and again I am amazed and profoundly moved by the beauty and affection of my cat and my dog. But at what a cost of senseless pain and misery, of wasteful and prodigal cruelty, does he manage to produce a daffodil, a Siamese cat, a sheepdog, a housefly, or a sardine. I resent the wasteful stupidity of a system which tolerates the spawning herring or the seeding groundsel or the statistics of infantile mortality wherever God has not been civilized by man. And I resent the stupid wastefulness of a system which requires that human beings with great labour and pain should spend years in acquiring knowledge, experience, and skill, and then just when at last they might use all this in the service of mankind and for their own happiness, they lose their teeth and their hair and their wits, and are hurriedly bundled, together with all that they have learnt, into the grave and nothingness.
It is clear that, if there is a purpose in the universe and a creator, both are unintelligible to us. But that does not provide them with an excuse or a defence.’
Are these views reasonable?
In this essay I shall be considering Woolf’s claims. I shall firstly unpack what it is he is really saying and try to identify his view in as succinct a form as possible. I shall then consider the arguments he puts forward, both explicitly and implicitly, and the extent to which they are reasonable, and whether they are supported in the philosophical tradition. I shall also consider directly contrasting views and discuss their validity as arguments against Woolf’s assertions.
It is clear that Woolf rejects a traditional dualist vision of humanity. He clearly states that he anticipates non-existence after death to be akin to his non-existence before his birth, and though he stops short, in this passage, of denying a creator deity, he does refer to its adulation as being ridiculous. Woolf’s is a materialist world view - there is what there is - but he goes further, lamenting the unfairness of life which deserts us just as we begin to get to grips with it. He doesn’t subscribe to the axial notion – the perhaps intuitive feeling that there must be something more, some other world or perhaps other way of interacting which would make more sense, be more fulfilling or more liberating than the seemingly deficient and incomplete existence we have been saddled with. Woolf acknowledges nature’s beauty and power to awe, but registers also his frustration that nature is wasteful and necessarily painful. He concludes that if there is purpose in the universe or a creator, whilst we are unable to comprehend it, our inability to do so provides neither excuse nor defence.
One can certainly infer that Woolf considers life to be absurd, in a philosophical sense, or meaningless. He raises the question as to whether life is intrinsically ‘good’, or otherwise. He admits to being both amazed and moved by affection from pets, yet talks of senseless pain and wasteful cruelty in relation to the evolutionary processes of life. He proclaims that just as man is reaching the emotional and intellectual maturity sufficient to grasp life fully, so life degenerates, as if some cruel joke; this is very much the metaphorical shrug of the shoulders in existential angst, “What’s the point?”
In what follows, I shall consider the reasonableness of the claim that life is meaningless or absurd. I shall look at some of Woolf’s specific points in more detail and reflect on the implicit arguments he offers in their defence. In particular, I shall look at his underlying assumption that life is good – that is, that life is intrinsically worthwhile, necessarily of value, as opposed to non-life. I shall also consider his argument that nature is unnecessarily cruel and wasteful, and that this in itself is reason to resent the ‘stupid wastefulness’ of life.
In the first instance, to declare life meaningless, I think we need to consider what we mean by ‘mean’. In purely linguistic terms, meaning can be an ethereal concept. As an example, the French word ‘putain’ literally means prostitute, or in a more derogatory sense, whore. However, in common usage, the French might employ this word in striking a thumb with a hammer or suddenly recalling something terribly important one had forgotten to do – in short it ‘means’ the same thing as the English expletive ‘fuck’ utilised in the same situations. What we mean by a word can become its meaning. Could this be the case with life? Can what we mean by our actions and the way in which we live our lives be the very meaning of life? This idea – that we may give life meaning through our actions – is one to which I shall return.
I might say something such as, ‘I’m starving’ which, whilst it might not ‘mean’ the literal sense of the words used, in that I am near death from malnourishment, it does carry a meaning, that is, it is something I intended to say, a message I intentionally put across, that of my being hungry. Life cannot mean anything, in this sense. It seems to me obvious that life – if one accepts a secular version, that is - cannot ‘mean’ anything in the sense of ‘intend’ something or have a purpose in mind. In this sense, Woolf’s view is perhaps not reasonable. He talks a lot of resentment, directing his feelings towards a universe whose purpose is unknown, a system requiring untold cruelty and ‘unfairness’. In doing so, Woolf seems to be making the assumption that there is a culpable entity to whom to apportion blame. It seems to me that anger or resentment directed at something essentially neutral is far from sensible or reasonable. If life just ‘is’, in the sense that being is simply a fact, then to rail against the unfairness of it would appear to be rather pointless – rather like resenting the cliff as one falls from it, or resenting gravity.
But ‘mean’ can mean ‘signify’, or destiny – as in something that is meant to be - or value –as in ‘you mean a lot to me’. It strikes me that my life can mean a lot to me, that indeed my life can mean something quite specific, whilst the notion that life in general is meaningless might still be acceptable. We talk about acts of violence being meaningless, when actually the act – for example an act of terrorism – may have very strong meaning, in terms of intentionality, as an expression of the will of the perpetrator. Whilst the act itself cannot mean something, in and of itself, it can have meaning, both from intentionality of the facilitator of the act, and from those affected by the act. Perhaps, in this way, life can have meaning whilst simultaneously being meaningless. Whilst this might appear paradoxical, it really isn’t. Some attributions of meaning are simply more valid, more convincing perhaps, than others. This would be Paul Edward’s ‘cosmic’ and ‘terrestrial’ meaning - in a cosmic sense our lives find meaning in the grand scheme of things, an overall purpose, often associated with God, or spirituality, whilst in the terrestrial sense one’s life is imbued with the meaning one subjectively gives it.
‘It is clear that, if there is a purpose in the universe and a creator, both are unintelligible to us,’ Woolf bemoans. Kant would perhaps agree with Woolf in one respect: the real purpose of life cannot be known to us. Whilst one implication of this might be that the ‘bigger picture’ is therefore irrelevant to our own individual search for meaning, I think that individual quests for meaning are necessarily shaped by the nature of reality – just as the heliocentric world view represented a paradigm shift for humanity, so too would concrete evidence of life on other planets, for example, and this would necessarily impact on the individual’s perspective on life and her own search for meaning. However, Kant’s views in this area are intriguingly paradoxical. Kant had reduced humanity to reason alone, refusing other means of knowing. At the same time, however, he claimed that reason was limited by our very nature. Things-as-they-are, or noumena, could never be known through reason, which itself belonged to the realm of things-as-they-seem. For Kant, human life, however, was only worth living in contemplation of deeper, fundamental metaphysical questions, even though these very questions are unattainable to our reason. It is the quest which informs us. In many ways, this is Kant’s legacy to mankind. The superstition of Religion supposedly exposed yet the scope of reason restrained, what is left to us to discover our true nature, our raison d’être?
Kant argued that there were three questions we could – and indeed should – ask: What can I know? Given the limits of my reason, what ought I to do? For what can I hope? Kant’s ‘Critique of Practical Reason’ famously concludes with, ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ For Kant, meaning was found in moral duty, in attaining the highest good. Our lives have meaning in so far as we have choices, we can act autonomously, and meaning can brought into our lives when we act appropriately. John Cottingham supports this view, suggesting that ‘We need to cultivate in ourselves the moral and spiritual basis for being able to live in the face of absurdity and contingency and failure.’ He suggests that the problem of human existence is essentially its fragility, and that to come to terms with this, we must embrace our dependency and lack of autonomy whilst cultivating a moral dimension; he argues that a life of viciousness and selfishness cannot be considered meaningful. Most of us do not have the heroic character of a Sisyphus, shrugging off failure and starting again as each contingency thwarts our plans, and so we must turn to a more spiritual approach which fosters hope.
Does this offer consolation to Woolf? It is hard to see how. Cottingham’s appeal to hope in the face of disaster could be interpreted trivially as a return to other-worldly optimism. His elevation of praxis over faith might be an appealing watering down of religious rhetoric, but it sails close to the axial wind. Kant outlines a battle between moral duty and natural inclinations, or passions – which he famously refers to as cancers of human reason. If we are to accept Kant’s view, of life being a battle between our desires and our rational acceptance of a moral higher good, then is not the individual subsumed? Is not the individual life more meaningless than ever? And it is the individual’s life – the meaninglessness of Woolf’s own life – that Woolf decries, along with the wider disapproval of the wastefulness of the entire process.
Hegel might offer a degree of support to Woolf’s position, but perhaps only in that there is nothing left of worth for us to do. History is dead and there is but a cyclical repetition of events. Meaning, if there is any to be had in life, comes from history. However, Hegel saw life as an unfolding autobiography of the Spirit – a postulated successor to God. In this view, whilst it may be that individual events, or even entire individual lives, are meaningless, with the power of hindsight everything does fall into place as part of some larger, grand scheme. This is perhaps scant consolation for modern secular man in his search for meaning in his own strivings. The idea that an individual life is meaningless, but on a massive scale life is evolving into something meaningful would do little to console Woolf – it is exactly the lack of individual meaning that he contests, and the high price life pays along its evolutionary development.
Hegel, however, did have a concept of selfhood to offer. A person has three dimensions, each constitutive of that person—or selfhood. Firstly, people have notions of themselves, which are intrinsic to who they are. This notion, or conception, is a real part of the person; the person is rooted in the conception they have of themselves. This conception is the first aspect of self. Oddly though, even when self-conception does not fit the actual self it conceives, it is still part of that person - it is not in some way an extra, or a minor characteristic. The second aspect of self then, for Hegel, is this self image or notion, be it accurate or not. Even if that conception we have of ourselves alters to another “mistaken” conception, this would mean that the person would have become a different person, to a substantial degree. The third dimension of self is the historical context in which we find ourselves, and this is where Hegel attempts to offer solace to the existentially challenged. Whilst the influence comes from outside of ourselves, one can imagine that being born into a different family, a different culture or a different economic class could radically alter the person we have become. This is reflected in the view ‘historicism’ – which would give meaning to life in terms of the historical events surrounding us. For Hegel, meaning is to found in society and history, in our citizenship and culture. It is not clear, though, despite its apparent optimism, that this view has much to offer Woolf as he reflects upon his own transitory passage through time. Is his life to be deemed meaningful by the chance fall of the historical dice, by his living in ‘interesting times’ as opposed to a life in the relative calm and easy luxury of political and social stability? The very proposition that meaning can stem from chance is perhaps not a reassuring one.
To address Woolf’s concerns about the fleeting passage of life, and its relative hardships, we need to turn to another philosopher, who clearly lends his approval to Woolf’s misgivings about life: Schopenhauer.
‘To dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole life; permanent night surrounds it…what does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and devoid of pleasure? Nourishment and procreation, that is, only the means for continuing and beginning again in the new individual the same melancholy course.’
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of life is more than just rhetoric, however. He argues fairly convincingly that the negative far outweighs the positive in life; that life is, in fact, more unhappy than happy. Uncomfortable periods – be they through boredom, dread or pain – seem to last longer than comfortable ones. When pleasures disappear we can disagreeably feel their loss, whilst there is no corresponding direct pleasure gained from the absence of pain, save for a fleeting sense of relief. To this last, I can concur – a chronic back condition for over a decade receded with a successful operation and the relief one would expect was felt tangibly for perhaps day or so – I can now reflect upon this condition, but not feel the absence of pain, in the same way as I can physically feel the absence of a loved one. Schopenhauer also identifies that the regret over happiness that has either been lost or will never be attained has no equivalent in the form of a positive sensation of a painful experience we will not have. He exclaims that health, youth and freedom, though often perceived as blessings, are in fact negations. One is only healthy in terms of not suffering from disease, one is only young in terms of not being old and one is only free in terms of not being restrained. Painlessness is not something we can feel, though pain is. Freedom from care is not something we can feel, but caring is. Freedom for fear, similarly, is not an actual feeling, whilst fear is. Even in our moments of pleasure, says Schopenhauer, we are negatively affected. Receiving what it is we desired is always a transitory pleasure, replaced soon enough with boredom and lack of satisfaction, followed by a new desire – a lack of something, the attainment of which will only repeat the cycle of dissatisfaction. If Schopenhauer is correct, then Woolf is indeed reasonable to protest that the suffering within life is too great, and its benefits too few. Great suffering may well imbue a life with great meaning, but perhaps the price is too high.
It is no surprise, given the similarity of the views, that Schopenhauer turned to Buddhism as a possible answer to the absurdity of life. Samsara – the Buddhist wheel of life – describes just this cycle of unsatisfied desire, craving, unsatisfactory attainment, new desires leading to the creation of karma which in turn leads to re-birth and the beginning again of the whole cycle. Only by breaking free of the cycle can peace, or nirvana, be achieved. Schopenhauer thought that the possibility of intellectual escape from life’s viciousness was reserved for only a few superior minds , and the rest of humanity was hopelessly entrapped. Schopenhauer might have misconstrued the idea of nirvana – he equated it with non-existence, or non-birth – but his thoughts on the subject were influential. The ultimate emancipation from wanting, nirvana -enlightenment and dispassionate disinterest - was that attained by the Buddha and sought after by his followers. Schopenhauer’s interpretation led him to believe that death was the only reasonable way out, a belief echoed by German composer Gustav Wagner, a staunch follower of Schopenhauer:
‘…I have yet found a sedative which has finally helped me to sleep at night: it is the sincere and heartfelt yearning for death: total unconsciousness, complete annihilation, the end of all dreams - the only ultimate redemption!’
