Christian Platonism

      

Creation is a gift – a sharing of God to us of his Being (goodness, beauty). Giving us part of God’s divine life, allowing us to participate in it. The analogy – or metaphor? – of ‘participation’ helps me to think about this gift of Creation (as it has helped many others throughout history including to some extent St. Paul and some of the early church fathers). Indeed, there is much Platonic imagery in the New Testament: most of all, perhaps, in the Book of John. Such images, of course, are a great leap of imagination into an unknown land. Kant and that whole tradition are right: these matters exceed the limits of human understanding. God, like Plato’s Idea (or archetype) of “the absolute Good” is beyond the world, and thus beyond your conceptual grasp. Whoever fails to understand the absolute difference between creature/Creation and Creator, the origin and source of the creature, is outside of Christian thought (which goes beyond Plato here).

           In addition to our finitude, of course, sin also darkens the intellect, which tends to become a slave to ego-centered constructions of desire. Yet if that were the whole story, then our intellect would be impotent when it came to understanding the meaning of our existence, or, which is the same thing, being as a whole (as a limited whole under the aspect of eternity). Through the fact that we share in existence and indeed in “God’s image”, we are not altogether cut off from our origin; some trace of the original goodness of Creation remains in us – otherwise, we all would be lost. Assuming our intellects – ultimately through grace – can achieve partial independence from the shadowy, constructed world as seen through the prism of alienated ego, it can become aware of its own existence, and understand the significance of the experience of beauty, goodness, hope, faith, and love. It can understand its connection with God.

        But – and this is the problem – we can apprehend all these wonders only from a dimension lower, from the perspective of finite, mortal, limited, material, sensory being. Perhaps as a mother cat, lacking the self-consciousness that some human beings possess, can only ‘love’ her kittens in an attenuated sense – still it has a connection to the individualizing, self-conscious love a human mother can experience for her baby. Or perhaps as our eyes can only see a limited portion of what is there is light, but what light we can perceive is a real aspect of light itself, which is beyond our sight. As when Plato, confronted reality from a higher dimension leaking through into our minds, resorted to myth when concepts failed, thus we resort to metaphors. However, metaphors based on a real analogy: the light waves our eyes can translate into color is not just ‘in our head’ but is a reality that we have only partial access to. The goodness, the beauty, or love we experience is a pale reflection of the full reality of the divine, but it is part of God’s self-giving we may partake in. All we have to do is free our intellect from our self-constructed prisons – for which we must cooperate with grace – and we know this in some form.

             The crucial point in Christian Platonism is this: we are in origin “good, very good.”  In contrast to Luther and most of Protestantism, we are not by nature wretched sinners, completely worthless, living in this wretched vale of tears, who can only be loved and kept in being by an unfathomable God for some inscrutable reason. Rather, God draws us away from the sin of self-enclosure back to our original goodness (love-ableness) through the love of Christ, through whom all was created. There is something in our being – which God gives us – that is “good, very good”, love-able, which “sin” darkens.

      Obviously, we can’t get out of the world and compare these two pictures with the thing itself. Both pictures reflect states of soul, forms of experience, projected by analogy onto a higher dimension of reality. Like barely sprouting seeds that cannot see the full blossom but only speculate on it from what has come out of the seed so far. But intellect is not completely helpless. Even in the face of our absolute inability to attain “knowledge” in theological matters, we can make judgements on what makes sense. Given that the world was created by God, “very good” it was created – a matter of faith and an axiom for Christians – and given God’s essential goodness (conceptual), Christian Platonism has helped me and others make sense of things in a way that Luther or Calvin cannot. Indeed, a Christianity interpreted in a way hostile to Platonism kept me away from it until I realized that one could be a Christian without accepted the traditional protestant view. Ultimately, we choose based on criteria like ‘I would not choose to be born into a universe like the one imagined by Calvin.’

 Human Dignity vs. Autonomy; Reality vs. Fantasy

I heard a Catholic priest perfectly express something I think is deeply true. (This has happened more than once.) “Each individual person is a subject of infinite dignity but not the creator of value.” I want to unpack this within the framework of the kind of Christianity espoused by Pope John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis I - all working within the tradition of St. Thomas. 

     To exist is to be loved, to be wanted, to be known by the One who is goodness itself. In every act of creating, God breathes life and grants dignity, bestowing worth that is not ours to create, modify, or revoke. This dignity is not bound to achievement, status, or merit, but rests in the bare fact of existence. Each created being, merely by being, reflects the goodness of the Creator who called it forth. And in this calling forth, God inscribes a value that cannot be changed or diminished, for it is rooted in His eternal will and love. While every uncorrupted created being has dignity and goodness insofar as it exists – its existence being the loving will of the Creator who keeps it in being at every moment – our human dignity comes from being created in the image of God: from being self-conscious beings capable of love and truth (in a finite way).

      We can understand what dignity means by thinking about our purest loves. Love is the joy that the beloved exists and the will that it continues to exist in the fullness of its being/reality. There are two senses of reality in play here: 1) real as opposed to what seems real to fantasy or desire; our love is a ‘rational’ or appropriate response to the independent reality of the beloved. 2) real in the sense of actualizing one’s inborn potential – as a rose actualizes itself when it blossoms a human being actualizes itself when he or she becomes virtuous, above all loving. We love the rose most fully as a beautiful blossom; we love the rose that failed to blossom (the soil was perhaps poor) because of what it is in potential, feeling sorry for this particular one that it did not bloom. Thus with beloved people: joyful love when our children become good, loving adults; compassionate love when they don’t. But the first sense of ‘real’ is prior: in any case, we love them means we affirm their lives, their existence. Sorry, this is a bit abstract.

      Parents cherish their children simply for being as well as for their potentials.  In this, there is a shadow of divine love – the source of dignity, a concept that imaginatively extends the preciousness we experience in those we love to others we do not know and so cannot love in a personal way. The child’s life, precious and irreplaceable, does not need to earn its worth; it is worth that radiates from the heart of love itself. Just as this love makes the child’s life feel infinitely meaningful, God’s love makes our existence carry infinite value. In each person’s existence, we glimpse something of the divine, something beyond the boundaries of time and space, grounded in God’s own self-giving nature.

