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哲學 – 開欄文
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瀏覽5,572 ｜回應29｜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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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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用大腦神經科學理論分析哲學議題 -- Rachel Barr
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以我現在的腦力，完全讀通這篇文章大概要一個星期到十天。還是早些刊出，讓對這三個議題有興趣的朋友先睹為快。
請參看《斯賓諾沙「心物一元論」簡介》(本欄2025/12/23)、《齊澤克對談：「一切量子說」》(本欄2025/12/10)、和拙作《唯物人文觀》(2006/02/04)。
3 philosophical debates from the 20th century that neuroscience is reshaping
Neuroscience isn’t dissolving philosophy’s hardest problems — it’s forcing us to rethink where they live.
Key Takeaways
* Modern neuroscience is reframing classic 20th-century philosophical questions about free will, meaning, and the self.
* Rather than eliminating these ideas, brain science shows how they emerge from the brain’s physical, probabilistic, and embodied processes.
* These debates now hinge less on abstraction and more on how brains actually work.
Rachel Barr, 12/22/25
Philosophers and scientists have always kept close company. Look back far enough, and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
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Before we had instruments to measure reality, we had to reason our way into it, but that intellectual lineage is what eventually gave us the scientific method. As technology advanced and the scope for observation expanded, specializations splintered off from philosophy to reconstitute as the sciences.
Astronomy cleared the sky of deities and showed us a universe governed by gravity, not gods. Geography mapped a not-so-flat Earth, then geology dated it, stratifying earthly time in isotopes and sedimentary layers. Physics folded time into space, and with it, reimagined us not as beings apart from nature, but as a continuation of its energy and mass. We are not, as Pink Floyd suggested, “lost souls swimming in a fishbowl.” We are matter, muddling our way through life in relativistic motion.
Now, in the 21st century, science is tracing a map through the other great unknown: the mind.
Advances in biophotonics and neuroimaging have brought us closer than ever to a material picture of the mind, but the questions we’re now brushing up against aren’t melting away under empirical gaze. Instead, neuroscience has wandered back to philosophy’s front door, testing the limits of its most durable questions.
1. Free will
In the early 19th century, French physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined the Universe as clockwork, each gear turning in obedience to natural law. He conceived of a demon who, knowing the position and momentum of every particle, could predict the future with perfect accuracy. This thought experiment crystallizes classical determinism: a world where there is no freedom, only inevitability.
Modern neuroscience can feel like Laplace’s demon in biological dress; if thoughts and actions arise from the physical machinery of the brain, are we anything more than cogs in the same cosmic clock?
Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky presses that case in Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. The deterministic nature of our neural universe, he writes, is a totalizing argument against free will. Every act is an inevitable output of prior conditions — from genes to stress to social context. Even the air in the room, he notes, subtly alters our behavior.
Some cases seem to justify his position. In Our Brains, Our Selves, Oxford neurologist Masud Husain tells the stories of patients who were dramatically reshaped by disease and injury. One such patient, David, developed profound apathy after a stroke damaged circuits that link the frontal lobes with the basal ganglia — structures heavily involved in motivation and action. He was awake, aware, and physically capable, yet the inner spark seemed gone. Neurologists call this syndrome abulia, the loss of will. Before treatment, others had to prompt him repeatedly to do even simple actions, but a simple dopamine-boosting medication restored David to his former ambitious self. Whether the drug restored free will is a philosophical question. What the case makes hard to deny is that whatever we call will — free or not — depends largely on the health of a few cubic centimetres of tissue and the concentration of a particular neurotransmitter.
Legal systems, psychiatry, and ethics all operate on a sliding scale of agency. Courts distinguish between crimes committed under premeditation and those committed under psychosis, for example.
This graded scaffold of responsibility sits more comfortably with the compatibilist view that determinism and free will can coexist. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has argued that freedom and responsibility arise from acting according to your own motives. The obvious objection is never far behind: “But where do those motives come from? Who chose them?”
This line of reasoning recurs endlessly in free-will debates — a philosophical whack-a-mole of causes causing causes. There’s a metaphor for this impasse: turtles all the way down. The phrase comes from a folk tale in which a scientist explains that the Earth orbits the Sun. A woman in the audience objects, “That’s nonsense, young man. The world rests on the back of a giant turtle.” When asked what the turtle stands on, she replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.”
One way out of this infinite regress is to stop sprinting back to the beginning of time and instead pay attention to what actually happens in the here-and-now of a living brain.
The past shapes us, but shaping is not the same as puppeteering. Causality is the medium in which agency emerges; it is a precondition of free will. A creature that could not be influenced by its history or environment would also be a creature that could not learn, plan, or take advice. In a very literal sense, you need causes in order to become the kind of system that can weigh options at all. As Dennett puts it, “the past does not control you; it causes you, but it does not control you.” Even the studies Sapolsky cites to illustrate biological and contextual determinism rely on statistics. They deal in distributions and averages, not one-to-one inevitabilities. For all practical purposes, brains and behavior must be described probabilistically.
Brains are not like the simple physical systems that populate a physics textbook. It is not a swinging pendulum, an ideal gas, or a neat circuit with a fixed input-output table. It’s a vast, nonlinear, adaptive network. Billions of neurons — each with thousands of synapses — form feedback-rich loops that are constantly being reshaped. When those neurons interact, their collective behavior no longer resembles a simple chain of causes.
At any moment, different coalitions of neurons can temporarily synchronise, form a functional team to guide perception or action, and then dissolve again. Neuroscientists describe this as a metastable system; it doesn’t lock into one pattern and stay there. The brain’s activity wanders across a landscape of possible patterns. Some regions of that landscape are attractors, preferred configurations the system tends to fall into. Others are ridges or passes that allow transitions between those attractors.
All of this is, of course, shaped by genetics and experience, but it doesn’t behave like a simple line of dominoes. Within this probabilistic terrain, neural circuits don’t dictate a single inescapable fate so much as bias the odds. Given your current state — your mood, your level of fatigue, the cues in the room — some patterns of activity are more likely to ignite than others. Causality constrains the menu of possibilities, but it does not pre-write the exact sequence of states you will traverse. This is where Laplace’s demon starts to lose its nerve.
Since the underlying dynamics are nonlinear, small differences in timing or input can, in the right conditions, be amplified into very different outcomes. Dynamical systems theorists call this sensitive dependence on initial conditions. In the brain, that sensitivity shows up at the boundary between competing options, where tiny fluctuations — an extra spike here, a few milliseconds’ delay there — can bias which attractor wins out. That isn’t indeterminism magically giving birth to freedom; rather, it is sensitivity placed where control signals can matter. It’s a thoroughly material feature of the brain’s organization that leaves the door to something like free will open a crack.
A decision does not require some magical breaking of the causal chain. It is a reconfiguration of the system’s dynamics: a shift in which neural coalition comes to dominate, a redirection of probabilistic flow through a lawful network. In theory, any non-zero degree of agency could be sufficient to move the needle.
To call this free will may stretch the term, but it captures a naturalistic form of agency, the ability of a physical system to use its own internal organization and history to navigate its causal possibilities. Neural computation operates squarely within the laws of physics. No synaptic transmission outruns light; no action potential violates Maxwell’s equations. Yet the brain transforms these laws into degrees of freedom. Brains are neither pure dice nor pure clockwork; they sit somewhere in between. That in-between space may be where whatever is worth salvaging under the name “free will” actually lives.
2. The existentialist crisis of meaning
Existentialism emerged from the collapse of theological certainty. In the 18th and 19th centuries, God was dead, or dying, and humanity found itself cut loose from the moral scaffolding that had once anchored its world. In the vacuum that followed, early existentialist thinkers, such as Søren Kierkegaard and later Friedrich Nietzsche, tried to rebuild with reason.
By the mid-20th century, after two world wars and the horror of Auschwitz, reason itself had come to look like a false idol. Writing amid the ruins of postwar Paris, second-wave existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir found that both religious and secular systems of moral governance had crumbled under the weight of human brutality. What remained was the individual, alone with the burden of choosing.
For a paper-knife, Sartre explains, “essence precedes existence.” Its maker conceives its purpose first; only then is the knife brought into being. Humans have no such luck, however. We give knives their purpose, but who gives purpose to us? According to Sartre and many other existentialists, we do. Since meaning is not given, it must therefore arise from how we live and act in the world.
Albert Camus, writing a few years later, found this project misguided. The very hunger for meaning was the problem, he argued. The mismatch between that yearning and the Universe’s indifference is what he called l’absurde. Any attempt to reconcile this impossible correspondence was, for Camus, “philosophical suicide.” According to his view, we must live for “the struggle itself,” in full awareness of its futility.
Today, existentialism has entered a third phase — a movement philosophers Owen Flanagan and Gregg Caruso call neuroexistentialism. If consciousness is “the hard problem” in mind science, then “the really hard problem,” writes Flanagan, is explaining how subjective significance can arise in a purely material brain. His answer — eudaimonistic naturalism — suggests meaning can be studied empirically, by examining what allows human beings to flourish.
I don’t necessarily disagree. However, looking at it from my perspective turns this question slightly on its axis. Meaning, I would argue, is not something we elect to create; it’s something that happens to us. To be conscious at all is to translate sensation into experience. The brain cannot help but impose coherence on the flux of sensory data — stitching cause to effect, moment to moment — because that is the mechanism by which it constructs and perceives reality.
At Northwestern University, researchers asked volunteers to write about the past or future, imagining themselves in the experience. Whether the scenes they pictured were joyful or sad didn’t seem to matter — the very act of temporal simulation increased their reported sense of meaning. And the greater detail they imagined into the experience, the stronger the effect, on average. This suggests meaning is dialogical, emerging when engaged in process. The very act of being alive to our experience, and to time’s unfolding, appears to feed some part of our existential hunger, which, don’t forget, is the brain’s fault in the first place.
The brain constructs our hunger for meaning, just as it conceives of meaning in the first place. Nobody else experiences meaning, aside from, perhaps, some other intelligent creatures whose existential despair remains private. Meaning has always been a brain-made construct. It was ours to begin with.
