Panpsychism and Biopsychism

 Hello, readers. I have returned to study with the aim of completing my MA in Philosophy. The following is an essay I wrote for the course, a paper on Philosophy of Religion. I hope you enjoy it.

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One recent major development in the ongoing conversation conducted by philosophers among themselves is the appearance of a new theory concerning consciousness and the material world. This new theory, known as ‘panpsychism’, has become very popular because it seems to many to help solve the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Panpsychists believe that mental properties, conscious states, are possessed by all material things, all physical things. The most widely believed postulate as to the kind of mental properties possessed by material objects among panpsychists is that all objects possess experience. However other kinds of mental property have sometimes been suggested, such as feeling, perception, or agency. Panpsychism comes in two main forms: micropanspychism and cosmopanpsychism. Micropanpsychists believe that the most fundamental level of reality is that of atomic and subatomic particles and that these microscopic entities have rudimentary forms of consciousness. Those micropanpsychists who hold that experience is possessed by all material things, that experience is fundamental, argue that particles have experience .The consciousnesses of creatures like us are composed of billions of these microscopic subjects – but this leads us to the problem of how billions of tiny experiencing minds can sum together to produce the mind of a creature like a human. Cosmopanpsychists, by contrast, think the most fundamental level of reality is the universe as a whole. This raises the inverse problem. If micropanpsychists have a combination problem, cosmopansychicsts have a decombination problem. If all humans, say, participate in a single universal mind, how can we explain the fact that individual minds feel like individual minds and the fact that one human mind may have desires and beliefs that are not compatible with the desires and beliefs of another human mind? The combination problem and the decombination problem are the major obstacles that must be surmounted by defenders of panpsychism.

The purpose of this essay is to discuss panpsychism in relation to life. I shall begin by sketching out the theoretical considerations that have made panpsychism so popular. I shall then move on to the following important question: if, say, subatomic particles possess mental properties, what kind of mental properties must they possess? I shall conclude that we cannot know at all what mental properties are possessed by particles like electrons. I shall then discuss life. Although this seems like a circular definition, one can say that the fundamental difference between a living organism and an inanimate system is that living organisms can die whereas physical systems cannot. (I shall present less circular definitions later.) No living organism is immortal. Because living organisms desire to stay alive and to reproduce, insofar as all living organisms have mental states these mental states must involve values. A living organism desires to eat, to mate sexually if it reproduces this way, to protect itself from predation and adverse environmental stressors such as a too high or too low temperature, so on and so forth. Even if an inanimate system like a river or boulder is made up of billions of tiny minds, the collective mind of such natural objects possess no value-involving mental states because a river can dry up and a boulder erode but neither system endeavours to protect itself from such ‘death’. If the mind of a living organism is made up of a multitude of micro-subjects, the summation of these mini-minds, considered as an organised whole, together want to remain alive. I shall argue that the mind of a living organism is a ‘further fact’, a fact not reducible to the sum of smaller facts. Alternatively, if we presume cosmopanpsychism rather than micropanpsychism, we might then wonder if the universe as a whole can be regarded as a living system, a system that can perish but is trying to stay alive. This possibility is something I shall consider briefly in the conclusion of this essay. My main aim is to defend two claims: firstly, that the living mental life of an organism is a ‘further fact’ that cannot be explained away through some kind of summation of micro-subjects and, secondly, that only living organisms possess mental properties analogous to human mental properties because only organisms can possess values.

We shall begin by defining three terms: ‘panpsychism’, ‘panvitalism’ and ‘pantheism’. Panpsychism is the belief that everything has mental properties. Panvitalism is the belief that everything is alive. Pantheism is the idea that everything together constitutes God, or that God is in everything. In the ancient world, these three concepts were not distinct: many ancients were ‘animists’, believing that supernatural presences could be found be found everywhere in the natural world. However by the Enlightenment all three belief systems had fallen by the wayside. Rene Descartes, in the seventeenth century, first put consciousness centre-stage through an argument that has become a slogan, ‘Cogito ergo sum’. Descartes believed that there was a spiritual substance and a physical substance and that these two substances interacted. His theory is thus known as ‘substance dualism’. He proposed that the mechanism through which these two substances interacted involved the pineal gland in the human brain. Importantly, perhaps partly because of his religious commitments, Descartes thought humans had minds or souls but that animals did not. By the twentieth century, such cynicism had been extended by some scientists to include humans themselves. The psychological theory known as ‘behaviourism’, represented perhaps most notably by Ivan Pavlov and BF Skinner, had as a central methodological principle the axiom that because consciousness and mental states are unobservable they could not and should not be scientifically studied. Although this was a methodological principle, it contributed to the idea that any talk of minds or consciousness at all was mystical balderdash, unscientific. Behaviourism and logical positivism were both popular contemporaneously. After the 1950s, this extreme scepticism concerning the existence of minds in people and animals gradually softened and an important milestone was reached in 1995 with the publication of David Chalmers’s essay “Facing up to the problem of consciousness”. Although this was long past the heyday of behaviourism, this essay marked an important turning point. Scientists might not be able to study consciousness at all but philosophers could write and think about it.

The hard problem of consciousness involves the idea that mental states like qualia cannot be explained away biologically or neurologically. Although neuroscience might be able to sketch out how a stimulus can affect the nervous system and then result in a behaviour, science alone cannot explain consciousness itself. Chalmers presented a thought experiment – imagine a world in which many or all of the apparent human beings in it are simply zombies. They behave exactly like humans in our world but lack consciousness. Chalmers claimed that this world is possible and would be indistinguishable from our own. The view Chalmers presented in this essay is one of causal closure – all physical effects have physical causes. Thus, if minds exist and are not physical, they must be epiphenomenal. (If mental states can have physical effects, if there is not physical causal closure, the zombie world could be distinguished from the physical world.) However, we know for a fact that we ourselves possess consciousness. Thus the reason why consciousness poses a hard problem for philosophers and scientists is that we know ourselves to possess it but cannot study it through the physical sciences. 

Chalmers states that he has consciousness himself and takes the courteous position towards his readers of ascribing consciousness to them as well. We assume that all normal humans possess consciousness and, today, often assume that higher-level animals also possess consciousness of some sort. One might be able to tell, for instance, that one’s pet dog is afraid of the noise of thunderstorms and firework displays by observing its behaviour, yelps and whimpers. Our attribution of mental states to other humans and to many animals involves empathy. Although we lack conclusive evidence that the humans we interact with have mental states, we tend to extend to them the courtesy of supposing that they are not zombies. The notion of the limits of potential empathy is explored by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his 1974 essay, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” However it is not obvious that non-human animals possess consciousness. If we were to take the strong position represented by Rene Descarte, that only humans possess consciousness, but set aside his particular kind of Christian ideology and incorporate Darwinian evolution and neuroscience into our picture of the world, we are faced with the question of how consciousness emerges. From the Darwinian angle, we might wonder exactly when, in human evolutionary history, consciousness suddenly appeared. Why is it the case that we have it even though the common ancestor we possessed with chimpanzees presumably did not? We might also suppose that a single neurone lacks consciousness but that suddenly consciousness emerges when enough neurones are packed together and connected with each other. A part of the hard problem of consciousness is the view that if consciousness is possessed by humans (and possibly some animals) but not other animals or plants or bacteria, then it must strongly emerge. This view arises because we regard consciousness as a phenomenon that must either fully exist in some organism or not at all. The notion of strong emergence, that if a system is complex enough consciousness suddenly appears, is difficult for many philosophers to accept. There is a paradox involved here much like the Sorites paradox.

It is because the notion of the strong emergence of consciousness is so hard to accept that many philosophers have recently embraced panpsychism. The supposition that everything has mental states even if these mental states are simple, rudimentary, has ridden to the rescue of all the thinkers who find the sudden appearance of consciousness in sufficiently complex nervous systems too egregious a pill to swallow. It is like saying, drawing by analogy on the Sorites paradox, that every grain of sand in a heap has a little bit of the ‘heapness’ quality to it.

