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哲學 – 開欄文
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瀏覽6,158 ｜回應34｜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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意義從何而來？-Ralph Lewis
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路額實教授的論述和結論有相當多的思考盲點和認知偏執；短時間也說不清楚。先行發表於此，各位請自行欣賞或研判。
How Did Meaning Emerge in a Meaningless Universe?
How life created significance.
Ralph Lewis M.D., 01/15/26 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
* Meaning emerges from goal-directed life forms, not from information or physical patterns alone.
* Neural patterns gain meaning through evolutionary shaping, individual learning, and how they guide action.
* Consciousness makes meaning felt—organisms can hold options in mind, compare them, and choose.
This post is Part 1 of a series.
In an earlier post, I explored how meaning might arise in a physical, meaningless universe—drawing in part on physicist Carlo Rovelli’s relational account, which treats meaning as emerging when physical correlations acquire evolutionary significance.[1] But that post left largely unexplored how this actually happens in brains. How do electrical signals come to be about something? How does significance arise from circuitry?
This four-part series explores how the brain generates meaning, tracing how meaning emerges in living systems—from biological value and goal-directedness (Part 1), through the neural representations that guide action (Part 2), to shared symbols grounded in social cognition (Part 3), and finally to the cultural institutions and personal narratives that give meaning its richest human forms (Part 4).
The Gap Between Pattern and Purpose
Physical systems exhibit patterns—molecular arrangements, light wavelengths, temperature distributions, etc.—that we can describe in informational terms.
Claude Shannon’s information theory, developed in the 1940s for telecommunications, formalizes informational description by treating unpredictability as the measure of a signal. Predictable patterns (like “AAAAA”) contain little Shannon information because you already know what’s coming. Random patterns (like “XQJKZPM”) contain maximal Shannon information because every letter is unpredictable. Yet random strings mean nothing—they carry no semantic content. Shannon information says nothing about meaning.[2]
But meaning clearly exists for organisms with brains. A scent can signal food or danger to an animal. The brain’s representation of that scent is about something in the world. Philosophers refer to this property as “aboutness,” or intentionality. It arises when living systems register environmental patterns in relation to their own needs, capacities, and stakes in survival.
Meaning Is Fundamentally Relational
Meaning, however, exists not in neural patterns alone but in relationships between those patterns, the organism's evolutionary history, its current goals, and the environment it navigates. A pattern of neural firing becomes meaningful through how it was shaped by natural selection, how it's been tuned by the organism's individual learning, and how it's currently being used to guide behavior.
Consider place cells in a mouse’s hippocampus. When the mouse occupies a specific location, particular neurons fire. That pattern represents location because evolution favored spatial tracking, learning refined it through experience, and downstream circuits use it to guide navigation.
The meaning isn’t in the firing pattern itself but in its web of functional and evolutionary relations.[3] But this raises a deeper question: What makes these relations matter for the organism in the first place?
Value: The Missing Ingredient
Living systems must maintain themselves against thermodynamic decay. This creates intrinsic goals (that is, biologically grounded needs and action tendencies): to maintain viability and reproduce. As the neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon argues, this organizational vulnerability gives rise to genuine teleology: Systems that can fail have goals, and goals create value.[4]
This is where a semiotic framework becomes useful (the study of signs and how they acquire meaning): it distinguishes correlations that merely occur from those that function as signs for an organism. Signs, in this sense, are correlations that an organism interprets and uses relative to its goals.[5]
From Directive to Descriptive
Early in evolution, meaning-bearing signs take the form of simple biological signals—internal states that primarily control action rather than describing the world. When a bacterium detects a toxin, the internal signal doesn’t represent “Dangerous chemical X is present.” It functions, in effect, as “Move!”—a pragmatic control signal in neuroscientist and geneticist Kevin Mitchell’s sense, guiding behavior directly rather than encoding an explicit description of the world.[3]
But as nervous systems evolved to process long-range senses like vision, something changed: Directive signals were increasingly supplemented by descriptive models of the world. You can’t directly detect objects—only photons striking the retina—so additional processing evolved to infer objects from light patterns. This produced internal representations of world states rather than mere action commands. Crucially, these representations were decoupled from obligatory action and could be held “in mind,” compared, and evaluated before guiding behavior.
Predictive Brains and Valued Predictions
Rather than passively receiving input, brains continuously generate expectations shaped by prior experience and goals, updating them when predictions err.[6] When your visual cortex represents an apple, that representation is meaningful because it predicts features relevant to eating and action—sweetness, texture, and graspability. These predictions aren’t neutral; they’re saturated with value, and the brain doesn’t predict all features equally. Prediction errors drive learning because they signal that something relevant to action went differently than expected[7]—for example, when an apple that looks ripe turns out to be sour or inedible.
Artificial Intelligence and Meaning
Could any sufficiently complex computer generate meaning by instantiating patterns and predictions like those found in brains? Not as computers are currently designed. Computers can instantiate patterns and predictions, but meaning emerges only in systems with intrinsic goals—systems for which outcomes genuinely matter. When a chess program evaluates positions, nothing matters to the program itself. When a brain generates prediction errors, something genuinely matters: The organism is navigating toward self-maintenance and reproduction, ends that are inherent in its organization as a living system.[3,4] Whether artificial systems could develop genuine meaning for themselves remains an open question, but it would require them to have stakes in their own continued existence.[8]
Consciousness and the Evaluation of Meaning
Neurobiologist Simona Ginsburg and evolutionary biologist Eva Jablonka propose a key evolutionary threshold: Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), the ability to form flexible compound associations between arbitrary stimuli and value outcomes and to use these associations across contexts. This allows an organism to hold multiple representations "in mind" simultaneously, compare them, and choose among them based on learned values.[5]
Before the evolution of UAL, organisms tend to respond to stimuli reflexively. After UAL, they can evaluate alternative responses before acting. This transforms the adaptive landscape.
