Our Impulse Toward Anthropomorphism

‘Animal Farm’, as imagined in the 1954 film, actually described human politics.

Posted by Keith Tidman

 

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last, the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

    ‘Who are YOU?’ said the Caterpillar.

    This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I--I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’

    ‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’

    ‘I can't explain MYSELF, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’

 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, is just one example of the book’s rich portrayal of nonhumans — like the Caterpillar — all of whom exhibit humanlike properties and behaviours. A literary device that is also a form of anthropomorphism — from the Greek anthropos, meaning ‘human’, and morphe, meaning form or shape. Humans have a long history of attributing both physical and mental human qualities to a wide array of things, ranging from animals to inanimate objects and gods. Such anthropomorphism has been common even since the earliest mythologies.

 

Anthropomorphism has also been grounded in commonplace usage as metaphor. We ‘see’ agency, intentionality, understanding, thought, and humanlike conduct in all sorts of things: pets, cars, computers, tools, musical instruments, boats, favourite toys, and so forth. These are often items with which we grow a special rapport: and that we soon regard as possessing the deliberateness and quirkiness of human instinct. Items with which we ‘socialise’, such as through affectionate communication; to which we appoint names that express their character; that we blame for vexing us if, for example, they don’t work according to expectations; and that, in the case of gadgets, we might view as extensions of our own personhood.

 

Today, we’ve become accustomed to thinking of technology as having humanlike agency and features — and we behave accordingly. Common examples in our device-centric lives include assigning a human name to a car, robot, or ‘digital personal assistant’. Siri pops up here, Alexa there… This penchant has become all the more acute in light of the ‘cleverness’ of computers and artificial intelligence. We react to ‘capriciousness’ and ‘letdowns’: beseeching a car to start in the bitter cold, expressing anger toward a smart phone that fell and shattered, or imploring the electricity to come back on during a storm. 

 

Anthropomorphism has been deployed in art and literature throughout the ages to portray natural objects, such as animals and plants, as speaking, reasoning, feeling beings with human qualities. Even to have conscious minds. One aim is to turn the unfamiliar into the comfortably familiar; another to pique curiosity and achieve dramatic effect; another to build relatability; another to distinguish friend from foe; and yet another simply to explain natural phenomena.

Take George Orwell’s Animal Farm as another example. The 1945 book’s characters, though complexly nuanced, are animals representing people, or perhaps, to be more precise, political and social groups. The cast includes pigs, horses, dogs, a goat, sheep, a raven, and chickens, among others, with human language, emotions, intentions, personalities, and thoughts. The aim is to warn of the consolidation of power, denial of rights, manipulation of language, and exploitation and control of the masses associated with authoritarianism. The characters are empathetic and relatable in both positive and flawed ways. Pigs, so often portrayed negatively, indeed are the bad guys here too: they represent key members of the Soviet Union’s Bolshevik leadership. Napoleon represents Joseph Stalin, Snowball represents Leon Trotsky, and Squealer represents Vyacheslav Molotov. 

Children's stories, familiar to parents having read to their young children, abound with simpler examples. Among the many favourites are the fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, and Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne. Such stories often have didactic purposes, to convey lessons about life, such as ethical choices, while remaining accessible, interpretable, and affable to young minds. The use of animal characters aids this purpose.

 

More generally, too, the predisposition toward anthropomorphism undergirds some religions. Indeed, anthropomorphic gods appear in assorted artifacts, thousands of years old, unearthed by archeologists across the globe. This notion of gods possessing human attributes came to full expression among the ancient Greeks.

 

Their pantheon of deities exhibited qualities of both appearance and thought resembling those of everyday people: wrath, jealously, lust, greed, vengeance, quarrelsomeness, and deception. Or they represented valued attributes like fertility, love, war, wisdom, power, and beauty. These qualities, both admirable and sometimes dreadful, make the gods oddly approachable, even if warily.

 

As to this, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, in his wide-reaching reproach of religions, struggled to come to grips with the faithful lauding and symbolically putting deities on pedestals, all the while incongruously ascribing flawed human emotions to them.

 

In the fifth century BCE, the philosopher Xenophanes also recoiled from the practice of anthropomorphism, observing, ‘Mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are [in their own likeness], and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form’. He underscored his point about partiality — modeling deities’ features on humans’ features by observing that ‘Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians that they are pale and red-haired’. Xenophanes concluded that ‘the greatest God’ resembles people ‘neither in form nor in mind’.

 

That said, this penchant toward seeing a god in humans’ own likeness, moored to familiar humanlike qualities, rather than as an unmanifested, metaphysical abstraction whose reality lies forever and inalterably out of reach (whether by human imagination, definition, or description), has long been favoured by many societies.

 

We see it up close in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, where it says: ‘So God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them’, as well as frequently elsewhere in the Bible. Such reductionism to human qualities, while still somehow allowing for God to be transcendent, makes it easier to rationalise and shed light on perplexing, even inexplicable, events in the world and in our lives.

 

In this way, anthropomorphism is a stratagem for navigating life. It reduces reality to accessible metaphors and reduces complexity to safe, easy-to-digest analogues, where intentions and causes become both more vivid and easier to make sense of. Above all, anthropomorphism is often how we arrive at empathy, affiliation, and understanding.

 

The Certainty of Uncertainty

Posted by Keith Tidman 

We favour certainty over uncertainty. That’s understandable. Our subscribing to certainty reassures us that perhaps we do indeed live in a world of absolute truths, and that all we have to do is stay the course in our quest to stitch the pieces of objective reality together.

