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.

                                                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

 

 

 

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

 

                                   

 

 

 

 

The Value of Modal Knowledge

 

 

As reflective rational beings, we tend to assume that knowledge of necessity has a special kind of value. Think back to when you first discovered that necessarily 2 + 2 = 4: didn’t you experience this discovery as a kind of revelation—as deep, interesting, and even thrilling? Not only does 2 added to 2 give 4 as a matter of fact, but this could not be otherwise—at any other time, for any other kind of thinking being, in any possible world. It may be useful and informative to discover that there happens to be a cat in the room next door, but it is a discovery of another magnitude that mathematical truths are necessary truths. Modal knowledge strikes us as uniquely valuable and profound—more so than non-modal knowledge of what is actually the case (even mathematically). In philosophy we seek it with particular ardor. But why is that? Why do we find knowledge of necessity so deep and exciting?

            One possible answer is that necessary truths are general or universals truths, while contingent truths are particular truths. Thus if a truth is necessary it is true in all possible worlds, while if a truth is merely contingent it is true only in some possible worlds. And universal statements are just logically stronger than existential statements—they entail more. It is more valuable to know a necessary truth because it has more general scope—intuitively, it says more. However, we don’t generally accord universal statements special value compared to singular or existential statements—as in “All the coins in my pocket are silver” versus “Some of the coins in my pocket are silver”. Nor do we reserve special esteem for knowledge of what is true at all places or for all times—unless this reflects a necessary truth. It is not universality as such that has value but universality over logical space, i.e. necessity.  The truth of a universal quantification is not itself a reason to prize modal knowledge to the degree that we do.

            A quite different suggestion invokes our faculty of knowledge: it is not the modal proposition in itself that is valuable but the faculty by which we know it. We are special not the necessary truth itself. For it is not given to every knower to know necessary truths: you have to be a special kind of being to know such truths. Animals, we may surmise, do not have knowledge of necessary truths, even if they have other kinds of knowledge. Nor do human children have such knowledge until they reach the requisite stage of intellectual maturity. As animals and children may be said to experience lower pleasures not higher pleasures, so they may be said to possess lower but not higher knowledge. They lack Reason or Insight or Intuition or Understanding. Thus modal knowledge is a proof of our unique elevation as knowing beings. However, flattering though this theory may be, it fails to identify the source of value we seek. Let’s accept that we are epistemologically special in virtue of possessing modal knowledge: why does that show that modal knowledge itself is especially valuable? We need to know what it is about the object of such knowledge—what it is that is known—that deserves special esteem. No doubt we are also special for having perceptual knowledge, given that this depends on a highly evolved and sophisticated cognitive system, but we don’t think that perceptual truths themselves (e.g. “It’s raining now”) are especially valuable objects of knowledge. Nor do we accord non-modal knowledge of arithmetic the same status as knowledge of the necessity of arithmetical truths, even though both are beyond the reach of animals and infants. There is something about necessity itself that strikes us as especially worth knowing—as epistemic gold. It is the fact not the faculty that invites admiration.

            I think the right answer has an Aristotelian complexion. Knowledge of necessity is knowledge of essence quaessence. It is knowledge of what makes a thing the thing that it is—its nature and definition. This is to be contrasted with knowledge of contingency, which concerns what merely happens to be the case, with what is true by chance. What is contingently true of an object does not penetrate to its inner being, but only to its accidental characteristics. For example, it is only contingently true that I am wearing spectacles—in no way does that define my identity—but the fact that I have a particular brain is integral to being the person I am. Thus when we know a necessary truth we are at the heart of a thing’s being, not merely hovering at its ontological periphery. So knowledge of necessary truths confers knowledge of a thing’s essential nature—its what-it-is-to-be, as Aristotle would put it. This is deeper knowledge than knowledge of the chance properties of an object, those it could easily have lacked. Chance, accident, and contingency—these are the marks of everything that is external to the core being of a thing. We value modal knowledge, then, because we value knowledge of a thing’s intrinsic essential nature. Modal knowledge is ontologically penetrating.

            This way of thinking posits two ontological levels to reality–a deep level and a superficial level. At the superficial level, we have the contingent and accidental—that which just happens to be true of a thing but could easily have been otherwise. At the deep level, we have essences and natures—that which could not be otherwise. The fact that we value modal knowledge as we do shows that we recognize the existence of these two levels; in particular, that we accept the existence of a level of reality that goes beyond what merely happens to be. It is a level of permanence, fixity, and immutability. This Platonic-sounding level contrasts with the transitory and ever-changing level, that which may be wiped away and abolished. It is the contrast between chance and necessity. Knowledge of the deeper level of reality strikes us as more valuable than knowledge of the more superficial level. It is harder to obtain such knowledge, and when we obtain it we have a more penetrating insight into reality. Any fool can see at a glance that 2 eggs plus 2 eggs equals 4 eggs, but it takes insight to grasp that it is in the very nature of the number 2 that when added to itself it must equal 4. We could reasonably paraphrase “Necessarily 2 + 2 = 4” as “It is in the very nature of the number 2 that doubling it equals 4”. To know this truth we need to have insight into the essential nature of numbers. We are dealing with a metaphysical truth not just an arithmetical truth. We value modal knowledge because we value metaphysical knowledge, which the concept of necessity enables us to possess.

            By way of confirmation of this suggestion notice what happens if we set out to deflate modal knowledge. Suppose we insist that all necessity is just a reflection of conventional linguistic rules, with no bearing on extra-linguistic reality. Then modal knowledge will boil down to knowledge of linguistic conventions and intentions to stick by them. In that case, any special value thought to reside in modal knowledge evaporates, along with the notion of de re necessity. Such a deflationary position is calculated to be revisionist, and is felt to be so. We feel that something valuable has been taken away from us—the idea of reality as composed of things with substantial objective essences, which we might discover. It is the same with nomological necessity: here too the notions of law and causation suffer ontological demotion and epistemological deflation if we decide to restrict ourselves to non-modal concepts (“constant conjunction” and the like). The case is comparable to anti-realist views in ethics and aesthetics. The way we spontaneously understand these domains has been attacked, and we are left with a mere husk of the original article. The disappointment we feel is an indication of our initial valuation: we thought we were dealing with something deep and important, but we have been brought to see that there is much less to it than meets the eye. That is: our intuitive sense of the importance of modality rests open a robustly metaphysical conception of its place in the world. We normally take it that necessity is written deep into the nature of things, and hence deserves our attention and respect; but we may be persuaded (wrongly, I would say) that necessity is nothing but revocable human convention. Our habitual starry-eyed and awestruck estimation of modality has been punctured. Thus we value modal knowledge because we believe (rightly) that it reveals deeps truths about the world. It couples with metaphysical knowledge.

            The question of the value of modal knowledge has an immediate relevance to the value of philosophy. For it is a traditional and powerful view that philosophy is precisely concerned with the discovery of essences quaessences. Suppose that view to be true: then philosophical knowledge is characteristically modal knowledge—knowledge that something is necessarily the case. Accordingly, philosophical knowledge has the value attaching to modal knowledge, which puts philosophy in a special place epistemologically. Not to put too fine a point on it, it makes philosophical knowledge superior (in one respect anyway) to scientific knowledge or historical knowledge or any knowledge that is of non-modal propositions. Philosophy provides knowledge of essence qua essence, while other branches of inquiry provide only knowledge of what is in fact the case—knowledge of the actual world not knowledge of all possible worlds. For many of us, that is why we went into philosophy to begin with—because it offers a uniquely deep insight into reality, extending across all of logical space. It tells us how things must be, not merely how things happen to be.

 

Co