Consider a pre-UAL animal encountering food near a predator. Fixed responses dominate: Approach food, flee predator. But with UAL, the animal can represent both possibilities, weigh relative values, and choose. Representations become objects of evaluation.
Before UAL, organisms respond without clear evidence of felt experience. After UAL, behavior suggests conscious awareness. Ginsburg, Jablonka, and their coauthor, philosopher of biology Jonathan Birch, argue that once animals can flexibly learn and compare options, their internal states are no longer just control signals—they feel like something. Consciousness isn't something added later—it emerges with UAL itself. The functional processes that enable flexible learning don't just correlate with consciousness; they constitute it.[5]
How this works mechanistically remains incompletely understood. For example, some theorists argue that consciousness emerges when representations become globally available for comparison within a “global workspace,”[9] while others emphasize recursiveness—the ability to represent one’s own representations. On either view, consciousness arises when meaning becomes an object of evaluation rather than a mere control signal.
How distributed neural processes create unified subjective experience remains incompletely understood. What's clear is that for conscious organisms like us, meaning is always experienced, not just enacted. Consciousness may be what goal-directed interpretation and evaluation feel like from the inside.
Evolutionary Transitions in Meaning
Jablonka and Ginsburg identify major evolutionary transitions in how goals, values, and meaning operate:
* Nonconscious to conscious: The emergence of UAL enabled flexible learning, evaluative comparison, and subjective experience.
* Nonlinguistic to linguistic: The emergence of symbolic cognition allowed meanings to be shared, preserved, and transformed across generations.
Each transition introduced new forms of goals and values, reshaping the targets and dynamics of selection. The transition from nonconscious to conscious processing—the shift from neural to mental—is particularly consequential: Once organisms could consciously evaluate competing representations, selection began to operate not only on behavior but also on representations themselves—what Jablonka and Ginsburg call mental selection.[10]
The Trajectory of Meaning
We’ve now traced meaning from its origin in goal-directed life to its emergence as something organisms can consciously evaluate.
In Part 2, we’ll examine how neural circuits give rise to semantic content and support the flexible use of meaning in perception, thought, and action.
References
1. Ralph Lewis, “In a Meaningless Universe, Where Does Meaning Come From?,” Psychology Today, March 9, 2023, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-purpose/202303/in-a-mea…; Carlo Rovelli, “Meaning = Information + Evolution,” in Wandering Towards a Goal: How Can Mindless Matter Become Purposeful?, ed. Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018), 17–27.
2. Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379–423, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.
3. Kevin J. Mitchell, “The Origins of Meaning: From Pragmatic Control Signals to Semantic Representations,” preprint, PsyArXiv, 2023, https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/dfkrv_v1.
4. Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).
5. Jonathan Birch, Simona Ginsburg, and Eva Jablonka, "Unlimited Associative Learning and the Origins of Consciousness: A Primer and Some Predictions, "Biology & Philosophy 35 (2020): article 56, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09772-0; Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg, "Learning and the Evolution of Conscious Agents," Biosemiotics 15 (2022): 401–437, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09501-y.
6. Andy Clark, “Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science, ”Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36, no. 3 (2013): 181–204, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477.
7. Anil K. Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 2021); Karl Friston, “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, no. 2 (2010): 127–138.
8. There are many ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) systems fall short of human cognition. Acutely mindful of this in developing this blog series, AI tools were cautiously used for research support, idea generation, and assistance with phrasing and clarity, but all analysis, arguments, and interpretations are the author’s own, and the final prose reflects the author’s voice and expertise.
9. Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux, “Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing,” Neuron 70, no. 2 (2011): 200–227, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2011.03.018.
10. In mental selection, internal representations compete for influence over behavior, and those that better guide action are preferentially retained and reused through learning and experience. Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg, “Consciousness: Its Goals, Its Functions and the Emergence of a New Category of Selection, ”Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 380 (2025): art. 20240310, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0310.
Ralph Lewis, M.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and a consultant at the Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto.
Consciousness Essential Reads
There Goes the Sun: Pondering the Universe's Past and Future
Why Consciousness Science Needs Darwin
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尼切和馬克斯兩位思想的對比 - Christopher Linkiewicz
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在我「私淑」的許多大師中，馬克斯和尼切大概排數一數二的位置；卡木、柏格、韋伯、米爾斯、達斯妥也夫斯基等等的位置就得慢慢思量了。別的「心法」或「文功」我這個蠢弟子學不會，只希望能多多少少沾染到尼切「存在風」和馬克思「戰鬥性」兩者的一些影子。
下文近3,000字，我一時三刻之間讀不完；由於上述因緣，循往例，先刊出、後拜讀、再找時間寫「讀後」。
Nietzsche Contra Marx
Perspectives on Method and Ideology
Christopher Linkiewicz, 01/19/26
Introduction: Marxism Today
Communism and Marxism have experienced a resurgence in popularity since 2015 with the rise of Trumpism, although earlier political trends have also influenced the popularity of alternative leftist ideologies, notably the Reagan presidency. The 20th century saw numerous communist governments rise and fall, notably the Soviet Union (1922–1991); China has been communist since 1949; North Korea since 1972; Cuba since 1976; Vietnam, 1976; Laos, 1975. In the United States, the 1950s saw the rise of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, which was characterized by institutional anti-Communism and fearmongering that there were “205 card-carrying Communists” working within the US government.
In the present day, numerous monumental political events have contributed to the overall perturbation of the left: the rise of Trumpism; racist police brutality; extreme concentrations of wealth in high places; fascist echo chambers overrunning the normal functioning of social media like Twitter/X; Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine; and the Israel-Palestine conflict. The prevalence of dubious right-wing and alt-right politics have generated substantial interest in alternative left-wing politics: Marxism, communism, socialism, anarchism. Arguably, the presence of the opposition between right and left has led to the aggravation of both sides of the political spectrum. Antifa arguably embodies the resentment of the left and a willingness to engage in direct political action; whereas the influential linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky has detracted from Antifa as being “a gift to the alt-right.”