 

We imagine the pursuit of truths as comprising a lengthening string of eureka moments, as we put a check mark next to each section in our tapestry of reality. But might that reassurance about absolute truths prove illusory? Might it be, instead, ‘uncertainty’ that wins the tussle?

 

Uncertainty taunts us. The pursuit of certainty, on the other hand, gets us closer and closer to reality, that is, closer to believing that there’s actually an external world. But absolute reality remains tantalizingly just beyond our finger tips, perhaps forever.

 

And yet it is uncertainty, not certainty, that incites us to continue conducting the intellectual searches that inform us and our behaviours, even if imperfectly, as we seek a fuller understanding of the world. Even if the reality we think we have glimpsed is one characterised by enough ambiguity to keep surprising and sobering us.

 

The real danger lies in an overly hasty, blinkered turn to certainty. This trust stems from a cognitive bias — the one that causes us to overvalue our knowledge and aptitudes. Psychologists call it the Dunning-Kruger effect.

 

What’s that about then? Well, this effect precludes us from spotting the fallacies in what we think we know, and discerning problems with the conclusions, decisions, predictions, and policies growing out of these presumptions. We fail to recognise our limitations in deconstructing and judging the truth of the narratives we have created, limits that additional research and critical scrutiny so often unmask. 

 

The Achilles’ heel of certainty is our habitual resort to inductive reasoning. Induction occurs when we conclude from many observations that something is universally true: that the past will predict the future. Or, as the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, put it in the eighteenth century, our inferring ‘that instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience’. 

 

A much-cited example of such reasoning consists of someone concluding that, because they have only ever observed white swans, all swans are therefore white — shifting from the specific to the general. Indeed, Aristotle uses the white swan as an example of a logically necessary relationship. Yet, someone spotting just one black swan disproves the generalisation. 

 

Bertrand Russell once set out the issue in this colourful way:

 

‘Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken’.

 

The person’s theory that all swans are white — or the chicken’s theory that the man will continue to feed it — can be falsified, which sits at the core of the ‘falsification’ principle developed by philosopher of science Karl Popper. The heart of this principle is that in science a hypothesis or theory or proposition must be falsifiable, that is, to possibly being shown wrong. Or, in other words, to be testable through evidence. For Popper, a claim that is untestable is no longer scientific. 

 

However, a testable hypothesis that is proven through experience to be wrong (falsified) can be revised, or perhaps discarded and replaced by a wholly new proposition or paradigm. This happens in science all the time, of course. But here’s the rub: humanity can’t let uncertainty paralyse progress. As Russell also said: 

 

‘One ought to be able to act vigorously in spite of the doubt. . . . One has in practical life to act upon probabilities’.

 

So, in practice, whether implicitly or explicitly, we accept uncertainty as a condition in all fields — throughout the humanities, social sciences, formal sciences, and natural sciences — especially if we judge the prevailing uncertainty to be tiny enough to live with. Here’s a concrete example, from science.

 

In the 1960s, the British theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs, mathematically predicted the existence of a specific subatomic particle. The last missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. But no one had yet seen it, so the elusive particle remained a hypothesis. Only several decades later, in 2012, did CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reveal the particle, whose field is claimed to have the effect of giving all other particles their mass. (Earning Higgs, and his colleague Francis Englert, the Nobel prize in physics.)

 

The CERN scientists’ announcement said that their confirmation bore ‘five-sigma’ certainty. That is, there was only 1 chance in 3.5 million that what was sighted was a fluke, or something other than the then-named Higgs boson. A level of certainty (or of uncertainty, if you will) that physicists could very comfortably live with. Though as Kyle Cranmer, one of the scientists on the team that discovered the particle, appropriately stresses, there remains an element of uncertainty: 

 

“People want to hear declarative statements, like ‘The probability that there’s a Higgs is 99.9 percent,’ but the real statement has an ‘if’ in there. There’s a conditional. There’s no way to remove the conditional.”

 

Of course, not in many instances in everyday life do we have to calculate the probability of reality. But we might, through either reasoning or subconscious means, come to conclusions about the likelihood of what we choose to act on as being right, or safely right enough. The stakes of being wrong matter — sometimes a little, other times consequentially. Peter Higgs got it right; Bertrand Russell’s chicken got it wrong.

  

The takeaway from all this is that we cannot know things with absolute epistemic certainty. Theories are provisional. Scepticism is essential. Even wrong theories kindle progress. The so-called ‘theory of everything’ will remain evasively slippery. Yet, we’re aware we know some things with greater certainty than other things. We use that awareness to advantage, informing theory, understanding, and policy, ranging from the esoteric to the everyday.

 

Miracles: Confirmable, or Chimerical?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Multiplication of the Loaves, by Georges, Mount Athos.

We are often passionately told of claims to experienced miracles, in both the religious and secular worlds. The word ‘miracle’ coming from the Latin mirari, meaning to wonder. But what are these miracles that some people wonder about, and do they happen as told?

Scottish philosopher David Hume, as sceptic on this matter, defined a miracle as ‘a violation of the laws of nature’ — with much else to say on the issue in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). He proceeded to define the transgression of nature as due to a ‘particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent’. Though how much credence might one place in ‘invisible agents’?

Other philosophers, like Denmark’s Søren Kierkegaard in his pseudonymous persona Johannes Climacus, also placed themselves in Hume’s camp on the matter of miracles. Earlier, Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote of miracles as events whose source and cause remain unknown to us (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670). Yet, countless other people around the world, of many religious persuasions, earnestly assert that the entreaty to miracles is one of the cornerstones of their faith. Indeed, some three-fourths of survey respondents indicated they believe in miracles, while nearly half said they have personally experienced or seen a miracle (Princeton Survey Research Associates, 2000; Harris poll, 2013).

