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哲學 – 開欄文
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瀏覽6,759 ｜回應37｜推薦3 |
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杜蘭的《西洋哲學史話》不是我讀的第一本哲學書，記得在它之前我就讀過《老子》。但它是對我影響最大的幾本書之一。主要的原因是：
a. 它引起我對哲學的興趣；
b. 它奠定了我對哲學一知半解的基礎；以及
c. 整體來說，它堅定了我追求知識的決心(該欄開欄文第3節)。
順帶說一句：我不敢以「知識份子」自居，但頗以身為「讀書人」自豪(該欄開欄文及《目的、行動、和方法》一文)；也就對兩者都有所期許(該文第4節)。
我不是哲學系出身；但因為對「人應該如何自處」以及「人應該如何待人接物」這兩個問題很有興趣，免不了接觸到一些探討「基本問題」的書籍(請見本欄第二篇文章)。現在垂垂老矣，不再有讀書的腦力；只能把過去的心得做個整理，算是收收網吧。
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「理解框架」概念為思考盲點 - Paul Austin Murphy
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請參考本欄上一篇。
There Are No Conceptual Schemes
Paul Austin Murphy, 09/29/22
Philosopher Donald Davidson once wrote that conceptual schemes are deemed to be “ways of organizing experience”; as well as “systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation”. What’s more, “they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene”. From this line of reasoning (which Davidson himself rejected), we pass on to such things as “linguistic relativity” (or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) and, perhaps (!), Kuhnian paradigms and Wittgensteinian language games.
Let’s start off with Donald Davidson’s take on what conceptual schemes are supposed to be. Davidson wrote the following:
“Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene.”
This passage can be found in Davidson’s paper ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’. That paper at least partly inspired the following essay
Donald Davidson (1917–2003) 照片
Davidson (who died in 2003) was primarily responding to the thesis that different “individuals, cultures, or periods” have different conceptual schemes. What’s more, these schemes are said to be at odds — or even in conflict — with each other.
The position that Davidson was at least partially arguing against is what’s called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (It’s worth stressing here that Davidson certainly wasn’t doing anthropology, history or political commentary.) The following is one definition of that hypothesis:
“The simplest Sapir-Whorf hypothesis definition is a theory of language that suggests that the language a person speaks determines or influences how they think. According to Sapir-Whorf, a person’s native language has a major impact on how they see the world.”
This means that Davidson’s clause “we are told” (in the opening passage) gave his game away…
That game being his rejection of the very idea of a conceptual scheme.
Davidson’s position was that there is only one conceptual scheme.
This basically means that, in a strong sense, there are no conceptual schemes at all… Or at least there are no conceptual schemes as such things came to seen by certain philosophers — and, indeed, by various social scientists.
Crudely speaking, this particular take on conceptual schemes (i.e., the one which Davidson had a problem with) partially mirrors Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a scientific paradigm and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game. However, if anything, a conceptual scheme has been deemed to be much deeper and far broader than a (scientific or otherwise) paradigm or a language game. Indeed it can even be argued that paradigms and language games must themselves belong to (or be embedded within) broader conceptual schemes.
All that said, I won’t be commenting on Davidson’s paper or even on anything specific within it. The main reason for that is that Davidson had a particularly epistemological take on this issue. (See the note at the end of this essay.)
We can start here with the American philosopher Thomas Nagel.
Nagel advanced the view that we can divorce ourselves from our conceptual schemes and even from our concepts. (It must be stressed here that the position which Nagel advanced is quite unlike Davidson’s.)
Thomas Nagel
In his book The Last Word (1997), Thomas Nagel argued that the “obsession with language” and conceptual schemes has “contributed to the devastation of reason”. He went on to argue that if philosophers and laypersons stress the importance of language and conceptual schemes generally (which are, after all, contingent), then they’re in effect stressing the contingencies of psychology and culture too. And it’s this approach, Nagel concluded, which “leads to relativism”.
All this raises the following two questions:
(1) How many (broadly speaking) differences are required to create a separate conceptual scheme?
(2) How many differences are required to make two different conceptual schemes mutually incompatible or even incommensurable?
If a distinction were to be made between two different conceptual schemes, then the boundary between them may well be vague. So how deep must conceptual variance go before something is christened a conceptual scheme? Would it necessarily mean that a new conceptual scheme would — or could — never (metaphorically) look out at other (possibly rival or competing) conceptual schemes in order to judge (or simply evaluate) them?
Clearly, simple differences in beliefs can’t themselves constitute different conceptual schemes. If that were the case, then we’d all belong to different conceptual schemes. In fact each individual would have his or her own conceptual scheme.
So perhaps it’s when concepts and/or beliefs begin to link up together and have mutual implications and entailments that the question of different conceptual schemes arises.
Take the following technical distinction which was made by the American philosopher Steven Stitch (1943-) in his paper ‘The Problem of Cognitive Diversity’. He wrote:
“[T]he Yoruba do not have a distinction corresponding to our distinction between knowledge and (mere) true belief.”
In this essay’s context, this raises the question as to whether or not having (or accepting) the distinction between knowledge and true belief itself entails, implies or generates other concepts which, in turn, partly help form a distinctive conceptual scheme. (Of course we can also ask if this is just a philosophical distinction that not even all members of “our own” culture — whatever we take that to be — share.)
Firstly, a belief in true belief or knowledge isn’t itself really a single belief. It’s a belief made up of other beliefs.
Again, the main question is whether or not we can stand outside our conceptual scheme (or conceptual schemes) and evaluate other conceptual schemes (or other cultures and historical periods).
Perhaps the American philosopher Thompson Clarke (1928–2012), for one, believed that we can. In his paper ‘The Legacy of Scepticism’, he wrote:
“Each concept or the conceptual scheme must be divorceable intact from our practices, from whatever constituted the essential nature of the plain. […] [O]bservers who usually by means of our senses, ascertain, when possible, whether items fulfil the conditions legislated by concepts.”
So did Thompson Clarke himself step outside his own conceptual scheme into other conceptual schemes in order to evaluate them? Alternatively, did he adopt a God’s-eye view (or “view from nowhere”) of what he called “the plain”?
There is a hint in the above passage that Clarke believed that he could become free of both concepts and conceptual schemes when he asked “whether [sensory] items fulfil the conditions legislated by concepts”. Thus, these sensory items (contrary to the note on Davidson at the end of this essay) seem to come first — at least in this instance. In any case, Clarke was certainly committed to the world’s “essential” nature when he wrote about “the essential nature of the plain”.
Some readers may now ask what “truth in all discourses” (if not in all conceptual schemes) actually is. It may also be asked if truth can be external to all conceptual schemes.
Truth in All Conceptual Schemes
What if a member of each conceptual scheme has his/her own version (or versions) of the nature of truth? And what if each member of such conceptual schemes also has his/her own truths?
Wouldn’t this create difficulties in communication… or worse?
That said, if different conceptual schemes can accept or believe (discounting different languages) the same claims (for example, that 2 + 2 = 4 or that Napoleon was an Emperor of France), then why can’t they agree on other more esoteric, recondite or controversial things too? Indeed it could be the case that from the fact that different conceptual schemes accept the non-contentious, then they may then (mutually) accept the contentious too.
Think here of how easy it is to agree on the weather, “established facts”, etc., and yet how hard it sometimes is to agree on politics, morality, art, music, etc.
More particularly, if different conceptual schemes can discuss and even agree on the weather, when Hitler died or what is the largest body in the Solar System, then perhaps they can also discuss and agree upon more contentious issues…
Or are there language games about the weather, historical facts and astronomy too?
Let’s get back to truths (or indeed facts) which are external to conceptual schemes.
If a conceptual scheme is chosen (rather than, say, born into) by an adult individual, then it must be so for reasons which are external to that conceptual scheme. Similarly, an individual may reject his — or a — conceptual scheme for reasons external to that conceptual scheme.
Now let’s (perhaps) be a little naïve here. Take these three simple logical examples and statements:
(1) A = A (in all conceptual schemes)
(2) A = B = C ⊃ A = C (in all conceptual schemes)
(3) P ⊃ Q P∴Q (in all conceptual schemes)
Similarly, does the schema (if not the actual content)
The sentence “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.
hold in only one conceptual scheme?
More factually and empirically.
If everyone — or almost everyone — believes that Napoleon was an Emperor of France, then they must also believe many other things which can be — or are — derived from (or dependent upon) such a belief. For example, that France exists. That France did indeed have an Emperor. That there was a time when France didn’t have an Emperor. (This last belief isn’t logically derived from the initial belief.) And if we all believe that Napoleon was an Emperor of France, then surely we may then also mutually believe that there were specific reasons as to why he became such a leader. So perhaps there can be agreement on those reasons too.
Those simple bits of logic above were intended to show that the contentious can be derived from the uncontentious. This itself may shows that if conceptual schemes share the uncontentious, then there’s nothing to stop them — in principle — from sharing the contentious too.
All this, in turn, casts doubt on the incommensurability (see also Kuhnian incommensurability) and untranslatability theses when applied — specifically — to conceptual schemes. And, if that’s the case, then perhaps the idea of different — or even rival — conceptual schemes is flawed.
That said, none of the above need imply that there’s a possibility of escaping from all conceptual schemes into Thomas Nagel’s or Thomson Clarke’s wilderness of Nowhere — the view from where we can see the world As It Truly Is.
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Note: Donald Davidson’s Own Take
It’s worth stressing here that Donald Davidson’s own position (which is quite unlike anything advanced in the essay above) was grounded on purely epistemological and philosophy-of-mind considerations, not on denying (or, for that matter, stressing) anthropological, historical and/or cultural differences.
That grounding can be found in the following passage (from the paper ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’), in which Davidson wrote:
“The relation between a sensation and a belief cannot be logical. Since sensations are not beliefs or other propositional attitudes. What then is the relation? The answer is, I think, obvious: the relation is causal. Sensations cause some beliefs and in this sense are the basis or ground of those beliefs. But a causal explanation of belief does not show how or why the belief is justified.”
Another passage (from the same paper) is even more apposite in this context. Davidson continued:
“Accordingly, I suggest that we give up the idea that meaning or knowledge is grounded on something that counts as an ultimate source of evidence. No doubt meaning and knowledge depend on experience, and experience ultimately on sensation. But this is the ‘depend’ of causality, not of evidence or justification.”
Basically, then, if this distinction between (as it were) pure and given “experiences” (or “sensations”) and later beliefs is rejected (as Davidson did), then the idea of conceptual schemes being free to (metaphorically) make sense (in multiple different ways) of those pure and given sensations is much harder to defend.
My philosophy blog:
Written by Paul Austin Murphy
MY PHILOSOPHY: https://paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com/
My Flickr Account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/193304911@N06/
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真相、詮釋、和理解框架論 – Outis
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請參考本欄下一篇。
下文介紹戴維森博士對「理解框架論」的批判。由於原文每節都是一整段文字；讀起來甚是吃力，也不容易了解。我將每一節文字依照意旨分成幾個獨立段落，比較容易閱讀和理解；如產生反效果，在此致歉。
「理解框架」一詞依照字面通譯為：「概念架構」；不過，拙譯或許更能表達此「術語」的意思；尚請指正。
我只讀過戴維森博士一本論文選，並不熟悉他的思想；但久仰他的大名。2002年戴維森博士應邀來台演講；由於機會難得，我特別起了個早，跑到清華大學敬陪末座。不幸次年就在報上看到他過世的消息。在此略誌數語，以為紀念。
請參考：(下文提及學者及學派相關資訊)
* Feyerabend, Paul Karl
* Kuhn, Thomas
* McDowell, John
* Quine, W.V.O.
* Rorty, Richard
* Sapir, Edward (下文未提及)
* Whorf, Benjamin Lee
* Linguistic relativity
Truth, Interpretation & the Rejection of Conceptual Schemes
“On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974)
Outis, 03/21/26
Critique of the scheme–content distinction (Davidson vs. Quine, Kuhn, Whorf)
Donald Davidson’s 1974 paper “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” initially presented to the American Philosophical Association and later included in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, launches a penetrating critique of the scheme-content distinction, a foundational concept in various philosophical traditions. The distinction posits a neutral, unstructured content — such as sensory experience or empirical data — that is organized or interpreted through diverse conceptual schemes, leading to potentially incommensurable worldviews.