I think it is fair to call this an inaccurate interpretation of the Buddhist ideal – as evidenced by the fact the Buddhists do not commit suicide by the thousands in an attempt to cheat samsara. Camus, with his story of Sisyphus and the never-ending futile task of pushing the bolder up the hill, rejects suicide also – indeed any attempt of escape - recommending instead defiance. ‘There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.’
Such a pessimistic view is not, however, universally accepted. Schopenhauer has been accused of caricaturing the human condition , and ignoring some more positive takes on emotions and events – for example, anticipation of something might be exciting and rewarding, rather than a painful acknowledgement of want, and the attainment of some things – my children in my own case, as an example - is not always greeted by instant dissatisfaction.
Thomas Nagel succinctly identifies Woolf’s implicit argument thus: ‘because we are going to die, all chains of justification must leave off in mid-air: one studies and works to earn money to pay for clothing, housing, entertainment, food, to sustain oneself from year to year, perhaps to support a family and pursue a career - but to what final end?’ Nagel goes on to offer fairly strong arguments against such affected helplessness. To complain as Woolf does of the tiny space we occupy – and the infinity before and beyond it – is to miss the point. Woolf is not alone, of course, in his view that our allotted time here is, in itself, cause for complaint. It is a fairly intuitive malaise. Blaise Pascal wrote in a similar vein:
‘When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity that lies before and after it, when I consider the little space I fill and I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I rest frightened, and astonished, for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there. Why now rather than then? Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time have been ascribed to me?’
As Nagel reposts, if we were to live forever, would our lives not be infinitely more absurd than a life which lasts only 70 years? To pose the question, as does Woolf, ‘To what end?’ is to assume that life needs an ultimate justification, as opposed to a series of justifications, some of which are self-contained in the moment. Many acts are justified, and hence have meaning, in and of themselves. Nagel gives the example of calling out to a child to stop him walking out into the path of an oncoming car. It seems obvious that the meaning of the act is self-contained – one need not search for further justification. All justifications, he argues, have to end somewhere; otherwise we would always seek further evidence of meaning outside of itself, leading to an infinite regress.
Our sense of the absurdity of life, after Nagel, comes from a basic incompatibility between our recognising that there are serious concerns about the value of life, and yet our continuing to take our own lives so seriously. ‘We can not only ask why we should believe there is a floor under us, but also why we should trust our sense at all – and at some point the frameable questions will have outlasted the answers.’ David Hume also recognised the inherent contradiction between sceptical doubt and practical life:
"Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.’
Perhaps there is, then, an innate absurdity which Woolf is right to question – we take our own lives and projects so seriously, as if in fact they do indeed have meaning, whilst at the same time recognising and accepting that there is a certain arbitrariness and gratuitousness which renders the whole project meaningless. I would suggest that this can indeed be seen to be the case – the subjective meaningfulness of life juxtaposed with the objective meaninglessness of the scheme of life in general. Nagel concludes his own arguments with the suggestion that if sub specie aeternitatis life is meaningless and nothing really matters, then this fact itself doesn’t matter either, and we need take recourse neither in heroism (á la Camus) nor in despair (á la Schopenhauer) but can pursue our lives in contented irony.
Woolf makes a huge assumption is his view that when he returns to the state of non-existence which was ‘his’ lot pre-birth he is necessarily the victim of something ‘bad’. This raises a very important question: Why is life valued over non-life, and a related though not identical question: is death necessarily bad? It seems an oft posited thesis that life is inherently valuable, and that the willing creation of life has little ethical grey area, whilst terminating life is, in most cases, thought to be ‘bad’. R.M. Hare, for example, is a proponent of this take on the issue – abortion is wrong, as it terminates a potential life, whilst euthanasia is wrong as it takes life away – even in cases where the entity itself is consciously able and willing to choose that option. It seems far from obvious to me that either is necessarily the case. There are numerous examples to illustrate this, but I do not want to enter into the debate about whether abortion or euthanasia are ethically acceptable, I merely wish to question the underlying assumption that life is intrinsically of value. In creating life – by which I mean consciously deciding to have a child and acting upon that decision – one is also creating the necessary conditions for the death of a person. Furthermore, it is impossible at conception for us to be aware of the role of the life we create. We can illustrate this with a simple thought experiment. Suppose Mary and Joseph (for wont of better names) have decided not to have a child, and that not having this child will in fact create a negative impact, some catastrophic or evil event. In this instance, they have not contributed to the forthcoming bad event – they have committed no action to precipitate events. Now assume the opposite scenario where they have the child and the act of having the child leads directly to the negative event, a bigger ‘bad’, if you will, than not having had the child. It seems beyond doubt that their actions are responsible for the bad that pursued, and that the existence of life, in this example, is worse than its non-existence.
Similar conclusions might be drawn from lives spent in incarceration or with painful diseases or emotional experiences. Many people have chosen death over life in many situations, and whilst there clearly are heroic exceptions, it seems clear that in choosing death, some people have valued non-existence over existence, given their particular circumstances. I think it is clear that we should not assume that life, of itself, has more value than non-life. Even without pessimistic thought-experiments, it is undeniable that in creating life the whole gamut of failure, disillusion, lost love, insecurity and impotence in the face of historical circumstances and natural events is unleashed upon a conscious mind. I do not think there is an open-and-shut case for life in this respect. There is, for example, significant debate over the value of longer lives – it is not even clear that more life would be desirable. There are issues about the concentration of power in the world related to longevity , but also to the very meaning of our lives. ‘…one may infer that what we basically seek as human beings is not more time to live, but meaningful experiences. These are found by decentring activities, through which the quality of life is expanded and the desire for self-preservation and life extension vanishes.’
Woolf’s other underlying assumption – and another very intuitive one – is that death is bad. However, one has to ask if this is necessarily so. Clearly, one normally hopes that one’s own will be a long way off and relatively painless, but it is not obvious that death is intrinsically bad or to be feared. As Epicurus claimed, we cannot experience our own death, since when death is there, we are not, and when we are, then clearly death cannot be. Wittgenstein wrote similarly that death was not an experience we could have. One cannot say that someone who has been dead for a year is luckier than someone who has been dead for two hundred years – one has not experienced more death than the other. Since death cannot be experienced, if it is bad, it must be in terms of what it deprives us of, that it to say, potential experiences.
Nagel identifies three distinct issues. If death is not positively bad for someone, in that they cannot experience it, than how can one say that death deprives someone of life, since there is no-one to mind the deprivation? Secondly, who is the subject of death? If I am declared dead, then I do not exist, in which case I cannot be anything, including dead. Thirdly, there is a problem with the analogy, as employed by Woolf and others, of prenatal nonexistence and of posthumous nonexistence. If it is bad to be dead after having lived, why is this not obviously the case before life? I think there are problems with each of these issues. Firstly, I do mind my being deprived of my life, though that deprivation has not yet come. I would also mind the deprivation of the life of someone close to me, whose death, in a purely selfish sense, deprives me of their role in my life. Secondly, whilst I accept that I cannot experience death, this is a purely semantic argument. I can anticipate my death, and to me, my death is purely representative of a removal of my life, in other words, loss of something I have and which I value. Whilst one cannot mourn the loss of a million pounds one doesn’t have, once given a million pounds, one can regret its being frittered away once it has been spent. As Nagel says, ‘The trouble is that life familiarizes us with the goods of which death deprives us.’ The same argument can be made in relation to the third issue Nagel identifies. Before one was born, one was unaware of the ‘goods’ of life. Unlike death, birth cannot be envisaged as being moved back in time – ruling out premature birth, being born much earlier than we actually were would simply make us a different person. Once having lived, though, the prospect of a longer life is real. Also, the loss of that life deprives us of time which we might have had alive. This is why we view a child’s death as tragic, and an octogenarian’s life as ‘a fair innings’.
On balance, I think Woolf is reasonable to protest that death robs us of life, which is worth having. However, I think his analogy with prenatal non-existence is not valid, for the reasons cited, and I think his trying to identify an entity to blame is equally misguided. In the search for good and bad in life, we are guilty of a personifying life metaphorically, and then taking our own metaphor literally. ‘This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.’ Woolf states, quite possibly rhetorically, that if there is purpose, then it must be hidden to us; from his ‘if’ one can perhaps infer the opposite – that there is indeed no purpose. Returning to the cosmic sense of there being meaning in life, Richard Dawkins is clear that there is none. He describes our universe as exactly what one would expect, given no purpose or creator:
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
I think there are parallels to usefully draw between Schopenhauer’s Will and Dawkins’ selfish gene. In Schopenhauer’s view, everything that happens is simply a by product of the Will, a pitiless and relentless force which has as its only intentional purpose its own reproduction. For Schopenhauer, this is despicable, a thing to be abhorred. We are tricked by the Will into believing that we have freedom, purpose and meaning. The reality is, however, that we are being used as a means to an end, that end being the blind and pointless reproduction of the Will. We are simply hoodwinked by our evolved consciousness into believing that we have any kind of free will, or ends or values of our own. Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene very neatly fits into this notion of the Will. ‘We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.’ I am not convinced, however, that this is a problem. Evolution has given rise to me as one of its best mechanisms for perpetuating my genes, and, in that sense, I would agree that I am being used. However, in another sense, the consciousness which this has bestowed upon me is a wondrous gift, an opportunity to experience this thing called life. It is not because there is no mystical purpose behind the existence of life in general, or even my own in particular, that I cannot rise to the challenge of endowing my own life with meaning through my actions, aspirations and values. As Wittgenstein remarked in his early writings, ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.’ Richard Dawkins agrees, in one of the most telling passages he has written about the unimaginable chance we have to even be alive:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
In conclusion, I feel that Woolf has identified some very real concerns about the meaningfulness of life. He raises questions which have been, and will continue to be, struggled with since we first asked the question, ‘Why am I here?’ It is likely that there is no answer to this question. There is no cosmic meaning to life. All along, we ought to have been asking, ‘Now that I’m here, what am I going to do?’ Ultimately, our own actions, our own intentions and our own subjective self-appraisal create all the meaning we require. I think the original quotation from Woolf suggests a certain desperation and angst. It appears that he is writing off ‘life’ as potentially meaningful and that he is giving up. However, the very fact that this is a precursor to his setting about to write an autobiography suggests something quite different. It suggest to me that he is attempting to find meaning, that he believes that it is there to be found (or created in the looking for it), despite protestations to the contrary. Our actions speak louder than our words, and it is through our actions that we can each give meaning to our lives.
Bibliography
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Cottingham, John The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value Cambridge University Press (2005)
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INTERNET SOURCES AND ARTICLES:
Cottingham, John interviewed on Philosophy Bites
http://www.philosophybites.com/past_programmes.html
http://hw.libsyn.com/p/7/1/d/71d0bd6aebd3ac65/CottinghamMix.mp3?sid=6c31e2f49dd7f258908904bc643154d8&l_sid=18828&l_eid=&l_mid=1729847
Dawkins, Richard ‘God's Utility Function’ Scientific American, November, 1995
Gems, David ‘Is More Life Always Better?’ The New Biology of Aging and the Meaning of Life
The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2003) http://www.jstor.org/stable/3528378.
21/02/2011
Levine, Michael P. ‘What Does Death Have to Do with the Meaning of Life?’ Religious Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 457-465 Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20019241 Accessed: 21/02/2011
Metz, Thaddeus ‘The Meaning of Life’ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/ 12/03/2011
Nagel, Thomas ‘Death’ Source: Noûs, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Feb., 1970), pp. 73-80
Blackwell Publishing Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214297 Accessed: 04/04/2011
Nagel, Thomas ‘The Absurd’ The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, No. 20, Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division (Oct. 21, 1971), pp. 716-727 Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2024942 21/02/2011
Pijnenburg, Martien A. M. and Leget,Carlo ‘Who Wants to Live Forever? Three Arguments against Extending the Human Lifespan’ Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 33, No. 10 (Oct., 2007), pp. 585-587 BMJ Publishing Group http://www.jstor.org/stable/27719955 21/02/2011
VIDEO LECTURES:
Erickson, Stephen “Philosophy as a Guide to Living” TTC Lectures 2006 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
‘The adulation of the deity as creator of the universe in Jewish and Christian psalms and hymns, and indeed by most religions, seems to me ridiculous. No doubt in the course of millions of millions of years, he has contrived to create some good things. I agree that 'my heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky', or 'the golden daffodils, beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze', or 'the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way'. I admit that every now and again I am amazed and profoundly moved by the beauty and affection of my cat and my dog. But at what a cost of senseless pain and misery, of wasteful and prodigal cruelty, does he manage to produce a daffodil, a Siamese cat, a sheepdog, a housefly, or a sardine. I resent the wasteful stupidity of a system which tolerates the spawning herring or the seeding groundsel or the statistics of infantile mortality wherever God has not been civilized by man. And I resent the stupid wastefulness of a system which requires that human beings with great labour and pain should spend years in acquiring knowledge, experience, and skill, and then just when at last they might use all this in the service of mankind and for their own happiness, they lose their teeth and their hair and their wits, and are hurriedly bundled, together with all that they have learnt, into the grave and nothingness.