One line of reasoning as to whether miracles are credible might start with the definition of miracles, such as transgressions of natural events uncontested convincingly by scientists or other specialists. The sufficiency of proof that a miracle really did occur and was not, deus ex machina, just imagined or stemming from a lack of understanding of the laws underlying nature is a very tall order, as surely it should be.

Purported proof would come from people who affirm they witnessed the event, raising questions about witnesses’ reliability and motives. In this regard, it would be required to eliminate obvious delusions, fraud, optical illusions, distortions, and the like. The testimony of witnesses in such matters is, understandably, often suspect. There are demanding conditions regarding definitions and authentication — such as of ‘natural events’, where scientific hypotheses famously, but for good reason, change to conform to new knowledge acquired through disciplined investigation. These conditions lead many people to dismiss the occurrence of miracles as pragmatically untenable, requiring by extension nothing less than a leap of faith.

But a leap of faith suggests that the alleged miracle happened through the interposition of a supernatural power, like a god or other transcendent, creative force of origin. This notion of an original source gives rise, I argue, to various problematic aspects to weigh.

One might wonder, for example, why a god would have created the cosmos to conform to what by all measures is a finely grained set of natural laws regarding cosmic reality, only later to decide, on rare occasion, to intervene. That is, where a god suspends or alters original laws in order to allow miracles. The assumption being that cosmic laws encompass all physical things, forces, and the interactions among them. So, a god choosing not to let select original laws remain in equilibrium, uninterrupted, seems selective — incongruously so, given theistic presumptions about a transcendent power’s omniscience and omnipotence and omniwisdom.

One wonders, thereby, what’s so peculiarly special about humankind to deserve to receive miracles — symbolic gestures, some say. Additionally, one might reasonably ponder why it was necessary for a god to turn to the device of miracles in order for people to extract signals regarding purported divine intent.

One might also wonder, in this theistic context, whether something was wrong with the suspended law to begin with, to necessitate suspension. That is, perhaps it is reasonable to conclude from miracles-based change that some identified law is not, as might have been supposed, inalterably good in all circumstances, for all eternity. Or, instead, maybe nothing was in fact defective in the original natural law, after all, there having been merely an erroneous read of what was really going on and why. A rationale, thereby, for alleged miracles — and the imagined compelling reasons to interfere in the cosmos — to appear disputable and nebulous.

The presumptive notion of ‘god in the gaps’ seems tenuously to pertain here, where a god is invoked to fill the gaps in human knowledge — what is not yet known at some point in history — and thus by extension allows for miracles to substitute for what reason and confirmable empirical evidence might otherwise and eventually tell us.

As Voltaire further ventured, ‘It is . . . impious to ascribe miracles to God; they would indicate a lack of forethought, or of power, or both’ (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764). Yet, unsurprisingly, contentions like Voltaire’s aren’t definitive as a closing chapter to the accounting. There’s another facet to the discussion that we need to get at — a nonreligious aspect.

In a secular setting, the list of problematic considerations regarding miracles doesn’t grow easier to resolve. The challenges remain knotty. A reasonable assumption, in this irreligious context, is that the cosmos was not created by a god, but rather was self-caused (causa sui). In this model, there were no ‘prior’ events pointing to the cosmos’s lineage. A cosmos that possesses integrally within itself a complete explanation for its existence. Or, a cosmos that has no beginning — a boundless construct having existed infinitely.

One might wonder whether a cosmos’s existence is the default, stemming from the cosmological contention that ‘nothingness’ cannot exist, implying no beginning or end. One might further ponder how such a cosmos — in the absence of a transcendent force powerful enough to tinker with it — might temporarily suspend or alter a natural law in order to accommodate the appearance of a happening identifiable as a miracle. I propose there would be no mechanism to cause such an alteration to the cosmic fabric to happen. On those bases, it may seem there’s no logical reason for (no possibility of) miracles. Indeed, the scientific method does itself call for further examining what may have been considered a natural law whenever there are repeated exceptions or contradictions to it, rather than assuming that a miracle is recurring.

Hume proclaimed that ‘no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle’; centuries earlier, Augustine of Hippo articulated a third, and broader take on the subject. He pointedly asked, ‘Is not the universe itself a miracle?’ (The City of God, 426 AD). Here, one might reasonably interpret ‘a miracle’ as synonymous for a less emotionally charged, temporal superlative like ‘remarkable’. I suspect most of us agree that our vast, roiling cosmos is indeed a marvel, though debatably not necessitating an originating spiritual framework like Augustine’s. 

No matter how supposed miracles are perceived, internalised, and retold, the critical issue of what can or cannot be confirmed dovetails to an assessment of the ‘knowledge’ in hand: what one knows, how one knows it, and with what level of certainty one knows it. So much of reality boils down to probabilities as the measuring stick; the evidence for miracles is no exception. If we’re left with only gossamer-thin substantiation, or no truly credible substantiation, or no realistically potential path to substantiation — which appears the case — claims of miracles may, I offer, be dismissed as improbable or even phantasmal.

The Afterlife: What Do We Imagine?

Posted by Keith Tidman

‘The real question of life after death isn’t whether 

or not it exists, but even if it does, what 

problem this really solves’

— Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921

Our mortality, and how we might transcend it, is one of humanity’s central preoccupations since prehistory. One much-pondered possibility is that of an afterlife. This would potentially serve a variety of purposes: to buttress fraught quests for life’s meaning and purpose; to dull unpleasant visions of what happens to us physically upon death; to switch out fear of the void of nothingness with hope and expectation; and, to the point here, to claim continuity of existence through a mysterious hereafter thought to defy and supplant corporeal mortality.

