An Essay called "My Surprisingly Novel Thoughts on the Freedom of the Will"

My Surprisingly Novel Thoughts on the Freedom of the Will

The mainstream, secular debate about free-will is a verbal dispute: it boils down to a question of framing. The debate happens under shared beliefs about the nature of the mind and the physical laws that give rise to it, as well as shared beliefs about the results of famous experiments (the Libet experiments) and recent work in neuroscience. This means there can’t be a “further fact” in dispute (indeed, a logical positivist would probably say there ought to be no debate at all). The only thing in dispute is how we should conceive of the concept of free will -- more specifically, whether there is a sensible way of modifying the traditional/religious or intuitive 'concept' such that it is compatible with the scientific facts, or whether there is no such sensible way because the idea of free will is an *inherently* superstitious concept that sits in irrevocable conflict with the facts. This is a question of framing.

Of the two framings that do exist in this debate, it seems to me that the “incompatibilist” framing is more popular among secularists than the “compatibilist” one. I think there are obvious reasons why one might expect this, despite the fact that we are all intuitive “libertarians” about the will. If you do take the word “freedom” in anything like our intuitive sense of it, the notion of free will is clearly absurd.

First of all, as soon as you dispense with the Cartesian Ego, you conclude that the mind must come from the brain (and only the brain), and that this hunk of matter must be subject to the bio-chemical-physical laws of our universe, just as all things are. This means that everything in your mind must be determined by these laws, including every aspect of your personality (whether you are good, bad, violent, non-violent, smart, dumb, rational, irrational, sane, insane, sociable, solitary) and all the decisions you make. There may well appear to be a division between the voluntary and the involuntary (we say addiction makes people zombies, for example), but it is more or less illusory. This means that when we deem murderers sane according to clinical standards – thereby implying they had a choice whether or not to kill their victim – we’re probably making some kind of error. There are, to be sure, degrees of insanity; some murderers might have genuinely weighed up the options, and experienced hesitation or regrets. However, even for these murderers, the deliberation was done according to fixed natural laws inside their brain. The reason a particular man ends up committing murder and his cousin doesn’t is almost certainly due to some slight abnormality in the man’s brain (caused by a bad set of genes, or a bad environment that led to the expression of bad phenotypes, or some kind of braindamage from physical trauma or drug abuse (probably also combined with bad genes and a bad environment)). There is no mysterious Will that somehow disrupts the natural processes going on in the brain and produces a truly spontaneous action (in any case, would the Will really be you, or just some part of you?). It may be true that quantum mechanics – the laws at the bottom of reality – are not deterministic but probabilistic, and seem to produce utterly random outcomes. While this suggests that your decisions were not predetermined from the moment of the Big Bang (which seems to be slightly more reassuring than believing they were), it still means your decisions have nothing to do with you (whatever “you” is).

Secondly, you (whatever “you” is) have absolutely no control over the vast majority of things that shaped and shape you (genetic and environmental): you don't choose your parents, your uterine environment, your general infantile environment, your city, your state or your nation, your infantile and childhood diet, the quality of the air you breathe, your parents' wealth, the size of your house, the number of books in your house, your siblings, the school you attend, your teachers at school, and so on ad infinitum.

Thirdly, as that annoying shithead Sam Harris writes, a number of findings in neuroscience have proved that “Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this ‘decision’ and believe that you are in the process of making it.” This means that the subjective feeling of deliberation has no connection to the actual machinations of deliberation that are going on in your brain (to which you have no access whatsoever). Consciousness of decision-making is therefore irrelevant to the question of free-will.

It is easy to see why these truths make free-will in our intuitive sense seem absurd. Define freedom in any normal way, and you will conclude that we don’t have it.

And yet, somehow, compatibilists still exist. Even more strangely, their arguments (i.e. ways of framing) aren’t totally insane either. They somehow manage to accept all these facts and still argue that we have the freedom required for moral responsibility (the only people who don't have freedom, they say, are the manifestly deranged or impaired). So how do they do it? In order to pull off this great feat of philosophical artistry, they have four main tacks.

The first is Derek Parfit’s strategy in On What Matters: highlighting the subtle distinction between “determinism” and “fatalism”. In the relevant chapter of this book, Parfit argues (as I recall it) that those who claim that determinism contradicts moral responsibility are victims of a common confusion of determinism and fatalism. Fatalism, Parfit says, is the condition of reality for Oedipus Rex in Sophocles’ famous play. If you are fated to experience some calamity, as Oedipus is, it means that whatever decision you make, the universe will find some way of putting you back on the path towards disaster. In Oedipus Rex, no matter what Oedipus chose to do, he was always going to end up having sex with his mother – thereby fulfilling the prophecy. But, as Parfit points out, nobody thinks our universe is fatalistic, just deterministic (or perhaps probabilistic, but if that makes any difference at all, it is on the side of compatibilism). In a deterministic universe, he says, our big, complex brains mean we can genuinely “make decisions”. We genuinely have “choices”, and these choices then affect our future. Even if these choices have antecedent causes in bio-chemical goings on in our neural structure (and these bio-chemical goings on have antecedent causes in the laws of physics), they are choices nonetheless. Our language of “decisions” and “responsibility” etc is therefore not in error.

The second tack is to observe how darn complicated our brains are. In his Big Think interview on Free Will, Steven Pinker (who seems to agree with me that the debate on free-will is a matter of framing) points out that the human brain consists of “a hundred billion neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses”. This means, he says, that choices are not possible to predict “in any simple way”. Pinker also observes that there is a significant neurological difference between reflexes (unconscious responses to stimuli like an iris contracting in strong light), and active decisions (say, deliberating over what to get for dinner or where to move a chess piece). The latter involve vast areas of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, and incorporate a vast array of information. So even if you’re not conscious of all the deliberation that goes into these active decisions (whatever “you” means), the brain has to make far more of an effort – seemingly vindicating the idea that a choice really is being made out of the landscape of possibilities. As a compatibilist would say, Does it matter that this choice goes on under cover of darkness if it’s still the brain in your skull doing it?

The third is to focus on the mentalistic level of analysis rather than the bio-chemical-physical. John Horgan demonstrates this strategy brilliantly in a scathing critique of Sam Harris’ book on free will in an article for Scientific American. His argument is worth quoting directly:

“Harris keeps insisting that because all our choices have prior causes, they are not free; they are determined. Of course all our choices are caused. No free-will proponent I know claims otherwise. The question is how are they caused? Harris seems to think that all causes are ultimately physical, and that to hold otherwise puts you in the company of believers in ghosts, souls, gods and other supernatural nonsense.

But the strange and wonderful thing about all organisms, and especially our species, is that mechanistic physical processes somehow give rise to phenomena that are not reducible to or determined by those physical processes. Human brains, in particular, generate human minds, which while subject to physical laws are influenced by non-physical factors, including ideas produced by other minds. These ideas may cause us to change our minds and make decisions that alter the trajectory of our world.

Some of us have a greater capacity to perceive and act on choices than others. The killer with a brain tumor, the schizophrenic, the sociopath, the obsessive-compulsive do not and cannot make decisions--or change their minds--in the way that I do. When I weigh the pros and cons of writing about Harris, my chain of reasoning is determined by the substance of my thoughts, not their physical instantiation.

Consider: When I watch the video of Sam Harris talking at Caltech, is it the electrons streaming through my MacBook, the photons impinging on my eye, the sound waves entering my ear that make me want to respond to Harris? Of course not. It's the meaning of the video that stirs me, not its physical embodiment. I could have watched a DVD of Harris's talk, or read a transcript, or listened to someone summarize his lecture over the telephone. And it's possible that Harris's words, instead of provoking me to write a critical response, could have changed my mind about free will, so that I decided to write a column defending his point of view. Of course, if I thought about it for a moment, I'd realize that the fact that Harris had changed my mind and hence my actions was evidence of my free will.”

