Memes, Dreams, and Themes

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                                                Memes, Dreams, and Themes

 

 

This is to be an exercise in the taxonomy of ideas. It is characteristic of ideas to be shared by many minds. Why is this? One reason is that ideas spread from mind to mind. Here is where the concept of a meme comes in: a meme spreads like a virus from one mind to another, duplicating itself, colonizing new minds. Memes include jingles, catchphrases, fads, fashions, crazes, religions, ideologies, mannerisms, and accents. They spread by imitation and credulity, exploiting the receptivity of the human mind to new information and influence. They may mutate and be subject to natural selection, sometimes proliferating wildly, before possibly going extinct. Thus ideas (in a broad sense) exist in many minds because they are memes: they have arrived there from somewhere else by means of meme transfer. The mechanism of meme transmission is essentially mental manipulation: minds are disposed to accept whatever comes along, as a result of the childhood need to absorb as much information as possible in the shortest time, and so uncritical copying is favored. People just can’t help picking stuff up, willy-nilly. Memes are like computer viruses—they trade on the architecture of the system to insert themselves into the software. Once inside they can vary from mild mental nuisance to dangerous ideology. In some respects they work like a drug: they trigger reactions in our brains that take over our minds. That annoying jingle in your head is a meme playing with your brain chemistry.  [1]

            The concept of the meme can be taken more or less widely. Some people take it to provide a general theory of human culture and idea transmission. I want to distinguish the meme from two other sorts of idea that are importantly different from it; thus I am providing a taxonomic survey of ideational contents. My taxonomy invokes a three-way division: memes, dreams, and themes. First I consider dreams. Dream ideas are also widely shared, with the same kinds of dream cropping up in different communities and cultures. Moreover, like memes, these dream contents often seem rather arbitrary and pointless—despite being widely shared. Thus people regularly dream of falling, flying, being pursued, being embarrassed, missing trains or buses, being inadequately prepared, being incapacitated, and finding an extra room in the house. The last item is particularly peculiar: why should so many people dream of that? It is fair to say that no one knows why people dream as they do, though theories abound. But one thing is clear: it is not by means of imitation. It is not that dreamers transmit their dreams to others by recounting them or otherwise making them public (say, by making a film embodying the dream). People just tend spontaneously to have the same sorts of dream. So dream ideas are not shared because they are transmitted like memes: they don’t spread like a virus from one mind to another; they are not the result of copying. Possibly dream life can be influenced to some degree by shared culture in meme-like fashion, but that is not the explanation of the majority of common dream content. Dreams seem to grow from within, like bits of anatomy; they are not picked up from interactions with others. Memes are exogenously formed; dreams are endogenously formed. So dreams are not memes.

            My third category I call themes, partly for the sake of the rhyme, but also because it has a breadth that I want to emphasize. One of the salient features of memes is that they do not spread by rational persuasion—they spread by non-rational manipulation. But the spread of scientific ideas, to take the most obvious example, is not like that (though there are theorists would like to extend the meme concept to scientific belief): scientific ideas spread because they have been found to be true—or at least have been empirically confirmed. Scientific beliefs are shared because of the existence of publicly available rational justification. Thus Darwinism, for example, is generally accepted because of the overwhelming evidence in its support, and similarly for other accepted scientific theories. There is no exploitation of weakness in the scientist’s mind, no drug-like manipulation, no lethal catchiness. The explanation for the spread of scientific ideas is simply the power of scientific method and rational persuasion. On no account should we assimilate the transmission of scientific knowledge to meme transmission; indeed, the concept of the meme is intended precisely to mark that contrast. Memes spread for reasons that are independent of rationality, not by virtue of rationality.

            I hope what I have just said is completely uncontroversial, because now I want to court controversy. It would surely be wrong to restrict the non-meme type of idea transmission to science: many other disciplines involve shared beliefs, where these beliefs are shared for good rational reasons. Thus: history, geography, literature, philosophy, mathematics, music theory, engineering, cookery, and bottle washing. There is a large range of human cognitive activities in which ideas are shared by something other than meme propagation—not all of them counting as “science”. We clearly need to expand the notion of rationality so as to incorporate these areas. And there is no difficulty in doing so: there are standards of evidence, argument, and intellectual rigor that characterize all these areas—it isn’t all jingles and ideology (despite what “post-modernists” may claim).

