Would The Afterlife Be After Life?

Someone, who knows who they are I think, made a stimulating comment on here which I picked up on this morning and I thought it might be worth responding to, so here it is.

First of all, I should probably point out that when I say “afterlife” it could equally well apply to future reincarnation, and in fact I want to mention what’s on my mind regarding that too. I’ll start with an experience I had shortly after becoming Christian.

The high-control faith organisation I became part of at eighteen was very conventionally evangelically Christian, and people within it set out their own views regarding a Christian’s fate, and at this point a surprise might be in order because it wasn’t like the conventional views of Heaven and Hell. In fact, I’ll start with that. The “demotic” culturally Christian understanding of the fate of human beings is something like, if you have enough good deeds, when you die your soul leaves your body and goes to another realm immediately which we call Heaven, and if you’re bad enough, your soul leaves your body and goes to another realm immediately which we call Hell. Heaven is an eternal place of reward and Hell an eternal place of punishment. Human experience continues after death in this form.

The above is basically never what reflective evangelical Protestants believe. There may be recent converts who do believe that or perhaps people who don’t particularly involve themselves in Bible study, small groups, quiet times and the like, although it seems likely to me that people in their church are likely to pick up on that and encourage them. It’s also possible that since I’m of a more philosophical, and therefore perhaps surmised to be a more theological, bent than my born-again Christian peers at the time, the discussion may have led me in that direction and it’s actually very common for them not to have reconsidered this idea, but it seriously is not found, so far as I know, anywhere in evangelical fundamentalist Protestantism. There’s also the rather silly idea that Heaven is above the sky and Hell below the ground.

It’s more like this, as I understand it. Humans are widely considered to be new creations at conception and to persist until death as a combined living soul and body unit. They are once again new creations if they make a commitment to Christ, i.e. become Christian, and some believe that humans are soul and body before conversion and become soul, spirit and body afterward. On death, there is an interval during which individuals have no experience and are effectively asleep, a period referred to as “soul sleep”. At the Day of Judgement, humans receive a resurrection body which is perfect and incorruptible, which again is accompanied by their soul. They have memories of their life on Earth and proceed to be judged by God. If they have been saved, or would’ve been saved if they’d heard the Good News but didn’t, or had it distorted in some way, God conveys them to a non-Earthly realm where they live forever in bliss. If not, they are conveyed to another realm where they suffer forever. In either case, the soul is a new creation at conception which continues to be conscious, except when asleep, comatose or temporarily dead, experiencing time sequentially with a past, present and future whose quality does not change after death. In other words, they believe in an afterlife.

I can’t guarantee that I’ve got this right and there’s likely to be a fair bit of variation between views within evangelical Biblically literalist Protestant Christians. Some of them probably believe exactly this, others don’t. Another set of beliefs about this is arguably more Biblical, and it’s what the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe. This is that humans are created, possibly from conception, as physical conscious beings who continue in consciousness until death. After death they cease to be conscious until God chooses to resurrect them if they have died before the Day of Judgement, then they are recreated as physical conscious beings in perfected bodies. After being judged, if they are not saved in the JW sense, and I’m not sure what that is incidentally, they simply cease to exist. If they are saved, they inherit the Earth as an earthly paradise and as physical conscious beings. There are some other complications, but that’s basically it as I understand it, and again it involves sequential consciousness. After being resurrected, we will recall our former lives as having happened already and our experience will continue after the gap which began with our deaths, providing we’re saved of course. Jehovah’s Witnesses give the impression of being fundamentalist and conservative nowadays, but back in the day they were, as conservative evangelicals in the late 20th century CE have pointed out, actually liberal Christians, or rather descended from them. They don’t believe in a place of eternal conscious torment, that Jesus was divine or in a different heavenly realm. The Kingdom of God is on Earth for them. This is also reflected in their cosmopolitanism: JW Kingdom Halls are notable for their very representative congregations in ethnic terms, you can expect the same proportionof Blacks, Whites, South and East Asians among them as in the communities they’re in, and they are also truly global rather than being restricted to the English-speaking developed world. They are of course also wrong and a high-control spiritual organisation. Many would call them a cult. They’re sexist and homophobic. In my years-long discussion with JWs, the longer I conversed with them, the more convinced I became that they were wrong, both in terms of how they interpreted the Bible and in more general terms. There is also much to admire in them, for instance their pacifism.

Getting back to my involvement in the high-control religious group when I was eighteen, I found myself encountering recurrent major problems with their beliefs. I may write about this elsewhere, but it’s not important here. In terms of the way justice was served, I had a couple of major problems. One is that I felt, and still feel, that saving souls for Jesus becomes a substitute for actually doing good in the world. Another is that too much emphasis was placed on repentance, to the extent that Hitler could repent and be saved but some paragon of virtue could go to Hell for not being Christian. Consequently, I decided to revive my old belief in reincarnation. I had a model of the spiritual universe like this: space-time extends infinitely, or at least vastly, in all dimensions, in this case meaning the three of space and the one of time. Outside that realm are souls, which for the purposes of the model are points. From these points radiate lines to every incarnation each soul ever experiences, a bit like a spider with a colossal number of legs. From each of these lives, they learn important lessons and their position outside space and time is informed by the sum total of their experiences. That’s how I saw spiritual reality at the start of my adulthood.

There are problems with this model. The most important one I perceived at the time was the problem of why we don’t seem to have experienced previous lives as aliens or remember our future lives. If the enlightened oversoul to whom we are connected in our incarnate lives doesn’t experience time the way we do, and if we live in such a vast Universe the chances of being reincarnated in the immediate future or past as a human on this planet are extremely close to zero, yet we don’t seem to remember lives spent on different worlds. Moreover, since our eternal oversouls are not within time and reincarnation is not consecutive, there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping us from remembering future lives unless we are in general blocked from remembering other lives. Although there are said to be cases of people remembering former lives, I’m not aware of anyone claiming to remember their own future lives, although there do seem to be cases of premonition.

I stopped believing in that model fairly early on. It was mainly an attempt to make sense of life and the world spiritually in a hostile environment, so when I left that I was able to let go of that belief. For a while I was dualist, i.e. I believed in a soul and a body which existed in the same sense, i.e. two concrete, equally real entities which interact. The problem with that view may be that it’s “not even wrong” – it can’t be discussed rigorously because it falls apart under the most cursory examination. I don’t object to the idea of a soul, but I don’t think it’s a ghost in the machine, and it’s worthwhile digressing here into what I find a fascinating set of views held by some Christians.

Some Christians are physicalist, and I’d venture to say that some of them don’t realise they are but would if they thought about it. The problem with soul sleep after death followed by resurrection and consciousness with memory of a former life is that there’s apparently nothing connecting the resurrected person to the historical figure they are supposed to be the same as, and therefore that there’s no justice in either rewarding or punishing them, or saving or damning them which is unfortunately not the same thing. God creates someone and they live out their life, alternatively either being a good or bad person or becoming Christian or refusing to do so. Then they die, and eventually nothing physical remains of them. At some point in the future, God recreates a seemingly identical person with a perfected body, the same personality as before and with accurate memories of a former life. But this is, in a way, just God playing a game. This new identical creation has not committed the sins or done the good deeds of the previous person because there’s nothing linking them and they’re not the same person. They don’t deserve either good or bad treatment based on that previous person’s life and no justice is served. Without a soul of some kind, there can be no justice because it means death is the end. Therefore, most Christians would probably say there is such a thing as a soul, and they’d probably tend to think of it as a kind of phantom reflecting the person as they are in life, or perhaps a brilliant point of light or something. To their credit, my main interlocutor in the high-control group would not be drawn on defining the soul despite some suggestions I gave him, and with hindsight that could be the right attitude, although it might also mean he was worried that close examination would disintegrate his ideas. But as I said, Christian physicalism exists. Such Christians argue that Christian anthropology, i.e. its view of the nature of humans, has been inordinately influenced by Plato with his idea of the separation of the soul and body. They further see the Bible itself as supporting the view that we are living souls, i.e. that the references to us being “living souls” in the Bible actually refers to our embodied, living selves rather than something our bodies contain or are in some way connected to while we’re alive. Many would also claim that at no point is a disembodied human soul depicted in the Bible. Demons are of course, and I’d also raise the question of Saul attempting to talk to Samuel’s soul via a medium, that soul being identified as Samuel rather than a deceptive demon pretending to be him. They also see all this as being more aligned with the findings of modern science and medicine. I don’t personally think they’ve succeeded in making any connection between the original body and the resurrection body, which if I were to try that myself I’d probably say is the same person created from something like a Platonic form, so it’s like there’s the number 2, the word “two”, the digit “2” and the Roman numeral “II”, all of which refer to the objectively existing and unique number 2, but it’s not up to me to defend really.

I do not believe in the human experience of sequential time except in waking life. I see our experience of time as one moment following another in order to be confined to the sequence of days we live through awake, starting with our birth or perhaps before and ending with our death or an irreversible loss of any kind of consciousness at the ends of our lives. However, it isn’t that simple and you’ve probably noticed that I’m obliquely referring to other states of consciousness, where matters are entirely different. The anti-theistic philosopher Daniel Dennett, of whom I’m not generally much of a fan, did make an interesting observation regarding sleep, which is that we don’t know that we’re experiencing dreams. It could just be that dreams are messes in our sleeping brains which our waking brains try to make sense of, although I don’t think that can be true because of the existence of lucid dreams and things like people talking in their sleep, sleepwalking and so forth, apparently acting out their dreams as they occur. Nonetheless, I have had an experience which suggested to me that dreams are not as they seem, which is that I dozed off with the radio on, woke up a few minutes later and my dream began with radio sounds when I woke up and ended with sounds from it as I dropped off. The only way I can make sense of this in conventional terms is that my dream consisted of assembled and confused information present in my brain resulting from sleep when I woke up, and that was my brain assembling that in the wrong order.

However, I don’t think it’s either/or, and I’m not the only person to believe this. Dennett’s belief that lucid dreams, i.e. dreams where the dreamer becomes aware they’re dreaming and takes control of it, are not experiences strikes me as the result of his dogma about the nature of consciousness forcing him to absurd conclusions and probably also reflects on how he accounts for all consciousness, i.e. very badly. All that said, I think you can have it both ways, and here’s why: wakefulness has one attitude to reality and dreaming has another. It’s also feasible that all states of consciousness have their own unique attitudes. In particular, time doesn’t operate the same way in dreaming as it does in everyday life. I don’t want to go into too much depth here, but I once had an extremely detailed dream in which I see places and people whom I had no idea existed at the time, and this is a single and particularly notable incident of many such. Dreams, I think, actually do sometimes foretell the future, and the only way I can make sense of this is to understand them as presenting temporal events in a different way to how they occur to the waking mind. This is certainly true in the case of past events, but my more extraordinary claim is that they also present events which haven’t yet occurred. All that said, judging by how our thinking and consciousness as waking people operates, dreams are indeed not temporal events at all but just arbitrary patterns in our minds which we make sense of when we awake, but that presentation and understanding is that of a wakeful, living brain and is not more true or more valid than the experience one has in another state of consciousness such as dreaming. It’s more like a three-dimensional cube being projected onto a flat surface and looking like a square or a hexagon. Our minds when awake simply can’t do anything else with the experience. For that reason, I also think that dreams don’t occur while we’re asleep, which is one reason I narrate them in the present tense. What actually happens is that a conduit opens to experiences which are no less valid or real, in their own terms, at a particular point in our waking lives. There was never a time when the dream someone has at the age of forty wasn’t there: it exists outside sequential time.

J W Dunne took this approach, which went on to influence J B Priestley and Olaf Stapledon among others. In his ‘An Experiment With Time’, published in 1927, Dunne claimed on the basis of prophetic dreams that there are two time dimensions, only one of which governs our lives. Another level of consciousness occupies the other time dimension, and there is an infinite regress into higher and higher time dimensions. This is interesting but not quite how I see things. I think that when we’re both alive and awake, we experience time sequentially, but that only makes sense within that state. Beyond that state, time is different and possibly indescribable and incomprehensible to us as we are now. Dreams are clues to this, but there’s a lot more to reality which they only hint at. Hence the question “what happens after we die?” is based on false assumptions about time. Death only occurs to our waking selves, and in fact it doesn’t even do that because as far as that mode of our consciousness is concerned, we always have a past, present or future. Death is not something we experience. I also find it entertaining, though maybe meaningless, to think of my life as an endless loop, which is however only operating in a general sea of consciousness and not limited to it, so maybe we live through our lives and go on to experience amnesia combined with death and rebirth into the same life repeated infinitely. As well as the other people I’ve mentioned, the author Ian Watson has expressed the idea that the “afterlife” is a dream state in which Hell is the inability to dream lucidly and Heaven is lucid dreaming, which can however be induced in the damned, liberating them from Hell by doing so.