The fourth is simply to draw attention to the fact that determinists are far too demanding. Horgan partly uses this strategy in the argument quoted above when he points out Harris’ obsession with “prior causes”. Determinists like Harris say that “prior causes” are all we need to refute free will. But, if you think about it, this creates a kind of absurdity. It means that anyone who denies the existence of a Cartesian ego – which makes no sense anyway – is led to believe that a human is no freer than a toad or an amoeba. In effect, therefore, if you accept the formula prior cause = no freedom, then free-will isn’t even a question. This seems obviously unacceptable: if free-will is not even a possibility on a given formula, then it’s clearly the wrong formula. Although this objection might seem like a mere bromide, it is actually an important semantic point. After all, it clearly makes sense to say that a human is more free than a chimpanzee, or that a highly intelligent, highly rational person is more free than some paranoid schizophrenic. Indeed, this brings us to one of Dan Dennett's main arguments: Dennett claims that, though we should (gleefully) abandon the intuitive or religious conception of free will, we can legitimately adopt the engineer's concept of "freedom" instead -- the view of freedom as a kind of continuum, varying in terms of degrees of 'movement' and extent of complexity. Crucially, this way of thinking allows us to say basically what we want to say: that a rock has no degrees of freedom, an ant has slightly more, a frog has more than an ant, a cat has more than a frog, a chimp has more than a cat, a mentally ill human has more than a chimp, and a mentally healthy, temperate, rational human has more than a mentally ill human. And once you accept this way of talking as legitimate (and it seems hard to reject), the shoe suddenly flips to the other foot: instead of being on the defensive, compatibilists can now accuse the incompatibilists of a kind of absurdity. How is it reasonable to deny the property of free will to the most intelligent and most complex organism in the known universe? How is it reasonable to deny free will to the animal that is the best candidate for it?

   I’m not really sure that one way of framing the debate is better than the other, although I am sympathetic to both sides. My favourite perspective on free will is that of Noam Chomsky, who frames the problem in a third way – one that commits him to neither side while also not committing him to mysticism.

Before I explain what this brilliant third perspective is, I should point out that I don’t agree with all of Chomsky’s comments about free will. For example, I know that he often makes a quip about free will that I believe to be facile: the classic meme that people who write “learned tomes” denying the existence of free will are refuting their arguments by the very act of writing a book (why would they bother making the effort if they really believed their actions were inevitable?). I know Chomsky makes this quip in jest (that’s why it’s called a “quip”), but even so, I think the quip itself is the result of a common misconception about free-will: namely, the Parfit-identified confusion of “determinism” and “fatalism”. It is not a primitive mistake to think that decisions exist in an important sense (even if you deny that they exist from the eye of the universe). It is undoubtedly true to say that people put effort into certain activities. Our language isn’t totally misleading us.

Now onto Chomsky’s perspective.

To put it briefly, Chomsky is sceptical that we even have the right categories to answer whether we have free-will or not – or perhaps even to phrase the question in the right way. He suggests that the main reason why our intuitions of free-will seem so out of whack with our best science is that we only have two scientific concepts to bring to bear on the problem – randomness and determinacy – and both of them seem utterly inappropriate. As he remarks, an intelligent Martian might be “looking at us and thinking how stupid we are – why do we keep to determinacy and randomness when there’s obviously that thing out there (that I can’t point to ‘cause I’m a human)?”

Even though Chomsky doesn’t suggest this, I can’t help thinking that what we should do to overcome this conundrum is invent some new words ourselves. They probably wouldn’t catch on (since they presumably would have been invented before if the concepts they express were congenial to our way of thinking), but it would be an interesting thing to do nonetheless. In fact, I've even made a start myself:

Perhaps we can say that brains have the property of deterministic spontaneity (only an apparent oxymoron), bio-spontaneity or neuro-spontaneity. Perhaps we can argue that bio-freedom or weak-freedom is an emergent property of neural complexity (as people say about consciousness). Perhaps we can say that humans have, instead of free-will, deterministic freedom (another apparent oxymoron), weak-freedom, bio-freedom or neuro-freedom. Perhaps we don’t even need compound words, but can just invest an entirely new word: we can say that brains have the property of spontaneation or that humans have libertaneity. Perhaps we can use the Old English word for freedom, freodom.

If you accept this new usage, it immediately solves the philosophical problem of free-will. The answer to the question, “Do humans have free-will?” goes from “It depends on how you frame it” to “That’s the wrong language; we have libertaneity” or “That’s the wrong language; we have freodom”. The answer to the question, “How does a physical brain, subject to natural laws, give us this “libertaneity” or “freodom”?” is “The brain is sufficiently complex for the emergence of the property of “spontaneation”.

Isn’t that wonderful?

[This was given a fairly significant edit on 5 July 2016]

A Strange Essay called "Why nobody really has a "Theory of Reality""

Why nobody really has a “Theory of Reality”

I used to think the metaphysical doctrine called “Materialism” (/“Metaphysical Naturalism”), just meant a commitment to the belief that there are no magical creatures in the cosmos and nothing spookier than quantum entanglement. I thought the doctrine was undeniable for anyone who didn’t believe in an immanent God or wasn’t a total mystic of some other kind. But I was wrong. During the metaphysics component of my first philosophy unit at uni, I started to get the impression that this is not quite the way most scientists and philosophers conceive of the doctrine. I now know that a great many scientists and philosophers assume a more specific, positively-framed definition of the metaphysical doctrine which has more significant implications for philosophical questions.

Instead of my negative definition, materialism seems usually to mean that all of reality is ultimately reducible to subatomic particles, atomic particles, gravitational waves, spacetime and all the other ‘material’ things that physicists have discovered. Materialists say that the Standard Model of Particle Physics is “a theory of almost everything” and that Einstein uncovered the major secrets of reality. This idea of reduction is key. According to materialists, not only do higher-level things ‘supervene on’ lower-level things right up until the mind and the brain; they also reduce to them. In the case of the mind and brain, this means that mental phenomena can be identified with (or, to some radical ‘physicalists’, really are) brain states.[1] And this reductionism means that materialists don’t even have to include mental phenomena, subjectivity and qualia in reality.

Similarly, because quarks and electrons and molecules of sulfuric acid have no purpose, materialists believe it is a mistake to talk about the purpose of reality; the only truths are descriptive truths. This means that the only ‘why’ questions that can be answered are the concealed ‘how’ questions of evolution (why do fish have fins? why do animals kill each other? why are men attracted to curves on a woman?) or concealed ‘how’ questions of a more general kind (why is there life on our planet? why do objects fall down to the ground when we drop them? why are plants green? why did the French Revolution happen?). The natural conclusion of this line of reasoning seems to be that humans have no purpose either (facts about reality can give us no guide as to values). There are thus no ‘ought’ truths – no ‘normative’ truths, as they’re known. This means that there’s nothing you ought to do, objectively speaking, and there’s no specific way you’re meant to experience things. This, in turn, means that nothing is objectively good, bad, admirable, evil, honourable, dishonourable, beautiful, ugly, magnificent, contemptible, tasty, unappetising, delicious, disgusting, fun or boring. All things, and all human actions, just are.

I realise that a number of people who would happily self-identify as materialists are also moral realists, but if they have agreed with my way of framing things until I mentioned normative truths, they must be stupid: I don’t see how you can deny any purpose in nature on the one hand and then say some states of affairs are objectively better than others. You cannot really mean objectively; you must mean intersubjectively. Or maybe that’s not quite the whole story. I have an argument about morality that is unique, as far as I am aware, and which allows materialists to say certain normative truths are objective – or at least “trans-intersubjective” (“inter-intersubjective”) – even if they deny that reality itself can have purpose. I wrote a very long essay a few months ago in which I formulated this argument. Here it is:

Possibly the Most Original Thing I have ever written

Regrettably, the past few days have seen me thinking about morality again. This essay is the output of that cerebration. I hope it is my final word on morality, although I realise that is unlikely since I also hoped that last time.

Many months ago, I discovered that Sam Harris claims in his 2010 book, The Moral Landscape, to have bridged Hume’s famous “is-ought” gap. When I learned of this absurdity in the course of reading a critical view, I was, naturally, very amused. It was just like when I heard that Tony Abbott had knighted Prince Philip; my initial thought in both cases was, ‘if this guy is not doing self-parody, then I have no idea what’s going on’. Of course, I did eventually get over the Harris thing, but over the last few days it has managed to insinuate itself back into my thoughts. Bizarrely, this time it doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous. I guess I’ve been wondering if it’s so stupid after all. In particular, I’ve been trying to think my way through some of the issues that lie at the intersection of David Hume and Sam How-to-be-spiritual-without-religion-the-self-is-an-illusion-Islam-is-a-motherlode-of-bad-ideas Harris.