    Everyone is the intelligible object of parental love, and so of dignity. (I think of the mothers of condemned murderers who still love their children; the dignity of the murderer is connected to this.) In the end, of God’s love grounds our dignity. We are all corrupted from the purity of the newborn baby at some point (sin) – few of us blossom fully. Indeed, in Christian belief, we fall so short of what we were created to be that we cease to be intelligible objects of human love – as a result of sin (or ego-centered fantasy consciousness that dissolves bonds of love and distorts reality), we cannot see ourselves as intelligible objects of a lucid love as we are.  Strange as it seems, we cannot see ourselves as we are unless we imagine ourselves as created and loved by God, who is Love-Goodness-Being-Truth himself (these words being synonyms that reveal different aspects of the same). Thus we cannot see the dignity in others, really. Thus talk of ‘human dignity’ tends to remain abstract. That is why I focus on the purest experience – loving children or other human beings (or whatever) – to help me see what ‘dignity’ amounts to. Our finite minds grasp these profound truths through real, lived experience. Concrete acts of love — patient care, compassionate presence, quiet sacrifice — reveal the unshakable dignity of the other, and in doing so, they reveal something of God. These acts are small reflections of the infinite, echoes of a love that is deeper and more lasting than any human affection, more constant than any earthly value.

    Great art, too, unveils these mysteries. In the brushstrokes of a master, the notes of a symphony, or the lines of a story, we find love portrayed, dignity unveiled. Art becomes a language of truth, conveying the beauty and depth of human existence, the unearned and enduring worth of each person. It invites us to see what is otherwise invisible: the sanctity of a life, the beauty of a soul, the so-called dignity rooted in the love that called it into being.

    I recall being moved by the movie Spartacus (directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, and Peter Ustinov) as a boy. That scene in the dungeon where Spartacus – in gladiator school – is offered a slave woman to ravage and the owner and trainer look down from below into the cell to enjoy the pornographic spectacle. But Spartacus retains (amazingly) some of his original innocence. In that dungeon, as Spartacus cries out, "I am not an animal," he resists being reduced to something less than human, refusing to accept a view of himself as an object or a mere tool for another’s ends. He ennobles human sexuality. His cry is an affirmation of his intrinsic dignity, a dignity that, although trampled by the structures around him, cannot be erased. The slave woman Varinia’s quiet, “me neither,” echoes this recognition of their shared humanity — a bond that transcends their status, power, or circumstances. Here, dignity is not something created by either Spartacus or the woman; it is simply present, a truth waiting to be recognized and respected. The damn Romans are of course blind to it.

   The artistry of this scene amplifies this revelation of human dignity. The dim, almost claustrophobic lighting contrasts with the boundless freedom inherent in their dignity, which no chain can truly contain. The music swells to evoke empathy, urging us to see the humanity of Spartacus and the other slaves, calling forth emotions of solidarity and sorrow. Kubrick’s use of close-up shots in that scene also places the viewer intimately with Spartacus and the woman, highlighting their expressions of defiance, hope, and recognition. It’s as though the camera invites the audience to participate in their inner realization of self-worth, underscoring that their dignity — though denied by society — is profound, inalienable, and rooted in something deeper than social status.

    This moment in Spartacus pictures true human dignity, pictures how it exists independently of societal recognition and power. By refusing to be reduced to porn stars (animals), Spartacus and Varinia reveal a truth about the human person — that each person has inherent worth, simply by virtue of being human. In this sense, the film provides a glimpse of dignity as an objective reality, unshakable and shared, portrayed vividly through the medium of art. 

    In love, in the depth of our encounters with beauty, we come closest to understanding that dignity is not ours to bestow or to remove. It is a gift, written into the very essence of being. And to contemplate this is to touch upon the eternal — to glimpse a reality in which all things are held together by a love that does not fail, a goodness that does not fade. In this light, to love is to honor what already is, to see each other and all creation as God sees us: infinitely worthy, “good, very good.” All these are pictures, like Spartacus. I think this is all either an illusion or a leak from another realm. They are a response to a reality that eludes our concepts but not our imaginations and our hearts.

. . .

    A philosophy that champions individual autonomy as the creation of one's own value, truth, and reality is radically incommensurable with a worldview in which dignity and value are intrinsic to being itself. In a self-created framework, value becomes fluid, reliant on personal choice and preference, detaching from any enduring essence or objective measure. Such a philosophy severs the individual from a shared reality, transforming dignity from a universally given gift into a subjective assertion, contingent upon personal assertion rather than grounded in a transcendent source. The result is a profound instability, as each person becomes both the source and arbiter of truth and value — an isolated project of self-definition cut off from any inherent connectedness to others. This ultimately leads to a fragmentation of meaning, where truths cannot be shared and value becomes provisional, threatening the very idea of human dignity, which in an objective framework rests on the infinite love and goodness of a Creator who calls all things into being.

. . .

     The Christian understanding of human dignity inverts the original Roman understanding of Dignitas. While Roman dignity was closely tied to social status, honor, and rank — reserved for the nobility — the Christian perspective democratizes dignity, asserting that every human being possesses inherent worth regardless of their social standing, achievements, or personal characteristics. This shift reflects the core Christian belief that all people are created in the image of God, thus endowed with dignity that is universal and unassailable. Christianity teaches that all people have inherent dignity. This dignity comes from being created in the image of God. It is not based on social standing or achievements.

   Nietzsche, the popularizer of the modern conception of autonomy (taking over the principle characteristic not of the real nobility but of the figure of Satan, as depicted by Milton), hated this inversion. He sees it as a form of slave morality. This morality values traits like humility and meekness. Nietzsche prefers master morality, which values strength and creativity. He believes the noble should define their own values i.e. be autonomous. Modern culture reflects these ideas. It promotes individualism and the idea of autonomy. People are encouraged to create their values and truths. This connects to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch: we are all little Übermenschen (supermen). In other words, narcissists.

    Sartre also shares similar thoughts. He says people exist before they have a purpose. They must create their own meaning. Both thinkers reject moral reality, the reality of people and other beings. They see morality as shaped by individuals. My love for my children is my choice, not a response to their independent reality. I can choose not to love them and no violation of their reality would happen. He emphasizes so-called authenticity and the need to live true to oneself. But not as the person you are but the person your ego-consciousness imagines you to be, wills you to be. [This expresses the form social consciousness takes within a particular mode of life: capitalism-science-technology.]

    Narcissism is a cousin of Nietzschean/Sartrean autonomy, where the ideal of self-creation becomes a self-centered fantasy detached from reality. While Nietzsche champions the idea of the Übermensch, an individual who asserts their will and creates their own values, narcissism focuses on self-gratification and rejecting the most profound truths. Instead of being attuned to reality, the narcissist constructs a false self that craves admiration and validation while disregarding the perspectives and the reality of others. Self-indulgent fantasy ultimately leads to isolation and a shallow existence as opposed to attending to real people and things – and deepening that attending.