Increasingly, an emerging class-consciousness has appeared on the left, with the object of pushing back against the demons of ultra-conservatism, neo-fascism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, artificial political polarization, exclusive tribal dynamics, psychological warfare, societal breakdown and urban decay, the (often self-conscious) collapse of values into nihilism, etc. This shift in the culture of the American left, particularly the alternative left, has often expressed itself as an increased interest in communism and Marxism.
Given the unpredictability and volatility of our present context, many leftists, including politicians, have turned to the challenging and exciting writings of Karl Marx. These politicians — principally democratic socialists —may not represent the prodigious threat to the system allegedly posed during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Democratic socialists more nearly resemble progressives and Greens, but have been willing to ride the coattails of Marx’s resurgence in popularity. Bernie Sanders wrote a book called It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism — whose title represents a thinly-veiled reference to Marx and to the recent surge in enthusiasm of workers and leftists about Marxism and communism. Marx’s critique of capitalism is incisive, reminding us — in theory — of our mutual responsibility and shared humanity, with, for instance, his concept of the alienation of labor.
The alienation of labor is defined in the first chapter of Capital (1867–1894), and refers to the propensity of capitalists to reap the surplus of the labor of their employees. Under capitalism, workers serve a function: their job entails the performance of certain useful tasks and the production of certain definite products or results. In other words, laborers sell “themselves”— their time, their attention, their skills — working so many hours per week, and in return they receive a wage or salary. That is, in the Marxist cosmology, the extent of their usefulness to capitalists. The express purpose of labor is the production of a commodity. A commodity is a product, or, to use Marx’s terminology, a use-value —which has a price, and the price determines the overall importance of the labor required to produce that commodity, to capitalists.
Capital is a dense and challenging “deep dive” into economics and sociology — viewed, however, through a lens that is unmistakably philosophical. Before he was a Marxist, Marx himself had been a member of the philosophical sect known as the Young Hegelians. We should assume, therefore — although Marx is primarily recognized as an economic and political author — that Marx has maintained some general connection to the world of philosophy. That being said, Marx is not necessarily a mere “philosopher,” in the conventional sense of a more or less humble, ivory tower-dwelling theoretician of abstractions, dreams, and possibilities; his role, historically, is decisively one of overwhelming influence with far-reaching real-world consequences.
Nietzsche “on” Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), best known as one of the primary forerunners of Existentialism, along with the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and the Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), never mentions or engages with Marx anywhere in his œuvre. An investigation of any possible connection or opposition existing between the works of Nietzsche and Marx, then, must necessarily constitute a speculative engagement with the consequences of their individual tendencies in thinking.
Communism and Left-Authoritarianism
Democracy is not necessarily well enough equipped on its own to defend against a concentration of racist, fascist, and alt-right attitudes among conservatives. Communism is one of the most frequently drawn-on formulas that leftists have turned to in their efforts to push back against the rise of Trumpism, neo-fascism, and recent political turmoil. The resurgence of interest in Marx may speak to a sincere desire and a need for humanistic politics in a survivable society. But Marx doesn’t set himself up as a simple agent of peaceful change.
In The Communist Manifesto (1848), co-authored by Marx and Friedrich Engels, the two authors acting as lifelong collaborators attempt to draw on “the specter of communism,” amassing the interest of workers and laborers throughout Europe, to seize the means of production, overthrow capitalism, and institute socialist governments. In a word, the goals of communism are understood to run counter to the self-interestedness of the capitalists, and it is for this reason that, for communists, revolutionary change can only be achieved through revolution. For communists, the proper direction of society, politics, and economics, can only be achieved by a complete dismantling of a corrupt system that has perpetuated unending class struggle.
For Marx and Engels, and for communism and the proletariat (working class), capitalism must be phased out in order to make a space in which for socialism to emerge — not as an improvement upon capitalism, but as a complete re-creation of the economic and political machine. The state exists to protect the interests of the ruling class, and consequently, Marx and Engels argue in The Communist Manifesto, violent revolution may sometimes be necessary to fully realize the interests of the communists. In practice, as is well known, communist regimes have often been unstable, brutal, and authoritarian. Under Stalin, the USSR silenced dissent and instituted “state art,” with rigid regulations controlling subject matter and tone, including a positive portrayal of socialism.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
When overthrowing corrupt, capitalist orders, in order to transition to a socialist government, an interim government is to be found in what Marx and Engels called the dictatorship of the proletariat. The capitalist government does not represent the interests of the proletariat. The proletariat, or working class, is the class whose interests are to be represented by a socialist government. This new government, it is assumed, will take time to implement — especially in lieu of violent revolution.
This is one place where Nietzscheans might wish to stop us. What are the consequences of the proletariat seizing control of society? What specific value do the individual members of the proletariat have for me? After all, as a prospective Übermensch, I may wish to, say: lead my own life, develop my own skills and abilities, implement my own values, etc. An individual proletarian’s wishes, whims, or happiness may or may not interest me directly in any way that is not more or less transitory.
Nietzsche’s method
This, however, doesn’t necessarily make a philosophical comparison of Marx and Nietzsche hopelessly speculative. Nietzsche casts himself in his books as an iconoclast, criticizing and deriding any and all philosophical and literary predecessors, as well as distancing himself from the egalitarian values and tendencies of democracy. He is often remembered — and misunderstood — for setting up an opposition between “master” and “slave” morality, a dichotomy he adopted from G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), but radically recast in the milieu of his own philosophy. For Hegel, the “master” and “slave” opposition refers to the outcome of just such an opposition, and implies the more primitive fact of power structures as such.
Hegel himself opposed the institution of slavery, putting forward a universal moral standard emphasizing what democratic institutions refer to as “human rights.” Nietzsche’s dichotomy of master and slave morality speaks, rather, to the opposition between “life-affirming” and “life-denying” morality —respecting self-overcoming and self-benefit, as opposed to ascetic religious values like universal compassion and charity — and as such is intended to bolster his individualistic imperative toward the creation of aristocratic values.
