Sexbots

Pepper spiced upWe need to talk about sexbots.  It seems (according to the Daily Mail – via MLU) that buyers of the new Pepper robot pal are being asked to promise they will not sex it up the way some naughty people have been doing; putting a picture of breasts on its touch screen and making poor Pepper tremble erotically when the screen is touched.

Just in time, some academics have launched the Campaign against Sex Robots. We’ve talked once or twice about the ethics of killbots; from thanatos we move inevitably to eros and the ethics of sexbots. Details of some of the thinking behind the campaign are set out in this paper by Kathleen Richardson of De Montfort University.

In principle there are several reasons we might think that sex with robots was morally dubious. We can put aside, for now at least, any consideration of whether it harms the robots emotionally or in any other way, though we might need to return to that eventually.

It might be that sex with robots harms the human participant directly. It could be argued that the whole business is simply demeaning and undignified, for example – though dignified sex is pretty difficult to pull off at the best of times. It might be that the human partner’s emotional nature is coarsened and denied the chance to develop, or that their social life is impaired by their spending every evening with the machine. The key problem put forward seems to be that by engaging in an inherently human activity with a mere machine, the line is blurred and the human being imports into their human relationship behaviour only appropriate to robots: that in short, they are encouraged to treat human beings like machines. This hypothetical process resembles the way some young men these days are disparagingly described as “porn-educated” because their expectations of sex and a sexual relationship have been shaped and formed exclusively by what we used to call blue movies.

It might also be that the ease and apparent blamelessness of robot sex will act as a kind of gateway to worse behaviour. It’s suggested that there will be “child” sexbots; apparently harmless in themselves but smoothing the path to paedophilia. This kind of argument parallels the ones about apparently harmless child porn that consists entirely of drawings or computer graphics, and so arguably harms no children.

On the other side, it can be argued that sexbots might provide a harmless, risk-free outlet for urges that would otherwise inconveniently be pressed on human beings. Perhaps the line won’t really be blurred at all: people will readily continue to distinguish between robots and people, or perhaps the drift will all be the other way: no humans being treated as machines, but one or two machines being treated with a fondness and sentiment they don’t really merit? A lot of people personalise their cars or their computers and it’s hard to see that much harm comes of it.

Richardson draws a parallel with prostitution. That, she argues, is an asymmetrical relationship at odds with human equality, in which the prostitute is treated as an object: robot sex extends and worsens that relationship in all respects. Surely it’s bound to be a malign influence? There seem to be some problematic aspects to her case. A lot of human relationships are asymmetrical; so long as they are genuinely consensual most people don’t seem bothered by that. It’s not clear that prostitutes are always simply treated as objects: in fact they are notoriously required to fake the emotions of a normal sexual relationship, at least temporarily, in most cases (we could argue about whether that actually makes the relationship better or worse). Nor is prostitution simple or simply evil: it comes in many forms from many prostitutes who are atrociously trafficked, blackmailed and beaten, through those who regard it as basically another service job, through to some few idealistic practitioners who work in a genuine therapeutic environment. I’m far from being an advocate of the profession in any form, but there are some complexities and even if we accept the debatable analogy it doesn’t provide us with a simple, one-size-fits-all answer.

I do recognise the danger that the line between human and machine might possibly be blurred. It’s a legitimate concern, but my instinct says that people will actually be fairly good at drawing the distinction and if anything robot sex will tend not to be thought of either as like sex with humans or sex with machines: it’ll mainly be thought of as sex with robots, and in fact that’s where a large part of the appeal will lie.

It’s a bit odd in a way that the line-blurring argument should be brought forward particularly in a sexual context. You’d think that if confusion were to arise it would be far more likely and much more dangerous in the case of chat-bots or other machines whose typical interactions were relatively intellectual. No-one, I think, has asked for Siri to be banned.

My soggy conclusion is that things are far more complex than the campaign takes them to be, and a blanket ban is not really an appropriate response.