    From the perspective of the fantasizing ego, this is the way the world looks. From the perspective of love, the Catholic view is how the world looks. 

    The tragedy of narcissistic autonomy is that it is a defense mechanism, a reaction to the inability to find oneself love-able, to find oneself precious, good, worthy of existence. That is the black hole around which narcissistic fantasy revolves – the bigger the black hole the more powerless to escape. Trump is what happens when the black hole becomes as deep as Hell. (Hitler. Mussolini. Musk. I could go on.) The desperate need to construct a self that others will love – indeed in the extreme case worship – reminds me of the Tin Man (The Wizard of Oz) who wanted a heart: he had it the whole time but needed external validation to believe in it. The autonomous self is turned toward external validation. So it reveals itself as utterly dependent on the perceptions of other narcissistic selves, not autonomous at all. The solution to the problem of narcissism is to attune yourself to reality. We are all, objectively, precious, loved. And if someone says that they reject that reality for a fantasy in which they are worshipped (e.g. as cool), well, we should know who they follow then.

  This is the spiritual crisis of my country. As I say, it has sociological grounds. Autonomy – this false autonomy – is the primary form of social consciousness generated by capitalism-science-technology at this stage of its dominance. Particular ideologies, whether on the Woke or MAGA (or some other) spectrum all reflect this underlying form of social consciousness, this alienation from reality, this blindness to truth. Having your own truth is to be blind to the truth. And if this is the social consciousness generated by the regime capitalism-science-technology (the synergy of all three working as one unholy trinity), then it reveals the essence of that particular regime.  It is all a kind of idolatry. 

p.s. I don't think liberalism as a philosophy is Satanic. It contains some important truths: the individual as the foundation of a political order, limited government, consent of the governed, free flow of ideas, etc. - all good ideas. But what was wrong with liberalism is that it interpreted these ideas in a way to make them compatible with capitalism (e.g. the individual is understood as basically self-interested and rational in that sense i.e. homo economicus). But it is capitalism, not liberalism, that is the essence opposed to human nature. 

 Sophists and Liberals

                               

 

    I re-read perhaps my favorite dialog of Plato yesterday, the Gorgias. In the Gorgias, Plato explores the difference between the rhetoric of those masters of persuasion, the Sophists, on the one hand, which is designed to give those who master it the power to win influence over the assembly (courts and legislature) and thus a key to power in Athens, and Socratic dialog as the primary form of discourse for the lovers of wisdom on the other. This turns out not just to be of academic interest; it goes all the way down.

       The position of Gorgias and his supporters Polus and Callicles is familiar to us: it is the philosophy of advertisers, propagandists, and on a lesser scale of everyday political rhetoric –the part art, and part science of getting people to think like you want them to think, act like you want them to act; or to narrow and amplify their prejudices to use for your own purposes. Just a few of the well-known techniques: well, the list of fallacies in any introductory logic course is a good place to start – attacks against the person, appeals to the crowd, getting off the subject, distorting the opponent's opinions, etc. The more heavy guns are of course building up fear and anxiety, scapegoating, negative stereotyping, subliminal suggestion, spin, creating ‘alternative facts’, disinformation campaigns, and so on. Basically, the rhetorician on this view is like an engineer, like a strip miner looking for the most efficient technical means to get the minerals out of the earth he wants: the human beings to be persuaded are ‘nature’ or ‘raw material’; the rhetorician finds the right technique to manipulate or exploit it to serve whatever human purpose the rhetorician has, even ‘progressive’ purposes.

         Socrates contrasts this, in his view ‘worthless’, means of persuasion to his kind of exploratory philosophical conversation aimed at unveiling as much truth as the conversation partners, being the people they happen to be, can unveil. This turns out to go so deep because it involves two very different and incompatible conceptions of the human soul, human life, and what it means to live a valuable life. And while exploring these differences a kind of moral truth was uncovered, I think to the astonishment of Plato himself. 

        I cannot help but see represented in the Gorgias position the dominant ideology of Western capitalist countries, Lockean liberalism, as Louis Hartz termed it – it includes both ‘conservative’ (e.g. Republican) and ‘liberal-progressive’ (left-Democrat) variations. Not that Lockean liberals consciously identify with the a-morality of Polus or Callicles – the line is drawn for different reasons at violence (and making sure no one becomes a violence-using tyrant) but a deeper affinity does exist (and violence is never far under the surface). It consists of this: the picture of a human being as an autonomous self-forming, like a sovereign nation, a little absolute, with its own purposes and wishes, defining its own needs, its own good – in separation from any overarching conception of community or morality beyond the legal minimum deemed necessary (in Hobbesian logic) for protection. The domination of many people by the few through communication technologies and techniques (in the broadest sense) is defined as part of the freedom of the autonomous self to ‘speech’. As there is no external standard by which to measure truth, reality, the good, justice, and so on, but only the transient agreements among competing and allied autonomous selves, it makes no sense to think of judging these agreements, based on individual acts and decisions, to a higher standard of truth or justice.

         My position on the wars against terrorism is not to be judged by the standards of truth, justice, or prudence but rather just reveals to others of my society who I am, my values, and so on – and that’s it. The way people position themselves on abortion or homosexual marriage, being Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian, on mask-wearing during a pandemic, on religion or secular naturalism, and so on: the different views are not really conceived as different beliefs about what is true and good, open to discussion, but as expressions of identities constructed in opposition to one another, which is to say a way of defining the sovereignty of an individual. To disagree is to reject the person, to put oneself in opposition to a person. Each side sees the other as either ignorant or wicked. The discourse is correspondingly one of war by other means. It is not a matter of getting deep insight into the truth of these matters, or honestly examining oneself, but self-identification against some other autonomous self, and self-assertion in the marketplace of autonomous selves. Gorgias is the right teacher for both groups; neither would have much use for Socrates. (In the Trump era, even basic facts are now located in the sphere of one’s autonomy; not only the determination of the right and the good, but the real is something people decide for themselves – and the Gorgias’ of today attempt to influence.)  

