Human Contingency

There are two views about the existence of humans on this planet: one view says that human existence was inevitable, a natural culmination, just a matter of time; the other view says that human existence is an accident, an unpredictable anomaly, just a matter of luck (I am discounting theological ideas). I can think of myself as the kind of being whose existence was built into the mechanism of evolution, or I can think of myself as a bizarre aberration of evolution. The first view is often defended (or found natural) because evolution is thought to produce superiority, and we are superior—the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. Evolution is conceived as a process that tends towards superior intelligence, and we are the most intelligent creatures of all. The second view notes that our kind of intelligence is unique in the animal kingdom and therefore hardly a prerequisite for evolutionary success; indeed some of the most successful animals as judged by biological criteria are the least intelligent (bacteria do pretty well for themselves). Big brains are biologically costly and can be hazardous, hardly the sine qua non of survival and reproductive success. I hold to the second view of the evolutionary process (which is standard among evolutionary biologists) but I won’t try to defend it here; my aim is rather to adduce some considerations that support the view that human existence (and human success) are highly contingent in quite specific ways—we really are a complete anomaly, an extremely improbable biological phenomenon. It is a miracle that we are here at all (though a natural miracle). We might easily not have existed.

            First, there are no other mammals like us on the planet: upright, bipedal, ground dwelling. Most land animals are quadrupeds (with the obvious exception of birds, whose forelimbs are wings, and who spend a lot of time in the air), and that body plan makes perfect sense given the demands of terrestrial locomotion. Our body plan, by contrast, makes little sense and no other species has followed us down this evolutionary path. Even our closest relatives don’t go around on their hind legs all the time existing in all manner of environments (are there any apes that live on the open plains or in the arctic?). There is no evolutionary convergence of traits here, as with eyes or a means of communication. Natural selection has not favored our bipedal wandering in other species (contrast the vastly many species of quadruped). This is by no means the natural and predictable mode of locomotion and posture that evolution homes in on. It is strange and unnatural (and fraught) not somehow logical or design-optimal. No sensible god would design his favorite species this way—unbalanced, top-heavy, swollen of head. (Note how slow even our fastest runners are compared to many other mammalian species.) Nor does evolution seem to have a penchant for large ingenious brains; it prefers compact efficient brains that stick to the point.  Whatever the reason for these characteristics, it is not that our bodily design is a biological engineer’s dream: evolution has not all along been dying to get this design instantiated in its proudest achievement (as if expecting huge applause from the evolutionary judges of the universe—“And the first prize goes to…”).  Cats, yes, who have been a long time in the making; but hardly humans, who arrived on the scene only yesterday and never looked the part to begin with.

            Second, imagine what would happen if you drove gibbons down from the trees. Up there they are well adjusted, at home, finely tuned, grasping and swinging; but down on the ground they would be miserably out of place, athletically talentless, scarcely able to survive. Indeed, they would not survive—they would go rapidly extinct. They evolved to live in the trees not on the ground, and you can take a gibbon out of a tree but you can’t take a tree out of a gibbon. Yet we (or our ancestors) were driven down from the trees and forced to survive in alien territory, subject to terrifying predators, cut off from our natural food supply, poorly designed to deal with life on level ground. We should have gone extinct, but by some amazing accident we didn’t—something saved us from quick extinction (and it is possible to tell a plausible story about this). Descending from the trees is not something built into the evolutionary trajectory of tree-dwelling animals, as if it is a natural promotion or development, life on the ground being somehow preferable, like a fancy neighborhood and upward mobility. That’s why other species have not followed us—those gibbons are still happily up there, as they have been for millions of years. Our descent and eventual success was not a natural progression but a regression that happened to pan out against all odds. It could easily not have happened. There is certainly no general evolutionary trend that favors animals that make the descent—which is why birds haven’t abandoned their aerial life-style and taken up residence on the ground. There is no biological analogue of gravity causing animals to cling to the earth’s surface. That we made a go of it is more a reason for astonishment than confident confirmation.