Seen this way, Camus’ absurd takes on a new texture. The Universe is unfeeling because, of course it is. It’s the very environment from which feeling emerged. It provided a world of sensations, and then organisms evolved to feel them — spawning abilities to help them navigate material reality and, crucially, survive inside it. For what other reason could we have awoken, were it not for evolutionary pressures that privileged the survival of reality-sensing organisms? Absurdity is simply the natural condition of consciousness awakened from unresponsive matter.
We are, whether we like it or not, phenomenological creatures. However we define it, meaning is ultimately a felt sense of coherence and value, not a fact about the world but a relation to it. This shifts the existential task. Meaning isn’t something to be manufactured ex nihilo, but a felt sense that arises when we feed the brain the kinds of patterns and environments it reliably metabolises into a sense of coherence. Which is not unlike the eudaimonistic naturalism Owen Flanagan suggested. I did tell you I don’t necessarily disagree.
3. The self
If you follow the trail of 20th-century philosophers chasing the self, what strikes you is how restlessly the thing keeps moving. Martin Heidegger moved it out of the skull and into the world. In his view, selfhood is expressed in what you do, what you care about, and how your life is organized under the awareness of mortality, or “being toward death.”
Maurice Merleau‑Ponty tightened the focus from world to flesh, describing selfhood as a lived body. For him, the self isn’t a story you tell, but a pre-reflective feeling of mineness braided into perception and movement.
Derek Parfit located it in something more abstract: in the continuing causal organization of mental life. He arrived at this conclusion via a thought experiment. Imagine your brain is divided and transplanted into two new bodies. Which one is you? Parfit argues that identity, as we imagine it, can’t do the job we want it to, because identity can’t branch. Psychological continuity, however, can — and that, he thinks, is what really grounds your concern about the future. You plan ahead, assuming that your future self will remember your past, carry your intentions forward, and feel the consequences of what you do now. After the transplant, your life continues in two streams, and what you care about is present in both. So perhaps, Parfit suggests, “you” can survive as two.
Above, we have three different answers to the same question: Where does the ‘I’ live? At the turn of the millennium, a new candidate was discovered.
When you let your attention drift inward — to your past, your future, your inner monologue — the default mode network (DMN) kicks into gear. Neurologist Marcus Raichle first noticed it when certain midline areas would hum to life when his volunteers were waiting idly in the scanner between trials. Mind-wandering was the first function linked to this network. Since then, the DMN has been implicated in autobiographical memory, rumination, and self-referential thinking — exactly the sort of heavy lifting you’d expect from a narrative self-system.
When that network is perturbed, the felt shape of the self can change. Under psychedelics, the DMN becomes less internally coherent. As its activity falls away, so too does the bounded, narrating self — a state referred to as ego dissolution. At the same time, sensation and emotion flood more freely into awareness. Experience can feel more immediate and emotionally saturated, as if the editorial voice has gone quiet and the world has rushed in.
Depersonalization looks like the bleak mirror image. Here, DMN hubs chatter away, but their links to salience and interoceptive networks are weakened. The part of the brain that keeps up a running commentary about “me” is still humming, sometimes even overactive, but its conversation partners in the body and emotional brain have gone quiet. Patients describe feeling like a spectator sealed behind glass. They know who they are, and they remember the events of their lives. What’s missing is the felt mineness of experience.
Depersonalization exposes the limits of what Parfit’s psychological continuity can explain. Continuity may be enough to ground the forward flow of memory, intention, and character, but it is not sufficient for the phenomenology of selfhood. In depersonalization, the continuer persists; the mineness does not.
Experience is not a faithful readout of external reality, or of internal viscera; it’s the brain’s best Bayesian explanation of viscerosensory inputs. You can’t see your pupils dilate; you often can’t place a visceral shift precisely in space or time. That forces the brain to lean heavily on estimation models, making guesses that help it to integrate interoceptive signals — like heart rate, breathing, and temperature — with sensory feedback from the external world.
In depersonalization, the system appears to down-weight those interoceptive signals, treating them as noisy and uninformative. The DMN keeps rehearsing the script of the self, but it’s no longer anchored to the visceral stream coming up from the body. From the inside, that feels like your life continuing in theory while someone else does the living.
The brain is ultimately an organ of regulation, which is why cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth describes us as “beast machines.” We are biological control systems first, reflective narrators only later. Nervous systems arrive late in evolutionary history, appearing as specialized gadgets for helping bodies anticipate and avoid trouble. Perception and action evolved in service of keeping the body alive, and so our experiences are never really disembodied.
Merleau‑Ponty was onto something, it seems.
Still, Seth relocates the self once more. He’s proposed that conscious selfhood arises from the brain’s role as a prediction-driven control system for the body. Feeling like a self, he argues, is the brain’s best effort to wrangle body, narrative, and world into a coherent stance. Selfhood lives in the connective tissue that binds story to sensation.
Psychedelics and depersonalization are instructive precisely because they pry those agreements apart. One loosens the narrator while flooding the body; the other preserves the narrator while muting ownership.
The primary project of a living system is not to understand the world; it is to avoid dying in it. Perception, action, memory, and even our hunger for meaning are elaborations of that basic constraint. The brain is not made of celestial material. It is tissue and salt water, warmed, fed, and continuously informed by the rest of the organism.
A brain removed from a body is not a mind; it is a rapidly failing organ.
Inside the organism that feeds it, the brain becomes a dynamical system that can model its own future, argue with itself about responsibility, suffer the absence of meaning, and feel like someone rather than something. We perceive the world and ourselves because of, not in spite of, being “beast machines.”
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斯賓諾沙「心物一元論」簡介 - Paul Austin Murphy
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雖然我對哲學很有興趣，畢竟尚未入門；沒什麼資格GGYY。
索引：
Davidson, Donald
Spinoza, Baruch
Spinoza: The Mind Is the Body
Spinoza’s ontological monism has a lot going for it. (The 20th-century philosophers Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson and Donald Davidson certainly believed so.) However, despite the coherence of Spinoza’s monism when taken exclusively as an ontological position, some of his arguments on free will specifically (which include psychological comments) don’t seem to work very well. In other words, Spinoza’s metaphysical monism can be upheld, without accepting those conclusions which ignored the complexities of human psychology.
Paul Austin Murphy, 10/07/25
Ontological Monism: Conceptual Pluralism
Baruch Spinoza expressed his overall monist position in the following way:
“Mind and body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under that of extension.”
This is an expression of ontological monism in that the mind and body are deemed to be one and the same thing. (Spinoza implicitly used the “is of identity” here, rather than the “is of predication”.)
Spinoza’s term “attribute” may need explaining.
Rather than the duality of mind and body, here we have the duality of thought and extension. According to Spinoza, the mind’s essential attribute is thought. (Clearly, Spinoza was reacting to Descartes here.) The body’s essential attribute is extension. Of course, thought and extension seem to be very different things. Yet Spinoza believed that this is only how we conceive of one and the same thing. Thus, if we conceive of x under the attribute of thought, we deem x to be the mind. However, if we conceive of (the same) x under the attribute of extension, we deem x to be the body.
This raises the question: So what is the value of the variable x?
The “nature” of x can be “conceived under the former or latter attribute”. In more concrete terms, Spinoza went on to say that
“consequently the order of the actions and passions of our body is the same as the order of the actions and passions of the mind”.
Again, the mind and body are one and the same thing. To Spinoza, this also meant that the actions and passions of our body are one and the same thing as the actions and passions of the mind. In both cases, we’re conceiving the same x in two different ways.
One other way in which Spinoza got his point across was by arguing that “a decision of the mind on the one hand, and an appetite and determination of the body on the other, are by nature simultaneous”.
Note that this isn’t about correlations (as with Nicolas Malebranche): it’s about simultaneity. In other words, decisions of the mind aren’t correlated with appetites and determinations of the body: “they are one and the same thing”. In 20th-century-speak, mental states/events aren’t correlated with brain states/events, they are all one and the same thing… if under two modes of presentation. As already stated, Spinoza’s phrase for this is “under the attribute of”. Thus, under the attribute of thought we use the word “decision”. And under the attribute of extension x is deemed to be a “determination [which can be] deduced from the laws of motion and rest”.
Just a moment ago, I stated that “in 20th-century-speak, mental states/events aren’t correlated with brain states/events, they are all one and the same thing”. In the work consulted here (i.e., Ethics), however, Spinoza never mentions the brain. Yet he hinted at it in various places.
For example, in terms of “what the body is capable of doing”, Spinoza went on to say that
“[f]or no one has yet achieved such an accurate knowledge of the structure of the body as to be able to explain all its functions”.
Spinoza even provided an example when he referred to “the things sleepwalkers do which they would not dare to perform while awake”.
Why did Spinoza bring all this up? It was primarily to explain why “the mind moves the body”, and how it does so.
The Phenomenology of Free Will
Spinoza focused on our (not his own words) phenomenological experience of — what we take to be — our own free will. He argued that this can’t be decisive. He wrote:
“[E]xperience, no less clearly than reason, amply shows that the only reason people believe themselves free is that they are conscious of their actions.”
Yet the same people are “unaware of the causes that determine them”.
Not only is Spinoza’s argument against free will radical, so are his explanations as to why he took his position. In terms of the causes that people are unaware of, they’re “nothing but its appetites [which themselves] vary depending on the various states of the body”. In other words, people can’t will their appetites, and neither can they will the changes in the their bodies.
So was Spinoza assuming a necessary relation between a given appetite and a given action? Does the same appetite always cause the same action in the same person over time? What about a similar appetite when it comes to another person? Would that result in the same action?…
Hah!
None of this may matter because all these other scenarios can be explained deterministically too.
If a specific appetite brings about a specific action at one time, but another action at another time, then it is still an appetite that has a deterministic effect on both actions. Indeed, even if the appetite changes over time, then it’s still the changed appetite which will have a deterministic effect on the following action.
Decisions and Appetites
Spinoza used the word “decision” rather than the broader term “action”. But whichever word he used, he concluded that “[t]he decisions of the mind are nothing but its appetites”. This is stronger than my earlier line of reasoning because I used the words “has a deterministic affect on”. Spinoza, on the other hand, again implicitly used the is of identity when he argued that the decisions of the mind are its appetites. Thus, the decisions of the mind aren’t expressions of appetites: they are appetites.