 

 

 

 

Hume the Buddhist

HuddhaAlison Gopnik suggests that David Hume was inspired by Buddhist ideas; she means well, but what atrocious nonsense! Hume is among the most important of Western philosophers and deserves to be widely appreciated, but if you wanted to strike a really damaging blow at popular understanding of what he says you could hardly do better than tangle him up with Buddha. Alas, the damage is probably done; the bogus linkage of the sceptical British empiricist with world-rejecting mysticism is probably lodged at the back of many minds.

Gopnik’s piece here (the same ideas are set out in a paper here) suggests that Hume got an important idea – that the self is an illusion – from Buddhist thought. Her focus is narrow, with relatively little about the philosophy. Nearly all of her account is directed towards establishing the historical possibility of a particular route by which Hume could have come to hear of Buddhist doctrine, from Jesuits at La Flèche. She spends a lot of time on the details and parades the results as a success, but actually finds no evidence for anything more than the bare possibility that Hume might have, could have discussed Buddhism with someone who might have picked up a knowledge from someone else who had produced unpublished translations of certain texts and who had been at La Flèche some years earlier.

If Gopnik had found proof that Hume showed an interest in Buddhism or that it was ever mentioned to him at La Flèche her research might be of some value. As it is it’s irrelevant, I think, because it’s not all that unlikely that Hume could have found out about Buddhism anyway, from other sources, if he were at all interested. There is, of course, a vast historical chasm between could have and did. As one of the West’s leading sceptics and the author of some of the most slyly biting sarcasm about religious beliefs it isn’t particularly likely Hume would have sought to learn from Eastern religions, but let it pass; for the sake of argument we can grant that he might have heard the gist of Buddhist doctrine.

Was that the only place Hume could have got sceptical beliefs about the self? Well, no: there’s a far more likely place. It was, after all, Descartes’ most celebrated claim – then as now, one of the best-known theses of Western philosophy – that the existence of the self was the most certain thing we knew, and that it could be established simply by thinking about it. All we need do is negate that – and negating other people’s claims is, after all, what philosophers do – and we’re pretty much there. Descartes rests his whole system on his perception of the self; Hume comes along and says, when I think about it I find nothing there. Surely Hume, the commonsensical British empiricist, is inverting the celebrated foundation of the Frenchman’s continental-style a priori reasoning?

Ah, but he could still have been influenced, couldn’t he? Gopnik floats the idea that Hume could have forgotten about Buddhist ideas consciously while still having them working away in his subconscious mind. Such things do happen, and if the influence were subconscious it would handily acquit Hume, the most honest and modest of men, from dishonesty or culpable silence over his sources.

The trouble is, Hume’s source was explicitly his own mind, and it matters. He presents his view of the self, not as an interesting argument he heard somewhere that might be true, but as the direct result of his own inner observation. He was simply reporting how things looked to him. Was he wrong? What are we to say, that his introspections were systematically determined by his prior beliefs? That his unremembered conversation about Buddhism somehow rendered him incapable of seeing actual key features of his own mental landscape? Or that these same forgotten words enabled him to perceive an absence which his mind would otherwise have filled with a confabulated construct? Gopnik talks as though she supports Hume, but to discredit his introspection so radically would invalidate the grounds he is claiming; it would be a vigorous attack on Hume. It seems far simpler all round to believe that he was telling the simple truth: he looked into his mind and found no self there.

That is the real killer for me; Hume did not, in fact, say that the self was an illusion; he saw nothing. On this he may well be unique; he is surely original. Buddhists, and some modern philosophers, contend that the self is actually an illusion; a powerful one which it is hard to shake off, but one which is ultimately misleading. Hume, on the contrary, just saw no self.

The distinction may not seem important, but it is; let me offer an analogy. Suppose we live near the great Nemonic Desert. Priests warn us that the fabled city of Nemonia, in the middle of the desert, is an hallucination. We will be tempted to stop and drink from its fountains, eat from the generous hospitality provided, and perhaps even stay; if we do we shall die, because the food and water are delusions and we’ll die of thirst. Modern scientists have offered theories which explain how the mind constructs the delusion of the Nemonian city and why we should stop sending expeditions to look for it.  In certain conditions our cognitive apparatus just constructs an encouraging but false perception for us, they say.