        This gets deep because it raises the questions that so astound Polus and Callicles:  Socrates’ convictions that good and evil are absolute and completely beyond the competence of mere nature or the human will; that the virtues such as justice and wisdom require truthfulness and the willingness to submit yourself to philosophical dialogue in order to form the mind and heart not to infantile or adolescent nature but to adult, moral nature – human nature seen through the clearer lens the mind that loves truth and virtue rather than the mind that wants to strip mine it or define itself by its basest desires;  the discovery that human beings are limits to the will like nothing else in nature, the distinctive terribleness of wrong others. In this understanding of our humanity, our desires, and self-definitions are not self-authenticating, and thinking of them as part of your ‘identity’ doesn’t change that. The self is in truth not analogous to a sovereign nation with rhetoric and its ministry of propaganda; the self is fundamentally ignorant, a never-ending work-in-progress, but open to a reality that is more wonderful than those who see nature as a war of all against all can imagine.

 

 Morality, the Soul, and the Body in Plato 

          The ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings made me think about this, and reminded me of the first time I thought of it with the ring in the story offered by Glaucon in Plato’s Republic.  This being the essence of morality. Glaucon was basically demanding a justification of morality or goodness from Socrates – for the reader the reference is clear: given that Socrates, who was poor and powerless, – and the wisest and most just – was executed for being a corrupter of the youth, and those with the power to execute him were considered good and just, what good is the good? What good is justice? In the tale a certain Gyges gains possession of a ring which makes him invisible, making it possible for him though deceit, theft, and murder to gain unlimited power to fulfill his desires. Deceit is necessary for power as it allows for the control of the minds of others, of what they see things as; this, in turn, enables the power man to also control people’s ideas of him and those such as Socrates: Gyges is the contrast to Socrates. Gyges has not only the unlimited power to fulfill his every desire, but controls even more absolutely than Donald Trump over his crowd of worshippers his ‘image.’ He is thought to be very good, while Socrates was thought of as absurd at best, corrupt and corrupting at worst; Gyges was thought ‘happy’; Socrates was executed in disgrace. Why be good when you can have everything you want by being evil with the ring, remaining invisible and unpunished? Why is wanting what you should, what is worthy of a human being, better than getting what you want? Doesn’t power make you happy if it is the power to get anything you want? Isn’t, if we are ‘realistic’, the only thing standing between us and great happiness the lack of the power to get what we want? The argument for the ring is simple: if we can only be ‘happy’ when we get what we happen to want, and if the ring would give us that power, then the ring would make us ‘happy.’ Injustice facilitates happiness, if one has a ring.

            For Plato, Gyges is the most pitiable of men, and Socrates the most blessed. That seems paradoxical, but a man is blessed only when he strives for that with is worthy and which he needs. (A dog of a friend once pulled down a whole plate for bourbon balls and ate every one; the dog spent the rest of the evening miserable and vomiting.) Happiness or blessedness is a state of soul. The needs of the soul: justice, courage, wisdom, love, and truth. A soul deprived of nourishment will weaken and decay. And now the crucial point: the kind of desires that Gyges could fulfill with the ring of invisibility were not those of the soul, but the unending appetites of the body – like an addict, the fulfilling of these desires is like trying to fill a sieve up with water.

            I do not accept the identification of the desire for the power to get what you want with the body. Tolkien’s ring story helps me here, and the Catholic Christianity that nourished his imagination. In Catholic (and most Christian) theology, God is love. Thus God cannot be a radically singular ‘I’ as an isolated ‘I’ could not really love. Love is a relationship, and God is a community for Christians, symbolized by the Trinity. Sauron is a pure will-to-power. Sauron’s ring radically cuts its bearer off from relationship, from community with the Creation and other living creatures. The bearer is alone with the eye. There is no room for an ‘other’, for two ‘I’s’. It isolates its bearer in its radical ‘autonomy’, giving the bearer the power to create good and evil, to determine what ‘justice’ is. This has nothing fundamentally to do with the body, though the body becomes, like the rest of nature, an object to be exploited, ‘property’ if you will. The elevation of the self at the expense of the reality of other selves and nature, the severing of essential connections and relations – that is the origin of corruption, and not the body. The body is not the enemy, but our allowing our ‘self’ to become absolute.

    

Is psychology a science? Bad Thinking and Ideology.

     I watched a YouTube video on this. YouTube videos are a perfect way to package ‘information’ that is really masked worldview, bad thinking, or ideology (propaganda). They almost exclude careful thinking about their text – the video presents its ‘information’ not as a move in a conversation, not in order to raise questions and stimulate thought, but to give its audience an easy ‘truth’ to work with, to show off with, to act on – one that confirms their own prejudices often. It is wearisome work as these issues are not really on the cutting edge of philosophy of science – actually long refuted, or as close to refuted as you get in philosophy;  but I will break down one of these videos: certainly not the worst, but all the more dangerous because it could be confused as ‘educational.’ The speaker’s name is Hank Green. He wants to pontifically inform the audience that psychology is a science and ignore both the metaphysics and morality of psychology grounded in its metaphysics as practiced. 

 

§  Psychology is the science of what makes humans tick. Yes, psychology is a science.

 

·         A science of ‘what makes humans tick.’ The metaphor is taken from a clock – what makes a watch tick. You look inside and find the spur gears, an unwinding spring, the driving wheel, etc.; you can see how it all works. That is supposed to be a metaphor for the way our inner lives ‘tick’ – if they ‘tick’ at all! Of course, if our inner lives are strongly analogous to a mechanical clock (or electric clock), then science is the perfect method to understand them better. But it is at least highly debatable that our inner lives are remotely like this. Yet the uncritical use of the metaphor has suggestive force, basically setting the parameters for the reality of the inner life (the ‘object’ of study) and thus begging the most fundamental question in the ‘debate.’

 

§  People have been debating this pretty much since psychology started as a science back in the 1800’s. You can sort of see why people might think psychology doesn’t count as science.

 

·         Psychology conceived as a science does have its roots in the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution of modernity. Precisely the worldview dominated by the mechanical view of the universe (as a clock-like reality). The first psychologists were all people who firmly believed that the inner life was like a clock and that psychology was the science to uncover what made us tick. Notice the way he phrases things, with the subtext: ‘Psychology obviously is a science as anyone who has studied it knows, but there are some superficial reasons why the uninitiated might mistake certain appearances that seem to suggest otherwise. I will proceed to debunk these.’ The force of this passage is to make the ‘debate’ into confusion; once one understands the matter one will see there is really nothing to debate. It is like ‘debating’ the meaning of a Bible text with a fundamentalist who thinks the literal meaning is obvious. One could see how someone who has not seen the light could mistake it for something other than it plainly is; it is the job of the preacher or missionary to enlighten that person. The very confidence with which one dismisses serious alternative conceptions suggests to the unknowing (often willfully unknowing) that the full weight of ‘common sense’ is behind the speaker. The Enlightenment becomes fundamentalist and dissolves itself.