This could be seen as being a proto-behaviourist account of the appetites in that they must aways be tied to human actions or decisions. In Rylian (as in Gilbert Ryle) or Wittgensteinian terms, perhaps an unexpressed or un-acted upon appetite is not an appetite at all.
This still seems odd.
An appetite is usually regarded as a “natural desire to satisfy a bodily need, especially for food”, whereas a decision is deemed to be a mental action or volition. Spinoza, on the other hand, fuses appetite and decision together.
There’s a further problem here.
Spinoza immediately jumps from talking about “appetites” to talking about “emotions”. Indeed, he almost says the same thing about emotions as he had just said about appetites. Spinoza argued that “[o]ur own emotions are the basis for all the decisions we take”. The words “almost says the same thing” were used because in the case of emotions, Spinoza argued that they are “the basis” for all our decisions. When it came to appetites, on the other hand, Spinoza argued that the “decisions of the mind are nothing but its appetites”. So appetites, unlike emotions, aren’t the basis for all our decisions: they are our decisions.
Example 1: Spinoza on the Drunkard
Spinoza put the case against free will by citing the case of a drunkard. He wrote:
“[T]he drunkard may believe it is by a free decision of the mind that he says the things that later, once he has sobered up, he wishes he had not said.”
The argument here is that the drunkard didn’t will what he said when drunk. However, he did will what he said when sober. Yet perhaps he did indeed will what he said when drunk.
The difference here being that in one emotional and psychological state the drunkard said p, and in another emotional and psychological state he said not-p. Indeed, even though/if alcohol interfered with the drunkard’s brain, he might still have willed to say p. The fact that he later rejected saying p doesn’t seem that relevant to the notion of free will.
For example, someone can easily say that the drunkard “let his guard down” when drunk, yet his guard was up when sober. Indeed, perhaps he was more free when drunk, not less so. (This could be because his moral sense or psychology wasn’t determining his actions/words.)
The other option here is that either the drunkard had free will in both cases, or he didn’t have free will in both cases. Being drunk or sober doesn’t seem to be decisive in this debate.
Spinoza broadened out his argument by saying that “we do many things we are afterwards sorry for”. This means that we don’t even need to be drunk to do many things we’re sorry for afterwards.
When one thing was done at one time, the person doing it was in a particular emotional and psychological state. And when he regretted doing that thing at a later time, he was in a different emotional and psychological state. In both cases, he either had free will or he didn’t have free will.
In fact Spinoza is right when he said that “we are agitated by conflicting passions”… But what has that to do with free will? After all, both the state of mind this person was in when the regretted act was done, and the regret which occurred later, might have both been at least partially determined by his passions.
Underneath all this another argument against free will is hidden. Spinoza argued that “those of us who are afflicted by contrary emotions do not know what we want”. Yet, as before, contrary emotions don’t seem to advance the case either for or against free will.
Again, a specific emotion may cause a specific action, and its (if there is such a thing) opposite may cause a different action. Yet perhaps in both cases, perhaps we did know what we wanted, if only for a short time. So the existence of free will applies to both cases. Unless, that is, an emotion and its opposite occur at literally one and the same time. It’s hard to make sense of that. So, instead, say that contrary emotions rapidly fluctuate. In that case, then, it’s still hard to say that this works either for or against free will.
Example 2: Spinoza on Wagging Tongues
One other example is given by Spinoza. This doesn’t seem to work either. However, that may be because it’s (at least partially) an attempt at a joke. This is Spinoza’s take:
“[H]uman affairs would certainly be in a far happier state if people had as much ability to keep silent as they have to speak out.”
This showed Spinoza that “experience provides more than ample evidence that the tongue is the organ people have least control over”. This has a similar shape to Spinoza’s other arguments against free will. Having no control over the tongue presumably means that people sometimes say things they later regret, or that they say things they didn’t really(?) mean. Like the example of drunkard, this may simply mean that a person was in one state of mind at one point, and in another state of mind at another point. Indeed, perhaps at a yet later time that same person may come to regret his previous regret!
As before, none of this seems to work either for or against free will. It simply displays the complex psychology and emotions of most human persons.
Note on Donald Davidson’s Anomalous Monism
The philosopher Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism is anomalous because it states that “thought and purpose [are] free[] from law”. Spinoza, on the other hand, didn’t believe that thought, purpose, etc. are free from natural law. Even though Spinoza believed that the mind can be seen “under the attribute of thought”, he still didn’t believe it was free from natural law. That’s because mind and body are “one and the same thing”. Then again, Davidson also believed that mental events are the same as physical events, but… Yes, this is too complicated to tackle in detail here. Davidson’s position is complicated in itself, but tying it to Spinoza is even more complicated.
Anyway, the guaranteeing of free will can be said to be one of Davidson’s primary aims in his paper ‘Mental Events’. Yet despite the fact that earlier on in that paper Davidson had referred to “the efficacy of thought and purpose in the material world, and their freedom from law”, he was only explicit on this subject at the very end of his paper. This is what Davidson wrote:
“The anomalism of the mental is thus a necessary condition for viewing action as autonomous.”
To put that another way:
The mind’s freedom from physical causation is necessary in order to secure us freedom (that is, secure us free will).
Immanuel Kant undertook a similar enterprise.
In the last paragraph, Davidson paid homage to Kant by quoting — in full — a passage from Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. This is the passage which Davidson quoted:
“[W]e think of man in a different sense and relation when we call him free, and when we regard him as subject to the laws of nature. [ ] It must therefore show that not only can both of these very well coexist, but that both must be thought as necessarily united in the same.”
In ‘Spinoza’s Causal Theory of the Affects’ (in the book Essays on Actions and Events), Davidson mentions Spinoza’s views on the mind and body. Davidson also references Spinoza in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (2001). There are other examples too…
Written by Paul Austin Murphy
MY PHILOSOPHY: https://paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com/
My Flickr Account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/193304911@N06/
Published in Paul Austin Murphy’s Essays on Philosophy
Philosophy: Go to ‘Stories’, and then ‘Published’ for all my essays.
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齊澤克對談：「一切量子說」 -- Slavoj Žižek
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齊澤克教授大概是當代人文/社會科學領域最有名的學者之一；著作等身。下面這篇「對談」討論他最新的大作《量子歷史學》。請自行欣賞。中文標題由「說一切有部」而來。在下文中，我用藍色字體標示《藝術與思想研究學會報導》編者愛德華先生所提的問題，以與齊澤克教授的回應略做區別。
我只讀過齊澤克教授一、兩本書和幾篇文章(該欄2023/12/22)，對他的思想並不熟悉；但是，根據這些粗淺的認識，我很尊重他。不過，我對下文中他的觀點頗有意見；從而，我用這個標題不無揶揄之意。
Slavoj Žižek on quantum history and the end of the past
From physics to the failure of politics
Slavoj Žižek, 04/12/25
Editor’s Notes：Dismissing the hope that either science or democracy will deliver a coherent future, Slavoj Žižek argues that quantum mechanics demands a new philosophy of “quantum history,” in which reality is incomplete and events retroactively reshape the past they emerge from. In conversation with IAI Contributing Editor Omari Edwards, Žižek connects this ontological uncertainty to contemporary politics, from AI and climate change to Trumpism and thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin and Wang Huning, claiming that the collapse of the liberal center is ushering in a new authoritarian moment.
Interviewing Slavoj Žižek is like trying to divert a crowd already surging toward violence. Not with authority, not with barricades, but by stepping into its path and hoping that a sudden question, a sharp interruption, or a desperate redirection might slightly bend its trajectory before impact. There is always the sense that, if you misjudge the timing or the angle, the whole thing will break loose and carry you with it. You begin with quantum mechanics and are rapidly swept through Stalinism, psychoanalysis, theology, ecological catastrophe, and the collapse of Western liberalism.
The danger is not that nothing will be said, but that everything will be said at once, without mercy. Early on, Žižek describes himself, with deadpan seriousness, as “a moderately conservative communist”—a phrase that turns out not to be a joke but a key. He is suspicious of liberal pieties, hostile to revolutionary romanticism, and impatient with both technocratic centrism and utopian fantasy.
Beneath the jokes, the perversity, and the provocation lies something colder and more exacting: an attempt to describe a world that no longer coheres. His new book, Quantum History, is not a metaphor dressed up as physics, nor a philosopher’s flirtation with science. It is an ontological wager. Reality, he insists, is not merely difficult to know but fundamentally cracked. Incompleteness is not a failure of knowledge but a property of existence itself.
This interview, then, is less a discussion of a book than an effort to keep hold of a single question as it mutates across physics, ideology, history, and politics: what does it mean to act in a world that offers no underlying guarantee of coherence, progress, or sense?
Omari Edwards: You call your new book Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy. So let’s start directly. Are you making an ontological claim about the universe itself, or simply using physics as a metaphor?
Slavoj Žižek: No, I pretend to, at least pretend, to make a strong ontological claim. And this is, for me, already, we touched now the very core of my understanding of quantum mechanics. We touched the very core of what bothers me.
Because, you know what is, for me, the big revolution of quantum mechanics? The usual skeptical approach to reality is: reality is out there. We can only gradually approach it. There are things we know, there are things we don’t know. And that was, for example, Einstein’s reading, you know, quantum mechanics means there must be some hidden variables. It doesn’t give a complete picture.
But for me, the genius of quantum mechanics is its obvious incompleteness. We cannot know everything about reality. And this is not just epistemological, but ontological, in the sense that reality is in itself incomplete.
It’s very interesting how when Heisenberg got to this idea that you cannot measure the speed and the position of the particle at the same time, he still took it as an epistemological limitation. But then Niels Bohr, who is nonetheless my big hero, immediately said: no. This gap, this incompleteness, has to be in reality itself.
And that’s why physics matters philosophically to you?
Yes. Because I am a staunch materialist. But I think in view of what is happening today, even politically, not just socially, we have to radically rethink the notion of materialism. The usual materialism is 17th, 19th century materialism, Greek atomism, Democritus. The idea is that all these emotions, values, ideas, are just subjective projections. What really exists out there is empty space and particles. Atoms. Photons.
We have to get rid of this radically. We have to rethink what materialism means.
I ironically refer to Lenin, who said that with every great scientific discovery, materialism had to be rethought. But my main target is Lenin himself. Because I think his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism is probably one of the big candidates for the worst philosophical book of all time.
