Philosophical Detritus VI—Time and Time Travel

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day;
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
-- Pink Floyd.

One of the most striking things about getting older is that time seems to go by much faster. No sooner has the year started, when suddenly it seems to be over. Another striking thing is being able to remember growing up in the analogue era, without mobile phones or personal computers. Things have changed so much in 60 years. And I've been writing this blog for 20 of those years.

The question "What is time?" is both completely banal, since we all experience time passing and in general have no problems understanding the concept, and at the same time deeply puzzling in that it's difficult to define exactly what time is or how it works.

My general approach in these essays has been to start with the fact that no one has epistemic privilege. We're all in the dark when it comes to metaphysics, which seems to be why philosophy is devoid of any consensus on any metaphysical matter, at any time. No one is ever compelled or obligated to accept any particular metaphysical proposition. Whereas we are compelled to accept experiences such as having weight, or being extended, oriented and located in space.

In this essay, I explore a number of time-related themes from a pragmatic perspective. While we may never know the reality of time, the experience of it is compelling enough to argue that we cannot do without it. We experience time passing, we remember past events, and we age and these are all salient. I touch on the metaphorical nature of our concept of time and the arrow of time. I don't find time deniers to be of much interest. I deflate the notion of "timelessness", and I briefly explain why time travel is impossible (not related to paradoxes).

On Time

When you finish reading a sentence, you have to recall what you read at the beginning in order to make sense of it, but you cannot do both at once. You have to start somewhere and end somewhere else. In every situation we encounter, there are sequences of events and they occur in a specific order that is salient to our understanding of both time and causation (the latter is a separate essay, but see There is No Cause & Effect, 5 August 2016).

So deeply do we experience such sequences, and understand the order of them, that most people can instantly spot if a piece of video is being played backwards, precisely because things happen in the wrong order.

Some of the experiences we have are iterative: they happen over and over. Such experiences include our own breathing and heartbeat, as well as day-night cycles, lunar cycles, seasonal cycles, and life cycles. We call these "cycles" to emphasise their iterative nature.

Iterative experiences allow us to begin to quantify durations of time. I could say, for example, that it took so many days and nights to go from location A to location B. This is useful information. If for example, I'm crossing a desert and the next watering hole is 3 days travel away, then I need to ensure I carry 3 days supply of water. Or I will die.

The obvious downside of using iterative experiences such as heart beats is that they vary in duration. If two people wish to agree on the timing or duration of events, then they must first agree on a measurement of time. A measure like "three days from now" only works because the two people experience the same day/night cycles.

Living in cities tends to create a demand for time keeping because we do things in large groups and need to coordinate. Living a coenobitic monastic lifestyle requires time-keeping for the same reason. For example, Buddhist monks who originally lived a solitary, itinerant life for most of the year, would meet up at times linked to the phases of the moon. One they began to live communally and engage in collective practices that meant they all had to arrive on time. In 2015, after puzzling over the Pāli term yāmagaṇḍikaṃ koṭṭetvā, I wrote an essay about time keeping in early Buddhist texts. I noted various early time-keeping measures such as a sinking bowl water clock, dating back at least to the Achaemenid Persians.

We define external standard durations of time like seconds, minutes, hours by linking them to some iterative process. These days, scientists define the second in terms of oscillations of an atom of Cesium.

It is a curious fact that until rail travel was invented time was more or less always defined locally. But once you had railroads connecting cities across Europe, the fact that each city was effectively its own time zone, became a hindrance to coordination. The hegemony of the British Empire when time was being standardised meant that universal time is based on the Greenwich meridian, which passes about 10 km west of my home in Cambridge.

Coordinating actions in large groups of people, is one of the most important functions of time-keeping. Societies that don't do big communal projects don't need to keep track of time in the same way.

The Arrow of Time and other Metaphors

In some cultures, TIME IS A PATH that we travel along. We "see" the future ahead of us and move towards it. We do not see the past since it is behind us and gone from view.

In other cultures, TIME IS A RIVER that flows past and around us. We are stationary and facing downstream. The future approaches us from upstream and, being behind us, we cannot see it coming. The past is downstream and we can see it stretching away from us.

When we say things like "time is a path" or "time is a river" we are using metaphorical language. I use the convention begun by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson of stating such metaphors in small caps.

Interestingly, many of the metaphors we use for time come from the spatial domain. We can talk about a duration in terms of length, for example. "How LONG must I wait?", "Will you be LONG?", "He's doing a STRETCH in prison". These emerge from metaphorically treating time as a path.

I've already noted that humans can usually spot a video being played backwards almost instantaneously. This is because time has a direction. Whether we conceive of time as a path or a river, we know that the past in in one direction and the future is in the opposite direction. And when we see a video with the direction of time reversed artificially, it's immediately obvious.

It is common to illustrate this using examples like knocking a cup off a table and watching it break. We never see a broken cup spontaneously reassemble itself and leap back onto a table. Physicists like to say it's "theoretically possible" for this to happen, but in practice it never does.

We can artificially create some situations in which the arrow of time is ambiguous. For example, imagine that I set up a video camera looking vertically down on a snooker table. If I set a ball in motion off-camera and record it bouncing off the cushion then leaving the frame, you won't be able tell whether you are seeing the recording forwards or backwards. Similarly for a collision between two balls, when you don't see the initial impetus or the final arrangement. However, with three balls, or if I show the cue striking the cue ball, the arrow of time once again becomes clear.

That is to say, when we look at isolated, decontextualised events in which the antecedent events are hidden from view, the arrow of time can be made to seem ambiguous. However, in practice, without these elaborate attempt to hide it, the arrow of time is always completely obvious. In practice, we never experience confusion over the direction of time. Every experience we have reinforces this.

A few years ago, I was cycling along the greenway from Haslingfield to Grantchester. Near the latter village, a field of sugar beets had been dug up and the beets were piled up waiting to the trucked off to the sugar factory in Bury St Edmunds. The loader driver was standing around for the next truck to arrive, and I stopped to chat with him for a couple of minutes. Two days later, I passed by the same field going in the other direction. And to my surprise, I saw a mature crop of beets where, just two days ago, there had been bare earth. I stopped and I really got a chill, because this was the closest thing to "a glitch in the Matrix" I'd ever seen. It was unnerving to say the least. I replayed the memory of seeing the field harvested several times. I looked closely to see that it was indeed a mature crop, several months old. And yet I knew I had seen it harvested just two days ago. At length I got back on my bike and started pedaling. About 200 m further down the track, I realised that they had only harvested the bottom half of the field. I just just assumed it was the whole field.

Physicists explain the apparent direction of time—which they call the "arrow of time"—by referencing entropy. Entropy is itself often quite poorly understood by lay people. It is often wrongly associated with complexity for example. Entropy is a measure of disorder. Sean Carroll introduced an image for this that is now everywhere

• On the left we have coffee and milk, unmixed. This is low complexity, and low disorder.
• In the middle, the coffee and milk have begun to mix. Complexity is high and disorder is medium.
• On the right the coffee and milk are thoroughly mixed and now complexity is low again, but disorder is high.

And this is how our universe seems to be. We're currently somewhere in the middle, with high complexity and medium disorder. Around the time of the big bang, the universe was simple and had low entropy. And we expect the universe to become less complex again over time, but for entropy to keep on increasing.

When we see a cup fall and break we see something becoming more disordered. Seeing the video backwards we something quite disordered becoming more ordered, and we know that, practically, this doesn't happen in our world.

The second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of a closed system always increases over time. Lay people often overlook the "closed system" part. A closed system in one in which energy cannot enter or leave. The earth for example is not a closed system. Nor is a biological cell. So living things, which persist in ordered states (low entropy), do not contradict the second law.

Time Denial

Hardly a week goes by without some pundit breathlessly telling us that "time is not real" or "time is an illusion". Or, maybe, "time is not fundamental". In the previous essay, on Determinism, I noted that the "it's an illusion" move doesn't explain anything.

Once again, this denial of what we experience is a dead end. Once you assert that time is not real, there is nothing left to say. There is nothing to explain. "It doesn't exist" is supposedly the explanation, but this simply leaves us hanging because as already noted, we experience the passing of time. Saying that "time doesn't exist" does not explain the experience. Writing it off as "an illusion" is also not an explanation. If all experience is an illusion, we are none the wiser, since we still have such experiences and if we try to act as if they are illusions we rapidly run into trouble.

If the government says "you must pay your taxes on or by the 1st of April", one cannot defend a failure to comply by arguing that "time is an illusion". Even if it is an illusion, it's one that we all share, and one that we are compelled by circumstances to take seriously.