The question I really want to probe in this essay is why so many intellectuals are so confused about whether morality is “real” or not. This probation (as it were) will take us many places, and I have thus made the decision to split the essay up into three parts. The first will be a brief meta-ethical argument to the effect that the “ontological status” of morality is fuzzier than most moral philosophers allow. In the second, I will propose an entirely new epistemological category to try to accommodate this fuzziness. Finally, in the third, I will attempt to justify my invention of an entirely new epistemological category by laying out a model of truth in which it could reside. So, in other words, it’s a ludicrously ambitious screed that I’m writing here. It would be incredible if it is a useful contribution to any scholarship, although it is probably the most original thing I’ve ever written.

Part I: How Real is Morality?

Despite how improbable this seems, there are a fair number of atheist materialist academics who think that morality is unambiguously “real”. It’s not just Sam Harris. Admittedly, most of these opt for “real” in a sense that lies somewhere between “more than just an invention” and “something implemented in the fabric of the universe”, but even so, it seems a bit strange for atheist materialists to believe such a thing. It’s true that no-one except evangelicals think that “good” and “bad” literally are properties expressed by certain forms of matter. Instead, they all agree that “good” and “bad” are concepts that exist within human minds. Nevertheless, secular moral realists like Derek Parfit and Thomas Nagel argue that the proposition “Suffering is bad” is as self-evidently and transcendentally true as 1 + 1 = 2. So, in other words, people of that ilk think that fundamental moral truths are kind of like Platonic truths. More specifically, Parfit calls them irreducible normative truths with “no ontological status”. To me (and all of Parfit’s critics), that seems like a weird fucking kind of truth. Then again, it is hard to see what other kind of truth moral truths could be, if they are indeed truths (but what does “truth” mean anyway?).

In any case, there are surely other ways for a secularist to try to convince you that there might be objectively right ways of acting. For example, you could point to the fact that all highly intelligent organisms in the universe (if there are any) will almost certainly have something similar to this thing we call “morality”, since the kind of strong morality we have is surely the prerequisite for large-scale, extrafilial co-operation and trade. People say that the theory of evolution itself is an objective truth about the entire universe, so why not say the same thing about one of the cognitive systems evolution is able to create in the organisms it shapes? If you say this, you could then assert that the “Golden Rule” is almost certainly a cosmic moral rule for highly intelligent creatures, which lends it much more weight and gravitas. Obviously, this doesn’t actually show that there are any objective normative truths or objective values, or that wellbeing is objectively desirable, contra Sam Harris. But the kind of argument that points to morality’s objective “necessity” would be your best bet of arguing that right and wrong are not at all inventions, but are strange kinds of universal properties that only emerge when complex life emerges.

Before anyone gets too carried away with that, though, let’s be clear that David Hume was right about the whole “is-ought” thing. It really is true that you can’t logically derive an “ought” from an “is”. Sam Harris claims that it’s a misleading dichotomy or something, but he is wrong. I’d like to explain why, using a version of the Humean notion revised and refined by the scientific progress we’ve made in the intervening centuries:

Facts, in the sense of data or “propositions about the way the world is”, cannot ever be used to derive conclusions about which values are correct i.e. which things we ought to do, or how the world ought to be.

Why must this be the case? Well, most broadly, it is because the matter or substance of the universe does not possess or express moral properties, moral propositions, intentions, emotions or desires. No matter how long we spend investigating the universe – no matter how much progress we make in quantum physics – this truth will remain the same. The universe will never give us any clues for how we should live.

Typically, people try to object to this by adducing examples, even though all examples fail. I’ll give you a couple of examples myself, to prove that all examples do indeed fail.

Despite what you might intuit, the fact that women and men have, on average, the same general intelligence is not in itself sufficient to show us that women and men should be treated equally. What tells us that men and women should be treated equally is the value of human equality combined with this fact. And no fact about the universe can be adduced to prove that the value of equality is actually objectively valuable.

Likewise, the fact that rape and murder cause harm and suffering to a human being does not tell you that harm and suffering are objectively “bad”. They’re bad for us, sure, but the universe does not have a view.

Ok, fine, you’re thinking, but Sam Harris must have found a flaw in this somewhere, otherwise he wouldn’t have written this book. So am I just being too rigid in my thinking? Perhaps the fact that consciousness arises out of matter and that consciousness is the source of normative “properties”^[2] makes it true to say that the “ought” emerges naturally out of the hard stuff of the world. You might even say that the nerves, sensory receptors and limbic system are the bridge across the gap! And from this, you might claim, as Sam Harris does, that “well-being” is an objective good for all creatures, and therefore an objective good simpliciter. Woah man. Did Harris seriously just dissolve hundreds of years of moral philosophy?

Well, let’s defer judgement on that question for the moment, and instead zero in on something more concrete: the substrate of morality and cognition themselves. What is actually the relevant neurological difference between intentions, desires and emotions, on the one hand, and intuitions, beliefs and knowledge on the other? What is actually the neurological difference between motivators and propositions? Are they fundamentally separate?

The standard doctrine in the philosophy of mind says that intentions, desires and emotions use intuitions, beliefs and knowledge as a basis for action. This was basically Hume’s view. When he said “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions”, he wasn’t so much talking about a Kahnemanian “affect heuristic” so much as the nature of practical human behaviour. He was observing that nothing we do can ever be motivated, impelled or compelled by reason alone – only by the things that actually motivate, impel or compel, which he called the “passions”. In other words, we can only use reason once we have a direction, as a means to an end. Clearly, this dictum is in some way related to the is-ought gap, because saying reason doesn’t impel is similar to saying you can’t derive behaviour from reason.

Importantly, not even Sam Harris can deny that this dictum is true. If nothing else, our computers attest to it: while they know millions of data and are able to compute very logically, they have no desires, emotions, intentions or values. Pure reason – just deriving conclusions from premises – is indeed separate from emotion. In fact, this is fucking obvious.

It is also true that, in the human mind, the centres of motivation are separate from the centres of cognition. Most of our abstract reasoning gets done in certain specific areas of the frontal lobes, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, whereas the things that make us do things originate in various parts of the limbic system and the hypothalamus. Nevertheless, it is true that these areas interact with each other. After all, just about everything we believe is suffused with emotion, and it’s a live issue in the philosophy of mind whether the distinction between “belief” and “desire” is even a coherent one. To pay lipservice to this problem, consider this basic example: when someone notices it’s raining outside, he doesn’t just dispassionately think “It’s raining”; instead, the belief that he has acquired is accompanied by a flood of emotional reactions.

None of this invalidates the logical truth of the is-ought gap, of course. It’s impossible to deny that it can never be deductively valid to derive an “ought statement” from an “is statement”. But if this doesn’t invalidate the logical truth of the is-ought gap, then what was the point of that discursion? What can we conclude from it? Where has this led us? Can morality still be objective? Could Sam Harris still somehow be right?

Ok, here’s my hunch: there isn’t a single extant meta-ethical category that captures the reality of morality, because our categories struggle to even make sense of morality. When we compile what we have established about normative truth, we can see how ambiguous the conclusions are.

Yes, morality is a deep universal phenomenon that arises as the natural consequence of the evolution of organisms in certain environments where co-operation is beneficial. Yes, this means that it is not just an “invention” but a natural product of complex life and certainly a prerequisite of civilisation.

Yes, everyone’s lives are equally important in the eye of the universe.

No, there is no-one judging you from above when you harm someone.

No, it cannot ever be logically proved that selfishness or altruism are objectively right ways of acting, since the universe is surely indifferent to both.

You see what is happening here? There is no one answer. Morality isn’t obvious. It’s not obviously objective or intersubjective. It’s somewhere in between. We have no category for it.

Part II: Filling the Gap

Ever since March of this year, I have been tentatively thinking an absurdly grandiose thing. This thing is that we are literally missing an epistemological category. I now really believe there is some kind of gap between intersubjective and objective, and that this confuses our attempts to discuss several deep, philosophical concerns. I believe that our vocabulary is specifically deficient in this way when we try to talk about forms of non-empirical knowledge that are wholly or partly normative, like morality, aesthetics, politics and historiography. I do not think that our mind is fundamentally ill-equipped to grasp this hazy intermediary category. Indeed, I could not think this, because I seem to be able to grasp it. Instead, what I do believe is that the lack of this category has thwarted our endeavours to properly conceptualise a range of fields that most of us believe to have some kind of “transcendental” truth that is not objective in the way that the canonical truths of science are.