Marx and Nietzsche, therefore, share a common antecedent in the figure of G. W. F. Hegel. Marx, on the one hand, inherited the general form of Hegel’s dialectical method, reshaping it into what has come to be known as dialectical materialism — itself distinct from Hegel’s method and therefore no longer Hegelian. Nietzsche, on the other hand, directly and repeatedly attacks the “will to a system,” and thereby explicitly distances himself from Hegel’s overall philosophical project. Nietzsche preferred to play the part of a gadfly, scrutinizing assumptions and refusing to put forward a systematic philosophy in the spirit of Kant or Hegel (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, Part 1: “On the Prejudices of Philosophers”). Any comparison of Marx and Nietzsche must therefore rely on a general sense acquired from a careful reading and interpretation of both thinkers.
In regards to Nietzsche’s opinion on Marxism, one might imagine that concepts of the will to power and a “master morality” would have placed Nietzsche’s interests in an opposition to Marx’s. Marx wanted to bring accountability to the proletariat, the working class at large; Nietzsche wanted to overcome the interests of the “herd” and instill aristocratic values for the capable and worthy. If the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t speak to aristocratic values, but wounds or undermines them, it may not hold the interest of Nietzsche’s ideal reader. On the other hand, one might also imagine Nietzsche as moving altogether independently of Marx’s influence.
Bureaucracy and Banality
Within the government itself — from auxiliary office spaces where bored civil servants unleash psychopathic apathy and sadomasochistic rage on the defenseless, the unemployed, the mentally ill; to wealthy millionaires in Congress — there exists a preponderance of what the public has come to know as “bureaucracy.” Bureaucracy refers to the hierarchical infrastructure of “the system.” The bureaucracy is the hand that feeds its employees and, often, neglects the needs of the populace. It is a largely reflexive internal structure that subsists on the complicit participation of its representatives.
Philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt’s book documenting the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, formulates a novel theory of the psychology of Eichmann. Eichmann never witnessed the results of his own actions; theoretically, as a mere bureaucrat, he himself didn’t directly commit any crimes against the Jews during the Holocaust, even as he participated in the Nazis’ hierarchy.
In 1934, when Eichmann applied successfully for a job, the S.D. [Sicherheitsdienst (the Security Service of the S.S)] was a relatively new apparatus in the S.S., founded two years earlier […] to serve as the Intelligence service of the Party […]. Its initial task had been to spy on Party members, and thus to give the S.S. an ascendancy over the regular Party apparatus. Meanwhile it had taken on some additional duties, becoming the information and research center for the Secret State Police, or Gestapo. These were the first steps toward the merger of the S.S. and the police[…]. Eichmann, of course, could not have known of these future developments, but he seems to have known nothing either of the nature of the S.D. when he entered it; this is quite possible, because the operations of the S.D. had always been top secret. As far as he was concerned, it was all a misunderstanding […]. (The Portable Hannah Arendt, pp. 313–314)
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt introduces the concept of “the banality of evil.” This refers to the breakdown of responsibility that occurs within a bureaucratic hierarchy, where one is innocent of the hierarchy’s overall consequences because one’s role within the hierarchy is one of passive acceptance of a minor role. The hierarchy exists for a purpose, but that purpose is not shared by all of the hierarchy’s members. Responsibility is deferred.
Likely, neither Marx nor Nietzsche would approve of the banality of evil. In his existentialist magnum opus, Jean-Paul Sartre coins the term mauvaise foi, or bad faith — a term that likely would have resonated with both Marx and Nietzsche. In practice, the banality of evil might be seen as influencing Marxists to recognize the corruption of the present order. On the other hand, one can imagine almost any government falling prey to the banality of evil.
Marxism and Nietzscheanism
It begins to appear that Marx’s and Nietzsche’s respective areas of interest and target audience are quite different. Marx wants to bring about a new political order that emphasizes the worker in the proletariat (political orders affect everyone), while Nietzsche wants to be read by, and create readers, who are self-sufficient, willing to consider radical ideas, and create their own values. Does such a convergence of ideas, between Marxists and Nietzscheans, lead to a direct opposition of ideologies? Fortunately, it seems Nietzsche intended to eschew the need for ideology altogether, attacking the weaknesses of ideology in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers.” Yet one might criticize the writings of Marx for being too practically concerned for those of an academic philosopher, and not “metaphysical” enough — in the way that Kant’s system, and Nietzsche’s destruction of it, are both in some sense “metaphysical.” The will to scrutinize dangerous or ill-considered ideas is prevalent in the writings of Nietzsche. Nietzsche applies the method of skepticism (one of the philosopher’s most powerful tools) to skepticism itself in Beyond Good and Evil. Arguably, Marxists, post-Marxists, communists, and other left-wing ideologies, do not necessarily train their adherents to use logic, skepticism, and other tools in a rigorous way. Their primary concern may be in gathering like minds to work on like-minded projects. Yet for the philosopher — as opposed to the members of political organizations — these tools are essential to developing an accurate, functional picture of reality, unafraid of thinking radically, but ready to question the motive or structure of any idea or ideology.
20th-century philosophy
Nietzsche’s legacy is prevalent throughout the landscape of 20th-century philosophy, including explicitly, with French Nietzscheanism — which included Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze — but also among authors not using the “Nietzschean” demonym: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida absorbed significant influence from Nietzsche. Generally, these authors have also been influenced (in one way or another) by Marx, and the “specter of communism” was no doubt a conscious consideration for all of them, whether or not any relationship to Marx or communism was present in their writings (as in the case of Louis Althusser and other structural Marxists).