            Third, and perhaps most telling of all, the other evolutionary experiments in our line have not met with conspicuous success. We are the only one left standing (literally). We now know there were many hominid species in addition to the branch called Sapiens, which flourished (if that is the word) for a while, but they are all now extinct—things just didn’t work out for them. And it’s not like the dinosaurs where a massive catastrophe caused the extinction (of them as well as innumerable other species); no, these hominid species went extinct for more local and mundane reasons—they just couldn’t cut it in the evolutionary struggle. They just weren’t made of the right stuff, sadly. Slow, ungainly, unprotected, weak—they simply didn’t have what it takes. Yet we, amazingly, are still here: we made it through the wilderness despite the obstacles and our lack of equipment. How did we do it? That’s an interesting question, but the point I want to make here is that it is remarkable that we did—no other comparable species managed it. Evolution experimented with the hominid line and it didn’t work out too well in general (most mammal species living at the time of our early hominid relatives are still robustly around), but somehow we managed to beat the odds. We look like a bad idea made good—here by the skin of our teeth. The characteristics that set our extinct relatives apart from other animals did not prove advantageous in the long run, but by some miracle the Sapiens branch won out—we did what they could not. And we didn’t just survive; we dominated. Not only are we still here; we are here in huge numbers, everywhere, pushing other species around, the top of the pile. We have unprecedented power over other animals and indeed over the planet. But this is not because evolution came up with a product (the bipedal brainy animals descended for the trees) that had success written into its genes–most such animals fell by the wayside, with only us marching triumphantly forward. And notice how recently our dominance came about: we weren’t the alpha species for a very long time, a sudden success story once our innate talent shone forth; instead we scraped and struggled for many thousands of years before we started to bloom—the proverbial late developers. None of it was predictable: only in hindsight do we look like the evolutionary success we have turned out to be. Anyone paying a visit to the planet before and after our improbable rise would exclaim, “I never saw that one coming!” You could safely predict the continuing success of cats and elephants, sparrows and centipedes, given their track record; but the spectacular success of those weedy two-footed creatures seems like pure serendipity. You would have expected them to be extinct long ago! You would want to inquire into the reasons for their unlikely success, looking again at their distinguishing characteristics (language, imagination, a tendency to congregate, dangling hands). These characteristics turned out to be a lot more potent than anyone could have predicted. Certainly there is no general trend in evolution favoring animals designed this way. It is not as if being driven from one’s natural habitat and being made to start over is a recipe for biological success.

            For these reasons, then, the existence and success of homo sapiens was not a foregone conclusion, a mere natural unfolding. It was vastly improbable and entirely accidental. It was like making a car from old bits of wood and newspapers that ends up winning the Grand Prix.  [1]

Colin McGinn             

  [1] This essay recurs to themes explored in my Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity (MIT Press, 2015). Of course, there is an enormous literature dealing with these themes. I think there is room for a type of writing about them that emphasizes the human significance of the scientific facts (one of the jobs of philosophy). It matters to us whether we are an accident or a preordained crescendo.

Good Works, Bad People

What should we do about people who do bad things but produce good works of art? What about a child-molesting composer, say? Should his works be banned? The question is not simple and I shall work up to an answer by considering some thought experiments.

            Suppose a man, call him Bill, has produced distinguished musical compositions but is guilty of unsavory and unethical conduct (theft, pedophilia, defamation, what have you). His nefarious deeds were unknown while his musical fame grew; he became extremely popular and admired. Then his bad behavior is revealed (we can suppose that there is no doubt about this). Boycotts are urged. There isn’t any question of rewarding him for his evil ways for the simple reason that he has been dead for ten years, but still some people feel that his work is now tainted and that it would be wrong to play his music, even in private. In fact there was always something funny about Bill, which is brought to light in the midst of the controversy: Bill had a split brain! He was born that way—separate non-communicating hemispheres. Indeed, inside Bill there lurked two distinct selves, one in the left-brain, and the other in the right. And, stranger still, it was the left-brain self that committed the crimes not the right brain self—that self was innocent of all wrongdoing. True, these two selves had the same name, the same birth certificate, and so on, but they were two different individuals sharing the same body. The person who composed that marvelous music was not identical to the person who committed those horrific crimes, despite appearances. Doesn’t that change the situation? We can’t hold the musical individual responsible for the misdeeds of the non-musical individual! So there is no ground for a boycott after all: the composer did none of the things his evil cohabiting self did. The works came from one source, the misdeeds from another.