It is clear that, if there is a purpose in the universe and a creator, both are unintelligible to us. But that does not provide them with an excuse or a defence.’
Are these views reasonable?
In this essay I shall be considering Woolf’s claims. I shall firstly unpack what it is he is really saying and try to identify his view in as succinct a form as possible. I shall then consider the arguments he puts forward, both explicitly and implicitly, and the extent to which they are reasonable, and whether they are supported in the philosophical tradition. I shall also consider directly contrasting views and discuss their validity as arguments against Woolf’s assertions.
It is clear that Woolf rejects a traditional dualist vision of humanity. He clearly states that he anticipates non-existence after death to be akin to his non-existence before his birth, and though he stops short, in this passage, of denying a creator deity, he does refer to its adulation as being ridiculous. Woolf’s is a materialist world view - there is what there is - but he goes further, lamenting the unfairness of life which deserts us just as we begin to get to grips with it. He doesn’t subscribe to the axial notion – the perhaps intuitive feeling that there must be something more, some other world or perhaps other way of interacting which would make more sense, be more fulfilling or more liberating than the seemingly deficient and incomplete existence we have been saddled with. Woolf acknowledges nature’s beauty and power to awe, but registers also his frustration that nature is wasteful and necessarily painful. He concludes that if there is purpose in the universe or a creator, whilst we are unable to comprehend it, our inability to do so provides neither excuse nor defence.
One can certainly infer that Woolf considers life to be absurd, in a philosophical sense, or meaningless. He raises the question as to whether life is intrinsically ‘good’, or otherwise. He admits to being both amazed and moved by affection from pets, yet talks of senseless pain and wasteful cruelty in relation to the evolutionary processes of life. He proclaims that just as man is reaching the emotional and intellectual maturity sufficient to grasp life fully, so life degenerates, as if some cruel joke; this is very much the metaphorical shrug of the shoulders in existential angst, “What’s the point?”
In what follows, I shall consider the reasonableness of the claim that life is meaningless or absurd. I shall look at some of Woolf’s specific points in more detail and reflect on the implicit arguments he offers in their defence. In particular, I shall look at his underlying assumption that life is good – that is, that life is intrinsically worthwhile, necessarily of value, as opposed to non-life. I shall also consider his argument that nature is unnecessarily cruel and wasteful, and that this in itself is reason to resent the ‘stupid wastefulness’ of life.
In the first instance, to declare life meaningless, I think we need to consider what we mean by ‘mean’. In purely linguistic terms, meaning can be an ethereal concept. As an example, the French word ‘putain’ literally means prostitute, or in a more derogatory sense, whore. However, in common usage, the French might employ this word in striking a thumb with a hammer or suddenly recalling something terribly important one had forgotten to do – in short it ‘means’ the same thing as the English expletive ‘fuck’ utilised in the same situations. What we mean by a word can become its meaning. Could this be the case with life? Can what we mean by our actions and the way in which we live our lives be the very meaning of life? This idea – that we may give life meaning through our actions – is one to which I shall return.
I might say something such as, ‘I’m starving’ which, whilst it might not ‘mean’ the literal sense of the words used, in that I am near death from malnourishment, it does carry a meaning, that is, it is something I intended to say, a message I intentionally put across, that of my being hungry. Life cannot mean anything, in this sense. It seems to me obvious that life – if one accepts a secular version, that is - cannot ‘mean’ anything in the sense of ‘intend’ something or have a purpose in mind. In this sense, Woolf’s view is perhaps not reasonable. He talks a lot of resentment, directing his feelings towards a universe whose purpose is unknown, a system requiring untold cruelty and ‘unfairness’. In doing so, Woolf seems to be making the assumption that there is a culpable entity to whom to apportion blame. It seems to me that anger or resentment directed at something essentially neutral is far from sensible or reasonable. If life just ‘is’, in the sense that being is simply a fact, then to rail against the unfairness of it would appear to be rather pointless – rather like resenting the cliff as one falls from it, or resenting gravity.
But ‘mean’ can mean ‘signify’, or destiny – as in something that is meant to be - or value –as in ‘you mean a lot to me’. It strikes me that my life can mean a lot to me, that indeed my life can mean something quite specific, whilst the notion that life in general is meaningless might still be acceptable. We talk about acts of violence being meaningless, when actually the act – for example an act of terrorism – may have very strong meaning, in terms of intentionality, as an expression of the will of the perpetrator. Whilst the act itself cannot mean something, in and of itself, it can have meaning, both from intentionality of the facilitator of the act, and from those affected by the act. Perhaps, in this way, life can have meaning whilst simultaneously being meaningless. Whilst this might appear paradoxical, it really isn’t. Some attributions of meaning are simply more valid, more convincing perhaps, than others. This would be Paul Edward’s ‘cosmic’ and ‘terrestrial’ meaning - in a cosmic sense our lives find meaning in the grand scheme of things, an overall purpose, often associated with God, or spirituality, whilst in the terrestrial sense one’s life is imbued with the meaning one subjectively gives it.
‘It is clear that, if there is a purpose in the universe and a creator, both are unintelligible to us,’ Woolf bemoans. Kant would perhaps agree with Woolf in one respect: the real purpose of life cannot be known to us. Whilst one implication of this might be that the ‘bigger picture’ is therefore irrelevant to our own individual search for meaning, I think that individual quests for meaning are necessarily shaped by the nature of reality – just as the heliocentric world view represented a paradigm shift for humanity, so too would concrete evidence of life on other planets, for example, and this would necessarily impact on the individual’s perspective on life and her own search for meaning. However, Kant’s views in this area are intriguingly paradoxical. Kant had reduced humanity to reason alone, refusing other means of knowing. At the same time, however, he claimed that reason was limited by our very nature. Things-as-they-are, or noumena, could never be known through reason, which itself belonged to the realm of things-as-they-seem. For Kant, human life, however, was only worth living in contemplation of deeper, fundamental metaphysical questions, even though these very questions are unattainable to our reason. It is the quest which informs us. In many ways, this is Kant’s legacy to mankind. The superstition of Religion supposedly exposed yet the scope of reason restrained, what is left to us to discover our true nature, our raison d’être?
Kant argued that there were three questions we could – and indeed should – ask: What can I know? Given the limits of my reason, what ought I to do? For what can I hope? Kant’s ‘Critique of Practical Reason’ famously concludes with, ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ For Kant, meaning was found in moral duty, in attaining the highest good. Our lives have meaning in so far as we have choices, we can act autonomously, and meaning can brought into our lives when we act appropriately. John Cottingham supports this view, suggesting that ‘We need to cultivate in ourselves the moral and spiritual basis for being able to live in the face of absurdity and contingency and failure.’ He suggests that the problem of human existence is essentially its fragility, and that to come to terms with this, we must embrace our dependency and lack of autonomy whilst cultivating a moral dimension; he argues that a life of viciousness and selfishness cannot be considered meaningful. Most of us do not have the heroic character of a Sisyphus, shrugging off failure and starting again as each contingency thwarts our plans, and so we must turn to a more spiritual approach which fosters hope.
Does this offer consolation to Woolf? It is hard to see how. Cottingham’s appeal to hope in the face of disaster could be interpreted trivially as a return to other-worldly optimism. His elevation of praxis over faith might be an appealing watering down of religious rhetoric, but it sails close to the axial wind. Kant outlines a battle between moral duty and natural inclinations, or passions – which he famously refers to as cancers of human reason. If we are to accept Kant’s view, of life being a battle between our desires and our rational acceptance of a moral higher good, then is not the individual subsumed? Is not the individual life more meaningless than ever? And it is the individual’s life – the meaninglessness of Woolf’s own life – that Woolf decries, along with the wider disapproval of the wastefulness of the entire process.
Hegel might offer a degree of support to Woolf’s position, but perhaps only in that there is nothing left of worth for us to do. History is dead and there is but a cyclical repetition of events. Meaning, if there is any to be had in life, comes from history. However, Hegel saw life as an unfolding autobiography of the Spirit – a postulated successor to God. In this view, whilst it may be that individual events, or even entire individual lives, are meaningless, with the power of hindsight everything does fall into place as part of some larger, grand scheme. This is perhaps scant consolation for modern secular man in his search for meaning in his own strivings. The idea that an individual life is meaningless, but on a massive scale life is evolving into something meaningful would do little to console Woolf – it is exactly the lack of individual meaning that he contests, and the high price life pays along its evolutionary development.
Hegel, however, did have a concept of selfhood to offer. A person has three dimensions, each constitutive of that person—or selfhood. Firstly, people have notions of themselves, which are intrinsic to who they are. This notion, or conception, is a real part of the person; the person is rooted in the conception they have of themselves. This conception is the first aspect of self. Oddly though, even when self-conception does not fit the actual self it conceives, it is still part of that person - it is not in some way an extra, or a minor characteristic. The second aspect of self then, for Hegel, is this self image or notion, be it accurate or not. Even if that conception we have of ourselves alters to another “mistaken” conception, this would mean that the person would have become a different person, to a substantial degree. The third dimension of self is the historical context in which we find ourselves, and this is where Hegel attempts to offer solace to the existentially challenged. Whilst the influence comes from outside of ourselves, one can imagine that being born into a different family, a different culture or a different economic class could radically alter the person we have become. This is reflected in the view ‘historicism’ – which would give meaning to life in terms of the historical events surrounding us. For Hegel, meaning is to found in society and history, in our citizenship and culture. It is not clear, though, despite its apparent optimism, that this view has much to offer Woolf as he reflects upon his own transitory passage through time. Is his life to be deemed meaningful by the chance fall of the historical dice, by his living in ‘interesting times’ as opposed to a life in the relative calm and easy luxury of political and social stability? The very proposition that meaning can stem from chance is perhaps not a reassuring one.
To address Woolf’s concerns about the fleeting passage of life, and its relative hardships, we need to turn to another philosopher, who clearly lends his approval to Woolf’s misgivings about life: Schopenhauer.
‘To dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole life; permanent night surrounds it…what does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and devoid of pleasure? Nourishment and procreation, that is, only the means for continuing and beginning again in the new individual the same melancholy course.’
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of life is more than just rhetoric, however. He argues fairly convincingly that the negative far outweighs the positive in life; that life is, in fact, more unhappy than happy. Uncomfortable periods – be they through boredom, dread or pain – seem to last longer than comfortable ones. When pleasures disappear we can disagreeably feel their loss, whilst there is no corresponding direct pleasure gained from the absence of pain, save for a fleeting sense of relief. To this last, I can concur – a chronic back condition for over a decade receded with a successful operation and the relief one would expect was felt tangibly for perhaps day or so – I can now reflect upon this condition, but not feel the absence of pain, in the same way as I can physically feel the absence of a loved one. Schopenhauer also identifies that the regret over happiness that has either been lost or will never be attained has no equivalent in the form of a positive sensation of a painful experience we will not have. He exclaims that health, youth and freedom, though often perceived as blessings, are in fact negations. One is only healthy in terms of not suffering from disease, one is only young in terms of not being old and one is only free in terms of not being restrained. Painlessness is not something we can feel, though pain is. Freedom from care is not something we can feel, but caring is. Freedom for fear, similarly, is not an actual feeling, whilst fear is. Even in our moments of pleasure, says Schopenhauer, we are negatively affected. Receiving what it is we desired is always a transitory pleasure, replaced soon enough with boredom and lack of satisfaction, followed by a new desire – a lack of something, the attainment of which will only repeat the cycle of dissatisfaction. If Schopenhauer is correct, then Woolf is indeed reasonable to protest that the suffering within life is too great, and its benefits too few. Great suffering may well imbue a life with great meaning, but perhaps the price is too high.
It is no surprise, given the similarity of the views, that Schopenhauer turned to Buddhism as a possible answer to the absurdity of life. Samsara – the Buddhist wheel of life – describes just this cycle of unsatisfied desire, craving, unsatisfactory attainment, new desires leading to the creation of karma which in turn leads to re-birth and the beginning again of the whole cycle. Only by breaking free of the cycle can peace, or nirvana, be achieved. Schopenhauer thought that the possibility of intellectual escape from life’s viciousness was reserved for only a few superior minds , and the rest of humanity was hopelessly entrapped. Schopenhauer might have misconstrued the idea of nirvana – he equated it with non-existence, or non-birth – but his thoughts on the subject were influential. The ultimate emancipation from wanting, nirvana -enlightenment and dispassionate disinterest - was that attained by the Buddha and sought after by his followers. Schopenhauer’s interpretation led him to believe that death was the only reasonable way out, a belief echoed by German composer Gustav Wagner, a staunch follower of Schopenhauer:
‘…I have yet found a sedative which has finally helped me to sleep at night: it is the sincere and heartfelt yearning for death: total unconsciousness, complete annihilation, the end of all dreams - the only ultimate redemption!’
I think it is fair to call this an inaccurate interpretation of the Buddhist ideal – as evidenced by the fact the Buddhists do not commit suicide by the thousands in an attempt to cheat samsara. Camus, with his story of Sisyphus and the never-ending futile task of pushing the bolder up the hill, rejects suicide also – indeed any attempt of escape - recommending instead defiance. ‘There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.’