But matters get a bit more interesting when it comes to aesthetics. Aesthetic ideas spread—is this kind of spread more like meme transmission or scientific communication? Compare an advertising jingle to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Both may lodge in the mind against one’s will, repeating themselves endlessly; and they may be transmitted to others, say by whistling. Are they both therefore memes? I would say not. There is a different explanation of the musical spread in each case: in the jingle case we have a meme, a worthless cultural trope that insidiously takes over the mind; but in the Beethoven’s Fifth case we have an aesthetically valuable musical theme. And that is why I call my third category “themes”: themes are cultural units with intrinsic value, which deserve to be spread and replicated. They are not annoying mind viruses but welcome friends, sources of personal enrichment. The reason they spread is that they are excellent—meritorious, worthwhile—and are recognized to be so. They are not science but they are not mere memes either.  [2]

Notice that we can only distinguish themes from memes by employing evaluative language, and by assuming that values play a role in cultural transmission. Themes spread because they have value, while memes spread despite having no value. It is the same with other aesthetic products—such as art and literature. Famous lines from Shakespeare don’t spread because they are memes—worthless cultural viruses—but because they are judged to be aesthetically valuable, and rightly so judged. It is a matter of merit. This is not a high culture versus low culture point: a good Beatles song, say, is a completely different animal from a commercial jingle. The point is that the mechanism of transmission is quite different in the two cases, being more like science in the theme case, in contrast to your typical meme. Whereas we can say that we are suckers for memes, we cannot say we are suckers for themes.

            None of this is to deny that memes and themes can get mixed up in practice, or that it is always easy to tell the difference. There can be fads and fashions in science too—memes masquerading as themes (the idea of a “paradigm shift” comes to mind). But there is a deep difference of principle here— there are two very different kinds of idea transmission. Memes may even disguise themselves as themes in order to gain a stronger hold, as with certain “scientific” ideologies. The difference lies in the psychological means of transmission. Themes may spread from mind to mind in an epidemiological manner, even mutating as they spread, but the reason for their exponential spread is not the same as for the case of memes. In the latter case it is brute susceptibility, but in the former case it is appreciation of merit. This is why we don’t resent the transmission of themes into our minds, while we do resent the insertion of memes (at least those recognized to be such). Theme transmission is genuine learning or improvement, but meme transmission involves no learning or improvement, merely mental infection. One of the central questions of cultural life is which of one’s existing ideas are memes and which are themes: which are absorbed because of mental manipulation and which have genuine cognitive value? That important question is possible only if we decline to extend the concept of a meme beyond its legitimate domain.

            In sum: there are three categories of ideas in the mind, differing in their etiology; none can be assimilated to the others. Memes are ideas that spread by non-rational means, bypassing our critical faculties. Dreams incorporate ideas that don’t spread at all, or very little, apparently arising from within. Themes are ideas that spread and proliferate, but they do so by appealing to our rational and critical faculties. Memes expose our weakness; themes demonstrate our strength; dreams reveal our oddity.  [3]

 

  [1] In this paragraph I have simply paraphrased Richard Dawkins, the inventor of the term “meme”.

  [2] In ethics we also find a meme-theme distinction: some ethical ideas spread by manipulative propaganda, while others spread by virtue of their inherent cogency (I leave it to the reader to supply her own examples). Politics may be viewed as the battle between ethical memes and ethical themes—propaganda versus merit. 

  [3] I don’t say anything here about the contribution of genes to the distribution of ideas across minds. But for anyone who believes in innate ideas, genes are the basis for some of our ideas; so it is genes that explain why ideas of this class are shared—we share genes for the same set of innate ideas. 

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Atoms, Genes, Ideas

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                                                Atoms, Genes, Ideas

 

 

I propose to ruminate briefly on the analogies between the three topics of my title. What do they have in common? The most obvious point is that they are each discrete isolable units that combine to form complexes with like units. Atoms combine with other atoms to produce molecules, which can then combine to form more complex physical structures. Genes combine with other genes to produce a genome, which produces an animal body. Ideas combine with other ideas to produce thoughts, which can combine to form theories and systems of thought. The units don’t blend, like paints on a palette; they retain their identity as discrete units while combining to form complex wholes. When the units are combined we don’t get something intermediate between the two, like a shade of color intermediate between two other shades, but a complex consisting of the original units in their original form. The units are devices of assembly, aggregation: this is why they tend to come in large packages, not individual units—chunks of matter, genomes, or minds. They exist in populations not in isolation.