Part of the impetus of the modern movement in philosophy to champion panpsychism comes from the rediscovery of the 1927 work The Analysis of Matter by Bertrand Russell. Russell argues that physics only describes the mathematical properties of matter, only explains how matter interacts with other matter according to mathematical laws. It is a view of the role of physics that goes all the way back to Galileo. But physics tells us nothing about what matter is in itself. Russell argues that physical stuff could be of the same kind as mental stuff and his theory is thus known as ‘neutral monism’. An important premise of the argument as presented by Russell and developed by modern panpsychists is that one can sit in an armchair and, through introspection, arrive at some knowledge of one’s own mental properties. Because one has consciousness oneself and one is a material thing as well as a conscious thing, perhaps all other things are both material and conscious. It seems to me that the attribution of consciousness to things other than oneself, to other people, to some or perhaps all animals, to trees, to planets, to stars, if we go that far, must thus involve something like empathy. If the mental states of other things are entirely unlike one’s own mental states, then the argument falls apart because Russell’s argument depends on the idea that there is some kind of analogy one can draw between one’s own mental states and the mental states of other things. If the mental life of an armchair philosopher is entirely unlike the mental life of his armchair, the analogy fails and it is no longer helpful to claim that the mentalities of the matter that makes up humans and the material world with which humans interact is analogous to the mentalities of the humans themselves.

When through introspection we examine our own mental properties, what do we find? We find emotions, desires, anxieties, fears, memories, cognitions, pains, etc. Many of our simplest impulses find immediate expression through behaviours. I want to stand up and make a coffee to help with the writing of this essay and do so immediately. If there is any truth to micropanpsychism,  we must imagine that simple particles like electrons and protons possess mental properties and that these mental properties are at least a little analogous to our own. Opponents of panpsychism often tend to disparage it by saying that it seems to imply that electrons experience emotions, desires, anxieties, fears,  memories, cognitions, etc. I want though to take this parodic characterisation seriously. If a free electron is in the vicinity of a positive charge, it will move towards it. Perhaps electrons desire to get closer to positive charges. Arthur Schopenhauer argued that at the heart of all material things is ‘will’ and it is perhaps surprising that in the literature surrounding panpsychism there is very little reference to Schopenhauer. It is surprising because when we hold a book at shoulder level and let it drop to the ground we could imagine it as willing to fall.  Similarly we could imagine that an electron wills to get as close as it can to a proton. Alternatively, we might suppose that an electron actually desires to move away from the positive charge and is pulled towards it against its will. There is a difficulty in the notion of ascribing emotions, desires, anxieties, fears, memories, cognitions, pains, etc to entities like electrons because electrons are so entirely unlike humans or higher-level animals that we cannot empathise with them. If a dog is afraid of a thunderstorm and barks or whimpers we can ascribe an emotion of distress to the dog but we lack the sensory cues to establish what emotions, if any, are associated with an electron in the vicinity of a positive charge. 

Many panpsychists feel some discomfort about going so far as to ascribe emotions, desires, anxieties, fears, memories, cognitions, etc. to electrons. They argue that if we introspect we find something at the foundation of our own mental life which is experience. It is experience, they argue, which we can truly ascribe to electrons even though we cannot ascribe any other mental properties to them at all. What does it mean to have experiences? It seems that a person’s ego is conscious of the world around him or her. (When a person is asleep, the ego may be conscious, during dreams, of material created by other parts of the mind.) Phenomenologists argue that consciousness always has an element of aboutness to it, directedness. This is termed ‘intention’. To be conscious at all is to be conscious of something else. It might be argued that an electron perceives and experiences the electric and magnetic fields that affect its motion. However there is a problem with this argument. A human visually perceives the world through his or her eyes. Light passes through the lens, falls upon the retina, and triggers signals that pass along the optic nerve, eventually arriving at the back of the brain. An electron lacks eyeballs or anything at all as complex as the visual organs humans and other animals possess. This argument is not intended to push the view that electrons do not experience the world but rather that, if they do experience it, the mental properties associated with this experience are so unlike human mentality that it is impossible to empathise with them. If the ‘experience’ of an electron is utterly unlike the experience of an armchair philosopher, the analogy we need to draw between them to make the argument work is stretched to the point where it becomes too implausible to be credible.

Thus perhaps it is not truly possible to empathise with subatomic particles or larger inanimate objects made up of lifeless matter like rivers and boulders and meteors. If so, it becomes more difficult to claim that they are conscious in a way analogous to the way we are.

 I would now like to relate this discussion of panpsychism to living organisms. The Cartesian position that persisted until perhaps the beginning of the twenty-first century is that all conscious creatures are alive but that not all living organisms are conscious. Plants, fungi, and bacteria for instance were regarded as alive but non-conscious. The modern panpsychist argues that all living organisms and, in fact, all non-living systems are conscious. I want to argue, contrary to both positions, that all living things are conscious in the right way and that all beings that are conscious in the right way are alive. I shall explain what I mean by “in the right way” later in the essay.

First, we need to define the term “life”. I shall cite the Oxford English Dictionary first. This dictionary defines life as “the ability to breathe, grow, produce young, etc. that people, animals and plants have before they die and that objects do not have.” Wikipedia provides the following description. “Life is matter that has biological processes, such as signalling and the ability to sustain itself. It is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostatic organisation, metabolism, growth, adaption, response to stimulation and  reproduction . All life eventually reaches a state of death, and none is immortal.” In practice, people collectively have little difficulty distinguishing living organisms from non-living objects and systems – just about the only exception is that biologists have not decided whether viruses are alive or not. We learn to divide the entities we find in our environment into living or non-living entities as soon as we become conversant with biology in high school despite the fact that ‘life’ itself is difficult to define. Although we cannot see bacteria, we learn from biologists that they can be found just about everywhere and put our trust in the biologists when they say that bacteria are alive.

The next part of the essay relies on the fact that people draw a sharp distinction between a living person and a dead person, between a living person and a corpse. Think now of a human life. A zygote is the fusion of a mother’s ovum and father’s sperm. There is thus a strong biological connection between a human and his or her parents. The human can even be considered a continuation of his or her parents’ anatomy or biology. The growing foetus relies on oxygen and nutrients passed from the mother to the unborn human through the placenta and umbilical cord. Soon after birth, the infant human begins breathing and will continue to breathe for his or her whole life, even while asleep. The cessation of breath is usually exactly the moment of death, although the brain can survive a couple of minutes without oxygen. Generally speaking, if the heart stops beating and oxygen stops reaching the brain, death occurs within a couple of minutes because the neurons in the brain begin cannibalising themselves for nutrients. The close connection between life and breath is shown by the fact that the ancients used the word ‘pneuma’ to designate an indefinable essence associated with human and animal life. We talk of the ‘breath of life’ or, in Bergson’s terminology, ‘elan vital’.  Life can be considered a continuous pattern of activations and deactivations in the brain, animated by the continuous oxygen-employing respiration of brain-cells. It is a pattern of activity that should it cease for a short period of time ceases absolutely. This is not to say that there cannot be borderline cases between living bodies and corpses. Sometimes a person can continue to have a functioning heart and body but be brain-dead. However such cases are rare. Generally speaking, the difference between life and death for a human being is abrupt and undeniable.

For traditional atheist materialists, when death occurs consciousness ceases absolutely as well. “"We give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more" (Beckett, 1952). Death is seen as the ultimate downer. There is an issue here that consequentialist ethicists I think get wrong – they measure utility by comparing happiness to unhappiness, pleasure to pain, but forget that the most important concern people have is with life and death. There is a reason why news reports about wars in foreign countries talk about the number of deaths rather than the number of wounded – because death is viewed as worse than pain. In New Zealand and elsewhere voluntary euthanasia has been legalised but such laws have had difficulty being passed by governments because many, including an important portion of the medical profession, regard the preservation of life as more important than any amount of pain. The atheist view that consciousness ceases at death has a longer history than people realise – the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus famously said, “Where I am there is death is notand where death is I am not.” Epicurus is trying to reassure himself and those he is speaking to that death is nothing to fear but the fact that he needs to make this argument suggests that a fear of death is hardwired into the human mind. Similarly, the faith of the religious in the afterlife can be seen as a response to this profound fear of death. The religious believe that consciousness is intimately tied up with the soul. Christians believe either that the soul passes to heaven or hell at death or that it enters a state of dormancy to be awoken when the general resurrection occurs. Hindus believe the soul is reborn in another body. Buddhists, rather confusingly, deny that the soul exists but believe in reincarnation, although they believe that enlightened ones go on to Nirvana. The fear of death seems to me fundamental. It manifests itself everyday when we restrain ourselves from jumping off bridges or throwing ourselves in front of moving cars. If we require evidence that the fear of death is more deeply hardwired than faith in an afterlife, we can consider how even the most religious of people take measures to avoid dying even though they ostensibly believe that death is simply a gateway to paradise.