The idea that time is not "fundamental" (and sometimes it is fundamental) comes from reductionism. Metaphysical reductionism equates "fundamental" with "real", and treats anything that is not fundamental as not real. Sometimes reductionists will tacitly admit to a hierarchy of reality in which the lowest level is specially marked as "fundamentally real". But this is nonsense by their own criteria. If it's not at the bottom, it is not fundamental. This only matters to true believers in reductionism. It's a doctrine, not a truth. The rest of us allow that structure is objective and that time being a structural feature makes no practical difference to us. Time is still objective.

So any philosophy that denies the passing of time rather than explaining it, is a dead end and practically useless.

Timeless

Most philosophers don't comment on the experience of timelessness. We've all had the experience of being absorbed in an activity and failing to notice time passing. Sometimes in meditation one loses touch with the world of the senses and it seems that time stands still.

Here I reference Thomas Metzinger's book The Ego Tunnel. Metzinger spends some time in his book discussing his out-of-body experiences. But he also describes how his initial intuitions, based on folklore about out-of-body experiences, were wrong. And he explains how he arrived at an objective account of them. Importantly, Metzinger describes how his objective explanation allowed him to reliably induce out-of-body experiences in experimental subjects under laboratory conditions using a variety of methods including virtual reality. I now see this as the gold standard for explanations of experience.

The fact of having experiences of timelessness, does not mean that time is not real. "Timeless" describes an experience, not a fact of the matter. Not being aware of time passing doesn't stop it passing. And we all have relevant experiences.

Every time we sleep, we spend at least some of the time in a dreamless state in which we have no awareness of time, space, self, world, or anything else. And yet, when we emerge from this state, it's apparent that time has passed. I go to bed in the evening and I wake up in the morning. The timeless state of deep sleep is not a metaphysical timelessness, it is an epistemic timelessness.

Becoming absorbed in meditation involves becoming unaware of all the sensory information we use to create our virtual maps of space and time: resulting in an experience that is spaceless and timeless. This is often interpreted as meaning that one was literally "outside space and time". Some interpret it to mean that mind is not tied to body. And so on. The fact is that time itself does not stop. Only our awareness of time passing stops. As with sleep, time continues to pass even in deepest meditation.

We might lose track of the world, but the world never loses track of us.

Time Travel

Time travel is one of the most enduring themes in speculative fiction. Both travelling to the past, with all the attendant paradoxes, and travelling to the future have been imagined many times. I grew up watching Patrick Troughton as Dr Who on a black and white television. I read H. G. Wells' The Time Machine as a teenager and have seen the classic 1960 film adaptation, produced and directed by George Pal many times.

Towards the end of the 20th century, physicists started to say things like "Time travel may be possible." If you search this phrase you can see that it regularly turns up in newspaper headlines. However, if you dig behind the headline, it usually leads to some theoretical physics paper that never really says that time travel is possible.

We get some mileage from the fact that if we make the present time t = 0 then we can put negative values of time into many physics equations and use them to retrodict the past. But we run into the problem that on the largest scale, physicists insist that t = 0 is when the big bang occurred. So the present is not t = 0.

Let us stipulate for the sake of argument that time travel is possible and that somewhere in the formalism of relativity it is possible to reverse time, or to alter the speed at which time passes.

What's not possible in any account of objective phenomena is the idea that you could move in time and not be affected by such movement. Because when you think about it, this is the key to fictional time travel. In all of the famous time travel stories, someone steps outside of time, they move along the time axis and arrive at a different time, whereupon they step back into time and are affected by it again.

For example, when Marty McFly and the Doc Brown go back 30 years to 1955, they don't become 30 years younger, but (fortunately for teenage Marty) retain their ages from 1985. No version of physics allows this.

Forget the "grandfather paradox", the real sticking point with time travel is travelling through time without being affected by time. This is what all time travel stories have in common, and yet it is precisely this that cannot be explained and cannot possibly happen in practice, even if moving arbitrarily in time is theoretically possible. This is my own insight, I don't recall ever reading any time travel stories that tackle this problem and I'm not aware of any philosophers who do either. It seems to be generally overlooked that time travel always tacitly allows moving through time without being affected by it.

Conclusion

I've briefly covered a range of topics in this essay: what time is, the direction of time, time metaphors, time denial, and time travel. I also touched on causality once or twice.

Time is a central and unavoidable aspect of our experience of the world. We cannot make sense of the world without it. Arnold J. Toynbee's facetious comment on the naive view of (chronicle) history as "just one damn thing after another" is in fact a truism about time. Time is unavoidable, it is visible in sequences of events, and measurable via quantities of iterative events. Time really is just one damn thing after another.

Time is objective, in the sense that we all experience it and it can be measured in ways that we all agree with. For example, we can predict when and where solar eclipses will happen decades hence. If time were not objective, what would it even mean to predict such events?

Time passes for everyone (all observers) at one second per second (time dilation notwithstanding). Time also has an objective direction, which is the same for all observers. And we instantly know when we see a video in which the "arrow of time" is reversed, because such a thing never happens in practice.

The experience of time passing is subjective in the sense that we may experience time passing faster or slower. But we know that this can be explained by relating it to the emotional intensity of the experience and the rate of memory formation.

However, the question of the reality of time is not one we can ever answer because no one has epistemic privilege, i.e. know one has privileged access to reality to perform comparisons with experience. We have experience and comparing notes on experience, and we have reason and imagination. That's all we have to work with. Reality, whatever it is, remains forever inaccessible to us.

This may be why time is so problematic for physicists. They cannot decide whether time is fundamental or not; whether it is real or an illusion. And so on. But no matter what they eventually decide, it won't change how we experience time.

However, we can and do infer useful information about the world. Comparing notes about sensory experience allows up to create and maintain virtual maps, which in turn allow us to navigate the world. Describing experience without time doesn't seem possible, but even if it were, it would not be useful. In our universe, everything is interacting with everything else, everything is changing, all the time. Time is integral to how we conceptualise this.

Unlike the previous example, therefore, where I concluded that no good ever came of thinking in terms of "determinism" or "free will", I believe we have to retain the concept of "time" and resist those who wish to deny it. Even if time is only an inference drawn from experience, we cannot do without it. Nonetheless, there is still no epistemic privilege so our definitions must be pragmatic rather than absolute.

~~Φ~~

See also: Time for a Change. (03 March 2017). In this essay, I'm still talking about "reality" in a careless, reified, way. However, I think the notes on metaphors and time are still useful. These essays are not merely academic. If you watch this blog—this 20 year sequence of essays—you can see my worldview changing over time. You can see understanding dawning on me. If I do my job as an writer well, you can have the same experience with considerably less effort.

Philosophical Detritus V: Determinism and Free Will.

I'm about write an essay about determinism and free will. No one is compelling me to do this; I just noticed that a lot of people were confused, and I hope to arrive at some clarity. I do not know in advance what each sentence is going to say or how many sentences there will be. I don't even know, as I start writing, all the ideas that I'm going to explore. I do research and learn things as I go. But I sit and write, usually in several sessions, until I think I've covered the topic adequately, and voila, another essay emerges.

English has a large vocabulary, with many nuances and synonyms. It also has a very flexible grammar, allowing ideas to be stated in many different ways with slightly different emphases. Moreover, the issues I want to write about are complex. 

There are a million essays I might have written. How did I come to write this particular one? It certainly feels like I chose the words and sentences as I sit and  deliberate on what to say and how to say it. Most especially when I write a sentence one way and then subsequently change the wording or phrasing. But what is really going on?

Do I choose words on a coolly rational basis, with no input from any other faculty, including my own emotions? Or were the words that I apparently chose to write actually predetermined by the laws of physics at the time of the Big Bang? Are either of these two widely believed possibilities plausible? Should I appeal to some middle ground, or should I find some completely different way to frame the discussion? How would I even know?

Of the legacy philosophical concepts I've commented on in this series of essays, determinism and free will are probably the least coherent. And this essay has been the most difficult to write. There are so many different approaches that even a basic overview of the main currents in this topic would be longer than I intend this essay to be. For any given statement one can make, the contrary is likely to be vigorously asserted by someone else. As before, my aim is to try to cut through the bullshit with some pragmatism. There's just so much of it in this case.

