Happy 250^th!

And so, America reaches its two hundred and fiftieth birthday, a milestone event (as some wit remarked). As nations go, that is about the early teen years (England is about 80 now). It seems uncertain of itself, neither one thing nor the other, wondering who it is. It has a toddler for president, but he is a fat toddler, not some skinny unit. He moans and weeps all the time, and lashes out frantically; no one seems to like him much. His linguistic skills are still in the development stage (grammar is a work in progress). He is fond of shiny bangles and sleep-overs. He wears pajamas all the time (he calls them “suits”). Anyway, he is not a bad sort (or so they say), just a little primitive and simple-minded. His meltdowns must be forgiven, in view of his tender age. The rest of the country is in its tweener years—charming, really, if a little unruly. It doesn’t know what gang it belongs to. Not quite Mods and Rockers, but more like Jets and Sharks. Some wear funny (but cheap) hats, others go hatless. Some have never been to school; others have had a few years of elementary education. They like to get together and have shouting parties in which they talk loudly over each other. They are still working on their manners. Some talk pure vicious nonsense; others struggle to articulate their thoughts but mean well. They all have a strange tendency to go completely hysterical for no reason; this can result in actual homicide. It is hoped that this is a passing phase, some sort of hormonal foul-up, but pediatricians fear a genetic component. Anyway, it keeps everyone from getting bored. Oh yes, there is also an epidemic of loneliness, despair, drug addiction, and seething anger that leads to gun play (they still like to play, especially with guns); but it is hoped the pharmaceutical industry will soon find a cure. Who is in charge? Hard to say: it is supposed to be a democracy, but theorists suspect it is the toy industry (aka the media and the tech-military complex). Only fictions are believed. People hate each other with a passion, but preach love from dawn till dusk. So, it’s like any schoolyard or rumpus-room. In only a few years adolescence will set in and then things will really heat up (literally). In nation time, this will be a couple of hundred years from now and no one really knows what will happen. Maybe a sixteen-year-old America will be a more mature place, or maybe it will have a prolonged childhood. One thing is certain: there will be celebrations, good feelings, and much irrational self-confidence.

Biology and Physics

Biology and physics are very different types of science, but why is this—and is it remediable? Are they essentially different, or is it just a historical contingency? Physics as we have it is highly mathematical, consisting of strict mathematically formulated fundamental laws, expressed as equations; biology is not very mathematical, employs loose statistical laws, if any, and makes little use of equations. You can’t be a (contemporary) physicist and not be a mathematician, but you can be a biologist, especially a zoologist, and be mathematically semi-literate (same for psychology). On the face of it, this seems strange: both are sciences, dealing with the natural material world, and yet one is heavily mathematical and the other isn’t. Part of the reason is that physics is concerned primarily with motion and biology isn’t—and motion is susceptible to mathematical treatment. But why is physics so preoccupied with motion? It is the study of the physical world and not all of that is motion; and animals also move. Zoology is not the study of animal motion, though animals move, and the things that move in physics have a composition and structure. Is biology really immature physics—will it develop into a mathematical physics of animal motion? Is it trying to be like physics and failing? Does biology await its Newton? Or is it simply barking up a different tree—doing a different kind of thing?

Let’s glance at the history. Newton came before Darwin. Physics and biology were not so markedly different before Newton (though Galileo and others were pointing it in a Newtonian direction). Newton mathematized physics with his three laws of motion and law of gravitation. Darwin never mathematized biology. They seem to be up to different things—not developing a unified science of physics and biology. Newton revolutionized physics, as is often reported, thus setting the stage for the age of Newtonian science. He had a massive influence, for good or ill.[1] Later science tried to mimic his achievements, generally failing (especially psychology). Biology deals with living things, physics with dead things (inorganic, or considered only physically). Darwin came in Newton’s wake. But suppose things had been different and Darwin had come first, revolutionizing biology. Suppose the buzzwords were not “force”, “motion”, “mass”, and “gravity” but “survival of the fittest”, “reproduction”, “species”, and (later) “gene”. Suppose biology had beaten physics to the finish line—it was the first real science, the glory of the Royal Society. It had the prestige, the power, the charisma. And suppose no one of Newton’s caliber had graced the scientific scene—no “God said let Newton be and all was light” (actually gravitation). Maybe physics doesn’t reach maturity till the twentieth century, while biology proceeds apace. Darwin is the shining scientific star and there is no miraculous Newton to compare with him. Wouldn’t the physicists look up to Darwin as their model and his theory as their loadstone? Wouldn’t they formulate their theories with reference to biology? Little to no mathematics, no obsessive focus on motion, no equations. Physical objects are modelled on organisms, atoms on cells, molecules on genes. Books like The Selfish Atom would appear and become bestsellers. Purposive language would be freely employed. Mechanism would be deplored. Gravity would be seen on analogy with (or a special case of) human and animal attraction. Heavy emphasis would be placed on evolutionary questions (how did the physical universe get here?), a keen interest taken in physical anatomy (material structure), a fascination with how physical things survive in a violent world—but not much about motion per se. Physics would look more like natural history than it does now. It would not be the queen of the sciences. It would not have the prestige it now enjoys. You could be a successful physicist and not know much mathematics. On the other hand, if Darwin had been an ace mathematician obsessed with motion, maybe biology would have looked very different, and in need of correction. As it is, however, Newton ruled the scientific universe and made everyone want to emulate him. The world was seen as a Newtonian mechanism.

