When Madness is Normal: Sanity in the Minds of Animals and the Rise of Divine Persons

There’s a perennial debate about the psychiatric concept of mental disorder. Is that concept being abused? Are normal behaviours being pathologized to sell pharmaceuticals? But the truth of mental health and insanity seems far removed from this controversy.

Mental Disorder as Dysfunction

The latest psychiatric manual of disorders, the DSM-5, defines “mental disorder” as “a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above.”

The key to understanding this definition is the notion of a “function.” The psychiatrist wants to distinguish between normality and pathology, the latter being a deviation from a norm that calls for psychiatric action; more precisely, she wants to cater to cultural presumptions about psychological normality, which is why the definition adds that “An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder” (my emphasis). If a culture sanctions some behaviour, the behaviour cannot be abnormal or dysfunctional—unless the whole culture is backward and deranged from a modern, Western viewpoint. What, then, does “dysfunction” add to the concept of mere statistical abnormality, that is, to the concept of something’s rarity? Here the psychiatrist walks a fine line between calculating the difference between common and uncommon psychological and social patterns, on the one hand, and moralizing on the other. The latter is forbidden to the contemporary psychiatrist who seeks to align her discipline more with the hard sciences than with philosophy, theology, and the arts. In the past, psychiatrists did rationalize theological prejudices regarding the alleged evil of certain dispositions such as homosexuality and femininity. Jews and Christians read in their scriptures that women are inferior to men, and early modern, Western psychiatrists deferred to that unscientific, moralistic judgment, prescribing patronizing means for women to adapt to their alleged inferiority and lack of full personhood. But after R.D. Laing, Foucault, and others showed in the 1960s and ‘70s that the prevailing psychiatric criteria for mental health were subjective, psychiatrists developed objective tests in the form of checklists, thus preserving the scientific image of their discipline. (For a stirring presentation of this recent history, see Part 1 of Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Trap.)

The notion of dysfunction, then, is crucial to this larger psychiatric project. On the one hand, a dysfunction is an inability to carry out some process, to complete some expected relation between cause and effect. The fact that there’s a causal relationship at issue provides the generality to account for the norm which is being violated, since causality is the paramount scientific concept for understanding natural order. Psychiatrists see themselves as scientists exploring the mind and so they posit an order in the mental domain. The order investigated by scientists in general is explained with an instrumental agenda in mind, the goal being not just to understand but to control phenomena. Thus, scientists are minimalists and conservative in their theorizing: they objectify, explaining regularities in terms of force, mass, and other such relatively value-neutral properties. Real patterns are understood in terms of physical necessity—not as happening, for example, by free choice, since that would be a form of magic, a miracle that couldn’t be controlled and therefore couldn’t be scientifically (instrumentally and objectively) understood.

So a dysfunction is a deviation from, or a blockage in the furtherance of, a function, where a function is at least a causal relationship. However, because the psychiatrist sees herself as a medical scientist, she thinks she does well in the world, and so a mental function must be more than a regularity that merely happens regardless of any normative context. Functions are deemed to be good from some perspective, namely by a culture at large. Psychiatrists thus still kowtow to social presumptions, but they do so under the cover of scientific (instrumentalist, objectifying) rhetoric.Mental dysfunctions are, therefore, relativelybad irregularities: violations of social norms, causing suffering which is commonly assumed to be unwanted, and preventing the individual from carrying out her “important activities.” The goodness of mental health depends on a social evaluation, which the psychiatrist merely presupposes, but she’s quick to point out that not every conflict with society is pathological. Political, religious, or sexual rebels aren’t mentally unwell unless their behaviour is brought on by a dysfunction, as the DSM definition says. This means the rebel must suffer because of her inability to function, that is, because of a syndrome reflecting a disturbance in her thought processes. 

Of course, a syndrome is also a pattern and a process, which is to say that the “disordered,” unhealthy behaviour exhibits its own order as opposed to being an anomalous event; otherwise, it wouldn’t be a form of behaviour, a general, predictable set of responses subject to scientific explanation. So is the difference between functional and dysfunctional processes in any way objective? The DSM-4 definition provides some more detail which might help: “each of the mental disorders is conceptualized as a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning) or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom.” From this we can gather that, while seeming oxymoronic, disordered regularities (syndromes) must be those thought patterns that cause the individual pain or a loss of freedom. Disability is painful because the “areas of functioning” are deemed important, and so a healthy person should want to engage in them. The mentally disordered rebel, therefore, mustn’t choose her antisocial course of action, but must be led to it by a thought pattern that causes her distress. She must be internally conflicted, which should make her liable to admit that her conflict with society is ill-advised.

The psychiatrist’s appeal to freedom, though, is curious, because it threatens to undermine the definition’s scientific status. But the question of whether the DSM’s definition of “mental health” is incoherent would be a red herring. The DSM itself acknowledges that “mental health” can’t be adequately defined. The definition is offered only because of its utility: as DSM-4 says, the definition “is as useful as any other available definition and has helped to guide decisions regarding which conditions on the boundary between normality and pathology should be included in DSM-IV.” This isn’t the extent of the definition’s instrumentality, however; as I said, the rhetoric of functionalism allows the psychiatrist to dabble in normative generalizations while clinging to the authority of science in the form of neutral-sounding jargon. The root of the contradiction is psychiatry’s intermediate position as a soft science, a discipline that stands between scientific investigation which necessarily objectifies and thus dehumanizes its subject, and cultural, teleological presumptions about the goodness of “health” and of the goals which a healthy person can achieve. In essence, then, the DSM definition is an act of camouflage.

Inadvertently, however, the definition helps to reveal some underlying social processes which shed light on the difference between so-called mental health and pathology. Step with me through the looking glass and look anew at these conventions we use to congratulate ourselves on our status as either normals or heroic rebels.

Animals and Persons, Slaves and Masters

Notice, then, that the talk of psychological or social functions is implicitly depersonalizing (and so quite at odds with any talk of freedom). At best, functions are roles played by actors, or by people who aren’t free to exhibit their personal preferences, because they have a job to do. For example, they might have to sacrifice their private standards to achieve a goal they’re expected to achieve on account of their prior commitments. This typically happens in the workplace where the worker needs a job to survive, but detests what her company compels her to do in this public role she occupies. For most people, psychological functions derive from social ones in that an individual feels the pressure to behave, to resist certain ways of thinking and feeling only when she contemplates how her actions would be publicly assessed. The roles most of us play are assigned by the myths that define the character of our culture, not by our private creative acts. By carrying out our social functions, we fit into society. 

There are three paradigms of “behaviour,” of functional activity in this sense. The first is animal behaviour which corresponds to natural order as determined principally by natural selection. Talk of the functionality or optimality (that is, the pseudo-rightness) of adaptive animal behaviour is a remnant of obsolete deistic thinking in biology. Interaction between the genes and the environment produces body types which in turn act with some regularity; in general, organisms are subject to a life cycle which requires that they seek resources to sustain them so they might contribute to the future of their species by reproducing. But Darwin showed that this process is a matter of sheer causality. Animals tend to approve of most stages of their life cycle (short of the final stage, being death), because their bodies are engineered to result in that approval via the influence of hormones, cognitive restrictions, and the like. They fear certain outcomes and desire others, and functional, adaptive, biologically-determined behaviour is the pattern of responses—by turns awe-inspiring and gruesome—that we see throughout the animal kingdom we’ve almost entirely displaced. Animals hunt for food, craft shelters, put on a show to attract a mate, and sometimes cooperate to raise their offspring, because that’s what they’re built to do. In that respect, their behaviour is robotic: genetically programmed and largely automated.

As I just hinted at, that paradigm of behaviour is in the process of being superseded, as domesticated animals replace wild ones and thus as a social order revolutionizes the prior, natural one. The second paradigm, then, is of animals conforming not to their phenotype or to their habitat, but to the dictates of a particular, godlike species that acts as their global master. While deism was a hangover from a time of mass medieval confusion, the behaviour of most large animals is indeed now intelligently designed, because those animals are almost all domesticated or on the verge of extinction. Domesticated animals fulfill social rather than “natural” (naturally selected) functions in so far as they’re forced to act as our slaves (as pets or livestock). For example, they live in pens or cages and so have their basic needs met not by the fitness of their labour but by the power of corporate farming conglomerates and by the insatiable demand of spoiled and deluded human consumers that drives the farming industry. Instead of caring for their offspring in the wild, domesticated sows have their piglets forcibly removed soon after they’re born so the mothers can return to their social function of pumping out another round of offspring.