Davidson contrasts his position with thinkers like W.V.O. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who, in different ways, endorse versions of this dualism. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) undermines the analytic-synthetic distinction but retains a form of relativism through indeterminacy of translation, where empirical content underdetermines theoretical schemes. Kuhn’s paradigm shifts in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) suggest that scientific revolutions involve changes in conceptual schemes, rendering pre- and post-revolutionary theories incommensurable due to differing organizations of the same data. Whorf’s linguistic relativity hypothesis, derived from studies of Hopi and other languages, argues that grammatical structures shape conceptual frameworks, implying that speakers of different languages inhabit distinct realities.
Davidson dismantles this dualism by arguing that the metaphor of schemes “fitting” content is incoherent: if schemes are truly alternative, there must be a way to identify the shared content, but this identification presupposes translatability, collapsing the distinction. He contends that these thinkers rely on an untenable empiricist dogma, where experience is a neutral arbiter, but in reality, interpretation is holistic and inseparable from belief systems. This critique positions Davidson as a unifier, rejecting relativism in favor of a singular, interpretable reality.
Argument: no criterion for translating radically different schemes
Central to Davidson’s paper is the argument that there exists no coherent criterion for identifying or translating radically different conceptual schemes, rendering the very notion unintelligible (“notion”一字在此指：”radically different conceptual schemes”).
He examines purported examples of alternative schemes, such as alien languages or historical paradigms, and shows that claims of untranslatability fail to hold. If a scheme is so divergent that translation is impossible, then we lack grounds to assert it organizes content differently — or even that it is a scheme at all.
Davidson employs a reductio ad absurdum: suppose we encounter a language where sentences do not align with ours; to deem it untranslatable, we must first interpret it partially, but successful partial translation enables full translation via holistic adjustments.
He draws on his radical interpretation framework, where an interpreter starts from scratch, using behavioral evidence to assign meanings and beliefs simultaneously. Without a neutral content to compare, differences in schemes dissolve into mere failures of interpretation, not genuine alternatives.
This argument exposes the circularity in relativist positions: to identify divergence, one must presuppose commonality in truth conditions or rationality. Davidson illustrates with thought experiments, like imagining a scheme where “true” sentences are those we deem false, but such massive inversion would undermine the attribution of any scheme, as it violates interpretive norms.
Ultimately, the absence of a translation criterion reveals that conceptual schemes are not empirical hypotheses but philosophical artifacts, better abandoned for a direct engagement with truth and meaning.
Charity & the impossibility of massive disagreement
The principle of charity plays a crucial role in Davidson’s rejection of conceptual schemes, underscoring the impossibility of massive disagreement between interpreters and subjects. Charity requires maximizing agreement in beliefs and rationality when interpreting others, assuming their views are largely true by our standards.
In the context of schemes, if we posit radical divergence, we would attribute widespread error or irrationality, but this contravenes charity, making interpretation untenable. Davidson argues that disagreement presupposes a background of agreement: to identify a specific false belief, most beliefs must align, providing the interpretive base.
Massive disagreement, therefore, erodes the evidence for attribution, leading to indeterminacy rather than alternative schemes. This ties into his holism: beliefs form interconnected webs, and charity ensures coherence across the system. For instance, in anthropological encounters, apparent exotic beliefs (e.g., in witchcraft) are reinterpreted charitably as metaphorical or contextual, not indicative of wholly different schemes.
The impossibility of massive error stems from the constitutive role of truth in interpretation: sentences held true correlate with worldly causes, anchoring agreement. Davidson’s view counters skepticism by affirming that human rationality is universal, not scheme-relative, fostering a pragmatic optimism about cross-cultural understanding.
Implications for relativism, incommensurability, and cultural anthropology
Davidson’s dismantling of conceptual schemes has profound implications for relativism, incommensurability, and cultural anthropology, effectively deflating relativist anxieties while promoting interpretive unity.
Relativism, which holds truths or meanings relative to schemes, collapses because without identifiable schemes, there are no relativizing frameworks.
Incommensurability, as in Kuhn’s paradigms or Feyerabend’s anarchism, loses traction: scientific changes are shifts in belief sets, not unbridgeable gaps, allowing translation across eras.
In anthropology, Whorfian relativism is tempered; linguistic differences reflect varying emphases, not alternate realities, encouraging ethnographers to seek charitable translations over exoticization. This fosters a non-imperialist approach: cultures are interpretable on their terms, but those terms must connect to ours via shared rationality.
Implications extend to ethics and politics, rejecting cultural relativism that shields practices from critique, as universal interpretability implies common moral grounds. Davidson’s view supports pluralism without fragmentation, where diversity enriches a singular discourse rather than splintering it.
Relation to Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics
The rejection of conceptual schemes is intimately linked to Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics, where meaning is elucidated through truth conditions derived from Tarskian theories.
In radical interpretation, a truth theory serves as a meaning theory, assigning conditions under which sentences are true, constrained by evidence and charity. Schemes would disrupt this by allowing multiple truth theories for the same data, but Davidson argues that holism and charity yield convergence, not multiplicity.
Truth is not scheme-relative but primitive, enabling interpretation without neutral content. This semantics obviates the need for schemes by treating language as directly engaging the world, with meanings fixed by causal relations and intersubjective agreement. The paper thus integrates with his broader project, where rejecting dualism reinforces the unity of truth, meaning, and reality.
Influence on Rorty’s anti-representationalism & McDowell’s “Mind and World”
Davidson’s ideas profoundly influenced Richard Rorty’s anti-representationalism and John McDowell’s Mind and World, reshaping pragmatism and epistemology.
Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) embraces Davidson’s rejection of schemes to dissolve the appearance-reality distinction, viewing language as coping tools rather than representations. Rorty radicalizes this into neo-pragmatism, where truth is solidarity, not correspondence, though Davidson critiqued Rorty’s relativist leanings.
McDowell’s 1994 work draws on Davidson to argue against coherentism and foundationalism, positing that experience is conceptually structured through “second nature,” echoing scheme rejection by integrating mind and world without dualistic gaps. Both extend Davidson’s anti-dualism, influencing quietism and perceptual externalism.
Contemporary relevance: pluralism, conceptual engineering, post-truth debates
In contemporary philosophy, Davidson’s rejection of schemes remains relevant to pluralism, conceptual engineering, and post-truth debates.
Pluralism benefits from his unity: diverse perspectives coexist within interpretable bounds, avoiding siloed relativism.
Conceptual engineering, as in Haslanger’s ameliorative projects, aligns with Davidson by treating concepts as revisable without scheme shifts.
In post-truth eras, his emphasis on charity counters polarization, urging interpretive generosity amid misinformation.
Applications in AI ethics question whether machines possess schemes, while global dialogues use his framework to bridge cultural divides.
Further Readings
* “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) — Proceedings and Addresses of the APA & in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation
* Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation — Donald Davidson (1984/2001) — essays 13 & 14
* Relativism & the Limits of Interpretation — Jeff Malpas (in Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning)
* Davidson’s Rejection of Conceptual Schemes — Michael P. Lynch (in Philosophy Compass)
* Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity — Richard Rorty (1989) — Rorty’s Davidsonian turn
* Two Dogmas of Empiricism — W.V.O. Quine (1951) — in From a Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press, 1953)
* The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas S. Kuhn (University of Chicago Press, 1962; 50th anniversary ed., 2012)
* Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf — John B. Carroll (ed.) (MIT Press, 1956)
* Mind and World — John McDowell (Harvard University Press, 1994)
* Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature — Richard Rorty (Princeton University Press, 1979)
* A Companion to Donald Davidson — Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig (eds.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) — includes essays on relativism and schemes
* Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality — Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig (Oxford University Press, 2005) — chapter on conceptual schemes
* Truth and Predication — Donald Davidson (Belknap Press, 2005) — extends ideas on truth and interpretation
* The Essential Davidson — Donald Davidson (Oxford University Press, 2006) — anthology with key papers including on schemes
* Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology — Michael Krausz (ed.) (Columbia University Press, 2010) — includes discussions of Davidson’s critique
相關詞彙：
* Conceptual scheme: Language and objects (ontology) are assumed as conceptual scheme by some authors. - In contrast, the content is formed by stimulus influences. In particular, between W.V.O. Quine and D. Davidson the status of the conceptual scheme is disputed. See also reference system, language, meaning.
Written by Outis, 03/22/26
linktr.ee/supportlicentiapoetica
Published in LICENTIA POETICA
Unveiling the Soul of Expression. Delve into profound exploration of liberated discourse. Explore the interplay of emotions and ideas, as this publication navigates the intricate realms of philosophy.
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介紹一本「存在主義」入門書 - Laura Westford
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請參考：
* At the Existentialist Café
* Review: In Sarah Bakewell’s ‘At the Existentialist Café,’ Nothingness Has a Certain Something
下文介於書評和簡介之間。由於提到「現象學」和「存在主義」思潮兩者間的關係，故置於此欄。
An Essay on Existentialism
Creating and observing the experience itself
Laura Westford, 03/19/26
Existentialism is an area of philosophy that a lot of people of my generation are going to have at least a passing familiarity with. In an era full of Nietzsche memes and internet pages posting quotes from Nietzsche or Heidegger that they haven’t read, it would be hard not to have at least heard of the term existentialism.
Despite this apparent bastardisation of existentialism as a philosophy, however, there have been considerable efforts undertaken in order to try and improve our understanding of the topic at hand. Sartre himself made this effort in his lecture (which has since been turned into a book), Existentialism is a Humanism, and in more modern times, we’ve seen books such as At the Existentialist Café become rather popular.
At the Existentialist Café is a book by Sarah Bakewell which explores the philosophy of existentialism, primarily as set out by Sartre and his longtime partner, Simone de Beauvoir. Her book also explains the philosophies of people such as Edmund Husserl, as well as talking about Martin Heidegger and his own thought. On top of this, she also covers the lives of the aforementioned thinkers as well as several others, including Karl Jaspers.
I’ve had the book for some time now, and decided to get around to reading it because I wanted to get it off my reading list at last. Having now finished the book, I have to say that it was a pleasant surprise and I really enjoyed reading it. A few years ago, I really got into the likes of Sartre and his existentialism, and I had a real affinity for his arguments about meaning and freedom. Reading Bakewell’s book ignited a lot of that interest in me again.
The full title of the book, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, & Apricot Cocktails, makes sense once you get past the early stages of the book, where Bakewell references a particular point that was apparently made by Sartre and de Beauvoir’s friend, Raymond Aron, who had once remarked that you can make philosophy out of apricot cocktails.
Bakewell actually uses this point to segue into a discussion about a similar point that was made by Edmund Husserl in his lectures on phenomenology. Husserl would discuss the nature of a cup of coffee with his students and talk about the ways in which we can analyse its nature. Sure, we can, on the one hand, talk about the chemical composition of the cup of coffee and how this relates to how we would define it, or even talk about how coffee beans themselves are grown and manufactured into the drink so many of us love. At the end of the day, however, these factors aren’t necessarily relevant when it comes to how we experience drinking coffee.
At the same time, Husserl would point out how if we were to analyse coffee in purely subjective or sentimental ways, we would still arrive at many of the same problems. Husserl took the perspective that we should look at coffee as a coffee drinker and experience it as ourselves. In other words, when we drink a cup of coffee, we notice that there is a strong aroma, a somewhat bitter taste, the warmth of the flavour, and even the weight of the coffee in the cup as we lift it to drink. All of these things (and many others) are important in terms of how we experience coffee as a phenomenon.
You can no doubt see that even something as simple as drinking coffee can be thought of in a philosophical manner, and this is one of the most interesting things about how Husserl’s philosophy of phenomenology is discussed in Bakewell’s book. She makes reference to this line of thought at numerous points, referring to it as a kind of show, don’t tell philosophy, and it actually reminds me of a point I saw in an interview with film director Christopher Nolan.
Nolan once was shown an internet post from someone who said, “My life is like a Christopher Nolan movie, I don’t understand what’s going on”, and his response was simply to say, “Don’t try to understand it, just feel it”. Such a point is very simple, but it’s also incredibly powerful. Oftentimes, we have a tendency to try to examine or understand things in very concrete, definite ways, but this is not really how we experience life much of the time, and it’s probably not the best way to try to go about doing so. Instead, there is a point to be made about how we should simply experience and feel things, a point made by Husserl and Nolan.
Analyses and perspectives such as these of experience and freedom are foundational to arguments made by existentialist thinkers throughout history. One very notable example, and one covered briefly by Bakewell in her book, is Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was very well known for exploring concepts such as anxiety, which is so fundamental to the human experience, and in particular, how this relates to theology and God.