The plethora of approaches for both determinism and free will (viewed as standalone concepts) are only multiplied when they are combined into one argument, where they are sometimes mutually exclusive and sometimes compatible. There is no consensus on either term on its own, and no consensus on how the two relate. It's not just that we disagree on details. There is no consensus on how to conceptually frame this discussion. In the case of free will, those who take a determinist stance argue that it simply doesn't exist, so there is nothing to frame. The situation is not helped when commentators tacitly assume a worldview and proceed as if that view is normative, which is all too common.

In matters related to determinism and free will, there is a profound dissensus and continuing divergence of views amongst intellectuals. The issue only becomes more complex over time. This abject failure to agree is sometimes presented positively as pluralism; however, in genuine pluralism, we expect a range of coherent positions that compete to explain some phenomenon. Here, we cannot even agree that there is a phenomenon to be explained.

Discussions of this type have been documented for thousands of years. Nowhere are the failures of academic philosophy and science more starkly revealed than in such long-term unresolved issues. I agree with Einstein that concepts should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. I'm not arguing for an enforced unity or some naive oversimplification. I'm genuinely perturbed by wanting to understand such issues and finding them so hopelessly lost in the weeds. At this point, it would take considerable effort to do worse than professional philosophers.

Academic philosophy seems to have devolved into competitive sophistry, completely unrelated to the lives that most of us live. Of course, people who like arguments find competitive sophistry endlessly entertaining. While arguing can be a diverting hobby for some, the rest of us find it annoying and counterproductive: it doesn't really change anything. 

One of the main themes of these essays has been the lack of epistemic privilege. No person has privileged access to reality. Ergo, no one is in a position of authority vis-à-vis reality. And this was strongly pointed out by both David Hume (1711 – 1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804). Rather than admit this, priests, scientists, and philosophers all seem to charge ahead regardless. And so confusion reigns. And I find this intensely irritating. Unlike some of my other suggestions about legacy concepts, I don't see anything here worth rescuing.

I think the whole, millennia-long exercise of arguing about determinism and free will has been a gigantic waste of everyone's time. If you are confused about this topic and go looking for clarity amongst philosophers, scientists, or historians, all you will find is a great deal more confusion. The topic is a tangle of shifting definitions, hidden assumptions, and conflicting ideological commitments. No layperson has any hope of finding genuine clarity, but all kinds of pseudo-clarity are on sale.

Pragmatically, we all experience making decisions and choices; we experience the impact of the choices we make and the impact of the choices that others make. This has to be our starting point. But we also have to acknowledge that we are often baffled by our own decisions. Decisions involve conscious and unconscious mechanisms. Any philosophy which does not say something constructive about these is not worth our time and energy. 

Demonic Determinism

The modern idea of determinism is often traced to the great French mathematician  Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827). In 1814, he wrote:

“We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.”
— Essai philosophique sur les probabilités. (tr. by F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory) Chapman & Hall, 1902. p.4.

The "intelligence" (une intelligence) mentioned by Laplace somehow became known in English as "Laplace's demon". While we credit Laplace, this mechanistic idea about the universe seems to have been quite widely accepted at the time. 

These days, we usually sum up the idea by saying that if we knew the location and momentum of every particle in the universe with perfect accuracy and precision, and if we also knew all the laws of physics that govern particles to the same perfect degree, then we could perfectly predict the future. 

In this hypothetical, the word if is doing a lot of work. For example, it is assumed in this view that such knowledge is theoretically possible. Remember that Laplace was saying this a century before quantum physics had been conceived. His view of the universe was purely classical and mechanistic.

Laplace also assumes that we can always recover the past by putting in negative values for time into some mathematical description of nature. This is true of classical laws of motion, but it's not possible in statistical mechanics (and thus thermodynamics) or in quantum mechanics. And note that all we get from this exercise is knowledge of the past, not the actual past (I will come back to this point in an essay about time and time travel).

The idea of "conservation of information" is quite popular, though it's unrelated to physical conservation laws based on physical symmetries in the universe (Noether's theorem). As far as I can see, the idea that "information" is conserved relies on a series of ontological presuppositions that cannot be true, not least of which is the assumption that the universe is absolutely deterministic. Arguments along the lines that, apparently, lost information is only hidden and unrecoverable, rather than truly lost, seem to have a weird definition of "lost".

The basic idea of determinism is that events can only occur in one way. All events are absolutely predetermined in advance by the starting conditions of the universe and the combined laws of nature. This view is similar to the absolute fatalism of Advaita Vedanta theology, which attracted Erwin Schrödinger in his later years. 

Determinists believe that, even though we experience ourselves making choices, there is never any doubt about the outcome. In this view, everything can be reduced to particles following rules. Obviously, if we have no choices and make no decisions, then there can be no such thing as "free will" or any other kind of will. An important corollary of this fact is that there can be no coherent morality or ethics. If no one chooses to do actions, then no one is responsible for those actions (Buddhists who deny the existence of agents also have this problem). Indeed, the idea that evil is blameworthy is entirely negated. Determinism is a form of nihilism. Nothing we do, say, or think makes any difference. Concepts like morality, fairness and justice no longer have any meaning. Nothing matters.

My sense is that while determinists make some powerful arguments, almost no one is willing to simply abandon the concept of morality. Which means that while some people (especially some physicists) argue for an uncompromising version of determinism, most intellectuals understand that morality needs to be retained and preserved. Indeed, the mainstream of academic philosophy has always promoted so-called compatibilism: a range of ideas that embrace determinism but argue that it (somehow) does not rule out free will.

Importantly, the idea of determinism is largely absent from our judicial systems. Notions of agency and responsibility appear to be indispensable to a society. This is a theme I plan to circle back to by way of a conclusion to this series of essays.

As an aside, note that male intellectuals like to call their favoured, often uncompromising, stance on any given topic the "hard" version, and any compromise the "soft" version. So, an uncompromising approach to determinism is often called "hard determinism", and compatibilist approaches are called "soft determinism". And one cannot help but think that, while Freud was wrong in most respects, he was not totally wrong. I try to avoid penis-based terminology in my writing.

In practice, there are dozens of different perspectives on determinism and even taxonomies that are supposed to help us grapple with the definitional promiscuity. If this problem is unfamiliar, I've posted a structured list at the end as an appendix. No doubt some will find the list inadequate, which only reinforces my point about the proliferation of definitions. However, I don't find any of these approaches interesting or meaningful. I don't think the idea of metaphysical determinism is coherent or cogent, at least as far as Laplacian determinism is concerned. There are numerous problems.

Mechanics of Various Kinds

Newtonian, Hamiltonian, and Lagrangian formulations of physics are deterministic as conceived, but also incomplete: they cannot account for events in systems with very large masses, very high relative velocities, and very high energies. Einstein's relativity theories are deterministic and can account for the exceptions. However, relativity is also incomplete, since it cannot be reconciled with our theory for very small masses and it clearly makes a wrong prediction for the Big Bang. We don't know of any classical—i.e., deterministic—theories that are complete. They all break down beyond certain limits. 

Moreover, we cannot even see the entire universe, and we have no idea what lies beyond the limits imposed on us by the speed of light. We can infer that parts of the universe exist from which light will never reach us. We have no way to infer the extent or nature of those parts of the universe. We can infer that physics is the same across the visible universe, but we simply don't know if this holds beyond the limits of our knowledge. Our "universe" could be a tiny bubble in a much larger structure. 

Incidentally, I don't find any multiverse theories cogent. This is simply what happens when you canonise mathematics and adopt the procedure of bending reality to fit your theory (a procedure that has more in common with medieval theology than with empirical science). Which brings us to so-called "quantum mechanics".

As far as I can see, quantum mechanics is not deterministic at all. While some people like to assert that it is, I showed why this is not the case in my previous essay: quantum mechanics can never tell us where a particle is. Precise location information is simply not a possible output of the Schrödinger equation. Indeed, to do a location-based calculation, we have to tell the Schrödinger equation where we expect the particle to be (often based on classical approximations). And all it does is tell us the probability of finding it there. This means that Laplace's demon has no starting information, so even if it knew the laws of physics, it couldn't apply them. 

That is to say, there are no deterministic rules in quantum mechanics that govern where a particle is now or where it will be 1 second from now. But it gets worse.

The uncertainty principle says that the precision with which we know where a particle will be (based on its momentum) is inversely proportional to the precision with which we know where it is now. This means that if we could know exactly where all the particles are at some time, we would necessarily know nothing about where they are going. Even a quantum Laplace demon could not know exactly where a particle is and simultaneously know exactly how it is moving.