            Second, these entities form the basic subject matter of their proprietary science. Physics is about atoms, individually or in the form of macroscopic bodies; biology is about genes, as such or as they configure the body and behavior of animals; psychology is about ideas (concepts, mental representations), especially as they feature in mental processes. In each science we have a distinction between the basic entities and their “expression”: the properties of atoms are expressed in the behavior of matter; the properties of genes are expressed in animal bodies and behavior; the properties of ideas are expressed in thoughts, cognitive processes, and behavior. The underlying entities themselves are invisible, but they are expressed in observable phenomena. We thus have upward causation: the basic entities cause the higher-level phenomena, from which they are inferable.

            Third, these entities were substantial discoveries, not given at the outset. They have the character of hypotheses, however well established, not a priori certainties. Even in the case of the mind, it was not obvious from the start that the mind is made up of discrete units—the atoms of thought. Consciousness seems like a fluid stream-like thing, but upon analysis it turns out to have a granular structure—as language also does. There are simple ideas and complex ideas, ideas of different logical types, combinations and re-combinations of ideas. Concepts are point-like elements in a web, but a web that is constantly updated; they are made to interact and join together. This was not evident to casual inspection, either introspective or perceptual. Nor were atoms and genes self-evident constituents of reality; on the contrary, they were major discoveries, revolutions in thought. Revealing the fine structure of atoms and genes took serious work (we have yet to do this for ideas).

            Fourth, despite the theoretical centrality of atoms, genes, and ideas, the question of the origin of these entities is highly non-trivial, indeed deeply problematic. This is obvious for ideas, since we have little understanding of how the mind arose during the course of evolution—ideas no doubt emerged, but how? In the case of genes the problem is how self-replicating entities arose from mere chemistry—how did DNA come to exist? Genes are a cosmic novelty, not prefigured in the prior state of the material world; hence the origin of life is a mystery. Even in the case of atoms their origin is obscure: evidently they came to exist during the first few seconds following the big bang, preceded by a much hotter undifferentiated plasma in which the particles had not yet formed. Aside from the issue of the process by which this happened, there is the problem of how the superhot plasma came to exist—the cradle of particulate matter as we know it. Were there atoms before the big bang or did atoms originate with it? Whence the plasma itself? The very beginnings of the physical universe are shrouded in mystery. So in each case we know what the entities are that we are dealing with, at least superficially, but we are baffled as to how they came to exist: we don’t know what caused atoms, genes, and ideas. These are all difficult origin problems.  Our best science thus invokes entities whose birth is mysterious.

            There seems to be a pattern here at a very abstract level—a formal structure with three different instances. The instances belong at quite different levels, from the basic physical level to the biological level to the psychological level. It does not appear that reality must be this way: it could have been more continuous, more a matter of blending, less punctate. But nature as we find it seems to prefer the discrete and aggregated.  [1] Its mathematics is digital not analogue. Matter could have been continuous, heredity could have worked by blending, and the mind could have been an amorphous field: but in fact all three consist of discontinuous units rigged up into conglomerations. Nature is arranged like individuals and societies, people and populations. It is not arranged like the color spectrum or musical tones. We might call this “the law of discrete organization” and postulate that the universe has a tendency to produce discrete organizations—as it has a tendency to entropy. It likes to make well-defined units that coexist and join with other well-defined units, not formless clouds or fuzzy borders. Everything is an island, linked to other islands, not a massive commingling and bleeding in. This holds at the level of physics, biology, and psychology.

 

Co

  [1] Not all of nature: some things are continuous not discrete, such as space and time. But matter, genes, and the mind obey a discrete logic not a fuzzy logic.

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The Evolution of Color

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                                                The Evolution of Color

 

 

According to projectivist views about color, color properties do not precede color vision. It is in virtue of color experiences in perceivers that things come to be colored. Color is mind-dependent. I will assume this view here. My concern is with the consequences of this view for the theory of evolution.

            Sensations evolve: they result from genetic mutations acted upon by natural selection. They are adaptive traits, just like bodily organs; they are there for a reason. Thus the feeling of pain has biological utility (as a warning sign and motivator), and even the phenomenological details of the sensation will have been subject to fine-tuned natural selection. The feeling of orgasm must be similar: it is the way it is for strictly biological reasons–as the best method the genes have for securing their survival. These traits are internal—sensations occur “inside” animals. They are part of what we might call the restricted phenotype: they belong with eyes and stomachs and other organs of the body. Their design follows the general rules of trait selection: they are solutions to evolutionary problems, more or less efficient, constrained by the past, and handed down through the generations.