Now for reincarnation. There seem to be two views of this. In one, we progress or regress in each life and are reincarnated accordingly. In another, we simply reincarnate without any particular plan or direction. The former is the southern and eastern Asian view on the matter, and it’s possible that their view of reincarnation is more valid because of the Valeriepieris Circle:

This circle represents half the population of the world. More people live inside this circle than outside it. Interestingly, to me anyway, it includes the main area where people take the existence of reincarnation for granted. The reason this is interesting is that this area is also the one where people are most likely to be reincarnated if it is true, so if there’s any evidence that people have lived before, for instance memories of former lives, that’s the area where they could be most easily verified or supported. If reincarnation is true, the most likely places religions or other belief systems which accept that are to arise is within that circle, and that is in fact what’s happened. It doesn’t prove anything of course. People would be less likely to experience it in large areas of tundra, desert or on oceanic islands, and of course the Abrahamic religions did arise in desert areas. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t believe in it elsewhere but it could be seen as evidence for it.

I’m not going to question the reality of people being able to remember things they “couldn’t” because they appear to have happened in someone else’s life. I’m prepared to accept that as at least a theoretical possibility and I’m more interested in what it might imply. The most common interpretation of this taking place is that someone’s soul lived out a life in one body which then died and they’re now in another body, often that of a small child, who can remember some events which occurred in the previous life. However, that isn’t the only explanation and it depends on the existence of a soul or persistent self which may not be real. David Hume, some other Western philosophers and of course Buddhists have the idea that there is nothing you can point to which is “I”. Instead, there are simply experiences in a stream linked by memories and anticipation. I don’t agree with this for two reasons. One is that I believe that total loss of memory which didn’t otherwise injure a person, or if you like cloning or duplication, would still be followed by a person with a very similar personality. There are cases of identical twins separated at birth who have ended up almost duplicating each other’s lives unwittingly, even to the extent of getting a dog of the same breed and calling him the same name. The other is that you are the person others relate to or see you as, for instance their parent, sibling, boss, mentor or favourite musician. These kinds of identity are real. However, they’re not the same as having a soul, and for that reason I think it makes as much sense to suppose that it isn’t the soul who is reincarnated but their various memories and experiences are reassembled, probably as a collage from many lives, in a new person. However, there is one proviso here: those experiences might only exist as part of someone’s whole life, and if that’s lived with integrity that would lead to a larger chunk of someone being reincarnated, and perhaps ultimately as the whole person undergoing that process. This is odd because it kind of means that the better life one leads, the more likely one is to be reincarnated rather than the other way round.

So to conclude, there have been two themes in this post.  One is the nature of identity and time, and the other is what can be said to happen beyond this life.  In that, I’ve committed myself to discussing only religious views, but it’s also possble that these thoughts can be adapted to more non-religious views. Some of them are inspired by Heidegger and existentialism, after all. Let me know what you think. It really isn’t that deep.

Goddities

This is going to be me going at it like a bull at a gate rather than just sitting down and composing my mind and thoughts about the issues at hand. My basic idea with this is to try to explore the common ground or otherwise between atheism and theism, because I sometimes wonder if we’re talking about the same thing or just using the same words. There are certain things which atheists have been known to do which I feel have just been designed for the specific occasion of their argument rather than having a wider respectability, and there are other things which, well, are just interesting for everyone, or at least might be, and I want to plonk all these things together today and talk about them.

The first one is something I’ve mentioned before, which is the question of active and passive atheism. I insist on a definition of atheism as the existence of a belief that no deities exist rather than the absence of a belief that a deity exists. I’ve been over this, so I’ll be brief. The motivation for defining atheism passively is to set it as the default belief, but in doing so one is forced to accept peculiar implications. We assume all sorts of things, which is in itself interesting and complicated because in fact we seem to have uncountably infinite assumptions but only a finite number of active beliefs. Therefore an assumption is not something which is happening in anyone’s mind. It’s something one has not done. This seems messy and excessive to me, and is actually more or less the exact issue which many philosophers have with the nineteenth century philosopher Gottlob Freges view of concepts, so it’s something which has been flogged to death in philosophy already and to produce this definition at this stage, I think, reflects a lack of philosophical training. It comes across to me as naive and reflecting a kind of thinking on the spot which hasn’t had its rough edges knocked off it. On the other hand, perhaps it reflects some kind of demographic shift. As I understand it, analytical philosophers have had very little interest in the concept of God since the start of the tradition, which was probably Freges thought itself back in the 1870s CE, but they may also have been enjoying this lack of interest in a more overtly theistic and religious society than nowadays, or perhaps a less confrontational one in this area, so the definition of atheism as the absence of a belief may have become more accepted simply because more atheists, as opposed to apatheists which probably characterises most philosophers, are now in academia. Nonetheless, there is no word for someone who doesn’t believe in Russell’s teapot or that there’s an invisible gorilla in every room, so in such a situation there may as well be no word for atheism, but clearly there should be and it does mean something. But I won’t go on.

Second issue: small g “god”. There are atheists who insist on using a small g for the name God. I think they do this because they want to equate God conceptually with what they think of as other deities. This, I think, is also erroneous and an example of an over-reaction to a situation they have kind of imagined. Look at it this way: atheists claim God is a fictional character. It’s possible to go further than that and claim that God is an incoherent concept, but that isn’t atheism, although it’s an interesting position to take and one I have more than a little sympathy with. Fictional characters are given names. We know who Gandalf is, who Bridget Jones is, and unfortunately we know who Bella Swan is (actually I forgot and had to look that up!), and they all have names beginning with capital letters. Is god supposed to be someone like ee cummings or archie the cockroach? Someone once said to me I was confusing myself by capitalising God, which they didn’t explain but I think it’s along the lines that God is just one deity among many. It is, though, a little bit interesting that we generally just call God “God” and don’t say, for instance, Metod any more, which used to be a word used for God and seems to mean “measurer” (i.e. “mete-er”) and “arranger”, which could be a euphemism or a kind of title but is in any case a name for God.

This is of course related to “I only believe in one fewer deities than you do,” which involves the supposition that theistic Christians believe the likes of Ba`al and Zeus don’t exist. This also I think is seriously misconceived and fairly thoughtless. My view of the other deities is not that they don’t exist but that they’re God under different names. They do of course have other attributes, but then if God exists, God is beyond human understanding, so we have no better idea of what attributes are true of God than of any other deities who are, in any case, God by other names. So yes, I do believe in all those deities because they’re all the same deity. Another rather unsettling consequence of saying I’m atheist about all the other deities is that it’s very like the Islamophobic belief that Allah is not God and that Muslims are not worshipping the same god as Christians. It has disturbingly racist overtones to it, to my mind, which is of course a feature of “New Atheism”, and this is where it gets interesting. Many Christians claim Muslims worship a different, false god and not the God of the New Testament, or presumably the Hebrew scriptures, where they see continuity, and among Christian nationalists I would expect a very strong denial that Muslims worship God. This unifies some theists and atheists. The details of the denial may be different though. For instance, Christian nationalists might want to distinguish between the Christian trinitarian God and the Islamic indivisible divine unity, whereas the New Atheist approach is more likely to be along the lines of imaginary beings being given different attributes, including the trinity or otherwise.

Emphasising the fact that New Atheism is not all anti-theistic atheism is vital. It’s also possibly a movement whose time has passed. Nor would I want to say that anyone within that movement is overtly racist. They are characterised, and perhaps led, by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, notably all White men, meaning that they will all have unconscious bias, some of which I inevitably share by virtue of my whiteness and to some extent other aspects of my social conditioning though not all. This by no means makes anti-theistic atheism unsalvageable, but equally it’s important to note that atheism is not monolithic. I always think of South Asia in this respect, with the separate Jain, Samkhya and Carvaka beliefs that God cannot or does not exist, among others, in one case because the force of karma is a sufficient explanation for the Cosmos, and more recently the Marxist anti-theistic movement there, though this is clearly influenced by the West. Some New Atheists see the development of European culture under Christian influence as a necessary precondition for the emergence of what might be termed a more liberal or progressive approach which includes atheistic approaches to reality, possibly including South Asian Marxist activists.

One major problem, I think, with anti-theist approaches in general is that they seem to make a major assumption which really doesn’t seem warranted and is odd for a group which tends to see itself as rational. That is that the urge to be religious can be removed from human psychology even if it should be. It seems to me that there are several reasons why this is unlikely. We have cognitive biasses involving finding patterns in things, we engage in magical thinking which may be the basis of rationality, and large communities tend to drift away from their constituted foundations after a while. We also have ego defences. The idea that a non-religious mind set could be adopted by the general population may not be realistic. There don’t seem to be any societies which are entirely non-religious, and when it does occur officially, religion creeps back in somewhere, such as superstitious beliefs about luck and fate. There are of course very large numbers of non-religious people whose lives are entirely healthy and well-adjusted, but they’re not an entire society and there’s too much diversity between people’s personalities and influences to conclude that everyone could live their lives that way. This has nothing to do with whether religious claims to truth are correct. This also seems to be an article of faith among, for example, humanists – that society can exist, whether or not it’s a good thing, without religion. I really want to stress that I’m not saying religion is needed, just that we don’t know if it even could be eliminated. In fact, ironically this belief is almost religious in itself, although I would also insist in defining religion in a different way which doesn’t emphasise belief.

I feel like I’ve spent several paragraphs low-key slagging off atheism. This isn’t what I want to do at all. I want it to be the way things are in my own life most of the time, and probably increasingly so in these isles with the possible exception of Ireland, that whether one is theist, atheist or agnostic is a private matter one would prefer not to talk about with people outside one’s possibly religious community and maybe not even that. What I’m trying to do is establish common ground and I’m not looking for a fight. There are more important things to engage in conflict over and it can be divisive even to bring this up, but at the same time it feels messy and naive, so I’m going to carry on.

Something which is not so divisive is the rather more nuanced approach found in both religious and non-religious circles which is not firmly atheist, theist, deist or agnostic, which is present both in some forms of mysticism and Western philosophy. Many religious mystics, and in fact a lot of just ordinary religious people like me, would say God is beyond human understanding, and in particular there’s the via negativa, which is the idea that you can best say what God is not in order to suggest what God is. God is also said to be unlike any created thing, and it’s a very familiar experience to find that one can’t express a religious experience in language. Similarly, there’s ignosticism and theological non-cognitivism, which I’ve talked about before on here. In the mid-twentieth century, there was a movement within analytical philosophy called logical positivism which attempted to establish that meaning, i.e. either truth or falsehood, only inheres in statements which are axiomatic, express necessary truths or can be empirically verified. Along with this claim was the one that religious statements were not in any of these categories and therefore they were meaningless. This is not the same thing as being false and in a way it corresponds quite well to the mystical position. Logical positivism is now considered passé, but other areas of Western philosophy have adopted a somewhat reminiscent position. My ex is of course German and among other things a philosopher in the continental tradition. When we got together, I was worried they might be Christian but it turned out that they saw religious claims very much as not having truth values in a manner I found reminiscent of logical positivism but which have much more in common with the postmodern condition, which sees philosophy as a branch of literature and everything as up for deconstruction. Statements about God make sense in their own communities and theology is a poetic or narrative truth, but these truth claims are no more or less valid than those of maths and science. Postmodern theology has been adopted by people in religious communities. There is, however, no truth outside language according to this.

I mean, I have certain views of course, as this view is both ableist and speciesist, but it is nevertheless interesting that there is a kind of agreement in this area between, of all things, postmodernity, religious mysticism and logical positivism. These are not all there is to philosophy of course, but it strikes me that this shows a way forward for us all. There are of course other non-theistic religions and non-theistic traditions within Christianity and Judaism.

Getting back to gripes though, there’s another cluster of beliefs which tend to be considered as universally associated. This is not a definitive list but I hope I’ve captured most of them:

• Theism
• An afterlife
• Souls and bodies as separate items which coexist in the same sense
• Varying fates according to actions in this life
• Subjectively sequential time extending beyond death
• Theological voluntarism/divine command theory
• Literal and unironic belief

The first three in particular seem to be closely associated with each other. For instance, it’s often said that people want to believe in God because they don’t want to die, so in other words they see the prospect of an afterlife, or possibly reincarnation, to follow from the idea that God exists. There’s also an implicit assumption that God is good and/or loving in theism, which unless you agree with the ontological argument for God’s existence out of the best-known “proofs” of God has no connection with whether God exists or not. In fact I strongly suspect a lot of fundamentalist evangelist Protestants don’t, deep down, believe God is good at all but are afraid to admit it even to themselves because God would be telepathic and know they believe this. Nonetheless their public view is that God is good and just.