Sartre’s Marxist Existentialism
The 20th century French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre — in contrast to Nietzsche, one of his primary influences — had a more sympathetic view of communism. Sartre’s “undiscovered” last work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason — a sprawling, unfinished philosophical treatise longer than Being and Nothingness — represents the culmination of a longtime affinity for Marx and communism, and the object of uniting Marxism and existentialism. The Critique serves as the mature expression of ideas found in his preceding work investigating a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism, Search for a Method. The Critique also serves to investigate and lay out the basis of dialectical materialism, and as such serves as an undertaking already within the milieu of Marxism. Dialectics, within Hegelianism, refers to the process of developing opposed ideas toward a resolution; while in the work of Marx and Engels, dialectical materialism refers to the development of oppositions with reference to a matrix of social and economic situations.
Sartre’s affinity for Marxism and communism had, in previous decades, contributed to his falling-out with his longtime compatriot and literary fellow, Albert Camus, a permanent break that would last for the rest of their literary and personal lives. Camus had previously been a member of the French Communist Party (1935–36), and briefly the Algerian Communist Party (1936) (he was native to Algeria, although professionally based in Paris). Camus participated actively in the French resistance against the French Occupation, contributing to and serving as editor of the banned newspaper Combat.
Ultimately, Camus’s short-lived affinity for communism and Marxism took a back seat to his humanitarian and humanistic concerns, and it was on this basis that he broke with Marxism and communism. Sartre and Camus became ideologically opposed, particularly on the status of violence in communism, with Sartre viewing “the cause” as primary, while Camus’s moral objections prevailed over his willingness to play a party to what he sensed as an authoritarian tendency within communism.
Conclusion
Marx and Nietzsche do not directly engage or encounter one another anywhere in their writings, which are themselves predominantly concerned with very different subject matter: for Marx, economics, social thought, and political action; for Nietzsche, self-cultivation and the “will to power.” Marx sought to bring more power to working people, while Nietzsche arguably sought separateness from common and ordinary people, in much the same way that he admonishes pity and democratic values. Both thinkers exerted significant influence on the history of 20th century philosophy, which must also inevitably carry into the 21st century. The relationship between Marx’s and Nietzsche’s respective legacies, or whether there is any, etc., may ultimately remain an open question.
Bibliography
* Arendt, Hannah. The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: The Viking Press.
* Camus, Albert, 2004. The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays. Translated by Stuart Gilbert, Justin O’Brien, Hamish Hamilton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
* Hegel, G. W. F., 1807. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Marx, Karl, 1867–1894. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Books.
* Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, 1848. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Samuel Moore. New York: International Publishers, 1970.
* Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.
* Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
* Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Viking Press.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1943. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes, 1992. New York: Washington Square Press.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1960. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. New York: Verso.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1960. Search for a Method. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Vintage Books.
Written by Christopher Linkiewicz
I am a writer, musician, photographer, and more recently a painter, with a BA in philosophy. https://buymeacoffee.com/consensusreality
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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卡木《西席弗斯神話》讀後 -- Marc Barham
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下文作者在下文中討論或試圖討論的主旨是「哲學議題」；他的思考模式則是「天馬行空」和「多愁善感」的「文學風格」。
不過，他介紹/解讀的是卡木作品和思想，我又是卡木的粉絲；轉載於此，敬請欣賞。不熟悉卡木的朋友，不妨把下文視為「卡木導讀」。如果對卡木有興趣，我大力推荐《沉淪》這本小說。關於《西席弗斯神話》，請參考此文、此文、和此文。
Part I: ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by Albert Camus and The Legend of Oedipus
Our noble fight against the Absurd
Marc Barham, 09/23/25
“ “I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Part I
In "The Myth of Sisyphus," a 1942 philosophical essay by Albert Camus, published in 1955, we are presented with a breathtaking elucidation of his concept of the absurd. The absurd comes with the realization that the world is not rational,
“At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world”
The absurd for Camus is a direct consequence of the absence of God. Without God, the discrepancy between human aspirations and the world is acute. The human condition is characterized by the probability of suffering and the certainty of death — a fate which human reason cannot accept as reasonable.
In the face of this absurdity, the universal reason of the Enlightenment has nothing to say. Existence is arbitrary, and the irrationality inherent to any search for the meaning of life must raise the question of suicide as “the only truly serious philosophical problem.” Probably the greatest opening line in any philosophical discourse, written or spoken. For this is how The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus starts.
For his offenses against both Zeus and Hades, Sisyphus was condemned to eternal punishment in Tartarus, the lowest region of the Underworld. The king of Corinth would forever roll a massive boulder to the top of a steep hill. But his efforts were always in vain, for whenever Sisyphus neared the top, the rock would roll right back down again. Sisyphus was thus forced to start his labour all over again. The myth of Sisyphus is a potent image of futility.
As Camus describes in his magisterial work, there is some discrepancy as to the character of Sisyphus, although he omits the killing, raping, and stealing that Sisyphus is known for. He was punished for none of these. He was punished only for the scorn of the gods exemplified in his disrespect for Zeus over his stealing of Aegina and his cheating, literally, of Thanatos (Death).
Homer called Sisyphus ‘‘the craftiest of men’’ and it is strongly suggested that he was the father of Odysseus. It does seem rather odd that a particularly unpleasant character, to put it mildly, should become the representative of a philosopher's eloquent treatise on the painful path towards accepting the futility of existence and the nobility of the acceptance of the absurd. But why not? It does seem rather more human.
But for Camus, the only aspect of character that interests him is when he is imagining the interminable punishment of Sisyphus,
“It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”
For Camus, it is this ‘lucid’ recognition of the absurdity of existence that liberates us from belief in another life and permits us to live for the instant, for the beauty, pleasure, and the ‘implacable grandeur’ of existence. Lucidity is the clarity and courage of mind that refuses all comforting illusions and self-deception. And surely here is the very definition of the absurd hero.
Camus wishes to place this moment of ‘lucidity’ as both boulder and Sisyphus descend the mountain. His final paragraph references the words of Oedipus at Colonus,
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Yet I cannot today envisage Sisyphus being ‘happy’, having now realised the futility of his situation. There is no redemption available to him. It is pure punishment. I can envisage Sisyphus being angry and rebellious. Perhaps refusing to move the boulder. Withholding his labour and striking? What then? Another punishment? A reductio ad absurdum. Until the whole absurd situation crumbles into, well, yes, absurdity. So why does he keep pushing that rock? If he stopped the whole pointless charade would then stop.