David Hume, on the other hand, tells us he walked across the desert keeping his eyes open and never saw anything but sand. Maybe it looks different to other people, he says, I can’t argue with them about that; but to me there’s just nothing there, simple as that.

To say then, that Hume got his disbelief in the city from listening to the priests is a dreadful error, a confusing misrepresentation, and really a bit of a slight against a man whose originality and honesty deserves better.

Quantum Cognition

cats jailedWe know all about the theory espoused by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, that consciousness is generated by a novel (and somewhat mysterious) form of quantum mechanics which occurs in the microtubules of neurons. For Penrose this helps explain how consciousness is non-computational, a result he has provided a separate proof for.

I have always taken it that this theory is intended to explain consciousness as we know it; but there are those who also think that quantum theory can provide a model which helps explain certain non-rational features of human cognition. This feature in the Atlantic nicely summarises what some of them say.

One example of human irrationality that might be quantumish is apparently provided by the good old Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two prisoners who co-operated on a crime are offered a deal. If one rats, that one goes free while the other serves three years. If both rat, they serve two years; if neither do, they do one year. From a selfish point of view it’s always better to rat, even though overall the no-rat strategy leads to least time in jail for the prisoners. Rationally, everyone should always rat, but in fact people quite often behave against their selfish interest by failing to do so. Why would that be?

Quantum theorists suggest that it makes more sense if we think of the prisoners being in a superposition of states between ratting and not-ratting, just as Schroedinger’s cat superimposes life and death. Instead of contemplating the possible outcomes separately, we see them productively entangled (no, I’m not sure I quite get it, either).

There is of course another explanation; if the prisoners see the choice, not as a one-off, but as one in a series of similar trade-offs, the balance of advantage may shift, because those who are known to rat will be punished while those who don’t may be rewarded by co-operation . Indeed, since people who seek to establish implicit agreements to co-operate over such problems will tend to do better overall in the long run, we might expect such behaviour to have positive survival value and be favoured by evolution.

A second example of quantum explanation is provided by the fact that question order can affect responses. There’s an obvious explanation for this if one question affects the context by bringing something to the forefront of someone’s mind. Asking someone whether they plan to drive home before asking them whether they want another drink may produce different results from asking the other way round for reasons that are not really at all mysterious. However, it’s not always so clear cut and research demonstrates that a quantum model based on complementarity is really pretty good at making predictions.

How seriously are we to take this? Do we actually suppose that exotic quantum events in microtubules are directly responsible for the ‘irrational’ decisions? I don’t know exactly how that would work and it seems rather unlikely. Do we go to the other extreme and assume that the quantum explanations are really just importing a useful model – that they are in fact ultimately metaphorical? That would be OK, except that metaphors typically explain the strange by invoking something understood. It’s a little weird to suppose we could helpfully explain the incomprehensible world of human motivation by appealing to the readily understood realm of quantum physics.

Perhaps it’s best to simply see this as another way of thinking about cognition, something that surely can’t be bad?

Ethics in a nutshell

KantWe’ve done so much here towards clearing up the problems of consciousness I thought we might take a short excursion and quickly sort out ethics?

It’s often thought that philosophical ethics has made little progress since ancient times; that no firm conclusions have been established and that most of the old schools, along with a few new ones, are still at perpetual, irreconcilable war. There is some truth in that, but I think substantial progress has been made. If we stop regarding the classic insights of different philosophers as rivals and bring them together in a synthesis, I reckon we can put together a general ethical framework that makes a great deal of sense.

What follows is a brief attempt to set out such a synthesis from first principles, in simple non-technical terms. I’d welcome views: it’s only fair to say that the philosophers whose ideas I have nicked and misrepresented would most surely hate it.

