What is it Like to Be a Fly?

You see an ant run as you take aim with your hand. If it didn’t sense danger, why would it scamper away? And who's to parse the difference in response to similar threats of the human mind which traffics in eventualities? The NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay entitled “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” As Elizabeth Kolbert points out in a recent piece, Nagel's essay could easily have been titled "What Is It Like to Be an Aardvark?" ("He Tried to Be a Badger," The New York Review of Books, 6/23/16). But what is the contrast between what the ant or fly is going through and what we as humans experience think when we see a suspicious looking character approaching us on one of those Hopper Streets with their solitary street lamps? If you’ve ever chased one of those big water bugs or better yet a mouse you realize how canny creatures can be. Such is their elusiveness, if they weren’t rodents you'd want to recruit them as tight ends for a football squad. So what is the real distinction? Both humans and so called lower forms seem to react to the penumbra of danger in the same way and if we assume that animals lack what we call consciousness or thought—an absence which it’s ultimately impossible to verify—then we may assume that what’s missing in the animal mind (Gregor Samsa not withstanding) is a concept. The ant or fly doesn’t say “uh oh there’s a man trying to get rid of me.”  Even the water bug and higher forms like the mouse or rat don’t do that. Humans have highly developed upper brains, one part of which, the language cortex is responsible for putting ideas into words, while animals depend on the lower brain, limbic faculties. So the big difference is language which mediates and translates emotion into thought and also is one of the factors that enables human consciousness to be uniquely self-reflexive. We look at higher brain functions as a gift (which they most certainly are), but might it not be said that animals, who lack such filters, have a better idea of what's going on?

What’s it Like to Be a Table?

                                                                       photo: Wualex

Phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger like to talk about intention. It’s what separates inanimate objects from animate objects (and in particular those animate objects which possess so called consciousness). A table doesn’t have a set of priorities with respect to the person sitting at it, while the person sitting at a table has lots of thoughts about the table—it’s height, its comfort, its state of cleanliness, it’s provenance—which create a picture in that person (or subject’s) mind. You have seen those biblical paintings where a sea of hands is raised to the heavens. Human existence is a chorus made up of willfulness and desire. Schopenhauer’s famous tome was the The World as Will and Representation. If you go down to the East or Hudson Rivers with their strong currents and murky waters, you’ll find an organic phenomenon which is a living metaphor for human consciousness. It takes the innocent bits of matter that come its way and sweeps them out to sea. Buddhists equate desire with suffering, but have you ever met a Buddhist who has so contained his or her will that they have achieved satori--a state in which they no longer inflict themselves on the innocent table, on which the server in his local vegan café has placed a platter of seitan? Which brings us back to the question of the world. There is the old conundrum about a leaf or branch falling in a forest with no one there to perceive it. How do we posit its existence?  But imagine a world without subjects. There has been talk about the conditions on the planets like Kepler-62 e and f, stars in the so-called Goldilocks area of the multiverse where conditions similar to those which created human life exist. However, there are portions of space/time where the chances of finding anything resembling consciousness or will may be lessened—take for example the event horizon of a black hole. In his famous essay “What’s is it like to be a bat?," Thomas Nagel deals with the questions of whether animals possess traits which we might define as a form of consciousness or self-reflexive awareness. However, there are likely whole galaxies in which rumblings of planets, meteors and supernovae occur like the leaf and the branch which go unobserved in the forest. Momentous events occur without being conceived of by beings who have wishes with respect to them—unless of course you believe in the mandate of the ultimate willful observer, God.

God Redux

In a Times Op-Ed piece entitled “God, Darwin and My College Biology Class” (NYT, 9/27/14), David P. Barash, an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington makes the following assertion: “The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.” Adding benevolent to the mix complicates the argument. Let’s make it simple. Does science explain everything? For instance, Thomas Nagel, a professor of philosophy and law at NYU and an avowed atheist has asked how naturalism “can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern.” (“A Philosopher Defends Religion,” The New York Review of Books, 9/22/12). The philosopher John Searle has remarked that free will and quanta are unanswered questions. Add to that the question of how something could be created out of nothing, an old favorite on the disenchantment talk circuit. Everyone wants certainty. Those who believe don’t like it that science diminishes or extinguishes God’s role. Those who hone to a rationalist and analytic view of the world quote the last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent.” But such certainties are neither spiritual nor scientific. Hamlet’s famous line, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” still points to the fact that we may have to leave open items on our teleological agendas.