In contrast to the atheists, who believe that consciousness ceases at death, and also in contrast to religious people who ostensibly believe in everlasting life either because they believe in reincarnation or because they believe that the souls of the dead go to heaven, we could imagine that consciousness persists in the corpse even though this mentality cannot influence or control the dead body at all. We can imagine that this consciousness remains attached to the body even after the body is interred and that this consciousness gradually disperses, leaches out, as the corpse decays. This story, however, is not one ever entertained by either atheists or religious people. Atheists believe that when the lungs and heart stop functioning, when life ends, consciousness ends as well. Religious people believe in a kind of transportation of the soul somewhere else. Many religious people are substance dualists and presume that the soul travels to a spiritual realm. However neutral monists cannot endorse such a picture because they view the physical world and spiritual world as simply different aspects of the same stuff. A religious neutral monist has to argue that at death the soul travels from this physical world to another physical world. Neutral monism is thus perhaps more sympathetic to reincarnation than to the Christian view that we associate with Descartes and most typical Christians.

This discussion has obvious bearing on panpsychism. Panpsychism holds that the human body, whether alive or dead, is composed of particles that are all conscious. These particles cannot die because they were never alive to begin with. These germs of consciousness persist after the breath and heart have stopped. Because the corpse is almost physically identical to the person’s body when it was alive, the panpsychist might believe that all the constituent micro-subjects that made up the person when alive are still conscious after death. Thus the panpsychist may be forced to accept the story told above, that all the micro-subjects that had together made up the person when alive are still conscious even as they are put in a coffin and lowered underground. If one is still to believe in micopanpsychism while also accepting the gulf between a living body and a dead body, one might presume that it is the organisation of micro-subjects that together constitute the human subject, the human identity, consciousness, or soul. It is this organisation that can be considered to strongly or weakly emerge. The difference between how we view a living body and dead body is so dramatic, though, that it leads us to conclude that the living consciousness of a human comprises what Derick Parfit calls ‘a further fact’. To put the argument succinctly, the a posteriori observation that people see a vast difference between a living and dead human body provides some reason for us to believe that human consciousness does emerge, that even if micropanpsychism is true, that human consciousness is something more than the sum of its parts. I am undecided as to whether this is a manifestation of strong or weak emergence.

Questions such as this help animate Philip Goff’s book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (2017). Goff’s concern in this book is principally to consider how the consciousness of a human or higher animal can be seen as grounded in, emerging from, constituted by, or entailed by micro-experiential components. Although Goff is an advocate of panpsychism, he does not spend any time discussing how consciousness may be possessed by non-living non-human matter. Instead he focusses on the human mind. Goff uses the term ‘ordinary experience’ or o-experience to designate the ‘mental life’ of a human or higher animal. O-experience is unified. We might also say that it is persistent. Goff considers a number of arguments that complicate any attempt to explain o-experience in terms of an assembly of micro-experiential subjects, arguments such as the subject-summing problem, the structural-mismatch problem, and the subject-irreducibility problem. In particular, the subject-summing problem seems to him a serious obstacle to any fully elaborated panpsychist theory because he asserts that o-experience must be considered something distinct from the micro-experiences of micro-subjects that might be thought to constitute it, such as “has an itchy elbow” or “smells roast beef.” There is a gulf between o-experience and micro-experiences. Goff does not provide solutions to the various problems he discusses but states instead that the panpsychist project is in its infancy and that hopefully solutions to these problems may be established in the future. Goff seems over-optimistic to me because the progress we have made in the sciences is due to the scientific method and we cannot apply the scientific method to consciousness. This is if we accept Russell’s argument that the sciences with physics at the centre can tell us only about the relations between material things and nothing about matter as it is in itself. Rather we can only make progress through better forms of introspection. An ancillary problem is that should say one philosopher be possessed of a superior form of introspection enabling her to solve these problems, she must convince others with less sophisticated forms of introspection that her solutions are correct when the contents of her own mind are simply not available to those she is trying to convince and so therefore there is no objective evidence to support her claims.

Goff’s notion of o-experience mirrors the notion that I have tried to set out concerning a unified mind or consciousness that is possessed by living humans but not by corpses. However Goff arrives at his conclusions largely through a priori arguments whereas my argument is based on the a posteriori observation that humans draw a sharp distinction between living and non-living bodies.

Could the organisation of micro-experiential subjects account for the appearance of o-experience? Consider the following simple analogy. A chair is made of four wooden legs, a seat, and a back-rest. The property of ‘chairness’ does not apply to any of these parts. We can only say that the chair emerges when its components are arranged in the right way and attached to each other. The organisation of sub-parts together constitute a ‘further fact’, that is the presence of a chair. Thus it seems to me that a macroscopic body or mind could be both an organisation of simpler components and a further fact, that the further fact is rationally deducible not only from the fact that the component parts exist but that they are organised in the right way. The alternative is mereological nihilism which does not seem to me a viable position at all when engaging with other humans and the material world. When we look at a chair we see that it is a chair. When we look at other humans, through empathy or a kind of projection, we attribute to each a mind or a consciousness or a soul or, to use Goff’s term, o-experience of the same sort as the kind we possess ourselves. However we do not perform this empathic operation based on observations of the facts that the other has two arms, two legs, a head, eyes, etc, all arranged in the right way. If we did we would see no difference between a living body and a dead body. Rather the organisation the other human manifests is a behavioural organisation. From subtle cues, such as but definitely not exclusively the fact that the other human is breathing, we establish that the other human has a mind. We perform a similar empathic operation with respect to many animals as well.  We learn when young that a dog wags its tail when happy and, having learned this, can attribute an emotion, happiness, to a dog when it is wagging its tail that is at least a little analogous to our understanding of what the word happiness means when we apply it to ourselves.. 

It may be that the human mind is indeed constituted by multiple micro-minds but that, at death, the organisation of these micro-minds falls apart. Because an organisation of parts can be taken as introducing a further fact, it may be that when the organisation of parts ceases to obtain, this further fact, a unified persistent consciousness or mind or soul or bearer of o-experience, either ceases to exist or goes somewhere else. Presumably if, say, a person is reincarnated, it is the pattern or structure of micro-subjects exhibited by the deceased when it was alive that is expressed after the death of the old body in the body of a new born child.

I arrive now at a discussion of values. Living organisms display behaviours that non-living objects and systems do not. The most revolutionary idea of modernity is not the Theory of Relativity, even though Einstein completely altered our understanding of time and space, but the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection as proposed by Darwin in 1859. Einstein’s theory did not change our understanding of everyday reality but Darwin’s idea did. If we accept Darwinism, all living things strive to remain alive and all living things strive to reproduce. This is true not only of humans but also of dogs, cats, kauri trees, and amoebas. Thus the behaviours of living organisms are goal-directed and involve values.  There is teleology involved. There is a value in remaining alive and so organisms eat, fight off diseases, protect themselves from predators, move if they can to more favourable environments, and so on. There is a value in reproducing so bower birds perform elaborate dances to attract mates. According to Evolutionary Biology, all human values are theoretically ultimately reducible to the desires to survive and to reproduce. These motivations are so basic they may not be consciously accessible. Evolutionary psychologists argue, for instance, that human artistic creativity is deep-down intended to attract a mate, a little like a peacock’s tail – this explains why the peak of an artist’s career generally occurs when he or she is at the most fertile period in his or her life. I do not want to argue that all values in human life are ultimately reducible to the desires to stay alive and to reproduce. It may be that many human values have a different provenance. But these two values are common to all living things, are shared. Because we know that these two values are common to all living things, this enables us to empathise with all living organisms even though we cannot empathise with rocks or rivers or electrons. The basis of our empathy with other living organisms is that we recognise their desire to remain alive. This is what I mean by “conscious in the right way.” Although we cannot understand the motivations of electrons, we can, with a little effort, ascribe emotions and motivations a little like our own to other organisms.