And so, the afterlife, in one form or another, has continued to garner considerable support to the present. An Ipsos/Reuters poll in 2011 of the populations of twenty-three countries found that a little over half believe in an afterlife, with a wide range of outcomes correlated with how faith-based or secular a country is considered. The Pew Center’s Religious Landscape Study polling found, in 2014, that almost three-fourths of people seem to believe in heaven and more than half said that they believed in hell. The findings cut across most religions. Separately, research has found that some one-third of atheists and agnostics believe in an afterlife — one imagined to include ‘some sort of conscious existence’, as the survey put it. (This was the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture, 2014.) 

Other research has corroberated these survey results. Researchers based at Britain's Oxford University in 2011 examined forty related studies conducted over the course of three years by a range of social-science and other specialists (including anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians) in twenty countries and different cultures. The studies revealed an instinctive predisposition among people to an afterlife — whether of a soul or a spirit or just an aspect of the mind that continues after bodily death.

My aim here is not to exhaustively review all possible variants of an afterlife subscribed to around the world, like reincarnation — an impracticality for the essay. However, many beliefs in a spiritual afterlife, or continuation of consciousness, point to the concept of dualism, entailing a separation of mind and body. As René Descartes explained back in the 17th century:

‘There is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, whereas the mind is clearly indivisible. For when I consider the mind, or myself insofar as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish any parts within myself. . . . By contrast, there is no corporeal or extended thing that I can think of which in my thought I cannot easily divide into parts. . . . This one argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different than the body’ (Sixth Meditation, 1641).

However, in the context of modern research, I believe that one may reasonably ask the following: Are the mind and body really two completely different things? Or are the mind and the body indistinct — the mind reducible to the brain, where the brain and mind are integral, inseparable, and necessitating each other? Mounting evidence points to consciousness and the mind as the product of neurophysiological activity. As to what’s going on when people think and experience, many neuroscientists favour the notion that the mind — consciousness and thought — is entirely reducible to brain activity, a concept sometimes variously referred to as physicalism, materialism, or monism. But the idea is that, in short, for every ‘mind state’ there is a corresponding ‘brain state’, a theory for which evidence is growing apace.

The mind and brain are today often considered, therefore, not separate substances. They are viewed as functionally indistinguishable parts of the whole. There seems, consequently, not to be broad conviction in mind-body dualism. Contrary to Cartesian dualism, the brain, from which thought comes, is physically divisible according to hemispheres, regions, and lobes — the brain’s architecture; by extension, the mind is likewise divisible — the mind’s architecture. What happens to the brain physically (from medical or other tangible influences) affects the mind. Consciousness arises from the entirety of the brain. A brain — a consciousness — that remarkably is conscious of itself, demonstrably curious and driven to contemplate its origins, its future, its purpose, and its place in the universe.

The contemporary American neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga, has described the dynamics of such consciousness in this manner:

‘It is as if our mind is a bubbling pot of water. . . . The top bubble ultimately bursts into an idea, only to be replaced by more bubbles. The surface is forever energized with activity, endless activity, until the bubbles go to sleep. The arrow of time stitches it all together as each bubble comes up for its moment. Consider that maybe consciousness can be understood only as the brain’s bubbles, each with its own hardware to close the gap, getting its moment’. (The Consciousness Instinct, 2018)

Moreover, an immaterial mind and a material world (such as the brain in the body), as dualism typically frames reality, would be incapable of acting upon each other: what’s been dubbed the ‘interaction problem’. Therefore the physicalist model — strengthened by research in fields like neurophysiology, which quicken to acquire ever-deeper learning — has, arguably, superseded the dualist model.

People’s understanding that, of course, they will die one day, has spurred search for spiritual continuation to earthbound life. Apprehension motivates. The yearn for purpose motivates. People have thus sought evidence, empirical or faith-based or other, to underprop their hope for otherworldly survival. However, modern reality as to the material, naturalistic basis of the mind may prove an injurious blow to notions of an out-of-body afterlife. After all, if we are our bodies and our bodies are us, death must end hope for survival of the mind. As David Hume graphically described our circumstances in Of the Immortality of the Soul (1755), our ‘common dissolution in death’. That some people are nonetheless prone to evoke dualistic spectral spirits — stretching from disembodied consciousness to immortal souls — that provide pretext in desirously thwarting the interruption of life doesn’t change the finality of existence. 

And so, my conclusion is that perhaps we’d be better served to find ingredients for an ‘afterlife’ in what we leave by way of influences, however ordinary and humble, upon others’ welfare. That is, a legacy recollected by those who live on beyond us, in its ideal a benevolent stamp upon the present and the future. This earthbound, palpable notion of what survives us goes to answer Wittgenstein’s challenge we started with, regarding ‘what problem’ an afterlife ‘solves’, for in this sense it solves the riddle of what, realistically, anyone might hope for.

How Life Has Value, Even Absent Overarching Purpose

Wherein lies value?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Among the most-common questions from philosophy is, ‘What is the purpose of life?’ After all, as Plato pithily said, humans are ‘beings in search of meaning’. But what might be the real reason for the question about the purpose of life? I suggest that what fundamentally lurks behind this age-old head-scratcher is an alternative query: Might not life still have value, even if there is no sublimely overarching purpose? So, instead, let’s start with ‘purpose’ and only then work our way to ‘value’.