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The deepest questions of philosophy are refreshingly simple. What is there? How do I know? And what should I do?

We might be tempted to think that that last question, the root question of ethics, could quickly be answered by another simple question; what do you want to do? For thoughtful people, though, that has never been enough. We know that some of the things people want to do are good, and some are bad. We know we should avoid evil deeds and try to do good ones – but it’s sometimes truly hard to tell which they are. We may stand willing to obey the moral law but be left in real doubt about its terms and what it requires. Yet, coming back to our starting point, surely there really is a difference between what we want to do and what we ought to do?

Kant thought so: he drew a distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives. For the hypothetical ones, you have to start with what you want. If you’re thirsty, then you should drink. If you want to go somewhere, then you should get in your car. These imperatives are not ethical; they’re simply about getting what you want. The categorical imperative, by contrast, sets out what you should do anyway, in any circumstances, regardless of what you want; and that, according to Kant, is the real root of morality.

Is there anything like that? Is there anything we should unconditionally do, regardless of our aims or wishes? Perhaps we could say that we should always do good; but even before we get on to the difficult task of defining ‘good’, isn’t that really a hypothetical imperative? It looks as if it goes: if you want to be good, behave like this…? Why do we have to be good? Let’s imagine that Kant, or some other great man, has explained the moral law to us so well, and told us what good is, so correctly and clearly that we understand it perfectly. What’s to stop us exercising our freedom of choice and saying “I recognise what is good, and I choose evil”?

To choose evil so radically and completely may sound more like a posture than a sincere decision – too grandly operatic, too diabolical to be altogether convincing – but there are other, appealing ways we might want to rebel against the whole idea of comprehensive morality. We might just seek some flexibility, rejecting the idea that morality rules our lives so completely, always telling us exactly what to do at every turn. We might go further and claim unrestricted freedom, or we might think that we may do whatever we like so long as we avoid harm to others, or do not commit actual crimes. Or we might decide that morality is simply a matter of useful social convention, which we propose to go along with just so long as it suits our chosen path, and no further. We might come to think that a mature perspective accepts that we don’t need to be perfect; that the odd evil deed here and there may actually enhance our lives and make us more rounded, considerable and interesting people.

Not so fast, says Kant, waving a finger good-naturedly; you’re missing the point; we haven’t yet even considered the nature of the categorical imperative! It tells us that we must act according to the rules we should be happy to see others adopt. We must accept for ourselves the rules of behaviour we demand of the people around us.

But why? It can be argued that some kind of consistency requires it, but who said we had to be consistent? Equally, we might well argue that fairness requires it, but we haven’t yet been given a reason to be fair, either. Who said that we had to act according to any rule? Or even if we accept that, we might agree that everyone should behave according to rules we have cunningly slanted in our own favour (Don’t steal, unless you happen to be in the special circumstances where I find myself to be) or completely vacuous rules (Do whatever you want to do). We still seem to have a serious underlying difficulty: why be good? Another simple question, but it’s one we can’t answer properly yet.

For now, let’s just assume there is something we ought to do. Let’s also assume it is something general, rather than a particular act on a particular occasion. If the single thing we ought to do were to go up the Eiffel Tower at least once in our life, our morality would be strangely limited and centred. The thing we ought to do, let’s assume, is something we can go on doing, something we can always do more of. To serve its purpose it must be the kind of behaviour that racks up something we can never have too much of.

There are people who have ethical theories which are exactly based on general goals like that, namely consequentialists. They believe the goodness of our acts depends on their consequences. The idea is that our actions should be chosen so that as a consequence some general desideratum is maximised. The desired thing can vary but the most famous example is the happiness which Jeremy Bentham embodied in the Utilitarians’ principle: act so as to bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.
Old-fashioned happiness Utilitarianism is a simple and attractive theory, but there are several problems with the odd results it seems to produce in unusual cases. Putting everyone in some kind of high-tech storage ward but constantly stimulating the pleasure centres in their brains with electrodes appears a very good thing indeed if we’re simply maximising happiness. All those people spend their existence in a kind of blissful paralysis: the theory tells us this is an excellent result, something we must strive to achieve, but it surely isn’t. Some kinds of ecstatic madness, indeed, would be high moral achievements according to simple Utilitarianism.