The third paradigm carries over our practice of domesticating (enslaving) wild animals, into the nonorganic realm of technology, yielding robots and other machines that likewise can function or malfunction according to whether they fulfill their programs. Sheep, pigs, and chickens, along with pets and zoo animals must be forcibly trained to behave as demanded by their masters, because their social function conflicts with their natural one, and so there’s always the risk that the animals will resist when the opportunity presents itself. Technology lacks any such ambivalence, of course, because machines have no prior programming.

These are the three touchstones of our notion of functionality. When applied to people, then, as in the case of the psychiatric conception of mental health, functional individuals are at least implicitly compared to wild or domesticated animals or to machines. In either case, notice that whereas mental health is supposed to be a benefit or even a precondition of our achieving our ultimate goal in life, such as happiness, virtually no one would approve of being compared to animals or to machines. And yet mental health is defined in terms of functionality, pathology in terms of dysfunction. Indeed, putting aside the idiosyncrasies of the DSM definitions, we generally think of mentally healthy individuals as those who successfully go about their business, thus performing one or another social function, the latter being a culturally-sanctioned pursuit such as a family life or a career. Like animals that have prior programming or like machines that are developed from their moment of invention to achieve a single purpose, so-called healthy human individuals are animalistic or mechanical in their social interactions.

But this raises the question of how the analogy might be extended to take into account the input of the masters. Who is assigning healthy, normal individuals their social roles?The answer follows upon our observing that the mass of normal “individuals” or “persons” are betas in the ethological respect: they’re followers in a dominance hierarchy, perhaps working their way to becoming alphas (leaders who enjoy privileged access to the group’s resources) or perhaps content with the security of their station. If human societies are composed of mammalian dominance hierarchies, at least at some level of analysis, there must be human alphas who have an outsized impact on societal standards. Historically, these alphas have been political rulers, including the lords and aristocrats who employed troubadours, playwrights, and painters to mythologize their exploits, but whose tastes and habits typically repulsed the unwashed masses, leading to violent overthrows as in the French, American, and Communist revolutions. More recently, thanks to the rise of public relations propaganda and to capitalistic and democratic assimilations of the potential for mass resentment about grotesque economic inequality, oligarchic tastes have trickled down to the conventions that outline what we might call the middleclass life cycle. A normal, healthy, middleclass beta would be alternately shocked, appalled, and jealous were she treated to an insider’s view of a plutocrat’s lifestyle, just as anyone who glimpsed a deity would be simultaneously terror-stricken and drawn towards the transcendent reality (as Rudolph Otto said about an experience of the numinous). Just as alpha and beta wolves don’t live in the same way, since the alpha has many more privileges and free rein whereas the beta must knuckle under or risk its life by staging a duel, human upper and middle classes might as well reside on different planets—as caricatured in the movie Elysium. For example, whereas a middleclass drudge must wade through the masses at the airport to board a crowded plane, the upper class member typically has access to a private jet or yacht.

The point isn’t that oligarchs explicitly plot to domesticate the masses, deciding step-by-step how the latter might be controlled. But the indoctrination and training do unfold organically as a result of loopholes in democracy and capitalism which implement old forms of social control in new guises, the old ones being theocratic or megamechanical, as in Lewis Mumford's conception of the latter. For example, in liberal societies, civic religion replaces theism as the noble lie that sways the citizens to trust in the society’s systems and laws (see Simon Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless). And capitalism perpetuates the myth that narrow-minded selfishness is the engine of progress, which tricks consumers into accepting vast status quo inequalities. All of which is most glaringly apparent in the political and economic dynamics of the United States. That country does indeed lead the free world in that it reveals how the progress of liberal humanism is due to a Faustian bargain. Humanism is evidently powerless to create a truly progressive civilization, one that does away with premodern forms of barbarism. On the contrary, the U.S.-centered, post-WWII global civilization we think of honourifically as “modern” only perfects the master-slave relationship. We use technology to accelerate the demise of all wild, uncivilized forms of life, meaning all nonhuman species, and then the strongest, most cunning or remorseless human leaders turn our predatory instrumentalism to the task of enslaving the bulk of humanity to boot. Now Hollywood and corporate advertising indoctrinate the masses with market-tested myths to cultivate our selfishness and materialism as well as stoking our fantasies and unconscious fears, to prolong the palpably unsustainable form of civilization at the apex of which is necessarily a quintessentially insane leadership.

And so we reach the surreal irony that the standard of mental health for the masses, namely social functionality, civility or domestication, is established by indoctrination flowing from a liberal, capitalistic (selfish and materialistic) civilization that reserves its most godlike rewards for those who are palpably unwell. To wit, oligarchs are typically psychopaths. They’re either able to peck their way to the top of the pecking order because they’re biologically unencumbered by a conscience which would otherwise retard their ambition, or else they accustom themselves to the inhumanity of their enterprise and so lose their scruples as they acquire more and more corrupting power, as in the case of U.S. President Obama. We middleclass folks—with access to computers and the internet and time to spare perusing blogs—may think it’s important to distinguish between the mentally healthy and the unhealthy, and we’d further conceive of the happy middleclass family that we see on TV ads or in 1950s Hollywood as the paragon of sanity. The smiling parents with their adoring children and pet dog are the sanest because they’ve completely conformed to mass cultural expectations. They beam their smiles not because all is well with them, but because they’re uninterested in learning how their lifestyle is endangered by blowback from the atrocities committed by those buried, as it were, in the matted fur growing from their nation’s repulsive underbelly.

What we fail to grasp is that the controversy over this middleclass distinction between mental health and insanity, where the latter is understood as mere social dysfunction, is a tempest in a teapot. Looked at in the context I’ve laid out above, what we call mental health is akin to the unknowing tranquility adopted by a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. We long to be the godlike oligarchs who have maximum prestige and freedom in our rapacious societies even as we shy away from seeing clearly either those leaders or those societies. Our complacence and passivity are functional means of preserving an unstable, highly-destructive civilization that’s represented by fittingly-monstrous avatars such as Donald Trump and his ilk. That is, our “healthy” normality entails our social functionality, which means we must focus narrowly on our middleclass life cycle, ignoring the global ramifications and the hideous deformities that naturally fester in the leaders of this delusion-fueled way of life. We think we’re sane and healthy when we do our jobs even though we long effectively to be perfectly insane (from this middleclass vantage point). We wish we were oligarchs—even though the oligarchs aren’t fully human; they lack the capacity for complex emotions, because were they burdened by a conscience, they couldn’t manage the massive cognitive dissonance that must form in the mind of any rational person who participates in the upper echelons of so grotesque and blinkered a civilization as the one in which we modern liberal humanists have created for ourselves. The point should be emphasized that the sociopathy of the top one percent of wealthy and powerful individuals is hardly accidental. While not all members of this upper class are equally inhuman, the process by which any average person is liable to be corrupted by their dominance over others and over the world in general is familiar, although we prefer not to dwell on the implications for our self-image, according to which we’re innocent followers of those leaders.    

Outsiders Liberated from the Rat Race

Who, then, are the truly sane ones? We can begin to answer this with a non-normative distinction, between those who are clearly unwell, according to the forgoing analysis, and any remaining folks who at least have that potential for mental wellness. If we eliminate the betas who are called mentally healthy but who are actually dupes in a freakish and heinous system, and we set aside the alphas who are either full-blown sociopaths or who are at least corrupted to some extent by their escalating engagements with hedonism and sadism, we’re left mainly with the losers who correspond, ethologically, to omegas. These last to receive the group’s bounties stand outside the dominance hierarchy because they’re too weak or unreliable to be trusted with the job of defending the territory or of securing the group’s next meal. That very outsider status, however, should allow omegas to appreciate the sublime horror that counts for daily life in the wild. Of course, this assumes that the social species in question have the capacity to feel that sort of abstract, existential fear, which presumably isn’t the case for most of them. Human omegas are in that position and yet that alone doesn’t make them sane. Some of these omegas are homeless and starving and thus ill-equipped to think clearly. Some are depressed or schizophrenic or otherwise deranged. Other, learned outsiders succumb to mystical balderdash and exploit beta herds as their cult leaders. Some graduate to beta status themselves as monks or nuns of a holy order.