Is an individual's existence best understood scientifically — more particularly, in biological terms? The purpose of biological life, in strictly scientific terms, might be reduced to survival and passing along genes — to propagate, for continuation of the familial line and (largely unconsciously) the species. More broadly, scientists have typically steered clear of deducing ‘higher purpose’ and are more comfortable restricting themselves to explanations of empirically, rationally grounded physical models — however inspiring those peeks into presumed reality may be — that relate to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of existence. The list is familiar:

• the heliocentric construct of Copernicus and the mechanistic universes of René Descartes and Isaac Newton
• the Darwinian theories of evolution and natural selection
• the laws of thermodynamics and the theory of general relativity of Albert Einstein 
• the quantum mechanics of Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger. 

But grand as these theories are, they still don’t provide us with purpose.

Rather, such theories focus on better understanding the emergence and evolution of the cosmos and humankind, in all their wonder and complexity. The (not uncommonly murky) initial conditions and necessary parameters to make intelligent life possible add a challenge to relying on conclusions from the models. As to this point about believability and deductions drawn, David Hume weighed in during the 18th century, advising,

             ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence’.

Meanwhile, modern physics doesn’t yet rule in or rule out some transcendent, otherworldly dimension of the universe — disproof is always tough, as we know, and thus the problem is perhaps unanswerable — but the physical–spiritual dualism implied by such an ethereal dimension is extraordinarily questionable. Yet one cannot deduce meaning or purpose, exceptional or ordinary, simply from mere wonder and complexity; the latter are not enough. Suggested social science insights — about such things as interactions among people, examining behaviours and means to optimise social constructs — arguably add only a pixel here and a pixel there to the larger picture of life’s quintessential meaning.

Religious belief —from the perspectives of revelation, enlightenment, and doctrine — is an obvious place to turn to next in this discussion. Theists start with a conviciton that God exists — and conclude that it was God who therefore planted the human species amidst the rest of His creation of the vast universe. In this way, God grants humankind an exalted overarching purpose. In no-nonsense fashion, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza took the point to another declarative level, writing:

‘Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived’. 

This kind of presumed God-given plan or purpose seems to instill in humankind an inspirational level of exceptionalism. This exceptionalism in turn leads human beings toward such grand purposes as undiminished love toward and worship of God, fruitful procreation, and dominion over the Earth (with all the environmental repercussions of that dominion), among other things. These purposes include an implied contract of adding value to the world, within one’s abilities, as prescribed by religious tenets.

One takeaway may be a comfortable feeling that humankind, and each member of our species, has meaning — and, in a soul-based model, a roadmap for redemption, perhaps to an eternal afterlife. As to that, in the mid-20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in characteristically unsparing fashion:

‘Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal’. 

Universes constructed around a belief in God, thereby, attempt to allay the dread of mortality and the terror of dying and of death. Yet, even where God is the prime mover of everything, is it unreasonable to conceive of humankind as perhaps still lacking any lofty purpose, after all? Might, for example, humankind share the universe with other brainy species on our own planet — or even much brainier ones cosmically farther flung?

Because if humankind has no majestically overarching purpose — or put another way, even if existentially it might not materially matter to the cosmos if the human species happened to tip into extinction — we can, crucially, still have value. Ultimately value, not exceptionalism or eternity, is what matters. There’s an important difference between ‘purpose’ — an exalted reason that soars orders of magnitude above ordinary explanations of why we’re riding the rollercoaster of creation — and ‘value’, which for an individual might only need a benevolent role in continuously improving the lot of humankind, or perhaps other animals and the ecosphere. It may come through empathically good acts without the expectation of any manner of reward. Socrates hewed close to those principles, succinctly pointing out,

            ‘Not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued’.

Value, then, is anchored to our serving as playwrights scribbling, if you will, on pieces of paper how our individual, familial, community, and global destiny unfolds into the future. And what the quality of that future is, writ large. At minimum, we have value based on humanistic grounds: people striving for natural, reciprocal connections, to achieve hope and a range of benefits — the well-being of all — and disposing of conceits to instead embrace our interdependence in order not only to survive but, better, to thrive. This defines the intrinsic nature of ‘value’; and perhaps it is to this that we owe our humanity.

Fact and Value: The Way Ahead

Grateful acknowledgement to Bannor Toys for the image

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Philosophy may begin to solve a problem as soon as it has identified it.  All too often, it has not.  This post, then, is about defining a problem—no more.  It is one of the most urgent problems of philosophy.

One of the most important aspects of philosophy is ethics.  Yet there is an issue which is prior to ethics, which has to be addressed first.  It is the problem of the fact-value distinction—a problem which, since it first appeared on the philosophical map, has cut a divide between fact and value, and more importantly, philosophy and ethics.  In the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein, ethics has become ‘what we cannot speak about’.  Yet ethics is all that we do, from morning until night, from year to year.  Today, this problem has filtered through to the common person, and has caused profound disorientation in our time.  On a social level, we are conflicted and confused with multiple ethics, while on a global level, our ethics increasingly seem to have come apart, with widespread poverty, social disintegration, and environmental destruction. 

It seems easy to describe the philosophical problem, yet far from easy to offer a solution.  Should I take a walk in the woods today, or should I write letters instead?  Should I be a ‘bachelor girl’, or should I marry Joe?  Should we travel to Mars?  Should we drop the Bomb?  On the surface of it, our reasons for choosing one course of action over another might seem obvious, yet it is not something we find ourselves able to decide on the basis of facts.  The problem is basically this: we know that this is how the world ‘is’—yet how should we know how it ‘ought’ to be?  The philosopher David Hume gave the problem its classical formulation: it is impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.  It is impossible to establish any value amidst an ocean of facts—and on the surface of it, Hume would seem to be unimpeachably right.  The facts cannot tell us what to do. 