“Trans-intersubjective” or “quasi-objective” are the two terms I have decided on to denote this new category. I think the first is more precise, although it is clearly much more clunky than the second, and arguably less dramatic. Obviously, the second of these is not a true neologism, since it has been coined before, by various other people, but it has never been defined in the way I will define it in this treatise. Here is my attempt to explain the category that these words will refer to.

A trans-intersubjective or quasi-objective truth[3] is a truth that lies between the intersubjective and the objective. It is a truth that cannot be discerned by any empirical study or investigation, since it is not possessed or expressed by the fabric of the universe. At the same time, it is not at all a mystical or Platonic truth, and it does not quite have the same status as an authentic objective truth. The best way to illustrate what kind of truth it is is with reference to the authentic objective truth that is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Richard Dawkins has claimed that, if life has evolved anywhere else in our universe, that life will also be subject to the laws of evolution by natural selection. In this way, the Theory of Evolution, though it pertains exclusively to the interaction of living things, is equally as “objective” as any of the physical theories that sit on more fundamental levels of analysis. What I’m interested in is one of the little-discussed implications of the view expressed by Dawkins: namely, that all life in the universe must have universalities in behaviour and thought. The sub-implication of this is that there must be universalities in the behaviour and thought of intelligent organisms in our universe: organisms that have reached civilisation.

One necessary universal for any civilised species is the possession of the highly complex, belief-desire-fused motivators we call “values”. Values are surely the only kind of mechanism possible to continuously motivate the behaviour of an organism as intelligent as us. A necessary universal for any organism that reaches civilisation must also be widespread co-operation, which is in turn necessarily underpinned by a series of moral emotions like our own. Emotions resembling sympathy, compassion, approbation, admiration, honour, justice, guilt, shame, anger, indignation, disapprobation and vengefulness are thus likely to be common across all civilised species. A legal system and government would also be universals for a civilised species.

Most major human activities, both intellectual and pleasurable, would also likely be common to all civilised species. A sense of beauty is yet another evolutionary necessity for any successful, intelligent organism, since it is the mechanism that motivates one to seek out fertile and congenial terrain. Indeed, beauty is surely another universal value. This means that art would likely be a capstone of any civilisation. In particular, music, pictorial art and various kinds of story-telling are likely to be common across all civilised species (although it’s conceivable that many species might have reached civilisation with different senses and would hence have different modes of expression). More generally, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, psychology, history, sociology, economics, politics are likely universal to all advanced civilisations, even if the subject matter of all of these disciplines might be split up in different ways (i.e. other civilisations might not see the difference between a lot of philosophy and psychology, and might not have a division between history and sociology, or economics and politics).

But why is it so important that there are these necessary constraints on the variability of civilised species in our universe? If you’ll forgive the grandiosity, I believe the recognition of this fact leads one to the conclusion that philosophers have been thinking the wrong way about morality, aesthetics, politics and history since time immemorial. In essence, the reason is simple: recognising the necessary universalities shows that there are cosmic goods, that there will be some cosmic standards of beauty, that some ways of running a society are always better than others, and that some ways of understanding the past are always superior to others. It is these literally universal epistemic phenomena that I have dubbed trans-intersubjective truths. They are truths that are intersubjective across all intelligent creatures (hence “trans-intersubjective”), but not quite objective like true physical theories, because they don’t exist without civilised species existing.

So, to be concrete, what are some examples of these truths?

• The ethical proposition that “Wellbeing is good” is a trans-intersubjective truth.
• The ethical proposition that “Suffering is bad” is a trans-intersubjective truth.
• The ethical proposition that “Altruism is good” is a trans-intersubjective truth.
• The aesthetic sentiment that “Fire is a mesmerising sight” is probably a trans-intersubjective truth.
• The aesthetic sentiment that “Landscape with bodies of water in them are beautiful” is probably a trans-intersubjective truth.
• The aesthetic claim that “Realism, regularity and emotional power are attractive in art” is a trans-intersubjective truth.
• The aesthetic claim that “A coherent narrative is more attractive in art” is a trans-intersubjective truth.
• The statement that “The immensity of the universe is truly mind-boggling” is a trans-intersubjective truth.
• The statement that “Quantum physics is almost impossible to get your hand around” is a trans-intersubjective truth.
• The historiographical claim that “The best historical methodology for complex societies should focus primarily on economic forces” may well be a trans-intersubjective truth.

The phrasing of some of my examples conveyed that I am not sure whether certain important aspects of our thinking and perception of the universe would be necessarily universal to all civilised species. Nevertheless, the examples where my phrasing was categorical are indeed examples of categorical trans-intersubjective truths. As I explained earlier, a prerequisite for civilisation is widespread co-operation and an elaborate legal system, so it’s certain that all civilised species would share our atomic moral convictions about “goods” and “bads”. Consequently, all species that can articulate moral truths would articulate roughly the same moral truths as us – they would almost certainly accept the “Golden Rule”. Due to common evolutionary forces, it’s likely that we would also have some aesthetic views in common. Similarly, since there are no conceivable natural mechanisms that could cause a species to evolve intelligence and insight far above our own, bafflement at the complexity of the universe would have to be a universal attitude for civilised species. Finally, there would undoubtedly be a whole series of common threads in the views of all civilised species on different political systems and ways of understanding society.

It’s true that the phrase “civilised species” is very vague and that I have been exploiting this aspect of it. Nevertheless, the fact remains that if any civilisation is going to come close to our level of knowledge, then it will necessarily possess certain features, and its scholars will necessarily reach certain conclusions about morality, aesthetics, politics, history and more.

Of course, if there are civilisations out there in our universe that have reached Kurzweil’s “technological singularity” (and there probably are not, since we should have seen evidence of them by now), then it may be that they have transcended certain of their primal preferences and cognitive patterns. Thus, it could be the case that super-advanced civilisations have their own set of trans-intersubjective truths. But this obviously doesn’t impugn the existence of trans-intersubjective truths; it just adds complexity.

Nevertheless, you might still be wondering, is there any point to this new category? Does it change the way we understand anything? What’s its use? Answering these questions will not be easy for me. Indeed, I regret to say that my attempt will involve giving a response to another question, one of the oldest and most tired questions in philosophy:

What is truth?

Part III: So what is Truth?

I believe the best way of thinking about truth is in terms of levels. I think it is best to say that there are strata of truth, each of which has a slightly different status. Though I assume many philosophers before me have reached this view, I know it is not uncontroversial. Apart from anything else, it probably clashes with most laypeople’s view of truth. I think the average Jane believes that when she says something is true it is true simpliciter – true pure and simple, without qualification or doubt. I do think there is such a thing as truth simpliciter myself, and hereafter when I want to discuss it, I will write “Truth”.  But although I do think there is such a thing as Truth, I also know that it’s hopelessly naïve for Jane to believe that she actually knows lots of Truths – or at least lots of non-trivial Truths. Humanity, collectively, knows few big Truths. Later in this essay, I shall discuss those few big Truths we do know.
     Before we dive into my 'model' of truth, it is important for me to explain how I actually conceive of the question "What is truth?", and how this is reflected in the model (the explanation will also serve as an explication of what I actually mean by "model").
     In recognition of the fact that average people know few big Truths, and yet think they're speaking the absolute truth in their daily experience (and the fact that I think I am writing the absolute truth in these straightforward sentences), my 'model' of Truth will actually end up being utterly paradoxical. Even though I defined Truth in the first paragraph as 'truth simpliciter' (absolute truth), the stratifying-tendency of my model will extend even to this seemingly indivisible top rank. That is to say, I will be stratifying even Truth into two categories, each of different status: commonsense Truths and scientific/deep-reality Truths. It might seem patently absurd for a model of Truth to be paradoxical, but I don't think it is: I think it would be patently absurd for a model of Truth to deny that almost all of the things we think are True are True, and in order for a model of Truth to be consistent, that is exactly what it would have to do. In fact, it wouldn't just be absurd for a model of truth to be consistent; it would be paradoxical in its own way. Creating such a model would be to use the truth in a way that totally divorces the word from its actual usage, which would involve straying into mysticism. Why mysticism? Simply because, when you come down to it, truth is just a word. It may be True that, when we ask, "What is truth?", we mean, "What is the deep metaphysical core or reality of truth?" not "What is the definition?" or "What are the connotations?" or "How is it used?" But to even think that there is a decisive division between these two types of questions is to make a basic philosophical error (the kind that Wittgenstein focusses on in PI). After all, answering the question, "What is the deep metaphysical reality of truth?" is the same as defining the word, just in a more prescriptive way than the descriptive definition of a dictionary. When you lay out your thesis of truth, or the conditions required for something to be true, or your view on why science has uncovered the real truths and religion offers no truths, you're basically saying, "This is how one ought to think of the word, and you should probably use the word in this way yourself".
     Now, I realise what I'm saying here sounds an awful lot like total relativism (or perhaps deflationism). But it is actually something far subtler. I am not a relativist: I think there are clear and straightforward reasons why scientific and deep-reality Truths are the Truths which deserve the highest status (and I shall outline these reasons later). But I simultaneously think that it fundamentally doesn't make any sense to present any kind of 'view' of truth that ignores what the word actually means 99% of the time for 99% of people. More contentiously, I think that, because the rich, complicated and versatile human concept "truth" (or human word, "truth") is just a rich, complicated and versatile human concept, that it is actually an epistemic or metaphysical mistake (not just semantic oversight) to say, "This version of truth is really how we ought to conceive of the word, because it meets the most rigorous conditions of truthhood". We can all agree that scientific Truth does meet the most rigorous conditions of truthhood, but I don't think that means that, when we answer the question "What is truth?", we should say, "Ask the physicists". Instead, I think we should answer the question "What is truth?" by laying out a way of thinking about the word (a model) that is both descriptive and prescriptive. In particular, I think the best way of answering the question is to present a model that includes the following features: two levels of truth that just reflect how we use the word (and not necessarily anything about deep-reality) called "subjective truths" and "intersubjective truths"; two levels of truth or Truth that reflect both usage and reality in some fashion, called "commonsense Truths" and "trans-intersubjective truths", and one level of Truth that reflects only deep-reality, called "scientific or deep-reality Truths". As you shall see, this is what I have done. 