Such a pessimistic view is not, however, universally accepted. Schopenhauer has been accused of caricaturing the human condition , and ignoring some more positive takes on emotions and events – for example, anticipation of something might be exciting and rewarding, rather than a painful acknowledgement of want, and the attainment of some things – my children in my own case, as an example - is not always greeted by instant dissatisfaction.
Thomas Nagel succinctly identifies Woolf’s implicit argument thus: ‘because we are going to die, all chains of justification must leave off in mid-air: one studies and works to earn money to pay for clothing, housing, entertainment, food, to sustain oneself from year to year, perhaps to support a family and pursue a career - but to what final end?’ Nagel goes on to offer fairly strong arguments against such affected helplessness. To complain as Woolf does of the tiny space we occupy – and the infinity before and beyond it – is to miss the point. Woolf is not alone, of course, in his view that our allotted time here is, in itself, cause for complaint. It is a fairly intuitive malaise. Blaise Pascal wrote in a similar vein:
‘When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity that lies before and after it, when I consider the little space I fill and I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I rest frightened, and astonished, for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there. Why now rather than then? Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time have been ascribed to me?’
As Nagel reposts, if we were to live forever, would our lives not be infinitely more absurd than a life which lasts only 70 years? To pose the question, as does Woolf, ‘To what end?’ is to assume that life needs an ultimate justification, as opposed to a series of justifications, some of which are self-contained in the moment. Many acts are justified, and hence have meaning, in and of themselves. Nagel gives the example of calling out to a child to stop him walking out into the path of an oncoming car. It seems obvious that the meaning of the act is self-contained – one need not search for further justification. All justifications, he argues, have to end somewhere; otherwise we would always seek further evidence of meaning outside of itself, leading to an infinite regress.
Our sense of the absurdity of life, after Nagel, comes from a basic incompatibility between our recognising that there are serious concerns about the value of life, and yet our continuing to take our own lives so seriously. ‘We can not only ask why we should believe there is a floor under us, but also why we should trust our sense at all – and at some point the frameable questions will have outlasted the answers.’ David Hume also recognised the inherent contradiction between sceptical doubt and practical life:
"Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.’
Perhaps there is, then, an innate absurdity which Woolf is right to question – we take our own lives and projects so seriously, as if in fact they do indeed have meaning, whilst at the same time recognising and accepting that there is a certain arbitrariness and gratuitousness which renders the whole project meaningless. I would suggest that this can indeed be seen to be the case – the subjective meaningfulness of life juxtaposed with the objective meaninglessness of the scheme of life in general. Nagel concludes his own arguments with the suggestion that if sub specie aeternitatis life is meaningless and nothing really matters, then this fact itself doesn’t matter either, and we need take recourse neither in heroism (á la Camus) nor in despair (á la Schopenhauer) but can pursue our lives in contented irony.
Woolf makes a huge assumption is his view that when he returns to the state of non-existence which was ‘his’ lot pre-birth he is necessarily the victim of something ‘bad’. This raises a very important question: Why is life valued over non-life, and a related though not identical question: is death necessarily bad? It seems an oft posited thesis that life is inherently valuable, and that the willing creation of life has little ethical grey area, whilst terminating life is, in most cases, thought to be ‘bad’. R.M. Hare, for example, is a proponent of this take on the issue – abortion is wrong, as it terminates a potential life, whilst euthanasia is wrong as it takes life away – even in cases where the entity itself is consciously able and willing to choose that option. It seems far from obvious to me that either is necessarily the case. There are numerous examples to illustrate this, but I do not want to enter into the debate about whether abortion or euthanasia are ethically acceptable, I merely wish to question the underlying assumption that life is intrinsically of value. In creating life – by which I mean consciously deciding to have a child and acting upon that decision – one is also creating the necessary conditions for the death of a person. Furthermore, it is impossible at conception for us to be aware of the role of the life we create. We can illustrate this with a simple thought experiment. Suppose Mary and Joseph (for wont of better names) have decided not to have a child, and that not having this child will in fact create a negative impact, some catastrophic or evil event. In this instance, they have not contributed to the forthcoming bad event – they have committed no action to precipitate events. Now assume the opposite scenario where they have the child and the act of having the child leads directly to the negative event, a bigger ‘bad’, if you will, than not having had the child. It seems beyond doubt that their actions are responsible for the bad that pursued, and that the existence of life, in this example, is worse than its non-existence.
Similar conclusions might be drawn from lives spent in incarceration or with painful diseases or emotional experiences. Many people have chosen death over life in many situations, and whilst there clearly are heroic exceptions, it seems clear that in choosing death, some people have valued non-existence over existence, given their particular circumstances. I think it is clear that we should not assume that life, of itself, has more value than non-life. Even without pessimistic thought-experiments, it is undeniable that in creating life the whole gamut of failure, disillusion, lost love, insecurity and impotence in the face of historical circumstances and natural events is unleashed upon a conscious mind. I do not think there is an open-and-shut case for life in this respect. There is, for example, significant debate over the value of longer lives – it is not even clear that more life would be desirable. There are issues about the concentration of power in the world related to longevity , but also to the very meaning of our lives. ‘…one may infer that what we basically seek as human beings is not more time to live, but meaningful experiences. These are found by decentring activities, through which the quality of life is expanded and the desire for self-preservation and life extension vanishes.’
Woolf’s other underlying assumption – and another very intuitive one – is that death is bad. However, one has to ask if this is necessarily so. Clearly, one normally hopes that one’s own will be a long way off and relatively painless, but it is not obvious that death is intrinsically bad or to be feared. As Epicurus claimed, we cannot experience our own death, since when death is there, we are not, and when we are, then clearly death cannot be. Wittgenstein wrote similarly that death was not an experience we could have. One cannot say that someone who has been dead for a year is luckier than someone who has been dead for two hundred years – one has not experienced more death than the other. Since death cannot be experienced, if it is bad, it must be in terms of what it deprives us of, that it to say, potential experiences.
Nagel identifies three distinct issues. If death is not positively bad for someone, in that they cannot experience it, than how can one say that death deprives someone of life, since there is no-one to mind the deprivation? Secondly, who is the subject of death? If I am declared dead, then I do not exist, in which case I cannot be anything, including dead. Thirdly, there is a problem with the analogy, as employed by Woolf and others, of prenatal nonexistence and of posthumous nonexistence. If it is bad to be dead after having lived, why is this not obviously the case before life? I think there are problems with each of these issues. Firstly, I do mind my being deprived of my life, though that deprivation has not yet come. I would also mind the deprivation of the life of someone close to me, whose death, in a purely selfish sense, deprives me of their role in my life. Secondly, whilst I accept that I cannot experience death, this is a purely semantic argument. I can anticipate my death, and to me, my death is purely representative of a removal of my life, in other words, loss of something I have and which I value. Whilst one cannot mourn the loss of a million pounds one doesn’t have, once given a million pounds, one can regret its being frittered away once it has been spent. As Nagel says, ‘The trouble is that life familiarizes us with the goods of which death deprives us.’ The same argument can be made in relation to the third issue Nagel identifies. Before one was born, one was unaware of the ‘goods’ of life. Unlike death, birth cannot be envisaged as being moved back in time – ruling out premature birth, being born much earlier than we actually were would simply make us a different person. Once having lived, though, the prospect of a longer life is real. Also, the loss of that life deprives us of time which we might have had alive. This is why we view a child’s death as tragic, and an octogenarian’s life as ‘a fair innings’.
On balance, I think Woolf is reasonable to protest that death robs us of life, which is worth having. However, I think his analogy with prenatal non-existence is not valid, for the reasons cited, and I think his trying to identify an entity to blame is equally misguided. In the search for good and bad in life, we are guilty of a personifying life metaphorically, and then taking our own metaphor literally. ‘This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.’ Woolf states, quite possibly rhetorically, that if there is purpose, then it must be hidden to us; from his ‘if’ one can perhaps infer the opposite – that there is indeed no purpose. Returning to the cosmic sense of there being meaning in life, Richard Dawkins is clear that there is none. He describes our universe as exactly what one would expect, given no purpose or creator:
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
I think there are parallels to usefully draw between Schopenhauer’s Will and Dawkins’ selfish gene. In Schopenhauer’s view, everything that happens is simply a by product of the Will, a pitiless and relentless force which has as its only intentional purpose its own reproduction. For Schopenhauer, this is despicable, a thing to be abhorred. We are tricked by the Will into believing that we have freedom, purpose and meaning. The reality is, however, that we are being used as a means to an end, that end being the blind and pointless reproduction of the Will. We are simply hoodwinked by our evolved consciousness into believing that we have any kind of free will, or ends or values of our own. Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene very neatly fits into this notion of the Will. ‘We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.’ I am not convinced, however, that this is a problem. Evolution has given rise to me as one of its best mechanisms for perpetuating my genes, and, in that sense, I would agree that I am being used. However, in another sense, the consciousness which this has bestowed upon me is a wondrous gift, an opportunity to experience this thing called life. It is not because there is no mystical purpose behind the existence of life in general, or even my own in particular, that I cannot rise to the challenge of endowing my own life with meaning through my actions, aspirations and values. As Wittgenstein remarked in his early writings, ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.’ Richard Dawkins agrees, in one of the most telling passages he has written about the unimaginable chance we have to even be alive:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
In conclusion, I feel that Woolf has identified some very real concerns about the meaningfulness of life. He raises questions which have been, and will continue to be, struggled with since we first asked the question, ‘Why am I here?’ It is likely that there is no answer to this question. There is no cosmic meaning to life. All along, we ought to have been asking, ‘Now that I’m here, what am I going to do?’ Ultimately, our own actions, our own intentions and our own subjective self-appraisal create all the meaning we require. I think the original quotation from Woolf suggests a certain desperation and angst. It appears that he is writing off ‘life’ as potentially meaningful and that he is giving up. However, the very fact that this is a precursor to his setting about to write an autobiography suggests something quite different. It suggest to me that he is attempting to find meaning, that he believes that it is there to be found (or created in the looking for it), despite protestations to the contrary. Our actions speak louder than our words, and it is through our actions that we can each give meaning to our lives.
Bibliography
BOOKS:
Cottingham, John The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value Cambridge University Press (2005)
Dawkins, Richard Unweaving the Rainbow Mariner Books (2000)
Dawkins, Richard A River ran out of Eden, Weidenfield & Nicholson, London. (1995)
Dennet, Daniel Breaking the Spell Penguin Books 2007
Hare, R.M. Abortion and the Golden Rule. Philosophy & Public Affairs 4, 1975, 201-222
Hanfling, Oswald The Quest for Meaning Backwell 1987
Kant, Immanuel Critique of Practical Reason (Trans. Thomas Abbot) Dover Publications 2004
Malpas, Jeff and Solomon, Robert C. Death and Philosophy First published 1998 by Routledge
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, (2002)
Monk, R. and Raphael, F. (ed) The Great Philosophers (Anthony Quinton – Hume) Pheonix (2000)
Pascal, Blaise Pensees Penguin Classics (1995)
Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation (New York 1969)
Spencer, Stewart and Millington, Barry (ed) Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London. (1987)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig Tractatus Logio-Philosophicus 6.44 Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974
INTERNET SOURCES AND ARTICLES:
Cottingham, John interviewed on Philosophy Bites
http://www.philosophybites.com/past_programmes.html
http://hw.libsyn.com/p/7/1/d/71d0bd6aebd3ac65/CottinghamMix.mp3?sid=6c31e2f49dd7f258908904bc643154d8&l_sid=18828&l_eid=&l_mid=1729847
Dawkins, Richard ‘God's Utility Function’ Scientific American, November, 1995
Gems, David ‘Is More Life Always Better?’ The New Biology of Aging and the Meaning of Life
The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2003) http://www.jstor.org/stable/3528378.
21/02/2011
Levine, Michael P. ‘What Does Death Have to Do with the Meaning of Life?’ Religious Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 457-465 Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20019241 Accessed: 21/02/2011
Metz, Thaddeus ‘The Meaning of Life’ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/ 12/03/2011
Nagel, Thomas ‘Death’ Source: Noûs, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Feb., 1970), pp. 73-80
Blackwell Publishing Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214297 Accessed: 04/04/2011
Nagel, Thomas ‘The Absurd’ The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, No. 20, Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division (Oct. 21, 1971), pp. 716-727 Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2024942 21/02/2011
Pijnenburg, Martien A. M. and Leget,Carlo ‘Who Wants to Live Forever? Three Arguments against Extending the Human Lifespan’ Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 33, No. 10 (Oct., 2007), pp. 585-587 BMJ Publishing Group http://www.jstor.org/stable/27719955 21/02/2011
VIDEO LECTURES:
Erickson, Stephen “Philosophy as a Guide to Living” TTC Lectures 2006 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
Friday, February 04, 2011
58%
Mmm - 58% they gave me for that last essay. I thought it was better. I'm sure I could have written something less time-consuming and more run of the mill to achieve a similar grade.
Anyway, Descartes and Wittgenstein behind me for now and a new unit, 'The Meaning of Life' looms on the horizon. Which will mean more of Kant, for sure, and Hegel and Schopenhauer, I guess. Getting the reading out here is tough...
Happy Year of the Rabbit, by the way.