            Tastes and smells are similar, only now it is external objects that have tastes and smells—whereas it is organisms that have sensations. Things taste and smell as they do for strictly biological reasons. As organisms evolve, tastes and smells come into being, though they are tastes and smells of external things. They are projected not inherent, relational not intrinsic. And it is the same for colors: objects are colored but they are so only in virtue of the existence of evolved organisms that see them that way. There were no tastes, smells, and colors before sentient organisms evolved. Thus we can say that colors evolve—like sensations of color. Red objects, say, came into existence (qua red) by means of genetic mutation and natural selection. If red were not an adaptive color for organisms to see, then it would not have evolved: red is a biologically useful color to project. In general, the colors organisms see must have been specifically selected for their adaptive value—presumably because of their ability to provide sharp contrasts (among other things). In other words, natural selection operates on colors—even though it is external objects that are colored (in virtue of color vision). If the genes for color vision were to mutate so as to produce a completely different set of perceived colors, and these new colors were more adaptive than the ones we now see, then we would find a selective pressure in favor of these mutated genes. The world contains the colors it does because of the selective pressures operating on organisms.

            That may sound odd, because colors, unlike sensations, are not properties of organisms—they are properties of external objects (though projected there). They are not part of the organism’s restricted phenotype, i.e. existing within its individual boundaries. But here we must remember the notion of the extended phenotype: it is not just the individual body type that is selected, but also what that body produces environmentally. Thus the beaver’s dam and the bird’s nest are part of these animals’ extended phenotype: natural selection works on the combination of body and external product, so that good dams and nests are favored, along with good limbs and brains. Body plans and behavioral capacities evolve, but so do the adaptive products of those things—she who builds the better dam or nest is most likely to pass on her genes. The unit of natural selection is the extended phenotype not merely the restricted phenotype. And now the point I want to make is that colors are part of an organism’s extended phenotype. They are products of minds and brains, like dams and nests, but they exist outside the boundaries of the organism—hence they belong to the extended phenotype. They evolve by the same rules as bodies, but they are not parts of bodies. As dams and nests evolve, so colors evolve (and sounds, tastes, and smells). Colors are created by genes, ultimately, and the better the color the more chance it has of surviving. The colors we see now in the world have stood the test of evolutionary time. The colors we project are the colors that have passed selective muster. Red, for example, has proved itself a highly adaptive color, along with the usual color spectrum that we see. Wishy-washy or indistinct colors might not do as well in the fight to survive—just as feeble or painful orgasms would not be apt to survive, in contrast to more pleasurable ones. In the case of colors, we might say that they belong to the projected phenotype—which is a subclass of the extended phenotype. The organism builds its physical environment (sometimes), but it also constructs its perceptual environment. It constructs a phenomenal world. This world consists of colored objects (among other things); so colored objects evolve (though not the matter they are made from). Evolution thus operates selectively on phenomenal worlds, as it operates selectively on limbs and brains. Whole species of phenomenal world come into existence by mutation and natural selection.

            Some properties of objects do not evolve—those that precede and are independent of organisms—but some do. Projected properties do, because they reflect the perceptual receptivity of organisms. When I say that colored objects evolve I obviously don’t mean that the objects themselves have evolved by natural selection; I mean that their having the colors they have is a result of natural selection–there are no colored objects on the planet without natural selection. It is because colors are both properties of objects and projected by the mind that they belong to the extended phenotype of the organism. If they were psychological properties of organisms, they would be part of the restricted phenotype; and if they were inherent properties of external things, not projected properties, they would simply be part of the non-evolving environment. The point is not that experiences of color evolve—that follows simply from the fact that sensations evolve. It is rather that the colors that are the objects of such experience evolve—as dams and nests evolve. Dams and nests are adaptive traits for beavers and birds, and colors are adaptive traits for visual organisms—though these traits all belong in the extended phenotype. As adaptive traits, they are subject to evolution by natural selection. The colors that exist in our world are those that have survived the rigors of natural selection.

            It may help in understanding the point if I make the ontology of colors clear. The projectivist view of color is naturally associated with a dispositional theory of color ascriptions: objects have the colors they are disposed to produce experiences of—an object is red, say, in virtue of being disposed to produce experiences of red. This need not imply that colors are identical to such dispositions: we can hold that colors supervene on these types of dispositions, without being identical to them. Then we can say that colors are simple qualities of objects, not in themselves mental, but that they are instantiated in objects in virtue of dispositions to produce color experiences. Color experiences clearly evolve, and objects only have dispositions to produce such experiences in virtue of the existence of evolved organisms; but it is a further claim that colors themselves evolve—conceived as simply qualities of external things. We thus have the nontrivial thesis that objects come to have simple color properties in virtue of evolution by natural selection. A mutation caused some object to look red, and hence (by projection) to be red; then natural selection favored that way of seeing, and hence what is seen. Colors came into the world by the same mechanism as hearts and kidneys. To put it paradoxically: it is adaptive for us to be surrounded by colored objects.