As far as I know, everyone would agree that “objective truth” means something like “observer- or agent-independent truth”. That’s certainly what its etymology would suggest. Obviously, objective truth is a kind of truth set against the other axiomatic category, “subjective truth”, as well as the less clear-cut and arguably less important third category, “intersubjective truth”. Unlike some philosophers, I think it is to best to think of objective truth as separate from Truth. This is not to say that Truth isn’t objective truth; instead, it is to say that the relationship of objective truth to Truth is a little like the relationship between rectangles and squares. To wit, all Truths are objective truths but not all objective truths are Truths.

Though this may seem baffling, I’m anxious to clarify that it’s really not mystical. What I mean by that square-rectangle analogy is that there are some truths that our best scientists agree on – i.e. the scientific “axioms” or “paradigms” – but which are nevertheless not Truths. There are plenty of known examples of these kinds of truths. Almost all really big truths in physics, for example, are agreed by physicists not to quite have the status of Truths. Newton’s mechanics are basically only True on Earth; Einstein’s Relativity is agreed by most theoretical physicists not to be quite a Truth (though it has worked so brilliantly hitherto, Nima Arkani-Hamed assures me that space-time is “doomed”); and the Standard Model of Particle Physics is possibly unfinished, and is thus not a Truth either. At this point, you may be questioning this conception of Truth. If not even the greatest insights of physics are True on this conception, then surely it is the wrong way of understanding Truth. After all, physics is at the forefront of human knowledge, and our understanding of the workings of our universe has to be our greatest achievement as a species. Most importantly, if the big truths of physics aren’t Truths, then surely there can’t be any Truths.

But no. It is True that physics is the scientific field in which we’ve made the most progress, and the field in which the greatest geniuses have had their most brilliant ideas. Yet is also True that physics is a very difficult scientific field, since it is literally about trying to understand the mystery of creation. It turns out that the mystery of creation is quite complicated for us to understand (although arguably easier to understand than history, economics or sociology, because you can idealise and abstract away from the mess of data). And the reason why the unTruth of the best theories of physics does not mean that there are no Truths is that finding different kinds of Truths (which can be given the same name) when investigating reality on certain other levels of analysis is not so hard. I believe, for example, that I have been articulating numerous Truths throughout this essay. Almost every time I have phrased something categorically, I have done this because I believe it to be a Truth. Assuming we’re not in a dream or I’m not just a brain in a vat, we can indeed assert that we know many Truths. That sentence was a Truth, and this sentence is a Truth also. There are certainly infinite atomic Truths. For example, I am sitting on a chair, Lionel Messi plays for Barcelona, and a baby called William Shakespeare was born on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. (Though these are clearly mere common-sense propositions -- truths of an entirely different sort from those investigated in physics, which clearly have much more 'status' -- I already mentioned that my model counts them as Truths, and I shall later explain why.) Less trivially, there are plenty of Truths that have been discovered in science – it’s just they tend to be slightly less complicated than the monumental, mathematical Truths needed to underlie the Theory of Everything.

Before we go on, though, I guess I have to briefly entertain the Problem of Induction, just to tick that scepticism box off the list. If you don’t know what the problem of induction is, it’s best summed up by the only good epistemological joke in existence:

“What’s the problem with induction? It’s worked well in the past.”

Well, actually, that joke is a bit oblique as an explanation of the problem, because it’s in fact an exemplification of the problem. Then again, you probably would have figured that out if you’re not braindead. So, anyway, the problem with induction is that there seems to be no deductive reason to assume that what has worked in the past will work in the future. No matter how many times you’ve done something and got a certain outcome, you can never be absolutely sure that that outcome will appear again. Think of flipping a coin. Say you were idly flipping a coin and you got 10 heads in a row. You would probably be amazed by this, and be tempted to conclude that the coin must be rigged. But for all you actually know, the coin could be perfectly normal. It’s perfectly possible that it is actually biased towards tails. Of course, statistics does tell us that the more times you flip a true coin the closer your tally will reach 50/50. Indeed, this phenomenon extends to a fundamental law of statistics, known as “regression to the mean”. This is the law that states that the more times you test anything variable, the closer your results will get to the true mean. It’s one of the reasons why sample size and repeated measurements are so crucial in science.

Yet the bleak Truth is that statistical laws don’t actually eliminate the problem of induction because we only know the statistical laws from induction! There is no way out of this one. It is Truly an inescapable bind. Strictly speaking, it means that no inductive truth is apodictic, and least of all the laws of statistics themselves, since statistical laws must necessarily be harder to prove than the specific phenomena that undergird them.

Of course, it’s important to note that if you object to induction on the grounds that it can never prove itself, there’s no good reason not to do it for deduction as well. Deduction, it turns out, is ultimately unjustifiable too! It may be True that Bertrand Russell formulated a proof for 1+1=2 using pure logic, but he sure as hell couldn’t justify logic itself. Instead, there were just the Three Laws of Thought:

(1) The law of identity: 'Whatever is, is.'

(2) The law of contradiction: 'Nothing can both be and not be.'

(3) The law of excluded middle: 'Everything must either be or not be.’

Yes these seem fucking obvious, but that’s all you can say… Then again, what else do you expect? Logic tells us that logic has to end somewhere. At some point, you’re going to reach the impenetrable bedrock on which everything rests. And, in fact, this is precisely why scepticism begets its own downfall. To deny the Truth of deduction is to trap yourself in a paradox. As sneering philosophers like to say, “The statement “It is impossible to know anything” is itself an assertion of knowledge”. You could even make the case that Descartes shouldn’t have started rebuilding knowledge on the proclamation, “I think therefore I am”; he should have started rebuilding knowledge on the statement, "If I doubt too much it just gets paradoxical so I might as well stop”.

And yes it may be true that philosophers talk more seriously about the problem of induction than they do about the problem of deduction, but they only do this because it’s not quite so paradoxical to argue about the problem of induction. The fact is that the problem of induction is actually much the same as the problem of deduction in the sense that it’s insoluble in philosophy but doesn’t exist outside of it. Both induction and deduction in the end just demand acceptance. The simple Truth is that they are the foundations of Truth, and you can’t talk about truth at all unless you accept this as True.