Anyway, Descartes and Wittgenstein behind me for now and a new unit, 'The Meaning of Life' looms on the horizon. Which will mean more of Kant, for sure, and Hegel and Schopenhauer, I guess. Getting the reading out here is tough...
Happy Year of the Rabbit, by the way.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Can a machine think?
In this essay, I shall explore the question of whether such a thing as a thinking machine is a possibility. This will involve a discussion of definitions, both of ‘machine’ and of ‘thought’.
One cannot begin such a discussion without an account of Cartesian dualism, the intuitively sensible view which separates mind and body, thought and physical process. Descartes proposed that human beings were unique in that they had a spiritual soul, or mind, which was non-extended and without motion, existing in some ‘other’ realm. The body was an advanced mechanism, which was somehow moved by the soul. This thinking survived and evolved as vitalism.
‘Vitalism holds that life results not from biochemical reactions but from a vital force unique to living things. Whereas modern science sees life as resulting from the complex interactions of mechanistic parts forming an organic whole, vitalism sees life as suffused with a substance not found in non-living nature,’
such as ‘The Force’ of the Star Wars concept.This conceptualisation has persisted in many forms to the present day. Descartes further suggested that animals, lacking the divine soul, were machines. He would argue against their ability to ‘think’ in the way that humans do. Whilst there is now a significant body of evidence supporting thought in higher mammals, another of Descartes suggestions pertains and persists. Descartes insisted that could a machine be created to look indistinguishable from a human, it could not pass itself off as human for two important reasons. First, a machine could never master language in a realistic and meaningful way and secondly it could never act appropriately in all possible contingencies. In other words, a machine would give itself away through poor choice of language or inappropriate actions.
Descartes’ comments do seem to be a direct foreshadowing of the seminal work of Turing in 1950. Turing suggested that, whilst it was meaningless to ask whether machines can think, it can be profitable to consider whether a machine can act in such as way as to convince a human interlocutor that it was actually human. The Turing Test was devised expressly to test such a proposition. Turing himself believed strongly that it was only a matter of time before machines – specifically digital computers – could pass his test. Turing describes an imitation game where there is an interrogator, a person and a machine. The interrogator is separated from the other person and the machine. Whilst the interrogator knows that there is both a machine and a person, she does not know which is which. A machine, therefore, is said to have passed the Turing Test if it is able to respond appropriately to questions posed by the interrogator in such a way as to convince the interrogator that it is in fact the person. Specifically, Turing stipulated that for a machine to be judged to have passed the test, an average interrogator should have more than a 70% chance of making the correct identification after just five minutes of questioning.
Turing rather optimistically believed that machine intelligence would become acceptable in short order: “I believe that at the end of the century the use of the words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted .” In fact, the Loebner Prize Competition, specifically set up for the task of running the Turing Test on hopeful machines, has become something of an AI embarrassment – in terms of how far we are from creating such thinking machines. Churchland (1995), as one of the observers of the test in 1993, admitted, ‘The truth is, none of the entrants was worth a damn, at least in terms of Artificial Intelligence.’ However, the fact that we are so far from the goal does not of itself negate Turing’s Test as being a good one. Churchland, in fact, does argue that the test is not a good one, and suggests that the Loebner Prize Competition only encourages programmers to fake intelligence in a very narrow range in order to ‘run off with the …prize’ .
Many objections have been raised to the validity of the Turing Test. One such is that the test is in some way chauvinistic; there is an inherent assumption that a thinking machine must in some way be like us. As Matt Carter (2007) points out, ‘The idea that we might one day be able to construct some artefact which has a mind in the same sense that we have minds is not a new one. It has featured in entertaining and frightening fictions since Mary Shelley first conceived of Frankenstein’s monster.’ This theme is well-explored in the science fiction genre relating to Artificial Intelligence; be it Commander Data in the Star Trek series or Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, time and again artificially created beings fail to accord their behaviour and language with the intricate and largely unwritten expectations of human behaviour. But herein lies a distinction crucial to our discussion. Does a thinking being need to be human-like? In our drive to create intelligence, are we guilty of an ‘after-our-own-image’ pre-conception of what a thinking thing must ‘look’ like, in terms of its functioning? Whilst these are good questions, they do not adversely affect the Turing Test – Turing merely asserted that a machine passing the test could be described as having intelligence, not that only such machines could be thus described.
Other objections to Turing have rested on increasingly ‘clever’ programming which, in a five minute period, could indeed dupe the man in the street. These objections miss the point that the Turing Test is specifically a situation in which the interrogator knows that one of her two subjects is a machine and is still unable to discover the true identity of the participants. Turing himself identified a variety of possible objections to his own test. He recognised that substance dualists would have a hard time accepting that a ‘body’ designed by humans could possibly be imbued with the ‘soul’ or ‘thinking thing’ which exists non-extended in another realm to the physical; they would necessarily contest that a machine passing the test was indeed ‘thinking’ in the way that humans do. However, the dualist camp has many difficulties to overcome, not least the question of why God couldn’t put consciousness into a machine if He saw fit. Turing also identified what Oppy terms ‘the head-in-the-sand’ objection: the implications of thinking machines – that we become inferior, that we have real concerns about being usurped or dominated – are so worrying that we ought not to pursue the goal. The objections, however, are not valid arguments against the possibility of thinking machines, simply an expression of fear of the result.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a label loosely applied to a range of possible entities. It would be helpful here to explore a definition. Perhaps the most persistent definitions have been suggested by Professor John Searle, of the University of California. He suggests that two interpretations of AI exist. Firstly, he identifies what he calls Strong AI. This is achieved when a machine achieves or supersedes human intellectual ability. Specifically, Searle proposes this definition to deal with the belief that computer programming – software – can cause a machine to become conscious, or indeed be conscious in its own right. Searle suggests that proponents of Strong AI believe that ‘by designing the right programmes with the right inputs and outputs, they are literally creating minds’. He specifically refers his arguments to the computer, having given a wider definition to the term ‘machine’. Searle argues that if by ‘machine’ we mean a physical system capable of performing certain functions – which surely we do – then humans are a very special kind of biological machine, and given that humans can think, machines can think, QED. In Strong AI, Searle is identifying the belief that a computer – this very specific type of machine – can not only act intelligently, but can have actual states of mind. ‘According to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states.’ We are all digital computers. This is more than analogy. Our brains are digital computers and our minds are computer programmes – the software to the hardware of our brain. This is known as Strong AI.
Weak AI is more of a specific intelligence, not at all encompassing the range of human cognisant abilities. Weak AI is a system designed to do a narrowly defined task exceedingly well. It is a system which simulates a conscious mind in a specific respect. This presents us with the issue of defining what it is we mean by ‘intelligence’ or ‘thinking’, and whether we mean the same thing by both terms.
Does a thinking thing have to be intelligent or vice versa? When IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, many were heralding an AI success. Others, determining that Deep Blue was ‘merely’ making computational choices, without any conscious awareness that it was doing so, meant that it wasn’t truly thinking or truly intelligent. Journalist Robert Wright commented on the match that whilst Kasparov felt down after losing the first game, it was improbable that Deep Blue could feel blue. He also reported the views of those against the whole notion of computers vs. humans in chess by citing the fact that fork-lift trucks were never invited to weight-lifting competitions: perhaps not a perfect analogy. As Drew McDermott put it, ‘Deep Blue is unintelligent because it is so narrow. It can win a chess game, but it can't recognize, much less pick up, a chess piece. It can't even carry on a conversation about the game it just won. Since the essence of intelligence would seem to be breadth, or the ability to react creatively to a wide variety of situations, it's hard to credit Deep Blue with much intelligence.’ Whilst this sounds pretty damning for the AI camp, McDermott however concludes, ‘Saying Deep Blue doesn't really think about chess is like saying an airplane doesn't really fly because it doesn't flap its wings.’ Computers such as Deep Blue can indeed help us to understand some of the processes of thought and this version - Weak AI - is what Turing referred to when he suggested in 1950 that it would soon be unremarkable to suggest that machine could think.
Searle tracks changes in philosophical thought about the mind. He traces the development from Descartes’ substance dualism, to the more palatable property dualism still defended today. He progresses through monism’s idealism, behavourism and physicalism, and showing where such arguments fail to account for causal relationships in the mind and paving the way for today’s more accepted viewpoint, that of functionalism. It is the functionalist viewpoint – that what makes something a desire or a thought or a feeling depends purely on its function, not at all on its internal makeup or engineering - which led to the computational model of the mind. Searle’s purpose in providing these definitions was to focus research on a realistic area, whilst being able to relatively easily dismiss the unrealistic, as he saw it, proposal of Strong AI. However, his refutation of Strong AI proved to be anything but easy. Searle proposed a basic thought experiment in order to debunk the idea – The Chinese Room.
The analogy is deceptively simple. A man inside a closed room receives input in the form of Chinese symbols. He has no knowledge of what the symbols mean, but does have a comprehensive set of instructions about how to select further Chinese symbols to output in response. Searle suggests that the instructions could be so clear and comprehensive that the ‘room’ could output appropriate responses to questions in Chinese. However, he argues pointedly, there is no point at which the man in the room understands Chinese. He neither understands the questions being put – indeed not even that they are questions – nor does he understand the answers he is providing; there is no understanding of Chinese. Searle here has provided an example of a machine that can pass the Turing Test. It could fool Chinese speakers, even if they knew one of two interlocutors was a machine. The output from the Chinese Room would be identical to that of a genuine, conscious Chinese speaker. However, there is nothing intelligently conscious about the Chinese Room, in terms of understanding Chinese. Searle’s thought experiment, then, asserts that the Turing Test is, in fact, no test at all for intelligence.
Searle’s argument goes further than this though. He sought to show that true AI is not possible, that representations and simulations of intelligence would always be shadowy ‘Platonic Cave’ reflections of the real thing. His arguments are intended to show ‘that while suitable programmed computers may appear to converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language, even in principal.’ More specifically, Searle is saying that formal computational systems, systems using the manipulations of symbols as a means of generating ‘intelligent’ output, can never think. This is a very strong claim, given that we don’t know how our own thinking comes about. Whilst it has intuitive appeal, there are many who have been unconvinced. I am inclined to accept Searle’s argument that computational shuffling of symbols to given rules cannot create a mind, that something else, quite possibly biological or emotional in form, is required. For now, there are many replies to the Chinese Room argument and some popular antecedents of the original thought experiment too. Some of these are worth considering in more detail as we evaluate what the implications are for allowing that machines can think.
The systems reply is one of the most basic replies to the Chinese Room. Whilst it may be true that the Searle in the room – the homunculus – has no understanding of Chinese, the room itself, as a whole system, does have understanding. This objection misses the point. As Searle was quick to point out, he could memorise the complex symbol-shuffling instruction manual, leave the room and operate from the middle of a field and still not understand Chinese, whilst performing equally well. He would still be taking the input, meaningless to him, running it through a complex system of programmed responses to squiggles and squaggles , and producing an output which although meaningful by virtue of the outside world, would still be meaningless to him. Searle further suggests that the systems reply entails absurd consequences, such as identifying sub-systems of ‘mind’ in things like stomachs, thermostats and telephones: ‘If we are to conclude that there must be cognition in me on the grounds that I have a certain sort of input and output and a program in between, then it looks like all sorts of noncognitive subsystems are going to turn out to be cognitive.’ What Searle is saying in response to the systems reply is quite simply that as long as the software is thought of in terms of manipulating symbols, no amount of playing with definitions will change that fact that symbols are being manipulated according to a set of instructions which do not in any way lead to actual understanding of what those symbols may mean. This in turn supports the position that computers cannot think. This position seems to me to be a tenable one.
Another related response to the Chinese room argument is the Virtual Mind reply. This suggests that whilst understanding might not be attributable directly to the computer, or to the system, it is possible that a virtual mind is created, separate to the original computer or system, which does understand Chinese. As Cole states, ‘The claim at issue should be “the computer creates a mind that understands Chinese”. A familiar model is characters in computer or video games. These characters have various abilities and personalities, and the characters are not identical with the hardware or program that creates them.’ Objections to the systems reply are valid here also. Penrose (2002) drew the analogy further through his consideration of The Chinese Gym variation – a room the size of India with Indians, suitably enough, doing the processing part of the equation. Penrose concluded that it was highly implausible that such a system could generate an independently existing mind capable of understanding in its own right.
Searle also makes short shrift of the Robot reply, in which the Chinese Room apparatus is put into a robot which has sensory input from cameras, microphones and tactile sensors. In such a case, goes the reply, the ‘room’ would learn through a causal connection between things it receives and what they represent. Searle simply tweaks the Chinese Room, having the input some from such devices instead of somebody physically putting pieces of paper into the room. He even adds an elaborate system of motion dampeners so that the man in the room is unaware that he is negotiating physical space. The notion remains unchanged – the man in the room is manipulating meaningless (to him) symbols according to instructions. He doesn’t understand what he is doing, in terms of attaching semantics to the input or output. The extra input he received in terms of ocular or auditory information would be equally meaningless and there would be nothing to attach meaning to – just extra work for the processor. Searle insists that ‘by instantiating the program I have no intentional states of the relevant type. All I do is follow formal instructions about manipulating formal symbols.’ There is no understanding created, neither for the homunculus within nor for the robot system.