            Does this view of color generalize? It certainly generalizes to other secondary qualities, but it may also generalize to qualities traditionally regarded as primary qualities, such as shape and motion. For it may well be that such qualities do not rightly belong in the austerely objective world described by physics; rather, they reflect our evolved sensibility—how we have been programmed to experience the world. If so, shape and motion—the perceptible qualities we experience—are also evolved (and evolving) entities. Objects have shape and motion, as we perceive them (if not in the austere world of physics), but they do so only as a result of our evolved sensibility; so they too are subject to evolution by natural selection. The whole world of colored objects with shapes and in motion is caught up in the evolutionary process: it originated in that way and its survival depends on the usual evolutionary pressures. In other words, the world we experience is an evolutionary product—like limbs and brains, dams and nests. The empirical world is really part of our extended phenotype.  [1] So the extended phenotype extends quite far into reality (though not all the way). When did this naturally evolved empirical world come to exist? It probably had its early origins in the projective mind of a sentient fish a billion or so years ago. Then it was that the world began to be clothed in color (and maybe shape and motion, as we conceive them in common sense). It has been evolving ever since, becoming ever more complex and subtle. It will cease to exist when there are no more sentient organisms projecting properties onto the world. Colors will eventually become extinct, joining the dinosaurs.

 

  [1] But not the whole of reality since there is an objective world out there that owes nothing to our evolved modes of experience. It is the world as it appears to us that belongs to the projected extended phenotype—but this world contains real (though projected) properties of things.

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The Cruel Gene

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The Cruel Gene

 

 

I can forgive the genes their selfishness; it is their cruelty I can’t forgive.  [1] I understand their need to build survival machines to preserve themselves until they can replicate: they need the secure fortress of an animal body. But why did they have to build suffering survival machines? Hunger, thirst, pain, and fear—why did they have to make animal bodies feel these things? Granted the survival machines benefit from having a mind, but it was cruel of the genes to produce so much suffering in those minds. Couldn’t they have found another way? Are they sadists?

            The answer is that suffering is an excellent adaptation. Genes build animals that suffer because suffering keeps the animal on its toes. If the body is the genes’ bodyguard, it pays to make the bodyguard exceptionally careful. Since pain signals danger, and hunger and thirst signal deprivation, and fear motivates, the genes will build bodyguards that are rich in these traits. To build a bodyguard that suffered less would be to risk losing out to genes that build one that suffered more. This is why we find suffering so widely in the animal kingdom—because it is so useful from the genes’ point of view. It probably evolved separately many times, like the eye or the tail. Pain also has many varieties, also like the eye and tail. There doesn’t seem to be any complex animal that lives without suffering, so the trait is clearly not dispensable. Surviving and suffering therefore go hand in hand.

            Most adaptations have a downside: a thick warm coat is a heavy coat, brains use up a lot of energy, and fur must be groomed. In fact, all adaptations have some downside, because all need maintenance, which calls upon resources. But pain and suffering have very little downside from the point of view of the genes. They don’t slow the animal down or make it lethargic or confused; on the contrary, they keep it alert and primed. The avoidance of pain is a powerful stimulus; hunger is a terrible state to be in. Animal behavior is organized around these aversive psychological states—and the genes know it. They are cruel to be kind—to themselves: suffering helps protect the survival machine from injury and death, so the animal lives longer with it than without it, with its cargo of genes. The reason the genes favor suffering is not from altruistic concern for the life of the animal, but merely because a longer life helps them replicate. The genes aim to reproduce themselves, and this requires a fortress that can withstand adversity; suffering is a means they have devised for keeping their fortress alive and functioning until reproduction can occur. Since there is so little downside to pain, from their perspective, they can afford to be lavish in its production. Thus the animal suffers acutely so that they may survive. They know nothing of pain themselves (or anything else), but natural selection has seen to it that pain is part of animal life. Nature has selected animals according to the adaptive power of their suffering. Genes for suffering therefore do well in the gene pool.