An example of this, which I always find very apt, is when you’re a child, and you go to a sweet/candy shop. You are met with an array of possibilities for what you want, and this sheer absurd number of possibilities creates a paralysis that actually hinders our ability to choose. Kierkegaard referred to this anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom” in his masterwork, The Concept of Anxiety, which happens to be my favourite book of Kierkegaard’s and one of my favourite books in general.
The core theme expressed by Kierkegaard of this dizzying and overwhelming freedom that is thrust upon us is something that would go on to become very influential for later existentialist thinkers such as Sartre and de Beauvoir. Even in Sartre’s lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, he would talk about how humans are born into this world as effectively nothing, and this freedom affords us an array of possibilities in terms of the choices we can make throughout our lives.
One of Sartre’s greatest quotes/ideas, and one which is examined in Bakewell’s book, is his idea that “existence precedes essence.” Despite apparently daunting language, this concept is very simple to understand in that it means, for people, we are not defined from the moment we are born, and this process of establishing ourselves and finding meaning is something we take up throughout our lives.
If you look at aspects of your life that define who you are or from which you are able to derive meaning, these are very rarely inherent characteristics or aspects of yourself. Just from my own life, I greatly enjoy reading, and I also enjoy writing little pieces and essays here. These are things I basically stumbled upon, for lack of a better term, and were things I had to come to throughout my life. They were not inherent things that I was born into, nor do they represent an inherent part of my makeup or experience. In other words, I was not born to be someone who enjoys reading and writing; this enjoyment and the meaning I find from these activities were something that came after I was born.
Much of Bakewell’s attention in this book is given to explaining the conditions that people were facing in the mid 20th century and how this led to an explosion in existentialism around this time. We had just seen World War 2 and the horrors it had unleashed across the world. France had been a major area where there was considerable conflict and destruction across major cities. So much destruction was wrought upon the country, and it created a real crisis for many people, including the philosophers discussed by Bakewell.
Amongst all of this, and indeed throughout the whole book, Bakewell goes into great detail with regard to the lives of the people she discusses. She goes into really interesting depth about Martin Heidegger and his life, especially explaining his support for the Nazi regime and how this made so many people who were former friends distance themselves from him.
One such example was the philosopher Hanna Arendt, who gained considerable attention for her work on Adolf Eichmann and her concept of the banality of evil, referring to how Eichmann and so many other Nazi officials displayed a calm, matter-of-fact attitude when discussing the atrocities they were a part of.
Heidegger’s Nazi past was something that was incredibly well-known, even when he was alive; it was something that former associates of his knew about. Bakewell talks about this in depth, and rather importantly, she notes how it was something he never really seemed to take much accountability for. Such problems as these have caused many people to view Heidegger with a strong degree of criticism, as support for the Nazi regime is surely going to lead people to question how a thinker could support such evil.
The existentialist thinkers discussed in the book all had very grand, and at times, very troubled lives. Sartre and de Beauvoir are both discussed as having various problems throughout their lives, Sartre having a myriad of health problems throughout his life, as well as troubles in the development of his own philosophy. Sartre was, obviously, one of the forerunners of 20th-century existentialism, but he was also a Marxist. Bakewell argues that Sartre’s positions were completely irreconcilable and that this support for contrary philosophies of existentialism and Marxism represented a major stumbling block for Sartre and his work.
Even in the case of Simone de Beauvoir, she is someone who was not spared the struggles of life either. She faced struggles throughout her life as a woman, and obviously, in the case of her and Sartre, they struggled deeply during the Second World War, even being separated for a time. Her writing of her masterpiece, The Second Sex, proved to be momentous, especially considering how impactful the book would go on to be.
I found these sections going into the lives of the thinkers discussed in this book to be really interesting, especially when discussing the broader political views of those discussed. Albert Camus, who also gets discussed at length in the book, took rather different political and moral views from Sartre, and eventually their friendship waned as time went on.
All in all, I think At the Existentialist Café is a really good introduction to existentialist ideas. Bakewell presents the philosophies of phenomenology and existentialism in a really digestible way that will no doubt resonate with people who aren’t of a particularly philosophical mind. Everything is presented super clearly; it’s not super dense and hard to understand like when you’re reading Hegel. This would be a really great book for someone who wants to get into existentialism or philosophy, as it’s written in such a way that anyone can find it easy to understand.
Overall, I definitely think that this is one of the best works of philosophy I’ve ever read, even if it is simply presenting the ideas and lives of different philosophers of existentialism and phenomenology. Definitely one of the best books I’ve read so far this year, and it’s inspired me to go back and read some of the people mentioned throughout. That definitely has to count for something.
Written by Laura Westford
Writer covering topics such as politics, culture, and philosophy
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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值得一讀的4本哲學類書籍 -- Mark Manson
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下文列舉的4本書中：我30-40年前，在書店陳列架上經常看到第二本這部暢銷書，後來也多次看到它被引用。第三本介紹尼切的生平。雖然我一本也沒有讀過，但開卷有益；而且有以上兩本在內，門森先生的功力和推薦應該信得過；所以轉載於此。
4 Modern Philosophy Books You Should Read
Mark Manson, 03/19/26
When most people think of philosophy, they likely imagine indecipherable books that stretch on for a thousand pages, saying and solving nothing. They envision stuffy old men in misbuttoned shirts, untied shoelaces with mismatched socks, shuffling about the hallways of some archaic university, mumbling to themselves, completely unaware of the humanity around them.
And most of the time, they wouldn’t be wrong. As someone who reads a lot of philosophy, I’ve struggled through my fair share of overlong philosophy books that seem outdated or worse, irrelevant. Which isn’t to say I haven’t also come across brilliant ones that offer a nuanced understanding of the often indecipherable world around us.
Here are four best books on modern philosophy that I discovered in recent years. They cover a wide array of topics and were (mostly) enjoyable reads. Approach them with an open mind, and they may rekindle the sense of wonder you lost to adulthood.
Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Sufferin by Scott Samuelson
A number of people asked me this year for recommendations of books to start learning more about philosophy and I think this book is as great a starting point as any.
There are two things I loved about this book. The first is that Samuelson structures the book around one of the fundamental questions of philosophy: how do we justify and cope with unnecessary suffering in the world? The book is a nice tour of the major perspectives throughout history — from the Ancient Greeks and Christianity to Buddhism and Confucius.
The second thing I like is that Samuelson grounds his philosophical discussion in the real world. He is a volunteer teacher at a local prison. Therefore, he grounds many of the philosophical issues he brings up about suffering with discussions he’s had with the inmates at the prison where he teaches. The result is a nice application for some of the headier topics.
Gödel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
I’m going to be honest. I’ve tried to read Gödel, Escher, Bach two different times in the last three years and failed (spoiler: there’s a bunch of math and stuff). But this time I powered through and I’m extremely grateful I did. Two comments:
1. Not even considering the content of the book, the format is absolutely a joy to go through. Hofstadter pulls from number theory, music theory, visual arts, molecular biology, Zen Buddhism, ancient philosophy, and funny little dialogues with talking animals and somehow ties them all together neatly into an 800-page book about paradoxes, self-referential systems, AI, and consciousness. The amount of thought and effort that went into this book is dizzying as well as breathtaking. It may be the most impressive book I’ve ever read in my life, for whatever that’s worth.
2. The central point of the book takes a long time to get to. In fact, you spend almost 700 pages leading up to it. Hofstadter complains in the preface to the anniversary edition that most people who read GEB actually don’t even get the main point of it. And part of that is likely because he doesn’t get to it until the last chapter.
His point is that systems, be they DNA strands or formal logic or computer programing languages or the human brain, are self-referential and inherently incomplete. This self-reference and incompleteness creates a sense of paradox, like:
The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.
He then argues that it’s the emergence of these self-referential systems that make up the basis of consciousness. That essentially, what we understand as the “self” is merely a symbol constructed within the mind that is always interacting with every other symbol the mind constructs. In that sense, what we perceive as consciousness is a constantly fluid system of interactions between the mind’s “self” symbol and its “other” symbols.
I’m not doing his thesis justice, of course. But here’s another reason I loved this book — it explains how matter can order itself into such patterns of information that it can “spin up” and start processing greater and greater amounts of information to the point it becomes “conscious,” and how this is a very special and rare thing indeed.
I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux
If 2017 was the year I fell in love with Kant, 2018 is the year I fell in love with Nietzsche. I didn’t expect to love I Am Dynamite. Hell, I didn’t even expect to like it. I bought it because I wanted to use one of Nietzsche’s ideas in a section of my new book and was curious about some of his biographical details. This book had just come out and was being lauded as the most humane and accurate treatment of the philosopher’s life, so it seemed like perfect timing to buy it. I’d just pick it up, check out a few details, maybe use an anecdote or two in my own book, and that’d be that.
But I ended up reading the whole damn thing, cover to cover, in three days.
I couldn’t put it down. Not only is it sublimely written. But I had no idea how fascinating the man’s life had been. Likely born with a neurological disorder, Nietzsche spent most of his life in severe pain. He couldn’t be exposed to bright lights. He spent weeks at a time in dark rooms. He had debilitating migraines. Injuries from his military days hobbled him and poor medical treatments for dysentery and diphtheria left his digestive tract in ruins. His body was a ruin.
By all accounts, he should have been a decrepit, miserable soul. Yet, he lived his life with a fierce, shameless vitality. He attracted and mingled a motley band of celebrities, professors, royalty, and bohemians. Intellectually, his thoughts leapt over chasms that had halted those who had come before him. He was a charming, if bitter, man who had an almost prophetic vision into the future of western culture, as well as the world.
That little section in my book that was going to reference Nietzsche turned into multiple pages. Then it became a whole chapter. Then much of the book’s central premise came to rely upon Nietzsche’s thought. I read three of Nietzsche’s other books this year. I read another biography about him. I just couldn’t get enough of the man. One day, I’d like to read all of his major works.
If you are interested in philosophy, this book is a beautiful entry point to Nietzsche’s work and ideas. If you just love good biographies, this book is also a pure joy. If you’re into European history and want to understand some of the social forces that later led to the German nationalism, the Nazis, and how Nietzsche’s ideas were later distorted to justify some of the world’s worst atrocities, then this is also a must-read. I’m into all of the above, so I was in heaven. This was my favorite book in 2018.
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund
Full disclosure: I hated the last third of this book. I thought it was terrible. But the first two-thirds were so beautiful and profound, I couldn’t help but admit that this was my favorite read this year. The 35-page introduction was probably worth the price by itself.
This is a philosophy book. Philosophy tends to be either
a) an absolute chore to get through, often hardly making sense, or
b) one of the best reading experiences of your life (there’s a reason my favorite book the last three years have always been philosophy books).
This Life is, at times, breathtaking in its simplicity and depth.
The book attempts to create a secular basis of morality, something philosophers have done for millennia. The starting point is simple: we all die. This is possibly the only subjective truth we all share. And it’s from our knowledge of our own death that makes life feel scarce and valuable. Therefore, all meaning in life stems from the knowledge of our own death. Hägglund then spends most of the book making an array of arguments extending from this realization — how religious beliefs of an eternal life are at the root of all unethical behaviors; how the freedom to choose one’s own meaning is the hardest yet most important use of one’s mind; how the desire to escape death inevitably forces us to avoid what gives us meaning in life.
Then, about 220 pages in, the book gets political. Hell, it goes beyond political — it becomes unabashedly Marxist. While I have no problem airing intelligent discussions about Marxism, Hägglund tries to argue that Marxism is the logical extension of the moral framework he set up in the first two-thirds of the book. In my mind, it simply doesn’t work. The feeling of an author stepping out of his area of expertise is tangible while reading. He seems lost in some sections, desperately clawing to square his political beliefs with his philosophical beliefs. As a result, many of the statements about economics, means of production, growth and so on are naive at best, and plain wrong at worst.
Despite that, I wholly recommend the first 200 pages of this book. They are fantastically written and explained. They are deep and life-affirming without being religious. They are, hands down, my best reading experience of 2019.
Looking for More Books to Read?
I’ve put together a list of over 200 “best books” organized by genre, as well as my all-time recommended reading list that includes the book(s) I’m reading each month. Check them out.
THE BREAKTHROUGH NEWSLETTER
Five minutes each week that could change your life. Check it out.
Written by Mark Manson
Author of #1 NYTimes Bestseller ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck’. OG Blogger. Psychology Nerd. I enjoy cats and whiskey. But not at the same time.
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意義從何而來？-Ralph Lewis
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路額實教授的論述和結論有相當多的思考盲點和認知偏執；短時間也說不清楚。先行發表於此，各位請自行欣賞或研判。
How Did Meaning Emerge in a Meaningless Universe?