 

§   The study of the human mind is often missing the tightly-controlled experimental conditions and conclusive results that you’ll find in other fields, like astronomy or chemistry. And yeah, psychology research can be tricky because brains are complicated. But it’s still a science.

 

·         Notice the ‘reasons’ listed why you can almost understand why laypersons might get confused about the status of psychology as a science are all problems conforming to a model of natural science: physics, astronomy, chemistry – sciences that investigate inorganic matter, sciences that seek to uncover regularities in the universe conceived as inorganic, and explain them by looking into the mechanics of it (the universe as a clock). Obviously, we don’t have a mechanics of the ‘brain’ that in any way replicates the models that exist in chemistry and physics. But the brain is a phenomenon that can be studied in the same way; no one disputes that. Neuroscience is making progress in uncovering the regularities of human brains and offering biochemical explanations of the gears and wheels that make the brain tick. Is, therefore, psychology today the same as neuroscience? And what can neuro-science tell me about my inner life? Can it tell me how to raise my boys? Whether I should retire? What my relationship with their mother should be? With the wife that I abandoned? Who to vote for? How to understand the characters of Huck Finn and Jim from Twain’s novel? What I should devote the rest of my life to? Whether my love of the boys’ mother was real? Whether my reaction against my son’s week-long class trip is overblown? Can it tell me anything about my grief over my father’s death or the meaning of his life? Why did I fall in love with two troubled women?  I think not. Surely psychology should have something to say about our inner lives? Psychology as neuroscience may have some medical and technological applications – some of these might be good; all should be critically scrutinized. But I don’t believe the speaker wants to say that psychology has merged into neuroscience. Why then the talk about the brain as the object of psychological investigation? Is psychology a science? It depends on what you mean by ‘psychology’ and ‘science’!

 

§  Now defining science is surprising because there is no standard definition that everybody agrees on. But most people would probably agree with this: science is systematically observing natural events, and then using those observations to develop laws and principles. Then those principles are tested through the scientific method, that list of steps you probably learned in your first science class – observation, hypothesis, experimentation, analysis, and conclusion.

 

·         Well, I wouldn’t because it is not clear what it means. What is it to observe ‘systemically’; what is a ‘natural event’? What is a ‘law’? What is a ‘principle’? And what is the difference between them? Notice how the method perfectly matches the object it is supposed to investigate: the clock-like universe. Now anyone who has any understanding of science can recognize how over-simplified this understanding is (he suggests some important qualifications below, but they don’t get to the heart of the oversimplification).

 

·         In the morning I listened to a fugue of Bach. Imagine a psychologist systematically observing what he takes to be a ‘natural event.’ What would he see? What would make the observations ‘systematic’? Well, he doesn’t see much. Blinks, twitches, scratches, a few slight twisting or turning movements, steady breathing, certain facial expressions (perhaps using math to describe them?), etc. etc. etc. All my brain and body events are in principle observable (e.g. hormonal changes, neurological changes, etc.) Perhaps he goes on to observe other people listening to a Bach fugue: sometimes he observes similar kinds of bodily events; sometimes very different ones. I guess what makes it systematic is first of all the purpose of observing events of something ‘listening to a Bach fugue’ – which is hardly natural but gives the observations a focus, and prevents the observations from being totally random. Why? Perhaps to understand the psychology of responding to music. In any case, systematic observations are always focused by a certain intent and purpose. We know this even from the natural sciences: a scientist does not just start observing but observes events already partly conceived in a certain way as relevant or not for a particular theoretical purpose – falsifying a particular hypothesis about what makes a person tick.

 

·         Three things need to be said about this picture of things. 1)If by ‘natural events’ and ‘systematic observation’ the scientific psychologist means to exclude the whole idea of ‘meaning’ from the practice of listening to a Bach fugue – what makes music different from the mere sound waves produced in a song; what makes the experience of listening to music, the unique kind of pleasure the beauty of a musical work can afford and the meaning such a piece can have for a person (for me, a kind of substitute for prayer, but also many other meanings) – no such consideration is by any standard a ‘natural event’. The point is this: if psychology blocks out the very idea of meaning because it imagines itself to be investigating something that works like a clock – my inner feelings, intentions, thoughts, meanings on this understanding being nothing but the effect of certain unseen mechanical processes – then rather than being a science of my soul (psyche in Greek) but is the science of explaining away my soul, of reducing it to categories used to understand inorganic nature insofar as it behaves in ways analogous to a clock. 2) The scientific process of blocking out meanings and emotions is itself one meaningful expression; you cannot get outside of meaning. Science is like a telescope or a microscope – it reveals things about the physical universe that are not visible to the naked eye of common sense; the reflective eye of wisdom, contemplation, philosophy; or the poetic eye of art, religion, myth. But if science – here, psychology conceived and practiced as science – imagines its microscope in the only way answering the questions like ‘What is the soul? What is a human being?; or imagines these questions are reducible to the question What makes us tick? – then we have left the realm of science far behind and are dealing with an unrecognized totalizing, reductionist metaphysical interpretation of reality as a whole. And since science does not take place in a vacuum, we must ask what motivates this metaphysical interpretation of reality? And we must answer: even as the modernist Entzauberung of nature (disenchantment of the world; emptying of all intrinsic, symbolic meaning) was the prelude to power over nature, typically resulting in the rape of nature for profit, so the will to see scientific psychology as the only legitimate psychology, however well-intended, is a prelude to power over human nature, with the same potential to do to human nature what science-technology-capitalism has done to the rest of nature. Indeed, an investigation into the role of scientific psychology in the practice of mass manipulation through the media, from corporate advertising to Russian disinformation, would be illuminating. Psychology can be practiced as a science, of course; but it needs strict monitoring by ethical authorities when so practiced, as the potential for weaponizing its findings is so great. The danger is human nature becomes reduced to the picture of human nature scientific psychology makes of it at any given time (e.g. Frederick Taylor’s scientific factory management theory; B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). 3) Is psychology a science? Depends on what you mean by ‘psychology’ and ‘science’. I would just point out that in fact there are serious conceptions of psychology that are not scientific in Green’s sense: for example, Viktor Frankel’s logotherapy with its emphasis on meaning or Carl Rogers's humanistic psychology. And there are serious conceptions of science that do not conform in the least to Green’s simple model (the Greek conception, for example).

 

§  Still these are just basic guidelines and most branches of science will operate a little differently from one another. Like, particle physics can’t directly observe the Higgs boson. Instead, they rely on statistics to know it’s there. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that physics isn’t actually science. The so-called rules of science all depend on the type of work a scientist is doing, and psychology is no exception.