            Now consider a person, call him Jack, with multiple personality disorder: he contains several distinct selves. When one self is uppermost Jack paints beautiful pictures; when other selves emerge wicked actions result. Should Jack’s paintings be banned or destroyed? Wouldn’t that be blaming one self for the actions of another? Jack can do nothing about which self has control at any given time, and each self is a genuinely distinct individual—so it would be hard lines to punish one of these selves for the misbehavior of the others. Think Jekyll and Hyde: should we refuse to teach the medical findings of Dr. Jekyll just because of the terrible things Mr. Hyde got up to? Again, that presupposes an identity of source, which fails in the present instance. You can’t blame X for what Y did. Given that Jack’s good self produced outstanding works of art, surely we don’t want to deprive ourselves of them just because of his unfortunate association with other unethical persons (over which he has no control). What if everybody was like this? We all go through a bad phase in which we do bad things, but then we get beyond it and turn into model citizens. Maybe a remnant of our earlier bad self survives in our mature good self, but we no longer act in those bad old ways. We each have some pretty nasty skeletons in the closet, but thankfully we grow out of all that to produce worthwhile work. Should we all be banned and boycotted? Wouldn’t that be manifestly unjust and leave us with nothing good to do with our time, culturally speaking? That old self is ancient history, of no relevance to what we are now, so it has no role in creating our good works. The good works don’t come from the same place as the earlier bad actions (we shudder to think of them now).

            Next we have Jill, a world-famous moral philosopher: not only are her works intellectually distinguished, she is also highly regarded morally. She lives a blameless life (outwardly) and dies a celebrated thinker and writer. However, unknown to everybody, Jill had a truly vile imagination: it was a cesspool in there—murder, torture, perversion, you name it. Her dreams were unspeakable and her daily imaginings disgusting. But she kept this secret fantasy life to herself—wise, because if her associates knew about it they wouldn’t want to go near her. Soon after her death, however, Jill’s dairies are discovered and they contain ample evidence of her deranged imagination, so skillfully kept under wraps during her lifetime (though people were sometimes disconcerted by a wicked look in her eye while daydreaming). Now we are made privy to her inner life and we find ourselves repelled. Should we ban Jill’s books and take down her plaque? We should certainly accept the modification in her image that the revelations indicate, but what about the work? It bears no mark of her horrible imagination, stemming from a quite different place in her psyche—the place of reason not fantasy. So we are not endorsing her imaginative excesses by applauding her intellectual productions—these are separate spheres of Jill’s mind. Her atrociousness was localized to her imagination and didn’t spill over into other aspects of her life. If we want to get technical about it, we could say that her intellectual mental module was distinct from her imaginative mental module. Jill had different aspects to her mind that functioned separately, so we shouldn’t pin on one what properly belongs to the other. Intellectually, she was exemplary; imaginatively, she was a monster.  We should not conflate one part of her mind with another part.