How life created significance.
Ralph Lewis M.D., 01/15/26 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
* Meaning emerges from goal-directed life forms, not from information or physical patterns alone.
* Neural patterns gain meaning through evolutionary shaping, individual learning, and how they guide action.
* Consciousness makes meaning felt—organisms can hold options in mind, compare them, and choose.
This post is Part 1 of a series.
In an earlier post, I explored how meaning might arise in a physical, meaningless universe—drawing in part on physicist Carlo Rovelli’s relational account, which treats meaning as emerging when physical correlations acquire evolutionary significance.[1] But that post left largely unexplored how this actually happens in brains. How do electrical signals come to be about something? How does significance arise from circuitry?
This four-part series explores how the brain generates meaning, tracing how meaning emerges in living systems—from biological value and goal-directedness (Part 1), through the neural representations that guide action (Part 2), to shared symbols grounded in social cognition (Part 3), and finally to the cultural institutions and personal narratives that give meaning its richest human forms (Part 4).
The Gap Between Pattern and Purpose
Physical systems exhibit patterns—molecular arrangements, light wavelengths, temperature distributions, etc.—that we can describe in informational terms.
Claude Shannon’s information theory, developed in the 1940s for telecommunications, formalizes informational description by treating unpredictability as the measure of a signal. Predictable patterns (like “AAAAA”) contain little Shannon information because you already know what’s coming. Random patterns (like “XQJKZPM”) contain maximal Shannon information because every letter is unpredictable. Yet random strings mean nothing—they carry no semantic content. Shannon information says nothing about meaning.[2]
But meaning clearly exists for organisms with brains. A scent can signal food or danger to an animal. The brain’s representation of that scent is about something in the world. Philosophers refer to this property as “aboutness,” or intentionality. It arises when living systems register environmental patterns in relation to their own needs, capacities, and stakes in survival.
Meaning Is Fundamentally Relational
Meaning, however, exists not in neural patterns alone but in relationships between those patterns, the organism's evolutionary history, its current goals, and the environment it navigates. A pattern of neural firing becomes meaningful through how it was shaped by natural selection, how it's been tuned by the organism's individual learning, and how it's currently being used to guide behavior.
Consider place cells in a mouse’s hippocampus. When the mouse occupies a specific location, particular neurons fire. That pattern represents location because evolution favored spatial tracking, learning refined it through experience, and downstream circuits use it to guide navigation.
The meaning isn’t in the firing pattern itself but in its web of functional and evolutionary relations.[3] But this raises a deeper question: What makes these relations matter for the organism in the first place?
Value: The Missing Ingredient
Living systems must maintain themselves against thermodynamic decay. This creates intrinsic goals (that is, biologically grounded needs and action tendencies): to maintain viability and reproduce. As the neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon argues, this organizational vulnerability gives rise to genuine teleology: Systems that can fail have goals, and goals create value.[4]
This is where a semiotic framework becomes useful (the study of signs and how they acquire meaning): it distinguishes correlations that merely occur from those that function as signs for an organism. Signs, in this sense, are correlations that an organism interprets and uses relative to its goals.[5]
From Directive to Descriptive
Early in evolution, meaning-bearing signs take the form of simple biological signals—internal states that primarily control action rather than describing the world. When a bacterium detects a toxin, the internal signal doesn’t represent “Dangerous chemical X is present.” It functions, in effect, as “Move!”—a pragmatic control signal in neuroscientist and geneticist Kevin Mitchell’s sense, guiding behavior directly rather than encoding an explicit description of the world.[3]
But as nervous systems evolved to process long-range senses like vision, something changed: Directive signals were increasingly supplemented by descriptive models of the world. You can’t directly detect objects—only photons striking the retina—so additional processing evolved to infer objects from light patterns. This produced internal representations of world states rather than mere action commands. Crucially, these representations were decoupled from obligatory action and could be held “in mind,” compared, and evaluated before guiding behavior.
Predictive Brains and Valued Predictions
Rather than passively receiving input, brains continuously generate expectations shaped by prior experience and goals, updating them when predictions err.[6] When your visual cortex represents an apple, that representation is meaningful because it predicts features relevant to eating and action—sweetness, texture, and graspability. These predictions aren’t neutral; they’re saturated with value, and the brain doesn’t predict all features equally. Prediction errors drive learning because they signal that something relevant to action went differently than expected[7]—for example, when an apple that looks ripe turns out to be sour or inedible.
Artificial Intelligence and Meaning
Could any sufficiently complex computer generate meaning by instantiating patterns and predictions like those found in brains? Not as computers are currently designed. Computers can instantiate patterns and predictions, but meaning emerges only in systems with intrinsic goals—systems for which outcomes genuinely matter. When a chess program evaluates positions, nothing matters to the program itself. When a brain generates prediction errors, something genuinely matters: The organism is navigating toward self-maintenance and reproduction, ends that are inherent in its organization as a living system.[3,4] Whether artificial systems could develop genuine meaning for themselves remains an open question, but it would require them to have stakes in their own continued existence.[8]
Consciousness and the Evaluation of Meaning
Neurobiologist Simona Ginsburg and evolutionary biologist Eva Jablonka propose a key evolutionary threshold: Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), the ability to form flexible compound associations between arbitrary stimuli and value outcomes and to use these associations across contexts. This allows an organism to hold multiple representations "in mind" simultaneously, compare them, and choose among them based on learned values.[5]
Before the evolution of UAL, organisms tend to respond to stimuli reflexively. After UAL, they can evaluate alternative responses before acting. This transforms the adaptive landscape.
Consider a pre-UAL animal encountering food near a predator. Fixed responses dominate: Approach food, flee predator. But with UAL, the animal can represent both possibilities, weigh relative values, and choose. Representations become objects of evaluation.
Before UAL, organisms respond without clear evidence of felt experience. After UAL, behavior suggests conscious awareness. Ginsburg, Jablonka, and their coauthor, philosopher of biology Jonathan Birch, argue that once animals can flexibly learn and compare options, their internal states are no longer just control signals—they feel like something. Consciousness isn't something added later—it emerges with UAL itself. The functional processes that enable flexible learning don't just correlate with consciousness; they constitute it.[5]
How this works mechanistically remains incompletely understood. For example, some theorists argue that consciousness emerges when representations become globally available for comparison within a “global workspace,”[9] while others emphasize recursiveness—the ability to represent one’s own representations. On either view, consciousness arises when meaning becomes an object of evaluation rather than a mere control signal.
How distributed neural processes create unified subjective experience remains incompletely understood. What's clear is that for conscious organisms like us, meaning is always experienced, not just enacted. Consciousness may be what goal-directed interpretation and evaluation feel like from the inside.
Evolutionary Transitions in Meaning
Jablonka and Ginsburg identify major evolutionary transitions in how goals, values, and meaning operate:
* Nonconscious to conscious: The emergence of UAL enabled flexible learning, evaluative comparison, and subjective experience.
* Nonlinguistic to linguistic: The emergence of symbolic cognition allowed meanings to be shared, preserved, and transformed across generations.
Each transition introduced new forms of goals and values, reshaping the targets and dynamics of selection. The transition from nonconscious to conscious processing—the shift from neural to mental—is particularly consequential: Once organisms could consciously evaluate competing representations, selection began to operate not only on behavior but also on representations themselves—what Jablonka and Ginsburg call mental selection.[10]
The Trajectory of Meaning
We’ve now traced meaning from its origin in goal-directed life to its emergence as something organisms can consciously evaluate.
In Part 2, we’ll examine how neural circuits give rise to semantic content and support the flexible use of meaning in perception, thought, and action.
References
1. Ralph Lewis, “In a Meaningless Universe, Where Does Meaning Come From?,” Psychology Today, March 9, 2023, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-purpose/202303/in-a-mea…; Carlo Rovelli, “Meaning = Information + Evolution,” in Wandering Towards a Goal: How Can Mindless Matter Become Purposeful?, ed. Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018), 17–27.
2. Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379–423, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.
3. Kevin J. Mitchell, “The Origins of Meaning: From Pragmatic Control Signals to Semantic Representations,” preprint, PsyArXiv, 2023, https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/dfkrv_v1.
4. Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).
5. Jonathan Birch, Simona Ginsburg, and Eva Jablonka, "Unlimited Associative Learning and the Origins of Consciousness: A Primer and Some Predictions, "Biology & Philosophy 35 (2020): article 56, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09772-0; Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg, "Learning and the Evolution of Conscious Agents," Biosemiotics 15 (2022): 401–437, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09501-y.
6. Andy Clark, “Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science, ”Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36, no. 3 (2013): 181–204, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477.
7. Anil K. Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 2021); Karl Friston, “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, no. 2 (2010): 127–138.
8. There are many ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) systems fall short of human cognition. Acutely mindful of this in developing this blog series, AI tools were cautiously used for research support, idea generation, and assistance with phrasing and clarity, but all analysis, arguments, and interpretations are the author’s own, and the final prose reflects the author’s voice and expertise.
9. Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux, “Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing,” Neuron 70, no. 2 (2011): 200–227, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2011.03.018.
10. In mental selection, internal representations compete for influence over behavior, and those that better guide action are preferentially retained and reused through learning and experience. Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg, “Consciousness: Its Goals, Its Functions and the Emergence of a New Category of Selection, ”Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 380 (2025): art. 20240310, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0310.
Ralph Lewis, M.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and a consultant at the Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto.
Consciousness Essential Reads
There Goes the Sun: Pondering the Universe's Past and Future
Why Consciousness Science Needs Darwin
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尼切和馬克斯兩位思想的對比 - Christopher Linkiewicz
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在我「私淑」的許多大師中，馬克斯和尼切大概排數一數二的位置；卡木、柏格、韋伯、米爾斯、達斯妥也夫斯基等等的位置就得慢慢思量了。別的「心法」或「文功」我這個蠢弟子學不會，只希望能多多少少沾染到尼切「存在風」和馬克思「戰鬥性」兩者的一些影子。
下文近3,000字，我一時三刻之間讀不完；由於上述因緣，循往例，先刊出、後拜讀、再找時間寫「讀後」。
Nietzsche Contra Marx
Perspectives on Method and Ideology
Christopher Linkiewicz, 01/19/26
Introduction: Marxism Today
Communism and Marxism have experienced a resurgence in popularity since 2015 with the rise of Trumpism, although earlier political trends have also influenced the popularity of alternative leftist ideologies, notably the Reagan presidency. The 20th century saw numerous communist governments rise and fall, notably the Soviet Union (1922–1991); China has been communist since 1949; North Korea since 1972; Cuba since 1976; Vietnam, 1976; Laos, 1975. In the United States, the 1950s saw the rise of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, which was characterized by institutional anti-Communism and fearmongering that there were “205 card-carrying Communists” working within the US government.
In the present day, numerous monumental political events have contributed to the overall perturbation of the left: the rise of Trumpism; racist police brutality; extreme concentrations of wealth in high places; fascist echo chambers overrunning the normal functioning of social media like Twitter/X; Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine; and the Israel-Palestine conflict. The prevalence of dubious right-wing and alt-right politics have generated substantial interest in alternative left-wing politics: Marxism, communism, socialism, anarchism. Arguably, the presence of the opposition between right and left has led to the aggravation of both sides of the political spectrum. Antifa arguably embodies the resentment of the left and a willingness to engage in direct political action; whereas the influential linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky has detracted from Antifa as being “a gift to the alt-right.”
Increasingly, an emerging class-consciousness has appeared on the left, with the object of pushing back against the demons of ultra-conservatism, neo-fascism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, artificial political polarization, exclusive tribal dynamics, psychological warfare, societal breakdown and urban decay, the (often self-conscious) collapse of values into nihilism, etc. This shift in the culture of the American left, particularly the alternative left, has often expressed itself as an increased interest in communism and Marxism.
Given the unpredictability and volatility of our present context, many leftists, including politicians, have turned to the challenging and exciting writings of Karl Marx. These politicians — principally democratic socialists —may not represent the prodigious threat to the system allegedly posed during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Democratic socialists more nearly resemble progressives and Greens, but have been willing to ride the coattails of Marx’s resurgence in popularity. Bernie Sanders wrote a book called It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism — whose title represents a thinly-veiled reference to Marx and to the recent surge in enthusiasm of workers and leftists about Marxism and communism. Marx’s critique of capitalism is incisive, reminding us — in theory — of our mutual responsibility and shared humanity, with, for instance, his concept of the alienation of labor.