Less dramatically, people with strong desires, who get more happiness out of getting what they want, are awarded a bigger share of what’s available under utilitarian principles. In the extreme case the needs of ‘happiness monsters’ whose emotional response is far greater than anyone else’s, come to dominate society. This seems strange and unjust; but perhaps not to everyone. Bentham frowns at the way we’re going: why, he asks, should people who don’t care get the same share as those who do?

That case can be argued, but it seems the theory now wants to tutor and reshape our moral intuitions, rather than explaining them. It seems a real problem, as some later utilitarians recognised, that the theory provides no way at all of judging one source or kind of happiness better or worse than another. Surely this reduces and simplifies too much; we may suspect in fact that the theory misjudges and caricatures human nature. The point of life is not that people want happiness; it’s more that they usually get happiness from having the things they actually want.

With that in mind, let’s not give up on utilitarianism; perhaps it’s just that happiness isn’t quite the right target? What if, instead, we seek to maximise the getting of what you want – the satisfaction of desires? Then we might be aiming a little more accurately at the real desideratum, and putting everyone in pleasure boxes would no longer seem to be a moral imperative; instead of giving everyone sweet dreams, we have to fulfil the reality of their aspirations as far as we can.

That might deal with some of our problems, but there’s a serious practical difficulty with utilitarianism of all kinds; the impossibility of knowing clearly what the ultimate consequences of any action will be. To feed a starving child seems to be a clear good deed; yet it is possible that by evil chance the saved infant will grow up to be a savage dictator who will destroy the world. If that happens the consequences of my generosity will turn out to be appalling. Even if the case is not as stark as that, the consequences of saving a child roll on through further generations, perhaps forever. The jury will always be out, and we’ll never know for sure whether we really brought more satisfaction into the world or not.

Those are drastic cases, but even in more everyday situations it’s hard to see how we can put a numerical value on the satisfaction of a particular desire, or find any clear way of rating it against the satisfaction of a different one. We simply don’t have any objective or rigorous way of coming up with the judgements which utilitarianism nevertheless requires us to make.

In practice, we don’t try to make more than a rough estimate of the consequences of our actions. We take account of the obvious immediate consequences: beyond that the best we can do is to try to do the kind of thing that in general is likely to have good consequences. Saving children is clearly good in the short term, and people on the whole are more good than bad (certainly for a utilitarian – each person adds more satisfiable desires to the world), so that in most cases we can justify the small risk of ultimate disaster following on from saving a life.

Moreover, even if I can’t be sure of having done good, it seems I can at least be sure of having acted well; I can’t guarantee good deeds but I can at least guarantee being a good person. The goodness of my acts depend on their real consequences; my own personal goodness depends only on what I intended or expected, whether things actually work out the way I thought they would or not. So if I do my best to maximise satisfaction I can at least be a good person, even if I may on rare occasions be a good person who has accidentally done bad things.

Now though, if I start to guide my actions according to the kind of behaviour that is likely to bring good results, I am in essence going to adopt rules, because I am no longer thinking about individual acts, but about general kinds of behaviour. Save the children; don’t kill; don’t steal. Utilitarianism of some kind still authorises the rules, but I no longer really behave like a Utilitarian; instead I follow a kind of moral code.

At this point some traditional-looking folk step forward with a smile. They have always understood that morality was a set of rules, they explain, and proceed to offer us the moral codes they follow, sanctified by tradition or indeed by God. Unfortunately on examination the codes, although there are striking broad resemblances, prove to be significantly different both in tone and detail. Most of them also seem, perhaps inevitably, to suffer from gaps, rules that seem arbitrary, and ones which seem problematic in various other ways.