‘‘I will not!’’ becomes revolutionary.
Of all the punishments devised by the Gods, this one must be the most pointless (pun intended) of all. For it is literally pointless. Hard labour for eternity is not punishment; it is existential cruelty. Such cruelty and meaningless punishment are the very antithesis of the moral world, which the Greek gods were heavily invested in, although their transgressions were manifest. The punishment of Sisyphus in such a way makes no sense whatsoever. His crimes against the gods were not in the same league as, say, the crime of stealing fire that Prometheus was punished for, and his fate is not dissimilar.
Prometheus was chained to a rock and every day had his liver eaten by an eagle, which would subsequently regrow, and the same process repeated. His punishment was an eternity of excruciating pain, but no death. But the punishment given to Sisyphus is an eternity of pointlessness. The pain is existential. What did the Greek gods know about existential pain? Nothing.
Yet Prometheus is the rebel. The leader of a rebellion against the tyranny of Zeus. But Sisyphus, by forever pushing that rock up that mountain, becomes complicit in the injustice perpetrated by Zeus against him. To be ‘happy’ as Camus suggests, because he sees the absurdity of his condition, is only to allow the oppression by any Authority to continue, whether that be the Gods or the secular State apparatus of these regimes.
Perhaps if we accept the main charge against Sisyphus that he outwitted Thanatos and cunningly defeated Death itself, then to make a man live a futile existence is the very blackest of black humour from Zeus. But it is not a punishment. It is a denial of punishment. For it has no substantive relation to the crime committed, and any meaning for the person being punished is lost in the banality of the process and in mockery.
It is a punishment that undermines the whole system of poetic justice so beloved of the Greek gods. These punishments were almost always metaphorically creative and poignantly pointed. Sophocles has Oedipus blind himself, for he can now ‘see’ the truth that he has murdered his father and married his mother. But there is nothing poetic about the treatment of Sisyphus. It is far beyond the tragic; it is, in essence, nihilistic.
And as such, it would only find meaning 2,000 years later when the world had itself experienced terror and nihilism on an unprecedented scale during World War Two. The myth of Sisyphus feels very much like a punishment for the 20th and the first twenty-five years of the 21st century.
It does feel like the quintessential Absurd punishment in a world without Gods, where the State has quasi-divine Authority and Capitalism is its new God. A mindless, machine-like action where the futility and meaninglessness of life are confirmed in an endless cycle of repetition and automatic reproduction. Reminiscent of a modern factory process churning out products for consumption in mass markets through the labour of men and women who are more machine than human.
Sisyphus is so much more than the Absurd Hero that Camus presents us with. For surely he is symbolic of political injustice. It took 2,000 years for Sisyphus to become an absurd hero, for he could not be that until the world itself descended into the abyss of absurdity. It took two World Wars. We watched as the killing of men, women, and children was mechanised and Death processed. The machines that built the modern world also destroyed that world. The system that produced our wondrous goods for consumption became our nemesis. Cycles of production became cycles of death, and the absurdity of our Sisyphus was finding fertile ground to grow in.
Sisyphus is partially rooted in the zeitgeist of the Second World War, where humanity had entered the Abyss. But there is something more to Sisyphus than that. For the history of the world has been in part an arc along which we have moved slowly but surely toward higher standards of human justice. It has been slow and painful. Just as if it were a huge boulder being pushed up a mountain. Yet that boulder of justice, once it has reached its high point (the top of this arc), then falls back down to the bottom. It feels as if the last 50 years have been exactly that — the rollback down the existential mountain right to the bottom.
To be continued in Part II.
Written by Marc Barham
Column @timetravelnexus.com on iconic books, TV shows/films: Time Travel Peregrinations. Reviewed all episodes of ‘Dark’ @ site. https://linktr.ee/marcbarham64
Published in Counter Arts
The (Counter)Cultural One-Stop for Nonfiction on Medium… incorporating categories for: ‘Art’, ‘Culture’, ‘Equality’, ‘Photography’, ‘Film’, ‘Mental Health’, ‘Music’ and ‘Literature’.
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客觀主義、相對觀、和關係論 - Pierz Newton-John
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下文作者是第n位自以為找到「真理」的半吊子哲學家。所謂「半吊子」，我指的是：作者用了80%左右篇幅東拉西扯的批評傳統「(自然)科學」觀點；但他沒有講清楚自己的觀點「是什麼」，以及「為什麼」它優於前者。
相較於論述需要「能破能立」這個標準，我給下文的評語是：「未破未立」。不過，作者本人似乎也了解到這一點；他在全文最後給自己搭了個台階(請見「作者後記」)。
我過去常常以「喃喃自語」或「大呼小叫」來描寫這一類型的「政論性」文字。
Objectivism, Relativism, Relationalism
The case for a fully relational account of reality
Pierz Newton-John, 01/05/26
Take a glance around the space in which you find yourself and make a mental note of what you see. Really, take a moment. In all likelihood, the description you came up with consists of something like a laundry list of objects, perhaps with some propositional clauses to establish their relative locations. “I see a wilting Christmas tree, a sofa. An iPad is lying on the sofa next to some cushions (…)” — and so on. This type of summary — objects first, relations second — reflects our default perceptual mode, especially in Western industrial society, in which many of the things we see around us are manufactured objects that do not interdepend with their environment in any significant way, unlike the things we find in nature, which are less sharply bounded, more interpenetrating.
And yet there is another way we could see the same perceptual facts, one which privileges relationality over objects. This is closer to the view of the artist, perhaps, of the psychedelic trip, or the meditative state in which the separateness of individual things is dissolved within an indivisible wholeness. Psychedelics pioneer Stanislav Grof called this mode of perception “holotropic” — moving in the direction of wholeness — as opposed to the everyday “hylotropic” mode, which divides the world into parts. It is also the Buddhist perceptual mode, in which everything is a “dependent arising”, nothing stands alone and self-subsistent.