I am saying all this because I believe physics has become too mathematical, or too exclusively mathematical—too unlike biology. Not that there is anything wrong with mathematics, but it skews our sense of the physical world and hence our science of it. Physics is about the nature of the physical world not about the mathematics of motion—that is just a part of it. It should be primarily concerned with evolution, anatomy, and physiology (the internal workings of material things). It should explain the transformation of one physical thing into another (metamorphosis), the creation of new kinds of object (red dwarves, black holes), the behavior of solar families (like our solar system), the microanatomy of physical cells (as atoms could have been called). We should have the mindset of a naturalist, a love of nature, an interest in classification and origins. Not anthropomorphic, to be sure, but not exclusively mathematical and abstract. To my mind, zoology is among the best sciences we have (probably the best), considered from every viewpoint, whereas physics has areas of dissatisfaction—quantum theory, space and time, the ultimate nature of matter, the ontology of force, the problem of unifying gravitation theory with particle physics, dark matter and energy. Putting it simply, we don’t know what the hell is going on in the physical universe, but the dynamics of the animal world is well understood. We have nothing like the gene-centered theory in physics—nothing all-encompassing and genuinely illuminating. In physics we easily lapse into operationalism and positivism, while in biology we deal with reality as it manifestly and intrinsically is. We have no qualms about being zoological realists, but instrumentalism is perennially popular in physics. Lions, elephants, and ants exist, no question, but fields, quarks, strings? Physics is an ontological mess for all its mathematical sophistication, but biology is on solid ontological ground. Biologists should not mimic physicists; physicists should mimic biologists. In sum, go back to the mindset of pre-Newtonian physics—the science of the material universe in all its aspects. Psychology benefited from leaving behaviorism behind and rediscovering seventeenth century psychology (as urged by Noam Chomsky); physics might benefit by rediscovering pre-mathematical physics (it can keep the mathematical stuff too). Stop talking about predicting motion on the basis of equations and start digging into the nature of matter as such. Newton himself appreciated this point, because he recognized that he had no theory of the real nature of gravitation, only a predictive mathematical apparatus. In a slogan: biologize physics! Make it more like Aristotle’s physics, but without the errors. Don’t be afraid to let go of the formulas and get down to the nitty-gritty.

Would the physics of an alien intelligence be like ours? Is our physics shaped by our peculiar traits and biological history—our taste for numbers, in particular? It seems likely that it is: our physics has a particular intellectual history and results from a combination of our biological brain and what lies outside of it—not to mention the idiosyncrasies of its heroes. We have resorted to a mathematized physics because it is the best method available given our epistemic situation, not because it is the only way physics could be done. Aliens might have developed their physics later than, and in the light of, their biology, and be mathematically inept.[2]They had many Darwins and zero Newtons. Their biology is a lot more advanced than their physics. Well, we need to be a bit more like them. As a bonus, many more people will be interested in physics now that it isn’t presented so mathematically; people will get degrees in English and physics combined. Maybe AI could be encouraged to develop this new non-mathematical physics (we especially need to downplay calculus). Science in general doesn’t need mathematics, though it can be useful, so physics could re-invent itself in a form suitable for the innumerate. You could do physics without the tedium of calculation. We are already half-way there, given that AI might take over calculation duties; we could then focus on the interesting stuff. Arithmetic always felt like a pain in the brain. I look forward to a physics without numbers. Mathematics can be left to the mathematicians.[3]

[1] There are those who believe, not without reason, that Newton was historically disastrous, as well as intellectually brilliant: for he established an ideal of knowledge that mesmerized his contemporaries and descendants, shaping (and deforming) other sciences and even the humanities. Everyone wanted to be like Newton, but the world is not exclusively Newtonian; it is also Darwinian, Shakespearean, sometimes Kafkaesque (it’s even Nabokovian in places). It isn’t all colorless billiard balls in mechanical motion.