The alienation of labor is defined in the first chapter of Capital (1867–1894), and refers to the propensity of capitalists to reap the surplus of the labor of their employees. Under capitalism, workers serve a function: their job entails the performance of certain useful tasks and the production of certain definite products or results. In other words, laborers sell “themselves”— their time, their attention, their skills — working so many hours per week, and in return they receive a wage or salary. That is, in the Marxist cosmology, the extent of their usefulness to capitalists. The express purpose of labor is the production of a commodity. A commodity is a product, or, to use Marx’s terminology, a use-value —which has a price, and the price determines the overall importance of the labor required to produce that commodity, to capitalists.
Capital is a dense and challenging “deep dive” into economics and sociology — viewed, however, through a lens that is unmistakably philosophical. Before he was a Marxist, Marx himself had been a member of the philosophical sect known as the Young Hegelians. We should assume, therefore — although Marx is primarily recognized as an economic and political author — that Marx has maintained some general connection to the world of philosophy. That being said, Marx is not necessarily a mere “philosopher,” in the conventional sense of a more or less humble, ivory tower-dwelling theoretician of abstractions, dreams, and possibilities; his role, historically, is decisively one of overwhelming influence with far-reaching real-world consequences.
Nietzsche “on” Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), best known as one of the primary forerunners of Existentialism, along with the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and the Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), never mentions or engages with Marx anywhere in his œuvre. An investigation of any possible connection or opposition existing between the works of Nietzsche and Marx, then, must necessarily constitute a speculative engagement with the consequences of their individual tendencies in thinking.
Communism and Left-Authoritarianism
Democracy is not necessarily well enough equipped on its own to defend against a concentration of racist, fascist, and alt-right attitudes among conservatives. Communism is one of the most frequently drawn-on formulas that leftists have turned to in their efforts to push back against the rise of Trumpism, neo-fascism, and recent political turmoil. The resurgence of interest in Marx may speak to a sincere desire and a need for humanistic politics in a survivable society. But Marx doesn’t set himself up as a simple agent of peaceful change.
In The Communist Manifesto (1848), co-authored by Marx and Friedrich Engels, the two authors acting as lifelong collaborators attempt to draw on “the specter of communism,” amassing the interest of workers and laborers throughout Europe, to seize the means of production, overthrow capitalism, and institute socialist governments. In a word, the goals of communism are understood to run counter to the self-interestedness of the capitalists, and it is for this reason that, for communists, revolutionary change can only be achieved through revolution. For communists, the proper direction of society, politics, and economics, can only be achieved by a complete dismantling of a corrupt system that has perpetuated unending class struggle.
For Marx and Engels, and for communism and the proletariat (working class), capitalism must be phased out in order to make a space in which for socialism to emerge — not as an improvement upon capitalism, but as a complete re-creation of the economic and political machine. The state exists to protect the interests of the ruling class, and consequently, Marx and Engels argue in The Communist Manifesto, violent revolution may sometimes be necessary to fully realize the interests of the communists. In practice, as is well known, communist regimes have often been unstable, brutal, and authoritarian. Under Stalin, the USSR silenced dissent and instituted “state art,” with rigid regulations controlling subject matter and tone, including a positive portrayal of socialism.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
When overthrowing corrupt, capitalist orders, in order to transition to a socialist government, an interim government is to be found in what Marx and Engels called the dictatorship of the proletariat. The capitalist government does not represent the interests of the proletariat. The proletariat, or working class, is the class whose interests are to be represented by a socialist government. This new government, it is assumed, will take time to implement — especially in lieu of violent revolution.
This is one place where Nietzscheans might wish to stop us. What are the consequences of the proletariat seizing control of society? What specific value do the individual members of the proletariat have for me? After all, as a prospective Übermensch, I may wish to, say: lead my own life, develop my own skills and abilities, implement my own values, etc. An individual proletarian’s wishes, whims, or happiness may or may not interest me directly in any way that is not more or less transitory.
Nietzsche’s method
This, however, doesn’t necessarily make a philosophical comparison of Marx and Nietzsche hopelessly speculative. Nietzsche casts himself in his books as an iconoclast, criticizing and deriding any and all philosophical and literary predecessors, as well as distancing himself from the egalitarian values and tendencies of democracy. He is often remembered — and misunderstood — for setting up an opposition between “master” and “slave” morality, a dichotomy he adopted from G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), but radically recast in the milieu of his own philosophy. For Hegel, the “master” and “slave” opposition refers to the outcome of just such an opposition, and implies the more primitive fact of power structures as such.
Hegel himself opposed the institution of slavery, putting forward a universal moral standard emphasizing what democratic institutions refer to as “human rights.” Nietzsche’s dichotomy of master and slave morality speaks, rather, to the opposition between “life-affirming” and “life-denying” morality —respecting self-overcoming and self-benefit, as opposed to ascetic religious values like universal compassion and charity — and as such is intended to bolster his individualistic imperative toward the creation of aristocratic values.
Marx and Nietzsche, therefore, share a common antecedent in the figure of G. W. F. Hegel. Marx, on the one hand, inherited the general form of Hegel’s dialectical method, reshaping it into what has come to be known as dialectical materialism — itself distinct from Hegel’s method and therefore no longer Hegelian. Nietzsche, on the other hand, directly and repeatedly attacks the “will to a system,” and thereby explicitly distances himself from Hegel’s overall philosophical project. Nietzsche preferred to play the part of a gadfly, scrutinizing assumptions and refusing to put forward a systematic philosophy in the spirit of Kant or Hegel (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, Part 1: “On the Prejudices of Philosophers”). Any comparison of Marx and Nietzsche must therefore rely on a general sense acquired from a careful reading and interpretation of both thinkers.
In regards to Nietzsche’s opinion on Marxism, one might imagine that concepts of the will to power and a “master morality” would have placed Nietzsche’s interests in an opposition to Marx’s. Marx wanted to bring accountability to the proletariat, the working class at large; Nietzsche wanted to overcome the interests of the “herd” and instill aristocratic values for the capable and worthy. If the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t speak to aristocratic values, but wounds or undermines them, it may not hold the interest of Nietzsche’s ideal reader. On the other hand, one might also imagine Nietzsche as moving altogether independently of Marx’s influence.
Bureaucracy and Banality
Within the government itself — from auxiliary office spaces where bored civil servants unleash psychopathic apathy and sadomasochistic rage on the defenseless, the unemployed, the mentally ill; to wealthy millionaires in Congress — there exists a preponderance of what the public has come to know as “bureaucracy.” Bureaucracy refers to the hierarchical infrastructure of “the system.” The bureaucracy is the hand that feeds its employees and, often, neglects the needs of the populace. It is a largely reflexive internal structure that subsists on the complicit participation of its representatives.
Philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt’s book documenting the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, formulates a novel theory of the psychology of Eichmann. Eichmann never witnessed the results of his own actions; theoretically, as a mere bureaucrat, he himself didn’t directly commit any crimes against the Jews during the Holocaust, even as he participated in the Nazis’ hierarchy.
In 1934, when Eichmann applied successfully for a job, the S.D. [Sicherheitsdienst (the Security Service of the S.S)] was a relatively new apparatus in the S.S., founded two years earlier […] to serve as the Intelligence service of the Party […]. Its initial task had been to spy on Party members, and thus to give the S.S. an ascendancy over the regular Party apparatus. Meanwhile it had taken on some additional duties, becoming the information and research center for the Secret State Police, or Gestapo. These were the first steps toward the merger of the S.S. and the police[…]. Eichmann, of course, could not have known of these future developments, but he seems to have known nothing either of the nature of the S.D. when he entered it; this is quite possible, because the operations of the S.D. had always been top secret. As far as he was concerned, it was all a misunderstanding […]. (The Portable Hannah Arendt, pp. 313–314)
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt introduces the concept of “the banality of evil.” This refers to the breakdown of responsibility that occurs within a bureaucratic hierarchy, where one is innocent of the hierarchy’s overall consequences because one’s role within the hierarchy is one of passive acceptance of a minor role. The hierarchy exists for a purpose, but that purpose is not shared by all of the hierarchy’s members. Responsibility is deferred.
Likely, neither Marx nor Nietzsche would approve of the banality of evil. In his existentialist magnum opus, Jean-Paul Sartre coins the term mauvaise foi, or bad faith — a term that likely would have resonated with both Marx and Nietzsche. In practice, the banality of evil might be seen as influencing Marxists to recognize the corruption of the present order. On the other hand, one can imagine almost any government falling prey to the banality of evil.
Marxism and Nietzscheanism
It begins to appear that Marx’s and Nietzsche’s respective areas of interest and target audience are quite different. Marx wants to bring about a new political order that emphasizes the worker in the proletariat (political orders affect everyone), while Nietzsche wants to be read by, and create readers, who are self-sufficient, willing to consider radical ideas, and create their own values. Does such a convergence of ideas, between Marxists and Nietzscheans, lead to a direct opposition of ideologies? Fortunately, it seems Nietzsche intended to eschew the need for ideology altogether, attacking the weaknesses of ideology in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers.” Yet one might criticize the writings of Marx for being too practically concerned for those of an academic philosopher, and not “metaphysical” enough — in the way that Kant’s system, and Nietzsche’s destruction of it, are both in some sense “metaphysical.” The will to scrutinize dangerous or ill-considered ideas is prevalent in the writings of Nietzsche. Nietzsche applies the method of skepticism (one of the philosopher’s most powerful tools) to skepticism itself in Beyond Good and Evil. Arguably, Marxists, post-Marxists, communists, and other left-wing ideologies, do not necessarily train their adherents to use logic, skepticism, and other tools in a rigorous way. Their primary concern may be in gathering like minds to work on like-minded projects. Yet for the philosopher — as opposed to the members of political organizations — these tools are essential to developing an accurate, functional picture of reality, unafraid of thinking radically, but ready to question the motive or structure of any idea or ideology.
20th-century philosophy
Nietzsche’s legacy is prevalent throughout the landscape of 20th-century philosophy, including explicitly, with French Nietzscheanism — which included Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze — but also among authors not using the “Nietzschean” demonym: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida absorbed significant influence from Nietzsche. Generally, these authors have also been influenced (in one way or another) by Marx, and the “specter of communism” was no doubt a conscious consideration for all of them, whether or not any relationship to Marx or communism was present in their writings (as in the case of Louis Althusser and other structural Marxists).
Sartre’s Marxist Existentialism
The 20th century French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre — in contrast to Nietzsche, one of his primary influences — had a more sympathetic view of communism. Sartre’s “undiscovered” last work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason — a sprawling, unfinished philosophical treatise longer than Being and Nothingness — represents the culmination of a longtime affinity for Marx and communism, and the object of uniting Marxism and existentialism. The Critique serves as the mature expression of ideas found in his preceding work investigating a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism, Search for a Method. The Critique also serves to investigate and lay out the basis of dialectical materialism, and as such serves as an undertaking already within the milieu of Marxism. Dialectics, within Hegelianism, refers to the process of developing opposed ideas toward a resolution; while in the work of Marx and Engels, dialectical materialism refers to the development of oppositions with reference to a matrix of social and economic situations.
Sartre’s affinity for Marxism and communism had, in previous decades, contributed to his falling-out with his longtime compatriot and literary fellow, Albert Camus, a permanent break that would last for the rest of their literary and personal lives. Camus had previously been a member of the French Communist Party (1935–36), and briefly the Algerian Communist Party (1936) (he was native to Algeria, although professionally based in Paris). Camus participated actively in the French resistance against the French Occupation, contributing to and serving as editor of the banned newspaper Combat.
Ultimately, Camus’s short-lived affinity for communism and Marxism took a back seat to his humanitarian and humanistic concerns, and it was on this basis that he broke with Marxism and communism. Sartre and Camus became ideologically opposed, particularly on the status of violence in communism, with Sartre viewing “the cause” as primary, while Camus’s moral objections prevailed over his willingness to play a party to what he sensed as an authoritarian tendency within communism.
Conclusion
Marx and Nietzsche do not directly engage or encounter one another anywhere in their writings, which are themselves predominantly concerned with very different subject matter: for Marx, economics, social thought, and political action; for Nietzsche, self-cultivation and the “will to power.” Marx sought to bring more power to working people, while Nietzsche arguably sought separateness from common and ordinary people, in much the same way that he admonishes pity and democratic values. Both thinkers exerted significant influence on the history of 20th century philosophy, which must also inevitably carry into the 21st century. The relationship between Marx’s and Nietzsche’s respective legacies, or whether there is any, etc., may ultimately remain an open question.