In each case you can uncouple the bullet-pointed belief from theism. It’s entirely feasible to believe in an afterlife in isolation, with no God. There are also Christian physicalists, who believe God will re-create us all in superior physical form at the end of time with no separate entity bearing our consciousness. Jehovah’s Witnesses may fall into this category. Alternatively, there are religions which are strongly atheist but believe in souls, such as the Jains. So far as I can tell, even faithful Judaism as opposed to the reconstructionist form is pretty much agnostic on what happens when they die, and as a Christian I think it’s important for ethical reasons to ignore any claims about what happens beyond this life, if anything. My views on the nature of time make it a bit involved for me to go into this just now without it taking over the post. Theological voluntarism and divine command theory are the idea that God alone makes ethics meaningful, a belief which can only sincerely be held by a psychopath. Finally, literal and unironic belief relies on Biblical literalism, which is seriously compromised by Biblical criticism, and there is also a project to imagine history as proceeding as young Earth creationists and otherwise Biblically literalist people suppose but with no God. Incredibly, there really are people who believe that and are atheist.

I very much get the impression that some anti-theistic atheists really would prefer theistic Christians to be conservative evangelicals, and I seem to remember Richard Dawkins saying that liberal and progressive Christianity are dangerous because they represent a kind of gateway drug to extremism. It also seems to me that some anti-theists simply think that’s what Christians are like as a block, and I think this is our fault because of those of us who are particularly strident and emphatic about our bigotry. In fact churches can be excellent factories for anti-theistic atheists and we’re responsible for creating them in many cases. But on both sides there is a tendency, which I’ve probably exhibited here, to caricature the other side, whereas in fact there could be said to be no sides at all, just people dedicated to the truth.

Pythagoras

I’m currently sitting on our favourite couch. It is in turn sitting in a room downstairs in our house in Scotland. We bought it in England and tried to get it up the stairs of our English house because our living room was upstairs there. We had enormous trouble getting it past the bends in the stairs and eventually I decided to measure the bend and the couch, so I measured the depth and height of the couch and then the three dimensions of which the bend consisted. Using the well known right angle triangle equation a²+b²=c² and taking the square root of c, I was able to calculate the hypotenuse of the couch. I then made the slightly more complex calculation of using the hypotenuse of the dimensions of the stair bend with the height of the ceiling above the stairs to work out the maximum length of an object which could be fitted through the gap, and since that second figure was smaller than c, I was able to prove, and I have to state this carefully to be precise, that the couch would not be able to fit into the space on the stair bend, and therefore it would be impossible to take it up the stairs and put it in our living room, so it remained downstairs. Now there could’ve been some other approaches, such as taking the feet off or the banisters down, but in fact both of those were part of the objects concerned and it wasn’t going to happen because I’m not Bernard Cribbins.

This is of course Pythagoras’s Theorem. People often say they never apply anything they learnt in maths to their lives after leaving school, leading me to conclude that either their lives are unnecessarily hard or that they don’t realise they’re using it, because this kind of problem comes up all the time in everyday adult life and I can only surmise that people think really strangely in this area. I scraped an O-level pass in maths and this is obvious to me. In fact I almost stayed in the CSE group and was the lowest grade person to go “up”. I should also mention that there is a famous Moving Sofa Problem in mathematics, but this isn’t that. The moving sofa problem is the question of which rigid two-dimensional shape of the largest area can be manoeuvred through an L-shaped planar region with legs of unit width. It didn’t help us because the stairs were three dimensional, i.e. they went up diagonally, turned through two ninety degree angles while continuing to ascend and the ceiling of the ground floor was in the way too. There migh be some couch-stair combinations which it could’ve been useful for, but not this one.

Most people know one thing about Pythagoras, and that’s that he’s responsible for Pythagoras’s Theorem that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the some of the squares on the other two sides of a right angled triangle. This also brings up the issue of the square root of two being irrational, i.e. not being expressible through a ratio, i.e. a fraction, because an isosceles right angled triangle with unit opposite and adjacent sides will have a hypotenuse length equivalent to the square root of two in units. As a child I thought this proved that units of measurement didn’t exist, but obviously that was my child’s mind failing to grasp things properly. The only thing is, Pythagoras probably didn’t think of his theorem. It’s more likely that in order to give it some kudos, people decided to attribute it to him, and it was known about before his time.

Unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to satisfactorily answer the question of whether Pythagoras existed. He may well not have done. I want to start by mentioning a few other figures: Nero was the Roman emperor who fiddled while Rome burned and rebuild the city in a much improved condition; George Washington was the guy who cut down the fruit tree as a boy and admitted to it, saying “I cannot tell a lie” and Archimedes was that bloke who got in the bath which overflowed, giving him the inspiration to tell whether a crown was solid gold, and shouted “Eureka!”, running down the street naked. Or maybe not. I haven’t checked these and they’re very likely to be just stories, and actually the question of whom we refer to when we tell stories like this is a modern philosophical problem. So Pythagoras, by the same token, was an ancient Greek philosopher who discovered something important about triangles, was vegetarian, wouldn’t eat beans and thought numbers were very important to the nature of reality. That’s probably more than most people “know” about him.

So I’m going to start with the question of whether he existed. At least three other important Greek men wrote about him and his life: Aristotle the philosopher, Herodotus the historian and Iamblichus the Neoplatonist philosopher. There was a whole school of philosophy named after him which he’s said to have founded, although that doesn’t mean he existed. That school of philosophy has a consistent belief system rather than just being arbitrary unconnected beliefs, so there is such a thing as a Pythagorean philosophy. However, no writings at all can be attributed to him because Pythagorean philosophy was an oral tradition. It was passed on by word of mouth long before it started to be written down, and this of course means it could’ve ended up being distorted even if he did exist. There was also a tendency in the Greco-Roman world for people to attribute ideas and quotes to people to make them seem more important and respectable than they would’ve been perceived as otherwise, rather like how lots of quotes today are attributed to Churchill and Einstein that they never said.

And the thing is, Pythagoras as he was understood in ancient Greek sounds absolutely bizarre. He had a thigh made of gold, was able to be in two places at once and could converse with non-human animals, and there were a few other things about him which were odd-sounding. He comes across as a kind of magical cult leader and demigod, perhaps a shaman or a sage rather than a philosopher. This partly reflects how philosophy was not neatly parcelled off from religion and spirituality as it is today, at least in academia, and what we separate today was actually considered together until at least the time of Newton. The difficulty, in fact, is similar to those of establishing the nature of the real Jesus and Socrates. So we’re in a situation where the one thing everyone thinks they know about him isn’t true and he was seen as some kind of superhero with incredible psychic powers. But in a way the question of whether he existed or not is the most boring thing about him. Everything I say about him from this point on has therefore to be attributed to some kind of possibly mythical or otherwise fictional figure rather than any real person called Pythagoras living in Ancient Greece.

He was seen as an expert on the soul. In Ancient Greek times before him, nobody thought there was a separate soul which survives death. This was more an Ancient Egyptian thing, and for all we know that’s where it originated. Because of this expertise, combined with his belief in reincarnation he was said to be able to remember his past lives. He once got someone to stop beating a dog because he recognised the cries as those of a dead friend reincarnated in the dog’s body. This is also why he was able to talk to members of other species. And whether or not he existed, there was clearly a cult based on his apparent beliefs, and this cult was also rather strange. They believed that the right shoe should always be taken off before the left one but that the left foot should always be washed before the right, that no-one should eat anything red, and they were seriously into numerology and vegetarianism. In fact, before the invention of the English word “vegetarian”, we were called “Pythagoreans”. They also included both women and men, which seems to have been unusual at the time. We may assume that the idea of an institution which admits women to be the exception back then but we don’t actually know. You also had to be silent for five years once you joined. Returning to the vegetarianism, although they did believe in it, justified through the idea of human souls being reincarnated in other forms, they also believed in sacrificing animals to deities. There’s even a story that Pythagoras was once seen eating chicken and replying to the objection that he was supposed to be veggie and not eat live animals by saying that the animal he was eating was dead, and this makes me wonder if they were actually vegetarian or simply sacrificing animals so they could eat them. Even so, many veggies do have stories like that made up about them, and most surviving records about Pythagoras are about criticising him and his followers or lauding him and them. There isn’t much attempting to be objective. Incidentally, although he had a religious cult of his own, he still worshipped the Greek deities of the time and what they did was “extra”: it was still dodekatheism, as it’s known nowadays, but a kind of denomination of it rather than a separate religion.

Pythagoras was of course into maths, which he combined with numerology because at the time there was no distinction. He seems to have been the first person to connect mathematics to an attempt to explain the world. This particular notion has been extremely influential. Even today, a hard science has to include maths to be taken seriously. One of the reasons psychology emphasises statistics so heavily is that it wants to be a “proper” natural science. However, the way Pythagoreans approached maths and its relationship to the physical world back then seems quite different to how they’re approached now. For instance, even numbers were considered female and odd numbers male, and since the number 1 wasn’t considered a number at all because it didn’t have a beginning and an end, five was considered the number of marriage, as it was the union of the first female number with the first male number. The number seven was considered sacred because, being prime, nothing could make it up and it could make up nothing. Two was considered the number of justice because it enabled things to be divided equally into two halves. Three was considered to sum up the whole Universe as it was the first number to have a beginning, middle and end. He also discovered triangular numbers. The number three was considered to represent a human being, and was of course male, representing the threefold virtues of prudence, good fortune and drive. That almost sounds like it’s out of a contemporary self-help book.

Although the links Pythagoras made between numbers and the Universe were peculiar, he also connected geometry and arithmetic more thoroughly than his predecessors, because of the hypotenuse connection with the square root of 2, and because of his theorem, although that had been known to the Babylonians. He was the first person to come up with a method for constructing a dodecahedron, and connected many shapes to the Cosmos, bringing me to what ought to be the most famous thing he was known for: he was the first person to claim Earth was round. Remarkably, although this has turned out to be incorrect, his reasoning had no connection to any observations because science wasn’t there yet. In addition to that, he came up with the idea that Earth and other planets moved in orbits, although oddly not around the Sun but a central fire, and also that there was a counter-Earth, required to make up the numbers in the system. There are convoluted reasons for all this.

This initially peculiar link between the Universe and mathematics, once forged, has stayed ever since and may not in fact be as obvious as it seems. I have suggested before that one solution to the Fermi Paradox (“where are all the aliens?”) might be that they’re all really bad at maths compared to humans, but another solution may be that although they’re perfectly good at maths, they never had a Pythagoras to make a link between the two and it’s never occurred to them to apply maths in this way. Hence their science is still Babylonian in nature, or even less like Western European science than that. They never got any further. If that’s true, it makes Pythagoras, even if he never existed, an incredibly important figure.

Another aspect of all this is that we can look back from our own “rational” viewpoint and poo-poo the idea that he was an ancient Doctor Dolittle, could be in two places at once and remember past lives, when actually maybe he could do all of that and it’s our own restrictive mind sets which have stopped that from happening. This doesn’t sound sane, but when we consider what many Christians believe about Jesus it becomes more a case of us simply having decided that one ancient semi-mythical person has such attributes rather than the other. It only sounds crazy today because we chose to retain the deification of Christ rather than Pythagoras, which could be seen as practically a coin-toss. There is a world not far from here where many millions of people still believe Pythagoras had something in common with C3PO.

Another numerological aspect of Pythagoreanism was that nobody should gather in groups of more than ten because the number ten was 1+2+3+4, so ten in particular was a sacred number to them. This extended to them composing prayers to that number, and I find this interesting because it creates a link between mathematical entities and deities and other spirits. Platonism and intuitionism are two opposing views of maths. Intuitionism holds that humans invent maths as we go along, i.e. it’s a creation of the mind just like a poem might be, whereas Platonism holds that maths is discovered. It’s already out there before we get to it. So for example, there are considered to be eight planets in this solar system. Assuming there are no others, there were also eight planets when the first trilobites appeared 521 million years ago. In fact, at that point there was a number representing the global population of trilobites, as there still is today: zero. So does that mean that the number eight exists independently of human consciousness or, more precisely, the ability to count? I have a strongly atheist friend who is also a Platonist, and she acknowledges that it’s an odd position to be in. The Ontological Argument for God tries to bootstrap God into existence from the concept of God, and this perhaps reflects the notion that God exists as a concept in a more objective manner than an atheist or agnostic would usually be expected to think. The concept of God is “out there” in the Cosmos in some way, and maybe in the same way as maths is said to be by Platonists. But this, well, I’m going to have to use the word “idea” at some point, of deities existing abstractly is usually considered separately nowadays from the idea that squares or numbers exist. We have a partition in our thoughts which Pythagoreans had yet to erect.

This can be directed back on Pythagoras. Clearly the idea of Pythagoras does exist, although it seems to have varied. We have Pythagoras as the triangle guy and the first person to suggest that the world is round, although actually that might’ve been one of his successors. But Pythagoras himself may not have existed in the same sense that Elizabeth I of England did, and as such this accords quite well with the general attitudes of the time and the problems of ancient history. Also, back at that time and place, the Greeks seem to have taken their religion quite literally so for them Zeus was as real as Pythagoras whether or not we think of him as real.