[2] See Daniel Whiteson, Do Aliens Speak Physics? (2025) for a discussion of alien physics.

[3] I think the human mind is more naturally suited to doing biology than physics, given the way we constitutionally think; you have to be something of an oddball to resonate to a physics textbook. Darwin is a lot easier to read (I myself have read all of Charles Darwin, as I have Jane Austen—both a joy to read). I intend this paper to fuel the ego of biologists—you are not inferior to those physicist chaps! And physics really does have too much prestige in our intellectual culture, admirable though it is (the subject not the people—that is a separate question).

The Subjective Mind(-View)

How subjective is our view of the mind, our own and other’s? How much are we skewed and limited by our given viewing faculties and conceptual resources? We have a view of the physical world—a picture, a conception—and we can ask how subjective it is, i.e., how dependent on our peculiar sensory and cognitive faculties. How far can we prescind from these and attain a more objective view? That is a controversial question; I would say only to a limited degree. Sticking my neck out, I will assert that our view of the physical world is 80% subjective and 20% objective, even among the most objective-minded human beings.[1] The blinkers are on pretty tight. One thing we have going for us is that we have five distinct senses that give us access to the same physical world, correcting each other, rounding the picture out. Then we have some high-powered cognitive faculties—and still only 20%! I am not talking about prediction and explanation here but about grasping the intrinsic nature of physical reality—what the stuff out there really is in itself. Our view of external reality is highly perspective-dependent, species-specific, and perceptually imbued. But in the case of knowledge of the mind we don’t have five senses—five ways of knowing—but just one, viz. the faculty we call introspection. We know next to nothing about this faculty: its physical basis, its modus operandi, its evolutionary history or individual development. Our view of it is itself subjective and partial (like looking through a keyhole at twilight). True, it gets things right at a superficial level, but it is hardly penetrative or sharp-sighted. And it conveys just one mode of presentation of its objects. Imagine if we had five introspective senses–we would be rich indeed compared to our current epistemic poverty. We are just not getting the real goods on the mind, the low-down, the back-story. We got zilch, nada. All we got is a subjectively formed glimpse of our elusive object. Sorry, bub. Detective-wise we are nowhere near. We don’t even have two introspective eyes. Introspection is strictly superficial, though adequate to its function.[2]

And that is with introspection of the mind—what about the minds of animals not like us? Bats, octopuses, snakes, spiders—what about them? Here we readily admit how subjective our view of their minds is—how dependent on our own type of mind (in so far as we grasp that). In this respect our conception of mind is woefully perspective-dependent (anthropocentric). And what about minds biologically unrelated to ours—those that are not even in our evolutionary family? Your extra-galactic stone people and electro-magnetic sky-dwellers—we have no conception of the kinds of mind they might have. Is consciousness even the same in such remote creatures? Even on our planet, we wonder what kind of mind a plant would have if it had one. Our knowledge of minds in general is about as extensive as our knowledge of life forms from other galaxies. We have a highly subjective viewpoint on the nature of mind, centered on ourselves (itself subjective). The introspective view is not an objective view. Do we have any inkling of mind as it is objectively? Here is one suggestion: we have a more objective view of mental structure than mental content, i.e., form rather than substance. In the case of the physical world, we are ready to allow that we don’t know the substance of matter, but we do know its abstract structure, as mathematically described. Could the same be true of the mind? Do we know its geometry better than its chemistry? Perhaps we apprehend the mind by means of secondary qualities (or something like them) that we can discount in order to get to the objective core of the mind. Thus, we know the structure of thoughts better than we know the items (“concepts”) that compose them: logical form is more perspicuous to us than lexical content. We are relatively objective about mental structure (form, geometry). Similarly, we may wonder whether any parts of the mind are more objectively known to us than other parts–for example, sensations more than thoughts. Sensations have been around for longer, and perhaps introspection is more attuned to them; but thoughts are relative newcomers on the evolutionary scene, and introspection is still finding its feet with them. Objectivity and subjectivity come in degrees, and so our introspection-based view of the mind might vary from case to case—some parts may be more objective than other parts. Some parts may be twice as subjective as other parts, or at any rate a good deal more subjective. Our view of some parts of the physical world is more subjective than our view of other parts, e.g., our view of the olfactory world versus our view of the spatial world. Well, it may be the same for the mental world: there are degrees of subjectivity where that is concerned too. Mind has an objective nature, just like everything else that exists, but our mental representations of it are subjective to varying degrees. Subjectivity begins at home—with our own subjectivity. Our view of our own minds is a subjective view. Subjective experience has an objective nature, but our (introspective) view of it is subjective to one degree or another.