            Here is another kind of case: a popular singer, Paul, is secretly an active pedophile. He is an icon of popular culture, his music much loved. He dies and his pedophilia is exposed. Should we say that his music module was separate from his erotic module as a way to preserve his musical legacy? But suppose that, in the light of the new revelations, several songs once regarded as innocent can now be interpreted (correctly) as expressions of pedophilia—so that’s what he was talking about! Should those songs be banned? I think we are inclined to say yes, because those songs tap into his unsavory immoral side: they can no longer be listened to in the same spirit, and enjoying them endorses their repugnant content. Here the work comes from the same place as the bad part of the person: the lyrics directly reflect the emotions and activities that characterized Paul’s secret life. Similarly, if Jill’s fantasy life incorporated anti-Semitic tropes, which found their way into her published works, those works should be boycotted. That is, we are inclined to treat cases differently according as they separate or connect the good and the bad: if the work is insulated from the author’s bad character, we are okay with it; but if the bad character feeds into the work, we are far less tolerant. Call this the insulation principle: then we can say that works should be banned (boycotted, frowned upon  [1]) if and only if they are not insulated from the badness of the person producing them. That principle is clearly reflected in cases of numerically distinct persons, as with Bill and Jack, but it also applies to single persons and their multiple faculties, as with Jill and her evil imagination. Paul is the test case because here we stipulated that the insulation principle is violated. The very trait that constitutes Paul’s badness contributes to the works in question. But when there is insulation we have grounds for leniency. To put it differently: persons are not simple unitary entities but complex assemblies of traits and faculties; and a work can result from one of these and not the others. We can endorse some of a person’s traits without endorsing all of them. Since everyone has some bad traits, this allows us to preserve their meritorious works, because we are not thereby showing any toleration for what is bad in a person. If we are inclined to accept multiple selves as the correct account of so-called personal identity, this becomes a lot more straightforward—all the interesting cases then approximate to the cases of Bill and Jack. At any rate, there is always a question about who created what: the self that created the great work may be distinct from the other selves that constitute what I refer to as “me”. Thus ethics connects with metaphysics: you can only be blamed for things that you do, not some prior self or simultaneous self existing alongside the self at issue. If Paul actually had two selves, an artistic self and an erotic self, then the productions of the former self would be insulated from the bad actions of the latter self. Hence we should not prohibit his works because of his dirty deeds, because they weren’t really his. But if Paul has one self that simultaneously writes songs covertly about child sex and indulges in it, then the right response is to let disapprobation fall on the songs as well as the person. Expressions of evil inherit the evil of what they express, and the same person is doing both.

            In actual real-world cases there will no doubt be difficulties, empirical and conceptual, as to a person’s guilt and its implications for his or her work; but the general principle that we must keep in mind is that if the work is separable from the heinous aspects of the person whose work it is, then it is not in general a good idea to ban that work. By all means boycott work that is intrinsically unethical, or which springs directly from unethical traits, but don’t extend this principle to work that stems from some source other than the bad traits in question. A person may have good parts and bad parts, and his or her work may partake purely of the good parts. No one should have their work judged by their worst traits, but only by the traits that generated it.  [2]

  [1] I am trying to avoid the question of legal prohibition because that raises questions of free speech; for my purposes here we can limit ourselves to self-policing, i.e. what you allow yourself to consume.

  [2] I have not attempted to adjudicate the numerous actual cases in which the issue comes up; that would require considerable factual knowledge of the details of such cases. I have restricted myself to teasing out the general principles that should guide our judgment, by considering hypothetical cases in which the facts are clear.

Forms of Analysis

Since Plato inaugurated conceptual analysis a certain pattern has recurred. His first stab at an analysis of knowledge broke it down into two parts: truth and belief. To know something you had to believe it and it had to be true. Neither element alone was sufficient (though both were necessary) but the conjunction of them added up to knowledge. We have a kind of conceptual equation: x plus y equals z. But then he noticed that this simple combination wasn’t enough for knowledge; it needed an extra ingredient. For it is possible to have true beliefs that aren’t knowledge, as when you accidentally hit on the truth. So he added a further element: justification. Now knowledge is a triadic concept: x plus y plus j equals z. The sufficiency of this was in turn questioned, but let us stop here for the moment. We could say that Plato discovered that truth and belief had to be coordinated in some way in order to add up to knowledge: you have to believe the truth justifiably (rationally, non-accidentally, for adequate reasons, reliably, etc.). Truth and belief had to be suitably connected not just exist side by side—you must have the belief because of the truth in order to have knowledge. Instead of belief and truth, we need belief because truth. Knowledge breaks into two parts, but the parts don’t just sit there separately; they meld in some way. Knowledge is the kind of belief that results from truth. Thus a structure emerged: the concept breaks into two basic parts joined in a certain way, where this way features as an extra ingredient added to the basic ones. Knowledge is not a simple thing, but it is not a serial thing either; it is a composite thing—parts coordinated. 