A recent change in biology and zoology is that, increasingly, animal experts have started to see and report on surprisingly intelligent behaviours by animals. A discussion of this may seem to lie outside the ambit of philosophy but changes such as this affect the intellectual zeitgeist and it would be myopic of philosophers to pretend not to notice such developments in other fields. A study recently found that cows can sometimes use tools – one was observed to hold a broom in its jaws and use the brush to scratch its hindquarters if it has an itch there. Octopuses are now considered as intelligent as three year old human toddlers, a surprising finding because octopuses are solitary animals and it was once thought that intelligence was associated with communality. Octopuses have been observed running across the sea floor carrying coconut halves so that when they rest they can hide away in the shell they are carrying. It has been shown that bumblebees, who have brains about the size of poppy seeds, can learn to solve puzzles and teach other bumblebees how to solve these puzzles. They can cooperate and, for a task that involves two bumblebees, one will wait for its bumblebee comrade to arrive before attempting the task. The prize is sugar which bumblebees value. Amoebas build shells known as tests from sand grains and, in perhaps the most astonishing finding, will discriminate between different types of particulate matter when building their homes. This is surprising because, of course, an amoeba has nothing like a nervous system. These reports of animal intelligence are so astonishing that it may lead some, including the author of this essay, to wonder if the doctrine of physical causal closure is false. Perhaps living things have minds that are not epiphenomenal and do not have a physical basis but can have physical effects. The relevance of this recent research to the current essay is that we can empathise with a mollusc like an octopus. We can imagine that by carrying a coconut shell with it, this provides it with a sense of security. We can only empathise with an animal like an octopus or a bumblebee on the basis that such creatures have desires and motivations a little analogous to our own. A fundamental telos is the desire to remain alive. (These examples all come from Youtube videos uploaded by Anton Petrov to be listed in the bibliography.)

Panpsychists are committed to the view that the atoms that make up a human, the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms, all possess consciousness. Although I believe this goes too far, we may justifiably wonder, given the previous discussion, if the cells that make up multicellular organisms like humans might each be conscious in the right way. The cells that make up multicellular organisms can die after all even if their chemical components cannot. Somatic cells have purposes additional to just staying alive. Red corpuscles have the task of carrying oxygen about the body and muscle cells have the job of contracting when the right nervous signal is received. Neurones in the brain receive electric and chemical signals in their dendrites and as a response may send electrical and chemical signals via axons to other neurones. A single neurone may not be aware of the human-level mind to which it contributes. When looked at from this perspective, we intuit that, if neurones have minds, they must be altogether different from the micro-subjects discussed by Goff that have experiences such as “has an itchy elbow” and “smells roast beef”. We do not assume that micro-experiences of this sort are possessed by single neurones although we may believe they arise somehow from near-simultaneous firings of multiple neurones. Instead neurones are impelled to send chemical and electrical signals when stimulated in the right way. Neutral monism is the theory that mind and matter are different aspects of the same fundamental stuff  – I am simply approaching the questions raised by neutral monism from a scientific empirical direction rather than the philosophical introspective direction taken by Goff. It may be even more difficult to empathise with a single neurone than to empathise with an amoeba but this does not mean the a single neurone might not possess its own mind. Given this perspective, it seems that o-experience is of an entirely different sort to the experiences had by neurones, and this leads us to make a provocative claim: perhaps neurones are to o-experience as humans are to the collective mind of humanity as a whole. Individual human minds contribute to a collective mind that may have aims, such as the desire to avoid extinction, shared consciously by few or perhaps no individual humans.

On a whole then, this essay has been defending a position that may best be described as ‘biopsychism’ rather than panpsychism. My justification for saying that only living organisms can possess mental properties in the right way is based on the a posteriori observation that we draw a sharp distinction between living and dead organisms, suggesting that we ascribe to living organisms minds, consciousnesses, or o-experiences not reducible to their physical or micro-experiential components, and on the accepted Darwinian tenet that all living organisms strive to remain alive as long as possible and to reproduce.  This is not to suggest that atomic and sub-atomic particles do not possess panprotopsychist properties. In a way this claim must be true because hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen are the building blocks of brains associated with minds and so these elemental particles must have the potential to be part of physical structures associated with mental properties. I conclude this essay by briefly mentioning cosmopanpscychism. It may well be that life is widespread throughout the universe although the technological efflorescence of recent Terran history is very rarely found elsewhere in the cosmos. If life is widespread and living things are a part of the universe, to this extent the universe can be considered alive and conscious. Whether the hydrogen clouds found between stars contribute to this cosmic consciousness is something we cannot know for now.

Putnam's Twin Earth Thought Experiment

In 2024, I published in this blog an essay called "The Meaning of Meaning". When rereading it the other day I found to my chagrin that it was far less clear than I had thought it was. I was unaware when I wrote it then that there is famous essay by Hillary Putnam also called "The Meaning of 'Meaning'". In this essay, the third chapter of a book by Putnam, he proposed a very influential thought experiment. It is the thought experiment that spawned a million doctoral dissertations and is known as the Twin-Earth Thought Experiment. The purpose of the essay you're perhaps only skimming through now is to present this thought experiment and then to lay out and justify my objections to Putnam's argument. Putnam's thought experiment itself is fascinating and so even if you want to side with Putnam and object to my objections, criticise my criticisms, I think you might find something interesting and engaging in this blogpost.

Imagine another Earth superficially exactly like this one. In particular, this Twin Earth has lakes and rivers, rainstorms, glaciers, clouds of all types, steam, cups of tea, etc. In this world there is a species in all ways exactly like the human race who inhabit our Earth and a language called English which contains the word 'water'. This word 'water' is employed by the English speaking inhabitants of Twin Earth to describe all manner of phenomena which resemble at a macroscopic level what we call water in this world, water in its liquid, solid, and gaseous states. However, in Twin Earth, 'water' is not composed of H2O but rather of XYZ, an entirely different chemical recipe. Putnam defends the view that the 'water' in Twin Earth is not really water at all but something else. The Stanford Encyclopaedia suggests we use the word 'twater' to describe the 'water' on Twin Earth and so I shall adopt this convention for the rest of the essay. Putnam argues that water and twarter are two different natural kinds and so the inhabitants of Twin Earth who have got into the habit of calling twarter 'water' are misusing the word. The word 'water', Putnam insists, regardless of the macroscopic similarities between water and twater, only refers to H2O and never to XYZ.

The thought experiment can be made more interesting. Let us imagine that human civilisation on Earth and Twin Earth have developed absolutely in parallel up until the late eighteenth century at which point the two histories deviate from each other. On Earth, water is discovered to be H2O and on Twin Earth water it is discovered to be XYZ. If we can rewind the clock and consider the thoughts and psychological states of humans in our world and t-humans on Twin Earth in 1750, we would find that the conception of 'water' or 'twater' among both sets of people are identical. Nevertheless, Putnam contends, we would still say that the word 'water' only refers to the water we find in our own world and never to 'twater' and this was true even back in 1750. For Putnam, the proposition "There is a possible world in which water is not H2O" is necessarily false. The notion from Kripke's theory of 'rigid designators' is relevant here and you might find it worthwhile to look up Kripke's theory after you've finished this essay, assuming you haven't heard of it already. Water, according to Putnam, just is H2O; its chemical composition is its identity. Water may not have been known to be H2O back in 1750 but nevertheless it was. Of course, presenting the Twin Earth argument this way immediately makes one think of an objection. Couldn't the English speaking inhabitants of Twin Earth just say, "There is no possible world in which water is not XYZ"? There is a kind of parochialism associated with Putnam's conclusion that when water is discovered to be H2O in this world, we have learned something necessary about water that is true in all possible worlds. I may come back to this objection later in the essay.

What was Putnam's aim when he dropped the Twin Earth thought experiment into the muddy waters of twentieth century philosophy? He was trying to say something about the nature of meaning. For Putnam, a natural kind word like 'water' or 'tiger' or 'beech tree' is associated with both an intension and an extension. The intension is like a concept or notion in the mind. It is something like a psychological state. In his essay, Putnam elaborates on the idea that the intension is a stereotype. For instance, the intension or stereotype associated with the word 'tiger' is 'large striped cat like animal'. The intension of a word, as I understand Putnam's argument, is shared among the linguistic community – important aspects of an intension may sometimes only be known by experts, the people who can, for instance, distinguish between elm trees and beech trees. However a natural kind word also has an extension. The extension is the set of all things in the world that the word is true of. There is thus a profound puzzle involved. How do we explain the relationship between the intension and extension of a word? How make the move from mind to world? Putnam does not clearly answer this riddle but he is adamant that because meaning involves an extension as well as intension, meaning cannot be wholly in the head. Is it in the head at all? Although Putnam elaborates on his notion of stereotypes in his essay, one can sense reading it that he really wants to say that meaning must primarily be found in the world. This is why his theory of meaning has been labelled 'semantic externalism'.