Bibliography
* Arendt, Hannah. The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: The Viking Press.
* Camus, Albert, 2004. The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays. Translated by Stuart Gilbert, Justin O’Brien, Hamish Hamilton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
* Hegel, G. W. F., 1807. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Marx, Karl, 1867–1894. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Books.
* Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, 1848. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Samuel Moore. New York: International Publishers, 1970.
* Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.
* Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
* Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Viking Press.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1943. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes, 1992. New York: Washington Square Press.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1960. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. New York: Verso.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1960. Search for a Method. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Vintage Books.
Written by Christopher Linkiewicz
I am a writer, musician, photographer, and more recently a painter, with a BA in philosophy. https://buymeacoffee.com/consensusreality
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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客觀主義、相對觀、和關係論 - Pierz Newton-John
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下文作者是第n位自以為找到「真理」的半吊子哲學家。所謂「半吊子」，我指的是：作者用了80%左右篇幅東拉西扯的批評傳統「(自然)科學」觀點；但他沒有講清楚自己的觀點「是什麼」，以及「為什麼」它優於前者。
相較於論述需要「能破能立」這個標準，我給下文的評語是：「未破未立」。不過，作者本人似乎也了解到這一點；他在全文最後給自己搭了個台階(請見「作者後記」)。
我過去常常以「喃喃自語」或「大呼小叫」來描寫這一類型的「政論性」文字。
Objectivism, Relativism, Relationalism
The case for a fully relational account of reality
Pierz Newton-John, 01/05/26
Take a glance around the space in which you find yourself and make a mental note of what you see. Really, take a moment. In all likelihood, the description you came up with consists of something like a laundry list of objects, perhaps with some propositional clauses to establish their relative locations. “I see a wilting Christmas tree, a sofa. An iPad is lying on the sofa next to some cushions (…)” — and so on. This type of summary — objects first, relations second — reflects our default perceptual mode, especially in Western industrial society, in which many of the things we see around us are manufactured objects that do not interdepend with their environment in any significant way, unlike the things we find in nature, which are less sharply bounded, more interpenetrating.
And yet there is another way we could see the same perceptual facts, one which privileges relationality over objects. This is closer to the view of the artist, perhaps, of the psychedelic trip, or the meditative state in which the separateness of individual things is dissolved within an indivisible wholeness. Psychedelics pioneer Stanislav Grof called this mode of perception “holotropic” — moving in the direction of wholeness — as opposed to the everyday “hylotropic” mode, which divides the world into parts. It is also the Buddhist perceptual mode, in which everything is a “dependent arising”, nothing stands alone and self-subsistent.
It is obvious, if we think about it, that the boundaries our perception draws around things don’t really exist. Step outside of the moment in time and space you currently occupy and the coffee table is revealed as a four-dimensional tube through spacetime, a standing wave of electricity and quarks, the ghostly mathematical denizens of the quantum world. Every ostensibly solid thing is an exchange of information from some place to another, a process too slow-oozing to recognise as such. This echoes the insights of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who argued a century ago against the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” For Whitehead, the world was composed not of static material substances, but of dynamic “occasions of experience” — a flow of events rather than a collection of things.
Objective perception is a handy fiction. It is the shorthand that the cognitive apparatus of tool-using apes employs to parse the world into what James Gibson termed “affordances”: the evolutionarily meaningful opportunities for interaction our environment offers. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, in The Case Against Reality, takes this evolutionary logic to its radical conclusion. He argues that we are systematically deceived by our senses; natural selection has provided us with a “user-friendly interface” that hides the complex truth of reality, much as a desktop icon hides the voltage and code of the software it represents. Nothing is even remotely as it seems.
The lineaments of this perspective were visible as early as 1905, when Einstein discovered the interconvertibility of matter and energy with his famous formula e=mc2. “Energy” is just another word for change, so Einstein’s equation reveals the fact that matter is change, too, just locked in a cyclical pattern. But what, then, is changing? The notion of substance as an ontological primitive has evanesced completely, replaced by change without a substrate, a strange notion for us apes to get our jungle-made heads around.
In the Relational Quantum Mechanics pioneered by Carlo Rovelli, the philosophical lesson that quantum physics has been trying to teach us for the past century is that all physical properties are relational in nature. That is, they pertain between systems; they do not inhere within them. Again, it was Einstein’s Special Relativity that opened the door by showing how many properties hitherto assumed to be absolute — such properties as mass, simultaneity and length — in fact depend on the reference frame of the observing system. QM, according to Rovelli, merely generalises the principle to all measurable properties.
The great Buddhist sage Nāgārjuna (龍樹；Nāgārjuna) reached much the same philosophical conclusion as early as the second century CE through simple reasoning. Every observable event depends on prior causes. We cannot ever isolate some property of an object of which we can say: this does not depend on anything before it. Everything is a dependent arising, flowing out of the conditions of the past and inseparable from them. From this, he denied the inherent existence (Sanskrit svabhava) of all phenomena, both mental and physical. This realisation is a cornerstone of enlightenment.
The logical philosophical extension of our naive sensory perceptions is atomism.It takes the primacy of objects in our sensory field at face value, combines it with the observation that the behaviour of complex systems can, to a large extent, be understood in terms of the behaviour of the parts, and concludes that the foundation of reality lies in some smallest, indivisible part: the atom. The Ancient Greek thinker Democritus is the philosopher most commonly credited with originating this theory, though historians generally agree that he was extending the work of Leucippus, an earlier Presocratic whose writings are now completely lost to time.
Democritus envisaged the world as composed of countless, extremely small objects of different shapes and sizes, the combinations and interactions of which gave rise to all the phenomena of the world. The atom, as the ultimate “thing of things”, served as ontological bedrock, with the relations between them important but secondary. Indeed, Democritus simply assumed time and space as an implicit background: a neutral arena within which the atoms moved rather than an ontological substrate in their own right.
Although largely overshadowed in the Christian era by Plato and Aristotle, Democritus’s ideas had a comeback in the scientific era when they were dusted off by John Dalton in the early 1800s and given a new, more rigorous empirical formulation, the basis for modern chemistry. When combined with Newtonian physics, the nineteenth century saw the apogee of atomic objectivism: a worldview so thoroughly accepted and apparently vindicated by experiment that scientists of the day found any alternative to it virtually inconceivable.
Even Max Planck, whose work on blackbody radiation at the turn of the century gave rise to the earliest quantum theory, did not really believe the implications of his own work. h, the constant of quantised action that provides the units for quantum-level measurements, was, he thought, just a kind of convenient fiction, a “calculation device” rather than a fundamental feature of reality itself. And yet the crack he opened in the formidable edifice of Newtonian physics did not cease to ramify until the final demolishing blow was struck with Heisenberg’s first paper on quantum mechanics, in 1925.
And yet, almost precisely one hundred years later, the work is not yet entirely done.
It is, after all, not so easy to unmake the foundations of our perception of reality. The human mind grasps for concretions even in the face of all evidence that the world is not concrete. Niels Bohr’s defensive manoeuvre against the tide of an abstract, relational reality was a Kantian one: he threw up his hands at what it all meant and declared that it is not the physicist’s job to answer questions of interpretation, to understand the Kantian noumenon or “thing in itself”. Shut up and calculate, is how David Mermin famously encapsulated the attitude.
We have to understand the culture of physics — and science as a whole — to understand how this position could have held sway for so long as the canonical interpretation (or non-interpretation) of Quantum Mechanics. The foundations of science lie in the backlash against the excesses of the Wars of Religion in the seventeenth century, when it was decreed that undecidable questions such as whether or not the bread of communion literally turns into the flesh of Christ in the mouth of the worshipper should be the reason for wholesale slaughter and the ravage of Europe.
Those early scientists rejected questions that were not tractable to some concrete procedure that could adjudicate them. They saw themselves as building a bulwark against the kind of superstitious insanity that had led Europe into the nightmare of the Thirty Years War and the burning of witches. Over three centuries from 1600, they parsed out the subjective from the objective, colour from wavelength, molecular motion from the sensation of heat, and found what they took to be the bones of reality: cold, hard matter, bereft of all subjective qualities. Atoms and the void: all else was vanity. Reduction — a hard-nosed, show-me-the-money attitude as much as an epistemological procedure — came to define the scientific worldview.
Physicists like Rovelli, who straddle the worlds of physics and philosophy, are still very much in the minority. Most people attracted to the physical sciences are engineering-adjacent, wranglers of differential equations or complicated experimental apparatuses. They have little time for what they regard as sterile language games. Mathematical rigour and quantitative prediction are everything.
Philosophy of science as a discipline has thus tended to be highly conservative. It has historically concerned itself primarily with providing a post-hoc account of what it is that scientists do, rather than venturing into the shark-infested waters of trying to define what it is that scientists study. Think of Karl Popper’s mid-twentieth century formulation of the scientific method: hypotheses followed by attempts to falsify them empirically. As later philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend subsequently showed, this is not at all what scientists do, yet such was the state of science’s own understanding of itself.
Today, that picture has perhaps begun to change. A relational philosophy of science — not of what scientists do, but an actual “non-materialist, physicalist” metaphysics — now exists in the mainstream. Every Thing Must Go, by James Ladyman and Don Ross, makes the case for what the authors term “Ontic Structural Realism” (OSR), a view of reality based on our best understanding of contemporary physics that dispenses with the primacy of matter (materialism) in favour of a structural account of reality: the world as a web of relations rather than a vast collection of tiny objects in mechanical collision. As the title suggests, this is a picture of reality with no “things” in sight — subatomic particles are treated as nodes in a network of interactions rather than independent individual entities. We have shifted away from objects with intrinsic properties and identities, to a purely relational field.
This is already a big advance on what I learned studying the History and Philosophy of Science in the 1990s, when ontology never even got a look in the door. Still, a less cautious and deflationary philosophical tradition less concerned with the sensibilities of engineers, could, one might suspect, go a step further. In OSR, certain intrinsic properties remain: the laws of physics, for example, continue to be intrinsic properties of the universe.
Yet there are good reasons to suspect that these laws, too, are part of a relational structure rather than representing absolute, unchanging properties of the universe. The so-called fine-tuning problem in physics is the challenge of explaining why it is that the constants of physics — the speed of light or the strength of the weak force, numbers that seem embedded into the way the universe functions — seem to be finally calibrated to values that allow for life to emerge. Tweak any of them even slightly, and complex structures collapse: stars don’t form, or burn up too fast, complex chemistry becomes impossible, black holes swallow everything.
The “coincidence” that all these values should be set within precisely the bounds that allow for the emergence of intelligent life demands an explanation. Yet if the laws of physics are just givens, fundamental properties that do not depend on any set of relations beyond themselves, then no explanation can ever be forthcoming. This seems unscientific at best. Must we accept that there is a boundary — the laws of physics — where no more questions should be asked, beyond which understanding cannot proceed, even in principle? This would be tantamount to magic: saying that the laws of physics are what they are “because”.
The philosophical view that I believe is rationally justified by our state of knowledge and the a priori consideration that there should be no “hard boundaries” in our metaphysics, no states of affairs beyond the at least theoretical possibility of explanation, is what I call strong relationalism. It is the view that all properties whatsoever are relational in nature. It is relations “all the way down”.
If this view is correct, there is an unexpected and radical implication. In a purely relational cosmos, there cannot be the kind of God’s eye perspective that is required for a completely objective account of the world. There is no “view from nowhere”, in Thomas Nagel’s phrase, but only ever “views from somewhere”: relational perspectives. That’s because such a godlike point of view would itself constitute a non-relational absolute, a point of fixity outside the infinite relational field. The first-person perspective comes built in to the structure of reality itself.
We could put it this way: we see the laws of physics we do because observers must occupy relational perspectives that support observation. Since they cannot find a “hard boundary” in their observational field of view, they must find themselves to be part of a field within which a coherent account of their own origins is possible: a story of the relations upon which their own existence depends. The preconditions of conscious observation include the apparent flow of time, a finely balanced interplay of stability and change that looks something like matter and energy, an informational arena that looks like space. At the same time, since the relational field is boundless, they must find their own existence also permanently a partial mystery. Infinity always bleeds through an explanatory gap.
