What is it Like to be a Paper Clip?

What is it Like to be a Paper Clip?

I know what it’s like to be me, because I experience it directly every day. I also know what it’s like to be you, more or less, because I know you are psychologically similar to me. I even know what it’s like to be a bat in that a bat is a sentient being like me, though not one similar to me in every respect. I know roughly what it’s like to be any sentient being in so far as they are all sentient, because I know what sentience is—what it’s like to be sentient. All sentient beings have this sentience in common. I know the mode of existence of sentient beings because I am one. Granted I don’t know all the details, but I grasp the big picture—being aware things, not being completely in the dark, sensing and feeling. But what about insentient beings—do I know what it’s like to be them? Do I know what it’s like to be a paper clip?[1] It’s like nothing, of course, so do I know what it’s like to be aware of nothing? I do not. I don’t know what it’s like to be a non-conscious being, since I have no experience of it—I have no experience of having no experience. I don’t know what it’s like to be phenomenologically empty, null and void, non-existent. I can’t imagine it. I can’t put myself in that position—me as a non-conscious being. I don’t know what it is like to exist as a paper clip; that is radically alien to me—much more so than bats or Martians. I am ignorant of the “life” of the lifeless. I know what is involved in the existence of a sentient being because I am one and I know it, but I don’t know what is involved in the existence of an insentient being—I can’t imagine that. If the paper clip were itself conscious, equipped with suitable perceptions and feelings, then I would be able to imagine it—the feeling of gripping a sheaf of paper, the desire to take a rest. But given that a paper clip feels nothing, there is nothing for me to imagine, except total blankness—less than that, not even the sensation of emptiness. Just nothing at all. I can’t imagine existing like that. So, there is something I know about conscious beings that I don’t know about non-conscious beings, namely what it is like (what it is) to exist as them. I don’t know what it’s like for there to be nothing it’s like. To that extent inanimate objects are a mystery to me—I don’t grasp their mode of existence as I grasp the mode of existence of living conscious beings. Paper clips are an enigma to me, as are mountains, planets, region of space, numbers, etc. I know what they do, what they are made of, and how they come to exist; but I don’t know the vital thing—what it’s like to be them. Because there is nothing it’s like for me to imagine. Moreover, it is the same for all inanimate objects: it is the same for a paper clip as for a mountain—just homogeneous emptiness. There is nothing pullulating inside them, only their outer reality. I gaze at them and think, “How boring, how pointless, how meaningless, how empty!” I cannot adopt their point of view, because they have no point of view; they exist in a kind of existential void, which is quite alien to me. I can’t get my mind around their mode of being-in-the-world.

Suppose we lived in a world of sentient beings and only sentient beings (like Berkeley’s world). Then we would understand everything in this world: we would know the nature of every object’s existence (assuming enough mental similarity). There would be nothing there is nothing it’s like to be. We would be omniscient with respect to existence. Now suppose we introduce into this idyllic world a collection of insentient objects: our omniscience would be dealt a serious blow—for now there are objects we can’t know as we know the objects existing hitherto. We can’t put ourselves in their position imaginatively; they are cyphers to us. They just sit there, heedless, blank, uncaring. Life and death mean nothing to them. We find them quite baffling—totally alien. But this is basically our world: we comprehend our own nature as conscious beings, and the nature of other conscious beings, but we don’t comprehend the nature of non-conscious beings. They are just too unlike us, too unlike the consciousness we know so well. In short: we don’t understand the physical world—not fully, not as we understand ourselves and each other.[2] Thus, from an epistemological point of view, other minds are more accessible to us than other bodies (or our own body). We know minds better than we know bodies. Souls are easier for us to understand than paper clips. I know the bat’s fundamental conscious nature better than I know a paper clip’s fundamental non-conscious nature, because I can in principle imagine being the former but not the latter.[3] The paper clip totally defeats me, but the bat poses a comparatively minor challenge. I don’t really know what it is not to be a feeling thing, though I can know how other sentient organisms feel to be sentient even when quite alien. It is the absence of consciousness that poses the problem not its presence. Perhaps this is why animism holds such an appeal: it makes physical objects comprehensible by giving them an inner life, which enables the imagination to get a grip on them. And isn’t it intuitively accurate to describe physical objects as alien beings—more alien than even the most alien of sentient beings? We just have nothing in common with them, as if they belong to another world plopped down beside us. They just arewhile we live. There are gods, living mortal beings, and inanimate objects—and the last exist apart in their own dead world. There is no meeting of minds, sharing of cultures, feelings of sympathy—just uneasy co-existence. The paper clip doesn’t care if I don’t know what it’s like to be a paper clip (viz. nothing)—it harbors no resentment towards me. It exists in its own mindless universe, sublimely indifferent (not even that). It is difficult to summon words to describe its mode of existence; the object doesn’t really exist as I do (existentialism doesn’t apply to it). It just dully and dumbly is (Sartre’s in-itself). It invites no emphatic italics. It is a kind of wasteland, an ontological desert. It doesn’t understand me and I don’t understand it; we just exist side by side, easily or uneasily. It isn’t my neighbor. It’s just a thing.

Not every philosopher has been willing to accept this dim and dingy reality—the soulless desert of brute material objects. It is just too bleak, too unconducive to comprehension. These philosophers yearn for commonality, communion. Thus, idealism, solipsism, panpsychism: mind everywhere. Everything becomes like my consciousness, or identical to it. Then all is transparent. There is nothing I don’t “get”. There’s nothing there’s nothing it’s like to be. But that is precisely the problem with such views: they deny that paper clips have zero inner life. They invent paper clip minds. The reason such views fail is that the world really does contain mindless objects—things without a tincture of consciousness in them. Sometimes a paper clip is just a paper clip, with nothing inner going on. True, we don’t know what it is like to exist like that, but that is our problem not the paper clip’s. We suffer from an intellectual limitation, a failure of imagination. We can’t imagine existing like that (what kind of life would it be?). So, we can refute idealist theories by insisting on the reality of the insentient—a world without sense or feeling. A soulless world. A psychological desert. That was the universe before minds came along, as empty then as it is now in its physical sector. Next time you look at a physical object remember: it has no soul, not even a hint of one. That’s why you can’t be friends with it, or know its dark little world.[4]

[1] Fair warning: I am going to stretch intuitions to the breaking point in what follows. I would not be a bit surprised if I fail to get the reader to share my intuitions. At least I can try. I don’t think human thought has ever gone where I attempt to go here, rightly or wrongly.

[2] We might say we only understand it abstractly, not in the way we understand the conscious mind (directly, intrinsically); but this is really just a label. The main point is the contrast not the labels. I don’t understand material existence in the way I understand mental existence; there is something lacking in my conception of the former.

[3] It is metaphysically impossible for me to be a paper clip, i.e., a small piece of bent wire—and also impossible a priori. I could not turn out to be a paper clip (of course, I could act like a paper clip and still have my human body).

[4] If the identity theory were true, something there is something it is like would be identical to something there is nothing it is like: but how could that be? It would imply that something you can know is identical to something you can’t know. You can know what it is for pain to exist, but not know what it is for the correlated brain state to exist. The brain is a physical object whose mode of existence you can’t imagine based on your knowledge of your own consciousness, like a paper clip. Not everything is like your own consciousness, we regret to report.