Another problem is that quantum mechanics is not a scalable theory. The Schrödinger equation for hydrogen, while being a complex problem in three-dimensional calculus, is nonetheless solvable. The Schrödinger equation for helium is not solvable, even in principle. Rather, in order to use quantum mechanics in a three-body system, one has to impose a series of simplifying assumptions, not least of which is treating the nucleus as a classical object. Rather than admit the implications of this for determinism, physicists simply ignore the fact and proceed as if quantum mechanics is a complete description and fully deterministic.

It's widely known that physicists themselves are deeply divided over the ontology of quantum mechanics, see:

• Gibney, Elizabeth. (2025) "Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows." Nature News 30 July 2025.

Again, this is not simply a failure to find a consensus on details. With the mathematics treated as canonical and inviolable, physicists are left to propose increasingly bizarre speculative accounts of how "reality" might be bent to fit the maths canonical. In philosophy, we call this a Procrustean bed. 

If you accept canonical quantum mechanics, then you must abandon determinism.

Structure Matters

I wrote three long essays exploring the idea that both structure and scale are important factors in any description of nature (NB: I was still using the term "reality" in a reified way a lot back then; I wouldn't phrase it that way now, but the basic intuitions about structure and scale are still relevant).

• A Layered Approach to Reality. Part I.
• A Layered Approach to Reality. Part II.1
• A Layered Approach to Reality. Part II.2

Here I owe a debt to Richard Jones, see

• Jones, Richard H. (2013). Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books.

Incidentally, Jones is also the most underrated Nāgārjuna scholar on the planet. He has published English translations of all Nāgārjuna's major works and a good chunk of Prajñāpāramitā. His commentary on Prajñāpāramitā was a major influence on me. But like me, Jones is an outsider. 

Structure refers to (relatively) static arrangements of stuff, be it particles, bricks, or people. A structural property is a property that an object obtains by virtue of the arrangement of its parts. A good example is the buoyancy of a ship made of steel. Steel is ~8x more dense than water. A 1000 kg lump of steel would have a volume of about 125 litres, about the same volume as a bathtub. In water, it would sink like a proverbial stone. However, if you take that 1000 kg lump of steel, flatten it to about 5mm thick, and shape it into a hollow cylinder that encompasses a volume greater than 8000 litres, then that steel structure will float on water.

I use "structure" as the general term, but I mean it to include systems. Structures are relatively static and stable, while systems are relatively dynamic and can be unstable. 

Reductionism focuses on parts, aiming to find something irreducible at the bottom of the well. Metaphysical reductionism says that "reality" resides only in the lowest level of structure that cannot be further reduced to parts; the corollary being that macroscopic objects are not real. Reductionist methods aim to first eliminate structure to expose the underlying parts.

The problem with this becomes apparent in biology. Simply atomising an organism tells us little about it. Even dissecting it only tells us so much. To understand a biological organism, we have to leave it whole and observe how it interacts with surrounding structures and systems (ecology), which themselves are inevitably only parts of much larger systems all the way up to the universe as an all-encompassing structure (cosmology).

Life cannot be understood via reductionism alone. The alternative goes by several names: holism, antireductionism, and emergentism.

It seems to be true that the universe is made of atoms, for example. And that atoms are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons. And that protons and neutrons also have some structure. But just as a pile of bricks is not a house, a universe of unstructured atoms is not what we observe. Atoms form molecules. Molecules form crystals, polymers, cells, and other kinds of structures. Cells form organs. And organs form bodies. And bodies form societies.

Structure exists. It persists over time. And it confers causal properties on complex objects. These properties are sometimes vaguely called "emergent", but "structural" is more accurate and precise, and less open to abuse. Importantly, while lower levels of structure place constraints on higher levels, they do not determine higher levels (I'll come back to this).

In order to understand the universe we actually inhabit, we do need to use reductionist theories and methods to understand the substantial foundations. But on its own, this is not enough. We also have to use holist theories and methods to understand the structures that the foundations support.

Scale Matters

As we move between different scales, our explanations of nature often break down. It was larger scales made visible via telescopes that exposed the incompleteness of Newtonian physics. Structure imparts structural properties to stuff. Microscopic effects are lost at larger scales, and macroscopic effects are greater than the sum of their parts.

For example, quantum mechanics simply ignores gravitation because the impact of it on the scale of electrons and protons is so small that ignoring it has no meaningful impact on precision or accuracy, and the simplification offers a huge advantage in computability. But if your theory ignores gravitation, it has no claim to being "deterministic" in the Laplacian sense.

Scale matters because, as I noted already, substantial properties constrain but don't determine structural properties. We cannot doubt, for example, that the properties of molecules are constrained by the properties of atoms. A molecule cannot have arbitrary properties. However, the properties of water (OH₂) are also strongly related to the asymmetrical arrangement of the three atoms. It is this structure that gives the water molecule its polarity, for example. Organic chemistry is even more fascinating since the possible arrangements of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms are almost endless.

As we scale up, we lose track of microscopic details. In chemistry, we talk in an idealised way about individual molecules, but, actually, 1 gram of water contains ~3 x 10²² water molecules. This number is unimaginably large, and individual molecules are unimaginably small. The only way to deal with such large numbers of molecules is with abstractions and statistics. Hence, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.

For example, the temperature of a volume of gas is proportional to the mean kinetic energy (= ½mv²) of the molecules in that volume. The pressure the gas exerts on its container is proportional to the average speed with which molecules collide with it. And so on.

In any case, determinism is a relic of reductive, mechanistic thinking about the universe. Uncompromising determinism is a castle built on sand. Physics is far less complete than it would need to be to support determinism, and quantum physics is not deterministic at all (at least in the Laplacian sense). Moreover, the absolute fatalism of determinism seems to fly in the face of experience, requiring us to abandon the whole concept of morality, which almost no one outside of academic physics is willing to do.

If anything, the situation with free will is even worse.

Free Will

We cannot even agree on how to spell this concept that may or may not exist. Three spellings are in common use: "free will", "free-will", and "freewill". Research suggests that most people opt for two words these days and that the other options are out of fashion. But the concept is singular, and the phrase seems like an obvious compound to me (in Sanskrit we'd call it a karmadhāraya compound). Sigh. 

If you look at general histories of free will, you will see claims that discussions extend back to antiquity, but my sense is that this is not quite true. People in antiquity may have speculated about how we make choices, but the particular idea of free will seems to be somewhat later.

However, we are hampered in such deliberations by the absence of a consensus on what free will means. Again, I have supplied a structured list of major views in the appendix for easy reference.

Apart from ancient discussions, ideas about free will embrace a range of influences. Early modern philosophers such as Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Kant all wrote about free will. Many scientists, such as Laplace, Darwin, and Einstein has commented on the issue, most often as a consequence of their commitment to determinism. Freud also commented on the issue. It's one of those issues on which the great and good all have (different) opinions.

One of the most striking forms of evidence that physicists cite against free will is the experiments performed by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s. This suggests that we make decisions around half a second earlier than we become aware of having made a decision. I noted in an essay titled Free Will is Back on the Menu (11 March 2016) that few of Libet's colleagues accepted his interpretation at the time, and it has been thoroughly debunked since. What Libet measured was conscious anticipation, not unconscious decision-making. See, for example:

• Clarke, P. G. H. (2013). "The Libet Experiment and its Implications for Conscious Will." Faraday Paper No. 17. Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. http://www.bethinking.org/download/faraday-paper-17-clarke-en

And yet, it is still common to see Libet cited in arguments about free will, especially by physicists. Notably, when Libet is cited in this context, no other neurophysiology authors are cited, and, notably, none of the neurophysiology literature that discussed Libet's work is ever cited. Which flies in the face of scholarly methods. The "literature review" remains an essential part of any research project.

Part of the problem with free will is the idea that there is one and only one decision-making faculty. And this faculty is all or nothing; it either makes all the decisions, or we don't make any decisions. Which is not even remotely consistent with my experience of making decisions. For a start, most decisions don't involve any conscious deliberation. And according to Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber—authors of The Enigma of Reason—the reasons we give for such unconscious decisions are merely post-hoc rationalisations, fabulated on the fly. 

One of the main sources of argument about free will is Christian theologians responding to the problem of evil, starting in the fourth century CE. The problem is relatively simple. If Jehovah is both good and omnipotent, why is there evil in the world at all? If Jehovah cannot do anything about evil, then he is not worthy of worship; if he can but does not, then Jehovah is evil. The theologians decided to blame humans, or more precisely, to blame women via their mythical progenitor Eve. God gave Adam and Eve free will, and Eve used it to disobey Jehovah's stricture not to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, thereby bringing evil into the world. Obviously, the theology of free will requires applying some rather torturous logic to some rather implausible fairy tales.