Objectivity with a capital ‘O’ may be impossible, but relationalism does not imply a slide into relativism, or the idea that “every perspective is equally valid”. It is entirely possible to make strong, specific claims about truth within the framework of strong relationalism. It is just that such claims can never be regarded as fully self-contained or complete. We can see this principle reflected in post-Gödelian notions of mathematical truth. Even though Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem showed that no sufficiently strong set of mathematical axioms can be regarded as complete in itself, this does not stop mathematicians from constructing proofs and relying on them. In the same way, the impossibility of ever nailing our foot, as it were, to some absolute self-complete truth does not prevent us from asserting that the world is round, or even from making strong moral claims. It is always only a matter of defining the correct relational context within which those claims are made.
As we pass the hundredth anniversary of what may arguably be regarded as the true birth of Quantum Mechanics: The 1925 Heisenberg/Born/Jordan paper “Zur Quantenmechanik” (“On Quantum Mechanics”), we are, I believe, just beginning to understand the radical philosophical shift it implies. We are leaving the shallow waters of objectivism and its shadow twin relativism behind, and venturing out into the deep waters of a truly relational view of reality. This shift entails leaving absolute certainties behind for good, a leap into the unknown that brings with it a certain lurch of fear for a species long addicted to the false comfort of such certainty. Reductionists, seeing safety in the retreat to a deflationary “common sense” that looks increasingly naive, may baulk. Yet the problem of absolute belief is what gave rise to the religious wars from whose ashes the scientific project was born in the first place. It’s time to let go.
Final note: a skeptical reader will no doubt find some of the above argument under-specified, especially in relation to the larger, more speculative leaps. The scope of an article of this length makes this inevitable. A more rigorously argued version can be found in my currently short-listed submission to the Berggruen Essay Competition: “The Relational Cosmos: Consciousness in a World Without Intrinsic Properties,” to be published by the Berggruen Institute in due course
Written by Pierz Newton-John
Writer, coder, former psychotherapist, founding member of The School Of Life Melbourne. Essayist for Dumbo Feather magazine, author of Fault Lines (fiction).
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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評帕特蘭「心靈-大腦功能論」 -- Paul Austin Murphy
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我在哲學論文和書本中看過帕特蘭的大名；但沒有讀過他的書，也沒有花時間去了解他的思想。在社會學領域，我大致接受帕森斯的「結構-功能論」；對意識(心靈)方面的「功能論」則沒有接觸。
從下文的簡短說明看，帕特蘭這類「哲學家」不過是有資格在校園混飯吃(行騙？)的「狡辯士」或「言語魔術師」；後者為相對於「道具魔術師」而言。
索引：
isomorphism：一個系統及其模型間的「異構同質關係」；比較：Homomorphism (一個系統及其模型間的「異構同形關係」)
outré：荒誕、怪胎
Putnam’s Immaterial Brains and Material Souls
The American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926 — 2016) is vitally important in the history of functionalism, at least as it applies to the human mind. Interestingly, he turned against functionalism in the late 1970s. The paper analysed in this essay (‘Philosophy and Our Mental Life’ — 1975) is only mildly critical of functionalism. (Putnam specifically argues against his former position of machine-state functionalism.) In any case, in order to get his functionalist point across, Putnam discussed what he called “immaterial brains” and “material souls”, stressing that in both cases if what matters are “functional states”, then such entities are possible.
Paul Austin Murphy, 11/17/25
See my follow-up essay, ‘Functionalism vs Materialism’.]
One central idea of functionalism was expressed very simply by Hilary Putnam. He wrote:
“I explained the most general notion of functional isomorphism by saying that two systems are functionally isomorphic if there is an isomorphism that makes both of them models for the same psychological theory.”
Putnam then really got down to the nitty gritty of functionalist isomorphism. Take his own example:
“[A] computer made of electrical components can be isomorphic to one made of cogs and wheels. In other words, for each state in the first computer there is a corresponding state in the other, and, as we said before, the sequential relations are the same — if state S is followed by state B in the case of the electronic computer, state A would be followed by state B in the case of the computer made of cogs and wheels.”
More importantly and relevantly, Putnam continued: “[I]t doesn’t matter at all that the physical realizations of those states are totally different.”
This is all very well when it comes to computers made of electrical components and computers made of cogs and wheels. However, does all this pass over to minds, brains and mental states? Indeed, even in the case of computer states, we’d still need to know exactly what they are regardless of the fact that state S is followed by state B, and state A is followed by state B.
Putnam on Souls in the Soul World
Bizarrely, Putnam discussed “souls in the soul world”. These souls are “functionally isomorphic to the brains in the brain world”. Yet souls are supposed to be non-physical (or non-corporeal). This means that the pains of souls can’t be realised by physical brains. (They aren’t realised by anything!) Souls may not be abstract, but they aren’t physical either. The fact that souls aren’t brains wasn’t important to Putnam’s functionalism. Indeed, Putnam continued by asking the following questions:
“Is there any more sense to attaching importance to this difference than to the difference between copper wires and some other wires in the computer? Does it matter that the soul people have, so to speak, immaterial brains, and that the brain people have material souls?”
Putnam brought in soul people to get his point across. It’s rather an extreme example. Talk of “immaterial brains” and “material souls” certainly seems very odd. Yet from a functionalist perspective, it isn’t. After all, Putnam interprets brains and souls functionally. That means that brains can be immaterial, and souls can be material. What matters to a brain being a brain, and a soul being a soul, is their functions. And, in this case, their functions are the same, or at least similar.
Actually, in this case, Putnam concluded by referring to a “common structure”, not common functions. He told his readers that “[w]hat matters is the common structure [ ] and not the hardware”. That’s not a problem because functions have structural explanations.
Putnam on Clairvoyance, Telepathy and Reincarnation
It’s worth adding here that Putnam’s talk of “souls” and the “soul world” didn’t mean that he had gone all religious, and then dressed that conversion up with technical talk about “functions” and “states”. Instead, this example (as already stated) was his outré means to get his point across. After all, Putnam wrote:
“If it is built into one’s notions of the soul that the soul can do things that violate the laws of physics, then I admit I am stumped.”
More relevantly to functionalism:
“There cannot be a soul which is isomorphic to a brain, if the soul can read the future clairvoyantly, in a way that is not in any way explainable by physical law.”
However!
Putnam provided his readers with a big but. He continued:
“On the other hand, if one is interested in more modest forms of magic like telepathy, it seems to me that there is no reason in principle why we couldn’t construct a device which would project subvocalised thoughts from one brain to another.”
And then Putnam became even sexier:
“As to reincarnation, if we are, as I am urging, a certain kind of functional structure, there seems to to be in principle no reason why that could not be reproduced after a thousand years or a million years or a billion years. Resurrection: as you know, Christians believe in resurrection in the flesh, which completely bypasses the need for an immaterial vehicle.”
It’s not immediately clear how adopting functionalism would help with projecting subvocalised thoughts from one brain to another via some kind of physical device. Unless seeing such thoughts in exclusively functional terms (i.e., as functional states) would help with this project. After all, the physical basis of such thoughts couldn’t be projected from one brain to another.
As for reincarnation.
If the mental lives of human persons are given an entirely functional description, then that description can be captured in a program. (Spiritual and religious thinkers stress “information” when it comes to reincarnation, not functional states.) This example, then, clearly relates to the one just given about the projection of subvocalised thoughts. In both cases, a functionalist account and approach makes everything so much simpler. The messy details of the body and brain can simply be dispensed with.
Putnam on Martian Pain
Putnam then brought on board the multiple realizability argument again. He wrote:
“It is as if we met Martians and discovered that they were in all functional respects isomorphic to us, but we refused to admit that they could feel pain because their C fibers were different.”
Readers may wonder how human persons could ever discover that Martians are in all functional respects isomorphic to us. After all, Putnam wasn’t hinting at analysing their brains. Instead, he must have meant that they (may) behave like human persons when they’re in pain. Thus, such functional respects must be derived from the behaviour of Martians.
Putnam’s point was that pain is multiply realizable. Yet how could he have known that? Was it entirely due to the behaviour of entities which aren’t human persons?
Putnam never actually mentioned behaviour in these passages. However, the gist of what he did say is indeed Wittgensteinian and/or behaviourist. In other words, if Martians behave as if they’re in pain, then they must be in pain. Yet Martians’ brains don’t contain C fibers. [See note.] So their pains must be realised by physical elements which aren’t C fibers. The upshot here, then, is that pains can’t be identical to the “firing” of C fibers.
Note:
The idea of “C-fibers firing” was often used in the philosophy of mind. It’s still used today as an example of mind-brain identity, even though many philosophers (including materialists/physicalists) now view it as being too simplistic.
Written by Paul Austin Murphy
MY PHILOSOPHY: https://paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com/
My Flickr Account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/193304911@N06/
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現實的客觀性--Ethan Siegel
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請參見本欄上一篇《引言》以及此文(該欄2026/01/15)。
Does our physical reality exist in an objective manner?
We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.
Ethan Siegel, 12/25/25
The idea that two quanta could be instantaneously entangled with one another, even across large distances, is often talked about as the spookiest part of quantum physics. If reality were fundamentally deterministic and were governed by hidden variables, this spookiness could be removed. Unfortunately, attempts to do away with this type of quantum weirdness have all failed, as any experimental difference between the Copenhagen interpretation and hidden variable theories has only supported the standard picture of quantum mechanics.
Credit: Alan Stonebraker/American Physical Society 示意圖
Key Takeaways
* The old philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the forest but there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” seems to obviously have an answer: yes.
* Whenever a tree falls, its trunk snaps, its branches collide with others, and it collides with the ground. Each one of those actions should make a sound.
* But relativity teaches us that the sound each observer experiences is relative to their position and motion, and quantum physics tells us that the act of observing changes the quantum state of this system. What does that all mean for the existence of “objective reality?”
If there’s one thing most of us can be certain of it’s this: that our observed, physical reality actually exists. Although there are always some philosophical assumptions behind this conclusion, it’s an assumption that isn’t contradicted by anything we’ve ever measured under any conditions: not with human senses, not with laboratory equipment, not with telescopes or observatories, not under the influence of nature alone nor with specific human intervention. Reality exists, and our scientific description of that reality came about precisely because those measurements, conducted anywhere or at any time, are consistent with that very description of reality itself.
But there had previously been a set of assumptions that came along with our notion of reality that are no longer universally agreed upon, and chief among them is that reality itself exists in a fashion that’s independent of the observer or measurer. In fact, two of the greatest advances of 20th century science — relativity and quantum mechanics — specifically challenge our notion of objective reality, and rather point to a reality that cannot be disentangled from the act of observing it. Here’s the bizarre science of what we know, today, about the notion of objective reality.
During Voyager 1’s 1979 flyby encounter with Jupiter, a brief “point” of light was seen on Jupiter’s surface, representing the first observed bolide event in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Jupiter experiences several thousands of times as many such events as Earth does, at minimum, as its gravity draws large numbers of objects into it that wouldn’t strike it, despite its massive size, otherwise. We think these objects strike Jupiter whether we observe them doing so or not.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Voyager 1 視頻
Objective reality
Put simply, the big idea is that reality exists, and it exists in a fashion that’s independent of anyone or anything that monitors or observes reality. Particles have masses, charges, and other intrinsic properties that don’t change, regardless of:
* who measures it,
* where they are,
* how fast they’re moving,
* which property gets measured,
* or by what means the measurement is acquired.
This is a big foundational idea of science: that something’s “realness” is completely independent of whether or how it’s being examined.
But this idea is only an assumption. Sure, we can see that the laws of physics and the fundamental constants of nature don’t appear to change over time or space: an atom of hydrogen here has the same set of emission and absorption lines as an atom of hydrogen many billions of light-years away or many billions of years ago. A proton has the same rest mass in Antarctica as it does on the International Space Station as it does in a galaxy anywhere within the Universe. As these examples show, we can only state that this assumption is good to the degree we’re capable of putting it to experimental and observational tests.
Different frames of reference, including different positions and motions, would see different laws of physics (and would disagree on reality) if a theory is not relativistically invariant. The fact that we have a symmetry under ‘boosts,’ or velocity transformations, tells us we have a conserved quantity: linear momentum. The fact that a theory is invariant under any sort of coordinate or velocity transformation is known as Lorentz invariance, and any Lorentz invariant symmetry conserves CPT symmetry. This notion of invariance under constant motion dates all the way back to the time of Galileo. Credit: Krea/Wikimedia Commons 坐標系示意圖
This was borne out extremely well by physics over most of its history, from Galileo to Newton to Faraday to Maxwell. The law of gravity appeared to be the same universal law everywhere we could see, from objects here on Earth to objects that orbited around the Earth to planets and moons and comets that orbited objects other than the Earth. The gravitational constant was truly a constant; the laws of motion appeared to be the same for everyone, and if two different people measured the position, motion, or acceleration of an object, as well as the duration it took to go between different points, they’d both get the same answer.