In any case, the question of sanity isn’t the one to ask. While we can speak biologically of normal and abnormal brain functioning, and of debilitating disorders such as Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia, the general notion of mental health is part of the beta’s self-delusion. The kind of health we have in mind is the pet’s passivity, the ability to function in the socially accepted way. Mental health is measured by your tendency to contribute to society, especially by raising a family and earning a living. Above all, the healthy person must fit into a culturally-prescribed role. In that respect, she’s more animal or machine than person. To borrow from the DSM definition’s hodgepodge of sophistries, the hallmark of personhood is autonomy—indeed the very freedom that has no place in functionality. Existentialists like Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre have exhaustively analyzed the concept of personal freedom, particularly from the phenomenological end. They emphasized the onerous burden of responsibility placed on the free individual, the dread and angst she suffers knowing that because she’s free, she has no foundation to rest on, no axioms to guide her choice of a direction in life. Indeed, the existentially-free individual seems deranged in her ruminations. Like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, the free person will be inwardly conflicted and crushed beneath the magnitude of her decisions, given that a precondition of her freedom is that she understands we alone must decide on our life’s meaning. And like Camus’ stranger, the free person is liable to be alienated from feel-good, beta society. If we ask the broader question—not "Who is sane?" but "What ought we to do?"—the person who is free to obey social conventions or to reject them as farcical may be both mentally unwell in some sense, but also heroically superhuman.

Incidentally, this is why the DSM’s point about the connection between suffering and dysfunction is so telling. The “well-adjusted” beta multitudes shouldn’t suffer because they’re sheeple, and disturbing their domesticity would be as rude as scaring babies. But genuine, enlightened peoplewill likely suffer for their self-understanding: they know that they’re free, that mass culture is obscene, and thus that they’re on their own as outsiders in the whole uncaring universe. Why wouldn’tthey suffer? But also, if that existential suffering makes them “dysfunctional” or even antisocial, why is that worse than being an apologist for a “humanistic,” “progressive” civilization that dehumanizesthe masses and enslaves or exterminates most forms of life like the crazed aliens you see wreaking havoc in old sci-fi movies?

The Emergence of God at the Reversal of Fate

The more pertinent distinction isn’t between dysfunction and mental health, but between animality and personhood. Animals and machines follow training and rules; their behaviour is programmed and so they’re slaves to a master. Again, existentially speaking, most humans, namely the beta class, are animals and machines, not persons: we live as functionaries in one system or another, playing roles without much self-awareness or appreciation for the cosmic tragedy—the destruction of the biosphere—to which we’re contributing in our workaday fashion. Those with the greater potential for autonomy are the omegas, the social outsiders who thus bear the weight of the existential choice of what to do with themselves, since they have no role to play. Again, the stakes are no longer pathology and health, but automatism and personhood. Instead of wondering whether we’re normal or deranged, we should be considering whether we’re authentic persons in the first place. Are the beta masses that follow the megalomaniacal predators of the top one percent healthy for doing so just because they thereby maintain some social order? Is it sane to pursue the long-term destruction of all life or to shirk your responsibility as a potentially self-aware human, by acting out natural and social roles instead of making a philosophically-informed choice of how to live? What is one deluded nobody’s happiness worth in the shadow of the dreadful con of which she’s a victim? If we shift our perspective to one that appreciates the existential stakes, we begin to discern that the majority that’s called healthy, sane, and normal aren’t even fully human. Their minds are inauthentic, because they haven’t been liberated by a philosophical awakening. Plato and Jesus both called them vulgar swine, those controlled by their lusts or who wouldn’t recognize pearls of wisdom even were they dropped at their feet.

Interestingly, once we set aside the psychiatrist’s narrow, half-hearted teleology, we can see that despite the alphas' psychopathy, they too have a greater capacity for authenticity since like the omegas they’re not imprisoned by any social system. Whereas the omega’s freedom derives from her marginalization and by the higher-order thoughts that afflict and alienate her as she retreats inward in hyper-reflection, the alpha is liberated precisely by his amorality and transnational perspective. Not committed to any national ethos, not trapped in any rat race, but godlike in his command over the experiences he chooses to have, the alpha stands above and thus apart from mass society. As you might have gleaned, freedom isn’t necessarily a gift. We’re most free when we’re detached from everything else, including our home and loved ones, when we’re isolated and left to stew over some weighty decision we alone can shoulder the responsibility for. The homeless and the forgotten losers, the nomads and beatniks, the introverted artists paralyzed by sensitivity, the misfits and drifters and fools and freaks and itinerant monks and above all the outsiders—these are the freest creatures on earth and thus they alone are fully human in so far as our species is supposed to be populated by people rather than by animals or machines. And if the plutocrats and mob bosses and emperors and dictators are warped by their power and celebrity, they can be just as superhuman as the sage, regardless of the alpha’s insanity or evil. Alphas wouldn't be fully human in the biological sense, because of their limited capacity for complex emotions, as I said, but they might be psychologically superhuman, given their detachment from mass society and from its social roles and norms. In any case, there's no guarantee that our best representatives are especially clear-headed and benevolent; on the contrary, we may be afflicted with the leaders we deserve because those masters may develop our human potential to its terrifying endpoint.

In a founding myth of Western civilization, Yahweh said about Adam that he should have a helpmate, because it’s not good for man to be alone, and so Yahweh made Eve (Gen.2:18). But this myth was a rewriting of earlier, Sumerian stories that reflected our animistic past, when our ancestors perceived all of nature as being alive, and so instead of being bent on controlling natural mechanisms, the ancients assumed they could socialize with the world. As Daniel Dennett explains in Breaking the Spell, animism and theism were caused by the overuse of our instinct for relating to each other as minds. On the whole, the ancient animists were thus also more akin to childlike animals than to authentic, liberated and forlorn persons. Far from being rationally alienated from nature and society, the ancients projected social categories onto the whole world and so felt at home everywhere and under all circumstances. Animists would have abhorred the prospect of being alone, because their aptitude for socialization and personification, which Dennett calls the intentional stance, was hyperactive. But solitude is almost a precondition for freedom and thus for personhood. This is why the introvert’s inner life transcends the extrovert’s monkey-like preoccupation with making acquaintances and flirting and gossiping and the like; the introvert’s presence graces the animal kingdom with something new, something virtually supernatural, with a godlike being that can do what it alone likes. The price for this emergence of godhood—which is almost synonymous with personhood—may be mental disorder in the form of cognitive or emotional dysfunction, because an absolute, posthuman god would be tortured by the sovereignty that alienates it from everything else. But there’s a fate worse than not fitting into an irresponsible society, and that’s being the human animal or machine that depends on the delusions keeping that society afloat.   

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Clash of Worldviews: Free Will Edition

MODERATOR: Welcome to another edition of Clash of Worldviews, the show in which our guests cry out philosophical ideas in the wilderness. We’re joined this evening by biologist and determinist, Professor Sam Harrison Coyney, who believes free will is an illusion. Arguing against his position is Adam Garnett, noted liberal secular humanist and believer in the existence of human freedom. Professor Coyney, shall we begin with you? Tell us why you don’t think people are free.

COYNEY: Well, it’s obvious to those who understand the science. We think we’re free because we’re ignorant of all the causes of our actions that precede our apparent choices. Our so-called choices are forced on us by the prior physical state of the universe, and if you rewound the cosmic tape, as it were, we’d repeat exactly what nature forces us to do the first time. We’d have no choice in the matter. So the freedom to do other than what the laws of physics and the physical initial conditions compel us to do is the impossible miracle of one natural being’s act of negating all of physical reality. No one’s that powerful or transcendent. We’re stuck in nature, with no immaterial spirit inside us, so we’re forced to do what the universe causes us to do.