            Suffering has no meaning beyond this ruthless gene cruelty. It exists only because natural selection hit upon it as an adaptive trait. A mutation that produced a talent for pain, probably slight pain initially, turned out to have selective advantage, and then the adaptation developed over the generations, until spectacular amounts of pain became quite routine. As giraffes evolved long necks, and cheetahs evolved fast legs, so animals evolved high-intensity pain. As an adaptation, pain is very impressive, a clever and efficient way for genes to keep themselves in the gene pool; it is just that pain is very bad for the animal. Pain is an intrinsically bad thing for the sufferer—but it is very beneficial to the genes. But they don’t care how bad it is for the sufferer—they don’t give it a second thought. Pain is just one adaptation among many, so far as they are concerned. Maybe if there was another way to obtain the beneficial effects of suffering—another way to keep the survival machines on their toes—the genes would have favored that: but as things are suffering is the optimal solution to a survival problem. The genes are unlikely to spare the animals that contain them by devising another method more compassionate but less efficient. Suffering just works too well, biologically. It wasn’t used for the first couple of billion years of life on earth, when only bacteria populated the planet; but once complex organisms evolved pain soon followed. It probably came about as a result of an arms race, as one animal competed with another. Today plants survive and reproduce without suffering: it is not an element in their suite of adaptations. They are the lucky ones, the ones spared by the ruthlessly selfish genes. Mammals probably suffer the most, and maybe humans most of all, at least potentially. We suffer acutely because the genes decided they needed an especially finely tuned and sensitive survival machine to get themselves into future generations. The possibility of excruciating torture was the price they left us to pay. Theydon’t suffer as their human vehicle endures agonies; yet the reason the agonies exist is to benefit the genes. The genes are the architects of a system of suffering from which they are exempt.

            Animals are probably tuned better for suffering than for pleasure and happiness. It is true that the contented sensation of a full belly is a good motivator for an animal to eat, but then the animal has already eaten. Far more exigent is the demand that an empty belly prick the animal into action. The pleasure of grooming might motivate animals to groom, thus avoiding parasites and the like. Far more exigent is the need to avoid injuries from bites and battering. The system must be geared to avoidance, more so than to approach. Thus animals are better at suffering than at enjoyment—their suffering is sharper and more pointed. Some animals may be capable of suffering but not enjoyment, because their pattern of life makes that combination optimal. But no animal feels enjoyment in the absence of a capacity to suffer, not here on earth. Suffering is essential to life at a complex level, but enjoyment is optional.

            This is why I can’t forgive the genes: with callous indifference they have exploited the ability of animals to suffer, just so that they can march mindlessly on. They have no purpose, no feelings, just a brute power to replicate their molecular kind; and they do so by constructing bodies that are exquisite instruments of pain and suffering. If they were gods, they would be moral monsters. As it is, their cruelty is completely mindless: they have created a world that is terrible to behold, yet they know nothing of it. It just so happens that animal suffering follows from their prime directive—to reproduce themselves. Animal suffering is how the genes lever themselves into the future. It is one tactic, among others, for successful replication. Its moral status is of no concern to them. The genes are supremely cruel, but quite unknowingly so—like blind little devils.

 

Colin McGinn

  [1] I indulge in rampant personification in this paper, knowing that some may bristle. I assure readers that it is possible to eliminate such talk without change of truth-value. Actually it is a helpfully vivid way to convey the sober truth.

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Particles and Identity

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                                                Particles and Identity

 

 

In the case of statues and similar objects we can separate the identity of the thing from its substance. Thus the statue is not identical to the piece of bronze that composes it, because the piece but not the statue survives being melted down. The piece is the aggregate of its constituent particles, but the statue is a particular form of that aggregate. For composite objects in general, the object is not identical to the mass of particles that composes it: the constitution relation does not coincide with the identity relation.

            But what should we say about the particles themselves? Suppose that electrons are physically basic: can their identity come apart from their constitution? Could we melt down an electron so as to destroy the electron but leave its substance intact? That could not consist in rearranging its constituents, because it has none. We cannot destroy the electron and leave the aggregate of its parts intact, since it is not composed of an aggregate. So it is not clear what it would be for its substance to survive the destruction of the electron itself. We can’t remove the form of the electron and leave the elements that compose that form. You might try saying that we could destroy the electron but leave its single constituent intact. But it is that single constituent, so when the electron goes it goes too. Nor can we suppose that the electron is composed of a substance that does not consist of electrons: for what could that substance be? If it were composed of some other type of particle, we could just repeat the argument for that particle.

            For simple objects, then, we cannot produce a statue-type example. The existence of the object and the existence of its substance cannot be pulled apart. At the basic level, constitution is identity. Not everything is composed of something to which it is not identical. So the distinction between identity and constitution is not a deep fact about the universe. It arises only at the level of composite objects.