As we seek a solution to the problem—because we must solve this problem if we are to find our way through to any discussion of ethics—Hume’s conclusion would seem to mean only one of two things: either he identified a problem which cannot be solved, or he was thinking in such a way that he created his own problem.  What, therefore, if Hume laid the very foundation on which the fact-value distinction rests? 

Hume considered that all knowledge may be subdivided into relations of ideas on the one hand, and matters of fact on the other.  That is, one begins with a handful of facts, then relates them to one another.  It is the simple matter of a world where facts exist, and these exist in a certain relation to one another—yet one finds no basis on which to determine what that relation ought to be.  Generations later, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that many philosophers, following Kant, have maintained that relations are the work of the mind, while things in themselves have no relations.  While Russell was not saying precisely the same as Hume, he was not far off.  A similar view is reflected in the theory of language.  The philosopher Rudolf Carnap considered, in the words of philosophy professor Simon Blackburn (specifically about the ‘material mode of speech’), ‘Speech objects and their relations are the topic.’  Wittgenstein, too, held this view, in his own unique way, through his multiplicity of language-games.

A pebble is a thing.  A house is a thing.  Even gravity, ideology, taxonomy are ‘things’ in a way (we call them constructs), which in turn may be related to other things.  In a sense, even a unicorn is a thing, although we are unlikely ever to find one.  Things, then, may further be involved in what we call truth conditions—which means that they may be inserted into statements, which can be affirmed or denied.  And when we affirm such statements, we call them facts.  For example, we insert the thing ‘pebble’ into a statement: ‘A pebble sinks’—or we insert the thing ‘unicorn’ into a statement: ‘The Scots keep unicorns.’  Our things are now involved in truth conditions, which means that our world is filled with facts.  And if not facts, then denials of  facts. 

Here, I think, is where the problem lies—and the way ahead.  To say that there is a fact-value distinction means that we have first divided up our reality into things on the one hand, and relations on the other.  On what basis, then, might we find our way back to a ‘grounded’ ethics?  Personally I believe the solution lies in the direction of levelling both fact and value to value alone—or things and relations to relations alone—in all fields, including science and mathematics.  Yet even then, we would not finally have reached the goal.  Even if we should be able to see everything in terms of value, which values should then be true, and which false?  And having once solved which values are true, we would need to establish on what basis I should—or could—submit to them.

Farmer Hogget, the Limited God

Posted by Eduardo Frajman

One beautiful autumn afternoon not too long ago, my daughters and I were coming home from an errand. They ran ahead of me, headed for our front yard to climb our knobby, twisted tree, or jump headfirst onto a leaf pile, or some other such wholesome activity that would add a tiny brick to the edifice of their innocent, golden childhoods. 

As I reached them I saw my eldest had stopped. She was prodding at something with her foot, nudging it back and forth. Though half-buried, I immediately recognized it for what it was. “What is it?,” my freckled-faced cherub asked. I saw her little sister step towards us curiously, an expectant smile on her face. The thing was roundish, about the size of a plum. Two blade-like stalks protruded out of one end. Amid the black dirt, I could make out patches of fur and a rigid, unseeing eye. “It’s a rock,” I said. My daughter shot me an incredulous, accusatory look as she wailed “Then why does it have ears?!”




The aftermath of our encounter with the decapitated bunny head will be familiar to most parents. “What happened to it?,” was the first question, the easiest one to answer. “I don’t know. Maybe a dog killed it, or a fox. Maybe it got caught under a lawnmower.”

“That’s sad,” said my youngest. “Why did the bunny have to die?” That was the big one, the one most of us can’t satisfactorily answer to ourselves, let alone to the little children who are so ignorant as to believe that we know everything. Why do bad things happen? Why is there evil in the world?

Regardless of how I chose to tackle the issue among the fallen leaves that day, I don’t really remember, I indubitably cracked the foundation of their innocence with a brief but unavoidable lecture on The Way Things Are. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of us, parents and children and bunnies, could frolic about, carelessly, eternally? But we can’t. That’s just not The Way Things Are. “But why not?,” my daughters insisted. That’s when I brought them inside, disinfected their hands, and slipped an old video about a lovable piglet called Babe (1996) into the DVD player.

In philosophical circles, the attempt to answer the question of evil is called “theodicy.” In its traditional Judeo-Christian form, theodicy aims to reconcile the existence of an all-powerful, loving, infinitely good God with the indisputable evidence that the world is awash with undeserved pain and suffering. This is what Babe is about. Yes, that Babe, the one about the talking pig. Babe, for those of you not in the know, is taken from among his brothers and sisters and becomes a prize at a county fair where he is won by Farmer Hogget. Babe meets the farm’s inhabitants: the sheepdogs Fly and Rex and their litter of puppies, Ferdinand the Duck, who is pretending to be a rooster to avoid being eaten, Duchess the evil cat (aren’t they all?), and the sheep, led by old and wise Maa. Babe gets into some low-key adventures until he is recruited by Farmer Hogget to help herd the sheep. This leads to some trouble with Rex, who besides being the alpha sheepdog is also the keeper of law and order among the animals.

Eventually, Farmer Hogget decides Babe is such a good sheep-pig that he enters him into a sheep dog competition, which of course he wins as everyone cheers deliriously. Everyone loves Babe, though it is often dismissed as just another flick selling the well-worn bill of goods to kids and their parents: “follow your star,” “be yourself,” “there is no secret ingredient.” It’s easy to see why this happens. The film follows the eponymous hero as he comes to understand the rules of Hogget Farm and, seemingly, challenges them by becoming a “sheep-pig.” But this is a misunderstanding based on inattentive watching. Babe never chooses to become a sheep-pig. The choice is made for him by Farmer Hogget – “The Boss,” as he is known to the farm animals. Babe is not a story about a young pig finding agency and thereby finding happiness. It is an allegory about the nature of God’s relationship with His creatures.