            This structure is not confined to knowledge. What is perception? It consists of two parts: experience and object. In order to see an object you have to have an experience (a “sense-datum”) and the experience must be veridical, i.e. there is a suitable object answering to it. You seem to see a table and there is a real table in front of you: neither is sufficient for seeing but if you combine them the upshot is seeing. There are two sides to seeing, as there are two sides to knowing–an internal side and an external side, a subjective side and an objective side. Seeing is a two-factor state, as we can see from conceptually analyzing it. But on further examination we see that seeing must be more than that, because these two conditions are not sufficient for seeing: there needs to be some connection between experience and object; they can’t just be accidentally joined, as when you hallucinate a table but there happens to be a table just where you seem to see one. Thus it becomes natural to require that the two elements be causally connected: the object has to cause the experience. Again, this triadic analysis itself runs into problems of sufficiency, but let’s not be detained by that: what we must note is that perception breaks into two parts and the parts must be properly coordinated. Perception is experience because of object. There is an internal side and an external side, along with a relation of dependence. The form is: x because of y equals z. This is beginning to sound like a kind of law of conceptual analysis—a recurrent pattern. And further inquiry confirms that diagnosis: for the same thing is true of memory. To remember a past event is to have both a memory impression and for the past to be a certain way: neither alone is sufficient for remembering but together we get memory. Mind and world supply the necessary ingredients–internal and external, subjective and objective. But again, the two elements cannot merely be conjoined, since you don’t remember something simply because you have a memory impression of it and it actually occurred—that could be so and yet you have completely forgotten the past event (the memory impression has some other source). You have to have the impression because of the past event (if you have it because someone randomly stimulates your brain, you don’t really remember). Once again, the concept has the form: x because of y equals z. Memory impression because of past event equals memory. Again, problems of sufficiency can be produced, but we won’t go into that. What we can say is that we now have three important concepts whose analysis follows the same pattern—quite an impressive record for the enterprise of conceptual analysis. Our putative law, in brief, then is this: Epistemic concepts break into two coordinated parts. Their analysis has the form: x because of y equals z, where x is subjective (internal) and y is objective (external).

            Emboldened by this result we might wonder whether other concepts follow the same pattern. In the history of the subject this claim has not been ventured, but I propose to extend the pattern into other areas of the mind. First, and somewhat familiar, there is the concept of action: an action consists of an internal component and an external component, both necessary and (on the face of it) sufficient. To perform an action it is necessary (a) to will it and (b) for a bodily movement to occur, as when I open a car door. I don’t open the door if I merely will it and my body doesn’t move, and similarly if my body causes the door to open but not because of any decision or intention of mine (a sudden spasm, say). Action is willing plus moving—subjective and objective, inner and outer. The concept bifurcates into two. But again, these conditions need to be augmented to deal with a familiar problem, namely that both elements could occur and yet I don’t act. What if I decide to open the door and my body is caused to open it by some accidental event? Then we can’t say that I opened the door: I performed no action, though I tried to and my body did what I was trying to do (because of some random outside stimulus). Again, the cure for this is to require that the agent’s body moved because of the internal willing: the willing has to cause the moving. Now the causation is going from inner to outer instead of outer to inner, but the structure is the same: x because of y equals z. Moving because of willing equals acting. Again, there are going to be problems of sufficiency (deviant causal chains and so on), but we won’t worry about that here. The important point is that yet another concept falls under our generalization: the concept of acting emerges as a composite concept consisting of two elements, internal and external, joined by a coordinating factor. The mere conjunction of the two elements is never enough; we always need to add the extra ingredient. Is this perhaps the general form of psychological concepts? That would be an interesting discovery in conceptual science, would it not?