Why does this matter now?
Because don’t we live in a time where ordinary people can no longer simply rely on inherited ethical and religious systems? We are constantly forced to make decisions that are philosophical decisions. Ecological crisis. Abortion. Artificial intelligence. These are not technical questions. They force you to take a philosophical position. When does life begin? What does thinking even mean?
That’s why we are back in Socratic times. Socrates was the first philosopher in this sense. The pre-Socratics asked what the world is made of. Socrates asked: what do you mean by justice? By courage? By dignity? And we need this more than ever today.
Many physicists accept indeterminacy in quantum mechanics but resist drawing ontological conclusions from it, treating the theory as incomplete or purely predictive. And many do still call for new theories of Qunatum Mechanics with hidden variable or with a super-deterministic universe. Why do you think quantum mechanics justifies a claim about reality itself rather than just about our theories?
People who advocate hidden variables, when I will be in power which, hopefully, will never happen, they get a one-way ticket to the Gulag. Because the greatness of quantum mechanics is in the reversal. What you think is epistemological limitation is the thing itself. And don’t tell me this is my eccentric reading. I’m not alone. I’m in contact with people like Emily Adlam, Carlo Rovelli, Lee Smolin. They all know this.
The problem with Einstein is that he remains a Spinozist. He believes in a perfect rational structure behind reality. For me the very premise of quantum mechanics is that totalization is impossible. Nature itself does not allow a complete picture.
One of the central and most beautiful ideas in quantum physics, for me, is this: every totalization, every attempt to grasp the whole, always occurs from a specific position. You want the complete picture, the hologram, the God’s-eye view. But the hologram is never neutral. It always appears from somewhere. And we can never step outside it and take a view from nowhere.
This is why I use the theory in quantum mechanics of the hologram, a holographic universe. Every perspective already contains a totality, but only from within its own position. You never see “everything”. You only see a whole as it appears from somewhere. And each such whole is real, but partial. And the same logic applies to history.
Once a social system comes into being, it produces its own hologram of the past. It reorganizes everything that came before it as if history had been leading toward this point all along. Capitalism, for example, reads the past as if it had been preparing the ground for capitalism itself. Only after it exists does the past begin to look like a prehistory of its arrival.
This is what Marx means when he writes that the anatomy of man provides the key to the anatomy of the ape. It does not mean that history was destined to lead to capitalism. It means that once capitalism exists, it retroactively reorganizes the meaning of everything that came before it.
So every epoch lives inside its own historical hologram. Each one constructs a totality in which the past suddenly seems necessary. But this necessity is always retroactive. There is no hidden teleology beneath it.
So, our knowledge is structurally limited?
Yes. And not just limited—included. Your knowledge is part of reality. This is true materialism. You accept that your knowledge, with its limitation, does not float above the world. It belongs to the world.
Graham Harman, in my recent interview with him, has suggested that what you’re really proposing is not materialism at all, but a form of occasionalism. He argues that you’ve replaced the Leibnizian or Malebranchian God with the mind, with ideology, or with the symbolic order. Where classical occasionalism denied real causation between objects, God stepped in to make all things happen, he thinks you deny direct access to reality itself by situating it in abstraction, inconsistency or failure. His claim is blunt: no matter how you frame it, he thinks you remain an idealist. How do you respond?
Yes, fine, I accept occasionalism, but read it properly. Occasionalism is the most subversive religious position. Normally you think there is some underlying harmony which guarantees the connection between thought and being. Occasionalism explodes this illusion. It says there is absolutely no natural fit between the universe of our mind and material reality.
But you must read this radically. The madness of occasionalism is its truth: there is no deep guarantee that reality makes sense. There is no reason beneath reason. I do not believe God coordinates mind and matter. I believe there is no coordination at all. Not by God, not by ideology, not by any hidden order.
So if you want to accuse me of something, accuse me of realism. Because my claim is not that reality depends on us, but that reality itself is cracked. Reality does not form a coherent whole. Being itself is inconsistent.
See this was Heidegger’s great insight. Heidegger is the greatest transcendental philosopher. Reality exists. But every access to it is historically mediated. Reality meant something different for the ancient Greeks, for medieval people, for modern people. But quantum physics goes further. It no longer asks only how reality appears from within different historical horizons. It asks something more radical: what is real beyond reality?
And for me, the answer is inconsistency. Reality itself does not form a completed whole. It is not a unified space of meaning. This also changes how we think history. The past is not finished. The past is incomplete. Take Shakespeare. What did Shakespeare really mean? He didn’t know. His plays are contradictory. Every epoch invents its own Shakespeare. Romantic Shakespeare. Modern Shakespeare. Political Shakespeare. Psychoanalytic Shakespeare.
This is not just about interpretation. It is not simply that we read the same past differently. The past itself becomes what it was only retroactively. This is Hegel.
T. S. Eliot already says this when he writes that every new work of art changes the entire past. Not just adds to it, but reorganizes it. The past becomes different because something new has appeared. History does not move forward in a straight line. It folds backward. The past is constantly rewritten by what happens later.
If history is built this way, does it not risk political paralysis? If everything is contingent, if nothing is guaranteed, if history is not tending toward anything in particular, does this not make action feel arbitrary, even futile?
No. For me it does exactly the opposite. It makes politics harder and more real. In quantum mechanics, collapse is not something you plan. It happens. And it is the same with history.
People imagine that if there is no teleology, no inevitable direction, then we are lost. But what the results of Marxism itself show is something much more disturbing. Marx at his worst is Marx of the famous Introduction to A Critique of Political Economy, where history appears as a simple evolutionary process: primitive societies, ancient despotism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and then whatever comes next.
But the real Marx is not there. The real Marx is in Grundrisse, where he has moments of real genius. And there he says something very different. He insists there is no inner necessity in history. Capitalism did not emerge because feudalism had to give birth to it. In the last chapter of Capital, on so-called primitive accumulation, he lists purely contingent events: the discovery of America, the extraction of gold, colonialism, the enclosure of the commons, violent privatization. Capitalism emerges not because history demanded it, but because enough accidents lined up.
But here is the twist. Once capitalism exists, it makes the entire past readable as if it had been leading toward it all along. And again, Marx even uses this strange formula, that the anatomy of man provides the key to the anatomy of the ape. This does not mean that history was moving toward capitalism. It means that once capitalism appears, it reorganizes the entire past retroactively around itself.
This is what I call the hologram. Capitalism becomes one totality among others, and from inside it, the whole of history suddenly looks like it was always pointing toward it.
And today, we are precisely in the opposite situation. We cannot afford such a hologram. We do not know where we are, and some Leftists still cling to the idea we are heading towards socialism. History no longer gives us the illusion that it is aiming at something.
Traditional Marxists thought that collapse meant communism. Rosa Luxemburg said the choice was either socialism or barbarism. But she was wrong. Stalinism taught us something much worse. You can have socialism and barbarism at the same time.
This is my pessimism. We plan to act. And what we can be sure of is that it will go wrong. But that is not paralysis. That is the beginning of politics. The true revolutionary moment is not when your vision succeeds. It is when it fails and you have to react. Not because history is moving, but because catastrophe forces you to think again.
That is why I was always irritated by the Frankfurt School. They analyzed fascism endlessly but treated Stalinism almost as an embarrassment. Read Habermas and you would almost never guess that until thirty years ago there was something called East Germany. Fascism became an object of theory. Stalinism was displaced.
It is easy to understand fascism. What is much harder is to understand how a madness like Stalinism could have happened at all. And we still do not have a serious theory of it.
You need a vision, yes. You cannot act without one. But true historical thinking begins when you also see how your vision is already broken from inside.
And this is also why, from today’s ecological perspective, Marx’s vision of communism appears even more limited. It was essentially capitalism without capital. He wanted the dynamic of continuous expansion without exploitation. That dream did not materialize. And it is not an accident. Collapse is not a destination. It is contingency. Politics does not fulfil history. Politics begins where history breaks.
So, are we now stuck in one of those periods of breaking, where the Left must react against its own failures? Such as with the failure to give a left-wing alternative to Trump, who has taken over the Republican party and changed its ideology?
I don’t think even Trump is the predominant trend. What is more important is what I call soft fascism. Not soft in the sense that it is not dangerous. Soft in the sense that it does not necessarily lead to war. It is not Nazi Germany. It is more like early Mussolini, Franco, Salazar.
The formula is simple. You allow productive capitalism, free competition, innovation. But you are correctly afraid that this will lead to social disintegration. So you supplement it with a strong authoritarian state, usually grounded in some traditional nationalist or moral ideology.
Something very tragic is happening. Liberal democracy is failing, and here I agree with people like Curtis Yarvin. Don’t be afraid. I don’t follow him politically. But in this point he is absolutely right.
The United States is not really a democracy. It is an oligarchy. And he shows this much better than many leftist critics, with enormous empirical detail. Through economic mechanisms, ideological mechanisms, institutional structures. If you look closely, power does not coincide with elections. Power is elsewhere.
That is my big pessimism. I don’t think the reply to this is simply “we need to awaken people” or “we need more democracy.” Moments of authentic awakening are rare. And they usually end in catastrophe.
Trump then is not an absence of democracy but the consequence of it?
Exactly. Trump is a nightmare, yes. But Trump is also a symptom. He is not the illness. He is what happens when the Democratic welfare-state center collapses. The Democratic Party wanted to present itself as the party of normality. Of stability. Of “back to business.” But people no longer want normality. Normality no longer works. Trump did something that the left failed to do. With all his horrors, he ended global capitalism as we knew it. He opened a new space. That is why things are now so unstable.
The United States today is already a four-party system. You have Republicans, Democrats, Trumpian populists, and Democratic socialists. And everything will be decided in how those forces interact.
Look what is going on in China. The Communist Party no longer speaks Maoist language. They have turned to Confucianism. Moral values. Authority. Harmony. Order.
Look what Modi is doing. Look what Putin is doing. Putin is not a Soviet communist. He openly promotes a return to Tsarist values. What we are seeing is not a return to communism but the emergence of authoritarian capitalism.
These systems can be extremely efficient. Even sympathetic in some cases. Look at Singapore. Look at Switzerland. When there is a crisis, trade unions, banks and government come together and organize a plan. And people largely stick to it.