 

·         These are valid points. I want to focus on the reality of what cannot be observed in physics and psychology. Of course, direct observation is impossible at the subatomic level; physics relies on its general theories, the observation of effects, and description through mathematical equations. However complex this is in practice, it makes sense based on the foundational assumptions of physics about the object of their study – the material universe as describe-able and/or predictable by means of mathematical equations. The problem with the analogy to the mind is this: what cannot be observed, meaning, the human spirit, does not fit in with the foundational assumptions of physics. If the foundational assumptions of physics are not taken as metaphysically absolute conditions of reality, but as an aspect, a level of a more complex reality, then no philosophical problem arises. If, however, psychology assumes the foundational assumptions of physics as an absolute metaphysical truth applying to everything in the universe including the human mind, then that which is not observable is simply written off as unreal.

 

Again, this is wearisome work. I would put most academic philosophy professors to sleep (others I might upset). And yet on YouTube – and I suspect many introductory college classrooms – distortedly metaphysical versions of subjects like psychology. Psychology is often a lifestyle (complete with metaphysics and values) parading as science. 

An Attitude towards a Soul – The Absurdity of Metaphysical Reductionism

 

            Although on the surface of grammar it seems possible to assert we live in a Matrix, and of course we cannot know that we do not, it is not ultimately (humanly) intelligible.  In a passage that goes to the core of this issue, Wittgenstein wrote:

 

'I believe that he is suffering.'  – Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?  It would go against the grain to use the word in both connections.  (Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am I certain that he is not an automaton?  Nonsense!). . . .  'I believe that he is not an automaton', just like that, so far makes no sense.  My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.  I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.

 

The implication of this passage is radical: not only, as a matter of fact, is the question “Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?” absurd in the sense that it uses a particular language in nonsensical ways; the implication is that it must be absurd in any possible human language, just as impossible for us to imagine as a round square. If I have understood the passage correctly, Wittgenstein's thoughts show that the idea that our conscious life is a shadow of the really REAL conceived as physical events that can be investigated by science is as unintelligible as a round square.

            Of course, if our inner life is nothing but a shadow of physical processes obeying physical laws, then we must imagine ourselves to be automata.  If someone's grief over the loss or a loved one or remorse over a wrong done to some loved one are nothing but insubstantial shadows cast by (what source of light?) the Real physical events taking place in those people's brains and bodies, then what else could they be?  The conscious experience of grief or remorse would then be like a computer screen where what appears is a function of the programming, which itself is determined by physical laws.  The shadow “remorse” (with all the language of remorse: “Oh my God, what have I done”) seduces us into thinking thoughts like “The person who was wronged was unique,” “I could have acted otherwise,” “I can make and keep promises,” and the like – shadows so dark they prevent us from seeing the reality that we are nothing more than automata carrying our physical programs, more complex than the orbit of the planets, perhaps, but just as mechanical.

            People's behavior (at least in science fiction – the Body Snatchers! and perhaps some bureaucrats!) could conceivably make one wonder whether they are automata. Given certain contexts it might indeed make sense to ask the question of a particular person.  But just so? Wittgenstein's point is that robot-like behavior could count as evidence of being an automaton only against the background that no one could seriously doubt that you have real thoughts and feelings.  And if one can't seriously doubt this, then one can't intelligibly entertain the notion our inner lives are nothing but physiological states. This “primitive” response to others as sentient (“attitude towards a soul”) is not an assumption, conjecture, hypothesis, or bit of knowledge concerning the reality of thoughts and feelings; assumptions, conjectures, hypotheses, and knowledge invite questions about whether they are justified. That you are a sentient being is not something we can seriously doubt because sentience happens prior to all thinking and asking questions:  thus it is not something we can sanely question or “have an opinion about.”  It is, in fact, the precondition (like being alive) of doubting, asking questions, and having opinions in the first place.  Grammatically you can ask whether I have an opinion on the question of whether the rest of the people in the class are automata; logically, the question is meaningless.

            The notion that our inner life is a shadow is so obviously flawed, I am tempted to coin the new name for this (actually quite ancient) logical fallacy in its honor – the Matrix fallacy.  This occurs whenever one wants to abandon the difficult job of critically and honestly reflecting on experience, and tries to underwrite one's own particular attitude with – and merely deduce it from – a hypothesis concerning ultimate Reality. All metaphysically reductive hypotheses are like this: Love is nothing but . . . physical events, conditioned behavior, the play of signifiers, discourse masking the will-to-power, a bourgeois ideology, subconscious libidinal forces, and so on – the list of the candidates for the really Real is (embarrassingly) quite long.   One could define the Matrix fallacy so:  one starts off by wanting to account for something meaningful and ends up explaining away the reality of what one began by wanting to account for.  One saws off the very branch one is sitting on.

The Fly in the Bottle – On the Absurdity of the Attempted Escape from Language and Experience in Thought 

            The desire to leap to a reality outside of language and experience is the attempt to see the world as if from no place within it – as we perhaps imagine God sees it, infallibly. Wittgenstein compared it to the attempt of the fly to get out of the bottle. But what comes clear from my argument is that the whole idea of getting out of the bottle seems unintelligible, since without the bottle of language and experience there would be no intellectual space at all.  To illustrate this we can examine one particular attempt to make the leap: call it the Matrix argument, the notion that the complex of our language and lived experience is the shadow of what is ultimately Real – the physical processes of the sort investigated by natural science.  For example, Romeo's love for Juliet is claimed to be really only the shadow of certain scientifically describable physical events in Romeo's body.  But the leap turns out not so much to be false as a leap into empty space.

            Of course, we are liable to error about love.  Romeo was sure he loved Rosalind, but later realized that it was not so much love but youthful infatuation.  He really loved Juliet.  And who knows, without the drama of circumstances he may have come to realize that, too, was a fairly superficial matter.  But that is not the Matrix argument's problem; that is a problem of language-and-experience which per hypothesis is to count as Unreal, as a shadow of the Real.  The Matrix argument claims a priori that experience is always and necessarily a shadow of ultimate Reality, which consists of physical events: a mathematician constructing a complex proof, a composer at work on a sonata, the astrophysicist trying to figure out the riddle of dark matter, the experience of beauty, grief or despair – these are to count as only the shadows of the real biochemical events.  