            One might suppose that it could not be the general form of psychological concepts: for consider belief itself. Is that concept triadic in the way described? Where are the two elements here, and what might coordinate them? We now venture into virgin territory, but not without some prior preparation. Here is an analysis of belief with respectable credentials: For a subject X to believe that p is for X to stand in a certain relation R to a sentence s and for s to mean that p. Intuitively, the subject assents to a sentence in the language of thought that means the content of his belief. For me to believe that the sky is blue is for me to internally assent to the sentence “the sky is blue” (or some synonym) and for that sentence to mean that the sky is blue. Thus belief is assent plus meaning: it is assenting to sentences with propositional content. These are two distinct conceptual elements that together add up to the concept of belief (we are supposing). One is psychological; the other is semantic. If you assented to a meaningless sentence, that would not be a belief, while the mere fact of a sentence meaning something confers no beliefs on anyone. Belief requires both things. But now comes the big question: do we need in addition a coordination condition? Is the mere conjunction enough? That would spoil our generalization (though not entirely), so we anxiously inquire whether our law can be preserved in this case. I think it can be preserved, happily, because the conjunction is not enough, and in a familiar way: you could assent to a sentence that means that p without thereby believing that p because you might not know what that sentence means. Suppose you are in a foreign country and hear the natives talking: you might accept what they are saying as true, and their sentences certainly have meaning, but you don’t know what they mean, and hence don’t believe what they say. You have to accept what they say because of what the sentences mean, not merely because the speakers look like a reliable bunch. You have to understand the sentences, not merely assent to them independently of understanding them. So the conjunction of assent and meaning is not enough.

But what if the sentence occurs in your very own language of thought? Here we must wax more recherche: suppose you have a psychological disability that prevents you from understanding the sentences coded into your genes, yet you have a credulous tendency to assent to these sentences anyway (maybe you think they wouldn’t occur in your mind if they were false, given the ways of natural selection). The sentences have meaning (inherited from your ancestors) but you don’t grasp this meaning—yet you blithely and blindly assent. If that were possible, this would be a case in which assent to sentences in your own language of thought would not suffice for having the corresponding belief; and conceptually there is clearly daylight here. What is needed to plug the gap is that your understanding of these sentences should play a role in your assent to them: that is, your assent must be because of their meaning (among other things). The two factors can’t just operate independently; they must be connected in the right way. Maybe we will find ingenious counterexamples even when this extra condition is added, but again that is not to the point—we have uncovered the same basic pattern in the case of belief too (given the suggested analysis of belief). Belief is assent because of meaning, to put it simply. (This means, of course, that the two-factor concept of knowledge embeds the two-factor concept of belief; or three-factor if we include the coordinating condition.) Belief might have struck us initially as logically simple, but upon analysis we see that it exhibits the same kind of structure that Plato long ago uncovered in the concept of knowledge (it only took us two thousand years). There are two parts to the concept, psychological and semantic, and a condition on their combination; put together we have the composite whole that is the concept of belief (and belief itself). Perhaps we reach conceptual bedrock with the concept of assent, or perhaps not, but there seem to be many ordinary psychological concepts that break down in the way described.    [1] Just to have a grand label for our would-be law, let us call it “The Law of Coordinated Duality”, or more colloquially “The Mixed Doubles Law”. It is a law about how psychological concepts are constituted (or some of them), which is to say how the mind is constituted.