So, to return to what I was doing before that digression, I’ll now give you a few examples of some unquestionable scientific Truths – the only big Truths we know. You’ll probably recognise all of them. The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old, and is expanding. Our solar system resides on the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, just one of the billions of galaxies in the universe. Like all other organisms on earth, we evolved originally from some complex replicating molecules that somehow formed in a roiling chemical soup more than 3 billion years ago. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution explains the existence of our species, along with every other organism on the planet. There’s an “electromagnetic spectrum” that encompasses every form of radiation in the universe, including our visible light spectrum, which is not particularly special. E = mc². Everything in the universe eventually reduces to a series of basic “elements”. Hydrogen is the most basic element of all. One hydrogen atom bonds with two oxygen atoms to make water. Inside every atom are three types of subatomic particle, protons, neutrons and electrons. The protons and neutrons have some mass and make up the nucleus of the atom. The electrons “whizz” around the outside… You get the picture.

Although there are clearly plenty of scientific Truths, it may be True that some of our scientific Truths are forever going to be approximate Truths, no matter how long we spend on them. As I wrote about electrons “whizzing”, for example, I was reminded that we cannot but apply everyday analogies to the most abstract and alien scientific concepts, even though such analogies must never quite capture the nature of what we’re talking about. Even relatively simple scientific ideas can be bewildering to us. As Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have shown us, we are basically incapable of thinking rationally about arguments and stats, for example, unless we are trained in the field and concentrating very hard (or using “System 2”, in Kahneman’s jargon). In general, I think all scientists would agree that we will probably never be able to conceptualise our Truths as God would conceptualise them. Indeed, it’s disingenuous to say that quantum physics is the only area of contemporary science that baffles our best scientists. Since all of physics and chemistry operates on the level of the very small, where all is strange and complex to even the most brilliant minds, it is True to say that our understanding of physics and chemistry will forever be imprisoned by an inadequate conceptual inventory, and thus an inapposite language, too. It doesn’t matter how smart you are – everyone on this planet learns science by means of an infelicitous set of metaphors transplanted from the simple, big world we inhabit. Indeed, we basically conceptualise everything in terms of basic analogies involving agents and causation. Richard Dawkins spends an entire book personifying genes, for Christ’s sake! One of the most important Truths science has taught us is that our Umwelt colours everything.

But it’s not all so depressing; there is one saving grace. Providentially, the language of mathematics seems to be God’s language, and somehow we have access to it. All of our best scientific Truths do make mathematical sense, even if nobody ever feels wholly confident explaining them in English. In mathematics, it seems, True abstraction resides.

Before I move onto subjective truth, I want to briefly justify why I think common-sense truths are actually Truths also. A few paragraphs, I mentioned three trivial Truths, which began with “I am sitting on a chair”. Naïve as it may appear, I am not embarrassed to say that I really do think the following things are True:

I am sitting on a chair in front of a computer, and the computer is resting on a small stack of books on a white desk; the desk is covered in various odds and ends and is quite messy; the room in which the desk stands is full of various other stuff and is also quite messy; the room is positioned on one end of my brown, brick house; this brown, brick house is located in the suburb of Wahroonga, which is in the north of Sydney; Sydney is on the south-east coast of Australia. I myself am called Tom Aitken; I have blue eyes, blonde hair, I am tall, I attend Sydney University, and I am 18 years old, born on 19 February 1997.

Now, it is True that this view of the world is just one of many views. Clearly, this view of the world is radically different from a snail’s, a fly’s, a lizard’s, a snake’s or a mantis shrimp’s. To repeat a pretentious word I used before, this perspective on the matter around me and how it all fits together is merely the Umwelt of Homo sapiens. Nevertheless, that fact doesn’t make any one of my assertions unTrue. They are all True, in fact, because we know real things by words like “sitting”, “chairs”, “computers”, “stacks”, “books”, “white desks” (and so on). Though a snail doesn’t see these things, it doesn’t mean they’re not really True. And though “computers”, “messiness”^[4] and “suburbs” are not fundamental constituents of reality, they are still real things, now that we have created them. In much the same way, there are surely many Truths of the snail world that we don’t understand.

But if commonsense facts are just human ways of seeing the world, how can I call them Truths, given my claim that all Truths have to be objective truths? Well, the answer’s a little complicated. First of all, these Truths are still objective, in the sense that all humans agree on them (which is probably better described as “strongly intersubjective”). That said, they are clearly not objective in the sense that they are about the world as it is independent of one species’ perspective. The fundamental constituents of reality cannot be features of reality that are reliant on one species’ way of compartmentalising and categorising reality using a perceptual system that only exploits a tiny sliver of the radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum and an idiosyncratic ape brain. It is for this reason that “computers, “messiness” and “suburbs” cannot be regarded as fundamental constituents of reality (and, despite our intuitions, it is not true that a word like "computer" really picks out a specific type of object in the world; it's more a concept in our minds). What they are is constituents of our own parochial reality. On the flipside, our understanding of physics, chemistry and the Theory of Evolution undeniably contain much deeper Truths about reality than commonsense assertions, and really do seem to show us the fundamental constituents of reality – i.e. aspects of reality that other intelligent species could also discover. In a similar way, my arguments in this essay clearly contain much deeper Truths about reality than "I am sitting on a chair" (and other species could conceivably make similar arguments). So clearly not all Truths are the same. In fact, here we encounter our first deliberate stratification. I hereby declare that there are two types of Truths: commonsense Truths and scientific/deep-reality Truths. The second category has considerably more status, obviously, but the former allows me to say that I Truly am typing on a computer right now, that the time Truly is 10:23 AM on the 30^th of October 2015, and that Austria-Hungary Truly did declare war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. I think this is what everybody wants from a model of truth, even if it means that everyday reality gets a capital-T and the Standard Model of particle physics doesn’t.

Of course, sometimes commonsense and scientific Truths interact – at least on the way I have been using commonsense. In zoology, for example, it’s not like scientists reduce everything to genes and molecules and refuse to talk about animals walking, running, making noises, or having limbs and faces (some alien species might have very similar concepts to these, but it seems ludicrous to think that any species would split up the world in a way that too closely resembles our own). Likewise, in cognitive psychology, it’s not like scientists will ever supplant abstract talk of beliefs and emotions with purely biochemical language. By “commonsense”, I have obviously been meaning just about all the (parochially) accurate things we say, so naturally it’s an extremely broad category. But I don’t think that poses a problem.

So now that that’s all been sorted, let’s move onto the other big axiomatic category – “subjective truth”. Given my uncontroversial definition of “objective truth”, you won’t be surprised to learn that I have a similarly standard definition for “subjective truth”. To wit, I believe that subjective truth is truth that is true merely to a particular “subject”, or a particular human being. But there is an important caveat. Although you can imagine someone saying that an idiot or ignoramus is “subjectively correct” that the earth is flat, that we didn’t have autism before vaccines or that chakras really exist, this is not what I mean by subjective truth. I only mean to include truths that are actually True for one person, not false empirical claims that people believe. So what are some examples of subjective truths on this conception? Well, many sincere expressions of emotion must surely be subjective truths. For example, when someone says, “That is a moving scene”, “It was such a tragic sight to watch him in that state”, “She’s beautiful”, “That ride was so fun” or “Quentin Tarantino films are sickening”, and does so with genuine feeling, those are subjective truths.^[5] Although some people might try to put forward a case why someone is beautiful (should be seen as beautiful) or why Quentin Tarantino films are sickening (should be seen as sickening), I did try to pick examples that could not easily be extended to objective claims or moralised. Incidentally, we do extend to objectivity and moralise a hell of a lot of our emotions, which is why talk of subjective truth ends up being such a muddle. If you just slightly tweak the Quentin Tarantino example to “Quentin Tarantino films are disgusting”, for example, you can see what a fine line there is between mere emotion and moralised emotion. What the process of moralisation does is immediately turn an emotion into a quasi-“normative truth”, and thereby immediately opens up the world of facts to the debate. For instance, when we read a story about a man who burnt a number of puppies, we quickly go from revulsion and horror to a categorical statement like “That is such an evil and execrable act, and he deserves to be punished to the fullest extent of the law”. Some moral philosophers would say that the truth-aptness of such a statement is deceptive, because the person is basically cloaking a visceral, emotional reaction in the language of facts. But it is also clearly true that there are facts involved in all normative questions. That’s why people are able to have serious moral debates about big issues, like abortion, the death penalty, trolley problems and so on. In all moral problems, there are different ways of weighing up the good and bad, different moral calculi, different terminologies (“rights” and “autonomy” versus “pleasures” and “pains”), and there’s always an aquifer of facts that can be tapped to bolster any given moral case. This same kind of fact-emotion-fusion is why people are able to have serious debates about art, too – although you might be hesitant about saying that moral and aesthetic truths are exactly the same.