And the result of all this attention from intellectuals across centuries, if not millennia, in at least a dozen different cultures? A vague, poorly defined, hotly disputed, abstract concept that may or may not exist.

It is already clear that if one adopts determinism, then one is forced to abandon morality. This result is so appalling that many philosophers and other intellectuals have tried to have their cake and eat it. They embrace determinism, but still claim that morality is meaningful. This kind of view is called compatibilism. 

Compatibilism

Here is Albert Einstein in 1929 (by which time he probably knew that quantum mechanics was not deterministic, even if few other people did):

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will... I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. (from an interview published in the Saturday Evening Post. 26 Oct 1929, p.114)

However, Einstein immediately contradicts himself:

Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.

If no actions are the result of decisions, if "we can only wish what we must", then no one is responsible for their actions, and thus they are not culpable for transgressions. The very idea of transgression has to be deprecated. Einstein's position is incoherent. Which just goes to show that physicists, no matter how great they are, often make lousy philosophers.

Compatibilism is not a single unified idea, but generally speaking, compatibilists do what Einstein does. They begin by claiming to accept determinism. For example, they will agree that all events, including human actions, are fixed by prior states and laws. They try to get around the morality-denying fatalism of this statement by redefining morality or some other fudge. For example, one approach is to argue that an action becomes morally significant when it flows from the agent’s internal psychological structures—desires, reasoning, character—without external compulsion.

Unfortunately, under determinism, the notion of an "agent" is incoherent. There are no agents; there are just entities evolving according to laws. Agency implies choice, and choice is eliminated by determinism.

Compatibilism is also simply incoherent.

Deciding to go Up Hill

Every adult human has vast experience of making decisions. This is something we all do all day long. Banal choices like what to wear or eat, and morally significant choices like choosing to be honest or non-violent. Life choices like where to live, who to live with, or what job to do.

As with choosing which words to write in this essay, there are almost always many options for what to do next in any situation.

Anyone who denies that we are making decisions, as Einstein did, is bound to provide an alternative explanation of what is actually happening. If that alternative explanation is determinism, then agents, free will, and responsibility are automatically eliminated, and we lose morality entirely. So, rather than explaining human behaviour, determinism simply eliminates it from consideration.

We have the category "agent" precisely because agents are not like other objects. Water has no choice but to flow downhill: water is not an agent. A thrown rock follows a parabolic arc. Rocks are not agents. A planet orbits a sun in an elliptical orbit. Planets are not agents.

Agents are not passive in the face of physics. An agent can go up hill or around hills. Some agents can fly over the hill. Humans often simply remove inconvenient hills or tunnel under them. As a being that experiences having agency, I would say that, where agents are concerned, there is something more going on than merely following laws. 

Agents use energy to do actions that are allowed but not favoured by the laws of physics; actions that would never happen spontaneously in nature. Agents can remain in overly energetic states over long periods of time, consuming energy to remain so. 

The Choice of Illusions

Simply saying "choice is an illusion" is not an explanation. If we go down this road, then reductio ad absurdum, all experience is an illusion. In which case, we have not explained anything. An illusion ought not to be able to participate in causality. However, it's quite clear that my choices translate into actions and events that are causal.

For example, I start writing in the morning with a flask of pǔ'ěrchá 普洱茶 or Pu'er tea (普洱 is a toponym that cannot really be translated). From time to time, I take a sip. When my cup is empty, I refill it. When my flask is empty, I make another pot of cha. Each action has objective consequences in the sense that it results in a repeatable sequence of objective events that would not happen if I chose not to do them. This is how we objectively define causation. This causal sequence of events is not an illusion. My cup being empty is objectively not the same as my cup being full. My desire for more tea causes me to refill my cup. But it doesn't compel me to refill it, nor does it compel me to fill it with tea, let alone Pu'er tea. There's no inevitability in this situation. 

It's one thing to performatively state the belief that "experience is an illusion", but in practice, people who act like experience is an illusion typically have a psychiatric problem such as dissociative disorder, and they find it difficult or impossible to function socially.

It would be weird to believe that our decisions are not influenced by our cultural conditioning, the language we speak, our peers, and environmental exigencies. The idea of a perfectly free will—sometimes called contracausal free will—is clearly nonsensical. Like the fictional "rational faculty" that operates without any input from emotion or external influences, free will in this sense is a unicorn. And yet it is precisely contracausal free will that many people tacitly have in mind if they have not thought much about it.

Framing the issue in black and white terms—either free will exists or it doesn't—virtually guarantees failure to understand decision-making. And yet this is what most commentators seem to insist on, and certainly this framing of the issue is by far the most common one amongst the general public.

A better, more pragmatic approach would be to enquire into what factors influence our decisions. I've already mentioned some of the main influences.

As I write, for example, my word choices are governed by the rules of the English language, by my vocabulary, by the style I adopt, by my knowledge of the subject and its conventions, and so on. Language itself is constrained by human anatomy and physiology. There is no arbitrary or abstract "freedom"; it's not a standalone idea. There are degrees of freedom within an elaborate set of physical and social constraints. That's what we should be talking about. 

Conclusion

Growing up, my moral education often consisted of simplistic aphorisms. This may help explain why I'm still fond of aphorisms (see my collection on the about page). One of the most common aphorisms I heard as a kid was: "Two wrongs don't make a right." In determinism and free will, we have two wrongs. Added together, they do not make a right.

Determinism seems attractive because, superficially, it offers a level of objective certainty that religious fanatics can only dream of. However, beyond the surface, determinism unravels because none of our working theories of nature is truly deterministic or complete enough to support determinism. Moreover, the tendency to combine uncompromising determinism with uncompromising reductionism creates a false picture of the universe. Importantly, such views ignore the influence of either structure or scale.

Our principal microscopic theory of matter, quantum physics (in its various manifestations), doesn't even scale from a hydrogen atom to a helium atom, let alone to the macroscopic world. The calculations are simply too complex to ever be solved without making radical assumptions like treating the nucleus as a classical object. Which, incidentally, proves that nature is not performing calculations when a helium atom comes into existence. 

The addition of layers of structure is significant. Because structure makes a qualitative and quantitative contribution. Structure is objective and causal.

Certainly, the macroscopic world is constrained by features of the microscopic, but it is not determined by them. Molecules are more than the sum of their parts. And that "more" is not mystical, magical, or emergent: it is precisely the contribution of structure. This is why reductionism fails as a universal approach.

Compatibilism is not unlike bleeding heart liberalism, the proponents of which acknowledge the evil done by capitalism, and strive to meliorate or mitigate the damage it does through acts of charity, but who nonetheless wholeheartedly embrace capitalism. 

The real problem with determinism, and the reason that even ardent determinists like Einstein adopt compatibilist approaches, is that it denies all forms of morality. The most fundamental assumption of morality is that we make choices that are reflected in our behaviour, especially our behaviour towards others. Without this assumption, all of our ideas about morality, fairness, and justice go out the window.

Religious theories of morality are even worse, since they divorce moral sensibilities from human experience. In theistic religions, morality is perceived to be imposed by some external agent. The Abrahamic religions have a very dim view of humanity. Buddhism, quite frankly, sees most people, and all non-Buddhists, as moral idiots.

I follow the primate ethologist Frans de Waal in seeing morality as structural feature of living a social lifestyle, and as rooted in the capacities of empathy and reciprocity. For a more detailed account, see my series of essays on this.

• The Evolution of Morality. Introduction and Deontology. (18 November 2016)
• The Evolution of Morality. Two Pillars of Morality - Reciprocity (25 November 2016)
• The Evolution of Morality. Two Pillars of Morality - Empathy. (02 December 2016)

And the source:

• Waal, Frans de. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.

In this view, we are naturally moral, since we inherit the capacities for empathy and reciprocity. If we are immoral, this is probably the result of deliberately suppressing empathy or subverting reciprocity. It is detrimental to the group, and the group is essential to our survival and the passing on of our genes. Ergo, the group acts to curb and prevent actions that undermine the group, which helps to keep the group functioning harmoniously. The main job of the "alpha male" chimp is to interpose in conflicts on the side of the weaker party. And to ensure that any members of the group who are in conflict find a way back to harmony. Rather than being the strongest or most violent, the alpha male is generally the most trusted and respected male in the group. 

The social primate code is "United we stand, divided we fall. All for one, and one for all." 

