Bill Maher and Donald Trump

Bill Maher gave an unexpected report of his dinner with Donald Trump. The president, according to the comedian, was gracious, warm, undogmatic, and quite different from the person we see all the time on television. Bill seemed to think the real Donald was the one he had dinner with not the one we see on the screen—that person is a kind of act, a part Trump plays, not the real man. An alternative theory, suggested by one of Bill’s guests, is that the fake Trump is the one Maher had dinner with, a part he played in order to get on the comedian’s good side. These are both possible theories: Erving Goffman would point out that people present different selves all the time. But both are rather puzzling to the expert psychologist, because neither is easy to believe. Could it be true that the crude, self-aggrandizing, vengeful, vicious self we see on the TV is just an act—a calculated performance at variance with the real man? He is really a kindly, intelligent, generous, altruistic, modest man. The question would then be why he chooses to project the repellent self he appears to be—does he really believe his nasty fake self is more likely to win votes? Also, wouldn’t this make him a superlative actor, rivaling Brando or De Niro? So genuine, so convincing! On the other hand, if he was acting at the dinner, it is surprising he got away with it, because Bill Maher is no fool: how did he manage to suppress his true self so effectively? True, he only had to do it for a couple of hours, unlike the self he projects publicly, but still pretty impressive. What is the truth of the matter?

I think that neither hypothesis is correct, or both are. Trump is a Goffman man, a Goff-man. He adopts whatever persona he thinks his audience desires, the better to suit his purposes. Both personas are available to him and he slides easily from one to the other. He is, as they say, a chameleon of the self. There is no real self just a series of passing selves. This is why he is so addicted to audiences, their size and composition. That is as real as it gets for him. Tough guy, nice guy, harsh voice, soft voice. The immaculate suit and curated hair—his socially presented self. Everything is presentation, image, appearance. The closest we ever get to the real Donald Trump is in his tweets—this is his true self in action. It is rife with self-deception and grievance, bluster and threat. It is not entirely sane. Trump is an actor to the core. His buildings with TRUMP written on them are his attempt to create a solid self. He has no deep beliefs, no fixed values, no passions. Maher saw one of his selves; his family sees others; the world sees yet others. He sees the void within.

On Knowledge, Consciousness, and Philosophy

Some philosophers have maintained that the proper subject of philosophy is thought. The idea is not wide of the mark (better than the thesis that philosophy is about language), but it is surely a mischaracterization. For it can hardly be true that philosophy is concerned with false thought, or incoherent thought, or unjustified thought. Putting it in terms of belief, we don’t want to say that philosophy is concerned with false unjustified incoherent beliefs as well as true justified coherent beliefs. It is much better to say it is concerned with knowledge—thoughts or beliefs that are true and justified (and anything else knowledge requires). Philosophy seeks knowledge of knowledge: it investigates human knowledge (it can’t very well investigate Martian knowledge). Humans have knowledge, or so we think, and philosophy wants to know about this knowledge. What does it want to know? It wants to know the correct analysis of knowledge, the varieties of knowledge, the scope and limits of knowledge, the possibility of knowledge. Thus, we have traditional enquiries into the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge, a priori and a posteriori knowledge, knowing-that and knowing-how, what we can know and can’t know, whether anything can really be known, etc. According to this conception, philosophy is primarily epistemology—that is its starting-point, its methodology, its sine qua non. If philosophy is the love of knowledge (“philo-sophia”), it is primarily occupied with knowledge. Not solely occupied, to be sure, since it is also interested in right and wrong, the nature of beauty, the physical world, the mind, and other matters; but knowledge is its original concern, where it begins. Even in those other areas, it may be said, we still have to do with knowledge—knowledge of right and wrong, knowledge of beauty, etc. We must look to our knowledge of reality first in order to discern whereof we know—we can’t study what we don’t know! We must examine our epistemic scheme, the components of that scheme (“concepts”), its expression in language, its macro and micro architecture, its basis in the brain, its place in human life. Even if we were convinced that meaning is the key to philosophical truth, we must concede that it is our knowledge of meaning that really concerns us—how we understand language. Historically, this has always been so: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc. One way or another they were all concerned with human knowledge: its basis, structure, analysis, possibility. Thus, there is a good deal of truth in the epistemological conception of the nature of philosophy. It was never really a “turn” because it was always the heart of the subject; what varied were opinions on the best way to study human knowledge—by formal logic, conceptual analysis, psychological science, phenomenology, linguistic behavior, or the brain. Epistemology is foundational, according to this view.