That the film is a theological parable is suggested in numerous details throughout. The young runt who will become Babe is “chosen” from among “thousands of pigs.” When Farmer Hogget and Babe first lay eyes on each other, they are said to share “a faint sense of some common destiny.” Later Farmer Hogget’s idea to turn Babe into a sheep pig becomes “the stuff of destiny” and Babe becomes the “pig of destiny.” The narration is inflected with Bible-like pronouncements – “a great flood came to the valley,” “there was only one fate for a creature that took the life of a sheep” – and the ancestry of both sheepdogs and sheep is treated as a marker of atavistic significance. On the night before the sheepdog trials, Hogget is shown watching a choir of children dressed as angels singing on television. And there is, of course, the matter of Babe’s parentage. The little pig, who seemingly has no father, boasts no fewer than three mothers: his biological pig mother, Fly the sheepdog who adopts him, and Maa the sheep who imbues him with moral sense.

This is not to say that Babe is a proselytizing work, looking to turn children into believing, unthinking Christians, along the lines of far inferior films such as the recent Little Boy (2015) or God’s Not Dead (2014). Far from it. Babe means instead to problematize belief, to highlight the very difficult questions raised by existing in a world with God in it. The pigs depicted at the start of the movie, for example, are shown lounging in their stys, waiting to be taken to the slaughterhouse. As they walk towards their deaths, they are said to believe they are headed for “pig paradise,” which is a “world of endless pleasures.” In other words, their religious beliefs serve them as consolation for the unavoidable fate that awaits them. There are plenty of followers of the Judeo-Christian tradition who use religion in this way. After all, God states in both the Old and New Testaments that He will reward those who follow His commandments:

“I will give the rain for your land in its season” (Deuteronomy 11:14)

and “rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in Heaven” (Matthew 5:11)

- promising that the sufferers in this world will be eternally rewarded in the next.

But the Bible also warns its readers not to accept this message uncritically, most explicitly in the Book of Job, its own stab at theodicy. Job is a good man, a blameless man, and thus deservedly prosperous and happy. Responding to a challenge, God allows Satan to make Job suffer, for no evident reason other than to see what happens. Satan takes away Job’s possessions, he kills Job’s children, he causes Job to endure great physical pain. Taken to his breaking point, Job lashes out against God. Why do I suffer?, asks Job. I don’t deserve to suffer.

God’s answer is meant to give pause to uncritical believers:

“Who is this who darkens my plans with words without knowledge?” (Job 38:1).

How do you know why I do anything?, asks God. Who are you to question Me? Who are you to pretend you understand how the world works, how anything works? You are nobody, says God to Job. You don’t know anything and you never will. And so, can I tell my daughters that it’s okay the bunny lost its head because it’s now hopping in the never-ending fields of bunny heaven? The Book of Job says no. It says that it is not in our capacity to understand why bunnies lose their heads, why pain and suffering pervade the world. It says only God knows the whys of The Way Things Are.

Likewise, it is not the animals’ place on Hogget Farm to question, let alone challenge, The Way Things Are. The only one who tries, Ferdinand the duck, finds only failure and frustration (though not, notably, punishment). Only The Boss can alter the rules. The film, of course, does not mean for Farmer Hogget to be seen literally as God. He and his wife are normal humans among many: they go to church and celebrate Christmas, they have children and grandchildren, she is the “assistant general secretary of the northeast region” for the Women’s Country Guild, he has “a long and honorable association” with the National Sheepdog Association. On the other hand, the beginning of the film goes out of its way to underline the couple’s specialness. Mrs. Hogget’s victory in a cooking competition is deemed “not a matter of luck” (she is later seen placing her trophy in a shelf stuffed with them). As the couple walk around the county fair, the image fades to black except for a small circle, which follows them around for a few additional moments, indicating their chosen status. Their power, such as it is, is mundane and earthbound, not supernatural. It is only in their own domains that each one of them lords. Inside the house, as made clear by Duchess the cat, it is Mrs. Hogget who is rules, while the farmer deserves only the status of “The Boss’ husband.”

To the farm animals, however, Farmer Hogget is god. His rule is unchallenged, and the animals all understand that their function in the world is to serve and obey him; even Ferdinand the duck, who doesn’t want to be eaten but still knows he must find a way to make himself useful. Hogget is a creator god. He is shown making a dollhouse for his granddaughter, a new gate for the farm, building the obstacles to train Babe for the sheepdog trials, lovingly placing the wool of a recently-shorn sheep on his wagon. He is a patient, loving god. He always has a kind word for his animals, “good dog,” “that’ll do,” and never ever loses his temper. He is a just but merciful god, as is shown by his actions after Maa is killed by a wild dog. The evidence points to Babe, and the Boss makes ready to execute the sentence he deems appropriate, but when he learns of his mistake he changes his planned course of action, like God does towards the city of Nineveh in the Book of Jonah.