MODERATOR: Seems clear enough, Adam, no?

ADAM: No, I’m not free to destroy the universe, but I’m free to control myself a little. That’s because I have a brain. A rock does whatever the universe tells it to, because it can’t think about it and mull the options. Its weight will force it down a hill because it can’t do anything about gravity. But I can think about jumping even though gravity’s telling me to stay put. Also, people thought hard about how to fly and they built airplanes, so now we can go even further against that force of nature. Freedom comes from the brain, because the brain controls the rest of the body. A rock has no brain, so it’s not free.

COYNEY: No, no, no, Adam, you’re missing the point. You may think you’re free when you learn how nature works and exploit that knowledge in your behaviour, but your ability to learn is likewise the result of evolutionary processes which derive ultimately from chemical and physical regularities. The brain is blind to all of those prior causes, so it thinks the only relevant causes of its actions are those it seems to control, namely the mental ones such as its conscious thoughts and feelings. But mental states are themselves forced upon us by our past and by the environment which is governed by natural laws.

ADAM: I thought you said the lack of free will is obvious to those who understand the science.

COYNEY: Yes, that’s exactly what I said.

ADAM: So why are you talking about natural laws?

COYNEY: When you were younger, Adam, didn’t you sit in a science classroom and hear about how scientists discovered the laws that govern the universe?

ADAM: I did, but didn’t you once find yourself in an English class where you might have learned how a metaphor can become outdated? 

COYNEY: I’m not following you.

ADAM: If scientists find laws of nature, they also find God. Is that what you want to say?

COYNEY: Hardly! But there can be natural laws without God.

ADAM: Really? I thought a law is a rule that people come up with to govern society. Do natural laws come from God who decides how the universe should work?

COYNEY: No, they don’t.

ADAM: So do they come from the scientists who make them up?

COYNEY: Certainly not! Scientists discover the laws that govern the world and those laws would operate even if humans never evolved.

ADAM: Then how can the universe be governed if it has no governor?

COYNEY: You see, Adam…it’s just…well, really, if you think about it—

ADAM: I already have thought about it. You don’t know what a metaphor is because you’re a Philistine.

COYNEY: I don’t appreciate the personal attack.

ADAM: Who cares about that! If we’re robots like you say, your hurt feelings would be as silly as someone yelling on a street corner that God’s about to bring the world to an end. If you’re allowed to make fun of the religious delusion, we should be allowed to mock yours about what should or shouldn’t be done, since if we’re robots, morality is bunk.

COYNEY: Yes, well, you’re right about that. But the illusion of free will is itself forced on us as a survival mechanism, so it’s not easy for anyone to live in strict accordance with the deterministic worldview.

ADAM: You’ve mistaken the reality of self-control for the so-called illusion of free will. What may look unimportant from the grand physicist’s viewpoint that covers everything from atoms to galaxies is still real enough in our experience. Physical processes really did come together to produce the brain’s ability to control its body with the mind. That’s no illusion, but part of the very history of causes and effects that you say makes us unfree. Instead, it made us free by making us people rather than animals or stones.

COYNEY: The emergence of those biological and psychological phenomena is likewise an illusion. Natural reality is entirely physical, and physical events are necessitated by laws, forces, initial conditions, and the like.

ADAM: But we’ve already shown that you don’t know what you’re talking about when you talk about natural laws, right? So we can scratch those off the list.

COYNEY: Sorry, Adam, but Newton’s second law of motion, that force is equal to mass times acceleration, works regardless of whether you call it a metaphor.  

ADAM: Does it work like the average Joe who goes to work every morning and gets paid for it?

COYNEY: Excuse me?

ADAM: You said the law works. Who pays it to come to work?

COYNEY: It doesn’t work in that literal sense. It works in that physical things exert effort to obey the law.

ADAM: You mean stones and planets try hard to make the law true so they don’t get punished by God or Newton?

COYNEY: No, physical things perform work when they act effectively. There are causes and effects all around us.

ADAM: But the effects don’t have to follow, right? It’s not like physical things will be thrown in jail for breaking natural laws.

COYNEY: But they don’tbreak natural laws! That’s the point. They’re compelled to unfold as they do because there are forces that enter into relationships, as mapped out by the laws.

ADAM: No, they dobreak the laws all the time, because the universe is complicated. The laws don’t tell the whole story, but only what wouldhappen if conditions were simple enough to let the stated process unfold. Things are rarely so simple in the real world, outside the laboratory.

COYNEY: What’s your point, Adam? What has this to do with free will?

ADAM: Oh, it’s just that you rely on the outdated metaphorical meanings of scientific words to make it seem as if free will were impossible. You say things must unfold as they do because they’re “governed by laws,” but there’s no such necessity because there’s no governor or purposeful efforts in the nonliving parts of nature. Also, scientists now talk about how the subatomic events are just statistical and so not forced at all, so there’s no guarantee that the world would unfold the same way if the tape of the universe were rewound.

COYNEY: Rolling a die is also statistical, but even though we can’t predict which side will be face up, we know that however the roll turns out, it has to be that way because of the angles and the velocities involved in the act of rolling the object. It’s the same with the brain and with every interaction of particles. It’s all just causality, which leaves no room for human freedom.

ADAM: Yeah, it leaves room for self-control.

COYNEY: No, I’m afraid it doesn’t.

ADAM: Yeah, it does, because the physical explanation is incomplete, so to explain what people do we have to turn to less exact concepts such as those of the brain and the mind. And that’s where freedom as limited self-control comes in. Again, particles and stones don’t have brains so they have no selves and therefore no self-control. They have no defense against how the rest of the world impacts them. We do have a defense, because we can think before we act. That’s our freedom.

COYNEY: Again, natural reality is purely physical; all else is illusion. Moreover, whether we can explainhow our thoughts are determined by physical processes is neither here or there, since they can be so determined all the same.

ADAM: You mean you can know that we’re robots, without knowing how the programming works? Sounds like a leap of faith to me, in which case again it would be misleading to say your case is based on science. Your faith in all-embracing causality could be countered by religious faith in the power of immaterial spirits, and that would be a stalemate.

Also, when you talk of illusions, do you mean things like tigers and bears don’t really exist, but we’re just tricked into thinking they do, like how a magician tricks the audience into thinking he’s sawing a lady in half?

COYNEY: Sort of. Our ability to understand the world is very limited, so we resort to incomplete, misleading models to make sense of it all.

ADAM: And physics isn’t just one more such model?

COYNEY: No, physicists are approaching the Theory of Everything, which will be not merely useful but ultimately, finally true.

ADAM: And how will you make sense of that notion of Truth without talking about the meaning of what scientists say? Once you have meaning, you have something more than the physics, so you leave room for the mind and thus for self-control.

COYNEY: I’m not sure I follow you.

ADAM: Then I’ll lay it out for you: the ideal of ultimate scientific truth comes from Plato’s religious vision of the world as being made of mathematical and other rational relations, which is convenient since scientists speak the languages of math and logic. In that case the world can agree with our symbols, since the latter literally mirror the former. How, though, could the cosmos be mathematical without being rational? How could there be a rational order to events without an intelligent designer of nature? You like to laugh off the idea that scientists find God at the center of being. But once you avoid those problems by humbly admitting that science is pragmatic, you’re left with incomplete models or maps of the world, and so again you’ve no right to speak of necessary connections between natural events. I think David Hume showed that, like, centuries ago. 

Moreover, these incomplete maps would allow for our autonomy, because deterministic physics and the ordinary talk of people as being different from animals by virtue of the former's greater self-control would both count as models that have the mere practical merit of fulfilling certain purposes, as opposed to getting at The Truth. Pragmatists about knowledge are going to have a more liberal, inclusive ontology: if a model or a limited map works by helping us predict behaviour, organize our beliefs, and maintain a way of life, we'll defer to it until some better model comes along, one that may eliminate conflicts between models that are bound to crop up because of the patchwork nature of knowledge on this non-Platonic account.