The Afterlife Reified

Paradise of Bhaishaijyaguru

NYU has produced eminent scholars in the fields of philosophy and law. The late Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel are two of the most notable examples. In a recent Sunday Review, Samuel Scheffler, another NYU professor whose appointment bridges these two disciplines broached a question that is not often taken up by either lawyers or philosophers and that’s the afterlife (“The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously,” NYT, 9/21/13). Scheffler isn’t dealing with the question of whether there is soul that lives on in heaven or hell. He is dealing with the life that goes on after we are gone and his premise is that many things wouldn’t make sense in this life, if we didn’t think human life was going to go on after us. It’s a little bit the notion that Beckett expresses humorously in Endgame when Clov asks “Do you believe in the life to come?” and Hamm replies, “Mine was always that.” Scheffler isn’t dealing with questions of heaven or hell. He avoids theology by materializing the question of the afterlife, in much the way that insurance companies do. From an actuarial point of view why would one want to expend energy on certain activities, if the world were coming to an end? “If you were a cancer researcher, you might be less motivated to continue your work,” he remarks. The end of the world would have a similar effect on “an engineer working to improve the seismic safety of bridges.” But when he brings up the question of novelists, playwrights and composers he’s on shaky ground. Sure most creatives dream they will produce classics that will live on forever. But the fact is that few do. Within a generation or two many well-known writers will fade into oblivion. Updike might have staying power, but few people today talk of John O’Hara, the author of Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 who was a legend in his time. Ever hear of a writer named John P. Marquand who won a Pulitzer for The Late George Apley in 1938? How many Rembrandts, Beethovens and Tolstoys are there in recorded history? Must a writer maintain the delusion of immortality in order to function? Or is there something to be said for the fact that writing, composing and painting would have a function even if Chicken Little were right and the sky was falling. After all in the case of a doomsday scenario who is going to write the eulogy for the human race? Who is going to provide the music at the service? Who will provide the design of life’s final brochure?

Nature’s Riddle

William D. Hamilton

In a review of Ullica Segerstrale’s biography of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton (“Inclusive Fitness," TLS 8/2/13), Nature’s Oracle: The Life and Work of W.D. Hamilton Jennie Erin Smith makes the following comment “The concept of inclusive fitness argued that an organism could increase its genetic success not merely by reproducing itself, but also by aiding the reproduction and survival of relatives carrying some proportion of identical genes.” What Hamilton was trying to deal with was essentially altruism or “why an animal should forego reproducing…or expose itself to danger to warn its fellows of a predator.” When you think of it altruism is actually contradicted by natural selection. Yet rather than being an aporia, it falls into a category that is becoming increasingly common amongst high level thinkers in both science and philosophy. For instance Thomas Nagel, who defines himself as an atheist, still maintains in his current book Mind and Cosmos, that pure naturalism cannot effectively explain the emergence of consciousness. The “inclusiveness”of a thinker like Nagel bears comparison to Hamilton who also exhibits a kind of scientific thinking that takes nothing for granted. But Hamilton who believed in Segerstrale’s words that warfare “could be seen...as adaptive rather than pathological” could also be quite provocative. Thinkers like Hamilton and Nagel, along with the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer of Animal Liberation fame are part of the “more things in heaven and earth” club who ask uncomfortable and bothersome questions that are bound to upset the applecart for purists who are unable to tolerate a multivalent view of the world. Philosophic and scientific multitasking is the name of this game.

Religion Without God

Photo of Ronald Dworkin by David Shankbone

Ronald Dworkin was a big thinker and carried on the legacy of Isaiah Berlin. His Justice For Hedgehogs paid homage to Berlin’s famous dichotomy in intellectual history between the fox and the hedgehog (the hedgehog referring to thinkers who depend on a unifying idea and the fox referring to multivalent philosophers). He was also part of a triumvirate of philosophers, which includes Martha Nussbaum at the University of Chicago and his colleague Thomas Nagel at N.Y.U., whose inurement in juridical questions has always given a unique twist to their pronunciamentos on ethical and moral questions. Only recently in a review of a work evangelical Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (“A Philosopher Defends Religion," The New York Review of Books, 9/27/12), Nagel made the argument that though he was an atheist, he found it impossible to make a valid philosophical argument challenging the existence of God. “Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism,” he says, “are directed at the deepest problem with that view--how can we account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves." On the basis of the excerpt from Dworkin’s last book, Religion Without God, recently published in The New York Review of Books (4/4/13), it seems, in fact, that Nagel and Dworkin might have been discussing similar ideas as they walked through those airy regions of the Ivory Tower that still resemble Plato’s Academy. Dworkin first asks if religion can exist without God? Here’s how his legal background informs his discourse. “Judges often have to decide what ‘religion’ means for legal purposes,” he avers. “For example, the American Supreme Court had to decide whether when Congress provided a ‘conscientious objection' exemption from military service for men whose religion would not allow them to serve, an atheist whose moral convictions also prohibited service qualified for the objection. It decided that he did qualify.” Having offered up this and other examples including a quote from Einstein (that discountenances the  scientism described by Max Weber in his concept of disenchantment), he goes on to ask, what religion then is? Dworkin cites two conditions “life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life” and concludes “What divides godly and godless religion—the science of godly religion—is not as important as the faith in value that unites them.” Dworkin offers up a wonderful anecdote about Richard Dawkins who has argued for so called scientific or “naturalistic” thinking. “’There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dream of in your philosophy.’ ‘Yes,’ Dawkins replied, ‘but we’re working on it.’” To which Dworkin might well have rejoined, “can man survive on bread alone?”