            What about purely mental actions? Bodily actions divide neatly into two, inner and outer, but what about actions that go on entirely within the mind? Again, we need to get imaginative if we are to discern a comparable structure. Consider mental calculation—calculating in the head. Since this is an action, it is willed—you intend to perform a certain calculation and proceed to do it. But there is also the event of calculation: symbols going through your mind. Someone observing these processes could use them to arrive at the same result you arrive at. So there is a willing and an execution of this willing. You perform the mental act of calculation if both things go on; thus mental action has the same fundamental structure as bodily action. But could there be a case in which the two elements are not properly connected, so that it is false that the person did the calculation? Imagine an alien scientist who uses your brain as a calculator: he punches in questions and recruits your brain circuits to perform calculations, thus sparing himself the trouble of doing them himself. From the inside you experience symbols passing through your consciousness, but no feeling of willing the process to occur. You feel, as we say, alienated from the calculation, because the alien is willing it not you (compare his causing mental images in your mind against your will). A calculation was occurring in your consciousness, but it wasn’t an action of yours. This is the analogue of the externally imposed bodily movement of opening the car door. Now suppose we add to this scenario your willing to do the calculation, but this willing is not the cause of calculation itself—the cause is still the alien. Intuitively, you still didn’t do the calculation: you willed it and it was done, but you didn’t do it. It just so happened that the alien caused the calculation immediately after you willed it yourself. The two together don’t add to your doing mental arithmetic—the calculation wasn’t your action. What is missing, obviously, is that the calculating didn’t occur because of your willing it, but because of the alien. So we need to amend the simple two-factor account by adding that the mental event of calculation was caused by the mental event of willing it. Calculation because of willing equals performing the mental act of calculating. Suppose that the calculation would not have occurred if the alien had lost interest in it, despite the fact that you willed it (maybe your brain’s executive functions are down); then you wouldn’t have done any actual calculating. Adding the alien-caused calculation doesn’t change this; you still didn’t perform the calculation. So again we have the two-factor analysis supplemented with a coordination condition. If you perform a calculation partly in your head and partly on paper, this result is more intuitively obvious, because now we can clearly separate the two side of the action: logically, inner calculating is just like outer calculating. It’s mixed doubles in the head.

            Finally, we reach the hardest case: having an experience. Does this break down into two separable components coordinated together? It may not; it may just be primitive (something has to be). At first sight two logically separable elements may be discerned: the experience and the having of it. To have an experience e is for eto exist and for you to have e. Experiencing is an experience and the having of it. But in this case there seems no logical gap between the experience and the having of it: one entails the other. There is no separating the components, as there is in all the other cases. However, consider this strange scenario: your brain is hooked up to someone else’s brain in such a way that when he has an experience you automatically do, irrespective of what else is happening in your mental life (you know this is the set-up). For example, you have an experience as of a green truck because this other guy sees a green truck (you are at home lying in bed and think, “Oh boy, here we go again!”). The experience occurred in your consciousness but was it your experience? One wants to say that it was his experience intruding on your consciousness; you endured it but you didn’t have it—it didn’t belong to you. That may sound wrong, because you certainly were the subject of an experience as of a green truck, but the question is whether it was your experience. The case is rather like possession: you are the subject of experiences that belong to the possessing demon, but it doesn’t follow that these experiences are (experienced as) yours—they are the demon’s experiences occurring in you. If it is logically possible for someone else’s experience to occur in you, then we have a possible case in which the experience occurs in you but isn’t had by you in the relevant sense. That would be the logical analogue of truth without belief or object without percept or past event without memory or bodily movement without willing or mental calculation without mental calculating. Conceivably the mind of a baby is like this: experiences occur in its consciousness, but we can’t say that it has the experiences, perhaps because a self has not yet fully formed. So there could be experience without the possessing relation holding between it and the subject.    [2] Conceptually, it looks as if there is a logical chink here separating an experience occurring and its being possessed by a subject. No doubt this is all very obscure and difficult to pin down, but there is some sense of the kind of structural duality I have discerned. In any case, the matter is worth considering further if we are to determine how far our law of analysis extends. It is possible that the same basic conceptual architecture exists in this case but that it differs in significant ways from case to case. That would certainly be an interesting finding of conceptual science—a kind of structural universal found across a wide range of psychological concepts. Knowledge would then not be a unique case but simply one instance of something much more general. Two factors in combination would be a general feature of mental life.