 

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Appearance Without Reality

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                                                Appearance Without Reality

 

 

Is it possible for everything to be an appearance? Might there be nothing in the world but appearances? Granted, there may be many appearances for which there is no corresponding reality (of the kind that we normally suppose), but could this be universally true? Is the pure-appearance world a possible world? I think not, for two reasons. First, appearances must be appearances to someone: there cannot be appearances that float free of a subject for whom they are appearances. Nor can a subject be an appearance of a subject—for who is that appearance an appearance to? Second, appearances must have causes outside themselves: they cannot be self-causing or entirely uncaused. Not all realities need to have a cause (say, the first cause), but appearances cannot come to exist causelessly. This is because they must be appearances of something, and that something cannot itself be an appearance. The logical form of appearance statements is: “A is an appearance of x to y”. That is the structure of appearance. So every appearance has a non-appearance cause. An appearance may be caused by an external object in the standard way, or it may be caused by the state of a brain existing in a vat, or it may be caused by God’s magic touch: but it has to be caused by something. The epistemological problem of appearance is that we don’t know for certain what the nature of the cause is—hence skepticism. We know that there has to be some cause, but we don’t know what cause. We know that our visual experiences, for example, are caused by something, and we may even have an exhaustive list of all the possible causes, but we cannot definitively select a particular item from the list. The appearances underdetermine their specific cause, but they necessarily have a cause—and that cause must be sufficient to bring about the appearances with their specific character. But appearances are not of such a nature that their cause can be read off them. That’s the trouble with appearances qua appearances. Still, we know that they must have some sort of non-appearance cause; so the world cannot consist solely of appearances. There must be a reality that appears and a reality that appearances appear to—there cannot be appearances alone. It cannot be appearances all the way down.

 

C

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Truth and Existence

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                                                Truth and Existence

 

 

The concepts of truth and existence form a natural pair. They are both highly general abstract concepts. They have both been suspected of being pseudo-properties, expressed by logically misleading predicates. They have both been declared redundant, adding nothing to their bearers: calling a proposition true amounts to no more than affirming the proposition, and ascribing existence to a denoted object does nothing more than bring out what is presupposed in denoting that object. Also, truth pairs with falsehood in the way existence pairs with non-existence: truth and existence are positive attributes, while falsehood and non-existence are types of lack. Truth and existence are deemed good, while falsehood and non-existence are deemed bad: we aim to assert what is true, as we aim to refer to what exists. If we fail in these aims, we do something amiss. Finally, it has often been supposed that truth and existence are fundamental and indefinable concepts, with the associated properties ontologically primitive (and vaguely “queer”). Neither property can be perceived via the senses, and neither plays a causal role in how the world works. They both seem non-empirical, non-natural, and oddly diaphanous.

            This raises the question of whether truth and existence are related in any way: do they perhaps enter into each other’s essential nature? If there is any interesting connection, it will not be simple—not a matter of defining one in terms of the other by substitution. Thus it is hopeless to suggest that ”p is true” means “p exists”, since a proposition can exist without being true (though the former follows from the latter). And it is equally hopeless to equate “a exists” with “a is true”, since objects cannot be true (or false). Clearly truth and existence are not the same property. But the connection might be less direct—one concept might be linked to the other in combination with other concepts. Thus consider: “A proposition is true if and only if it designates an existing state of affairs”. That sounds very much on the right lines (Tarski mentions it as a possible definition of truth). Note that we need to include “existing” here because a proposition might designate a possible state of affairs that does not exist (is not actual): the possible state of affairs of snow being yellow does not exist. The world is the totality of existing states of affairs. Given that we are happy with states of affairs, and with applying the concept of existence to them, this seems like a perfectly worthy definition of truth; and it contains the concept of existence essentially. Thus truth is conceptually linked to existence.

            What about the other way round—is existence linked to truth? The following sounds right: if a exists, then we can make true statements about a. If a does not exist, then we cannot make true statements about a—we can make only false statements or statements that are neither true nor false. Existence is a necessary condition for true predication: we cannot speak truly of something that does not exist. Someone might object that this principle is false for fictional objects, since we can say truly that Sherlock Holmes is a detective. Maybe or maybe not, but we can easily strengthen the principle to say that existence is a necessary condition of literal or factual truth. Thus the concept of existence entails a consequence concerning truth—existence is what makes truth possible. In a world with no existence there is no truth. If we are feeling ambitious, we might even try to define existence this way: an object exists if and only if there are true statements about it. This would be the analogue of defining truth in terms of existing states of affairs. But we do not need to go that far in order to recognize a non-trivial conceptual link—a kind of mutual conceptual dependence. Grasp of the concept of truth involves grasp of the concept of existence and vice versa: one concept feeds into the other.   