The Brain Simulator reply to Searle’s thought experiment suggests that a computer which simulates every last firing of neurons and every last synapse of a real Chinese speaker’s brain would have to understand Chinese in the same way that the Chinese speaker does. Not so, claims Searle. His argument boils down to the fact that a simulation is just that, an image of the real thing. In the same way as a computer simulation of digestion cannot be mistaken for actual digestion, nor should a computer simulation of understanding Chinese – or thinking in general – be mistaken for actual understanding of Chinese, or actual thinking. Searle remains convinced that the phenomena of human thought – of mental states and consciousness - is directly related to the chemical and biological make-up of actual human brains. No amount of simulating will produce anything other than a simulation.
Other detractors have resorted to the Other Minds reply – an extrapolation of the old chestnut of the other minds problem. In much the same way that I cannot be sure that you are conscious in the same way that I am, nor could I be sure that a computer is, irrespective of its behaviours. However, I judge from your behaviour that it is highly probable that your mind functions largely as mine does; you do think and understand. Turing made this assumption thirty years before Searle came up with the Chinese Room. ‘Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.’ It is therefore possible to make the same case for the observable behaviour of a computer. If a computer acts as though it thinks, I should accord it that role. The Turing Test effectively does this, by extending the protocol to computers exhibiting thinking-like behaviour. Searle’s response to this is that we know the workings of a computer to be syntactical and not semantical. We know the computer is not thinking, because we know it is doing exactly what we told it to do – to manipulate symbols according to a set of instructions. He also objects in more general terms to this argument from analogy, suggesting that actually the argument in the case of other minds is not from pure analogy, but from recognising similar causal relationships on similar systems. Experience A on a body of type B will have a similar effect, C. Given this view, an argument from analogy falls down with reference to computers displaying ‘thinking-like’ behaviour, since the body, B, is of an entirely different nature – the causal-consequential relationship cannot be compared.
Many commentators upon the Chinese Room have declared that the argument is based on an intuition that the man in the room – and so a computer – cannot possibly understand; the Intuition reply. Ned Block (1980) suggested as much directly in his original response to the Chinese Room, that it depended upon an intuitive feeling that machines do not think. Pinker (1997) goes so far as to say, “You can almost hear {Searle} saying ‘Aw, c’mon! You mean that the guy understands Chinese?!!! Geddadahere! He doesn’t understand a word!!’” He makes the convincing point that Searle has so slowed down the thought process – a man in a room with paper instructions would take millions of years to process convincing replies to questions in Chinese – that he has falsely concluded that understanding is not present. If, continues Pinker, the process were speeded up to real time, we would not be so quick to dismiss the behavioural evidence before us. Pinker also suggests that the whole Chinese Room debate is merely a discussion about how we use the word ‘understand’ – perhaps reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s assertion that all of philosophy was language. He suggests using another, less-loaded word to escape the problem. In any event, argues Pinker (1988), the Turing Test is not a sufficient test for a thinking machine, and he suggests a harsher test for intelligence: ‘Could a mechanical device ever duplicate human intelligence, the ultimate test being whether it could cause a real human to fall in love with it?’ referring to an old episode of The Twilight Zone.
Some opponents to Searle’s case take the view that newer advances in computer sciences render his objections invalid. The example of parallel computing and neural networks, termed ‘connectionism’ is one of these. Arguing that modelling computers on the brain and arranging layers of neuron-like processing units which interact with one another, connectionism promises a closer analogy to the human brain than traditional von Neumann computers. Connectionism has moved a long way since original experiments were buried by the ‘exclusive or’ and neural nets now produce fascinating results. In terms of facial recognition, for example, Garrison W. Cottrell has been able to programme such a machine to be 100% accurate in recognising something as a face and 81% accurate in gender recognition on new samples which the net had not been trained on. This would certainly suggest that the machine has ‘learnt’. But despite optimism from some quarters and a conviction that Searle’s Chinese Room doesn’t impinge on the success of such machines , Searle dismisses the distinction – ‘The parallel ‘brain-like’ character of the processing…is irrelevant to the purely computational aspects of the process.’ Whilst these machines appear to learn – even to the extent of having ‘teacher computers’ to regulate connections strengths between layers – that fact that anything done on them can also be done, albeit more slowly, on a series machine (or a universal Turing machine) shows that there is no advance here other than that of speed. This would seem to me to be a very strong case – if it is true that speed alone is the advantage of such a system, it would be hard to argue that the system therefore can understand, simply by virtue of that quality.
Other responses – not specific to Searle’s arguments, but attempts to advance strong AI - include the CYC programme – an attempt to load a massive database with all the accumulated ‘common sense’ of humanity, in an effort to overcome the classic ‘frame problem’ in which an intelligent agent can sift relevant from non-relevant information. It is a controversial project, with many feeling that no matter how large the database, this wealth of common sense ‘knowledge’ is not what consciousness stems from. The advent of defeasible reasoning – the ability to override default assumptions in the light of new experiences or extra information - also suggests, to some, that progress is being made towards actual thought and learning.
It is important here to backtrack. My original question was whether machines could think. Searle has never argued that they cannot. His arguments are a refutation of strong AI – that software programmes in and of themselves could create a mind. His argument is basically as follows. He establishes three axioms: i) computers are syntactic formal systems (they manipulate abstract symbols devoid of any intention or meaning), ii) human minds have semantic content (meaning and intentionality) and iii) syntax alone cannot produce semantics. His conclusion is that ‘programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.’ The whole Chinese Room debate was sparked by an attempt to illustrate the third axiom of this argument.
For us to be able to assess whether a machine can think – can have conscious experiences – we need to define what that is – and the problem here is that there is no easy answer to this issue. In trying to establish if machines – in theory at least – can be conscious, we find that we actually don’t know a great deal about what it is it is to be conscious. Stuart Sutherland writes, "Consciousness: the having of perceptions, thoughts and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means... Nothing worth reading has been written about it." Searle gives a more pragmatic definition - "'Consciousness' refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become 'unconscious'." – and Dennet concurs, "The improvements we install in our brain when we learn our languages permit us to review, recall, rehearse, redesign our own activities, turning our brains into echo chambers of sorts, in which otherwise evanescent processes can hang around and become objects in their own right. Those that persist the longest, acquiring influence as they persist, we call our conscious thoughts."
If we are to ascertain whether man-made mechanisms can attain conscious thought, we need first to be sure of what it is we are looking for. Searle makes the strong case that it is not computational symbol manipulation. Neuroscientists now work with a wide definition of consciousness, which basically incorporates all of our “‘experience’ – of Life, subjectively understood. Experiences, it is widely held, have a special qualitative character” , thus giving rise to the notion of qualia. A quale is held to be the qualitative character of experience. Damasio (2000) describes qualia as ‘simple sensory qualities to be found in the blueness of the sky or the tone of a cello’ . It is widely thought that the ability to define qualia, to explain them as phenomenal qualities, is to define consciousness.
Damasio puts forth some ideas about how the brain operates, and how, in particular, emotion plays an essential role in aiding and complementing our ability to understand and to function the real world. He cites examples of patients with impaired emotional areas of the brain and their corresponding dysfunction as rational thinking beings. He outlines the interactive processes of the biological and chemical systems of the human body, involving far more than ‘just’ the brain, which seems to suggest that modelling the brain alone could not hope to reproduce consciousness. This has huge implications for the world of artificial intelligence. If consciousness and reactive thought are dependant to some extent upon emotional feedback, then the computational theory of mind is in serious trouble, and the notion of building minds through software advances seems more doubtful than ever. Dreyfus was a forerunner to such thoughts and presented a related argument, that the body was necessary for the global interaction necessary to create understanding. It seems to me that there are two, possibly distinct, points here: (i) the emotions are involved, (ii) more than just the brain is involved.
Aleksander (2007) describes a machine designed by Stan Franklin of Memphis University – the Intelligent Distribution Agent, or IDA. The purpose of the machine was to organise billeting for US seamen via e-mail. ‘The key feature is that the seaman using the system should not feel that there has been a change from human billeters to a machine in terms of the sensitivity and concern with which their case is handled.’ The machine receives a sailor’s preferences, current postings and skill set and matches this information to available billets before making a suggestion. The analogy here to the Turing Test is unmistakable, but Aleksander suggests that such a connection would be too superficial. Franklin’s machine, he says, has not passed the Turing Test since it has no phenomenological consciousness as such. Whilst it is not clear to me that such phenomenological conscious was suggested by Turing, Aleksander says that it merely has ‘a functional stance that is sufficiently effective to leave users satisfied that they are interacting with a system that is ‘conscious’ of their needs.’ This example though, introduces a very significant issue – the more recent versions of IDA include emotional input – ‘guilt’ for not meeting the needs of the sailor. The process of inputs interacting with various forms of computational memory, including the marriage of both internal and external stimuli suggests what Franklin terms a ‘consciousness area’ which directs the process until ‘the “thought” is sufficiently well formed to activate an action-selection mechanism that communicates with the sailor and initiates a new set of internal and external inputs for further consideration.’ Franklin would certainly seem to be suggesting that his IDA can think, and it would seem the programmed ‘guilt’, as a rudimentary nodding to human emotion, might be a very important factor in the illusion of a concerned and compassionate thinking machine.
It seems to me that to really get into the notion of a thinking machine, we need to get into the notion of how our own thinking is possible. Why is there anything, rather than nothing, in terms of our consciousness? Dennet (2007) suggests that this is the ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness, explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences – as opposed to the ‘Easy’ problems, which involve simply identifying the mechanisms by which we perform various functions, such as smelling a flower or recognising an old friend; it can, he says, be dismissed. Dennet offers a new take on the Simulated Brain discussion, proposing a situation where Steven Pinker’s brain is being destroyed by a progressive brain disease. Following huge successes in the Easy Problems of consciousness, scientists are able to replace damaged sections, neuron by neuron, in such a way as neither he nor observers can tell any difference. Ultimately his entire brain is replaced. Steve thinks he is alive and well and continues to write and joke and feel pain. Dennet suggests that the problem is that there can be no test to dismiss or prove that Steve is experiencing reality consciously – we are back with the other minds problem. ‘There could not be an objective test that distinguished a clever robot from a really conscious person.’ Dennet thinks we should just move on and accept this.
Can a machine think? Trivially, yes. We are machines – biological and chemical machines as opposed to silicon – but machines none the less. Evidently, we can think. Ironically, we may end up with a machine that can do what we do, that has a level of intelligence equal to our own, but still have no idea how it achieves this. It will not be clear, from opening up a neural network and looking at the strings of syntactical numbers and symbols therein, just how such semantic awareness was generated. Grim clearly states, ‘At the neuron level, your brain works in terms of syntactic-like impulses, not semantic-like meanings. We don’t know how semantics is produced from syntax – but we know that it is.’ To the question of whether we can build an artificial machine that thinks as we do, Searle is content to reply that there is no logical reason in principal as to why not, but for now it is still within the realms of science fiction. Brains raise consciousness by operating causally, and any machine that could produce consciousness or intentionality would have to do so by duplicating the presently inexplicable causal powers of the brain. If the neuron-by-neuron replication of a human brain – with emotional feedback and sensory apparatus – does one day produce a machine that can think, perhaps we’ll find that we were asking the wrong question. Perhaps the question is, “How come we think?’
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More, Max, ‘Beyond the Machine’ in proceedings of Ars Electronica 1997. (FleshFactor: informationmaschinemensch), Ars Electronica Center, Springer, Wien, New York, 1997. http://www.maxmore.com/machine.htm Sept 2010
Oppy, Graham ‘The Turing Test’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2008 http://plato.standford.edu/entries/turing-test/
Searle, J. ‘Minds Brains and Programs’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 417-57 1980 http://pami.uwaterloo.ca/tizhoosh/docs/Searle.pdf
Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460. http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html accessed 22nd December 2010
Wright, Robert, ‘Can machines think?’ Time Online Monday 25th march 1996 http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,984304,00.html accessed 10 October 2010
Other
Churchland, Paul and Patricia Smith, ‘Could a machine think?’ Scientific American 1990 p 32 – 37
Dennet, Daniel ‘The Brain: A Clever Robot’ Time Magazine January 18th 2007
Grim, Patrick SUNY Lecture 15 Artificial intelligence and Lecture 17 Attacks on AI TTC Video 2008
Hacker ‘Is there anything it is like to be a bat?’ Philosophy 77 (300):157-174. 2002
Searle, John, ‘The Philosophy of Mind’ Lecture Series The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1996
Searle, John, ‘Is the brain’s mind a computer programme?’ Scientific American 1990 p26-31
One cannot begin such a discussion without an account of Cartesian dualism, the intuitively sensible view which separates mind and body, thought and physical process. Descartes proposed that human beings were unique in that they had a spiritual soul, or mind, which was non-extended and without motion, existing in some ‘other’ realm. The body was an advanced mechanism, which was somehow moved by the soul. This thinking survived and evolved as vitalism.