Colin McGinn     
  

    [1] We might say that members of this family of concepts have the same body-plan, to borrow a term from biology—the same architecture, the same geometry.

    [2] Could the possessing relation exist without the experience? That would be the logical analogue of belief without fact or percept without object, and so on. It seems hard to make sense of, since it would be the mind shorn of all experience. But maybe it does correspond to some sort of psychological reality in that the mind presumably has a pre-existing capacity to host experiences of different kinds—something like a blank slate. Whether it could exist in a state of pure possessing without anything possessed is hard to contemplate, but conceptually it seems like a distinction exists here. There is the experience and there is the fact that I have it.

Father Time

I liked it best when only I existed. That was a simpler time, a purer time. Good times. I stretched out to infinity in both directions with no beginning and no end. Nothing troubled me; nothing disturbed my peace. Moments, epochs, and eons—these were my units. Oh, I was beautiful! I passed the time silently and serenely–uniform, measured. I was not a god, but I was the next best thing. I was perfection, even if I say so myself.

            Then space arrived on the scene—from whence I cannot say. Space with all its size as far as the eye can see (no eye can see me). It boasts of its extension, its sheer volume. To me space is obese. It’s the sheer vulgarity of space that bothers me–so attention grabbing, so full of its own importance. And so pointlessly static: it just hangs there without forward movement, going nowhere. I am ceaselessly active; space is passive to the point of indolence. Unemployed. Why should I have to share reality with such an aimless emptiness?

            As if that wasn’t bad enough, space made something else possible—matter. Matter boasts extension too, but it also boasts solidity. Solidity I say! That made collision possible, smashing and clashing. The thuds in the night were terrible. Matter would cruise about space, on the prowl for who knows what, and then bash into other bits of matter, shattering and destroying. Pure anarchy. Matter always seemed to be itching for a fight, and it was noisy. Ugly too—all chunk and hunk. And with a horrible deadness, like so much congealed space past its sell-by date. Its main interest seems to be preventing other bits of matter occupying its location.  Above all, it wouldn’t leave me alone and in peace: material events kept happening, and for that matter needed my assistance. Things happened inme, through me—and without so much as a by your leave. Where’s the respect?

            But that wasn’t the end of it—oh no. Next life came along, and with it mind. Before long there were intelligent conscious beings. I wasn’t so opposed to consciousness as such—it reminded me of myself—but I took exception to some of its so-called ideas. These finite little specks insisted on trying to describe and understand reality—matter, space, and time. They weren’t so far off the mark with the first two—nothing too challenging there—but with me they were at a complete loss. No idea! They attempted to measure me: to take my measure. They compared me to a river—a river. They invented clocks, as if a mechanical device could do justice to my sublime nature. Clocks, with their ticks and tocks, their breakdowns, their lifeless flat faces: they are not as I am. I am nothing like a clock. But in their puny little minds they reduced me to clocks. Some even maintained that nothing could be true of me that was not true of clocks. There were those who declared me relative, and questioned my simultaneity. But I am all about simultaneity! I stand magnificently apart from space and matter; my nature has nothing to do with theirs. Nor is light a guide to my nature (though I have nothing against light—it is quick). But this is a subject too painful to consider—and beneath my dignity. Suffice it to say that the callow and callous beings that demeaned me thus are not worthy of a moment of my time.

Anyway I have to share reality with space, matter, and consciousness, spoiling the view, polluting the atmosphere. No doubt they think they add value to reality, but to me they are just so much litter and dirt. Life was so much sweeter before—before the barbarians broke down the gates. I have one hope and I believe this hope will come to fruition: all this chaos is temporary. It will soon be over. Tranquility will return. The days of conscious beings are clearly numbered, because matter is not cooperative. And matter too is by no means secure: once it was not and it could easily revert to nothing. Even space is not woven into the basic fabric of reality—not as I am. I have all the time in the world. I can wait. Reality will one day be mine again, for all eternity.