On consideration though, I do think he existed in the way we generally understand existence today, i.e. not just as an abstract or mythological entity. The reason for this is that his cult existed and was quite forceful and distinct in nature. It seems to me that a requirement for a large group of people to avoid speaking for five years and never to eat beans sounds like the kind of thing a charismatic leader would get their followers to do, and it really sounds like cultish behaviour by today’s standards. It makes cults seem like constant fixtures in human life rather than phenomena characteristic of the modern world. This is probably not terribly surprising, but maybe this assumes too much, because it might be that cults with leaders are more recent developments connected to individualism and a tendency for people to seek complete answers to life’s problems. I haven’t checked, but I don’t think the Essenes had a founder or leaders.

Here’s the weird bit though. As I’ve said before, although Pythagoreans seem to have been the first people to link maths and science, from today’s perspective they seem to have come up with a list of arbitrary superstitions and ideas without a thorough connection to reality. But despite this, somehow they were able to assert the correct idea that the world is round, which to us seems to depend on observation rather than philosophical or mathematical abstraction. Nobody seems to have had that idea before. Later Greek philosophers came up with ways of testing this and measuring Earth’s size, but it wasn’t those careful tests which led to the initial thought. What are we to make of this? Maybe the idea crept in from somewhere else.

We still have the metric system. Does that maybe represent a similar superstition about numbers? We happen to have ten digits on our hands and it’s led to us producing a system which is easier to use than imperial because of how we count, but are we also partaking of Pythagorean mysticism there? We’ve put that into the box of rationality, but maybe it’s more to do with custom. Also it seems that the real mystery is how maths actually manages to engage with the world at all. Why would this be?

Successfully Predicting The Future

This post is not about Nostradamus, although I have written something about him. It would also be easy to write me off on the strength of what I wrote there, but the approach here is very different and in fact suggested by the opinions of the Zizians and other rationalists. It’s based on probability.

We are first of all aware that the way things were before Trump’s election, the human race was due to die out in the 2060s from respiratory paralysis, along with all reptiles, mammals and fish, the last for other reasons. With the change in policies regarding carbon emissions in the US, that date has now been brought forward, but this is not about that. I now realise that I’ve told you two things this isn’t about.

You might remember my post on the Doomsday Argument (there’s probably more than one) a few years ago. The basic idea behind this is based on an estimate of when the Berlin Wall would come down by someone who visited it in the 1960s. In 1969 CE, when the astrophysicist J Richard Gott III visited the then eight year old Berlin Wall, he posited that the Copernican Principle, that there’s nothing special about a particular observation, individual and so forth, meant that the best assumption about how far through the total number of visitors to the Wall was that he was about halfway through. He gave an estimate of 50/50 that it would be gone by 1993. In fact it came down in 1989, which is quite close. The Doomsday Argument is that from the perspective of an individual human life, one’s birth is best estimated as being about halfway through the total number of human births. With the population growth during the twentieth century of doubling every thirty years and an estimate of the number of human lives being lived so far at seventy five thousand million since 600 000 BP, and taking my own birth in 1967 as an example, it being the only one I can, it appears that the human species will probably be extinct by 2133. There are numerous flaws in this argument, but it’s important to note that it isn’t an argument that overpopulation will cause extinction or that any cause in particular will do so. There will of course be a cause but we don’t seem to be able to tell from this argument what that would be. Nonetheless it is the case that if population growth slows, the prediction extends further into the future and it also depends substantially on assumptions about which entities are likely to have those thoughts, that is, when we became human and started to conceive of the idea of the end of the world, the human race and so forth. In fact, population growth is indeed decelerating and this stretches our probable prospect well into the future. I’ve talked about all of this before, but I think it’s a measure of the occurrence of the thought and not the occurrence of humans. An outbreak of optimism about the future of the human race by the early 22nd century would mean that no more ideas of that kind will occur, or that they’ll be rarer, so maybe what we’re really measuring is the extinction of doomerism, not that of humanity. There are all sorts of reasons why this might happen. It could be that our descendants are all parasitic tumour cells with no brains and therefore no expectations, that we’re all wiped out by AI which doesn’t have that thought or that things are going to get a lot better. Hence this apparently cold mathematical argument has so many hidden variables that it may be worthless.

There is another, similar, argument which I’ve used to predict a future without human space exploration, and it goes like this. Suppose there are a million habitable exoplanets which will one day be within human reach, or alternatively the same area in the form of artificial space habitats of some kind. This is a very conservative estimate as it would mean that only one star system in four hundred thousand would have such a planet or that the technology to produce such habitats is very inefficient. Now suppose that each of these planets (I’ll use the planet settlement scenario for simplicity’s sake) only has an average population of a million, with each such population being considered as a discrete number per century, so for example there are a million people on one such planet and then a century later they’ve died but another million people have replaced them. Suppose this goes on for ten thousand years. That’s 100 x 1 million x 1 million, which is 10¹⁴ people. Going back to the original figure of 7.5 x 10¹⁰ people having lived so far, that makes that a tiny fraction of the number of people who will live in this scenario, namely 0.075%. This means that the probability of living at a time before this has happened, i.e. not being one of these people, is only one in around 1300. These are ridiculous betting odds which nobody rational would risk their money on. Also, the estimate I’ve made is extremely conservative. The Galaxy has been estimated to contain around 300 million habitable planets which will continue to be habitable for on average several hundred million years each and could support a population of ten thousand million people each. If the other scenarios are explored, a much wider variety of stars could support a Dyson swarm, i.e. a roughly spherical shell of space habitats with many times Earth’s land surface area which would dwarf even the second estimate at the order of 10²⁵. If one considers one’s life as a random sample from human history, with these odds it can be guaranteed that if humans settle in space substantially in the future, one would be living during that era and not this one. Our very existence now makes it practically certain it’ll never happen. It doesn’t give the reason for it though.

I actually think this is more productive than the Doomsday Argument, but it’s also flawed. Suppose you consider the much greater probability of being born. The chances of that for each person are lower than one in six hundred thousand million, assuming three hundred ovulations per lifetime and 200 million sperm per ejaculate. This also assumes that our identity depends on genes, which I strongly disagree with, but it’s an interesting thought with substantial basis in reality. It’s still a tiny probability, but even so, every one of us does exist. That probability, incidentally, could perhaps be multiplied by the number of generations since the point at which a single allele could be definitively traced to an individual, which is actually only around sixteen, or by the number of generations since the start of sexual reproduction, although since fish, for example, don’t ovulate single eggs but produce similar numbers of eggs as they do sperm, the numbers get wild before about four hundred million years back. Nevertheless, here we are.

But suppose the argument works. It seems to have predictive power of some kind, although what exactly it predicts is unclear. It might simply mean that we won’t make a Dyson swarm, that distances between stars are too large or even that there isn’t enough phosphorus. It’s also closely coupled to the Fermi Paradox, because whatever stops that from happening may also stop other cultures from doing the same, which is why there are no aliens in contact with us, so maybe we’re about to find out why that is. I personally think it means that something will, or is, happening which will prevent that future from unfolding. It could be something positive. Maybe we will achieve a degree of enlightenment which leads us to stay on our planet and make it an earthly paradise which nobody will want to leave. Or, maybe we’ll just bomb ourselves to bits or die in the ocean acidification scenario, or whatever. Just thinking of this in the wider “where are all the aliens?” setting, it’s also possible that the Great Filter only applies to us because there are no intelligent aliens. Just to spell it out, the Great Filter is the idea that an event takes place everywhere life might be expected to develop and prevents it from getting to the point where intelligent representatives start visiting other star systems. It could be that Earth-like planets are rare, phosphorus is too scarce and vital for life of any kind to develop, there aren’t enough mass extinctions to stimulate evolution, there are usually too many of those for intelligent life to evolve, that intelligent life is just unlikely, that intelligent life is common but tends to develop at the bottom of the ocean, that it’s common but really bad at maths, those all being the past Great Filters, and in the future that AI takes over, we wipe ourselves out through war, pandemics put paid to us, we get too engrossed in online activities to bother and that space exploration is a flash in the pan. There are plenty of others. If there are no spacefarers because there’s no life elsewhere, many of those still apply to us.

Ultimately, we only have the brute fact that we’re intelligent tool using entities which have not colonised the Galaxy. It’s difficult to draw conclusions from that. Lack of information also tend to stimulate speculation too much. Venus is a good example. At some point, astronomers realised that the reason Venus looks so bright is that it’s covered in clouds. They couldn’t see any surface features. Because the only clouds they knew about back then were the ones here on Earth, they drew the erroneous conclusion that Venerean clouds were also made of water vapour, and in fact this is a parsimonious decision because it doesn’t posit that they are made of anything else in the absence of information. From that, they further concluded that Venus must be warm (fair enough, it being near the Sun) and humid, perhaps being covered in swamps, rainforests or just a global water or carbonic acid (fizzy water) ocean. Since at the time it was thought that the planets further from the Sun were older, some scientists also wondered if it was home to dinosaur-like creatures. All this, as Carl Sagan observed by the way, from the fact that you can’t see any surface features through a telescope. Lack of knowledge begets dinosaurs.

We don’t actually know we’re not doing something similar from this lack of knowledge but it’s hard to restrain oneself from trying to fill in the gaps. I want, though, to start from the position that it does seem to be a good argument that this will never happen, for whatever reason. I do think it’d be good if it did, because for example the overview effect influencing a lot of people would make the world a better place. The overview effect is the influence seeing Earth from space has on astronauts, where they begin to see humanity as one and the planet as a precious and delicate place worth preserving. It’s been described as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus”. When people have spent some time in space, they come back changed, usually positively so, and actually settling in space, I think, would have a lot of other positive results including those which would promote radical left wing and Green political activism here on Earth, which is why I’m so focussed on it. All that said, it doesn’t follow that it would be a good thing in the end and staying here on Earth and turning our back on all that is seen by many people as a good thing. There’s a pretty good case for this too, as the sums of money and resources spent on space while there are starving people down here. . . well, you know the argument. There’s a famous poster by the artist Kelly Freas from the early 1970s which comes across as being finely balanced in this respect:

Presumed to be copyright NASA and therefore in the public domain but will be removed on request

The motivation behind this picture is to encourage support for the Apollo space program and more widely the space program in general, but I think to a 21st century viewer it comes across as emphasising the problems here and makes the Saturn V seem like a wasteful attempt to escape this and distract the world, along the lines of Gil Scott Heron’s ‘Whitey’s On The Moon’. In other words, the simple possibility that astronauts’ days are numbered can be regarded as a neutral fact rather than utopian or appalling. This still appears to be able to predict the future.

A while ago, I raised questions about the Artemis program. If it’s to be conjectured that a probable result of the return of humans to the lunar surface is a large number of people living in space, which then increases until it outnumbers the population ever having lived on Earth, the probabilistic argument I offered above predicts that that’s unlikely to happen. It could still happen if the number of people in space always stays very small or even if it’s relatively large but short-lived. Something will have to stop this from happening unless it’s along the lines of a pointless publicity stunt. Paradoxically, Elon Musk seems to think that it’s vital for humans to settle on other planets for the sake of the long term survival of the species, and that may well be true but he seems to be very good at preventing that from happening due to incompetence and overreaching himself, plus the mere fact that he’s close to being a (long scale) billionaire (he’s only a billionaire using the American system). To be highly specific, this argument in the current period seems to predict that Artemis will fail. Weirdly, this appears to be a form of retroactive causation — the cause follows the effect. Because one can have a high degree of confidence that there will be no significant human space program in the future, one can conclude that Artemis will fail. It’s as if the failure is caused by the way things are in the future rather than the other way round.

This of course has a Zizian flavour, and more broadly Roko’s Basilisk (don’t look it up – it’s almost certainly wrong but in case it’s right, it’s better not to know what it is). Both of these seem to be examples of the future influencing the past, and that makes it appear to be possible to predict certain aspects of the future. A really obvious one appears to be that time machines which travel back before the first instance of one will never be invented, as if they were we might expect to have witnessed time travellers and we haven’t. There may be some stipulations here, and it’s worthwhile putting in the work to determine exactly what we’re attempting to predict, hence for instance the proviso that they can’t travel back before their first instance. There might be other elements. For instance, it might be that time travel backwards is possible but it kills the time traveller, erases them from ever having come into existence or that it makes them undetectable. We would have to be precise about what we know, but once we’ve reached that precision, we basically have a way of predicting certain facts about the future on our hands and also revealing a weird reverse causality phenomenon. It’s pretty revolutionary in itself that effect can precede cause in some situations.

Something rather similar can be done regarding the present moment and the past. Our existence guarantees that we live in a Universe which is not entirely hostile to intelligent tool using entities, which in our case arose through the appearance and evolution of biochemical life. We also know that Earth formed, is currently habitable, and that there was no time between the appearance of life here and today when it was completely wiped out. However, one thing we don’t know is how improbable it is that we’ve come into existence. Just because we’ve lived on a planet which has been hit by a few comets and asteroids without killing all life on it or been sterilised by a gamma ray burst doesn’t mean that it’s unlikely, because our existence today is a given. That could happen tomorrow for all we know, and there may be nothing keeping the future like the past at all. We just don’t know how precarious our situation is.