Any philosophy of nature that denies the centrality of morality in our (social) lives is practically useless. As I said at the outset, I don't see anything worth rescuing from this mess. Neither determinism nor free will is even a good idea. Whereas morality is a great idea. If the choice is either determinism or morality, then I choose morality without any hesitation. 

~~Φ~~

Appendix

Approaches to Determinism

• I. Determinism Proper (what is fixed?)
• Global determinism — the complete state of the world plus laws fixes all future states
• Local determinism — determinism holds in some domains but not others
• Nomological determinism — determinism relative to the laws of nature
• Causal determinism — every event has a sufficient prior cause
• Logical determinism — truth-values about the future fix what will occur
• Theological determinism — divine foreknowledge or decree fixes outcomes
• II. Indeterminism (denial of fixation)
• Ontological indeterminism — the world itself is not fully fixed
• Causal indeterminism — causes do not necessitate effects
• Event-level indeterminism — some events lack sufficient causes
• System-level indeterminism — higher-level descriptions are indeterminate
• III. Hybrid Views (mixed structure)
• Soft determinism — deterministic structure with explanatory slack
• Probabilistic causation — laws constrain outcomes statistically
• Emergent indeterminism — indeterminacy arises at higher levels
• Chaotic determinism — determinism with practical unpredictability
• IV. Epistemic Positions (about knowledge, not reality)
• Epistemic determinism — the world may be deterministic even if unknowable
• Epistemic indeterminism — indeterminacy reflects limits of description
• Predictive scepticism — determinism undecidable in practice
• V. Deflationary / Quietist
• Instrumentalism — determinism as a modelling choice
• Pragmatic determinism — determinism adopted for explanatory utility
• Semantic deflationism — disputes about determinism are verbal or framework-relative
• VI. Metaphysical Rejections
• Anti-realist determinism — no fact of the matter about determinism
• Pluralist metaphysics — multiple incompatible but adequate descriptions

Approaches to Free Will

• I. Denial
• Eliminativism — no such thing as free will
• II. Deflationary / Revisionary
• Pragmatic / practice-based — “free will” fixed by its role in responsibility practices
• Revisionism — weakened notion retained for moral or social purposes
• III. Accounts of Agency (what kind of thing acts?)
• Reductive event-causal agency — actions explained by mental events
• Non-reductive agency — agency irreducible to subpersonal processes
• Emergent agency — agency arises at the personal level
• Agent-causal agency — agents as primitive causes
• IV. Accounts of Control (what makes action mine?)
• Reasons-responsive control — sensitivity to reasons
• Guidance control — ownership of the mechanism producing action
• Hierarchical control — higher-order endorsement
• Identification/ownership — identification with motives
• V. Accounts of Sourcehood (where does action ultimately come from?)
• Historical sourcehood — dependence on past self-shaping
• Structural sourcehood — present-time ownership of springs of action
• Ultimacy-based sourcehood — agent as ultimate origin
• VI. Phenomenological / Narrative
• Phenomenological agency — lived experience of choosing
• Narrative identity — agency embedded in a self-narrative

Philosophical Detritus III: Reality.

This is the third in a series of essays about abstractions in philosophy. Here, I continue the critique and extend it to another abstract concept that seems to trip many people up: reality.

Reality is one of the most common abstract metaphysical concepts used by both amateur and professional philosophers. We all like to say things like "In reality,..." We love to cite reality as the ultimate authority. "In reality..." is treated as a killer argument. And we try to ground our ideas of truth in reality.

However, these informal or common-sense uses of the term belie a deep and pervasive malaise in professional philosophy (the world over). After millennia of argument—across human cultures—there is no consensus on what "reality" is. Nor is there any consensus on what "truth" means (I'll come back to this). Metaphysics keeps promising insight into these problems, yet it never produces anything testable or even conceptually stable. New ways to approach reality keep emerging, but none of them ever manages to solve the problems it promises to solve.

And yet, at the same time, we all feel confident we know what reality is, or that we would know it when we see it.

When a problem has been argued over by clever people for a century without any consensus emerging, we may begin to suspect that we have framed the problem poorly. However, when we have argued for millennia and failed to reach any satisfactory conclusion, it calls the whole enterprise of philosophy, or at least metaphysics, into question.

Metaphysics is bunk. But why is it bunk?

Reality and Epistemic Privilege

Questions about reality are the principal topic of metaphysics.

• What is real?
• What does it mean for something to be real?
• What is the nature of reality?

Reality is such a basic concept that you might expect there to be a long-standing consensus about it. After all, given how most of us use the term "reality", it ought to define itself. And as noted, we all seem to have a "common sense" view of reality. However, there is no general consensus on reality amongst philosophers, and there never has been. On the contrary, reality is one of the most disputed concepts in philosophy. As with many problems I've written about in recent years, there is not only an existing discordant dissensus, but it is growing all the time as new propositions are floated that try (and usually fail) to take the discussion in different directions.

We need to be clear about the implications of this dispute over "reality". If philosophers cannot even agree on what reality is, they cannot agree on anything else. There is a structural failure in the field of philosophy, an impasse that has existed for thousands of years. Lacking agreement on “reality,” philosophy fragments into self-contained silos with no common reference point. Nonetheless, this ambiguous and disputed concept continues to play an essential role in philosophy and daily life.

The problem with all these abstract metaphysical concepts is that we only have experience and imagination to go on. No one has privileged access to reality, so no one actually knows anything about reality. There is no epistemic privilege with respect to reality.

Everyone’s access to reality is mediated by factors such as perception, cognition, language, theory, and culture. There is no way around this mediation; no way to get unmediated access to reality, whatever it is. In my "nominalist" view, reality is an abstract concept; an idea. And, thus, the idea that we could have direct access to reality is quite bizarre.

Still, the idea that some amongst us do have epistemic privilege is widespread, especially in relation to religions. People are constantly stepping up to confidently tell us that they alone have privileged access to reality and can tell us what it is. It is very noticeable amongst Buddhists who like to invoke reality.

“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”--Kalu Rinpoche

"the development of insight into the ultimate nature of reality." --Dalai Lama

“To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.”--Thich Nhat Hanh

Closer to home, for me, the founder of the Triratna Order, Sangharakshita (1925 – 2018), argued that imagination was our "reality sense". This idea was inspired by English Romantic poets rather than Indian Buddhists. No word in the canonical languages of Buddhism means "imagination". It's not a concept Buddhists made use of prior to contact with Europe. Moreover, the "reality" imagined by Sangharakshita and his followers is distinctly magical, vitalistic, and teleological (all of which seem unreal to me).

Buddhists are not exceptional in seeking to leverage the dissensus on reality to stake a claim to privileged metaphysical knowledge. Nor are Buddhists the only ones who meditate. Hindus also have a long history of meditation, and they have arrived at radically different conclusions about the significance of meditative states. So too with the Sāṃkhya philosophy, which most people now encounter in the context of haṭha yoga.

There is no "reality sensing faculty" and no way to know reality directly. I do not doubt that some people experience altered states in meditation, though I would say these largely arise in the context of sensory deprivation. Whatever those states are, after 13 years of intensively editing, translating, and studying Prajñāpāramitā texts, I no longer find it plausible that altered states in meditation reflect reality (or that "reality", in any European sense, was an important concept in Buddhism prior to European contact).

Obviously, if we cannot get information about reality directly, then we cannot know reality in any conventional sense. In other words, the big problem with metaphysics is epistemic.

To be more precise, there is no epistemic justification for any metaphysics. We don't know reality. And we cannot know reality. All traditional metaphysics arises from speculating about experience.

This is not a new observation. David Hume (1711–1776) came to similar conclusions. He famously noted that we never see a separate event that we could label "causation". What we call "causation" is merely a regular sequence of events. If event B is always seen to be preceded by event A, then we say that A caused B. And this generalised to metaphysics. Hume argued that all knowledge is either sensory experience or ideas about sensory experience. And experience is not reality.

I have encountered many people, mostly Buddhists, over the years who professed to believe the opposite of this, i.e. that experience is reality. The corollary is that we all have our own reality. This is solipsistic and egocentric. We can show why this is false by coming back to the main argument.

Half a century earlier, Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) was able to formulate relatively simple expressions using calculus that made accurate predictions about the motions of objects.

(where F = force, v = velocity, p = momentum)

And since, for any event we can witness on earth, these expressions predict future motion with considerable accuracy and precision, they surely reflect some kind of knowledge about reality. We can confirm this by using the same equations to retrodict past events that have already been observed, so we know the outcome of the process in advance. Newton's laws of motion are a very robust description of motion as it could be observed in the 18th century. In the course of my formal education, I personally demonstrated the efficacy of all these laws of motion.