How are we to tell what the correct code is? Our code is to be authorised and judged on the basis of our preferred kind of utilitarianism, so we will choose the rules that tend to promote the goal we adopted provisionally; the objective of maximising the satisfaction of desires. Now, in order to achieve the maximal satisfaction of desires, we need as many people as possible living in comfortable conditions with good opportunities and that in turn requires an orderly and efficient society with a prosperous economy. We will therefore want a moral code that promotes stable prosperity. There turns out to be some truth in the suggestion that morality in the end consists of the rules that suit social ends! Many of these rules can be worked out more or less from first principles. Without consistent rules of property ownership, without reasonable security on the streets, we won’t get a prosperous society and economy, and this is a major reason why the codes of many cultures have a lot in common.

There are also, however, many legitimate reasons why codes are different, too. In certain areas the best rules are genuinely debatable. In some cases, moreover, there is genuinely no fundamental reason to prefer one reasonable rule over another. In these cases it is important that there are rules, but not important what they are – just as for traffic regulations it is not important whether the rule is to drive on the left or the right, but very important that it is one or the other. In addition the choice of rules for our code embodies some assumptions about human nature and behaviour and which arrangements work best with it. Ethical rules about sexual behaviour are often of this kind, for example. Tradition and culture may have a genuine weight in these areas, another potentially legitimate reason for variation in codes.

We can also make a case for one-off exceptions. If we believed our code was the absolute statement of right and wrong, perhaps even handed down by God, we should have no reason to go against it under any circumstances. Anything we did that didn’t conform with the code would automatically be bad. We don’t believe that, though; we’ve adopted our code only as a practical response to difficulties with working out what’s right from first principles – the impossibility of determining what the final consequences of anything we do will be. In some circumstances, that difficulty may not be so great. In some circumstances it may seem very clear what the main consequences of an action will be, and if it looks more or less certain that following the code will, in a particular exceptional case, have bad consequences, we are surely right to disobey the code; to tell white lies, for example, or otherwise bend the rules. This kind of thing is common enough in real life, and I think we often feel guilty about it. In fact we can be reassured that although the judgements required may sometimes be difficult, breaking the code to achieve a good result is the right thing to do.

The champions of moral codes find that hard to accept. In their favour we must accept that observance of the code generally has a significant positive value in itself. We believe that following the rules will generally produce the best results; it follows that if we set a bad example or undermine the rules by flouting them we may encourage disobedience by others (or just lax habits in ourselves) and so contribute to bad outcomes later on. We should therefore attach real value to the code and uphold it in all but exceptional cases.

Having got that far on the basis of a provisional utilitarianism, we can now look back and ask whether the target we chose, that of maximising the satisfaction of desires, was the right one. We noticed that odd consequences follow if we seek to maximise happiness; direct stimulation of the pleasure centres looks better than living your life, happiness monsters can have desires so great that they overwhelm everything else. It looked as if these problems arise mainly in situations where the pursuit of simple happiness is too narrowly focused, over-riding other objectives which also seem important.

In this connection it is productive to consider what follows if we pursue some radical alternative to happiness. What, indeed, if we seek to maximise misery? The specifics of our behaviour in particular circumstances will change, but the code authorised by the pursuit of unhappiness actually turns out to be quite similar to the one produced by its opposite. For maximum misery, we still need the maximum number of people. For the maximum number of people, we still need a fairly well-ordered and prosperous society. Unavoidably we’re going to have to ban disorderly and destructive behaviour and enforce reasonable norms of honesty. Even the armies of Hell punish lying, theft, and unauthorised violence – or they would fall apart. To produce the society that maximises misery requires only a small but pervasive realignment of the one that produces most happiness.

If we try out other goals we find that whatever general entity we want to maximise, consequentialism will authorise much the same moral code. Certain negative qualities seem to be the only exceptions. What if we aim to maximise silence, for example? It seems unlikely that we want a bustling, prosperous society in that case: we might well want every living thing dead as soon as possible, and so embrace a very different code. But I think this result comes from the fact that negative goals like silence – the absence of noise – covertly change our principle from one of maximising to one of minimising, and that makes a real difference. Broadly, maximising anything yields the same moral code.