You might wonder how consciousness fits into this picture. Philosophy is interested in consciousness, but we don’t normally think of consciousness studies as a branch of epistemology. Consciousness is about subjectivity not objectivity, about subjective “feel”; it is something inner not externally directed. What has pain got to do with knowledge, or seeing red, or the smell of a rose? Experiencing qualia is not the same as knowing that the earth moves or that water is H2O. But this betrays an unduly narrow conception of the nature of knowledge. For we have not only propositional knowledge but acquaintance-based knowledge—the kind that comes from direct conscious experience.[1] When you consciously see red you know what red is; similarly for pain and the smell of rose. Consciousness and knowing go inextricably together. You can’t be conscious of X without knowing X. You have knowledge by conscious acquaintance. Indeed, this kind of knowledge is arguably the kind of knowledge on which all (or most) other knowledge depends: it all traces back to episodes of knowing consciousness. In fact, this feature of consciousness is recorded in dictionary definitions of the term “conscious”, as in “aware of and responding to one’s surroundings” and “having knowledge of something” (OED). The word derives from the Latin “conscius” meaning “knowing with others or in oneself”. Consciousness has information built into it; it isn’t epistemically neutral or empty. You learn something by being conscious—you become epistemically enriched. Even in the case of pain, you learn what it is like to feel pain—you come to know what pain is. This is a substantial piece of knowledge (valuable information) not available to those who feel no pain. There is a lot a zombie doesn’t know; indeed, it is not clear that a zombie knowsanything (it may behave as if it knows). A conscious state is both subjective and informationally rich, a source of knowledge. In consciousness we know ourselves qua conscious subjects. Consciousness is a way of knowing (there are other ways, unconsciously). To feel pain is to know pain. It is not an accident that philosophers have spoken of ‘sense data”: the noun indicates a type of information, a thing known. The subjective is also epistemic.

This conception of consciousness puts a new twist on old problems. Is consciousness epiphenomenal? Well, it is a vehicle of knowledge, and knowledge is not in general epiphenomenal. The conscious being knows things the unconscious being doesn’t know, and he can act on this knowledge. He doesn’t just have a mysterious glow that leads to nothing. If you know what pain is, you know to avoid it. The knowledge in question presumably has a neural correlate that affects how the brain behaves, as any type of knowledge does. Second, we can now re-frame the mind-body problem as it concerns consciousness: how does the brain contrive to generate knowledge-by-acquaintance? It doesn’t just generate what-it’s-likeness; it generates a cognitive state, viz. knowing what it’s like—something true and justified. How can brains (neurons) know such things? Can there be an identity theory of consciousness-knowledge? When I know what red is by experiencing it, what in my brain can form the intelligible basis of this knowledge? How can neural impulses add up to knowledge by acquaintance? The mind-body problem is thus partly a problem about knowledge—about how knowledge is possible in a physical organism. It isn’t just about “feelings” untethered from anything else—phenomenological danglers, as it were. It is about knowledge in a full-blooded sense. Third, there is the problem of other minds: how do I know what knowledge other people have? If I don’t know whether they feel pain, I don’t know whether they know what pain is. This doesn’t make the problem any easier (or harder), but it does indicate that it has an extra dimension—I can’t know another person’s state of knowledge. I don’t know what you know, as well as what you feel. Fourth, the question of the biological function of consciousness acquires a new wrinkle: what is the biological function of knowledge by acquaintance? Why is it in the genes’ interest to endow us with knowledge by acquaintance? It must have some purpose or else it wouldn’t be there, but its purpose is something of a mystery. Why is it biologically advantageous to know what pain is (we already know the biological value of pain itself)? Do all animals that feel pain know what it is? Is knowledge of what pain is adaptive or could animals do just as well without it?[2]