I want to talk about something similar now and I don’t quite know how to link it but I’m convinced it’s similar. The past being as it has been in certain ways is assured by “survivorship bias”: we have no option currently but to live in circumstances where we’re still here and where we came into existence. Survivorship bias is a logical error. One example of it is successful guesses made of the psychic test cards with different shapes on them, where a researcher with a large number of subjects might select a subject she thinks is psychic because they’ve guessed correctly each time. Suppose there are 1024 subjects being asked to guess a sequence of cards with one of four symbols on each. Given the null hypothesis, statistically, 256 of them will guess correctly the first time, 64 the second and so on until after five guesses, one person will have done so every time. However, suppose further that there are 1024 of these studies going on in universities all over the world. In this situation, there will be variation in the number of successful guessers and in some of them there will be “super-guessers”, meaning that there can statistically be expected to be one person in the whole group who guesses correctly ten times in a row. Moreover, there’s a twenty-five percent chance that someone will do it eleven times, a chance of one in sixteen that one will do it twelve times and so on, and once it reaches below one in twenty, that reaches the arbitrarily chosen threshold for responsibility and a researcher can publish her result suggesting the statistical significance of guessing in at least one subject thirteen times in a row, and there’s then a danger of that paper receiving all the attention while the papers showing nothing remarkable remain unpublished. This is supposed to be avoided because it distorts the results. Negative findings are as important, if not more so, than positive ones. This is potentially an aspect of academic research which is distorted by a need to be perceived as doing something notable, because it means negative results are buried.

Survivorship bias may influence our perception of how typical our history and planet, and possibly even our universe, are. We’re here, so it follows, for example, that Earth hasn’t recently been hit by a large asteroid and that Covid didn’t wipe us all out – it wasn’t actually that kind of virus anyway, although it could’ve been a lot worse. The fact that the former didn’t happen dictates that the asteroids mainly orbit in a belt far from our orbit rather than us being situated in the middle of an asteroid belt, but it may also be that that kind of solar system is short-lived or rare anyway. We may seem to have lived charmed lives in a sense, and this is where things could be extended into the future.

Quantum immortality is a concept whose scientific respectability has never been clear to me. The idea is that as the timelines branch (I actually don’t think they do branch as such, but that’s not something I want to go into just now), we inevitably end up in the ones where we continue to be conscious. For instance, when I was eight, I rushed out of my primary school and was almost hit by a car, but survived of course. There are, depending on how firm determinism is, other timelines where I was fatally injured, but I’m obviously not in any of those, at least in the current year. In fact I couldn’t be, just given the simple fact that I’m still here typing this. The extension of this thought is that in fact, none of us ever die, and in fact our consciousnesses never end, not just subjectively but in terms of continuing to survive as observed by others. Every time a potentially consciousness-terminating event occurs, we take the road where our consciousness continues. Note that I’m talking about the permanent cessation of consciousness here, since we’re clearly temporarily unconscious on a regular basis during dreamless sleep. Hence the idea is that subjectively each of us will never die. A way of linking it to quantum ideas more clearly is to imagine a machine gun which works like the Schrödingers Cat thought experiment, except that the radioactive particle is replaced by a radioactive sample whose decay gives the firing of each bullet a 50% chance of happening, one bullet per second. The subject sits in front of the gun, aimed at their head. Subjectively, the gun will never fire because there will then be no observer to be aware of the bullets not firing, and of course the death of the observer would mean there is no such observer. This is rather sloppily put together but I hope you get my point. After five minutes the gun has potentially fired up to three hundred times and the probability of it not having fired is equivalent to one against a number more than three hundred thousand times greater than the number of atoms in the observable Universe, so it can be almost guaranteed that no-one else not in the firing line will observe the victim still alive at the end of the five minute period, but for the “victim” the situation is one hundred percent safe. Of course, somewhere out there in the Multiverse there is someone who has the reputation of being fantastically fortunate. Other people exist.

Extending this to every event while keeping the quantum component, it’s easy to imagine that each timeline begins with a quantum event which ends up determining the whole future in that timeline until it’s observed, and since it has to keep being observed, there has to be at least one immortal being in each. This means that in the majority of universes, which appear often to be merely composed of hydrogen rather sparsely distributed throughout space, there are no observers and therefore they actually don’t exist, although this would be countered by either panpsychism or the existence of an omniscient deity. I am of course panpsychist myself. A more conventional way of understanding it is that you are immortal in any timeline you actually experience. The bullet misses you, the car crash isn’t fatal, you recover from the infection and your cancer goes into remission.

However, this is not a recipe for ceasing to worry about the future. If you’ve read ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, you’ll know about the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg, who are born with a red dot above their left eyebrows which changes colour until it’s black. Swift obviously did a better job than I’m about to, so you can read his own words on them here. It’s in Chapter Ten. It won’t surprise you to learn their immortality is not a blessing but a curse. The condition’s not hereditary and a baby of this kind is only born every few years in the whole country. Lemuel imagines Struldbrugs to be mentally liberated from the prospect of death and able to become extremely wise, passing on their wisdom to the younger generations as a positive jewel to the land. However, what they actually do is serve as a dreadful warning to the populace which makes them feel relieved that they’re mortal, as their presence is a constant reminder of old age. They have, as the phrase has it, years in their lives but no life in their years, because they continue to age despite being immortal. Just as the old in our society tend to be world-weary, think they know more than they do and have contempt for the young (don’t shoot the messenger – this is Swift talking here, not me), they have all the more vices owing to their knowledge that they’ll never die. They’re ” not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection”, and they don’t care about any of their descendants beyond their grandchildren. They’re mainly envious and frustrated, and basically wish they were dead the whole time, lamenting at funerals because they know they’ll never have that release, and past the age of eighty, if they’re married to each other the state mercifully dissolves their union out of compassion, because otherwise their marriage will become a living hell out of being totally sick of each other. They’re also declared dead at eighty in order that their heirs can inherit and although they are either allowed to continue on a pittance from their own estate or receive welfare, they can’t own property or even rent it. Any diseases of old age continue, though they don’t get worse, and due to changes in language, after about two hundred years they cease to be able to hold any conversations with people outside their generation, who in any case are very few, and they also have dementia.

Swift wasn’t the only person to make this observation, although this is of course typical of him. There’s also an ancient Greek myth about Τιθωνός, lover of Eos, who scooped up a handful of sand and was granted to live as many years as there were grains in his hands, but forgot to ask for eternal youth and ended up walled up in a room insane until he was mercifully turned into a cicada. There’s also an Asimov story, ‘The Last Trump’, where the dead and the living are given eternal life and youth and initially suppose they’re in paradise but soon realise that they’re damned and that eternal life will become unbearably boring. They’re then reprieved on a technicality when an angel points out that the date of resurrection is different in different calendars, so it can’t have been a proper doomsday.

For this is what quantum immortality is. You don’t die, and you remain conscious, but you also deteriorate without end so your life becomes unbearable. It’s also entirely compatible with dementia to some extent. You don’t need a good memory, only to be able to sense things in one way or another, perhaps with the last remaining cone cell in one retina. Perhaps you occasionally notice a red dot and then forget about it immediately. It isn’t good, really. In fact it wouldn’t even be good if you retained all your faculties because your life would be poisoned by boredom and over-familiarity.

This raises a few questions. One is that of what ageing actually is. In a sense, not all organisms do actually age or die of old age. There’s a species of petrel, a bird, which is effectively immortal, and a jellyfish who responds to injury by regressing to infancy and beginning to mature again. However, these are not in fact immortal. Both, for example, would die in a fire or if eaten by a predator, and this raises the question of what ageing actually is. Is it the accumulation of internal insults and health problems which eventually proves fatal? If so, it’s effectively the same as accidental death – it’s just that the accidents are things like oxidative stress, cardiovascular deterioration or cancer. Or, do we have an allotted span such that we die after a certain number of years determined by an internal clock? This clearly does affect many species which die immediately after reproducing, which is just as well because otherwise they would use up the resources needed by their children, who would then starve, or end up eating their children shortly after hatching. Some might say that this is what one current generation of humans in positions of wealth and power is actually doing right now. We hang around for our children and grandchildren, but on the whole we need to die to get out of the way for future generations.

Presumably with quantum immortality, the former scenario is assumed to be in play. We don’t have an inherent life expectancy, but simply accumulate injuries until they become fatal, but in each subjective case those injuries never end up killing us. Obviously we’re not surrounded by immortals, so each of us has their own private world in this scenario, dying in an increasing number of timelines but persisting in a dwindling number of them, which, however, never reaches zero. One major problem with this is that it seems to be solipsistic, as all the “people” around you are still mortal and are just shadows with no consciousness. You’re in your own world. This may, however, have a form of retrocausality too. For instance, two ways of living longer are to be lucky with your genes and to inherit or adopt health-promoting attitudes from your family or community, meaning that you are, for example, more likely to have particularly healthy and long-lived relatives in your personal timeline. This doesn’t rule out straightforwardly accidental death, but it does mean you’re likely to have selected long-lived relatives. Therefore, if you believe in quantum immortality it would often be reasonable to conclude that your relatives, while not immortal, might end up living a particularly long time or be especially healthy in old age. It might even go further than that, with the possibility of living a relatively charmed life in a stable political environment, free from local wars and famines for example, or with a particularly low rate of serious crime.

This raises an ethical problem. It could make you complacent. You’d know that everyone else was subjectively immortal and also that you’ll never encounter potentially fatal dangers. Therefore you might well be less motivated to do good to others or even particularly bother to look after yourself. In the initial example, you could just wander in front of the quantum machine gun secure in the knowledge that you’ll be unharmed despite the increasingly vast odds against that being so. But you and others still wouldn’t have life in your years, and that would be worth preserving. It’s a heady prospect, but probably not a good one because you might stop caring about those affected by the troubles and hardships of the world, although suffering would still exist, more in fact than it does if we’re mortal.

Hugh Everett was a prominent proponent of this idea, although I have to say it’s a fairly obvious one so I doubt he was the first. He was the first well-known theorist of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, which is the apparently branching paths (in fact they’d probably always have existed but be indiscernible) idea of innumerable parallel universes forking at each probabilistic event. He believed he would never die because of this. From our perspective, he is in fact dead, although this may not have any bearing on whether he’s immortal as if he was right, he would be “elsewhere”: we just happen to live in one of the majority of universes where he is in fact deceased. He died suddenly of a heart attack on 19th June 1982 at the age of fifty-one, having smoked sixty a day, consumed excessive alcohol and being grossly obese, never exercised and never went to the doctor. His son was very angry with him after his death that he never took care of himself, although he also observed that he just did what he wanted without interference and then just died without withholding any pleasures from himself. He also wanted to be cremated and have his ashes thrown out with the rubbish, something his widow wasn’t keen on for a few years after his death but eventually complied with. Incidentally, if you know the band The Eels, that’s the son who commented thus and there’s an album inspired by his death. Of course, this album doesn’t really exist because Hugh Everett is immortal! It seems to me that this kind of self-neglect may have resulted precisely from his belief in quantum immortality – there’s simply no point in looking after your health in his view.

I’m not sure this follows, to be honest. I think that apart from anything else you probably would want to be healthy for as long as possible in order to enjoy life, and also to spare the feelings of people close to you. Also, what if you’re wrong? I don’t think many people who have recently touched grass, as the phrase has it, would willingly step in front of that machine gun. Certain persons, of course, haven’t done that recently.

The Doomsday Argument and Quantum Immortality feel like they’re from the same stable, so it’s worthwhile working out what they have in common. They both start from a kind of Descartes-like position of noting that one is currently conscious and attempting to draw conclusions from that bare fact, though unlike Descartes they neither raise the possibility that the physical world doesn’t exist nor that God does, which gives them greater traction on the consensus view of reality and the Universe. Both constrain the Universe through the fact that we’re observing it, like the anthropic principle that the Universe must have certain physical constants and laws to produce conscious beings. Both involve vast numbers of items. In the Doomsday Argument, this is everyone who has or will ever live, and in Quantum Immortality it’s the number of possible worlds in which one has existed or currently exists. In fact I don’t believe the many worlds are strictly separate but that’s an argument for another time. Oddly though, they draw opposite conclusions from their reasoning. The Doomsday Argument concludes we’re all going to die but Quantum Immortality decides each of us is individually, though perhaps unhealthily, immortal, and that our consciousness will never permanently end. Neither of them are amenable to observational testing. The former can’t be observed by human scientists because it says there won’t be any, and the latter can only be observed by all the lonely people, but individually.