            But to know whether our language-mediated experiences of love, beauty, or constructing a mathematical proof are only shadows, one would have to have a clear and distinct experience of certain knowledge into the truth: we can't know x is a shadow unless we know the reality (X) that x is a shadow of.  Clearly, we only know that our particular experience of the sun rising is distorted only by finding a way to look at it truly, from a more comprehensive perspective.  But to conjecture that all experience is always a shadow – to know our conscious experience of life in the world is like the Matrix – we would need not a more comprehensive perspective within experience, but a perspective outside of experience itself as we know it, a view of the inner life “as if from nowhere in it.”  Yet we can only step outside of one experience into another. 

            To illustrate the point: Assume Romeo is a budding scientist. Romeo as a scientist must step outside of his experience of love as Romeo the lover of Juliet, and can map the brain-body states which seem to correspond to his being in love.  He concludes that brain state x correlates to his love for Juliet – and then believes that his love is just brain state x. (Would he still love Juliet?)  But the thinking about and mapping of  his bodily states are also ways of experiencing, just as is testing to see whether the sun rises – science is also experience, a human practice with its own concepts.  So now “Tybalt” – another scientist – comes along and maps the brain states of Romeo in the act of doing science, and concludes that his new belief about his love for Juliet being nothing but brain state x itself is only brain state y.  And then another scientist appears and maps Tybalt's brain state z, and so on, ad infinitum.  As C. S. Lewis commented on this infinite regress: “Where is the rot to end?”          

            In fact, in the Matrix argument we have come upon a hypothesis that we cannot actually seriously imagine.   Of course, this argument doesn't “prove” that our inner lives our real any more than the Matrix argument proves they are unreal.  It does prove that this way of thinking leads to a dead end – or, to return to the original metaphor, to an empty universe in which the concept of space itself signifies nothing.

 

 Is love just a physiological state?  – A Case of Confused Reductionism

 

            Recently an intelligent student wondered in class whether love just is a particular physiological state.  So I take it she was asking us to seriously consider whether Romeo's love of Juliet was just a particular physiological state in Romeo.  Theoretically then, if we wanted to know whether one might apply to concept love to Romeo and Juliet, we could just look and see whether the particular physiological state which science has identified as love is present, similar to a diagnosis like cancer, which just is the presence of cancerous cells in the body. The implied argument is that immaterial souls don’t exist and physiological states accompany all our mental states; thus the physiological states and the mental states are reducible to one another. But this notion is not so much false as interestingly confused, revealing that not every grammatically well-formed question is an intelligible question.         

             The question Is love nothing but a physiological state? runs together a question about the meaning of love with a question about what physiological events may accompany certain experiences of love.  One sees this in the answer proposed by the intelligent student: “Love is a physiological state that can be investigated by science.” The concept of love is being classified as, or even identified with, a physiological event – in principle observable and measurable. But questions about using concepts involve meaning and whether particular uses of the concepts make sense – not observing and measuring. These questions are logically quite distinct from finding out about particular empirical states like hormone levels or brain maps. 

            Some examples should make the distinction clearer.  Questions about the meaning of love might be: Does Romeo really love Juliet? Is he perhaps only infatuated, as he was with Rosalind? To answer one must already understand the meaning of love and whether it can be applied to Romeo.  Scientific questions about love might be: What physiological state occurs (if any) in Romeo when he is love with Rosalind? With Juliet? Are they the same? Do these physiological states occur in all people who may be described as 'being in love’?  These two sets of questions both make sense; one knows in principle about how to go about looking for answers in each case.

            But the reductionist’s question wanted to dissolve the former kind of question into the latter, implying that we could find out the meaning of any concept by empirical investigation into body states turns out to be perfectly unintelligible.  Indeed, how would one go about finding answers to Is love just a physiological state? Certainly not by investigating Romeo's body states, for that would only answer the scientific questions such as Romeo’s hormone levels when what we want to know is whether love is just these hormone levels.  And the question in fact presuppose that we have already identified Romeo as being in love – that we already know how to apply the concept meaningfully.  Thus the scientific investigation cannot tell us how to apply the concept for the simple reason that no scientific investigation into love is even conceivable unless we already know how to use language – already know what it is to be in love.  How can MRI graphics (or blood tests) tell me anything about Romeo's love when I would already have to understand what this was before I could measure his hormone levels and mapping his brain states?

           To take another example: the confusion would be like trying to find the meaning of beauty by studying the atomic structure of trees.  The atomic structure of a beautiful tree would be indistinguishable from atomic structures of other things unless one was already able to distinguish trees from other objects as well as the beautiful from the non-beautiful; this in turn presupposes prior knowledge of how to apply the concept of beauty (and tree).  How can an empirical investigation tell me that the tree is beautiful if I already have to understand beauty (and tree) before I can even begin to investigate beautiful objects scientifically?     

            The – as it turns out rather odd – idea that love just is a physiological state reveals a confusion made possible because of the gap between the surface grammar of the language and the actual meaningful use of the language. Is love just a physiological state? is a well-formed grammatical question that is no real question because it doesn't make sense – we don't really have an idea of how to even begin to go about answering it, no more than we know how to find the chemical formula for beauty or how to locate Gödel's proof or Bach's Goldberg variations on a MRI of the brain.  No measurable data “out there” can determine the meaning of a concept. 

 

Is Love the Shadow of Physiological Events? 

         Recently one of my students wondered in class whether love was just a physiological state, and I argued that nothing empirical like a brain state could determine the meaning and proper application of a concept. I suppose the serious asker of the question might think my response in terms of logical analysis ignores the metaphysical thrust of the student's question, and thus begs it. To avoid confusion: the Matrix argument is not a possible scientific hypothesis. It is true that properly scientific investigation of love presupposes a view from the outside of the immediate lived experience.  But to ask whether the view from the outside (science) is the only valid view of Reality or, even more counter-intuitively, whether the view from the inside (experience) is necessarily unreal already goes beyond science.  No scientist worth the name would ever investigate such a question. How could one test it? What scientific experiment could possibly provide evidence for or against any possible answer to speculations about lived experience being necessarily illusory?  Mapping brain states implies nothing about experience except that one must (apparently) have a living brain to have it, and perhaps certain physical events in the brain correspond to certain mental activities and are a necessary condition for them to take place. 

A metaphysical question is not about this or that particular aspect of reality, but about Reality as such. We constantly make assumptions about ultimate Reality. One might believe, for example, that Reality excludes the possibility that lived experience can be real, that our experience is similar to the slaves of the popular film The Matrix; or, like most people, one can believe that our experience is of Reality. Metaphysical assumptions – in contrast to scientific hypotheses – can't be empirically tested.  But they can be analyzed to determine whether they are using language in a nonsensical way or guilty of logical fallacies – and in the problem of reducing love to physiological states, the escape from logical confusion by a leap onto the metaphysical plane simply magnifies the confusion.