‘Vitalism holds that life results not from biochemical reactions but from a vital force unique to living things. Whereas modern science sees life as resulting from the complex interactions of mechanistic parts forming an organic whole, vitalism sees life as suffused with a substance not found in non-living nature,’
such as ‘The Force’ of the Star Wars concept.This conceptualisation has persisted in many forms to the present day. Descartes further suggested that animals, lacking the divine soul, were machines. He would argue against their ability to ‘think’ in the way that humans do. Whilst there is now a significant body of evidence supporting thought in higher mammals, another of Descartes suggestions pertains and persists. Descartes insisted that could a machine be created to look indistinguishable from a human, it could not pass itself off as human for two important reasons. First, a machine could never master language in a realistic and meaningful way and secondly it could never act appropriately in all possible contingencies. In other words, a machine would give itself away through poor choice of language or inappropriate actions.
Descartes’ comments do seem to be a direct foreshadowing of the seminal work of Turing in 1950. Turing suggested that, whilst it was meaningless to ask whether machines can think, it can be profitable to consider whether a machine can act in such as way as to convince a human interlocutor that it was actually human. The Turing Test was devised expressly to test such a proposition. Turing himself believed strongly that it was only a matter of time before machines – specifically digital computers – could pass his test. Turing describes an imitation game where there is an interrogator, a person and a machine. The interrogator is separated from the other person and the machine. Whilst the interrogator knows that there is both a machine and a person, she does not know which is which. A machine, therefore, is said to have passed the Turing Test if it is able to respond appropriately to questions posed by the interrogator in such a way as to convince the interrogator that it is in fact the person. Specifically, Turing stipulated that for a machine to be judged to have passed the test, an average interrogator should have more than a 70% chance of making the correct identification after just five minutes of questioning.
Turing rather optimistically believed that machine intelligence would become acceptable in short order: “I believe that at the end of the century the use of the words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted .” In fact, the Loebner Prize Competition, specifically set up for the task of running the Turing Test on hopeful machines, has become something of an AI embarrassment – in terms of how far we are from creating such thinking machines. Churchland (1995), as one of the observers of the test in 1993, admitted, ‘The truth is, none of the entrants was worth a damn, at least in terms of Artificial Intelligence.’ However, the fact that we are so far from the goal does not of itself negate Turing’s Test as being a good one. Churchland, in fact, does argue that the test is not a good one, and suggests that the Loebner Prize Competition only encourages programmers to fake intelligence in a very narrow range in order to ‘run off with the …prize’ .
Many objections have been raised to the validity of the Turing Test. One such is that the test is in some way chauvinistic; there is an inherent assumption that a thinking machine must in some way be like us. As Matt Carter (2007) points out, ‘The idea that we might one day be able to construct some artefact which has a mind in the same sense that we have minds is not a new one. It has featured in entertaining and frightening fictions since Mary Shelley first conceived of Frankenstein’s monster.’ This theme is well-explored in the science fiction genre relating to Artificial Intelligence; be it Commander Data in the Star Trek series or Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, time and again artificially created beings fail to accord their behaviour and language with the intricate and largely unwritten expectations of human behaviour. But herein lies a distinction crucial to our discussion. Does a thinking being need to be human-like? In our drive to create intelligence, are we guilty of an ‘after-our-own-image’ pre-conception of what a thinking thing must ‘look’ like, in terms of its functioning? Whilst these are good questions, they do not adversely affect the Turing Test – Turing merely asserted that a machine passing the test could be described as having intelligence, not that only such machines could be thus described.
Other objections to Turing have rested on increasingly ‘clever’ programming which, in a five minute period, could indeed dupe the man in the street. These objections miss the point that the Turing Test is specifically a situation in which the interrogator knows that one of her two subjects is a machine and is still unable to discover the true identity of the participants. Turing himself identified a variety of possible objections to his own test. He recognised that substance dualists would have a hard time accepting that a ‘body’ designed by humans could possibly be imbued with the ‘soul’ or ‘thinking thing’ which exists non-extended in another realm to the physical; they would necessarily contest that a machine passing the test was indeed ‘thinking’ in the way that humans do. However, the dualist camp has many difficulties to overcome, not least the question of why God couldn’t put consciousness into a machine if He saw fit. Turing also identified what Oppy terms ‘the head-in-the-sand’ objection: the implications of thinking machines – that we become inferior, that we have real concerns about being usurped or dominated – are so worrying that we ought not to pursue the goal. The objections, however, are not valid arguments against the possibility of thinking machines, simply an expression of fear of the result.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a label loosely applied to a range of possible entities. It would be helpful here to explore a definition. Perhaps the most persistent definitions have been suggested by Professor John Searle, of the University of California. He suggests that two interpretations of AI exist. Firstly, he identifies what he calls Strong AI. This is achieved when a machine achieves or supersedes human intellectual ability. Specifically, Searle proposes this definition to deal with the belief that computer programming – software – can cause a machine to become conscious, or indeed be conscious in its own right. Searle suggests that proponents of Strong AI believe that ‘by designing the right programmes with the right inputs and outputs, they are literally creating minds’. He specifically refers his arguments to the computer, having given a wider definition to the term ‘machine’. Searle argues that if by ‘machine’ we mean a physical system capable of performing certain functions – which surely we do – then humans are a very special kind of biological machine, and given that humans can think, machines can think, QED. In Strong AI, Searle is identifying the belief that a computer – this very specific type of machine – can not only act intelligently, but can have actual states of mind. ‘According to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states.’ We are all digital computers. This is more than analogy. Our brains are digital computers and our minds are computer programmes – the software to the hardware of our brain. This is known as Strong AI.
Weak AI is more of a specific intelligence, not at all encompassing the range of human cognisant abilities. Weak AI is a system designed to do a narrowly defined task exceedingly well. It is a system which simulates a conscious mind in a specific respect. This presents us with the issue of defining what it is we mean by ‘intelligence’ or ‘thinking’, and whether we mean the same thing by both terms.
Does a thinking thing have to be intelligent or vice versa? When IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, many were heralding an AI success. Others, determining that Deep Blue was ‘merely’ making computational choices, without any conscious awareness that it was doing so, meant that it wasn’t truly thinking or truly intelligent. Journalist Robert Wright commented on the match that whilst Kasparov felt down after losing the first game, it was improbable that Deep Blue could feel blue. He also reported the views of those against the whole notion of computers vs. humans in chess by citing the fact that fork-lift trucks were never invited to weight-lifting competitions: perhaps not a perfect analogy. As Drew McDermott put it, ‘Deep Blue is unintelligent because it is so narrow. It can win a chess game, but it can't recognize, much less pick up, a chess piece. It can't even carry on a conversation about the game it just won. Since the essence of intelligence would seem to be breadth, or the ability to react creatively to a wide variety of situations, it's hard to credit Deep Blue with much intelligence.’ Whilst this sounds pretty damning for the AI camp, McDermott however concludes, ‘Saying Deep Blue doesn't really think about chess is like saying an airplane doesn't really fly because it doesn't flap its wings.’ Computers such as Deep Blue can indeed help us to understand some of the processes of thought and this version - Weak AI - is what Turing referred to when he suggested in 1950 that it would soon be unremarkable to suggest that machine could think.
Searle tracks changes in philosophical thought about the mind. He traces the development from Descartes’ substance dualism, to the more palatable property dualism still defended today. He progresses through monism’s idealism, behavourism and physicalism, and showing where such arguments fail to account for causal relationships in the mind and paving the way for today’s more accepted viewpoint, that of functionalism. It is the functionalist viewpoint – that what makes something a desire or a thought or a feeling depends purely on its function, not at all on its internal makeup or engineering - which led to the computational model of the mind. Searle’s purpose in providing these definitions was to focus research on a realistic area, whilst being able to relatively easily dismiss the unrealistic, as he saw it, proposal of Strong AI. However, his refutation of Strong AI proved to be anything but easy. Searle proposed a basic thought experiment in order to debunk the idea – The Chinese Room.
The analogy is deceptively simple. A man inside a closed room receives input in the form of Chinese symbols. He has no knowledge of what the symbols mean, but does have a comprehensive set of instructions about how to select further Chinese symbols to output in response. Searle suggests that the instructions could be so clear and comprehensive that the ‘room’ could output appropriate responses to questions in Chinese. However, he argues pointedly, there is no point at which the man in the room understands Chinese. He neither understands the questions being put – indeed not even that they are questions – nor does he understand the answers he is providing; there is no understanding of Chinese. Searle here has provided an example of a machine that can pass the Turing Test. It could fool Chinese speakers, even if they knew one of two interlocutors was a machine. The output from the Chinese Room would be identical to that of a genuine, conscious Chinese speaker. However, there is nothing intelligently conscious about the Chinese Room, in terms of understanding Chinese. Searle’s thought experiment, then, asserts that the Turing Test is, in fact, no test at all for intelligence.
Searle’s argument goes further than this though. He sought to show that true AI is not possible, that representations and simulations of intelligence would always be shadowy ‘Platonic Cave’ reflections of the real thing. His arguments are intended to show ‘that while suitable programmed computers may appear to converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language, even in principal.’ More specifically, Searle is saying that formal computational systems, systems using the manipulations of symbols as a means of generating ‘intelligent’ output, can never think. This is a very strong claim, given that we don’t know how our own thinking comes about. Whilst it has intuitive appeal, there are many who have been unconvinced. I am inclined to accept Searle’s argument that computational shuffling of symbols to given rules cannot create a mind, that something else, quite possibly biological or emotional in form, is required. For now, there are many replies to the Chinese Room argument and some popular antecedents of the original thought experiment too. Some of these are worth considering in more detail as we evaluate what the implications are for allowing that machines can think.
The systems reply is one of the most basic replies to the Chinese Room. Whilst it may be true that the Searle in the room – the homunculus – has no understanding of Chinese, the room itself, as a whole system, does have understanding. This objection misses the point. As Searle was quick to point out, he could memorise the complex symbol-shuffling instruction manual, leave the room and operate from the middle of a field and still not understand Chinese, whilst performing equally well. He would still be taking the input, meaningless to him, running it through a complex system of programmed responses to squiggles and squaggles , and producing an output which although meaningful by virtue of the outside world, would still be meaningless to him. Searle further suggests that the systems reply entails absurd consequences, such as identifying sub-systems of ‘mind’ in things like stomachs, thermostats and telephones: ‘If we are to conclude that there must be cognition in me on the grounds that I have a certain sort of input and output and a program in between, then it looks like all sorts of noncognitive subsystems are going to turn out to be cognitive.’ What Searle is saying in response to the systems reply is quite simply that as long as the software is thought of in terms of manipulating symbols, no amount of playing with definitions will change that fact that symbols are being manipulated according to a set of instructions which do not in any way lead to actual understanding of what those symbols may mean. This in turn supports the position that computers cannot think. This position seems to me to be a tenable one.
Another related response to the Chinese room argument is the Virtual Mind reply. This suggests that whilst understanding might not be attributable directly to the computer, or to the system, it is possible that a virtual mind is created, separate to the original computer or system, which does understand Chinese. As Cole states, ‘The claim at issue should be “the computer creates a mind that understands Chinese”. A familiar model is characters in computer or video games. These characters have various abilities and personalities, and the characters are not identical with the hardware or program that creates them.’ Objections to the systems reply are valid here also. Penrose (2002) drew the analogy further through his consideration of The Chinese Gym variation – a room the size of India with Indians, suitably enough, doing the processing part of the equation. Penrose concluded that it was highly implausible that such a system could generate an independently existing mind capable of understanding in its own right.
Searle also makes short shrift of the Robot reply, in which the Chinese Room apparatus is put into a robot which has sensory input from cameras, microphones and tactile sensors. In such a case, goes the reply, the ‘room’ would learn through a causal connection between things it receives and what they represent. Searle simply tweaks the Chinese Room, having the input some from such devices instead of somebody physically putting pieces of paper into the room. He even adds an elaborate system of motion dampeners so that the man in the room is unaware that he is negotiating physical space. The notion remains unchanged – the man in the room is manipulating meaningless (to him) symbols according to instructions. He doesn’t understand what he is doing, in terms of attaching semantics to the input or output. The extra input he received in terms of ocular or auditory information would be equally meaningless and there would be nothing to attach meaning to – just extra work for the processor. Searle insists that ‘by instantiating the program I have no intentional states of the relevant type. All I do is follow formal instructions about manipulating formal symbols.’ There is no understanding created, neither for the homunculus within nor for the robot system.
The Brain Simulator reply to Searle’s thought experiment suggests that a computer which simulates every last firing of neurons and every last synapse of a real Chinese speaker’s brain would have to understand Chinese in the same way that the Chinese speaker does. Not so, claims Searle. His argument boils down to the fact that a simulation is just that, an image of the real thing. In the same way as a computer simulation of digestion cannot be mistaken for actual digestion, nor should a computer simulation of understanding Chinese – or thinking in general – be mistaken for actual understanding of Chinese, or actual thinking. Searle remains convinced that the phenomena of human thought – of mental states and consciousness - is directly related to the chemical and biological make-up of actual human brains. No amount of simulating will produce anything other than a simulation.