[1] The locus classicus here is Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy (1912). He doesn’t, however, make a fuss of the fact that consciousness is essential to knowledge by acquaintance: we can’t have the latter without the former. Thus, acquaintance knowledge inherits the puzzles and peculiarities of consciousness. It is one of the powers of consciousness. Here philosophy of mind and epistemology join up.

[2] It is an interesting fact that our philosophical talk of consciousness leans on emotional talk more than cognitive talk: we say that consciousness is what feels a certain way (what it’s like is what it feels like). We haven’t taken to describing it in epistemic terms—as what carries information, data, insight. To be in a particular conscious state is to have a certain kind of insight: bats have insights we don’t have; they know things we don’t know. I am morally certain this is useful information to have, but it isn’t easy to say that this usefulness consists in.

A Problem About Mysteries

What is the natural history of mystery? When did human beings first feel a sense of mystery, and what mystery came first? We don’t know, but presumably there is a fact of the matter. Is there a logical order here—with mysteries ranked according to their subject matter? So, consider a time before the sense of mystery had ever dawned (I assume animals have never had this sense, but I may be wrong). What prompted the first human to think, “Hmm, that’s pretty mysterious”? And what did he mean by “mystery”? He had faced problems before—things he needed to figure out, to solve: how to make a tool for cutting, how to shelter from the rain, what to do about his troublesome neighbor. He knew he could answer these questions with time and concentration, as he had done with so many questions before. But when did he first feel that some question was quite beyond him, that he had no idea what the answer might be? Children might be thought to go through a similar experience today, only they can always ask an adult. I think the natural order is as follows: first the stars; then his own body; then the origin of life; then the nature of matter, then the nature of mind.  He goes about his terrestrial business, his eyes firmly before him, or pointing down: this is what he has to deal with on a daily basis—food, safety, potential mates. His eyes are keen and informative in these respects. But occasionally he looks up, seeing the sun during the day and the stars at night (especially the moon). “What are they?”, he wonders. No clue is provided by what surrounds him here on earth; he is seeing a different order of nature. He waxes religious, mythological, supernatural. He is in the presence of mystery. He knows he can’t travel to where the stars are and have a look; he feels condemned to ignorance. Even the village elders confess themselves baffled, and they know stuff!

Then he begins to ask questions about his own body, something very close to home. It is with him always, but what is its nature—what is it like inside, how does it do what it does? He eats and defecates, but what is the connection—might the one be the other in altered form? What about his reproductive organs and their connection with babies? What is blood, why does he sometimes feel a beating in his chest, why does he fall ill? All quite mysterious. He would like to know, but he has no obvious way of finding out (cutting up corpses is not to his taste). The distant sky is a mystery, but so is his proximate body. It feels surprising to him that his body is a mystery, given that it is what he is—he thinks, “I am a mystery”. These reflections on his body make him wonder about other bodies: he knows babies come from them, human and animal, so he knows they have origins, causes. But where did the adult bodies come from? From other bodies, evidently—but how far back does this go? Puzzling. Again, he waxes religious and mythological. It is a mystery where life comes from, calling for extravagant speculation.

That’s three perceived mysteries, all quite manifest, not requiring much theoretical ratiocination. But they lead to more abstract questions. He is very familiar with material things, though he may not use this concept, and he is familiar with their composition and observable properties. But, he wonders, what is matter—what is matter made of? About any piece of matter, you can ask what is it made of. No obvious answer comes to mind, and no empirical procedure suggests itself (he is starting to think fancy thoughts like this). He wonders if material things are all made of the same kind of stuff, or some subset of the full plurality. He is thinking about the mystery of matter in general. Again, the village elders are no help (they advise him to put his mind to more practical things).