It is obvious, if we think about it, that the boundaries our perception draws around things don’t really exist. Step outside of the moment in time and space you currently occupy and the coffee table is revealed as a four-dimensional tube through spacetime, a standing wave of electricity and quarks, the ghostly mathematical denizens of the quantum world. Every ostensibly solid thing is an exchange of information from some place to another, a process too slow-oozing to recognise as such. This echoes the insights of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who argued a century ago against the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” For Whitehead, the world was composed not of static material substances, but of dynamic “occasions of experience” — a flow of events rather than a collection of things.
Objective perception is a handy fiction. It is the shorthand that the cognitive apparatus of tool-using apes employs to parse the world into what James Gibson termed “affordances”: the evolutionarily meaningful opportunities for interaction our environment offers. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, in The Case Against Reality, takes this evolutionary logic to its radical conclusion. He argues that we are systematically deceived by our senses; natural selection has provided us with a “user-friendly interface” that hides the complex truth of reality, much as a desktop icon hides the voltage and code of the software it represents. Nothing is even remotely as it seems.
The lineaments of this perspective were visible as early as 1905, when Einstein discovered the interconvertibility of matter and energy with his famous formula e=mc2. “Energy” is just another word for change, so Einstein’s equation reveals the fact that matter is change, too, just locked in a cyclical pattern. But what, then, is changing? The notion of substance as an ontological primitive has evanesced completely, replaced by change without a substrate, a strange notion for us apes to get our jungle-made heads around.
In the Relational Quantum Mechanics pioneered by Carlo Rovelli, the philosophical lesson that quantum physics has been trying to teach us for the past century is that all physical properties are relational in nature. That is, they pertain between systems; they do not inhere within them. Again, it was Einstein’s Special Relativity that opened the door by showing how many properties hitherto assumed to be absolute — such properties as mass, simultaneity and length — in fact depend on the reference frame of the observing system. QM, according to Rovelli, merely generalises the principle to all measurable properties.
The great Buddhist sage Nāgārjuna (龍樹；Nāgārjuna) reached much the same philosophical conclusion as early as the second century CE through simple reasoning. Every observable event depends on prior causes. We cannot ever isolate some property of an object of which we can say: this does not depend on anything before it. Everything is a dependent arising, flowing out of the conditions of the past and inseparable from them. From this, he denied the inherent existence (Sanskrit svabhava) of all phenomena, both mental and physical. This realisation is a cornerstone of enlightenment.
The logical philosophical extension of our naive sensory perceptions is atomism.It takes the primacy of objects in our sensory field at face value, combines it with the observation that the behaviour of complex systems can, to a large extent, be understood in terms of the behaviour of the parts, and concludes that the foundation of reality lies in some smallest, indivisible part: the atom. The Ancient Greek thinker Democritus is the philosopher most commonly credited with originating this theory, though historians generally agree that he was extending the work of Leucippus, an earlier Presocratic whose writings are now completely lost to time.
Democritus envisaged the world as composed of countless, extremely small objects of different shapes and sizes, the combinations and interactions of which gave rise to all the phenomena of the world. The atom, as the ultimate “thing of things”, served as ontological bedrock, with the relations between them important but secondary. Indeed, Democritus simply assumed time and space as an implicit background: a neutral arena within which the atoms moved rather than an ontological substrate in their own right.
Although largely overshadowed in the Christian era by Plato and Aristotle, Democritus’s ideas had a comeback in the scientific era when they were dusted off by John Dalton in the early 1800s and given a new, more rigorous empirical formulation, the basis for modern chemistry. When combined with Newtonian physics, the nineteenth century saw the apogee of atomic objectivism: a worldview so thoroughly accepted and apparently vindicated by experiment that scientists of the day found any alternative to it virtually inconceivable.
Even Max Planck, whose work on blackbody radiation at the turn of the century gave rise to the earliest quantum theory, did not really believe the implications of his own work. h, the constant of quantised action that provides the units for quantum-level measurements, was, he thought, just a kind of convenient fiction, a “calculation device” rather than a fundamental feature of reality itself. And yet the crack he opened in the formidable edifice of Newtonian physics did not cease to ramify until the final demolishing blow was struck with Heisenberg’s first paper on quantum mechanics, in 1925.
And yet, almost precisely one hundred years later, the work is not yet entirely done.
It is, after all, not so easy to unmake the foundations of our perception of reality. The human mind grasps for concretions even in the face of all evidence that the world is not concrete. Niels Bohr’s defensive manoeuvre against the tide of an abstract, relational reality was a Kantian one: he threw up his hands at what it all meant and declared that it is not the physicist’s job to answer questions of interpretation, to understand the Kantian noumenon or “thing in itself”. Shut up and calculate, is how David Mermin famously encapsulated the attitude.
We have to understand the culture of physics — and science as a whole — to understand how this position could have held sway for so long as the canonical interpretation (or non-interpretation) of Quantum Mechanics. The foundations of science lie in the backlash against the excesses of the Wars of Religion in the seventeenth century, when it was decreed that undecidable questions such as whether or not the bread of communion literally turns into the flesh of Christ in the mouth of the worshipper should be the reason for wholesale slaughter and the ravage of Europe.
Those early scientists rejected questions that were not tractable to some concrete procedure that could adjudicate them. They saw themselves as building a bulwark against the kind of superstitious insanity that had led Europe into the nightmare of the Thirty Years War and the burning of witches. Over three centuries from 1600, they parsed out the subjective from the objective, colour from wavelength, molecular motion from the sensation of heat, and found what they took to be the bones of reality: cold, hard matter, bereft of all subjective qualities. Atoms and the void: all else was vanity. Reduction — a hard-nosed, show-me-the-money attitude as much as an epistemological procedure — came to define the scientific worldview.