In fact, the vaguer we are about what we seek to maximise, the fewer the local distortions we are likely to get in the results. So it seems we should do best to go back now and replace the version of utilitarianism we took on provisionally with something we might call empty consequentialism, which simply enjoins us to choose actions that maximise our own legacy as agents, without tying us to happiness or any other specific desideratum. We should perform those actions which have the greatest consequences – that is, those that tend to produce the largest and most complex world.

We began by assuming that something was worth doing and have worked round to the view that everything is: or at least, that everything should be treated as worth doing. The moral challenge is simply to ensure our doing of things is as effective as possible. Looking at it that way reveals that even though we have moved away from the narrow specifics of the hypothetical imperatives we started with, we are still really in the same territory and still seeking to act effectively and coherently; it’s just that we’re trying to do so in a broader sense.

In fact what we’re doing by seeking to maximise our consequential legacy is affirm and enlarge ourselves as persons. Personhood and agency are intimately connected. Acts, to deserve the name, must be intentional: things I do accidentally, unknowingly, or under direct constraint don’t really count as actions of mine. Intentions don’t exist in a free-floating state; they always have their origin in a person; and we can indeed define a person as a source of intentions. We need not make any particular commitment about the nature of intentions, or about how they are generated. Whether the process is neural, computational, spiritual, or has some other nature, is not important here, so long as we can agree that in some significant sense new projects originate in minds, and that such minds are people. By adopting our empty consequentialism and the moral code it authorises, we are trying to imprint our personhood on the world as strongly as we can.

We live in a steadily unrolling matrix of cause and effect, each event following on from the last. If we live passively, never acting on intentions of our own, we never disturb the course of that process and really we do not have a significant existence apart from it. The more we act on projects of our own, the stronger and more vivid our personal existence becomes. The true weight of these original actions is measured by their consequences, and it follows that acting well in the sense developed above is the most effective way to enhance and develop our own personhood.

To me, this a congenial conclusion. Being able to root good behaviour and the observance of an ethical code in the realisation and enlargement of the self seems a satisfying result. Moreover, we can close the circle and see that this gives us at last some answer to the question we could not deal with at first – why be good? In the end there is no categorical imperative, but there is, as it were, a mighty hypothetical; if you want to exist as a person, and if you want your existence as a person to have any significance, you need to behave well. If you don’t, then neither you nor anyone else need worry about the deeper reasons or ethics of your behaviour.

People who behave badly do not own the outcomes of their own lives; their behaviour results from the pressures and rewards that happen to be presented by the world. They themselves, as bad people, play little part in the shaping of the world, even when, as human beings, they participate in it. The first step in personal existence and personal growth is to claim responsibility and declare yourself, not merely reactive, but a moral being and an aspiring author of your own destiny. The existentialists, who have been sitting patiently smoking at a corner table, smile and raise an ironic eyebrow at our belated and imperfect enlightenment.

What about the people who rejected the constraints of morality and to greater or lesser degrees wanted to be left alone? Well, the system we’ve come up with enjoins us to adopt a moral code – but it leaves us to work out which one and explicitly allows for exceptions. Beyond that it consists of the general aspiration of ‘empty consequentialism’, but it is for us to decide how our consequential legacy is to be maximized. So the constraints are not tight ones. More important, it turns out that moral behaviour is the best way to escape from the tyranny of events and imprint ourselves on the world; obedience to the moral law, it turns out, is really the only way to be free.

Selves without concepts

conceptlessThinking without concepts is a strange idea at first sight; isn’t it always the concept of a thing that’s involved in thought, rather than the thing itself? But I don’t think it’s really as strange as it seems. Without looking too closely into the foundations at this stage, I interpret conceptual thought as simply being one level higher in abstraction than its non-conceptual counterpart.