Would you then say the Left needs some version of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew? Our own somewhat authoritarian pragmatic leader to push a socialist agenda?
Yes. Absolutely. I agree with Peter Sloterdijk here. I once asked him: who from our time will people build monuments to in one hundred years? And he answered: Lee Kuan Yew.
I am ready to admit that capitalism works, but only under strong political control. Free-market idiots forget this. In the United States, again and again, when monopolies emerged, it was not the market that solved it. It was the state.
If you want a free market today, you need a strong state. That is the paradox.
But would you then not be calling for that very authoritarian Chinese Communist vision?
No, because I know there is a great temptation now. Among many of the left to say, okay, they're a little bit non-democratic, but maybe China is the model. No. I think I think that, you know, I didn't meet him because we don't like each other, but the key person in China is, I wrote about him, Wang Huning. He's the second, third person. He's their ideologist. He openly calls himself neo conservative. He’s a very interesting guy. He wrote a book 20 years ago, with his survival there. America Against America. 30 years ago, he spent two years, I think, in America, United States, and he was on the one hand, fascinated by economic creativity and so on, but also horrified by social disintegration and this solution is basically soft, fascist.
And this is always the problem of fascism, how to keep the capitalist dynamic without disruptive social events. But I don't believe in Chinese models, not only for the obvious reasons, but it's really, you know, if it's really too dictatorial, they if they were to be doing what they claim they are doing, that the party is a space where all opinions could be heard and so on, that would work, but it's not. You know what? For me, the truth of China. You remember every two, four years, they have party Congress. And then the central event, everybody's just waiting for that. At the end, they announce who will be seven members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. This is power. But there is no debate about who. One doesn't know what goes on beside the closed doors.
I wouldn’t advocate adopting a Chinese model, but doesn’t it risk sliding back into the kind of barbarism you associate with Stalinism, a strong state overriding society? And while China is often praised for decisiveness, critics say policymaking can take years. How do you reconcile those two views?
Yes, but on the other hand, what friends are telling me is that actually, because they can bypass all those democratic debates and so on, when there is urgency, they can act very fast.
For me, the darkest point is this: even Trump supported Cuomo, a Democrat. That tells you something. Trump has effectively taken over the Republican Party. The real question now is what the Democratic socialists do. Do they build their own party or not? I think Mamdani made the right decision. In a direct fight between Trumpian Republicans and Democratic socialists, Trump probably still wins. So the strategic question is how and when you intervene.
You have the same problem here in the UK. You have one big center-right party which is called, as we all know, the Labour Party. Then you have the “crazy left.” And I enjoy this obscenity: Labour forms a government, you have Rachel Reeves and so on, but it’s still mostly white men. If you want real diversity, black politicians, women, Indians, go to the Tory Party. And then you have the third party disappearing.
So if I am pessimistic, yes, it is because if Corbyn and Zarah Sultana succeed, the only real election, by which I mean a contest between two genuinely mobilizing political visions, would be Farage versus whatever this new thing becomes. That would be the first real election in a long time.
For me, maybe the ideal coalition today is not the Labour Party as it is now. They don’t have any spirit, no mobilizing force. What about a coalition between something new, if it manages to emerge, Corbyn and this new left, but also, and this will sound strange, with intelligent conservatives? I increasingly admire some moderate conservatives. And this will annoy the liberal left, but they like to play this game: they introduce half-radical measures, and then when they fail, they refuse responsibility.
My dream is something crazy, I admit it: a new Labour Party, but with intelligent conservatives to keep contact with reality. You know where I learned this? From Marx.
Marx said that this is why he loved Balzac. He saw something in embittered conservatives that the left should learn from. These conservatives are not reactionaries; they are finished as reactionaries. But they see the deadlocks of the situation. They know there is no easy way out. And this is exactly what the left needs today.
So the liberal parties are failing due to a lack of ideology, and a lack of understanding of the importance of a vision.
That’s a very important point. With all my skepticism, that’s my paradox. Be skeptical in this sense: whenever you have a project, think from the very beginning about how it may go wrong. But don’t be afraid, nonetheless, to make choices. That’s what people are afraid of today, making radical choices.
So it was my pleasure. I really mean it. I imagine the two of us in power, it would be wonderful, insulting each other all the time. Perhaps we would have more fun than the politicians today.
I feel like if we were to join the Standing Committee, the rest of the committee would send us directly to the Gulag.
But then we would make a secret pact with the secret police.
And if they discovered us?
Then we would be like Sparta. Two kings. Yes? And maybe, just maybe, we would be intelligent enough to resist this temptation, but why you?
Well I’d be happy to take you up on that, thank you Slavoj Žižek.
It truly was a pleasure.
Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy is now available at all good bookstores.
Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Communist. His latest book is Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy (Bloomsbury 2025)
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記憶並非儲存於大腦--Victoria Trumbull
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Memory is not stored in the brain
Time, not space, contains memory
Victoria Trumbull, 11/17/25
Editor’s Notes：The leading theories of memory describe it as being stored in the brain – similarly, some argue, to the way a computer stores memory. But this assumption relies on materialist assumptions and problematically bypasses the hard problem of consciousness. Memory is not stored in space, but in time, argues philosopher Victoria Trumbull, in the first article of a new IAI series on memory.
From ancient times, philosophers have used the “storage” metaphor to describe the phenomenon of remembering. Memory is often pictured as a vast warehouse or library of experiences. In the past century, this “storage” metaphor has come to be taken literally: neuroscientists today maintain that a “memory” is simply a given pattern or collection of patterns of neural activity. This hypothesis forms a key part of the greater worldview known as “materialism” or “physicalism”: in brief, the idea that reality consists solely in physical stuff, and, correspondingly, that the human mind is reducible or equivalent to the body or the brain.
The central problem with this picture of memory is that, like many descriptions of the mind, the storage metaphor is only a metaphor. It feels intuitive to say that we “store” memories like books in a library or files on a hard drive. While this is a useful metaphor insofar as it helps us to describe and express what it feels like to remember, it cannot be anything more than this.
In order to prove that memories are stored in the brain, we would need to be able to observe this. But this is not a fact that belongs to the order of observation and experimentation. The most that neuroscientists can do is track cerebral activity and attempt to correlate the physical brain state to a description of concurrent mental experience. In carrying out experiments of this kind, however, the neuroscientist has already provisionally assumed that there is an exact identity or perfect equivalence between the mental state and the cerebral state. In other words, the hypothesis of localization that the neuroscientist has set out to prove has already been assumed as an initial axiom of his or her research. The correlation between brain activity and memory reports doesn’t prove that memories are stored in the brain any more than the correlation between footprints and walking proves that walking is stored in footprints, or the correlation between the piano and a sonata proves that the sonata is stored in the piano.
If we assume that the brain stores up discrete, localisable memories, it then becomes extremely difficult to explain how the brain can be said to generate, preserve, and reconstruct “representations” of this kind. How can the brain translate an image of experience, itself intangible and invisible, into a physical record or neural pattern? The neuroscientist is left with the philosophical challenge famously known as the “hard problem of consciousness”: given the complex physical machinations of the brain, whence arises the conscious experience of remembering?
It does not make sense to say that we “store” the smell of coffee, the face of our mother, or the sound of a Mozart symphony “in” the brain. But can a pattern of neural firings, like the embossed print of Braille or the successive taps of Morse code, indicate or contain these prior events, or even mark their salient outlines? In recent years, the idea of “neural code” and the general hypothesis that the brain operates like a computer has been offered as one way of trying to solve this puzzle. But this framework simply provides us with another metaphor; the computer model is no more explanatory than the storage metaphor itself. Neuronal configurations may very well be a biological prerequisite for remembering, but it does not follow from this fact that these configurations are the memory, nor that they can be said to “represent,” “portray,” “depict,” or “contain” what is being remembered.
In truth, the theory of localization far exceeds the facts of current neurobiology. When neuroscientists locate memory “in” the brain, what they’re really finding is that certain brain regions are active during remembering. But being active during a process is not the same thing as being the storage location for that process. The brain is undoubtedly involved in remembering, but involvement does not necessitate containment.
In most neuroscientific experiments intended to prove that memories are stored in the brain, the researchers study habit, not recollection proper. Habit is a motor attitude or pattern retained by the body or nervous system; it is characterized by repetition and acquired by motor education. Memory is personal recollection, involving the persistence of the past under the form of an image, reflecting a unique moment of our original history. In famous experiments with rats and sea slugs, the kind of “memory” being studied is nothing more than a physiological response. What has been shown successfully in experiments of this kind is that physical conditioning produces a regular motor reaction to a given external stimulus, and that brain activity prepares and paves the way for the systematization of this motor response. In other words, what has been proven is that habit is effectuated via lasting changes in synaptic architecture. But to move from the fear response of a mouse to a human episodic recollection would require more than an increase in the number and complexity of neurons: it requires a distinction in kind, a categorical leap from motor habituation to conscious evocation.
Furthermore, if localization theory were true, and if memory-images are indeed “stored up” as cellular or neural traces, then the impairment of certain brain regions should definitely correspond to the destruction of certain well-defined recollections. But this is precisely not the case. For example, on a timescale varying from weeks to years, many patients who have suffered from a stroke come to recover their once-lost ability to speak and comprehend words. Similarly, certain objects or sound-based triggers can cause patients suffering from Alzheimer’s to suddenly recover memories that were previously lost in obscurity. Perhaps what we find to be impaired by brain lesions is the mechanism required to recall or express certain kinds of memories, rather than a firm and final destruction of the recollections themselves.
What, then, are memory-images? First of all, it is important to note that the objects of memory are not like the objects of perception. They are neither visible nor tangible. The remembered thing or event is not found in the present, except somehow intangibly “in” the mind, while the perceived object is present physically and externally. Second, memory-images essentially bear the mark of “pastness.” They are attached to the past by their deepest roots, so that we immediately recognize a memory as distinct from a perception and thus know it as “memory.” An individual recollection points to the wealth or totality of the past that it belongs to and from whence it originates; it points to the total history of the personal life we have lived since our birth.