I would dearly love to put a number on this—then philosophy would be an exact science! How much more subjective is our view of the mental world than our view of the material world? The number that shouts out its truth to me is (wait for it) three—three times more subjective. It’s a ball-park figure, I concede, but it has the ring of truth to it: given our actual modes of access, the mind is subjectively represented at three times the rate of the physical world. Or as my wise advisors advise me to say, it is “quite a good deal” more subjective than our view of the physical world. The mind has an objective reality that departs considerably from the limited subjective view we have of it.  Yet we are under the illusion that it is less subjective: we think we know the objective nature of mind better than we know the objective nature of matter. I believe this illusion arises from what we are pleased to call privileged access—we make fewer mistakes about mind than we do about matter. Introspection is more reliable than perception. That is no doubt true, but it doesn’t follow that we know what mind is better than we know what matter is. I know for sure that I am in pain, but I don’t know what pain is in its real essence, i.e., in its objective nature. I know how it seems to me, but I don’t know how it seems to the universe. I know it from my own particular and peculiar point of view, but not from its point of view—objectively, absolutely. My view of my own mind is very subjective, but my view of matter is only somewhat subjective—roughly speaking. Hence, the attraction to the number three.

This has an obvious bearing on the mind-body problem. For we are not likely to get a good handle on the mind-body problem if our grasp of mind or body is seriously subjective—we need an objective conception of both to make any headway. If our view of mind is grievously subjective, to the point of being positively misleading, then we are not in much of a position to connect it intelligibly to the brain, itself (somewhat) subjectively represented. It’s like trying to see a mechanism through a mist. We are mystified because we are locked into our given cognitive perspective, as if wearing dark glasses our whole life. The trick would be to lift the subjective veil and reveal the glowing objective face beneath—and not to shift one’s gaze to some connected imposter (such as the biochemical brain). Solving the mind-body problem involves achieving an objective view of all of nature—not an easy task. Imagine the degree of subjectivity that characterizes a simple organism’s perspective with regard to both mind and matter: do you think it would make much progress on the mind-body problem? We differ from that organism in degree not in kind (same sense modalities, neural brain); we are not free of those subjectively fixed blinkers. We just don’t see our minds (and the minds of other beings) at all clearly—see into them. Our view of our own subjectivity is a subjective view, markedly so.[3]

[1] Subjectivity in the intended sense has nothing to do with error or lack of justification; it concerns whether we have a conception of the nature of things that contains ingredients derived from our specific perspective, sensory and conceptual, on the object in question. See my “Philosophy of Objectivity and Subjectivity”, “Objective and Subjective Knowledge”, “A Paradox of Objectivity and Subjectivity”, and “A Program Delineated”. Of course, this discussion goes back to Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere. We are investigating the degree to which we can transcend our particular perspective on the world, to obtain a “view from nowhere”. Thus, can we view our own minds from a perspective outside of them? Put that way, the task seems impossible. But that doesn’t imply that we can’t have a lot of objective knowledge of the world in other senses of “objective”. (This is a delicate subject.)

[2] There is something almost paradoxical about this, since we do have a special kind of access to our own minds. This access seems in tension with the hiddenness of the mind to the introspective eye: how can the mind be both so visible and yet so hidden? The answer is that freedom from error is not inconsistent with hidden depths: the former is about existence, the latter about essence. I can know that a pain exists in my arm without knowing what the underlying nature of pain is (the reality behind the appearance). It is not so different from knowing there is a sheep in front of me and knowing what a sheep essentially is. Knowledge of the one thing is compatible with ignorance about the other. In the case of the mind, we seem to be both spectacularly ignorant and splendidly knowledgeable. The latter is apt to conceal the depths of the former.

[3] I have written this essay in a somewhat boisterous style; this is the way it came out, so I left it that way. Maybe philosophy is sometimes best written thus, as opposed to in our usual staid style. The sense of excitement should not be stifled (there is such a thing as philosophical ecstasy). Nor should we hold back from bold statement if the subject is served by it. That is: reader, I know what I am doing.