In order to push his idea that meaning is found outside the head, Putnam sought to show that a word can have the same intension for two different people but different extensions for each. This is the point of the Twin Earth thought experiment. Imagine a person called Oliver living in our world before 1750 and a doppelgänger of Oliver living on Twin Earth at the same time. Both Oliver and his counterpart possess the same psychological state when considering the meaning of the word 'water'. The word 'water' appears to have the same intension for both. Oliver can point to a glass of water and say that it bears a kind of sameness relationship to other phenomena that he and I call water – he can also state that, say, when ice melts it becomes liquid water. Oliver's doppelgänger can say something similar about twater. But water in Oliver's word is metaphysically different to the twater found on Twin Earth. Putnam argues that because the extension of the word 'water' in Oliver's world is different to the extension of the word 'water' in the doppelgänger's world, that when using the same word, with the same intension, they are meaning different things by it. In fact Oliver's counterpart is always misusing the word 'water' when he describes XYZ using that word. Meaning must therefore depend on things in our actual world referred to by that word.

The Twin Earth thought experiment is a thought experiment and so I might say something briefly about thought experiments in general. They are a big part of modern philosophy – Derek Parfit used them routinely in his own philosophical corpus. Thought experiments are intended as intuition pumps. They are supposed to help us hone our concepts. But I think we can best see the flaws in Putnam's argument if we take the thought experiment seriously. Let us start with the idea that twater is indistinguishable from water at a macroscopic level but has an entirely different chemical composition. When Putnam decided to say in his essay that on Twin Earth twater is chemically XYZ, he was simply picking three letters at random. Do these three letters represent elements found in our own periodic table or does Twin Earth have an entirely different periodic table? Either way, it seems that the laws of chemistry and physics must be totally different on Twin Earth than our own Earth – this is the only way we can explain how an entirely different chemical structure can exhibit the same human level characteristics that water has in our own world, such as freezing at 0 degrees centigrade and boiling at 100 degrees centigrade (at normal atmospheric pressure). It follows that, if the laws of chemistry and physics are different on Twin Earth than they are with respect to our own world, H2O must exhibit behaviours on Twin Earth that are different to the behaviours it exhibits here in our terrestrial environs. Putnam is saying, in effect, that the sentence "There is a possible world in which water is not H2O" is necessarily false but that the sentence "There is a possible world in which the triple point of H2O is not 0 degrees centigrade" is true. One might ask, then, why the truths we find through chemistry are supposed to be necessary but the truths we find through the study of physics, particularly quantum physics, contingent? Why should chemical truths be true in all possible worlds but physics truths be allowed to vary among possible worlds?

There is a philosophical position known as nomological determinism. Adherents to this position think that the laws of physics are necessary and that everything that follows from them is necessary. Nomological determinists think that the sentence "The triple point of H2O is 0 degrees centigrade" is not just true but necessarily true. If everything occurs as the result of physical laws acting on prior circumstances, an argument can be made that not only are the chemical compositions of physical substances necessary but that everything that occurs is necessary. Not only is water necessarily H2O but the triple point of water is necessarily 0 degrees centigrade. It seems that given some initial set of conditions, which we can take to be those obtaining at the Big Bang, everything that happened subsequently is the necessary entailment of these initial conditions and the laws of physics. In proposing that everything is necessary, I am setting aside quantum indeterminacy and free will. It is a thesis that I have discussed in previous blogposts and so I will not attempt to provide a detailed argument in favour of this position here. All that needs to be said is that if we suppose that water is necessarily H2O, there is a slippery slope which, should we slide down it, will lead us to suspect that everything in the actual world is necessary. It follows from the premise that everything in the actual world is necessary that when we engage in counterfactual reasoning and thinking, we are not imagining possible worlds bur rather impossible worlds. This enables us to say that the sentence, "There is an (im)possible world in which water is not H2O" is true. If all the 'possible' worlds that differ from the actual world are equally impossible, there is no limit on what we can pretend to be true of them. There is nothing to stop us from saying that on Twin Earth water is not H2O because the world described by the Twin Earth thought experiment is not really a truly possible world anyway. There is nothing we cannot say truly about such putatively 'possible' worlds.

If I can use a strange metaphor, I would like to say that the slippery slope is inclined in both directions. In the same way that if we concede that some properties of natural kinds are necessary it follows that everything may be necessary, if we concede that some properties of natural kinds are contingent this could lead us to suppose that everything is contingent. If we slide down the slope in this opposite direction, it follows that just as we can say that the sentence "The triple point of H2O is 0 degrees centigrade" is true only in some possible worlds, we can also say "Water is H2O" is true only in some possible worlds. The issue hiding behind Putnam's thought experiment is that some properties of natural kinds are supposed to be essential and other properties are supposed to be accidental. This distinction goes back to Aristotle who used the terms per se to mean essential and per accidens to mean accidental. Putnam is saying that the sentence "Water is H2O" is describing an essential fact about water whereas the sentence "The triple point of H2O is 0 degrees centigrade" is describing an accidental fact about H2O. It seems that Putnam thinks that the truths revealed by chemistry are necessary and the truths revealed by physics are contingent. But why should this be the case? In the same way that Putnam seems to be displaying a parochialism with respect to who can use the English word 'water' accurately, he is displaying a prejudice in favour of chemistry. In fact, at one point in his discussion, Putnam goes so far as to imply that the only essential thing about a peach is its DNA sequence. 

There is a philosophical position, a position strongly at variance with Putnam (and Kripke), holding that when we talk about the essential properties of natural kinds, we are really talking about properties we are very reluctant to give up. Let us now set aside both the argument that everything in the actual world is necessary and the argument that everything in the actual world is contingent and imagine that water and twater have both essential properties and accidental properties, that Earth and Twin Earth have both necessary and contingent facts associated with each. How do we decide which facts are necessary and which are contingent? Because the laws of physics are different in Twin Earth than in our world, it may be impossible for a person to simultaneously hold the view that "Water is H2O" and the view that "The triple point of water is 0 degrees centigrade" when considering water and twater in Twin Earth. It is impossible because on Twin Earth it is not H2O that freezes at 0 degrees centigrade but rather twater, XYZ. Putnam says that, if we have to choose between them, we should accept the first sentence as a necessary truth and discard the second, suppose the second is contingent,  but there seems to me no reason why we should not discard the first sentence and keep the second as being necessary. We could say that it is essential to water that it form lakes and rivers, rainstorms, glaciers, clouds of all types, steam, cups of tea, etc. We could also say that it is essential that, at normal atmospheric pressure, water freezes at 0 degrees centigrade and evaporates at 100 degrees centigrade. We could say that it is the macroscopic properties of the substances that both inhabitants of our planet and the inhabitants of Twin Earth call 'water' that are necessary properties; and we could say that the exact chemical compositions of both water and twater are accidental rather than necessary, essential. We could say that both water and twater share the same essential properties and that the differences between them in terms of chemical constitution are contingent, accidental. It is because we are prejudiced in favour of the identity statements made by chemistry that we are reluctant to give up the idea that water is H2O. It is because we are prejudiced in favour of chemistry that we are prepared to say that a substance that behaves exactly like water at a macroscopic level isn't water at all. But there is no reason why we cannot say that there are two different kinds of water, both behaving exactly the same at a macroscopic level but having accidental differences at the level of chemical composition.

I shall turn now to a different objection to Putnam, an objection based on the notion of 'psychological state'.

To restate, Putnam's aim is to show that two people can have in mind the same intension for a word like 'water' but that the word's extension can differ between the two. Both Oliver in our world circa 1750 and his doppelgänger in Twin Earth circa 1750 are in the same psychological state when considering the word 'water', appear to be referring to the same stuff – the stuff that one drinks, swims in, which forms lakes, rivers, and glaciers, falls from the clouds as rain, is transparent (usually), freezes at 0 degrees centigrade and evaporates at 100 degrees centigrade, etc. However, again to restate, Oliver is supposedly referring to H2O and his doppelgänger to XYZ. The objection I want to raise is this. Oliver is made up approximately of 60 percent water, H2O, and his doppelgänger must be made up approximately of 60 percent twater, XYZ. Furthermore the laws of physics and chemistry must be different on Twin Earth than in our planet. If a psychological state supervenes on a physical state in the brain, then because the physical state of Oliver's brain must be different to the physical state of his doppelganger's brain, they must have different psychological states and so, therefore, they must have different intensions in mind when considering the word 'water'. Therefore Putnam's aim, to show that even if two people possess the same intension for a word like 'water' they can still be referring to different things, is not realised by his thought experiment because Oliver's psychological state when using the word 'water' must be different to the psychological state of his doppelgänger.