We might imagine now a long gap in our man’s mystery journey—he thinks he has the ground covered with the four basic mysteries already listed (the stars, the body, life, and matter). But after a while a new question occurs to him: what about his own mind? At first, he simply assumed he knew all about it—it was more transparent than his body. He knows what is inside his mind! But then he starts to wonder about memory: where do his ideas go when he isn’t thinking about them? He sometimes forgets things, but not always—where do his “memories” exist? Memory is pretty mysterious, he concludes. Then he moves on to perception, thought, and emotion; he is troubled by inchoate questions. By this time, he has learned a bit about the body, so he wonders if the mind and body have any connection. The mind-body problem takes shape in his mind, culminating perhaps in a sense of mystery about consciousness—the thing closest to himself.

His sense of mystery has moved from the distant stars, to his own body, to life and matter, to his own inner nature as a conscious being. We can suppose that at this point there is still no science to speak of, so the mysteries retain their full depth; but it will turn out that some of these mysteries can be solved, or at least mitigated. In any case, these are the five stages of mystery natural history; and they have shaped the development of human thought. Perhaps the most impressive result has been the solution of the first great mystery—the mystery of the stars—which has set the standard for mystery resolution, rightly or wrongly. Don’t we tend to think that what has been done for the stars can be done in all the other cases? Consciousness awaits its Copernicus.[1]

[1] I haven’t discussed the question of how early man came to have the power to recognize mystery when he sees it. What cognitive preconditions made this possible? Did it require language or metacognition or a primitive epistemology? I really don’t know. It does seem like a basic fact about our apprehension of nature.

Evil and Plasticity

It used to be held, with some vehemence, that what is bad or evil in human behavior is derived from our “animal nature”: aggression, uncontrolled sexuality, greed, lack of personal hygiene. We must not give in to our animal tendencies; we must cultivate something called “civilization”. We must “rise above” animal instinct in order to achieve virtue and avoid evil. Religion was supposed to help us perform this feat. We have a bad part and a good part, coinciding with the instinctive and animal as opposed to the civilized and rational. Nowadays this view is less common in enlightened circles: animals are really not that bad (not that animal), so we need not negate our animal self in order to be decent upstanding individuals. What I am going to suggest, on the contrary, is that our evil tendencies belong to our civilized side, specifically our mental plasticity (to use the trendy term). We are evil because we are plastic (flexible, innovative, intellectually free; the OED gives “easily shaped or molded”). We are not wholly governed by our genes; we can learn, change, and adapt. Thus it is that we can become victims of propaganda, conspiracy theories, political ideologies, cults, and sheer nonsense. Our instincts tie us to the tried and true; our plastic minds enable us to be shaped by the new, the false, the wacky. What leads to evil, especially the political kind, is credulity and susceptibility to fantasy—our excessive “intelligence”. Animals don’t believe conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, and crazy cults; they stick to the basic facts of life. But we humans, because of our mental plasticity, succumb to the wildest ideas, and proceed to act on them. Genocides are fueled by ingenious falsehoods and sophistical rhetoric—they thrive on human receptivity. We are not commendably closed-minded like animals; we are culpably open-minded. We stand apart from animals cognitively, and this makes us stand apart from them morally; we are capable of far worse than them. Our thoughts are creative, labile, nimble; and they interact with our emotions to produce vicious attitudes and actions. Evil is the result of cognitive flexibility and emotional manipulation (try manipulating the emotions of a cat or tortoise!). We are evil because we are not genetically hardwired—because we are (partly) blank slates. We are all too suggestible, impressionable, pliable. The cost of our great intellectual and artistic achievements is a proneness to political evil (I am not talking about simple theft and the like). We are too educable, too ready to absorb what we are told. Our minds are like ordinary plastic: warm it up a bit and it is putty in people’s hands (including our own). Plasticity leads to persuasion. Have you noticed that animals are never stupid in the way humans are? They don’t have the necessary plasticity. But humans can believe the stupidest things at the drop of a hat, because they are easily mentally molded. We are stupid because we are clever—quick learners. It isn’t fixed animal instinct but openness to influence that makes us capable of evil.