Hogget is also a wise god. He is truthful, but is not beyond using slight subterfuge when it suits his aims. He follows his intuition because he knows “that little ideas can turn into the stuff of destiny,” as when he decides to spare Babe from becoming roast pork and turn him into the pig of destiny, but is willing to learn new things, as when he uses the fax machine he initially mistrusted. He realizes that Rex the dog, the Old-Testament prophet of the farm and the keeper of its laws, attacks Babe, the New Testament prophet of love, out of jealousy and fear of being replaced. It’s worth remembering that the only character with any stake in the outcome of the climactic sheepdog trials is Hogget himself. Fly articulates the most awful possible outcome: “The Boss will look like an idiot!” After Babe triumphs in the trials, after the animals in the farm and the crowd in the stands erupt in celebration, the camera shows the two of them standing alone, a ray of sunshine emerging from the clouds and shining down on the two chosen ones. It then shows Hogget’s face from Babe’s perspective, a halo of sunlight around his head, projecting gentleness and pride and love. “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.”

And so, Babe’s happiest state manifests itself in a moment of service to his god. And yet, just the night before, Babe had sunk into a deep crisis of faith. In preparation for the trials the Boss had modified The Ways Things Are. While hitherto only dogs and cats had been allowed in the house, Babe was invited in to partake in the best food and the warmth of the fireplace. Duchess the cat was livid at this unwanted invasion onto her turf. She tried to scratch at Babe, but this only earned her temporary banishment. On her second try, she went for the more subtle approach. “Why do you think you’re here?,” she asked the pig. “Why are any of us here?,” he parried. All creatures have a purpose, Duchess told Babe. The dogs herd the sheep, the cow gives milk, the cat looks beautiful. “What do you think your purpose is?” Babe didn’t know, so Duchess told him the truth, that a pig’s purpose is to be eaten. Babe could not believe it. He ran to his adoptive mother Fly and asked her whether humans ate his biological mother, the rest of his family. “Yes, dear,” said Fly. “Even The Boss?” “Yes, dear.” Babe was inconsolable. He wouldn’t eat or move. The other animals were heartbroken. Babe had lost his innocence. He had learned the awful implications of The Way Things Are. Even Rex, his former nemesis, could not stand to see him like that. “The Boss needs you!,” he pleaded.

Why does God allow for such things to happen? Why does Babe have to lose his family so we can put bacon in our burgers? If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t He just create some bacon trees, or make bacon taste like dirt for that matter? One of the most famous answers to the question was proposed by Leibniz in 1710, in the only book that he published in his lifetime, called the Essays on Theodicy, in the process introducing the new term.

It’s obvious, according to Leibniz, that God is all-powerful, as well as infinitely good. It stands to reason that if evil exists, it does so because God decided that a world with evil in it is better than a world without evil since God, being all-powerful, could only create “the best of all possible worlds.” Imagine a painting that contains all the possible colors. Some colors are gorgeous and pleasing to the eye, others are dreary or unpleasant to look at. Would the most beautiful painting use only the most beautiful colors? Or is it possible that, by judiciously using the ugly colors, one could enhance the impact of the beautiful colors and thereby achieve an even greater result? For example, anybody would agree that compassion is a great thing, and that a world where compassion exists is better than a world in which it doesn’t. But, in order to feel compassion, a person needs to witness someone else suffering. No suffering, no compassion. The same is probably true of most positive emotions, many of which are magnified by being preceded by bad emotions. Consider the pleasure of eating something after an extended period of fasting.

Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” theory was criticized by many for being, at best, too naïve and, at worst, willingly blind to the mind-shattering levels of bad things that actually exist in the world. Voltaire famously satirized Leibniz in Candide (1759), a novel in which a young man’s suffering of tragedy upon tragedy is played for laughs not unlike those elicited by Willie E. Coyote’s travails in Looney Tunes films. Imagine that, early on in your life, you discover that your parents, siblings, everyone like you, is being raised as food for a “superior” species. Imagine that, any day, you could be killed and eaten by your “owner.” Would you conclude from this knowledge that the world you live in is the best possible world?

As David Hume put it in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, you can only get to Leibniz’s conclusion if you start out by assuming an infinitely good, all-powerful God exists. If you start by looking at the evidence, however, you might conclude something else entirely. You might conclude that God doesn’t exist, that the world is just the random consequence of an immeasurably complex series of natural laws and events that led us to a state of affairs in which I love my daughters so much that I find it necessary to shield them from grief by explaining away a decapitated bunny head. Or perhaps, as some have argued, God does exist but He’s just plain nasty. Hume didn’t find this likely, since just as there are plenty of terrible things in the world, there are plenty of wonderful things in it as well. Perhaps God is just like us, only more so. This is essentially what the ancient Greeks believed.

In the film, though, Babe chooses a different option. The same one that, curiously, Rabbi Harold Kushner proposes in his now-mostly-forgotten bestseller When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner begins with the problem of evil as seen by Job as well as Babe. Since there is no doubt that evil exists, how can it be that an all-good, all-powerful God also exists? He then examines the evidence available to him, in defiance of God’s admonition at the end of the Book of Job. Kushner rejects the idea that God does not exist, and he cannot bring himself to suggest that God might be evil. It follows, therefore, that God must not be all-powerful. God is in charge, but not fully in charge.

The same is true of Farmer Hogget. He has all the qualities one wants in a god: he is capable, wise, merciful, full of grace. But he is not fully in charge of what happens. He cannot prevent his sheep from being stolen, or Fly to lose her puppies, or Maa from being mauled by a wild dog. He cannot make a world in which pigs and ducks are not eaten. And so, when Babe the pig is lying in his house, refusing to eat or to budge, about to die of dehydration, Farmer Hogget can do nothing but sing the plaintive song of the limited god:

“If I had words to make a day for you/I’d sing you a morning golden and new/I would make this day last for all time/Give you a night deep in moonshine.”

“I love you”, says Farmer Hogget to Babe with his song, but certain things even I can’t make happen. “I can’t make a perfect world. I can’t take away your pain. Are you still with me?”