Another reason why the category of “subjective truth” is a bit fuzzy is that people very often meld fact directly with emotion. They say things like “This is really miserable weather”, for example, which is not obviously either a subjective truth or commonsense Truth.

The hybridity of normative questions is why the intermediary category “intersubjective truths” is more necessary than you might intuitively think. The intersubjective category is an excellent one for just those normative truths that the vast majority of people within a community agree with, but which don’t quite reach commonsense Truths on account of the fact that people have different limbic systems and reason can’t bridge the gap. If you omit ethical examples, some good candidates for intersubjective truths are, “Shakespeare is a great writer”, “Mozart is a brilliant composer”, “Picasso has some wonderful paintings”, “Football is an entertaining sport”, “Chocolate is delicious” and “Champagne is really nice”.

At this point, you may be thinking that that just about covers everything, even though I still haven’t answered the question of why the trans-intersubjective category is useful. But I do believe I can justify it, and I’ll do so now.

A trans-intersubjective truth, as I have defined it, a necessary truth. It is a truth that is necessary for all civilisations to believe in. This, I believe, is crucial. It means that a trans-intersubjective truth is in some way intrinsic to our universe, and perhaps all universes (if one of the multiverse theories happens to be true). Does this somehow give it a different “ontological” status from a merely intersubjective truth? I think that’s a bad question. Does it take it closer to Truth? Yes, I believe it does. As we clarified before, the best scientific Truth is objective in the strictest sense we have: objective in the sense of being species-independent. It is this kind of Truth that other intelligent species could have acquired. Indeed, it might be that other intelligent species have come to the same conclusion we have about physics, chemistry and evolution.

Yet, here’s the crux: I am saying that there are normative truths like that, too. As I claimed way back near the start of part II, many people have overlooked one of the profoundest things evolution tells us: that other intelligent species would surely also have normative views very similar to ours – most importantly, in morality. So while other civilisations would almost certainly have produced a Hume-like figure who identified the is-ought gap, people in that civilisation would also, like us, have strong normative convictions. Moreover, their moral philosophers would almost certainly agree with the Golden Rule. What I am claiming is that the Golden Rule might not just be an intercultural phenomenon, but an intergalactic one – a cosmic one. What a thought! Certainly, wellbeing would have to be a cosmic good, and suffering a cosmic bad.

In effect, trans-intersubjective truths are truths that emerge out of intelligence itself.

That is why trans-intersubjective truth is an important category. Trans-intersubjective truths are part of the normative reality of our universe. I believe that must earn them a place above commonsense Truths, only a little below scientific Truth itself.

Is that vague? I admit it might be. But I think it makes sense.

The essay is now over. Now you can see why I think materialists do have scope to be moral realists of a kind; they can believe “Suffering is bad” and “Altruism is good” have far more truth status (as cosmic realities) than “Milkshakes are delicious” (which is a parochial intersubjective truth).

At this point, you might be wondering what my beef with materialism actually is. If I discuss morality within a materialist framework, what could possibly be my problem with materialism? Well, I have two main gripes, and they are both rather massive.

My first objection is that materialism is not even a coherent doctrine. Though definable in a general way (as I did at the start of this essay), materialism has no precise definition, since nobody can really explain what ‘matter’ is. Chomsky explains this criticism well. He points out that, before Newton, everyone assumed the universe was ‘mechanical’ in some fundamental way – that it operated according to a series of comprehensible laws and worked like a machine, with physical parts interacting with each other in an orderly fashion. This was the materialism of the time. Before he discovered gravity, Newton himself held this view. However, Newton’s discovery showed the universe was not perfect, orderly and mechanical. Instead, it contained “occult forces” like gravity: weird and mysterious energies that could affect the movement of planets millions of miles apart. Although the mathematics that demonstrated this result was beautiful and neat – enough to convince Newton that God was on his side – the revelation itself was not. Chomsky goes so far as to claim that Newton killed materialism. It may be true that Newton’s theory of gravity represented another step towards a Godless view of the cosmos, but in the process he had obliterated the understanding of the universe as mechanical, and replaced it with a much more mysterious conception. According to Chomsky, there never has been a ‘mind-body’ problem since Newton, because we haven’t had a coherent concept of “body”. 

Even if one is sceptical of this bold argument, there are other critics of materialism who claim that quantum physics had a similar effect, and that ‘matter’ died with the rise of this field. These critics argue that as soon as quantum physics arrived on the scene, materialism went from a well-defined doctrine that committed one to certain axioms about the nature of reality (at the bottom of reality, there are particles which operate according to fixed, comprehensible physical laws, etc) to an ill-defined hodgepodge which committed a believer to one axiom only: whatever physics discovers is reality.

Einstein’s theories were the greatest triumph of materialism, even though they again did something funny with our concept of ‘matter’ (now the “fabric of reality” was this bizarre thing called “spacetime” whose warpage caused gravity etc). But when quantum mechanics began to take the ascendancy in Einstein’s later life, the challenge to the materialist worldview was far greater than any that had come before. Suddenly, the universe wasn’t deterministic, wasn’t even vaguely comprehensible, and even objectivity had taken a battering with the revelation that the act of observation on the quantum level couldn’t be divorced from the thing observed. Suddenly, particles could be interacting millions of miles apart (quantum entanglement) and the universe was filled with what Einstein derided as “spooky action at a distance”. Suddenly, it seemed impossible to reconcile the world of the very small with even that one level above. Suddenly, the universe appeared to have required fine-tuning in order to exist at all! As one can find out from the Wikipedia page “Fine-tuned Universe”, Martin Rees formulates the fine-tuning of the universe in terms of the following six dimensionless physical constants, most of which have been discovered through quantum theory:

1.      N, the ratio of the strength of electromagnetism to the strength of gravity for a pair of protons, is approximately 10³⁶. According to Rees, if it were significantly smaller, only a small and short-lived universe could exist.

2.      Epsilon (ε), the strength of the force binding nucleons into nuclei, is 0.007. If it were 0.006, only hydrogen could exist, and complex chemistry would be impossible. According to Rees, if it were above 0.008, no hydrogen would exist, as all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after the big bang. Other physicists disagree, calculating that substantial hydrogen remains even if ε is as high as 0.01. 

3.      Omega (Ω), also known as the density parameter, is the relative importance of gravity and expansion energy in the Universe. It is the ratio of the mass density of the Universe to the "critical density" and is approximately 1. If gravity were too strong compared with dark energy and the initial metric expansion, the universe would have collapsed before life could have evolved. On the other side, if gravity were too weak, no stars would have formed.

4.      Lambda (λ) is the cosmological constant. It describes the ratio of the density of dark energy to the critical energy density of the universe, given certain reasonable assumptions such as positing that dark energy density is a constant. In terms of Planck units, and as a natural dimensionless value, the cosmological constant, λ, is on the order of 10⁻¹²². This is so small that it has no significant effect on cosmic structures that are smaller than a billion light-years across. If the cosmological constant was not extremely small, stars and other astronomical structures would not be able to form.

5.      Q, the ratio of the gravitational energy required to pull a large galaxy apart to the energy equivalent of its mass, is around 10⁻⁵. If it is too small, no stars can form. If it is too large, no stars can survive because the universe is too violent, according to Rees.

6.      D, the number of spatial dimensions in spacetime, is 3. Rees claims that life could not exist if there were 2 or 4.

These facts about fine-tuning have led many quantum physicists to postulate the Multiverse Hypothesis – an unabashedly metaphysical idea with no material evidence supporting it. They have also revived the possibility of a creator (or perhaps a Bostromian simulator). In fact, using Occam’s Razor, it is possibly more logical to postulate a creator of some kind than the multiverse (I’m sure physicists would disagree with that though).

Despite the utterly occult nature of quantum physics, materialism has clearly survived the quantum revolution. Yet it has done so only by being vague – just as it did in order to survive the Newtonian Revolution. This is my point: the only coherent way of defining what matter means to a materialist nowadays is “All the ‘things’ that physics has discovered or might discover in future”. That’s not much of a doctrine.