            The question-hypothesis that love is just a body-brain state asks us to take seriously the possibility that the meanings of words and the experiences they are rooted in – in fact our whole inner life – are nothing but observable bodily events in space and time, or rather a kind of shadow of these events. Thus we are asked to take seriously the belief that only physical events which can in principle be studied by science are to count as “Real.”  If we could imagine this, then our use of the concept “love” and its various meanings would belong to this shadow of reality.  Thus to argue, as I have done, that determining what a concept means from how it is meaningfully used logically differs from investigating physical states of affairs would be to assume that something in the shadow world of language and conscious experience is real – and this is perhaps what the serious asker of the question “Is love just a physiological state?” wants to doubt.  In other words, we can't rely on language (and thus meanings, concepts, applications) because language is rooted in experience, and our experience is precisely what is said to distort what is really Real – the physical events. This, in effect, is to seriously consider the possibility that our inner life corresponds to something like the Matrix, with nature rather than a computer as program designer.  Let me call this the Matrix argument.          

            The advocate of the Matrix argument might thus claim that to distinguish between concepts and physical events as I did is to beg the question of whether concepts are real or rather only shadows of the physical, which was the way the original question about love should be understood. But this view is squarely – and fallaciously – based on how a metaphysical concept is (im-)properly used: Real, Reality. The argument might only make sense by applying a conceptual distinction between the Real and the Unreal (shadow): the set of possible physical events being assigned axiomatically to the set of the Real; the complex of concept-and-lived-experience (like love) to the Unreal. But obviously the meaning of the concepts Real / Unreal cannot itself be determined by referring to brain states depicted on a brain scan, since one could only call the scan graph a picture of the Real by applying the very concept in question – without that the graph couldn't tell us anything.  In other words, physical events without concepts are deaf and blind.

Furthermore, questions involving the meaning of the concept “real” are logically no different from the sort “What is the meaning of love?”  The entire Matrix argument in presuming to point to an ultimate reality beyond language thus presupposes the very language activity it is supposed to explain away – determining the meaning and proper application of a concept.  So if there is any question-begging going on, it is the advocate of the Matrix argument who is doing it.

            The desire to leap to a reality outside of language and experience is the attempt to see the world as if from no place within it – as we perhaps imagine God sees it, infallibly. Wittgenstein compared it to the attempt of the fly to get out of the bottle. But what comes clear from my argument is that the whole idea of getting out of the bottle seems unintelligible, since without the bottle of language and consciousness there would be no intellectual space at all.

 

The Neutral Observer – A Confused Epistemological Ideal

What gives the Matrix hypothesis – the notion that our experience of meaning is nothing but a shadow of a physical reality – its logical force for a not inconsiderable number of members of western scientific culture?  What underwrites the leap from doing science (investigating brain physiology) to believing in a particular metaphysical picture (only physical events like brain physiology are real)?  The force seems to come from a certain epistemological ideal – the Neutral Observer – which is in itself seems unproblematic for many kinds of activity like science and auto mechanics, but which becomes quite confused when elevated metaphysically to a perspective which transcends experience altogether such that it can legislate a priori which experiences are real and which aren't. 

            For the Neutral Observer, our experience of meaning structured by language is the enemy of truth.  The question of how many moons Jupiter has or whether the sun orbits around the earth has an answer which is in a sense “out there,” independently of whether particular human beings or groups' languages and cultures, independently of the varied interpretations of Jupiter altogether (e. g. as a god, a ball of gas, etc.).  Whether one is Lutheran, Catholic, or Atheist; whether one shares the cosmology of the cavemen, people living during the medieval period, or Newton, the answer is the same: only the subjective frameworks of the concrete human being get in the way, preventing some from seeing it. And indeed, for certain kinds of factual states of affairs, the neutral observer ideal seems to work; certain sorts of facts seem true independently of particular subjective frameworks. From this model with its limited applications, the advocate of the Matrix argument makes a metaphysical leap to get at the Truth. To know the Truth about Reality, one need only to assume the position of the Neutral Observer and observe Reality as a whole, bracketing out all subjective experience and relying on the impersonal methods of science.

            Trying to picture the Neutral Observer, we can do no better perhaps than to turn to AI (Artificial Intelligence), the designer of the Matrix.  AI is certainly outside experience as we know it.  Interestingly, AI does science: it knows human biology and something about human psychology.   Here in AI we seem indeed to have found what modernity has striven for – the metaphysical Neutral Observer, uninfluenced by the subjective life of everyday language users, emotional response, and all of the inner life.  AI as a Neutral Observer can see things as they really are, having no “veil of Maya” that has been cast over the phenomenal world by human experience, standing in the presence of the “things in themselves” as they are apart from the shadows of language and experience.

            But without language rooted in experience (the inside view), one can't even speak of knowledge at all, much less metaphysical knowledge of ultimate Reality.  Take the example of pain. AI of course is a bodiless machine. Assuming AI could recognize behavior and physiological states it could connect with the human word “pain” at all, and thus could observe pain behaviors in humans, map particular brain states, and so on: Has AI thereby understood pain in any meaningful sense? Explained it? Does AI know pain at all, much less what it can come to mean in the lives of human beings?  Having never experienced pain, how could AI even pick out “pain behavior” without error from the nearly endless other purely physical movements of human bodies?  A grimace wouldn't be in any way expressive to AI, no more than a caress.  To understand pain, an intelligent alien must understand the painfulness of pain. 

            What is true of pain is much truer of more complex meanings like love.  But without experience from the inside, AI would not have a clue what it was it was trying to understand – less so than we have of the strangest practice of the most (for us) exotic culture that has ever existed on earth:  we at least can begin knowing what it is to meaningfully experience.  AI could not recognize the difference between real suffering and an MRI of the brain.  The notion that our linguistically mediated experiential life is Plato's cave; that chemistry is the Real outside the cave; and that knowledge requires leaving this cave to see Reality as a machine intelligence – this is a reductio ad absurdum of the Matrix hypothesis and the Neutral Observer.  AI would have less chance to understand the human than the deaf would have to understand Bach's music or the blind Rembrandt's painting.

   Suppose a dimension of reality is not reducible to scientific categories as currently understood. In that case, we may hope that the life of the spirit and mind is part of the universe after all – that there are more things on Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by analytical philosophy and natural science.