Dogs, I think, are perfectly capable of non-conceptual thinking. Show them the lead or rattle the dinner bowl and they assent enthusiastically to the concrete proposal. Without concepts, though, dogs are tied to the moment and the actual; it’s no good asking the dog whether it would prefer walkies tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon; the concept cannot gain a foothold – nothing more abstract than walkies now can really do so. That doesn’t mean we should deny a dog consciousness – the difference between a conscious and unconscious dog is pretty clear – only to certain human levels. The advanced use of language and symbols certainly requires concepts, though I think it is not synonymous with it and conceptual but inexplicit thought seems a viable option to me. Some, though, have thought that it takes language to build meaningful self-consciousness.

Kristina Musholt has been looking briefly at whether self-consciousness can be built out of purely non-conceptual thought, particularly in response to Bermudez, and summarising the case made in her book Thinking About Oneself.
Musholt suggests that non-conceptual thought reflects knowledge-how rather than knowledge-that; without quite agreeing completely about that we can agree that non-conceptual thought can only be expressed through action and so is inherently about interaction with the world, which I take to be her main pointer.

Following Bermudez it seems we are to look for three things from any candidate for self-awareness; namely,

(1) non-accidental self-reference,
(2) immediate action relevance, and
(3) immunity to error through misidentification.

That last one may look a bit scary; it’s simply the point that you can’t be wrong about the identity of the person thinking your own thoughts. I think there are some senses in which this ain’t necessarily so, but for present purposes it doesn’t really matter. Bermudez was concerned to refute those who think that self-consciousness requires language; he thought any such argument collapses into circularity; to construct self-consciousness out of language you have to be able to talk about yourself, but talking about yourself requires the very self-awareness you were supposed to be building.

Bermudez, it seems, believes we can go elsewhere and get our self-awareness out of something like that implicit certainty we mentioned earlier.  As thought implies the thinker, non-conceptual thoughts will serve us perfectly well for these purposes. Musholt, though broadly in sympathy, isn’t happy with that. While the self may be implied simply by the existence of non-conceptual thoughts, she points out that it isn’t represented, and that’s what we really need. For one thing, it makes no sense to her to talk about immunity from error when it applies to something that isn’t even represented – it’s not that error is possible, it’s that the whole concept of error or immunity doesn’t even arise.

She still wants to build self-awareness out of non-conceptual thought, but her preferred route is social. As we noted she thinks non-conceptual thought is all about interaction with the world, and she suggests that it’s interaction with other people that provides the foundation for our awareness ourselves. It’s our experience of other people that ultimately grounds our awareness of ourselves as people.

That all seems pretty sensible. I find myself wondering about dogs, and about the state of mind of someone who grew up entirely alone, never meeting any other thinking being. It’s hard even to form a plausible thought experiment about that, I think. The human mind being what it is, I suspect that if no other humans or animals were around inanimate objects would be assigned imaginary personalities and some kind of substitute society cobbled up. Would the human being involved end up with no self-awareness, some strangely defective self-awareness (perhaps subject to some kind of dissociative disorder?), or broadly normal? I don’t even have any clear intuition on the matter.

Anyway, we should keep track of the original project, which essentially remains the one set out by Bermudez. Even if we don’t like Musholt’s proposal better than his, it all serves to show that there is actually quite a rich range of theoretical possibilities here, which tends to undermine the view that linguistic ability is essential. To me it just doesn’t seem very plausible that language should come before self-awareness, although I think it does come before certain forms of self-awareness. The real take-away, perhaps, is that self-awareness is a many-splendoured thing and different forms of it exist on all the three levels mentioned and surely more, too. This conclusion partly vindicates the attack on language as the only basis for self-awareness, undercutting Bermudez’s case for circularity. If self-awareness actually comes in lots of forms, then the sophisticated, explicit, language-based kind doesn’t need to pull itself up by its bootstraps, it can grow out of less explicit versions.

Anyway, Musholt has at least added to our repertoire a version of self-awareness which seems real and interesting – if not necessarily the sole or most fundamental version.