At the very least, this is objective knowledge.

Thus, there is a tension between Hume's observation that we cannot know reality and Newton's observations that appear to describe reality very well.

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) attempted to resolve this tension by redefining "metaphysics" as a critical inquiry into the conditions that make knowledge and experience possible, rather than as speculative knowledge of things beyond experience. In his view, metaphysical ideas like causation, space, and time are a priori forms unconsciously imposed on experience by our minds. In other words, "space" and "time" are not part of reality and don't exist independently of an experiencing mind. Similarly, causation is how we explain sequences of experiences, not an aspect of reality. This means metaphysics cannot reveal things as they are in themselves, but only the necessary structures of how we must experience them.

The problem with Kant is that his view still requires a metaphysics, since he tacitly assumes that all humans experience the world in exactly the same way. This is a speculative view about human nature and requires something both universal and beyond experience. And I don't think it works because this is not something that Kant could know (even now). Worse, this is not my experience of other people. Exposed to a range of people, one of the most striking things we notice is that we do not all experience the world in the same way. Some aspects of experience are unequivocally not shared; they are subjective.

Kant might have gotten around this by emphasising that empiricism is more than just observing nature; it also crucially involves comparing notes about experience with other people. But he did not. It is precisely comparing notes about experience, noting the similarities and differences, that allows us to parse the commonalities in experience.

Kant doesn't really account for Newton's objective knowledge. Rather than positing that every human being sees the world in exactly the same way, it makes more sense to me to say that objective knowledge of this type is independent of the observer. From observations like Newton's laws of motion, we can infer that there is an objective world, which does have its own structures and systems. Still, this world can only be appreciated via mediated experience. At the very least, we may say that our ideas of space and time, for example, must be analogous to something objective, or we could not use them to predict the future in the way that we do.

Similar dissatisfaction with Kant drove the emergence of phenomenology. Husserl, for instance, wanted to suspend all assumptions about “reality itself” and focus instead on experience as it presents itself. Note that, despite the many successes of phenomenology, we all still rely on metaphysical frameworks to structure our understanding of the world. But this retreat from objectivity is also hamstrung by the fact that we can make valid inferences and predict the future.

However, despite the emergence of phenomenology, speculative metaphysics continues to dominate philosophy. Arguments about "reality" are ongoing and diversifying as time goes on.

Rescuing the Concept of Reality through Pragmatism

As far as I can see, some form of realism is inescapable. Realist explanations do the best job of predicting the future. Newton's laws of motion are still in daily use by scientists, engineers, and technologists precisely because they accurately predict the future. All the attempts to deprecate realism have ended in failure: specifically, failure to predict the future as realist explanations do.

Newton's laws of motion are objective facts. They are apparent to any observer. The laws have limits, and there are situations in which they fail to be accurate or precise enough. Still, within the well-known and accepted limits, the laws of motion apply.

And at the same time, we still only have experience to go on. Which means that realism has to have a pragmatic character. We can infer objective facts—such as Newton's laws of motion—and these allow us to predict the future. Being able to predict the future, and thus reduce the burden of uncertainty (without ever eliminating it), is nontrivial. Of course, such a pragmatic approach can never provide the kind of certainty that metaphysics promises, but then metaphysics has never delivered on such promises either.

I come back to a crucial point already made above: comparing notes. When we compare notes, especially in small groups, we immediately see that some aspects of our experience are shared and some are not. By painstaking observation and comparing notes, we can infer which things appear the same (or at least similar) to everyone and which are only apparent to ourselves.

Take the example of the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the Earth. It doesn't matter who observes this or what method they use; it always turns out to be ~9.81 ± 0.15 ms^-2. It doesn't even matter which units we use. We could measure it in fathoms per century squared, as long as we know how to convert one unit to another.

So the acceleration due to gravitation is more or less the same for everyone. And we can account for the variations with factors like elevation and the density of the underlying bedrock. We can say, therefore, that gravitation is independent of the observer. Another way of saying this is that gravitation is objective. And having inferred this, we can imagine many ways to test this with a view to falsifying it. An inference that both makes accurate and precise predictions (and retrodictions) and also survives rigorous attempts at falsification can be considered an accurate indicator of reality.

But we don't just compare notes on individual phenomena. Gravitation is a particular phenomenon, and we can compare this to other forces and how they operate. For example, we might look at gravitation in the light of observations of other kinds of motion. If we had a theory of gravitation that predicted motion that disagreed with our theory of motion, then we would be at an impasse. But this is not the case. When we investigate nature, we find that our inferences support and reinforce each other.

Newton's law of gravitation is consistent with his laws of motion. And they are both consistent with other formal regularities in the universe. And we now have explanations that go beyond the limits of Newton but which show that Newton's laws are special cases under certain limits.

Note that values obtained in this way should always include some measure of uncertainty. We aim to measure things with a high degree of accuracy and precision, but there is always some measurement error. And our inferences often rely on assumptions that may introduce inaccuracy or imprecision.

The physical sciences are inherently pragmatic. We aim to arrive at valid inferences that allow us to predict the future to a desired level of accuracy and precision. Doing this allows us to compile useful and robust inferences into a system of inferred knowledge that is highly reliable. Newton's laws are paradigmatic of such knowledge.

And when this is the case, we don't need to know what cannot be known. What we can and do infer is enough to be getting on with. We can step back from speculating about unobservable metaphysics and focus on what can be observed.

Note that this is not the same as the instrumentalism that afflicts quantum mechanics. Quantum theory was developed in a milieu profoundly influenced by logical positivism. Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, and others collectively resisted any attempt at a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, arguing that since we could not observe the nano-scale (in the 1920-30s), we could not know it. They rejected both Schrödinger's realistic interpretation and both his and Einstein's critique of non-realist approaches. Schrödinger's cat was intended as a refutation of the Copenhagen view, but ended with Copenhagen adopting the cat as their mascot. The modern, Von Neumann-Dirac, formalism still resists realist interpretations. The majority of physicists simply accept that no realist interpretation of nanoscale physics is possible, even though we now have images of individual atoms, which allows us to affirm that atoms are objective phenomena.

While principled arguments exist for idealist or other non-realist views, such approaches have never allowed us to predict the future in the way that realism does. There is no idealist equivalent of Newton's laws of motion, let alone the systematic accumulation of useful knowledge that characterises science. To my knowledge, idealists have made no contribution to understanding the world.

Pragmatism allows for pluralism. Of course, most people do not want pluralism. They want answers. They want certainty. I sympathise. I want answers too. But after a lifetime of seeking answers, this is as close as I have come to a satisfactory solution.

Conclusion

"Reality" seems to be paradoxical. It is both intimately familiar and foundational to our worldviews and, at the same time, forever beyond our perception and understanding.

Thousands of years of argumentation over reality and the nature of reality have not resulted in a consensus; rather, it is the source of a growing dissensus.

Very many people reify reality, i.e. treat the abstract concept of reality as a thing in itself.

Since reality is an abstract concept, the nature of reality is abstract.

No one has epistemic privilege with respect to reality. No one knows. And the people who claim to know—including religious gurus—are misleading us or have themselves been misled. Sincerity is no guarantor of accuracy or precision. Belief is a feeling about an idea.

The emergence of phenomenology was not the end of metaphysics.

We can rescue this ambiguous and paradoxical abstract concept via pragmatism.

It has been apparent for some centuries that we don't have to rely on speculative metaphysics. We can and do infer objective facts about the world.

There are patterns and regularities in experience that only make sense in a realist framework. At the very least, experience must be analogous to reality, or we'd get lost and bump into things all the time. The precision and accuracy with which we can describe patterns and regularities in experience, and use these to predict the future, also argue pragmatically for adopting realism.

The most obvious of these descriptions and predictions come from physics, but we get them from all kinds of sciences, including social sciences.

Pragmatic objectivity is something we can aspire to and, at our best, approach. It's not the same as certainty, but it is good enough to be getting on with.

However, my sense is that promises of certain knowledge will always be attractive to some people. And this leaves those people open to manipulation and economic exploitation.

~~Φ~~

Philosophical Detritus II: Consciousness

In the previous essay in this series, I made some fairly banal comments about abstractions from something like a nominalist point of view. Nominalism is usually couched in metaphysical terms, but my approach is epistemic and heuristic. I don't say "abstractions don't exist", I say "abstractions are ideas". 