But why are we so plastic? What makes this possible? I believe the chief culprit is language, because language changed the fundamental dynamics of the human mind. First, we have to be able to learn our spoken language—a prodigious feat of elastic knowledge acquisition. We do it as children—the time we are at our most mentally shapeable (it’s just formless goo in there).[1] Whatever the language is, we absorb it without difficulty (some humans can even speak Finnish). But second, the language capacity is itself massively plastic; it is capable of amazing feats of unbounded creativity. We don’t just say what our genes tell us to (as with non-human “languages”); we construct indefinitely many novel sentences and understand them perfectly. We are that plastic—that creative, unconstrained. Our minds team with linguistic possibilities. Just think of the cognitive revolution this must have required: not just plodding re-enactments of ancient genetic instructions but brand new mental and physical performances. The mind came to have enormous creative potential; it could assume infinitely many internal configurations. Speech represents unlimited cognitive plasticity; it isn’t just a limited series of pre-programmed noises. Language requires cognitive elasticity on a grand scale; it is what lifted the mind to a high level of processing capacity. Thus: we are plastic because we speak; and we are evil because we are plastic; therefore, we are evil because we speak. Evil of the political-religious kind is an offshoot of the evolution of language. The freedom inherent in language is what leads to the freedom inherent in evil—the ability to conjure persecutory ideologies. Animals don’t have this kind of mental freedom because they don’t speak, but we speak and in consequence have the mental machinery to generate evil world-views. I speak; therefore, I am (capable of) evil. Of course, other factors come into play, particularly affective, but the basic enabling mental machinery is derived from our linguistic capacities. Animals have neither, so they remain essentially gene-controlled, i.e., instinct-bound. The creative evil of Iago, say, is bound up with his verbal ingenuity: he could not be so evil without it.[2] The holocaust would not be possible without the persuasive and creative powers of language: it must be possible for minds to be shaped by linguistic inputs that trade on their plasticity. And the more fanciful the better: for the human mind can accept virtually any degree of absurdity (language has absurdity built into it). Sense and nonsense go together. If humans had never developed language, the cognitive pre-conditions of political evil would not be satisfied. Fascism presupposes cognitive plasticity. Fascism isn’t an instinct that exists without benefit of language; it is made possible by language. An unforeseen side-effect, no doubt, but then evolution has never been good at anticipating undesirable side-effects. Sense perception alone could never produce it, even conjoined with memory and emotion, because perception is not plastic; it is reflexive and instinctual, stimulus-bound. Evil acts come from evil thoughts; and evil thoughts arise because the mind is flexible enough to entertain them. The hypothesis, then, is that this flexibility owes its origin to language—that which most clearly distinguishes us from other animals. Not the grammar of language, to be sure, but its high degree of plastic variation—all those languages, all those sentences. These are not written into the genes and are not present by instinct; they issue from a remarkably flexible capacity coupled with great powers of learning and productivity. Evil arises not from our animalistic side but from our intellectual-linguistic human side.[3]

[1] I am not here endorsing a blank slate model of the language capacity—I don’t doubt that the grammar of human languages is innately specified. I am making the obvious point that the particular language a child learns is not innately given; this is what requires cognitive plasticity. Similarly, novel utterances depend on prior fixed rules, but which utterances are produced is not antecedently given—it is “free”. Spoken language is really a combination of the fixed and innate, on the one hand, and the free and acquired, on the other: stiff, inelastic, and rigid versus soft, elastic, and bendable.

[2] I talk about Iago and the evil character in general in my Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (1997).

[3] The cure for evil is not then suppression or repression of instincts but education of the intellect (the “soul”). The mind has to be trained to curb its enthusiasm—critical thinking, in a word. This is actually an optimistic view, because instincts are hard to control but the mind is susceptible to re-education; thus, the mind’s plasticity can be used to cure the ill effects of that plasticity. This isn’t easy, but it can in principle be done.