For these two reasons, our desire to think of memories as “things” that are capable of being “stored” in a receptacle is what we philosophers might call a “category error.” Memory-images are not objects or things. We thus cannot apply to them the same categories, such as the necessity of “being contained somewhere” that we apply to the things of space. The relationship of “container” to “contained” here arises from a misguided analogy with material objects. Why should recollections, which are neither visible nor tangible, need a container, and how could they have one? We could say, again metaphorically, that they exist “in” the mind, but “mind” is not a literal container for mental experiences any more than the number 10 can be said to be a “container” for the series “1, 2, 3…etc.”
Memory is, essentially, a fact of time—it is the persistence of the past—and, because it is a temporal phenomenon, it is fundamentally extra-spatial. To extend to memories, to a series of moments in time, the obligation of “being contained” in a place is to transfer to a temporal phenomenon a quality which applies only to the collection of material bodies perceived in space. And it is this series of observations which leads us directly to the reality of the mind: because the past overflows the present, memory overflows the brain; and because memory overflows the brain, mind overflows the body.
Perhaps what the brain does in all of this is far less extravagant. The body or brain can be said to retain and resume specific habits, patterns, or motor attitudes. Most importantly, the brain provides the motor basis for recall. The capacity to remember certainly depends functionally upon the health and integrity of certain brain regions. Thus, if you damage certain parts of the brain, then you diminish the capacity for recollection within the present; you do not, however, destroy the images themselves. If we go further than this, if we say that a brain injury abolishes individual recollections, then we are forced to assume that psychological states are miraculously capable of springing about from anatomical configurations, and thus to consequences that partake of the metaphysical rather than observational order. The invigorating opportunity for neuroscientific research is to determine by what mechanism the brain concretely serves the dynamics of remembrance, but the storage hypothesis will only hinder neuroscience from pursuing its natural course.
If we assume from the start that everything mental must be reducible to something physical, then we close the possibility of understanding the mind on its own terms. We have consigned ourselves to translating the wealth of subjective experience into impoverished neural patterns, only to then realize that this has not helped us to “explain” memory in any meaningful sense of the word. A genuine science of memory would begin by questioning the storage metaphor itself. Perhaps memories are not stored “anywhere.” Perhaps the brain’s role is not to house the past, but to facilitate our engagement with it.
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Victoria Trumbull is an Oxford Philosopher working at the intersection of philosophical psychology, metaphysics, and the history of philosophical thought.
On 1st December at 17:20, the IAI will return to the theme of memory in a live online debate between Iain McGilchrist, Oliver Hardt, Catherine Loveday and Charan Ranganath, hosted by Jessica Frazier. The topic will be: I Forget Therefore I Am: Does the Self Arise from Forgetting?
Book your tickets on IAI Live here.
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意識不是現實的基礎 -- James Cooke
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下文屬於「本體論」和「認識論」，旁及「方法論」。我曾用庫克教授的論述策略，批評「唯心論」和「知識/意義『不定』論」。此「策略」要點請見全文的最後一句話；相關拙作一時找不到，容日後補上。此外，我恕難苟同庫克教授在倒數第2段對康德「認識論/本體論」的詮釋。
Consciousness is not fundamental
Consciousness is the foundation of knowledge, not reality
James Cooke, 10/17/25
Editor’s Note：In order to know anything, we must be conscious of it. This simply idea, combined with a recent modern move away from metaphysical physicalism, has led many to claim that consciousness itself is fundamental; fundamental not only to our experience of reality, but fundamental to reality itself. But, argues neuroscientist James Cooke, this is to mistake the foundations of knowledge with the foundations of the world.
For centuries, philosophers have wrestled with a simple but unsettling question: if all we ever know of the world comes through consciousness, how can we be sure there is anything beyond it? If reality comes to us through the filter of our fallible minds, how can we know that we are actually experiencing something real in this moment? How do you know that this is not a dream that you are about to wake up from?
In light of this possibility for doubting reality, how can we begin to assess what is real? One approach is to throw out everything that can be doubted until one settles on a bedrock undoubtable truth. This is the skeptical approach that Descartes took. He settled on experience as the one undeniable truth, proclaiming cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. Even if all else were illusion, the fact of consciousness itself could not be doubted, as doubt would be an experience arising in consciousness, and this would demonstrate its existence. For Descartes, this became the unshakable ground of all knowledge in his philosophical system.
This is an important insight for understanding how it is that we can know reality, but it is sometimes confused as having implications regarding the nature of reality itself. This leads some to the conclusion that only mind exists, a metaphysical stance known as idealism. Consciousness, under this view, is not merely epistemically primary, it is ontologically fundamental. Reality, idealists argue, is mind-like at its core.
The logic often goes like this: have you ever encountered anything outside of consciousness? Everything you have ever experienced arises within experience, by definition. If you cannot step outside consciousness, how can you justify claiming that anything exists beyond it?
The flaw in this reasoning is the assumption that knowledge must be direct, but there is no reason to believe this to be the case. If knowledge of reality is assumed to be direct, then only experience can be real. If knowledge of reality is indirect, then it is possible that there is more to reality than experience.
The key point here is that epistemology and ontology are different things. The insight that our experience of reality arises in the mind tells us nothing about the nature of reality itself; it is a claim about epistemology, not ontology. It tells us about the standpoint from which we know, not about the nature of what is known. Using this insight to bridge from epistemology to ontology is like saying that because every map is drawn on paper, the territory itself must be made of paper.
So we have the claim that we can’t directly confirm anything outside of consciousness, because knowledge of reality comes to us through consciousness. What if we flip this claim? Given the experiential nature of consciousness, could it be possible that something exists outside of it? When in a dream, could it be possible that a person in a bed with a dreaming brain exists, even though it can’t be confirmed in the dream? Of course it is possible. And so it is possible that being can exist beyond knowing. If we accept the indirect nature of knowledge then there is no problem at all in being open to the possibility of something existing outside of consciousness.
We know from our understanding of science, perception, and even life itself that knowledge is arrived at in an indirect rather than direct manner. Science does not simply look at the world directly and record its essence. It works by constructing hypotheses, models of how the world is, and testing them against evidence. Scientific theories are not windows onto reality but stories that are tested and refined through experimental feedback. These stories succeed when their predictions survive error-correction, tuning them to wider reality. This correspondence can give the impression that the map is the territory when a good fit is achieved, but this is not the case. Science does not give us direct contact with reality but constructs a model of reality that is always open to further refinement.
This indirectness is not confined to science—it applies to perception as well. According to the predictive processing framework, the brain does not passively register the world but instead actively predicts it. Based on past experience, the brain builds models of the world and generates expectations about what sensory inputs should arrive based on these models, much like a scientist using their hypotheses to make predictions. Where sense data shows the predictions were wrong, errors are registered to further tune the model. Perception consists of top-down expectations and bottom-up inputs meeting to produce a guess that is both educated and informed.
The Free Energy Principle generalizes this principle across all life. Every organism persists by minimizing the gap between its internal model and its sensory environment. This gap, formalized as “variational free energy,” must be minimized or the organism dissolves into disorder. From a bacterium swimming toward sugar, to a human navigating a conversation, to a scientist testing a hypothesis, the same recursive process plays out: prediction, error correction, and updating of one’s model in order to come to know the world in an indirect manner.
In The Dawn of Mind, I argue that this epistemic behaviour of life is what consciousness is. Experience is a relational process between organism and environment, one in which the contents of experience reflect constructed models that resonate with reality. From the organism’s perspective, all that it knows directly is its own consciousness. It never knows the molecules of its body directly, but that does not negate their existence. There is no need to conclude that reality is made of mind simply because knowing occurs in the mind.
Immanuel Kant distinguished what he called “the phenomenal world” of experience from “the noumenal world” outside of experience. We come to know reality, the noumenal world, by inferring its structure by tuning models of it in our phenomenal world. This is a kind of transcendental inference, an intuiting of what might be the case in reality beyond direct experience. With this idea of knowledge, everything falls into place. Even though we cannot detect the dreaming brain from within the dream, our model that a dreaming brain nonetheless exists feels very satisfactory for most of us. The same is true for a world that extends beyond the appearances of our individual minds.
It makes sense that we would be trapped in the phenomenal world when it comes to what we can know directly, yet there is no reason for this to be an issue when inferring the nature of wider reality. In the extreme, this particular argument for the world being mental collapses into solipsism, as you have never known anyone else’s mind directly, or even the reality of another being outside the appearances in your own mind. It is trivially true that everything we have ever known must be known in experience, but that need not be surprising or informative when it comes to the nature of reality itself. Yes, all knowledge arises in consciousness, but to conclude that reality itself must be consciousness is to mistake the map for the territory. Experience is the means of knowing, not the substance of what is known.
James Cooke is a neuroscientist, writer & speaker, focusing on consciousness, meditation, psychedelic states, science and spirituality. He is author of 'The Dawn of the Mind: How Matter Became Conscious and Alive'.
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SUGGESTED VIEWING
A landscape of consciousness With Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Hilary Lawson
The language of the unconscious
Consciousness pre-dates life
Consciousness beyond the brain
Electricity creates consciousness
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「自私基因」錯了嗎？-- Chris Earl
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多金斯教授這本書甚是有名，也頗具爭議；我沒有讀過。我是生物學和基因學兩個領域的門外漢，毫無資格或功力對此議題置喙。只是直覺上感到：
這個「比喻」或許說得通；拿它來給中學生和大學生闡明「演化論」或基因機制應該很生動。但如果根據它來導出任何屬於社會科學/人文科學領域的「說法」，則是一種「撈過界」謬誤。
刊出此文，謹供參考。
Is Richard Dawkins wrong about the nature of life?
Dr Chris Earl MOL-BIO, 10/10/25
Is it time to abandon the metaphor of “The Selfish Gene”?
Richard Dawkins is one of the best science writers of all time. Many know of him through his vocal, sometimes controversial opposition to religious doctrine. However, those who have read his books will know he is the written word equivalent of David Attenborough’s nature documentary narration, extracting every ounce of joy and wonder from the natural world. He published his first book, “The Selfish Gene”, almost 50 years ago in 1976, and it was the first popular science book that I read, 16 years ago. The way he combined science and philosophy to offer profound insight into the nature of life, my life, and every living thing on planet Earth was awe-inspiring.
The book, along with his many others, served as a powerful source of motivation in my decision to study Molecular Biology as an undergraduate, and later as a PhD student.