Other detractors have resorted to the Other Minds reply – an extrapolation of the old chestnut of the other minds problem. In much the same way that I cannot be sure that you are conscious in the same way that I am, nor could I be sure that a computer is, irrespective of its behaviours. However, I judge from your behaviour that it is highly probable that your mind functions largely as mine does; you do think and understand. Turing made this assumption thirty years before Searle came up with the Chinese Room. ‘Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.’ It is therefore possible to make the same case for the observable behaviour of a computer. If a computer acts as though it thinks, I should accord it that role. The Turing Test effectively does this, by extending the protocol to computers exhibiting thinking-like behaviour. Searle’s response to this is that we know the workings of a computer to be syntactical and not semantical. We know the computer is not thinking, because we know it is doing exactly what we told it to do – to manipulate symbols according to a set of instructions. He also objects in more general terms to this argument from analogy, suggesting that actually the argument in the case of other minds is not from pure analogy, but from recognising similar causal relationships on similar systems. Experience A on a body of type B will have a similar effect, C. Given this view, an argument from analogy falls down with reference to computers displaying ‘thinking-like’ behaviour, since the body, B, is of an entirely different nature – the causal-consequential relationship cannot be compared.
Many commentators upon the Chinese Room have declared that the argument is based on an intuition that the man in the room – and so a computer – cannot possibly understand; the Intuition reply. Ned Block (1980) suggested as much directly in his original response to the Chinese Room, that it depended upon an intuitive feeling that machines do not think. Pinker (1997) goes so far as to say, “You can almost hear {Searle} saying ‘Aw, c’mon! You mean that the guy understands Chinese?!!! Geddadahere! He doesn’t understand a word!!’” He makes the convincing point that Searle has so slowed down the thought process – a man in a room with paper instructions would take millions of years to process convincing replies to questions in Chinese – that he has falsely concluded that understanding is not present. If, continues Pinker, the process were speeded up to real time, we would not be so quick to dismiss the behavioural evidence before us. Pinker also suggests that the whole Chinese Room debate is merely a discussion about how we use the word ‘understand’ – perhaps reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s assertion that all of philosophy was language. He suggests using another, less-loaded word to escape the problem. In any event, argues Pinker (1988), the Turing Test is not a sufficient test for a thinking machine, and he suggests a harsher test for intelligence: ‘Could a mechanical device ever duplicate human intelligence, the ultimate test being whether it could cause a real human to fall in love with it?’ referring to an old episode of The Twilight Zone.
Some opponents to Searle’s case take the view that newer advances in computer sciences render his objections invalid. The example of parallel computing and neural networks, termed ‘connectionism’ is one of these. Arguing that modelling computers on the brain and arranging layers of neuron-like processing units which interact with one another, connectionism promises a closer analogy to the human brain than traditional von Neumann computers. Connectionism has moved a long way since original experiments were buried by the ‘exclusive or’ and neural nets now produce fascinating results. In terms of facial recognition, for example, Garrison W. Cottrell has been able to programme such a machine to be 100% accurate in recognising something as a face and 81% accurate in gender recognition on new samples which the net had not been trained on. This would certainly suggest that the machine has ‘learnt’. But despite optimism from some quarters and a conviction that Searle’s Chinese Room doesn’t impinge on the success of such machines , Searle dismisses the distinction – ‘The parallel ‘brain-like’ character of the processing…is irrelevant to the purely computational aspects of the process.’ Whilst these machines appear to learn – even to the extent of having ‘teacher computers’ to regulate connections strengths between layers – that fact that anything done on them can also be done, albeit more slowly, on a series machine (or a universal Turing machine) shows that there is no advance here other than that of speed. This would seem to me to be a very strong case – if it is true that speed alone is the advantage of such a system, it would be hard to argue that the system therefore can understand, simply by virtue of that quality.
Other responses – not specific to Searle’s arguments, but attempts to advance strong AI - include the CYC programme – an attempt to load a massive database with all the accumulated ‘common sense’ of humanity, in an effort to overcome the classic ‘frame problem’ in which an intelligent agent can sift relevant from non-relevant information. It is a controversial project, with many feeling that no matter how large the database, this wealth of common sense ‘knowledge’ is not what consciousness stems from. The advent of defeasible reasoning – the ability to override default assumptions in the light of new experiences or extra information - also suggests, to some, that progress is being made towards actual thought and learning.
It is important here to backtrack. My original question was whether machines could think. Searle has never argued that they cannot. His arguments are a refutation of strong AI – that software programmes in and of themselves could create a mind. His argument is basically as follows. He establishes three axioms: i) computers are syntactic formal systems (they manipulate abstract symbols devoid of any intention or meaning), ii) human minds have semantic content (meaning and intentionality) and iii) syntax alone cannot produce semantics. His conclusion is that ‘programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.’ The whole Chinese Room debate was sparked by an attempt to illustrate the third axiom of this argument.
For us to be able to assess whether a machine can think – can have conscious experiences – we need to define what that is – and the problem here is that there is no easy answer to this issue. In trying to establish if machines – in theory at least – can be conscious, we find that we actually don’t know a great deal about what it is it is to be conscious. Stuart Sutherland writes, "Consciousness: the having of perceptions, thoughts and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means... Nothing worth reading has been written about it." Searle gives a more pragmatic definition - "'Consciousness' refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become 'unconscious'." – and Dennet concurs, "The improvements we install in our brain when we learn our languages permit us to review, recall, rehearse, redesign our own activities, turning our brains into echo chambers of sorts, in which otherwise evanescent processes can hang around and become objects in their own right. Those that persist the longest, acquiring influence as they persist, we call our conscious thoughts."
If we are to ascertain whether man-made mechanisms can attain conscious thought, we need first to be sure of what it is we are looking for. Searle makes the strong case that it is not computational symbol manipulation. Neuroscientists now work with a wide definition of consciousness, which basically incorporates all of our “‘experience’ – of Life, subjectively understood. Experiences, it is widely held, have a special qualitative character” , thus giving rise to the notion of qualia. A quale is held to be the qualitative character of experience. Damasio (2000) describes qualia as ‘simple sensory qualities to be found in the blueness of the sky or the tone of a cello’ . It is widely thought that the ability to define qualia, to explain them as phenomenal qualities, is to define consciousness.
Damasio puts forth some ideas about how the brain operates, and how, in particular, emotion plays an essential role in aiding and complementing our ability to understand and to function the real world. He cites examples of patients with impaired emotional areas of the brain and their corresponding dysfunction as rational thinking beings. He outlines the interactive processes of the biological and chemical systems of the human body, involving far more than ‘just’ the brain, which seems to suggest that modelling the brain alone could not hope to reproduce consciousness. This has huge implications for the world of artificial intelligence. If consciousness and reactive thought are dependant to some extent upon emotional feedback, then the computational theory of mind is in serious trouble, and the notion of building minds through software advances seems more doubtful than ever. Dreyfus was a forerunner to such thoughts and presented a related argument, that the body was necessary for the global interaction necessary to create understanding. It seems to me that there are two, possibly distinct, points here: (i) the emotions are involved, (ii) more than just the brain is involved.
Aleksander (2007) describes a machine designed by Stan Franklin of Memphis University – the Intelligent Distribution Agent, or IDA. The purpose of the machine was to organise billeting for US seamen via e-mail. ‘The key feature is that the seaman using the system should not feel that there has been a change from human billeters to a machine in terms of the sensitivity and concern with which their case is handled.’ The machine receives a sailor’s preferences, current postings and skill set and matches this information to available billets before making a suggestion. The analogy here to the Turing Test is unmistakable, but Aleksander suggests that such a connection would be too superficial. Franklin’s machine, he says, has not passed the Turing Test since it has no phenomenological consciousness as such. Whilst it is not clear to me that such phenomenological conscious was suggested by Turing, Aleksander says that it merely has ‘a functional stance that is sufficiently effective to leave users satisfied that they are interacting with a system that is ‘conscious’ of their needs.’ This example though, introduces a very significant issue – the more recent versions of IDA include emotional input – ‘guilt’ for not meeting the needs of the sailor. The process of inputs interacting with various forms of computational memory, including the marriage of both internal and external stimuli suggests what Franklin terms a ‘consciousness area’ which directs the process until ‘the “thought” is sufficiently well formed to activate an action-selection mechanism that communicates with the sailor and initiates a new set of internal and external inputs for further consideration.’ Franklin would certainly seem to be suggesting that his IDA can think, and it would seem the programmed ‘guilt’, as a rudimentary nodding to human emotion, might be a very important factor in the illusion of a concerned and compassionate thinking machine.
It seems to me that to really get into the notion of a thinking machine, we need to get into the notion of how our own thinking is possible. Why is there anything, rather than nothing, in terms of our consciousness? Dennet (2007) suggests that this is the ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness, explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences – as opposed to the ‘Easy’ problems, which involve simply identifying the mechanisms by which we perform various functions, such as smelling a flower or recognising an old friend; it can, he says, be dismissed. Dennet offers a new take on the Simulated Brain discussion, proposing a situation where Steven Pinker’s brain is being destroyed by a progressive brain disease. Following huge successes in the Easy Problems of consciousness, scientists are able to replace damaged sections, neuron by neuron, in such a way as neither he nor observers can tell any difference. Ultimately his entire brain is replaced. Steve thinks he is alive and well and continues to write and joke and feel pain. Dennet suggests that the problem is that there can be no test to dismiss or prove that Steve is experiencing reality consciously – we are back with the other minds problem. ‘There could not be an objective test that distinguished a clever robot from a really conscious person.’ Dennet thinks we should just move on and accept this.
Can a machine think? Trivially, yes. We are machines – biological and chemical machines as opposed to silicon – but machines none the less. Evidently, we can think. Ironically, we may end up with a machine that can do what we do, that has a level of intelligence equal to our own, but still have no idea how it achieves this. It will not be clear, from opening up a neural network and looking at the strings of syntactical numbers and symbols therein, just how such semantic awareness was generated. Grim clearly states, ‘At the neuron level, your brain works in terms of syntactic-like impulses, not semantic-like meanings. We don’t know how semantics is produced from syntax – but we know that it is.’ To the question of whether we can build an artificial machine that thinks as we do, Searle is content to reply that there is no logical reason in principal as to why not, but for now it is still within the realms of science fiction. Brains raise consciousness by operating causally, and any machine that could produce consciousness or intentionality would have to do so by duplicating the presently inexplicable causal powers of the brain. If the neuron-by-neuron replication of a human brain – with emotional feedback and sensory apparatus – does one day produce a machine that can think, perhaps we’ll find that we were asking the wrong question. Perhaps the question is, “How come we think?’
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Carter, Matt Minds and Computers Edinburgh University Press 2007
Clark, Andy Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again MIT Press 1998
Churchland, Paul The Engine Of Reason, The Seat Of The Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into The Brain MIT Press 1995
Cottingham, J. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol I. CUP 1985
Damasio, Antonio Descartes’ Error Vintage Press 2006
Damasio, Antonio The Feeling of What Happens Vintage Press 2000
Dennett, Daniel 'Kinds of Minds', London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1996
Floridi, Luciano (Ed) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information Blackwell Publications 2004
Lowe, E.J., An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind CUP 2000
Mazis, Glen A. Humans, Animals, Machines SUNY Press 2008
Pinker, Steven How the Mind Works Penguin 1988
Searle, John The Mystery of Consciousness New York Review Books; 1st edition 1990
Stich Stephen P. and Warfield Ted A. (Ed) The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind Blackwell Publications 2003
Velmans, Max and Schneider, Susan (Ed) The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness Blackwell Publications 2008
The International Dictionary of Psychology. 2nd ed. New York: Crossroad, 1995
Internet resources
Cole, David ‘The Chinese Room Argument’ (2009)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ Accessed 02/03/2010
Elton, Matthew ‘Persons, Animals, and Machines’, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 23, No. 4, Special Issue: Humans, Animals, and Machines (Autumn, 1998), pp. 384-398 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/690139 Accessed: 27/02/2010
Lenat, Douglas B. ’From 2001 to 2001: Common Sense and the Mind of HAL’ 2001 http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/cache/halslegacy.html January 7th 2011
McDermott, Drew ‘How Intelligent is Deep Blue?’ 1997 http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/cache/mcdermott.html
More, Max, ‘Beyond the Machine’ in proceedings of Ars Electronica 1997. (FleshFactor: informationmaschinemensch), Ars Electronica Center, Springer, Wien, New York, 1997. http://www.maxmore.com/machine.htm Sept 2010
Oppy, Graham ‘The Turing Test’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2008 http://plato.standford.edu/entries/turing-test/
Searle, J. ‘Minds Brains and Programs’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 417-57 1980 http://pami.uwaterloo.ca/tizhoosh/docs/Searle.pdf
Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460. http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html accessed 22nd December 2010
Wright, Robert, ‘Can machines think?’ Time Online Monday 25th march 1996 http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,984304,00.html accessed 10 October 2010
Other
Churchland, Paul and Patricia Smith, ‘Could a machine think?’ Scientific American 1990 p 32 – 37
Dennet, Daniel ‘The Brain: A Clever Robot’ Time Magazine January 18th 2007
Grim, Patrick SUNY Lecture 15 Artificial intelligence and Lecture 17 Attacks on AI TTC Video 2008
Hacker ‘Is there anything it is like to be a bat?’ Philosophy 77 (300):157-174. 2002
Searle, John, ‘The Philosophy of Mind’ Lecture Series The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1996
Searle, John, ‘Is the brain’s mind a computer programme?’ Scientific American 1990 p26-31
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