COYNEY: All of that muddleheaded philosophy is merely wasting our time. Even if Hume were right, it wouldn’t make us free.

ADAM: Well, if causality isn’t a matter of necessary connections, there’s flexibility built into the world that could be exploited by intelligent creatures like us, a cosmic openness to possibilities that a mind could map with its thoughts and could creatively fulfill.

And it’s because you haven’t spent that time puzzling over things at the philosophical level that you’ve fallen for the sophomoric drivel of determinism—even after Newton’s clockwork physics has been superseded by relativity and quantum mechanics.

COYNEY: Listen, you’re still missing the point about causality. When you imagine you’re deciding whether to jump, that decision is an event in your brain. All events have causes and those causes are likewise events that have causes and so on until we can finally trace the causal chain to a point outside your head, whereupon we’ve shown that that choice is an illusion, since it’s caused ultimately by an external event over which you’ve no control.

ADAM: Yeah, so our self-control is limited, that’s all. We don’t get to choose the world in which we choose. So you’ve shown we’re not all-powerful, not that we have no self-control. We obviously do have some control over our mind and our mind has some control over our body, which in turn has some tiny control over the world. If I jump just because physical processes made possible the act of jumping, then my act wouldn’t be free. But what sort of explanation of the event would thatbe? I jump when I do because I was just then thinking of whether to jump and I decided that jumping as high as I could would be fun. You could leave out those details if you like, but then you’d be stuck with a weak explanation and so you couldn’t boast any longer that you’d have science on your side. You’d be pretending that physics can explain everything, but you couldn’t predict when or how people would jump, because you’d be talking about particles and gravity and other irrelevant things, and you wouldn’t even be entitled to the concept of jumping. Meanwhile, the rest of us would see the usefulness of the ordinary model of the self, and so we’d understand the difference between an action of a self-controlled person and the forced outcome of an objective system.

COYNEY: What you call self-control is just a series of events in your brain, but that series doesn’t begin there. Like I said, it traces back to the genes and the environment, so instead of being self-controlled, you’re a puppet that can’t see its strings.

ADAM: There are trillions of connections in the human brain. If you can trace them all across the billions of different brains that have each rewired themselves to suit their different experiences, to lawful events in the environment—which, by the way, is largely chaotic—or to physical events—which, by the way, are weirdly non-causal at the quantum level, then good luck to you. Show us the laws of cognitive science that allow you to predict what anyone would do under any circumstances, and your case against free will would indeed be scientific. Instead, everyone appears to behave differently, even under exactly the same conditions, depending on their character, experience, and culture, so it’s not likely a law of psychology would look anything like a much-less-flexible law of physics.

You might think it’s easy to come up with a psychological law: hand a starving person some food and she’ll eat it. But that law would apply to our animal body, not to our mind. We do eat and breathe and sleep along with the other animals, but we also turn our food into art or go on a hunger strike to kill ourselves for religious or political reasons. Where’s the law that fits that bizarre behaviour into the universe of physically trapped objects?

You say the environment controls what we do, just as forces like gravity control physical things. But there are zones in nature where the laws break down, like in a black hole or at the quantum level where Einstein’s theories don’t apply. Black holes and subatomic particles behave strangely, and in case you haven’t noticed, so do people. The brain is made of physical stuff, but that doesn’t mean its activities are natural in the sense of being normal for the universe we observe. Black holes literally gobble up nature and quantum events make a mockery of scientists’ mechanistic theories, the ones that are very good at explaining what larger clumps of matter can do. Why can’t the same be true for people? How are we not just as anomalous? We’re free because our brain isolates us from the rest of the world. Conscious awareness removes us from nature in that we’re the outcomes of those trillions of connections in the brain. You want to explain the mind as a puppet pulled by physical strings, thus ignoring the brain’s mysteries. That’s like explaining the heart of a black hole as just more clockwork, thus ignoring the event horizon that divides that heart from space and time.

COYNEY: You’re positing an immaterial spirit, but there’s no such thing. We’re natural beings, and everything in nature obeys laws.

ADAM: You’re still confused about natural laws. You think things “follow” laws because they’re “forced” to, but in that case they don’t willfully obey a governor. You need the forces to make the laws natural, but you need the obedient will and the governor to make them laws. That’s a hopeless mess.

COYNEY: Whatever! The brain doesn’t remove you from nature.

ADAM: So you don’t think the human experience is anomalous? That what we do isn’t just rare but downright strange, compared to the more commonplace effects of physical, chemical, or stellar processes?

COYNEY: We don’t yet entirely understand how we fit into the rest of nature. But it’s a safe bet the evolution of life isn’t any kind of tunneling to a point outside the universe, making us antithetical to natural being or giving us any supernatural power of choice.

ADAM: You can point to all the natural regularities as evidence against anything’s freedom, but I can point to the unnaturalness of everything we do that makes us people rather than animals. A black hole does oppose the universe, by devouring it, but it doesn’t do so freely. And subatomic particles oppose the scientific kind of explanation, by being nonlocal or non-mechanical, but again they have no freedom to do anything else. We’re both animals and people. We can choose to follow our instincts or our reason or conscience. We can choose to be one with nature or to oppose it, by learning how things happen and replacing the wild places with our machines and cities. The self-divided brain has the power to choose between those paths; it’s in those trillions of internal connections that divide us from the world.

COYNEY: That’s not what most people mean by “free will.” You’re redefining the word and moving the goalposts. Free will is supposed to consist in our sole responsibility for choosing between A and B, so that if we choose A but were faced with the same choice again, nothing outside us could stop us from changing our mind and choosing B. That’s the ability to be unforced by anything, and it’s a miracle so it’s impossible.

ADAM: Black hole singularities are miraculous, meaning unnatural, and they’re real. Quantum nonlocality is miraculous, but it’s real. Your old-fashioned prejudice for clockwork counts for nothing. Can you hear it? That’s the universe laughing at your presumptions.

Anyway, we have just that ordinary kind of freedom. We choose between A or B, to act like animals or like people. We make that basic choice all the time in many different contexts. If we choose A, our behaviour is biologically pretty straightforward. But if we choose B, we oppose nature with our rational planning, with our science and technology and religion and art and everything else. And nothing forces us to go one way rather than the other. We often believe there are gods that prefer that we choose B, but even if they exist they evidently don’t force us. There’s nothing natural or supernatural that compels us to regress or to progress, no natural laws that prevent us from transcending our wingless bodies and flying in airplanes or from bypassing natural selection through genetic engineering. You’re missing the wealth of evidence for free will because it’s hiding in plain sight: it’s not the inner feeling of being free when we choose, which could be an illusion, but the strangeness of our activities, the unnaturalness of the option to transcend our animal bodies and the rest of nature.

We don’t transcend them by being ghosts that literally fly to heaven when we die. Again, that’s a metaphor. We happen to be ghostlike in that we’re alienated as we stand between worlds, between the natural one that came before us and the artificial one we create. We’re ghostlike in that the mind that makes the fundamental choice to act like an animal or like a person is invisible and lost in limbo like the core of a black hole. We’re patterns in the trillions of connections in our brain, patterns of thoughts and feelings that can direct our bodies to steal, rape, or kill, or to investigate as scientists, build as engineers, withdraw as monks, or imagine as artists.

COYNEY: Face it, Adam: you’re a robot.

ADAM: No, you are!

MODERATOR: Ah, well, that’s all the time we have this evening. I’d like to thank our guests for their stimulating exchange. Stay tuned for advertisements produced by big businesses that bank on your behaving like robots. 

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Are Minds like Witches? The Catastrophe of Scientific Progress

Here's an article of mine that went up on Scott Bakker's blog. The article's called "Are Minds like Witches? The Catastrophe of Scientific Progress." It's about the full implications of thinking that the naive, quasi-dualistic conception of the human mind should be eliminated in favour of thinking that only material systems exist. Here are the article's first few paragraphs:

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As scientific knowledge has advanced over the centuries, informed people have come to learn that many traditional beliefs are woefully erroneous. There are no witches, ghosts, or disease-causing demons, for example. But are cognitive scientists currently on the verge of showing also that belief in the ordinarily-defined human self is likewise due to a colossal misunderstanding, that there are no such things as meaning, purpose, consciousness, or personal self-control? Will the assumption of personhood itself one day prove as ridiculous as the presumption that some audacious individuals can make a pact with the devil?