My personal copies of: The Selfish Gene (left) (1). I am a big fan of the black colourway on this 40th anniversary edition. I have re-bought this book multiple times; the original version that I owned was the 30th anniversary edition (bought in January 2009), which I gave away as a gift. And my personal favourite of Richard Dawkins’ written works is The Ancestor’s Tale (right) (2), which is a journey back in time meeting our common ancestors (or concestors) with other animal groups at several key branching points in the history of life on Earth, all the way to single-celled organisms. 請至原網頁觀看多金斯教授此著作封面
My decision to study life at the molecular level, the realm of atoms and molecules, including DNA and proteins, was intentional. This was where the most exciting advances in our understanding of life seemed to be coming from. The idea of “The Selfish Gene” served as a framework throughout my studies and in my time as a professional research scientist, adding clarity to my thoughts. It does this so well because it is a simple idea; however, I have now come to abandon the concept altogether. This article is about why I have reached this conclusion.
What is The Selfish Gene about?
In Short, The Selfish Gene Metaphore is：
That humans and all living organisms are survival machines constructed by DNA, for the benefit of the DNA. The mortal body is transient and temporary, but the gene may be passed on to the next generation. In this way, genes are considered “immortal,” outliving the organism and surpassing it in terms of importance. Information is king, specifically inherited genetic information in the form of gene.
(以上這段話應為此文作者翻印自多金斯教授原著某一頁。)
In a previous article, The Illusion of Meaning, I described how, from the 1600s onwards, the Scientific Revolution has given us many humanity-decentering moments. First, in 1543, astronomer Nicolas Copernicus displaced the Earth, and with it all of us, from a privileged place at the centre of the Universe, demonstrating instead that the Earth revolves around the Sun. There were many other moments where the illusions we held about our place in the cosmos were shattered by scientific discovery. Not least of all, when Charles Darwin (and Alfred Russel Wallace) proposed the theory of natural selection to explain how species evolve in 1858. This demonstrated how the non-random but blind force of natural selection could result in the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that we see around us today in the natural world. (and this quote is an excerpt from Charles Darwin’s beautiful closing words from On the Origin of Species, 1859). This helped shatter the convincing illusion that the complexity of life can only be explained by the work of an intelligent designer. Fast forward over a hundred years to the 1970s, and Richard Dawkins further extended evolutionary theory, bringing us arguably the most humbling moment so far.
The metaphor of The Selfish Gene was born out of the theory of kin selection, which helped to explain animal behaviour and sociality by calculating the relatedness of the actors. Altruistic, or selfless behaviour, could be described mathematically because there is a shared proportion of genetic material between individuals of the same species, and this proportion increases the more closely related they are, as does the level of co-operativity. One of the most compelling aspects of the book is the explanation of how social insects, such as termites and ant colonies, function.
“the majority of individuals in a social insect colony are sterile workers. The ‘germ line’ — the line of immortal gene continuity — flows through the bodies of a minority of individuals, the reproductives. These are the analogues of our own reproductive cells in our testes and ovaries. The sterile workers are the analogy of our liver, muscle, and nerve cells.” The Selfish Gene, p 224 (40th anniversary edition).
It seems nonsensical as to why the sterile workers forego the opportunity to reproduce (a right reserved for the Queen and short-lived drones). Still, it turns out, according to Dawkins and others*, that this co-operative behaviour could all be explained by the “self-interested” propagation of genes** (for a more detailed treatment please see: “What is a Gene?” below the article).
The Selfish Gene perspective minimises the importance of the organism, demoting it to the position of a “survival machine” that exists only to propagate its genes into the next generation. It turns out that, even as I sit in a chair writing this sentence, I am not the most important thing in the chair. I am merely a vessel constructed by genes to ensure their efficient propagation into the future. Or in Dawkins’ own words, found at the beginning of his book The God Delusion, “The ultimate purpose (gene survival) hides behind a more up-front ‘design’” which is “you and I, and every other living creature…machines of ineffable complexity” (3). This could be another one of those humanity-decentering moments; in fact, it is moving towards full-on dehumanisation. Life could now be reduced to its core genetic basis, and isn’t that the whole point of science — to provide a mechanistic description of life?
The world could now be divided into those people who can accept reality as it is and those who require delusion to dull the ensuing existential pain.
Reductionism is indeed an integral part of science. But there is a rich ongoing discussion as to whether the complexities of life, from a single bacterial cell all the way up to the holy grail of understanding human consciousness, can be explained entirely by the laws of physics. Scientific reductionists would argue that our failure to provide a complete account of the phenomenon of life is merely a limitation of our current state of knowledge (4, 5, 6).
Others argue that an alternative approach to reductionism, known as holism, will always be necessary, as is the case in systems biology (7, 8, 9). I still don’t know exactly where I stand on this topic, and I look forward to exploring it in detail here on MOL-BIO in the near future.
Regardless of the outcome of that debate, which may never be resolved (6), the type of reductionism that Dawkins pursued with The Selfish Gene is not wrong because it is reductionism. It is incorrect because it misapplies reductionism. The metaphor sets up a false dichotomy between the organism, on the one hand, and the genes, on the other hand. If we place the 1970s in a bit more historical context, we can see why this might have occurred.
I previously wrote about the history of the molecular revolution in biology. The revolution saw many monumental discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the discovery of the structure of DNA and the mechanism by which the genetic code is replicated, wherein it serves as a template for its own replication. Note, though, that serving as a template for your own replication is not the same as self-replication and we will discuss the myriad other factors required for replication later in this article. Nonetheless, scientists now had a molecular basis for how organisms were encoded by digital information. The genetic code, DNA, was the inherited material that linked Darwinian evolution with genetics (and genetics, up until this point, was the study of how traits are inherited, without knowing the chemical basis of inheritance, which we now know to be DNA). As organisms evolve or change over time, so does the genetic code that contributes to their form and structure.
“gene and organism are candidates for different, and complementary, roles in the story, the replicator and the vehicle.” -- Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
But in reality, things are not so simple as this “quote” would have you believe! The DNA and the cell structure are replicated together. It is not just the DNA that is inherited, but also the cell structure. Furthermore, DNA by itself is pretty much inert; it doesn’t do very much unless it is inside a cell. This is not inconsequential; even the most primitive bacterial cell is hideously complex. And when it comes to actually doing things, then that tends to be done by other biological molecules, such as RNA and proteins. Proteins are much more chemically diverse than DNA, and they are essential for reading the genetic code, and, with the help of RNA, they make other proteins. (Proteins are produced by ribosomes, which are themselves made up of RNA and protein components). And most importantly for our current focus, proteins are responsible for the process of DNA replication; in other words, DNA is not a replicator (or more specifically, it is not a self-replicator), nor is the cell or organism a mere vehicle for that replication.
“Calling organisms “machines made by genes” is a metaphor for how life might be productively regarded by an evolutionary geneticist. But if they come to believe that this is what organisms really are, they have indeed lost sight of their object. I don’t just mean that we are also breathing, feeling, imaginative, social beings (although this is true); I mean that we are not literally machines, nor “made by genes,” at all, any more than a tree can be called a “device for pumping water vapour into the air”. Philip Ball from his book How Life Works (10).
I wholeheartedly agree with Philip Ball here. The Selfish Gene is an oversimplification, and it achieves this by downplaying the role of the above processes. It also fails to give due attention to the role of energy in maintaining life, which is another huge oversight. Through the lens of thermodynamics, we can envisage life as a process. That is to say, that the word life should be used as a verb (or doing word), rather than a “thing”, or a noun. Life requires a constant source of energy to support its processes, including the replication of DNA.
This is what we mean when we use the term genetic reductionism; Dawkins has over-emphasised the role of the gene and overlooked the importance of the organism. But we need not make the same mistake in the other direction. We can provide a more complete and meaningful description of what life is when we integrate energetic considerations in combination with the informational storage capabilities of DNA. By virtue of being copied with high fidelity (by an army of proteins in an energetically demanding cellular process), information, in the form of DNA, plays a crucial role in renewal (which is replication for single-celled organisms or reproduction for complex multicellular organisms) and in the complexification of life over evolutionary time.
“The energy-chaneling capabilities of life…are destroyed by death. But living matter, to its perhaps everlasting credit, has found a way to cheat the inevitable entropic decay of its degrading systems: reproduction. In reproduction, new bodies, new natural metabolic machines, are produced that carry on the work of degradation.” Schneider and Sagan, Into the Cool, 2005.
Why do so many scientists still support The Selfish Gene, if it is wrong?
The Selfish Gene was also famous for introducing the world to the concept of the meme. This was an expansion of Dawkins’ ideas about genetic “replicators” to include cultural replicators called memes, which include phenomena such as tunes, fashions, ideologies, and, in the current age, viral internet content.
Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body, via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” The Selfish Gene 40th anniversary edition p 249.
Dawkins has often talked about the alternative name that “The Selfish Gene” nearly had, which was to be called “The Immortal Gene”. The almost affrontive tone of the former was likely a crucial factor in the book’s memetic power and success, in terms of sales and cultural impact.
There have been many detailed and comprehensive critiques of the idea. In particular, from Denis Noble (8, 11) and others, but these have been culturally impotent by comparison with the fecundity of The Selfish Gene. I don’t say this as a criticism of this honest and vital work. These books are of interest to academics and professional scientists (like myself), but lack the “best seller” potential of widely read popular science. It is a tall order to capture the imagination of the broader public by disproving a well-established, exciting, and controversial idea. Here is an example of how The Selfish Gene metaphor has permeated into the field of existential philosophy:
“Stephen Law says that every other living organism has a purpose, namely, “to reproduce and pass on its genetic material to the next generation.” He says that we “each exist for a purpose, a purpose supplied by nature, whether or not there is a God.” David Benatar’s- The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.
But the power of the meme is not the only factor; another significant disadvantage to its successful challenge results from scientific tribalism. Many authors take issue with genetic reductionism, such as origin of life researcher Nick Lane, science historian Michel Morange (13), systems biologists like Stuart Kauffman (9) and the aforementioned Denis Noble, alongside many, many others. To take a recent example, author Philip Ball, in “How Life Works,” provides an extended critique of the idea, which I would highly recommend (10).