            Granted these links, the similarities between truth and existence fall naturally into place: they are concepts that presuppose each other. Truth is all about the existence of states of affairs, and existence is all about the stating of truths. Truth is a certain kind of existence, and existence is the basis of truth. We have the word “true” so that we can describe existing of states of affairs, and we have the word “exists” so that we can describe what makes truth possible. We could get along without these short words, using only the longwinded formulations, saying things like, “Your statement designates an existing state of affairs” and “a meets the condition for allowing true statements about a”. What is notable about these definitions is that each concept incorporates the other concept essentially. Thus truth and existence are natural conceptual partners: they point towards each other.

 

Colin McGinn

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A Refutation of Positivism

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A Refutation of Positivism

 

 

The positivists maintain that a sentence is meaningful if and only if it is verifiable. Thus a sentence can be said to be both meaningless and unverifiable. Here is a possible counterexample to that claim: “It’s raining”. This sentence is not meaningless, but it is not verifiable–and similarly for all other indexical sentences. Considered out of context, just in virtue of their lexical meaning (what Kaplan calls character), such sentences are not verifiable—they are unverifiable. It will be replied that we need to consider such sentences in a context in order for them to be verifiable—we need to consider the proposition they express in a particular context of use (what Kaplan calls content). That is undoubtedly correct, but now we are talking about propositions (or statements or sentences “under an interpretation”), not sentences per se. Thus we might reformulate the positivist’s principle to read: A sentence is meaningful if it expresses a proposition that can be verified, and it is meaningless if it expresses a proposition that can’t be verified. (The same point goes for falsifiability as a criterion of meaningfulness.) This implies that a sentence can be meaningless and yet express an unverifiable proposition. But how can a sentence be meaningless if it expresses a proposition? Either it expresses no proposition, in which case it cannot be either verifiable or unverifiable; or it does express a proposition, in which case it is meaningful. Meaningfulness (or the lack of it) is a property of a sentence; verifiability (or the lack of it) is a property of a proposition. The positivist’s principle conflates this distinction, which is what enables it to sound like a viable principle.

            Some sentences are meaningless in a straightforward way, such as ungrammatical sentences or sentences like “Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”. Into this category falls the positivist’s favorite example of meaningless metaphysics, Heidegger’s “Nothing noths”. The problem here stems not from unverifiability but from other kinds of linguistic defect—and no proposition is accordingly expressed (unless we stipulate a sense for the problematic verb “noths”). Other sentences arguably fail to express verifiable propositions, for example “God exists”; but to call them meaningless appears far-fetched. The only reason “God exists” is unverifiable is that it expresses a proposition that is unverifiable; but then it is meaningful in virtue of expressing that proposition. The problem for the positivist is that no sentences fall between these two possibilities: no sentences are both unverifiable and meaningless—simply because to be unverifiable requires a proposition to have that property. Any sentence that fails to be verifiable because it fails to express a proposition at all will be so for reasons other than its unverifiability, say by being ungrammatical. Such sentences are unverifiable only in the entirely trivial sense that a brick is unverifiable: it is simply not the kind of thing that could be verified. A sentence can be unverifiable in the non-trivial sense only if the question of its verifiability can arise, but that requires an expressed proposition to be a candidate for verifiability. So the sentence must be meaningful after all.  

            Nor can we say that a proposition is meaningful if and only if it is verifiable (or falsifiable), since it is a category mistake to call a proposition meaningful or meaningless. A proposition has meaningfulness built into it (it is a meaning). Sentences are meaningful in virtue of expressing propositions, and these propositions can be verifiable or unverifiable; but they cannot express propositions without thereby being meaningful—and this is what they need in order to be verifiable or not. Indeed, we should not speak of sentences as verifiable at all, unless this is simply short for “expresses a verifiable proposition”–in which case the problem with the positivist’s principle is evident straight off. Expressing an unverifiable proposition is a way of being meaningful, not meaningless. Intuitively, we can only know that a sentence is unverifiable if we know what it says, but if it says something then it must be meaningful. Positivism thus rests on confusion between sentences and propositions–bearers of meaning and bearers of verification.

 

Colin McGinn

 

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