Progress and a World of Mechanisms

According to this radical interpretation of contemporary science, everything is natural and nature consists of causal relationships between material aggregates that form systems or mechanisms. The universe is thus like an enormous machine except that it has no intelligent designer or engineer. Atoms evolve into molecules, stars into planets, and at least one planet has evolved life on its surface. But living things are really just material objects with no special properties. The only efficacious or real property in nature, very generally speaking, is causality, and thus the real question is always just what something can do, given its material structure, initial conditions, and the laws of nature. As one of the villains of The Matrix Reloaded declares, “We are slaves to causality.” Thus, instead of there being peopleor conscious, autonomous minds who use symbols to think about things and to achieve their goals, there are only mechanisms, which is to say forces acting on complex assemblies of material components, causing the system to behave in one way rather than another. Just as the sun acts on the Earth’s water cycle, causing oceans to evaporate and thus forming clouds that eventually rain and return the water via snowmelt runoff and groundwater flow to the oceans, the environment acts on an animal’s senses, which send signals to its brain whereupon the brain outputs a more or less naturally selected response, depending on whether the genes exercise direct or indirect control over their host. Systems interacting with systems, as dictated by natural laws and probabilities—that’s all there is, according to this interpretation of science.

How, then, do myths form that get the facts so utterly wrong? Myths in the pejorative sense form as a result of natural illusions. Omniscience isn’t given to lowly mammals. To compensate for their being thrown into the world without due preparation, as a result of the world’s dreadful godlessness, some creatures may develop the survival strategy of being excessively curious, which drives them often to err on the side not of caution but of creativity. We track not just the patterns that lead us to food or shelter, but myriad other structures on the off-chance that they’re useful. And as we evolve more intelligence than wisdom, we creatively interpret these patterns, filling the blanks in our experience with placeholder notions that indicate both our underlying ignorance and our presumptuousness. In the case of witches, for example, we mistake some hapless individual’s introversion and foreignness for some evil complicity in suffering that’s actually due merely to bad luck and to nature’s heartlessness. Given enough bumbling and sanctimony, that lack of information about a shy foreigner results in the burning of a primate for allegedly being a witch. A suitably grotesque absurdity for our monstrously undead universe.

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The Irony of a Natural Afterlife

Is a natural afterlife possible? Answering this depends on what we mean by a person, since that which is traditionally supposed to survive the body’s death is the personal self, or more specifically the individual’s innermost self. Mystical traditions in the world’s religions identify that self with God, so that the afterlife is thought to be the “union” of an individual’s mind with the ultimate source of all minds. This is a euphemistic way of saying that in the afterlife we’re all destroyed as we realize that only God is real.

The Plausibility of a Natural Afterlife

In any case, most religions identify the self with a spirit, that is, an incorporeal substance. New Thought adherents attempt to explain this substance in terms of energy, vibrations or other such pseudoscientific notions, so that the self-help advice sold by leading members of that movement can appeal to a secular crowd (because that crowd has the most disposable income). If we assume the naturalistic, cognitive scientific picture of the self, though, this metaphysical dualism between mind/spirit and body looks as though it reifies higher-order thought. Reification is the concretization of something, such as treating a thought as though it were the same as that which only symbolizes it. In effect, Judaism’s ban on idolatry prohibits the reification of God, since the monotheist’s God isn’t supposed to be any particular being but the ground of all beings. Likewise, if the self is something sustained by the brain, the religious notion of the immaterial spirit is only a symbolization of that mostly hidden inner reality of consciousness flowing into particular thoughts and feelings. If we ask what the human brain does that distinguishes us from other species, the answer is that it thinks abstract thoughts. Those thoughts in turn allow us to use language and form meaningful social relationships and thus communities bound by cultures that include religious ideas; moreover, our abstract ideas can act as models or simplifications of our environments, which enable us to discover how natural processes work, to predict and to plan for events, and thus to technoscientifically control the wilderness by reshaping it according to our wants and needs.

The natural self, then, isn’t a thing that thinks abstract thoughts. To speak of a possessor of thoughts is to reify or to concretize the self, to mistake a symbol or other simplification, such as the Cartesian mental substance or the immaterial spirit, for the self’s reality. The human self isn’t identical even with the brain, as is clear from the computational, which is to say linguistic, aspect of thinking. Just as a computer program can be implemented in different devices, so too a pattern of thinking is multiply realizable. In any event, the person that we most wish to survive bodily death is just the stream of thoughts itself, including the appetites, fears, tastes, imaginings, fantasies, cogitations, and all the myriad other forms of thinking that make for the experience of being a human person. Some of these thoughts are more primitive or animalistic than others, but all are distinctly human to the extent that they have rich layers of meaning owing to their intellectual connections to background thoughts or worldviews that draw upon language and culture. For example, other species have appetites and fears, but animals lack personal selves if those mental states of theirs have only mechanical roles in causal relations as opposed to having higher meanings in a certain autonomous project, that being the creation of a coherent inner selfthrough practice in introversion. Each self is different because we have different patterns of mental activity owing to our distinguishing artistic judgments about what sort of person we want to be. We practice being one sort of person or another by feeding our impulses so that we accumulate peculiar assortments of mental habits which individuate us.

The question of an afterlife, therefore, is about whether a pattern of thinking can survive physical death. To some extent, this question was answered long ago by Plato who distinguished between biological afterlife through procreation and intellectual afterlife through the survival of ideas. Plato lives on, in part, because the survival of his texts sustains Platonism, the system of ideas that reflects some of his mental habits. But this isn’t the survival of the whole self, since most of Plato’s mental habits aren’t recorded in Platonism. As science fiction authors have speculated since the invention of the computer, the whole self may be immortal, after all, as long as a computer can implement the entire pattern of mental activity that comprises the inner self. A computer program can be copied and stored on multiple devices, greatly increasing its potential longevity; in addition, the program would be immune from biological degradation or from the vicissitudes of the cellular or animalistic life cycles. Simulating a mind would require being able to predict how a person would respond to any situation, by weighting each possible thought in terms of its probability given either some sense impression or another thought. For example, someone who works at a zoo may be more likely to think of elephants in superficially non-elephant-related situations, since she’s liable to interpret her experience in terms that she considers important on the basis of her experience. If she loves elephants, she’ll be in the habit of wondering about their inner life or about how our modern activities endanger them. Again, someone whose parents smoke and who takes up that habit herself will have a high probability of thinking of smoking a cigarette when faced with certain stresses. With enough study, such habits should be predictable, in which case we could map out the relations between our mental tendencies, which amounts to laying out the blueprint for reproducing the personal self in question.

Now, even if a futuristic supercomputer could compute these probabilities, you might think that implementing a program that duplicates a long-deceased person’s inner life would be impossible, because the data would have been lost: no one has studied the vast majority of people’s mental proclivities or discovered the key to preserving them by calculating the probabilities of their associated thoughts. Thus, an afterlife could be possible only for the future generations in which the requisite computers for simulating persons are combined with the technology for mapping out the relations between the person’s thoughts. But not so fast! The mapping technology is a red herring, because a futuristic supercomputer could theoretically bypass that tedious business by implementing all possible systems of mental association, thus reproducing the mental essence of our species. Mapping our mental potential would thus be akin to mapping our genome.