Putnam has an answer to this objection. Although he does not discuss this in "The Meaning of 'Meaning'", Putnam proposed a theory of mind known as functionalism. He argued that the brain is like hardware and the mind is like software. He argues that two different brains can run identical software programs. I feel that functionalism is not enough to save Putnam's conclusion because it is impossible to access the mind of Oliver's doppelgänger on Twin Earth to see if he is in the same psychological state as Oliver on our earth when using the word 'water', and so it is impossible to know if Oliver and his twin have the same intensions in mind when using the word 'water'. This is not an absolutely water-tight response to Putnam's answer. I may have to think about this some more and my readers may want to consider this line of thought themselves and see if they can find the next step in reasoning about this issue, a step that may either endorse or undermine Putnam's own thinking about this puzzle.

To conclude, we might say at a first pass that either everything in our own world is necessary or that everything is contingent. If we opt for the first prong in the fork, the Twin Earth scenario is impossible and so we can say anything we want about water or twater in that world. If everything is contingent, similarly, the statement "Water is necessarily H2O" is false because there are no necessary truths at all. If water has both necessary and contingent properties, there is no reason why we should say that "Water is H2O" is necessarily true and "Water boils at 100 degrees" is only contingently true. We could equally well say the reverse. Finally, we can question the idea that a person circa 1750 in our world has exactly the same intension for the word 'water' in mind when talking about it as a person circa 1750 in Twin Earth. This essay has not categorically debunked Putnam's argument but I hope that it has provided fodder for the philosophically curious among my readers. If you take anything away from this discussion, it is that for there to be a Twin Earth in which twater, XYZ, has all the same macroscopic properties as water does in this world, all the laws of physics and chemistry obtaining in Twin Earth must be different to those obtaining in our world. This is the aspect of Putnam's thought experiment that he does not say anything about himself. And it may be the fatal hole in his argument.

Concerning Divine Hiddenness

The argument is simple and I shall present it syllogistically although it has more than two premises. I am quoting Wikipedia here but, never fear, the rest of this essay will be my own work with no more thieving from Wikipedia and without any help from Google's AI, an AI I cannot access from this computer anyway. It runs as follows.

1.) If no perfectly loving God exists, then God does not exist.
2.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person.
3.) If there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists.
4.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists (from 2 and 3).
5. ) Some human persons are non-resistantly unaware that God exists.
6.) No perfectly loving God exists (from 4 and 5).
7.) Therefore, God does not exist (from 1 and 6).

This argument, first proposed in this form by  J. L. Schellenberg as recently as 1993 in his book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, has a beautiful simplicity and a kind of human dimension to it that other arguments for and against the existence of God lack. The purpose of this essay is to find some of the loopholes in this argument, to show that non-belief is compatible with the existence of a perfectly loving God. I have been thinking about this for several months and I believe my discussion of this argument will be both interesting and original, an argument you can't get via a colloquy with Chat GPT. I found yesterday a video essay by Gavin Ortlund called "Divine Hiddenness: My Response to Alex O'Conner", uploaded two years ago and so before AI began thinking for us, and although there will be some overlap in my own argument and his, there is less than you may expect or, to put it another way, I will be approaching his answer from a different direction. I recommend you watch this video either before or after reading this essay.

First, though, I need to steel-man Schellenberg's argument because it has a gap in it that he may not have been aware that he had allowed in. Suppose there is a janitor in St Petersburg who believes Putin's rhetoric absolutely and loves Donald Trump with all his heart. However, this janitor's love of Trump is not sufficient for them to enter into an open personal relationship with each other. The janitor lacks the power to make Trump aware that he exists. Similarly God might want to enter into a personal relationship with Alex O'Conner but lack the puissance to do so. To steel-man Schellenberg's argument, and in doing so I am being completely consistent with the history of Christian apologetics, we need to add a couple of premises. I shall set the argument forth again in its steel-manned form.

1.) If no perfectly loving God exists, then God does not exist.

2.) If no omnipotent and omniscient God exists, then God does not exist.

3.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person.

4.) If a perfectly powerful and knowledgeable God exists, then it is within His power to establish such a relationship.

5.) If there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person and has the power and knowledge needed to establish such a relationship, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists.

6.) If a perfectly loving, perfectly powerful and perfectly knowledgable God exists, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists (from 3, 4 and 5).

7. ) Some human persons are non-resistantly unaware that God exists.

8.) No perfectly loving or perfectly powerful and knowledgeable God exists (from 6 and 7).

Therefore, God does not exist (from 1, 2 and 8).

In discussing and challenging this argument, we need first, of course, to acknowledge that some human people believe in God and some do not. These two groups, theists and atheists, seldom see eye to eye and sometimes deny that the other group exists at all. Richard Dawkins famously regards all religiosity as delusional while a lot of theists think the atheists have "hardened their hearts" against a God the theists regard as self-evident. Atheists are happy with science, with physics, with the voluminous tracts produced by sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, with Darwinian evolution and the Standard Model. They often feel no hankering for some figure behind the scenes pulling strings. Theists, however, claim to have a clear and distinct idea of God.  If I could go back in time and pose some difficult questions to Rene Descartes, for instance, I might ask him God's eye colour and what he wears. Perhaps Descartes might answer that he conceives of God the same way that Michelangelo did when he painted the Sistine Chapel. More likely, however, I suspect that as much as theists like to say that they have a clear and distinct idea of God, in reality their conception of Him is much more diffuse. I myself used to be a militant atheist but now am on the fence – but even in those moments when I think of God existing I don't really regard him as a person with flip-flops,  muttonchop sideburns, Received Pronunciation, or with any other characteristic that I might clearly and distinctly conceive of him possessing. 

The first criticism I would like to make concerning Schellenberg's argument is that all non-believers must be to some degree resistant. Non-resistant non-belief is not a thing unless the non-believer never encounters believers at all. Let us suppose that you, the reader, are an atheist. Should you be pestered by a missionary or proselytiser on the street with a pamphlet talking about how all sinners who refuse to accept Jesus Christ as their lord and saviour are destined for hell, of course you are going to resist his arguments, argue back. I used to meet such people a lot although they were outnumbered by devotees of Krishna. Similarly, all theists are resistant. When Daniel Lane Craig debated Christopher Hitchens, he too was resistant. If he weren't, otherwise he would have ended the debate by saying, "Of course, you're right. Christianity is evil and I forswear it." To have a firm belief of any sort is to resist the claims of those who have conflicting beliefs. The only truly non-resistant people are the agnostics who change their mind as a result of every passing influence and/or the people who never encounter opposing beliefs concerning God at all. It is because I am on the fence myself that I am someone most qualified to discuss this argument – because sometimes I have a conception of God and sometimes do not. I can speak to the fact that both belief and non-belief are real and justifiable.

What theists and atheists have in common though is that both believe in something I shall call Reality with a capital R. The Reality Principle is that the world runs according to simple rules. If I walk up the road to the cafe at the top of the hill, I expect that if I ask for a coffee and pay six dollars I will be given a flat white. When I cross the road, I look both ways because otherwise there is a slim possibility I might be hit by a car. When the fire alarm goes off, although I know that usually it is just a drill, I vacate my apartment block on the off-chance that there might be a conflagration somewhere. These are rules related to causation, rules that resemble the types of conclusions we draw from inferential reasoning even though most of these rules we pick up on in other ways, often from hearsay. There is a rule that swans in the Northern Hemisphere are white although they may be black in Australia and New Zealand. There is a rule that the people we call 'bachelors' are unmarried men. This first rule is synthetic a posteriori and the second analytic a priori to use Kant's terminology. Many of the rules are derived from the laws of physics – if I hold out my copy of The Complete Illuminated Books of William Blake and drop it, I expect it to fall to the floor. If I kick the door, I might expect to break or at least bruise my toes. Rules exist at multiple different levels, the level of subatomic physics at one end of the scale and the level of human behaviour at the other. There is a question of whether some rules are emergent or all can all ultimately be reduced to particle physics but this is not a question I intend to tackle in this essay.