This appeared, initially, to apply just as well to electromagnetism as it did to classical mechanics. The laws of electricity and magnetism were the same everywhere we looked, and applied to charges at rest and in motion — at any speed — equally well. It didn’t matter whether these were radioactive particles like alpha particles (helium nuclei) or beta particles (electrons), or whether these were enormous collections of charges like one might find on a charged-up van de Graaf generator. Charges might behave differently within conductors or insulators, and the nature of those materials might affect how charges move within them, but the laws, constants, and who measured what would all be consistent regardless of the setup.
Apollo 10, known as the ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Moon landing, was actually equipped with all the apparatuses that would have allowed them to land on the lunar surface themselves. They came closer to the Moon than any previous crewed mission, and paved the way for the actual moon landing which took place with Apollo 11 in July of 1969. The entire endeavor required only Newtonian physics, and astronauts in orbit around the Moon experienced themselves as completely weightless. Credit: NASA/Apollo 10 照片
Relativity
Things began to change with the discovery of length contraction and time dilation, however, which would eventually lead to the revolution of Einstein’s relativity. If you fired a projectile from rest here on Earth, everyone standing around would be able to measure how fast it went and would measure the same speed; the only differences would be in the direction they saw the projectile moving, as someone “behind” the projectile would see it moving away from them, while someone “ahead of” the projectile would see it moving toward them.
If the projectile was on a moving platform, and/or if the observers were on a moving platform, they might now measure different speeds from one another as well as different directions. However, if you knew how fast the various platforms were moving, each observer could easily reconstruct what any other observer would see.
However, what if, instead of a common projectile like a cannonball, this was a particle that was moving close to the speed of light? In fact, what if it actually were light itself? All of a sudden, these older laws didn’t work. For everyone who observes light always sees it moving at precisely the same speed: c, or 299,792,458 m/s.
A “light clock” will appear to run differently for observers moving at different relative speeds, but this is due to the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein’s law of special relativity governs how these time and distance transformations take place between different observers. However, each individual observer will see time pass at the same rate as long as they remain in their own reference frame: one second-per-second, even though when they bring their clocks together after the experiment, they’ll find that they no longer agree. Credit: John D. Norton/University of Pittsburgh 不同運動速率觀察結果相異的動態示意圖
All of a sudden, notions like space and time weren’t objective parts of reality, but rather only existed relative to the observer. In the thought-experiment above, two observers measure how much time it takes for light to travel up from the floor toward a mirror at the top, and then back down toward the floor again. This type of setup — known as a light-clock — should yield the same result for any observer, whether in rest or in motion.
But to the observer at rest, the light-clock in motion would appear to run more slowly, and in fact time would appear to pass more slowly for the person in motion relative to them. Similarly, for the observer in motion, their light-clock would appear to run at the normal rate, but the light-clock at rest — which would appear to be in motion relative to them — would appear to run more slowly, and time would appear to pass more slowly for everyone who wasn’t in motion along with the observer and their clock.
Similarly, how far apart two objects were, a measure of distance, could only be defined relative to an observer. And notions like “simultaneous” could again only be defined for two observers at rest in the same location. In fact, if we could measure “time” precisely enough, observers at different locations or in motion with different speeds or directions would even measure different results for the simple example of, “When did this projectile hit the ground?”
In Newtonian (or Einsteinian) mechanics, a system will evolve over time according to completely deterministic equations, which should mean that if you can know the initial conditions (like positions and momenta) for everything in your system, you should be able to evolve it, with no errors, arbitrarily forward in time. One cannot describe the position of an object accurately without including a time coordinate in addition to the spatial ones. In our practical Universe, due to the inability to know the initial conditions to truly arbitrary precisions, including when we factor in the presence of quantum uncertainty, this is not true to arbitrary accuracy. Credit: ESO/M. Parsa/L. Calçada 「宇宙事務前定論」示意圖
As it turns out, it isn’t just changes in position or motion that can affect questions such as, “How distant is this object?” “How long did this phenomenon last?” or “Which event happened first?” In addition, changes in the curvature of spacetime itself — i.e., the effects of gravitation — can impact the answer. Time doesn’t just dilate when you move close to the speed of light, it also dilates when you’re in a stronger gravitational field. The presence and distribution of matter and energy impacts how we experience space and time, which is why light bends when it passes too close to a mass and why time slows down when you approach a black hole’s event horizon.
In fact, some very bizarre and counterintuitive observations can arise as consequences of the fact that an objective measure of “space” or “time” doesn’t exist. If you have a supernova go off in a distant galaxy, you might expect that light to arrive at your eyes at one particular, pre-determined time. But if there’s a large mass between you and that supernova, it can actually distort the intervening space, resulting in multiple images of the same galaxy and supernova: with the light from the supernova arriving at different, non-simultaneous times in each image where it appears. Space and time might be real, but they’re not objectively real; only real relative to each individual observer or measurer.
This series of images, captured with the Hubble Space Telescope, shows four images, stretched out into arcs by gravitational lensing, of the same galaxy. In 2016, we captured a supernova in one of these images (labeled SN1), and then saw a second and third separated by a total of around 6 months. Based on the reconstructed geometry of the lensing foreground cluster, we can expect to see the fourth replay in the location labeled SN4 in the year 2037. Credit: S.A. Rodney et al., Nature Astronomy, 2021 哈伯望遠鏡照片四幅之 1
Quantum physics
In the quantum realm, things get even more counterintuitive, as the outcome of an experiment or observation depends on your method of making that observation or measurement, and on whether you make one at all.
Consider, for example, the famed two-slit (sometimes known as the double-slit) experiment. If you attempt to throw a large number of small objects through a barrier with two slits carved in it, you expect to see those objects collect against the wall behind the barrier in two piles: one corresponding to the slit on the left and one corresponding to the slit on the right. This is precisely what happens in the macroscopic world, whether you use balls, pebbles, or living organisms.
But if you use a quantum particle, like electrons or photons, you don’t get two piles. Instead, you get what appears to be a wave-like interference pattern: alternating locations, equidistantly spaced, where particles preferentially land and are forbidden from landing. The greatest “peak” of collected particles is at the midpoint between the two slits, with alternating peaks (that decrease in magnitude) and troughs (which always go all the way down to zero) as you move away from that central peak.
The wave pattern for electrons passing through a double slit, one-at-a-time. If you measure “which slit” the electron goes through, you destroy the quantum interference pattern shown here. Regardless of the interpretation, quantum experiments appear to care whether we make certain observations and measurements (or force certain interactions) or not. Credit: Dr. Tonomura; Belsazar/Wikimedia Commons 「雙縫實驗」照片5幅
It might occur to you to, then, to send the particles through one-at-a-time, instead of all at once. When you do that, the same results emerge: macroscopic objects make two piles, but quantum particles only land in the “peaks” of an interference pattern. When enough particles are tallied, the full pattern emerges.
It might occur to you, after that, to try to measure which slit each particle goes through on its way to the back wall. Perhaps surprisingly, now both experiments — the macroscopic and quantum ones — lead to only two piles. The act of observing “which slit each particle went through” destroys the quantum behavior. Somehow, making a measurement, which means inducing an energetic-enough interaction between the quantum particle you’re experimenting on with another quantum, alters the behavior of the quantum system.
We see this phenomenon rear its head in many different ways in quantum mechanics. Pass a spinning quantum particle through a vertically-oriented magnet, and the particle will deflect either upward or downward, revealing its spin. Put another vertically-oriented magnet farther downstream, and the particles that deflected upward will still deflect upward, while the ones that deflected downward will still deflect downward. But what, do you suppose, will happen if you put a horizontally-oriented magnet between the two vertical ones?
When a particle with quantum spin is passed through a directional magnet, it will split in at least 2 directions, dependent on spin orientation. If another magnet is set up in the same direction, no further split will ensue. However, if a third magnet is inserted between the two in a perpendicular direction, not only will the particles split in the new direction, but the information you had obtained about the original direction gets destroyed, leaving the particles to split again when they pass through the final magnet. Credit: MJasK/Wikimedia Commons 具「量子自旋」性質粒子通過特定方向磁場示意圖
The answer is twofold:
* the horizontal magnet splits the beam of particles in two, with one set of particles deflecting leftward and one deflecting rightward,
* but now, regardless of which sets of particles you choose to pass through the next vertical magnet, they once again split into upward and downward trajectories.
In other words, making a “horizontal” measurement (or observation) destroys the “vertical” information about the spin-orientation of these particles.
Does this mean that there is no such thing as objective reality? Not necessarily; there could be an underlying reality that exists whether we measure it or not, and our measurements and observations are just a crude, insufficient way to reveal the full, true character of what our objective reality actually is. Many people believe that this will someday be shown to be the case, but so far — and this advance was just awarded 2022’s Nobel Prize in Physics — we can place very meaningful constraints on just what type of “reality” exists independent of our observations and measurements. To the best that we can tell, the real outcomes that arise in the Universe cannot be divorced from who is measuring them, and how.
Quantum mechanics’ entangled pairs can be compared to a machine that throws out balls of opposite colors in opposite directions. When Bob catches a ball and sees that it is black, he immediately knows that Alice has caught a white one. In a theory that uses hidden variables, the balls had always contained hidden information about what color to show. However, quantum mechanics says that the balls were gray, or a combination of black and white, until someone looked at them, when one randomly turned white and the other black. Bell inequalities show that there are experiments that can differentiate between these cases. Such experiments have proven that quantum mechanics’ description is correct, and the balls have an indeterminate color until the measurement is made. Credit: Johan Jamestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 「量子纠缠」示意圖
It isn’t the job of science, contrary to popular belief, to explain the Universe that we inhabit. Instead, science’s goal is to accurately describe the Universe that we inhabit, and in that it’s been remarkably successful. But the questions that most of us get excited about asking — and we do it by default, without any prompting — often involve figuring out why certain phenomena happen. We love notions of cause-and-effect: that something occurs, and then later on, as a consequence of that first thing occurring, something else happens because of it. That’s true in many instances, but the quantum Universe can violate cause-in-effect as well in a variety of ways.
One such question that we cannot answer is whether there is such a thing as an objective, observer-independent reality. Many of us assume that it does, and we build our interpretations of quantum physics in such ways that they admit an underlying, objective reality. Others don’t make that assumption, and build equally valid interpretations of quantum physics that don’t necessarily have one. All we have to guide us, for better or for worse, is what we can observe and measure. We can physically describe that, successfully, either with or without an objective, observer-independent reality. At this moment in time, it’s up to each of us to decide whether we’d rather add on the philosophically satisfying but physically extraneous notion that “objective reality” is meaningful.
This article was first published in November of 2022. It was updated in December of 2025.
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該文作者希苟教授是理論天體物理學家(請見本欄下一篇)；也是一位相當量產的大眾性科學類作家。他的文章有兩個特色：
1) 評論和分析在說明和教育性兩個層面都頗為深入(前者2025/05/22；後者2022/08/13第二篇)；跟其他同樣具有專業背景的大眾性科學類作家相較，也頗勝一籌；非專業出身的科學新聞報導者更難望其項背。
2) 他的作品都附有詳細的照片和/或統計圖片來幫助解說；該文自不例外，請至原網頁觀看。
希苟教授大作的主題屬於哲學，其內容則屬於「近代物理」(這是我大學時代的名詞)；置於那一欄，還真得推敲、推敲。本部落格類似的文章還有：此文(該欄2026/01/01)、此文(該欄2026/01/04)、和此文(該欄2026/01/04)等。本想另開一個相對於「形上學」的「形下學」專欄；又好像顯出我老頑童的一面。考慮再三，決定依「主題」置於此欄。
說到這裏附帶聊兩句：我的論政風格時而嘻皮笑臉，時而潑翁罵街；我論學時則一向嚴謹恭敬。話雖如此，在對待一些立論主旨在表達自己「政治正確」，或把「學術」當做「羊頭」掛在自己項上的學者(該欄2025/09/18)，我一向甚為鄙視，敵意也高；自然就從不手軟。碰到這種情況，尚請看官擔待一、二(1)。
該文從相對論和量子力學兩個角度討論：「客觀現實是否存在？」；對這類問題有興趣的朋友，不妨一讀。
附註：
1. 在以上兩者之外，對一些英文字不怎麼認識，張口就來的「學者」，我下筆也很嚴厲；請參見：《評《另類哲學》》、《評《哲學辭典》中譯本》、和《《自由的所以然》讀後》。
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