Would such a comprehensive computer program count as a potentially immortal afterlife for each person who ever lived? You might think it wouldn’t, because as John Locke said, that which is crucial to personal identity is memory, which connects earlier and later stages of ourselves despite whatever growth or other changes we may undergo. Suppose those computer programs, which instantiate all of our patterns of mental activity could likewise be implanted with memories of their former, embodied lives. How would the programmers know which body to assign to which mind or indeed which set of experiences to assign to each future, immortal self? This sort of afterlife would seem to require a simulation not just of every mind, but of the entire world of the past, complete with all the complexities of known history and the remembered events that provoke our reactions and thereby help to define our personality. Again, suppose the all-powerful computers of the distant future can achieve this stupendous feat of engineering, by simulating all possible worlds, thus mooting the simulators’ ignorance of how the past actually unfolded. One of those possible simulated worlds would be the right memories shared by future versions of everyone who ever actually lived, meaning memories that correspond to what actually happened, including the memory that the sky during the day was blue rather than green, that President Obama was African-American rather than Chinese, that your grandmother’s apple pie tasted better than her chocolate chip cookies, and so on.

Suppose, then, the simulated minds, existing as patterns of mental activity generated by superpowerful computer processors were equipped with memories of their former life and even of being transformed, as it were, into digital code. Would that be the right sort of afterlife? Not really, you might think, because the memories shouldn’t be merely implanted, but they should flow from physical continuity between the stages of the person’s development to make for a unified identity. Thus, when we sleep each night or get drunk or struck in a car accident, we lose consciousness and incur gaps in our memory. But we identify with the self that regains consciousness, because our body is intact. We integrate the memory loss in an explanation of how the gap occurred and we learn to live without complete information pertaining to ourselves. There would be no such physical continuity between, say, a person who dies in the fifth century CE and the simulation of that person’s mind that might occur five centuries from now. The person’s body will have rotted away. However, this too is something of a red herring, because the physical continuity between our earlier and later stages is superficial. Our childhood bodies are hardly similar to our adult ones and even the cells of our adult bodies frequently die and are replaced by new ones. This is why our skin can recover from cuts or bruises, for example, since skin heals itself by replacing the affected cells.

In any case, physical continuity is inessential. If the personal self consists of the mind that the body produces as a work of ideational art projected by the brain into psychological and social spaces, the transformation from embodied to simulated person might be compared with that between child and adult. The body changes drastically, but the self retains its identity as long as it can intellectually accommodate the transition in its worldview. For example, the simulated self might feel identical with its former, biological self by rationalizing the chasm between the rotted body in the earth and the mind’s resurrection in cyberspace. A child’s body is connected with its adult form because there are causal relations between the two. But as the Buddhist says, every event is interconnected with every other one. Perhaps, given chaos theory, quantum mechanics and the conservation of matter and energy, some of the molecules that form the body may tangentially impact the mass resurrection in the distant future. For example, the molecules might be recycled in the earth that eventually sustains a plant that provides oxygen to the software engineer that oversees the resurrection of the mind that once inhabited the body that used those molecules in its thumb. This may seem merely incidental, but there’s nothing magical about causal relations. The closer you look at the latter, the more ceteris paribus they seem, which means that even a causal relation has exceptions because the conditions that need to come together to produce the effect may be interfered with by events not modeled in the science that posits the causal relation. This is to say that even causal relations are contingent and messy. Whether a series of events counts as causally ordered depends, to some extent, on the theorist’s interests. The simulated mind might be disposed to identify with the self that originates its memories, in which case it will overlook the tenuous relation between its incarnations.

Moreover, even if the simulated self isn’t really a survival of the earlier one, because there’s no reliable connection between the two bodies (since the molecules of the decayed thumb wouldn’t tendto have the same effect in similar circumstances, which is to say their influence on the future programmer would be entirely coincidental), this metaphysical lack of identity might not be as important as the psychological integration. Just as the simulated mind might resort to a mystical perspective in which everything is united by its interdependence with everything else, so as to mitigate the strangeness of being an immortal computer program, we might each presently take a leap of faith that some form of us will survive our physical death due to the futuristic scenario. We do something similar each night, since the continuation of our physical body is secondary to what matters most to the self we want to preserve, that being the lack of interruption in our stream of thoughts. That stream is nevertheless interrupted whenever we enter delta sleep, so that in a sense our mental self dies thousands of times before our brain expires. Again, we feel comfortable with those periods of unconsciousness, because we understand them and confidently expect to overcome them each morning when we awake, having retained sufficient memories to preoccupy us and to preserve the integrity of the project of being ourselves.

Of course, we should be much more confident of awaking each morning than of being resurrected in the distant future thanks to staggering advances in computer technology, since the above futuristic scenario is speculative. But this is a difference of degree. According to Moore’s Law, we do know that, ignoring various factors, the number of transistors in a computer circuit doubles every two years. This law acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the prediction is one of the conditions that comes together to generate the advance in processing speed. Another such condition is that the societies that use the computers must be economically stable, whereas they might on the contrary suffer catastrophic blowback from Islamist terrorists, for example. In any case, we have some reason to be confident that the simulation of patterns of personal, mental activity will one day be feasible. Whether it actually happens is another matter, just as it’s possible you might die in your sleep.

The Existential Value of Artifacts

My point here, though, isn’t just to consider the likelihood of a natural afterlife. Rather, I’m interested in the relation between the near-universal religious anticipation of an afterlife and the technoscientific creation of personal life after physical death, given that the assumption of the latter is at least tenable. Suppose that technology affords our descendants more and more power over natural processes, so that because we’re natural beings, some such natural form of resurrection as I sketched above will one day be realized. In that case, we’re obliged to explain how the ancients foreshadowed an eventuality they couldn’t have imagined, because they had no conception of computers. One explanation we can dismiss is that the ancients would have ventured a mere lucky guess. More likely is the possibility that the ancient dream of immortality had some independent foundation and then the dream acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy, rather like how Moore’s Law figures in the business of researching and developing computers. The problem with this explanation, though, is that it would require scientists and engineers, who tend to be atheists or at least not particularly religious, to feel compelled to fulfill not just the supernaturalist’s agenda, but that of the ancients whom modernists tend to ignore because of their relative ignorance. (This is one of the distinguishing features between philosophy and science, for example, which is that philosophers are more interested in the history of their discipline than are scientists in the history of theirs.) Of course, most people don’t want to die, so those who are developing the technology that may one day end our mortality would be independently motivated to do so. But this leaves the mystery of how the ancients could have stumbled on a scenario that—while hopelessly mythologized and steeped in archaic symbolism (gods, spirits, heaven, divine judgment, and the like)—eerily presages a transformation that has some natural likelihood.

There’s apparently a mystery here because the ancients should have had no reason to expect to live forever. Death was all around them and their life expectancy was low. Medicine was in its infancy and the natural landscape, which was as lethal a place as it ever was, was much more prominent for the ancients than it is for moderns who are more sheltered. Most ancients had to hunt or farm to survive, so they must have been deeply familiar with the cycle of life. The seasons and the stars come and go, and we too perish albeit usually after renewing life in the act of procreation. Why, then, imagine that we might survive the evident destruction of our bodies? The ancients performed elaborate religious rituals to renew the seasons and to appease the gods, but this only raises the further question of how they could have been so audacious as to have dealt with their understandable terror of death by personifying all of nature—including the carcass of each deceased person who was thought to have passed on to another world.

If the question is why they would have hoped they could live forever, the answer is obvious: virtually no one wants to die and indeed our personal nonbeing is unthinkable to us. We can imagine and even long for the death of our enemies, but the thought of the world ceasing to flow through our senses or of our final breath, heartbeat or rumination is utterly repugnant. Our loathing of our inevitable death is evidently one of the means by which we struggle to survive despite that fate, having been genetically built to serve as vessels for the immortal genetic code. And since the ancients likewise distinguished themselves from the other animals by their higher-order intellectual functions, they would have prized their inner life and reified the abstract nature of their mind. After all, we don’t sense a mind in the way we sense everything outside our body, since our main senses all point outward. Apparently lacking physical features, then, the mind, meaning consciousness and the abilities to think and feel, might have seemed immune to natural changes, including death. Conceived of as a spiritual, which is to say supernatural body, the inner self was readily interpreted as immortal.