However, what will be important to this essay is a claim that the rules, even the laws of physics, allow for occurrences that might seem impossible. A person might be able to walk on the Sea of Galilee if every time he puts down his foot, the water molecules are rushing up towards him at that very moment. Because a subatomic particle can quantum tunnel through a wall, there is always the tiniest possibility that a person can do it too. Even the images on photographs can conceivable change in peculiar ways depending on unlikely combinations of heat, moisture, and other chemical reactions. The thing about miracles is not that they are impossible but rather that they are just very, very unlikely. So the rules by which we live our lives and base our predictions and decisions on are not iron-clad but, rather, just very very likely, so likely we tend to regard them as absolute. Both the atheist and the theist believe in these rules. The atheist thinks these rules are all there are but typical theists somehow believe both in divine control and in the Reality Principle. Suppose an ordinary theist prays to win Lotto and then does. I assert that such a theist still believes in the Newtonian mechanics underlying the ball drop but also believes that God has ordained that he or she win. God is the the God of the Gaps – when He intervenes in the world He does so in ways that the rules permit. There is a rule that it is possible for cancer to go into remission sometimes and so a theist who has cancer may pray to God to be cured, recover, and, should this happen, may believe both in divine intervention and in the medical finding that sometimes a person's body can fight off cancer on its own. For the theist, the rules we entertain as beliefs concerning how the world operates have God as their foundation. I believe some such idea animated Descartes, Newton, and, even more so, Spinoza. The theist sees God in the workings of the world, in the interstices – all events, situations, display the handiwork of the Divine. The theist thinks this while also thinking that they also occur as the consequence of causal laws. 

The atheist, as I have said, believes that these rules completely explain the world we live in. He or she does not worry about why these rules exist to any degree. When something unlikely occurs, something the rules would ordinarily loosely rule out, the atheist rationalises such an event as being a consequence of blind chance. Atheism is not just possible but plausible. Schellenberg's argument is so strong because he is suggesting that if there is a single non-believer, only one, this proves that God does not exist – in fact, he argues that even if a person adheres to atheism just for a period in his or her life and otherwise is a theist, this is sufficient to dispose of God. So if a single person believes that the rules require no first cause, no ultimate legislator, this is sufficient to negate the existence of the God of the theologians. However, Schellenberg does not argue, as I understand his argument, that believers might not imagine that they are in an open relationship with God. And so we can wonder: what might it mean, feel like, to be in open relationship with an omnipotent, omniscient and omni-benevolent being? I have a suspicion that the people who actually think they can have conversations with God, conversations where God talks back, are people we should be wary of. It is these people who might say that God told them to burn down the orphanage. The ordinary theist, as I have said, though, just has a vague sense of the existence of a being who loves him or her and who wants the best for him or her, a being who acts indirectly through the world. How might a typical theist react if diagnosed with an incurable and inevitably fatal disease? It might shake his or her faith but, if he or she does indeed have open relationship with God, it might be that the afflicted one will simply say, "God moves in mysterious ways", chalk it up as a plot point in God's divine plan, or take comfort in the belief that he or she will reunite with the loved ones who predeceased him or her upon arrival in Heaven. The perennial question of the Problem of Evil which this essay is indirectly tackling is obviously more a problem for theists than atheists. Nevertheless, and setting aside the ways in which the presence of Evil may cause a believer to toy with atheism, it seems that, really, the only way to parse Schellenberg's key notion of "open relationship with God" is to suppose that all it means is for the person to have some sense that God exists and loves him or her.

When atheists and theists debate God's existence (usually within the Christian framework), it is often acknowledged by both sides that the only real way for an atheist to change his or her mind and become a theist is to have a "religious experience". For some people, the religious experience might seem insignificant. At a low point in her life, Sally was approached by a Jehovah's Witness, told that God loved her, and given the latest edition of the Watchtower. In this way God might be seen as displaying His desire for open relationship with Sally by acting through the Jehovah's Witness who had shown up at her door. For more resistant non-believers a more visceral miracle might be required. When atheists who haven't thought deeply about the question of Divine Hiddenness react to Schellenberg's argument, they often ask why, if God exists, wants us to love Him, and wants us to know that He loves us back, He doesn't just write "I EXIST" in the cirrus clouds over their suburb of the city. Surely, the naive atheist asks, wouldn't this immediately bring about proper communion with God? First, it needs to be said, such a miracle could still be ascribed to dumb luck. An apparent message in the sky could still be a random meteorological fluke. Or a hallucination. Richard Dawkins has said that nothing whatsoever could ever persuade him of the existence of God and, of course, resorting to 'hallucination' is the perfect get-out-of-jail card because then no sensory experience at all could ever prove the existence of God. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once put in Sherlock Holmes's mouth the atheist slogan, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Because the atheist has decided that God is impossible in advance, any alternative is better. (It should be remembered that Doyle himself believed in ghosts and seances.)

However, let us suppose that when God writes his message in the sky, it is convincing. Perhaps all the atheists in Auckland see it and decide that it is indeed proof that God exists. All New Zealand, then all the world, have irrefutable evidence that God is real, that the one who was once hidden has now revealed Himself. Would this make the world a better place? I shall argue, perhaps surprisingly, that it would make it worse.

My original contribution to this debate involves the Reality Principle. In order to function successfully and effectively in the world, in order to survive and hopefully flourish, people require some sense that the world runs according to rules that they can understand and exploit if necessary. A miracle is quite obviously a violation of these rules, regardless of whether the phenomenon that could be deemed a miracle is impossible or simply very, very unlikely. If God were to suddenly start performing miracles as a way of proving His existence, violating the rules we thought we knew governed the world, we would afterwards be able to predict nothing at all with confidence. We would always for ever after be unsure of the causes of the phenomena we observe. They could be the result of rules the knowledge of which has either been learnt by humans through inference or through being transmitted verbally or otherwise from one human to another, or they could be the result of divine intervention. This is why I argued that theists believe simultaneously in God and the Reality Principle – because otherwise they would simply sit around all day doing nothing, waiting for God to help them, make them happy, satisfy their desires. They would live in something like the Garden of Eden. I discussed the Garden of Eden in a recent post and this essay should be regarded as a companion piece to that one. If you haven't read it yet, have a quick look through it when you've finished this essay.

There is an argument, attributed to the eleventh century monk Peter Damian, that God's omnipotence enables Him to even change the past. Damian argued that God can restore the virginity of a woman who has lost it. Damian's argument is effectively that the moral stain of having had sex can be laundered away by God and the God can also restore the woman's hymen. However he was taken to mean that God can literally alter the past, make it so something that has been was not. Even in Damian's day there was debate about whether God's omnipotence enabled Him to break the law (the rule) of non-contradiction. According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Damian argued that God is capable of changing the past, breaking the law of non-contradiction, but chooses not to because God only chooses to do good things and violating the law of non-contradiction would be an evil thing. One might wonder if a God who can change the past but chooses not to is also a God who knows the future but refuses to change it. These are ideas I encountered in a paper on Medieval Philosophy I took in 2022 and there is an essay in this blog which was the essay I wrote for this paper if readers want to look at it.

I would like to proffer the following incredible suggestion. Perhaps if God wanted to perform a miracle to convince someone that He exists, he might do so by changing the past. This would after all constitute a miracle of sorts. In order to explore this idea, I need to say something about the past. Suppose I want to talk about the famous Existentialist Albert Camus. To whom, to what, am I referring? Am I referring to the corpse buried in Pere Lachaise in Paris? It seems, if I am to avoid falling into the trap of mereological nihilism,  I must be referring to a man who came into existence in 1913 and went out of existence in 1960. The problem with the past, with people, things, and events that are of yesteryear, is that the past no longer exists in the present. So how can we know about the past if it no longer exists? To what, when asserting claims about the past, are we referring? It seems we know about the past in two ways, via memory and via various kinds of documentary evidence. It seems to me that God could change the past by simultaneously altering the memories of those alive now who think they can remember the people, things, and events of yesteryear and by miraculously altering all the documentary evidence. Perhaps Peter Damian had never existed until last week. Perhaps all the documents that seem to prove he existed are divine forgeries and all the people who can remember reading about Peter Damian before last week are the victims of False Memory Syndrome. Such a miracle would not violate the law of non-contradiction. If God were to indeed perform a miracle of this sort, there would be no way for us to know that such a miracle has occurred. However, suppose that God performs the miracle of past-changing by leaving the memories of a person intact, the same as they had been in the past, but changing all the documentary evidence – poems, photographs, letters, etc. If the person is alone in thinking there is a discrepancy between his memories and the material evidence, others may think that there is a problem with the memory of the person. However the person himself, the victim of God's miracle, may remain so convinced of the infallibility of his memory that he would rather believe that God has miraculously changed all the material evidence, perhaps as a way of arousing holy terror in the newly god-fearing convert.