Ideas are ontologically subjective. We can have objective knowledge about ideas, it's just a different kind of knowledge than we can have about objects. As John Searle puts it:

The ontological subjectivity of the domain [of consciousness] does not prevent us from having an epistemically objective science of that domain.

For example, ideas do not have properties such as location, extension, or orientation in space or time. Still, ideas are knowable. Counting systems and numbers are abstract and thus ontologically subjective, but 2 + 2 = 4 is an epistemically objective fact about numbers.

At the same time, we can treat ideas as metaphorically located, extended, and orientated. An apt example would be "the ideas in my head". Metaphorically, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. With this mapping from objects to ideas in place, we can now make statements in which qualities of objects and verbs that apply to manipulating objects are applied to ideas. 

Unfortunately, this opens up the possibility of (1) treating the abstract as real (reification) and (2) treating the abstract as independent of concrete examples (hypostatisation). There is a third problem, which has no widely-accepted name, but which we can call animation, which is treating ideas as if they have their own agency (compare Freud's psychoanalytic theory which gives emotions their own agency). That is to say, without care we may conclude that ideas are real, independent, and autonomous agents.

The point of taking this approach to abstractions is pragmatic. Over the years I have participated in and witnessed many philosophical discussions. Not a few of these have concerned the nebulous abstraction consciousness. And on the vast majority of occasions the discussion is plagued by unacknowledged reification, hypostatization, and animation. In other words, the abstraction "consciousness" is routinely treated as a real, independent, and autonomous agent. For example, these are some actual questions recently asked on Quora.

• If we did not have a consciousness, would we have thought of the idea of consciousness?
• If science was able to clone an exact copy of me, including my consciousness, would it be me?
• How can we upload human consciousness via AI?
• Is there any scientific evidence that we are all one consciousness?
• Is it possible to transfer consciousness to another body like a clone or machine?
• Is it scientifically possible to transfer self consciousness from one body to another?
• What is the real nature of consciousness? Can it be engineered or exported by humans, or does it exist beyond us?
• Is consciousness a fundamental property of the universe, or is it an emergent phenomenon of complex biological systems?
• How likely is it that humans will eventually be able to fully explain consciousness?

These kinds of questions are asked again and again with minor differences in emphasis. They are also answered over and over again. It appears that having many available answers does not reduce the desire to ask the question. I think part of the problem is that answers are wildly inconsistent. Asked a yes/no question, Quora answers often say "yes", "no", and "maybe" with equal confidence and authority.

In this essay, I will attempt to apply my heuristic to cut through some of the bullshit and bring some order to one the most confused topics in philosophy: consciousness. This is not as difficult as it sounds. 

Meaning is Use

Observing how people use this term "consciousness", my sense is that that vast majority of people use "consciousness" as a synonym for "soul". That is to say they treat "consciousness" as a nonphysical entity that is both independent of their physical body (including their brain) and, at the same time, integral to their identity and/or personality. For the majority, it seems, consciousness is a kind of secularised soul, stripped of the supernatural significance given to it by christians, but still a real, independent, autonomous agent. 

Being independent of the body means that "consciousness" is able to survive death. It is hypostatized consciousness, for example, that allows for techno-utopian ideas such as "uploading consciousness", "transferring consciousness" from one body to another (including the wildly incoherent concept of the "brain transplant"), as well as various kinds of disembodied consciousness (including post-mortem consciousness).

In these examples, "consciousness" is something that is not causally tied to a body and, as such, it can exist without a body or be moved between bodies, including non-human bodies. Like the soul, the uploaded consciousness is disembodied and effectively immortal (which explains some of the ongoing appeal of the fallacious idea). "Uploading consciousness" is an analog of the christian narrative of resurrection or the buddhist narrative of rebirth. It's an afterlife theory. In my book Karma and Rebirth Reconsidered, I argued that all religious afterlife theories are incoherent because they all contradict each other. 

A particular mistake that almost always goes with consciousness qua soul, is vitalism. This is the idea that what distinguishes living matter from non-living matter is some kind of animating principle or élan vital. In antiquity, this principle was almost always associated with breath (see, e.g. my essay on spirit as breath). In Judeo-Christian mythology, Yahweh breathes life into Adam, animating him. The word animate derives from a root meaning "breathe". Similarly, psykhē (Greek) and spīritus (Latin) originally meant "breath".

As anyone who has experienced the corpse of a loved one knows, its intuitive to think that something animated them and that their corpse is the body minus that animating principle. For example, I vividly recall seeing my father's corpse in 1990 and having this reaction.

Actually, what's missing in the experience of see the corpse of a loved one is our emotional response to them. There is a neurological condition known as Capgras Syndrome, in which localised brain damage can leave a person able to recognise familiar faces, but unable to experience emotional responses to them. They frequently arrive at the bizarre conclusion that the people they know have been replaced by doppelgangers.

My father's corpse was like an exact replica of him, that wasn't moving or responding. All the personality was gone. Like many people my first intuition was that my father's life and personality had gone somewhere. Which is to say, that they still existed apart from the body. With a lot more life experience and learning under my belt, I can now see that, while the difference between living and dead is stark, it's our own lack of emotional response to corpses that we are trying to explain.

As a teenager, I remember going to the funeral of my best friend's father who died quite young. My friend and his nuclear family were all disconcertingly smiling and happy. They were not overtly religious in the conventional sense of being members of a religious community. Nevertheless, for them, the deceased man was still a very strong presence. They felt him still there with them. They were not sad, at the time, because in their minds, the father was not gone wholly gone or inaccessible.

I get the attraction to and plausibility of vitalism. I just don't believe it. Vitalism was discredited when we discovered how to synthesise organic compounds in the late 19th century. We don't have to add any "vital principle" or "life force" to account for animate matter.

Despite being secularised and stripped of significance, the idea of a consciousness qua autonomous entity that survives death still has a religious flavour. Witness the people who assume that "consciousness" is an entity then go around seeking evidence that supports this view. 

By contrast, a rational approach would begin with concrete evidence. If we were to start over, and re-examine the evidence, no one would propose the concept of a soul.

The abstract concept “consciousness” has become a dead end.

• All statements that treat “consciousness” as a concrete or real thing or entity are false.
• All statements that treat “consciousness” as a separate or disembodied thing are false.
• All statements that treat “consciousness” as an autonomous agent are false.

And from what I can see, very little of what remains is useful. Some metaphorical uses of "consciousness" are common:

• A stream of consciousness.
• The fabric of consciousness.
• A field of awareness.
• A thread of awareness
• The tapestry of the mind
• A vessel of thought
• The machinery of the mind.
• A lens of perception.

However, all of these uses are prone to hypostatisation, reification, and animation. 

Intentionality

One way around the mistakes people make is to acknowledge Dan Dennett's observation that consciousness is (almost) always intentional. We can say that consciousness (almost) always has an object or condition. Heuristically, we can say that consciousness is always consciousness of something. If we always follow "consciousness" with "of _____" and fill in the blank, we are much less likely to go wrong. For example:

• Concrete: “I am conscious of feeling cold.” ✓
• Abstract: “There is consciousness of feeling cold.” ✓
• Reified:
• “There is a consciousness.” X
• “My consciousness...” X
• “Consciousness is…” X
• “Consciousness does…” X

Unfortunately, even true abstract statements about experience are likely to be misinterpreted in ways that falsify them.

The exception to conscious states being intentional is the state of "contentless awareness" sometimes experienced in sleep or meditation. See for example the discussion: "Can you be aware of nothing?" in The Conversation.

For Buddhists, note, that I now distinguish "contentless awareness" from "cessation". Following cessation there is no awareness. The state of śūnyatā (also an abstract noun) is not a conscious state. It is an unconscious state, though seemingly distinct from sleep or anaesthesia.

Contentless awareness probably corresponds to the higher āyatana stages, for example "the stage of nothingness" (ākiñcaññāyatana) or "the stage of no awareness or unawareness"(nevasaññānāsañña). Prajñāpāramitā texts make it clear that having any kind of experience or memories of experience is inconsistent with śūnyatā.

To sum up

"Consciousness" is an abstract concept. An idea. Ideas are not real, independent, and autonomous agents. Ideas are ideas. Ideas are subjective; though we can have objective knowledge about them.

Talking about consciousness as a soul is a dead loss. But, then, there is very little talk about consciousness that is not a dead loss. And this includes most of "philosophy". 

Consciousness as a abstract concept is intentional. This can be reflected in statements that include what we are conscious of.

~~Φ~~