Another significant concept linked to both of these is Roko’s Basilisk, which we cannot talk about. A fourth one is the Simulation Argument. This is an argument which has been popular with Elon Musk but doesn’t seem to work. This is that we are much more likely to be living in a simulation than the real world because any civilisation which existed for long enough and became advanced in computing will eventually decide to simulate the world. Those simulated worlds will then simulate other worlds when their own simulations are sophisticated enough to do so, and so forth. This would mean that of all instances of apparently real worlds, almost all are simulated. This argument compared to the others seems almost trivially easy to refute. Firstly, taking it at face value this means a cascading tree of simulations, each generation more numerous than the last and also more simplistic and therefore less realistic due to lack of computing power, so the fact that the universe is more complex than it might be means we aren’t in the most numerous types of simulation, so why would we be in a simulation at all? Secondly, again taking it at face value, the three-body problem and beyond can in most cases eat up all available computing resources. I actually don’t think this argument works because in the non-special cases a pseudorandom number generator could just be used to prevent this from happening and the chances are nobody would be any the wiser, since the movements of the large number of bodies is in fact unpredictable. I suppose this could be tested by looking at one’s own simulations of three-body problems using various pseudorandom generator algorithms or for that matter true randomness. But beyond all this, the really big assumption seems to be that any civilisation would inevitably end up bothering to simulate the world in the first place. As I’ve said before, apart from anything else they might just be really bad at maths, and with anything else maybe they’ve got more important things to do.

All of these seem to have a self-centred element to them. There’s also an arrogance to them, in that they boldly assert that the person proposing or learning of them has taken everything into consideration and nothing can assail the argument. The Simulation Argument is obviously full of holes, but the holes are the blind spots of a probably autistic sociopath in that the assumption is that just because one person or a group of people working in a particular field would try to do this, thereby incidentally becoming a God to the sims, everyone else would, regardless of their personality or neurodiversity. Quantum Immortality and the Simulation Argument both seem to leave us with “non-player characters”, i.e. zombie shells of people who aren’t really conscious and don’t really matter, so that’s sociopathy and lack of empathy again. They seem to provide an excuse to ignore people’s needs. The Doomsday Argument assumes that humans all contemplate the end of the world or the human race and are all that matters, rather than it being the thought of the end of the world which is significant. There needs to be a cut-off point or certainty that we are the only conscious beings in the Universe for it to work.

In the end, although these arguments are interesting I think they really say more about the people who think of them than the actual world they’re supposed to be applied to. I do think that something will prevent the Artemis Project from succeeding, and that is because of the future galactic civilisation thing, but there could be really positive reasons why it won’t. As for the others, well, they all have a kind of solipsistic and self-centred air to them which it doesn’t seem healthy to entertain. But who knows? Maybe there are other kinds of argument of this nature which do have real predictive power, and if there are that would be fascinating and also useful.

Levinas, Buber and the Ethics of the Face

There’s a time-worn philosophical problem in certain circles which has a recent iteration through the medium of video games.  Although they have changed considerably since, Space Invaders illustrates this.  Computer game protagonists are either player characters, PCs, ornon-player characters, NPCs.  In Space Invaders, the PC is the base shooty thing you move about at the bottom of the screen.  NPCs are the aliens and flying saucers.  You can’t play Space Invaders as one of those – they’re NPCs.

Nowadays, games are much more convincing and imagination has become less important, so gamers have more immersive experiences in 3-D simulations, but there are still PCs and NPCs.  There are still characters whom one can play as and characters one cannot play as.

Some people extend that to meatspace.  There are people who roleplay as NPCs, for example.  Some people also now truly believe there are NPCs in the physical world, or at least in the simulation which some of them hold reality to be. That is, there are people who see themselves as real and another set of figures around them as not having minds or consciousness at all.  Not a very healthy development, but it has significant implications.  However, there is nothing new under the Sun, and this is just today’s solipsism.  In analytical philosophy, this is the problem of other minds: since we only have access to our own consciousness, for all we know everyone else we meet could be a robot or a zombie with no inner life at all.

I’ll get back to that, because for now I want to mention Edwina Currie.  I was once at a protest against Edwina Currie in the mid-’80s, and it was like the Five Minutes Hate.  I was at the front of the crowd, and she stepped out of her car right in front of me.  This immediate face-to-face meeting completely disarmed me as I realised that, far from a hate figure, she was a fellow human being with her own subjectivity and consciousness.  Right then, I couldn’t conceive of her any other way.

Sartre might have sympathised with the notion of an NPC.  He was acutely aware of how some people act out a particular role rather too strongly, but I want to dwell not on that right now but on his take on the problem of other minds.  Sartre saw the very idea that the problem could be taken seriously as scandalous and symptomatic of what was wrong with Western philosophy.  Showing how this was a pseudo-problem, he imagined the following scenario, referred to as ‘The Look’.   Suppose you’re at the end of a long corridor spying on someone in a room through a keyhole  when you hear footsteps behind you, making you ashamed or guilty, and self-conscious.  None of that could happen without you assuming other minds.  The apparent issue of their existence or otherwise is a kind of abstract, cold-blooded issue which Sartre sees as irrelevant to properly engaged philosophy.

This can be used to introduce the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, a French-Lithuanian Jewish philosopher.  Levinas is significant and worth reading for all sorts of reasons, not least his views on the nature of Jewish thought separate from its involvement with Hellenisation which might be helpful for Bible study, but for now I just want to consider his ethics of the face, and ethics as first philosophy.

Modify Sartre’s Look slightly.  Imagine you are driving along a deserted road in a remote area and you come across someone whose car has broken down at the side of the road.  That meeting makes an original demand on you before you consider anything else about the situation:  this person needs help, and you can provide it.  In fact, if you can, you should provide it.  These are the “ethics of the face”.  The face-to-face encounter makes an immediate ethical demand, and everything else can be built from that. Clear parallels can also be drawn with the Good Samaritan.

English is unusual in having only one word for “you”.  We rarely contrast “you” and “thou”.  When I chose my name, this was partly an attempt to overcome this, because if there are formal and informal versions of names, it gives one a clue as to the nature of one’s relationship, but it doesn’t work very well because the T-V distinction is a little different.  Even German speakers can be unsure, doing things like using the plural familiar form when they only know one member of a couple well.  There and in Hungary, they have a ceremony for thouing.

For Buber, pronouns occur in pairs:  I-It and I-Thou.  Each implies the existence of the other member of the pair.  Sie, and for that matter “a senhora” and “Usted”, are third person, and therefore correspond to I-It.  “It” here stands in for the other singular third person pronouns.  God is the eternal “Thou” and we are also each “thou” to God. Being omniscient, God knows us intimately. God asks for a face-to-face relationship, and demands we have face-to-face relationships with each other.  We must be “I-Thou”, although we must begin from “I-It” in order to reach “I-Thou”.

Sacred argument:  The Talmud comprises a series of nested commentaries on each page centred on the oral Torah, also known as the Mishnah, consisting of fewer than a hundred words per page.  Around this are Rashi’s commentary, around twice as long, the Gemara, a record of intricate debates on matters arising, written around the time of the Fall of Rome, and the Tofasot, Mediaeval European attempts to resolve conflicts between the other commentaries.  The Mishnah is about a tenth of the content.  The discussion is where the action is.  It’s the point of the whole activity and when the Talmud is studied, further discussion occurs around all of these.  There is a seven year daily cycle of Talmudic teaching which is considered inadequate by many Jews.

The I cannot exist without the Other.  This is true in practical terms:  we had to learn to speak and take care of ourselves, serve the community and so forth from others, often our parents.  Babies and children are of course vulnerable and dependent, although the point at which they begin to contribute varies according to culture and family ethos.

There must be sacred argument: authentic presentation and mutual respect with proper dialogue and without over-simplification.  In fact, it could be pursued by trying to construct and strengthen one’s opponent’s position and possibly by swapping positions, arguing for the opposite to your own opinion.  Loving and sacred argument.

The issue of first philosophy:

Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ is an attempt at epistemology as first philosophy.  A metaphysical foundation might be another option, where the likes of the nature of reality might be considered to be its basis.  Levinas took a different view, suggesting that philosophy should be based on ethics, and this is in fact also my position although I don’t know how similar it is as I might be reading my own views into his.

It’s very easy to build a self-serving system if you aren’t careful.  There’s a myth that male scholastic philosophers claimed women had no souls whereas men had.  This is a misrepresentation of what was actually said.  The Council of Macon in 585, despite claims to the contrary, did not claim that women had no souls.  This would have made no sense given the acceptance of, for example, martyrdom, female saints and of course Mary the mother of Christ.  Even so, it is very often the case that self-serving claims are made, and these are set into the presumed structure of reality.  I would posit such claims can dominate what we imagine are neutral, innocent world views.

To illustrate this, I want to talk about Jean Baudrillard.  who claimed that the 1991 Gulf War would not take place because it was sufficient that the media hype and representation of the imminent conflict occur and could replace any purported “reality” of the situation.  Then, of course, the Gulf War happened, but Baudrillard said it didn’t happen for the same reasons.  The reality of the war, whatever your view of the rights and wrongs of the situation politically, is that people suffered and died in countless numbers.  I would say that he’s wrong because his assertion is unethical, which also means the past is real.  You could say the world was created just now or the past is less real than the present.  Responding to these ideas is a possible philosophical exercise, but more importantly, they would allow, for example, Holocaust denial.  Hence it’s more important that it’s unethical to make such claims.

But there’s a problem.  If you are in a position of privilege, it may be salutary and magnanimous to examine what assumptions you might be making about the world.  However, how do you know you’re in that position?  Also, if you’re not, and you make concessions to others on the strength of assuming that you are, you could end up distorting your view of reality just as much as someone in that privileged position might without examining their assumptions.

Finally, I want to mention politics.  This is an ethical position.  Is it feasible to extend this into a political position which in some way transcends the likes of the left-right division?  I encountered Edwina Currie and was unable to demonise her.  What would the world look like if nobody demonised anyone?  What does this look like in view of the imperfection of the world and our tendency to sin?

“What Is The Universe Expanding Into?”

Steve, I wrote this with you in mind.

Yahoo Answers is, as I mentioned previously, about to die, although it’s a death by a thousand cuts. In the past I’ve used this blog to put more thoroughly thought-out answers to frequently-asked questions on the site, so I’ve probably addressed this before, but right now I have a different and perhaps less dogmatic take on this question than I usually adopt. Before I go on, I should probably insert the standard diagram people put in nowadays when talking about the Big Bang:

Strictly speaking, this diagram is inaccurate because it shows a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional model of a four-dimensional set of circumstances. Take the barred spiral galaxy at top right. If the X-axis is supposed to be time, we should be concluding that the left hand arm of that galaxy happens first, then the end of the right hand arm and the nucleus, and finally the middle of the right hand arm. Also, space is two-dimensional in this picture when for most practical large-scale purposes it really has three dimensions. In other words, this isn’t so much a diagram as an illustration intended to communicate the history of the Universe since the Big Bang. You can’t take it too seriously. It has an artistic, creative aspect.

One possibly inaccurate, because it isn’t really intended to be that accurate, feature of this diagram is the way it shows space. It’s a black rectangle into which the Universe is expanding. There is an outside to this Universe, and at that point you’d be forgiven for asking, if the Universe is everything, what’s the blackness outside it supposed to be? Why is that not also the Universe? The Jains, of all people, had an answer to this. They believed that the Universe as we know it was suffused with a substance which made movement possible, but was surrounded by infinite space from which this was absent. Nowadays, maybe we could do something similar with the idea of dark energy, the apparent force which causes the Universe’s expansion to accelerate. The above picture has a literal “bell end”. It flares out rather than widening steadily or perhaps slowing down from left to right. This is the influence of dark energy, as it represents accelerating expansion. I suppose it’s possible to think of the Universe as infinite space with at least one region where dark energy is active. However, this is neither how I think of it nor, as far as I know, the way scientists do.

Before I go on, I want to make a point about the nature of science at this scale. In certain circumstances, rational thought is “bigger” than science. Maths is one example of that. There’s plenty of pure mathematics which seems to have no practical application and even applied maths doesn’t need to be tested by observation if it’s proper pure maths. For instance, it’s a mathematical truth that any roughly spherical planet covered by an atmosphere must have at least two points on its surface where there’s no wind at any moment, although these points may move. However, our oceans needn’t have any points where there’s no current because there’s land on this planet. Likewise, a doughnut-shaped planet needn’t have any such locations, nor need any planet with at least two mountains high enough to stick up into the stratosphere. There’s no need to observe any planets to prove this because it’s a mathematical fact. I’m not entirely sure about this, but I suspect that cosmology may also have aspects of this: it may not be possible to approach the nature of the Universe entirely scientifically because there’s by definition only one example of the Universe and it can’t be compared to others. This is a particular view of the nature of the Universe which either includes the Multiverse as part of the Universe or in some way demonstrates that this Universe is all there is. There are a number of conceivable ways in which there could be other universes, but some of the arguments for it not only rely on logic and maths but also require that they cannot be observed even in principle. For this reason, without disrespecting the field, there’s a way in which cosmology cannot be scientific. James Muirden once said:

The Universe is a dangerous place – a sort of abstract wilderness embracing the worlds of physics, astronomy, metaphysics, biology and theology. These all subscribe to the super-world of cosmology, to which students of these various sciences can contribute. Strictly speaking there is no such person as a ‘cosmologist,’ for the simple reason that nobody can be physicist, astronomer, metaphysicist, biologist and theologian at the same time.