I’ll provide some examples to illustrate my point. For instance, Denis Noble favours his own concept of biological relativity, which takes a systems biology and integrated holistic perspective on life, but this is likely to be disagreeable to those who identify themselves as scientific reductionists, even if they agree with his challenge of Dawkins.
Furthermore, Nick Lane outlines the difficulties that have been created as a result of genetic reductionism:
“Bacteria are autonomous self-replicating entities — cells — whereas genomes are not…Proteins may set to work on it, transcribing and translating genes; the host cell may divide, powered by the dynamism of its proteins and metabolism, but the genome itself is wholly inert, as incapable of replicating itself as the hard disk of a computer.” Nick Lane in The Vital Question (12).
However, Lane is a vocal proponent of the alkaline hydrothermal vent origin of life, which posits that energetic considerations are the fundamental factor in life getting started. This hypothesis conflicts with other origin theories, such as the idea that life arose instead in volcanic ponds. As such, any agreement between these camps on the limits of genetic reductionism is obfuscated by their differences.
Then there is the divide in evolutionary biology between those who support the modern synthesis (like Dawkins himself) versus those who believe we need something else, such as the extended evolutionary synthesis, to take its place. Again, these ad hoc areas of departure between different schools of thought shield The Selfish Gene from effective challenge.
The true reductionist would have to acknowledge that Dawkins has misapplied the tool of reductionism. Systems biologists would generally disagree with reductionist views, but they would take even more issue with genetic reductionism specifically.
It is incontrovertible to say that we must think of life, not just as being produced by genetic information, but as a complex arrangement of matter, a diverse range of biological molecules (not least of all lipids, proteins, DNA, RNA, metabolites, and many others), animated by the flow of energy. Where the control of gene expression (which genes are switched ON or OFF at any given time) is in constant dynamic conversation with environmental signals (transmitted to the genome via forms of biological information other than genetic code).
Summary
Even though I disagree with the premise, I believe that “The Selfish Gene” should be celebrated in its 50th anniversary year, 2026. It will continue to inspire scientists and philosophers to ask those big questions about the nature and purpose of life for many, many years to come. It tested the limits of how far we could use our knowledge of information stored in the form of DNA and genes to explain life; it was a necessary exercise. In saying all of that, I believe it is time for us to recognise that we have reached the ceiling of genetic reductionism, and this wonderfully written book may be immortalised as the place where it was reached.
References, further reading and acknowledgements
1. Dawkins, R. (2016). The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary Edition. Oxford University Press.
*The gene’s eye view of evolution emerged from the population genetics work of J.B.S Haldane, R.A. Fisher, and Bill Hamilton (kin selection and altruistic behaviour). The 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection by George C. Williams was a particular inspiration for Dawkins. John Maynard Smith’s mathematical exploration of game theory in evolution was also critical. Note that a fair bit of the criticism of the gene-centric perspective came from developmental biology, but see the 2016 book by Yanai, I., & Lercher, M. (2016). The society of genes, which takes a systems biology approach to incorporate these discoveries within the framework of The Selfish Gene.
2. Dawkins, R., & Wong, Y. (2017). The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
3. Dawkins, R. (2016). The God Delusion: 10th Anniversary Edition. Transworld.
4: Graham, L. (2025). Physics Fixes All the Facts. Springer Nature Switzerland.
This book provides a detailed analysis of the power and/or limitations of reductionism. Importantly, there is an extensive look at the term “emergence”, which is a term used by holists to capture properties that are (or appear to be) displayed by systems, for example, consciousness. For Graham, describing something as an emergent property is an elaborate way of saying we don’t really know how something works.
5: Rosenberg, A., & Walsh, D. M. (2007). Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology. ISIS, 98(4), 886–886.
6: Hossenfelder, S. (2023) Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions (p. 89). Atlantic Books.
“In summary, according to the best current evidence, the world is reductionist: the behavior of large composite objects derives from the behavior of their constituents”. Hossenfelder expresses open-mindedness as to the future limits of the explanatory power of reductionism. Noting the principle of the decoupling of scales as you move up through the levels of reality.
7: Walker, Sara Imari. (2025) Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (p. 134). Little, Brown Book Group.
“what assembly theory is telling us is that complex matter is complex because it has a physical extent not just in space, but in time too.” Walker takes a nuanced approach, acknowledging different frames of reference for various types of objects in the universe, for example, life. I agree with Walker that the “historical contingency” of life is required for us to understand the complexity that we see around us. For example, the details of Earth at a particular time in history are important, such as the sudden increase of oxygen in the atmosphere and how this changed the landscape of possibilities for life on this planet. I think the committed reductionist would categorise this type of explanation as an example of where our knowledge of physical laws, or a theory of everything, is limited and requires these higher-level descriptions.
8: Noble, D. (2017). Dance to the tune of life: Biological relativity. Cambridge University Press.
This is the most comprehensive challenge to The Selfish Gene to date, it is also a challenge to reductionism, or the limits of reductionism, in general.
9: Kauffman, Stuart A. (2019) A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
“We think that in physics — Special and General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory with the Standard Model — we will find the foundations from which we can derive the world, the ultimate becoming. We cannot. The ultimate may rest on the foundations, but it is not derivable from them. This ultimate, an unknowable unfolding, slips its foundational moorings and floats free.”
Kauffman shares my feelings, which Denis Noble and Philip Ball also share, that: “Richard Dawkins has famously written The Selfish Gene, stating that evolution is a more or less brutal race for the survival of genes, and further, that organisms are merely the vehicles that carry the genes to be selected. But the story is deeply inadequate…Dawkins has forgotten the organism.”
10: Ball, Philip. (2025) How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology (p. 97). Pan Macmillan.
11: Noble, Denis. (2008) The Music of Life: Biology beyond the Genome. OUP Oxford.
12: Lane, Nick. (2015) The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? (p. 295). Profile.
13: Morange, M. (2020). The black box of biology: A history of the molecular revolution. Harvard University Press.
**The term gene is not straightforward, which has been a critique of the gene’s eye view, but I won’t explore this angle in detail for this current article. A gene often encodes a protein, but it can also encode a functional piece of RNA, where the RNA, rather than being a messenger for the code, actually does something in its own right. Important RNAs are involved in bringing amino acids to the ribosome (tRNA or transfer RNA), others are found in the ribosome (rRNA or ribosomal RNA), and others still can regulate the expression of other genes. There is even more to be said about what a gene is, and we will have to devote specific time to explore that question effectively in another article.
Final thoughts:
This article was not intended as a comprehensive catalogue of all the scientists, philosophers, writers, or commentators who have contributed to a more complete understanding of life as we move away from the limited perspective of The Selfish Gene. First and foremost, I wanted to provide the rationale for why I have abandoned this metaphor with as much clarity and with as little additional baggage as possible.
Written by Dr Chris Earl MOL-BIO
Scottish scientist, who believes that the profound philosophical implications of our modern scientific understanding of life have yet to be realised by society.
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課程介紹：唯心論 - Bernardo Kastrup
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身為一個「唯物論」者，我只「介紹」這個課程給對哲學有興趣的朋友；而不是「推薦」它。畢竟，不論接受或反對，都需要對各相關理論的淵源、基本主張、和主要論點等有所了解。
The Case for Idealism
Bernardo Kastrup, 10/2025
About the Course
The idea that reality exists outside and independently of our minds seems so obvious as to be indisputable. Yet in philosophy, there is a rich tradition of turning this model on its head – arguing that reality is not fundamentally material, but fundamentally mental. While this idea, metaphysical idealism, has gone out of fashion, evidence is beginning to mount up suggesting it might actually be right.
What exactly is materialism, and why is it so popular? How can we rate a metaphysical system, and why does materialism fail? What is the hard problem of consciousness, and why is it important? What is panpsychism, and does it succeed where materialism failed? If there is only one consciousness, why does it seem like we are separate beings? Why do hallucinogens reduce brain function, and why does this matter?
World-leading defender of metaphysical idealism Bernardo Kastrup, author of The Idea of the World and Meaning in Absurdity, draws upon analytic philosophical arguments, his scientific background, and a deep knowledge of the philosophical tradition of metaphysical idealism to explain why reality is fundamentally mental.
By the end of the course, you will have learned:
* Why materialism is unscientific.
* What it means to have a good metaphysics.
* Why panpsychism is more similar to materialism than is commonly thought.
* Why the similarities between the universe and the brain are no coincidence.
* How dissociative identity disorder can explain more than we realise.
As part of the course, there are in-video quiz questions to consolidate your learning, suggested further readings to stimulate a deeper exploration of the topic, discussion boards to have your say, and an end-of-course assessment set by Bernardo Kastrup.
AI Academy courses are designed to be challenging but accessible to the interested student. No specialist knowledge is required.
About the Instructor
Bernardo Kastrup
"The brain doesn't generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn't generate water."
Bernardo Kastrup is a Dutch computer scientist, philosopher, and one of the most prominent defenders of "metaphysical idealism" - the notion that the world originates in the mind, instead of being independent of our experience - in the academic world today.
Bernardo has worked as a scientist in leading laboratories across the world including CERN and the Philips Research Laboratories, and he is a regular contributor to Scientific American.
As developed in such texts as Why Materialism is Baloney and The Idea of the World, Bernardo's stance is that "the body is in mind, not mind in the body."
Course Syllabus
Part One: Materalism's Mistakes
Some think consciousness arises from the physical, others think that the physical is itself conscious. In part one of this course, Kastrup deconstructs the missteps of materialism and the mistakes of panpsychism.
Part Two: Why the Evidence Points to Idealism
What do new developments in neuroscience suggest about the nature of reality? In part two of this course, Kastrup explains the fresh evidence that vindicates idealism.
Suggested Further Readings
* Kastrup, B., The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality, (Winchester: IFF Books, 2019).
* Kastrup, B., Meaning in Absurdity: What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us About the Nature of Reality, (Winchester: IFF Books, 2012).
* Chalmers, D. J., The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
* Nagel, T., Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
* Strawson, G., Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism, (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2006).
* James, W., Essays in Radical Empiricism, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976 [1912]).
* Schopenhauer, A., The World as Will and Representation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1818]).
Subscribe to enrol
Purchase individual course
Instructor：Bernardo Kastrup
Categories：Mind & Reason
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