Something like this happened to me last year. A number of poems, photographs, and messages seemed to communicate different things early in the year than they did later in the year. To give one example, late in 2024 I quoted a Janet Frame poem in this blog. In around July 2025 I reread it, both in my blog and in editions of the book I found in the University Library. It was subtly different, not so different as to make for a different interpretation of it but enough to make it a slightly inferior poem. Early in the year I read, online, the Philip Larkin poem "The Whitsun Weddings". This poem is Larkin's description of being on a train and seeing at every station he stops at wedding parties boarding the train. I had read this poem many years ago and thought it a cynical bitter bit of verse that you might imagine being written by a confirmed bachelor. Last year, in the midst of an experience that some might call psychosis and some might say was something like a religious experience, I reread the poem and this time it seemed something celebratory, a joyful Christian song of praise in honour of the sacrament of marriage, a union of two people that Larkin knew he was never going to enjoy himself. The poem is called "The Whitsun Weddings" not only because Larkin's train trip occurred on Whitsunday but because Whitsun is the festival commemorating the descent of the Holy Ghost on the disciples of Jesus seven weeks after Easter. It might be that when I reread this poem I interpreted it this later time as something profoundly spiritual because the Holy 'Ghost had descended on me. Some months later I reread the poem again and realised that both interpretations were true of it. Perhaps atheists read it one way and theists another. Readers of this blog may want to read Larkin's poem online and see what meanings they themselves find in it. Similarly, last year I read Ibsen's play Ghosts and derived from it an interpretation quite different to the orthodox interpretation. In the case of both "The Whitsun Weddings" and Ghosts, the text, I believe, is stable – it is whether or not one has received the Gnosis that is the determinate concerning how these works are to be interpreted. However, there were a number of occasions in which the actual texts of things I have in my possession or have access to seemed to have changed.

If God wanted to perform a miracle to prove that He exists and did so by changing the past, it might prove utterly incapacitating to the one who witnesses or receives the miracle. If we can have no confidence in our memories of the past, how can we plan for the future? I really want to sue the Mental Health Service for medical misconduct and libel and, if I had proof and financial resources, would like to sue my faggot older brother as well. But to do so, I need to feel confident that the past is settled. I have left a paper trail starting in 2014, not only in the form of this blog but in the form of emails, and I would like some surety that what I have supposedly written is the same as what I remember writing. I really want God, having displayed his omnipotence, to direct a little of his omni-benevolence in my direction.

Let us get back to the example of the message written in the clouds. A God who can do this is a God who can do anything. Should God throw perfect rainbows into the sky at decisive moments in a person's life, the formerly Doubting Thomas might start to feel that there are no rules whatsoever. If God were to start to announce his existence over and over again overwhelmingly, the person who is the witness to these miracles might start to wonder if anyone apart from him and God exist in the world. I think it likely that free will is illusory but I also still feel it is a necessary illusion. Even if in our most coldly rational and logical moments we doubt the existence of free will, emotionally and viscerally we need to believe that we have some control over out lives. It would be pointless thinking one had free will if there were no solid rules enabling one to predict the outcomes of one's actions. Observing multiple miracles might have severely deleterious effects on a person's sense that he or she has agency, autonomy, and efficacy in the world and over the world. This could be at least a part of the reason God seeks to remain hidden.

We can present the argument syllogistically as follows.

1. God is all loving.

2. God is all knowing and all powerful.

3. If God is all knowing and all powerful, He is capable of entering into personal relationship with each human being.

4. At the very least, to be in personal relationship with God is to feel sure that God exists.

5. The only way for God to make resistant non-believers sure that He exists is to perform miracles.

6. If God were to perform miracles and in this way prove that He exists, this might undermine the feeling the witness to these miracles had that he or she had some control over his or her world – the feeling the person had that he or she has agency, autonomy, and efficacy.

7. If the person's feeling that she has agency, autonomy, and efficacy is undermined, this is a harm perpetrated against the person.

8. Therefore, for God to enter into personal relationship with resistant non-believers may be to cause harm to them (from 4, 5, 6, and 7).

9. If God is all loving, he will not want to cause harm to resistant non-believers.

10. Therefore, although God is capable of entering into personal relationship with each human being, He will not try to enter into personal relationship with some human beings (from 1, 8 and 9).

I want now not so much to present an argument as to make an observation and then propose a hypothesis concerning the Divine Plan. For many thousands of years, non-belief was very uncommon. Plato, as I understand it, was the first known philosopher to make an argument known as the consensus gentium. Plato, and then more famously Cicero much later, argued that because belief in the gods (plural) is universal and innate among all peoples, the gods must exist. In the days of Peter Damian, faith in Christianity was ubiquitous among all Europeans. There might have been the occasional village cynic who refused to go to church on Sunday but on a whole belief in the Christian God was common to everyone, perhaps even to the uneducated peasants with the flimsiest notion of such core Catholic tenets as the existence of the Trinity. If, at the very least, to be in relationship with God is to believe that God exists, almost all people were in such a relationship. God wasn't hidden at all – he was present in the minds of almost everyone. It was only starting, I believe, in the nineteenth century, around the time that Darwin's magnum opus was published, that not only did atheism become a thing but it became permissible for people to state publicly that they were atheists. Richard Dawkins, in our contemporary world, still regards atheists as a persecuted minority. This has always seemed really fucking stupid to me but this might be because I live in New Zealand where most of the population are non-believers. It is the fact that atheism had to spread through all the Western world for Schellenberg's argument to make sense that might explain why we had to wait until 1993 for an argument of this sort to appear. It is, after all, also known as "The Argument from Non-Belief."

The rise in atheism coincided with the rise in science. Through innovations such as indoor plumbing, the germ theory of disease and disinfectant, the discovery of antibiotics, organ transplants, and so on, we were able to vastly increase the average lifespan of humans throughout the world. The Haber-Bosch process has enabled us to ensure the vast population of the world can be fed, won't starve. Electrical lighting allows us to walk safely around the city at night. Computers and cell phones enable us to contact love ones at whim at once. Science has vastly improved the happiness and well being of humans everywhere. Belief in science, and the scientific method, follows on from our faith that understandable rules govern the world. It is as though God stepped back to enable us to investigate the world, that he has allowed us the presumption that we cannot rely on God for everything, or in fact anything, but must rely on ourselves. 

In the recent essay "Concerning the Garden of Eden" I argued that Good cannot exist without Evil. I argued that we find meaning in our lives through taking steps to improve the lives sometimes of ourselves and sometimes of others. I would like to suggest, now, that God deliberately removed himself from the picture for a couple of centuries so that we could investigate and utilise the magical rules that we collectively call 'science' in order as far as possible to help each other rather than hoping and praying that some supernatural force will do it instead.

In the introduction to this essay I said that I would expose the loophole in Schellenberg's argument and I will conclude the essay by pinpointing it. The second premise is "2.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person." There is equivocation in the way this premise is stated. If God is always open to personal relationship with each human person, is it God or is it the person upon whom the onus lies to initiate, establish, the relationship? In this essay, I have argued that God has to take the initiative. The only real way to turn an atheist into a theist is via a religious experience and such an experience must have God as its author, whether it is through a Jehovah's Witness at the door, a message scrawled in the clouds, or through alterations to several poems. The alternative is for the non-believer to suddenly, for no reason at all, start to believe in God. I would ask the reader if in his or her imagination he or she can envisage a scenario in which a militant atheist such as Richard Dawkins or Alex O'Conner suddenly finds faith. It might be that a perfectly loving God wants Dawkins to remain a staunch non-believer for his own sake and for the sake of his fans. God moves in mysterious ways indeed.