James Muriden, ‘The Handbook Of Astronomy’ 1964.

It isn’t clear though whether something which is outside the realm of science will always remain there, and in this view, it may be that there’s not in principle something imponderable about cosmology if the mind pondering it is sufficiently powerful, but simply that the span of disciplines is too broad for anyone to grasp. There certainly seem to be cosmologists nowadays, but maybe they’re cosmologians.

Although I don’t want to dwell on that, I do want to point out that it isn’t immediately obvious what space and time are. The nature of space in particular seems to depend on observation. It’s possible to doubt the existence of space but not the passage of time, since as far as we know we are disembodied viewpoints imagining the world but we can only do that imagining if time passes. This is in spite of the fact that spacetime is unified, so it isn’t clear how we’re immediately confronted with time but not space. Maybe there are more advanced minds in the Universe who experience both with the same immediacy. But there are, in any case, at least two different ways of thinking of space and this is what I usually based my answer on.

Space can be thought of as a thing or a relationship. That is, it could be understood as a container, as it were, in which objects are located, but also an object in itself. The Universe clearly is an object, but that doesn’t mean it’s made of space and studded with galaxies like spotted dick. There is a famous “balloon” analogy applied to space, which views the galaxies as spots on the surface which move apart from each other as the balloon inflates. This makes it sound like there’s a hyperspace into which the Universe is expanding, but this may not be the case.

In maths and physics, the concept of space is often used to make arcane ideas simpler. For instance, up, down, top and bottom quarks seem to refer to direction and location, but of course they don’t. They’re just called that to indicate that they are related to each other more closely than they are to other quarks. Likewise, we might talk about the temperature rising and falling, but that doesn’t mean there’s a spatial dimension called temperature. This can even be taken into the realm of space itself. We impose the idea of several dimensions on the idea of direction and temporal precedence, but there are reasons to suppose that this is mere convenience.

Suppose space is an actual thing. What would happen if there was a tear in it? It would surely mean that one could go into that tear, wouldn’t it? But how could that happen if there was no space there, since it’s torn? Does it mean anything to say that you can take a one metre sphere out of space? What happens when you move “into” it? How would it be different from a point? This suggests that there’s a flaw in thinking of space as the fabric of the Universe.

Consequently, space can be thought of as a combination of direction and location. Location can be described, more or less, using three numbers, although since there are higher dimensions this doesn’t work perfectly. It is, however, true, that relative to one’s current position a list of numbers is sufficient to describe where something else is. This tells you how far away something else is and in what direction. However, there is no absolute position. The Universe has no centre, or its centre is everywhere. This would also be true if space is infinite but it isn’t. However, as I’ve just said, space cannot have an outside, so how can this be?

The answer is that there is a maximum distance between two points, after which the direction between them reverses. This follows from the fact that the parallel postulate is incorrect: parallel lines do in fact meet at an enormous distance in most circumstances, and nearer than that in special circumstances to do with extremely high gravity. These are just properties of that group of qualities we refer to as space or spacetime, in a similar sense to addition working the same way either way round and subtraction not. When it’s said that space is expanding, all that means is that the maximum possible distance between two locations is increasing. That doesn’t imply that any actual object is expanding. A further clue to this being so is that although it’s impossible to travel faster than light, sufficiently distant objects do recede from each other at superluminal speeds. This would be impossible if space was an object unless the mass of such an object could only be expressed by a number on the complex number plane, but the distance between nearby locations increases at less than the speed of light, at a specific distance at the speed of light and at a greater distance greater than the speed of light. This is impossible for a single object because it would have to have real mass in small quantities, zero mass at the volume of the observable Universe and imaginary mass at greater than that volume. I have to say that’s an interesting set of properties and I’m not sure if it really is impossible.

The point is that in this view the Universe has no outside or, in terms of hyperspace, no interior. It clearly does have a three-dimensional interior, but not an interior in terms of a larger set of large dimensions. This account is slightly complicated by the fact that as well as time there are tiny further dimensions, but it usually makes more sense to measure the length of a pencil line than its area.

That’s an expanded version of my usual answer to the question “what is the Universe expanding into?” but it could be wrong. The reason it might be wrong is fascinating, and therefore probably not valid, but here it is anyway: ‘Brane Theory.

You might think at first that Brane Theory is just “Brain Theory” spelt wrong. That would be funny, but sadly it’s not so. Brane Theory is an extension of string theory and although I’m not afraid of maths, I can’t understand it fully. I’ve already mentioned the issue of extra dimensions which are, however, tiny. Brane theory uses this idea to explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces, if indeed it is a force. It isn’t immediately clear to observation, but there seem to be three major forces in the Universe plus gravity: electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. Of these, electromagnetism is obvious except that it may not be realised that light is part of electromagnetism. The strong force prevents atoms other than hydrogen from exploding as soon as they form, since their nuclei are made up of positively charged particles which repel each other. The weak force is a bit more obscure, and might be better described as the weak interaction because it doesn’t involve attraction or repulsion. It amounts to a tiny force field which occurs when radioactive decay involves atoms emitting beta particles, which are fast electrons. When a nucleus releases an electron, because it’s negatively charged and there are no negatively charged particles in the nucleus, a neutron becomes a proton, or the nucleus emits a positron and a proton becomes a neutron. In the former case it means the element moves one place up the periodic table. But nothing is pushing or pulling, which makes it confusing. The strong and weak nuclear forces are very small scale in their range, only operating within atomic nuclei, and for some reason the strong nuclear force is 128 times weaker at double the distance. Electromagnetism is more straightforward, probably because we experience it ourselves directly and obviously in the form of light, current, magnets, compasses, lightning and so on, and it diminishes like gravity, following the inverse square law. That is, for example, a light source emitting light all around it such as the Sun will do so in a sphere and because a sphere twice the size has four times the volume, it will be a quarter as bright from twice as far away. Gravity may not even be a force at all, but the distortion of spacetime by mass, and is anomalously weak. A magnet can pick up a piece of iron against gravity even if the magnet only has a mass of one gramme, yet Earth’s mass is nearly six quintillion (long scale) times the mass of the magnet. That’s ridiculously weak.

Brane theory, at least sometimes, attempts to solve the problem of gravity being as weak as it is by using extra dimensions. Instead of exerting a force in three-dimensional space, gravity may be doing so in hyperspace, which means that instead of weakening due to the geometry of a sphere, it does so due to the geometry of a higher, multidimensional cousin of a sphere, but the other forces are confined to three-dimensional space, in a thin membrane, hence the name “Brane Theory”, which is of course expanding in hyperspace. It’s also theorised that just after the Big Bang, in the part of the above diagram labelled “inflation”, this Universe collided with another one, causing this inflation.

So in other words, perhaps it isn’t a silly question to ask what the Universe is expanding into. This still doesn’t require space to be a thing, but makes the galaxies and stars into a thin, three-dimensional skin on a four-dimensional or multidimensional bubble. The answer is therefore possibly that the Universe is expanding in hyperspace, which is also not a thing but a way of describing distances and directions which need more than three numbers relative to where you are.

A few bits and pieces I want to clear up. This might all be thrown up in the air by the recent discovery of the way muons precess, because that suggests that the standard model of particle physics is wrong. And finally, I may have got this wrong myself. That is, what I just said might turn out to be nothing like what Brane Theory actually is. But note this: it’s maths and I’m not afraid of it. Lots of people are afraid of maths, and think they’re no good at it. I may well also be no good at maths, but I’m not afraid of it. This is a tangential point but very important, and probably has more bearing on everyday life that Calabi-Yau manifolds and stuff have anyway.

Ethics As Foundation

It’s important to bear in mind that certain issues tend to serve as a distraction from working together for the common good, and therefore that certain discussions, dialogues or arguments are not fruitful because they take energy from the main effort to do this. There are two situations in particular which come to mind in this respect. One of them is the gender identity issue. In certain circles, Mumsnet comes to mind, feminist discussion is dominated by this concern at the cost of others, such as period poverty, the importance of female access to toilets in the developing world, rape culture, domestic violence, and basically everything which comes up in Everyday Sexism. I often wonder if that’s almost the point: to prevent action being taken on these issues by focussing on trans stuff. To a lesser extent, the same issue can arise in conversations about atheism, agnosticism, theism and the much more interesting but rarely mentioned misotheism and ignosticism. Therefore, I have only reluctantly decided to address this point here. It is, however, an important point because sometimes there needs to be a united front on certain issues, and while we’re fighting or discussing, we aren’t addressing those and that serves the “Other Side”. There’s also the issue of what constitutes the other side, and whether that’s even the right way of describing things.

Nonetheless, communication is important and I recently got the impression this wasn’t working very well because I wasn’t giving people the context to my views. It’s not easy to do this because they involved a lot of work and thinking and are, like everyone’s, drawn on life experience, and you haven’t lived my life. All of this hardly needs saying, although it probably does need saying that through no fault of my own, I seem to reliably arrive at different conclusions from everyone else, which is probably to do with neurodiversity, but the conclusions I reach, particularly in this case, might illustrate why I’ve previously described myself as being “neurodiverse not otherwise specified”.

Here it is then.

Immanuel Kant once analysed our apprehension of the phenomenal via something he called “categories”. We are initially confronted with a blizzard of impressions he referred to as the Manifold, and in order to conceive of and think of anything at all, we impose structure on them. The thought that a physical object is known is making a judgement about it. The word is not used here in terms of classification but as what can be stated about any object. They include such things as cause and effect, existence, necessity and contingency. Now at some point in the past I noticed a remarkable parallel between Kantian categories and Freudian ego defences such as projection, rationalisation, transference and the like. I am not Freudian but do believe ego defences are valid and can be observed in oneself and others, although not with sufficient rigour to become valid natural kinds. Also, Herbert Marcuse attempted a synthesis of Marxist analysis of society with Freudianism in his work in the 1950s and ’60s. This is the kind of environment in which I think of the world.

A second, much less nebulous factor in my thinking is based on a process which may be practically universal. There is generally something about the characteristics of the thinker in their beliefs which appears to justify their position, which are convenient for that thinker. For example, a meat eater may believe that humans have souls and other species haven’t or a man may believe that women can’t be raped because “the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down”. A White person may believe that Black people are naturally less intelligent than White people. I probably don’t need to give many more examples. We might like to think we’re objective and neutral, but we aren’t, and in the past this has applied to science so there’s no particular reason to suppose that it no longer applies.

Addressing this is difficult, but one way of doing so is a little like the Cartesian method of doubt, which is well-known enough not to need introduction, but it’s still worthwhile to describe it to pursue this analysis. The Cartesian method of doubt is to systematically doubt everything until one is left with what can be known, in the sense of beliefs which cannot be rationally doubted. This left him, in his opinion, with sensory impressions, the laws of logic and mathematics and his own consciousness, although some would reduce that further. He then made what in most circles today looks like a very silly move involving attempting to prove the existence of a benevolent deity via the ontological argument, which I can’t even be bothered to repeat, in order to establish that he would not be deceived and therefore the “external world” exists more or less as it’s perceived. This was not a sensible move, but the method of doubt is sound.

What I chose to do was establish a similar ethical process in order to reach a stage where my motives couldn’t be doubted, and to reconstruct the world in a similar way based on moral considerations rather than logical or rational ones. This applies mostly to the issue of consciousness. It’s impossible to be certain that one lacks ulterior self-serving motives for particular beliefs and in fact it’s very common for people to believe things first and try to find reasons for believing them later. This is of course rationalisation.

One of the most significant features of my world view, following from this, is panpsychism. If one believes that all reality is conscious (and there’s an issue here regarding whether it’s atomic matter, all matter or matter, energy and space), it’s likely to make one a lot more cautious and considerate. If I believed something else, I could be motivated unethically and it could be about selfishness.

What we consider to be rational thought is in fact moulded by emotions, maybe sometimes unconscious ones. I believe this is true to the extent that we are never truly rational and it isn’t even desirable to be so. We just aren’t, we should embrace that and acknowledge it, and when we explore our reasoning we should also explore our feelings, because the two are inextricably entwined and may not even be distinct.

This has a number of consequences. One is that it solves the problem of deriving an “ought” from an “is”. Utilitarians notoriously attempted to establish the principle of utility from the idea that that which was desired was therefore worthy of desire. This is partly due to a shortcoming of the English language, that whereas many others would use a gerund or future participle to derive their word for “desirable” from “desire”, English instead tacks “-able” on the end: capable of being desired as opposed to worthy of being desired. This leaves the whole world of ethics apparently unfounded in naturalistic terms, and is therefore known as the naturalistic fallacy. But what if it’s the other way round? What if, instead of deriving evaluative terms from descriptive ones, descriptive ones derive from evaluative ones? This would explain why you can’t get an “ought” from an “is”. It’s simply the wrong way round.