The mystery is solved, then, if we posit a fear of death common to the ancients and to the future resurrectionists. Most of us don’t want to die and the inner self seems metaphysically different from the transient phenomena we outwardly sense. But this isn’t the real conundrum. The deeper question is why the fulfillment of our natural desire for immortality should be physically permissible. Why would it be technically feasible to acquit the prehistoric and universal longing to live forever? Maybe the potential for immortality through the likes of computer simulation was always present and we merely got historically lucky in hitting upon the means to achieve our species’ most profound goal. But there are other relations between the desire for immortality and the technological fulfillment of it that go unnoticed when we focus on the absurdity of the supernatural form of eternal life. To conceive of the inner self as effectively a ghost is to confess that you’re lost in a childish daydream. Most of what children say is false, strictly speaking, but that’s irrelevant to the effects of childhood creativity, one of which is to distract their impressionable minds from the world’s grim indifference to their nakedly selfish preoccupations. Children are largely helpless, but their mythopoeic projection of fantasy and personhood onto impersonal natural processes insulates them and delays the horror that’s the birthright of all existentially upstanding individuals. Ancient religions acted as virtual reality filters that postponed our species’ reckoning with the existential facts that we alone are the gods we dreamed of and that no one else will rescue us from our instinctive fear of the dark which informs our fear of death. The inner self’s spirituality is only an illusion caused by our inherent ignorance of the brain, owing to the fact that we’re evolutionarily geared towards learning about the outer environment. Thus, there is no heavenly refuge from brutal nature.

The ancient virtual reality systems of Christianity, Islam, and the rest lost their charm in the West after the Black Death, the Protestant challenge to Catholicism, the Renaissance and the Age of Reason. And again the epistemic status of modern substitute myths may be secondary to their function. Now the problem isn’t an excess of childish naivety, as in the ancient animistic mindset that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality and between subject and object; instead, we hypermodernists are faced with an excess of knowledge that alienates us from the real world while simultaneously depriving us of our species’ trusty escape mechanism, which is the supernaturalist’s virtual reality generator. Not only must we face the world’s godlessness and amorality, but we’re unable to reenter the childish mode of ignoring nature’s palpable alienness and inhumanity and of pretending or “having faith” that the works of our imagination are as real as the physical world that mindlessly assaults our senses. We cope with this existential crisis by applying our scientific knowledge in such a way that we ironically vindicate our childish yearnings: we engineer artificial worlds that are indeed as real as nature and that embed the morality and spirituality in physical systems, whereas the ancients imagined that those normative properties have always been present. The functions of our devices incorporate our intentions so that any purely physical explanation of their operations is incomplete. This is to say that whereas the animists could only have acted as if the universe is magically full of life, or could only have psychotically believed as much, we emerging technoscientific masters of the cosmos transmogrify and enchant the landscape so that the gods and their heavenly abode can actually be brought into being—in us and in our artificial worlds. We are all wizards and our magic is the personalization of impersonal, prehumanized natural phenomena, the imbuing of lifeless processes with our mentality, the vivification of the undead god.

The Irony of Promethean Defiance

The irony of all of this is telling. Put bluntly, the natural world humiliates the supernaturalist by meeting her religious fantasies with a harsh reality that won’t be denied. To avenge the ancients and thus our species’ childhood phase which we profess to have outgrown but which we jaded hypermodernists are nostalgic about, we apply our enlightenment, which is our clearer vision of natural reality, by way of fulfilling those very childish expectations of all-powerful gods, eternal life, and the timelessness of cultural categories such as morality. For example, we engineer a means by which our thought and thus our inner selves might persist after our body’s decomposition. Whereas nature humbled our naïve ancestors by differing wildly from their cherished but fanciful ontologies, we gods confound that world by replacing it with another—and not just with any other, but with the very world that would have comforted our childlike ancestors. True, ironically we are the higher powers we prayed to and sacrificed livestock for, but the functionalization of natural processes, the injection of human intentions and thus ideals into our technological creations brings heaven to earth, albeit only within tragic limits since even the superpowerful computers of the distant future wouldn’t likely last forever. Still, as Zoroastrianism and the subsequent monotheistic faiths proclaim, heaven is a place in which the old world that includes natural evils of embodiment passes away. If technology one day conquers death, whether through artificial intelligence or cloning or some other means, that will meet a necessary condition of creating the heaven that was once just a naïve daydream and an escapist fantasy.

This historical fulfillment of our childish longings fulfills the criterion that the most profound philosophical truth must at least be embarrassingly ironic. There is no occult correlation between symbols and facts; in so far as symbols such as words or thoughts are treated as bearers of semantic significance, as reaching out and touching what they’re about, these symbols are effectively vestiges of magical thinking. Meaning is real, but only in the aesthetic sense. Symbols are meaningful as works of art that express our urge to magically enchant the undead wilderness. And yet the most artistically significant use of symbols amounts to so much ironic graffiti on nature’s hide. The irony in question is that we do the opposite of what we intend, which is to say that the exoteric, outer meaning in culture tends to be undercut by an esoteric, inner meaning. Consumers take themselves to be happy imbibers of useful commodities, selfish calculators of the hedonic value of various means of satisfying their whims, whereas they’re magicians whose spells have backfired so that instead of enchanting nature with their artifices, the postmodern habitat has trained them to be as gullible and pliant as children.

Artists themselves, from writers to actors to painters and musicians, usually lose their humility or their daemonic inspiration sometime after their work attracts a sizeable following (see, for example, the film director Neill Blomkamp’s downward slide from District 9). The power of fame corrupts even those engaged in the fundamental human pastime, which is that of creativity. First we create ourselves and then we create our worlds which in turn mold the unenlightened masses. Art is absolutely everywhere. Natural elements and regularities which comprise the undead god are divine because they’re supremely creative, but their art which evolves throughout the universe is grotesque rather than sublime because the artist in question is paradigmatically monstrous (mindless but strangely active and ordered). The artifacts left behind by organisms are likewise aesthetic and the ultimate such works have promethean, satanic significance in the existential struggle of the confined, tortured creatures who must define themselves in relation to the unimaginably vast and hideously complex monster they inhabit.

The irony here is twofold in that we’re both greater and lesser than we seem. All sentient beings have the heroic potential for satanic, tragic rebellion against the undead god; indeed, personhood is liberation from the prison of robotic causality and the retreat to an autonomous inner world of arguments, interpretations, visions, feelings, and the like which eventually horrify the person as they enlighten her and which inspire her to take creative matters into her hands. But a person is also ultimately a plaything of monstrous nature. In so far as we behave as predictable, unoriginal animals, as nameless “masses” in the pejorative sense, we still have the potential for enlightenment, and the irony of that reversal is magical in that it’s utterly anomalous (virtually miraculous). And when the enlightened philosopher-artist thwarts the undead god with originality, with a break from the natural program, whether through grim humour or the enlightening of others, or when she succumbs to temptation or is corrupted by the power she earns by her success in her public endeavours, she’s betrayed by her footing in the decaying belly of our maker. Even our greatest art is ultimately for naught and we rarely achieve even that goal of temporarily interrupting the natural decay with the side project in which we pursue our humanity (our wizardly, satanic struggle against the most divine being).

Art is everywhere, but irony, being an indicator of relative creativity (artificiality), is rare and precious. Ironic reversals in which we achieve the opposite of what’s expected and natural are profound revealers of our natural god’s weakness. Nature’s omnipotence lies in its actualization of everything that’s possible in space and time, among other dimensions. The mindlessness inherent in that lack of discrimination entails—somewhere and at some time—the creation of intelligent creators (persons) who may eventually understand their existential situation and respond with valiant reengineering projects. So what looks like a childish theistic daydream of the spirit’s immortality must be overcome along with wild nature: to live forever we must enchant the world, using technology to build the heaven of our imagining, but we must also outgrow the mythopoeic mindset and afflict ourselves with the curse of reason. The posthuman immortals occupying the simulated world in cyberspace would be as divine as the mythical gods of yore, and yet while they’d be greater in that they’d be real rather than fictive, they’d also have a right to be embarrassed by their point of origin: science and technology, the triumphs of modern reason would have as their esoteric, existential significance their utility in a daring uprising which would be simultaneously a pitiful capitulation to a childish, fearful, egoistic yearning for endless life.

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