As I said at the start of this essay, I used to think that materialism was just a vague doctrine in general – that it basically referred to a mature, rational view of reality, without an anthropomorphic God or any panpsychical conceptions. However, the really weird thing about materialism is that it is both poorly defined and yet also quite prescriptive in its reductionism. Materialists believe that what they call non-material things are reducible to what they call material things (however poorly these material things may be defined). This reductionism is what I will now attack in my second objection.

  By definition, any theory of reality must account for all of reality. However, the simple fact is that materialism – which claims to be a metaphysical doctrine encompassing all reality – fails to meet this condition. I do not say this from a mystical point of view, but simply on the basis of logic. Materialists believe in reductionism: reducing higher levels of reality to lower levels. However, not only is it impossible to reduce the mind to the brain (as Thomas Nagel and Jerry Fodor have argued, among others), it is impossible to reduce biology to chemistry, and physics to quantum physics (and more). Reducing has to mean explaining how one level can give rise to another. But how do you build an explanatory bridge between two supervenient levels of reality which are fundamentally qualitatively different and have radically different properties? Consider the following:

Can anyone explain how two ‘up quarks’ and one ‘down quark’ gives you a stable particle called a proton? Can anyone explain how two ‘down quarks’ and one ‘up quark’ gives you a stable particle called a neutron? Can anyone explain how one proton and one electron gives you a completely new kind of thing called hydrogen? Can anyone explain how adding another proton, another electron and two neutrons to hydrogen gives you a completely new kind of thing called helium (and how you can then get to lithium, etc)? Can anyone explain how the cosmos suddenly goes from probabilistic to deterministic as soon as you leave the quantum level? Can anyone explain how Einstein’s theories of the cosmos work, even though they were made in ignorance of the reality of quantum mechanics? Can anyone explain how having lots of H₂0 molecules in one place gives you a completely new kind of thing called ‘wetness’? Can anyone explain how a soup of chemicals on our planet circa 3.5 billion years ago gave rise to these odd replicating chemical containers we call ‘life’ (how chemicals acquired l’élan vital)?  Can anyone explain how Deoxyribonucleic acid (a chemical) acts as a kind of instruction manual, ‘coding for’ proteins in organisms that end up creating the features and traits of those organisms? Can anyone explain why scientific laws in physics (like Laws of Thermodynamics) are so different from laws in biology (the Theory of Evolution)? Can anyone explain why laws in biology are different from those in sociology and economics? Can anyone explain how matter creates a mind? Can anyone explain how a mind made of matter can have the property of intensionality? Can anyone explain how consciousness, self-consciousness, subjectivity and qualia come from matter?

The short answer is no. No-one can build the explanatory bridges. In fact, we can’t even conceive of the explanatory bridges. I think it’s probable that in our universe there simply are no explanatory bridges between these things. The best way of looking at our universe is not in terms of reductionism but emergentism: the recognition that there are multiple levels of reality, each of which supervenes on the one below it, but possesses its own unique set of properties and laws.

Emergence is clearly an important concept in our reality. After all, our world is literally brimming with emergent phenomena. Think of a snowflake. Can anyone explain why ice crystals form into these beautiful mathematical patterns? No, they cannot; it’s just the way things happen in our universe.

Consciousness is, I believe, another one of these emergent phenomena (and one of the “levels of reality”). Out of the dense, complicated neural structure of our brain, something remarkable emerges: subjectivity, qualia, awareness, being. It is what makes possible perceiving and thinking and knowing. It is what makes possible my existing at this moment as I look out the window at the green vista of trees and ferns swaying in the wind and the mouldy washing line with the brown sheets and the tea towels and socks, and as I look back towards the computer and stare at the words I have typed on my laptop screen. As certain thought philosophical thought experiments have shown (the best-known one is Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument), there is a profound difference between seeing the colour red and knowing all the facts that are involved in seeing red – what happens when the light waves hit the retina and so on. You can’t reduce qualia to any neurobiological facts, or even any computational facts (like discussions of neural networks). It is just a totally different kind of thing from anything that you can describe in physical terms. Nobody can deny that. 

Of course, all materialists recognise that qualia is a totally different kind of thing from brain matter (though some of them expect some profound synthesis far off in the future), yet many of them then say that qualia isn’t really a part of a reality – that it is just an “illusion” in some deep, undefined sense.”.[7]  But I think this is slightly loopy. In order for consciousness or qualia to be excluded from reality, one has to show that it can be successfully reduced. But as we’ve shown, it simply can’t be reduced. We don’t know how to reduce it in any fashion. Qualia is qualitatively different from the brain, or anything within the brain. Qualia and a hunk of spongy matter have nothing in common. Moreover, as I’ve argued, consciousness is not even unique in its irreducibility to something simpler. Can you reduce wetness to H₂0 molecules? No. Can you reduce economics to psychology? No. Can you reduce psychology to biology? No. Can you reduce biology to physics? No. Can you reduce atoms to subatomic particles? No. We simply can’t explain how to get from one to the other.

Also, what the fuck does “illusion” mean when you’re talking about qualia and subjectivity? As Nagel likes to say, “illusion to whom”? An illusion to the universe? Are all mental things illusions? Are my thoughts – expressed in this essay – an illusion? Are the thoughts you’re having in your head as you read it an illusion? What the fuck does it mean? Surely subjectivity has to be included in reality. Mental phenomena have to be included in reality. And one can surely avoid being a Cartesian Dualist while believing that.

Thus concludes my refutation of mainstream materialism. Now a few words on the implications of it.

‘Despite my rejection of the word ‘materalism’ in its common usage, I am nevertheless happy to call myself a non-reductive materialist. Unfortunately, I don’t think “non-reductive materialism” is really a universal metaphysical doctrine in the way materialism claims to be. It is this fact that explains why I gave this piece its title; if you reject standard materialism and you’re not a mystic, you no longer have any theory of reality. You have to become a metaphysical pluralist instead.

If we look at the history of philosophy, it shouldn’t be a surprise that metaphysical monism is in error. Nobody takes seriously Thales’ view that everything is water anymore. Is it really reasonable that a metaphysical doctrine that says that everything is ‘matter’ (without even defining what matter is) should be taken any more seriously than that? I don’t think so. What we should all do instead is accept my metaphysical pluralism, the view that says the following:

There are multiple levels of reality,[7] each of which (except the very bottom layer of quantum physics) somehow emerges from the level below it. Each of these levels is supervenient on the one below but not reducible to it. There is a normative reality to our universe just as there is a material reality (which is what I argued in that essay about morality). There is an objective reality and a subjective reality.

Doesn’t that seem better? Less unified, but I think closer to Truth.

    

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[1] Don’t ask me what “brain states” actually are. Obviously, one synapse firing doesn’t equal one brain state, but I assume a flash of red in an fMRI doesn’t equal one brain state either. (Nobody knows what a “brain state” is, or on what level of analysis you’d find one.)

[2] It’s actually fucking impossible to do philosophy without this constant nagging feeling that you’re a mystic and your words aren’t even remotely adequate for the task of investigating the Mariana-Trench-like metaphysical notions you’re trying to understand.

[3] Hereafter I’ll just use the former.

[4] Blatant, indisputable “messiness”, that is… But wait, given “messiness” is normative, does that mean I think blatant, indisputable moral claims, like suffering is bad or wellbeing is good, are commonsense Truths? Yes, basically. Only the blatant, indisputable ones, though – no ethical “questions”, moral issues or even faintly debatable assertions.

[5] I obviously can’t use examples like “I am happy”, “I am sad, “I feel really good”, “That makes me sick”, because, if sincere, these are best described not as subjective truths but objective truths about subjective mental states. You might object that that’s only the best description on a very literalist reading of the language, ignoring pragmatics – but I don’t want to get into that. I just want unambiguous examples.

You might also object that the examples I did choose could easily be rephrased as objective truths about subjective mental states – but that’s not important for my argument. (Remember, I'm not saying that "subjective truths" are really metaphysically 'real'; they are one of the descriptive levels of my model.)

[6] More strictly, these people are called “Eliminativist materialists”. I should note that according to similar nomenclature I myself could be regarded as a species of materialist: a non-reductive materialist. This is a label I share with Jerry Fodor.  

[7] You may have noticed that I have scrupulously avoided defining “levels of reality” throughout this essay. The truth is that it is better left vague. As my paragraph of questions showed, I am using “levels” to mean both small and big levels.