A couple of other people have come up with something similar. One of them is the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Much of his thought involves the attempt to purify a Jewish approach to things, although his thought needn’t be taken theistically. It isn’t clear to me whether he is in fact theistic, and this is undoubtedly a good thing because it’s better to transcend the distinction between theism and atheism than to focus on it in, as I mentioned above, the interests of solidarity in pursuing social justive. It also crops up in Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship, and the idea that when we relate to each other it’s ideally face to face, i.e. authentic, honest, personal. There should never be a point where something is simply used, and that of course hearkens back to Immanuel Kant’s Kingdom of Ends.

So there you go. This could’ve been more detailed but I think I’ve at least presented my view even if I haven’t justified it. This is generally how I attempt to conceive of the world and relate to it. It justifies, for example, my veganism, anti-racism, anti-sexism and so forth, and at least in psychological terms helps to explain why I relate to certain people the way I do.

And now I’m going to do the census form.

Could Everything Be Alive?

Hylozoism, the idea that everything is alive, may be such an old idea that it isn’t an idea at all. It may also be such an early idea in people’s minds that it may not be an idea at all in our personal life histories. Imagine you come to awareness in a dim, warm, red world like the inside of someone’s mouth, in your mother’s womb. Everything you know is alive. Or is it? Is the amniotic fluid alive? How finely must matter be divided before non-living parts emerge? How much of something has to be dead before the whole thing is dead? Are my bones and teeth alive? What about the water in my stomach? What makes it alive?

There are three related ideas here, but perhaps I’m naming them in spite of them always having been there, or naming the same thing three different ways: hylozoism, pantheism and panpsychism. As I’ve said, hylozoism is everything being alive, pantheism is everything being God, or perhaps each thing being a deity, and panpsychism is everything being conscious. Pantheism is distinct in that it may in fact be a form of atheism, whereas it doesn’t seem like the other two are anything like atheism, although maybe they’re similar to their apparent opposite in their own ways. In that case, hylozoism may be the view that everything is dead and panpsychism that there is no consciousness. But there is consciousness. That’s undeniable. And at least some things are alive.

The word is from two Greek words, `υλη – substance, stuff, and ζωον, which I’ve always understood to mean “animal” rather than “life”, which is βιος as I understand it. Perhaps that’s important. Perhaps the idea is that the world is in motion and wriggling like an earthworm or buzzing and swirling around like a swarm of gnats. The Greeks are known for using this idea. For instance, some of them would’ve argued that a magnet was alive, which is an interesting choice because I tend to use magnets as a metaphor to illustrate panpsychism – correctly arranged matter can attract opposites physically and repel like matter, and needn’t be made of iron to do so, and differently arranged matter can express its consciousness. Giordano Bruno also believed in hylozoism. I say that, but maybe that’s not remarkable because maybe we all start off assuming it, and perceive ourselves as growing out of it.

Cats are keen on crunchy things and rustling noises because their evolutionary imperatives attract them to small animals whose bones they can crunch after they’ve heard them rustling, or perhaps chirping or squeaking. In that sense, maybe the whole world is alive to a cat, but along with that they cannot afford to extend the faculty of empathy towards that world because then they couldn’t survive. As humans, we are not carnivores and we are social animals, so we require empathy. We’re the opposite to predators even though we have preyed upon other animals. Sometimes when we’ve done so, we’ve treated their dead with reverence and honoured their spirits.

Amœbæ are, much simplified, envelopes of phospholipid into and from whom water passes and we apparently decide that once that water is within their bodies, it participates in the lives of those organisms. Yet it’s merely a molecule of a very special substance. There’s a sense in which most of a tree or coral is dead. Both arrangements of matter only have a thin veneer in which living processes continue, in the case of the tree joined by a transportation system of vessels moving their sustenance between the living parts. Yet the whole organism in both cases is alive. As far as we know, Earth is the same. A thin skin of life, the biosphere, surrounds an apparently dead planet. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between the situations. Hence maybe Earth is alive.

This brings me rather delightedly to ‘Blake’s 7’, Series B episode six, ‘Trial’, in which I feel more may be happening than appears. Gan has just been, possibly pointlessly, killed in the previous episode. Having been confronted with death of a crew member, Roj Blake asks Zen to find him an appropriate planet to be passive-aggressive on and go for a walk. It looks like a jungle and he is rather surprised to meet a being on it called Zil who thinks it’s his mother and needs protection. Zil turns out to be one of a race of parasites who live on this entirely living planet, described in the show as a “flea”. Just as an aside, something is definitely going on here. This is William Blake’s painting ‘The Ghost Of A Flea’:

And this is Zil:

It’s a terrible costume and the whole thing is poorly-executed but the idea is there. I don’t think it’s accidental. But in any case, the planet, like others in science fiction such as Lem’s Solaris or Marvel’s Ego, is depicted as alive in that it is infested with parasites and eats or destroys those parasites when things have gone too far. The ground opens up and swallows them, but they also feed off the ground, and ultimately the land is inundated by the saliva ocean to digest Zil and its mates. This is not merely a metaphorically living planet, although the entire story is a metaphor, and the question arises, taking the tale literally, what are the significant differences between this unnamed globe and Earth?

The major difference that comes to mind is that our planet’s biosphere can be thought of as a dog-eat-dog, competitive situation with everyone struggling against everyone else to survive, and a single living organism who does that is not healthy. Autoimmune diseases, for example, involve the body attempting to destroy itself from within because it’s mistaken part of itself for a foreign body or infection, and they’re not part of a healthy state. However, is this really the way the living world is, or are we projecting that onto it because it’s merely the way we tend to live? Also, touching back to ‘Blake’s 7’, Zil is going to get eaten by its planet and that’s not peaceful coexistence. I have an image of Cynthia (“the Moon”) backing away from Earth because she’s got the lurgy we call human beings and has already had a mild infestation back in the early 1970s which she does not wish to re-acquire. Humans are scabies?

Biology defines life as the confluence of seven characteristics: reproduction, growth, sensitivity, respiration (not the same as breathing), excretion, movement and eating. This is an older list which is more to do with what can be observed easily on the macro level. I’m not sure where it comes from but it may be from Aristotle. More recent characteristics lists look more closely and include such things as passing genes on and homoeostasis, but whereas this is more well-informed, I don’t think this is the way to go in this case, at least for now. I actually suspect that there are complex life-like processes elsewhere in the Universe which we would count as alive on cursory examination which in fact lack one or more of these criteria. For instance, what if there is a Solaris-like living ocean which sustains itself but counts as a single organism? It wouldn’t reproduce, but it would be kind of bureaucratic to deny it was alive. I’m also not sure that this rather reductive list works particularly well on an intuitive level. Nowadays we have art and science in separate categories, but in antiquity this was not so: astrology and astronomy were basically the same thing.

Another aspect of this is the hierarchy of emergent properties we have imposed on epistemology. Biology is applied biochemistry operating on a larger scale. Biochemistry is a special case of mainly organic chemistry (not entirely, as there are plenty of inorganic compounds in living things such as salts and inorganic acids) and chemistry is a special case of physics. Does it have to be in that order though? Have we imposed our own reductivist understanding on science where it doesn’t belong? What would happen if biology was considered the basis of other sciences? This may sound absurd, but we could just take the view, without needing to justify it, that the Universe is alive and that the life we think of, such as bacteria and anteaters, is just a special case. Is there a kind of homoeostasis to the way a star manages to balance the pressure of light and gravity? It could be argued, of course, that everything depends on physics, but perhaps science would still make sense if life was considered some kind of focus at the centre of the conceptual universe, gradually fading out into viruses, crystals, organic compounds in the interstellar medium and so on.

So far I’ve been talking about matter as potentially alive, but what if that isn’t the limit? Could space itself be alive? The philosopher Baruch Spinoza thought so, or rather he saw space as God, partly because it had various characteristics often attributed to God such as omnipresence, eternity and infinity, at least as he understood space. My problems with this are that this may not be the same as life. Does the concept of God require God to be alive as opposed to a consciousness? According to Christianity, God has reproduced, and the same is often true with polytheism, but it’s vital to Islam, Judaism and Baha’i that God does not and never would reproduce, so going by a possibly rather crass biological definition of life, God is not alive. But the claim that God is dead, made of course by Friedrich Nietzsche, is generally taken to mean that we have transcended the concept of God and now realise that God never existed. It doesn’t mean that God existed at some point and no longer is, and in general, when one speaks of a formerly living thing being dead, we tend to mean that it no longer exists.

Not always though. Centuries ago, some Christians used to claim that fossils were put there by Satan to deceive humanity into thinking that Earth was more than a few thousand years old. One of the many problems with making that claim today would be that many sedimentary rocks and minerals are in fact made of fossils, such as chalk, flint, coal, oil and gas. This means that saying Satan made fossils is tantamount to saying that he created much of the surface of the Earth, such as the chalk downs of Kent and Sussex, the coal deposits in Kent, the flint from which many churches are built and so on. This illustrates how the surface of this planet is in a sense alive in many places, in that it consists of the bodies of organisms. These are only dead in the same sense as hair and the surface of the skin are. When we look at each other, most of what we see is dead in that sense, but it’s counterintuitive to think of it in that way because it makes it sound like we’re a load of zombies or something.

This way of thinking, though, is a portal into what might be called the “world of It”. Forgive me a brief foray into gender identity issues here. It’s currently considered advisable to introduce oneself using one’s pronouns in some circles, and various requests are made here, usually amounting to “she”, “he”, “they” or something like the quixotic Spivak pronouns. As far as I know, I’m the only person who prefers the pronoun “it”. The reason for this, of course, is that “it” has been weaponised by gender-critical people, or more precisely, people who seem to have a moderately unmediated view of gender identity based on presumed genitals and karyotype. To counter that objection, just briefly, there are quite successful attempts to recuperate “queer” from its status as an insult, so why not “it”? But there is a lot of truth in the thought that we are, first of all, “it” rather than “she/they/he”, because we are objects which happen to be alive and conscious. And if we’re “it”, what about all the other things which we habitually refer to as “it”? Is their status so different from our own or are we just putting on airs?

There is a case to answer here to the claim that hylozoism could just be a bit vapid, in the same way as pantheism is perhaps just a word used by squeamish atheists. If we’re saying everything alive, are we also saying that nothing is? Using pantheism as an example, Spinoza claimed that only “God or Nature” exists, that phrase not representing alternatives but a single reality which could be thought of in either way. This pantheistic God doesn’t seem to act, hear prayer or give anything. Richard Dawkins has described pantheism as “sexed-up atheism”, and here the view is definitely assumed to be combined with metaphysical naturalism, that is, the denial of the supernatural. Pantheists who accept that there are no miracles, souls of the same status but essentially different from bodies, or psychic abilities, then it does seem that people calling themselves that are really just holding onto something out of sentiment. But even in that case, it would seem to cultivate some kind of reverence for the world and the Universe which is worth having and which there may be an ethical imperative to adopt. It makes sense, for example, to consider inanimate objects as having rights, assuming that there is such a category. A deforested area of the Amazon which is going to be ploughed up and have grass grown on it for cattle destined to become burgers does seem intuitively to have had its rights violated in some way, even if there is no God or consciousness involved.

Controversially perhaps, I am not metaphysically naturalistic. There is a problem with delineating what constitutes the natural as opposed to the supernatural that makes it difficult for me to express what I mean, but I believe, for example, that prayers are answered. You may be uncomfortable with that, but there are other possibilities which are less theistic, but in which I don’t necessarily believe personally. For instance, someone might believe it’s possible to communicate with the souls of the departed or have accurate foreknowledge of the future acquired without ratiocination. Either way, this is seen as supernatural, but the question arises of whether it would still be supernatural if it turned out, for example, that our brains are sensitive to tachyons and that’s how we perceive the future. That would be a radical naturalistic explanation. This is not what I mean though. What I mean is that there are many things, not least consciousness, which are beyond our understanding simply because we evolved as hunter-gatherers on the Afrikan savannah, so why would that mean we would be able to understand the finest intricacies of the Cosmos? If we can, that is itself a bit weird from a naturalistic perspective. I presume that we are hampered with respect to the world of odours, for example, because we lack a good sense of smell, and other species may have a more intuitive grasp of magnetic fields because they use them to navigate or detect potential prey or predators. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why the supernatural would not in some way exist simply because all possible projects of the human mind occur in a particular arena, outside which a lot more could be going on. This is in a sense the supernatural but perhaps not in the sense we generally understand the word. In any case, this supernatural realm, whether or not it’s a psychic supernatural realm, could provide scope for the existence of either a pantheist God or a sense in which the Universe is alive, but this would then not be the kind of meaning which could be reduced to a mere definition.

Finally, there’s the question of the Marxist metaphysics of dialectical materialism. In the Marxist view, everything must be seen as dynamic rather than static and also as connected, and contradictions exist objectively. It’s quite odd that this aspect of Marxism as applied to physical reality seems to get “bleeped out” of most depictions of the ideology both left- and right-wing. However, maybe this kind of constant flow and change is a way of conceiving the Universe as alive, and if biology is given primacy as opposed to physics, thereby couching all scientific findings in terms of life, it’s even closer.