Physicists like Rovelli, who straddle the worlds of physics and philosophy, are still very much in the minority. Most people attracted to the physical sciences are engineering-adjacent, wranglers of differential equations or complicated experimental apparatuses. They have little time for what they regard as sterile language games. Mathematical rigour and quantitative prediction are everything.
Philosophy of science as a discipline has thus tended to be highly conservative. It has historically concerned itself primarily with providing a post-hoc account of what it is that scientists do, rather than venturing into the shark-infested waters of trying to define what it is that scientists study. Think of Karl Popper’s mid-twentieth century formulation of the scientific method: hypotheses followed by attempts to falsify them empirically. As later philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend subsequently showed, this is not at all what scientists do, yet such was the state of science’s own understanding of itself.
Today, that picture has perhaps begun to change. A relational philosophy of science — not of what scientists do, but an actual “non-materialist, physicalist” metaphysics — now exists in the mainstream. Every Thing Must Go, by James Ladyman and Don Ross, makes the case for what the authors term “Ontic Structural Realism” (OSR), a view of reality based on our best understanding of contemporary physics that dispenses with the primacy of matter (materialism) in favour of a structural account of reality: the world as a web of relations rather than a vast collection of tiny objects in mechanical collision. As the title suggests, this is a picture of reality with no “things” in sight — subatomic particles are treated as nodes in a network of interactions rather than independent individual entities. We have shifted away from objects with intrinsic properties and identities, to a purely relational field.
This is already a big advance on what I learned studying the History and Philosophy of Science in the 1990s, when ontology never even got a look in the door. Still, a less cautious and deflationary philosophical tradition less concerned with the sensibilities of engineers, could, one might suspect, go a step further. In OSR, certain intrinsic properties remain: the laws of physics, for example, continue to be intrinsic properties of the universe.
Yet there are good reasons to suspect that these laws, too, are part of a relational structure rather than representing absolute, unchanging properties of the universe. The so-called fine-tuning problem in physics is the challenge of explaining why it is that the constants of physics — the speed of light or the strength of the weak force, numbers that seem embedded into the way the universe functions — seem to be finally calibrated to values that allow for life to emerge. Tweak any of them even slightly, and complex structures collapse: stars don’t form, or burn up too fast, complex chemistry becomes impossible, black holes swallow everything.
The “coincidence” that all these values should be set within precisely the bounds that allow for the emergence of intelligent life demands an explanation. Yet if the laws of physics are just givens, fundamental properties that do not depend on any set of relations beyond themselves, then no explanation can ever be forthcoming. This seems unscientific at best. Must we accept that there is a boundary — the laws of physics — where no more questions should be asked, beyond which understanding cannot proceed, even in principle? This would be tantamount to magic: saying that the laws of physics are what they are “because”.
The philosophical view that I believe is rationally justified by our state of knowledge and the a priori consideration that there should be no “hard boundaries” in our metaphysics, no states of affairs beyond the at least theoretical possibility of explanation, is what I call strong relationalism. It is the view that all properties whatsoever are relational in nature. It is relations “all the way down”.
If this view is correct, there is an unexpected and radical implication. In a purely relational cosmos, there cannot be the kind of God’s eye perspective that is required for a completely objective account of the world. There is no “view from nowhere”, in Thomas Nagel’s phrase, but only ever “views from somewhere”: relational perspectives. That’s because such a godlike point of view would itself constitute a non-relational absolute, a point of fixity outside the infinite relational field. The first-person perspective comes built in to the structure of reality itself.
We could put it this way: we see the laws of physics we do because observers must occupy relational perspectives that support observation. Since they cannot find a “hard boundary” in their observational field of view, they must find themselves to be part of a field within which a coherent account of their own origins is possible: a story of the relations upon which their own existence depends. The preconditions of conscious observation include the apparent flow of time, a finely balanced interplay of stability and change that looks something like matter and energy, an informational arena that looks like space. At the same time, since the relational field is boundless, they must find their own existence also permanently a partial mystery. Infinity always bleeds through an explanatory gap.
Objectivity with a capital ‘O’ may be impossible, but relationalism does not imply a slide into relativism, or the idea that “every perspective is equally valid”. It is entirely possible to make strong, specific claims about truth within the framework of strong relationalism. It is just that such claims can never be regarded as fully self-contained or complete. We can see this principle reflected in post-Gödelian notions of mathematical truth. Even though Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem showed that no sufficiently strong set of mathematical axioms can be regarded as complete in itself, this does not stop mathematicians from constructing proofs and relying on them. In the same way, the impossibility of ever nailing our foot, as it were, to some absolute self-complete truth does not prevent us from asserting that the world is round, or even from making strong moral claims. It is always only a matter of defining the correct relational context within which those claims are made.
As we pass the hundredth anniversary of what may arguably be regarded as the true birth of Quantum Mechanics: The 1925 Heisenberg/Born/Jordan paper “Zur Quantenmechanik” (“On Quantum Mechanics”), we are, I believe, just beginning to understand the radical philosophical shift it implies. We are leaving the shallow waters of objectivism and its shadow twin relativism behind, and venturing out into the deep waters of a truly relational view of reality. This shift entails leaving absolute certainties behind for good, a leap into the unknown that brings with it a certain lurch of fear for a species long addicted to the false comfort of such certainty. Reductionists, seeing safety in the retreat to a deflationary “common sense” that looks increasingly naive, may baulk. Yet the problem of absolute belief is what gave rise to the religious wars from whose ashes the scientific project was born in the first place. It’s time to let go.
Final note: a skeptical reader will no doubt find some of the above argument under-specified, especially in relation to the larger, more speculative leaps. The scope of an article of this length makes this inevitable. A more rigorously argued version can be found in my currently short-listed submission to the Berggruen Essay Competition: “The Relational Cosmos: Consciousness in a World Without Intrinsic Properties,” to be published by the Berggruen Institute in due course
Written by Pierz Newton-John
Writer, coder, former psychotherapist, founding member of The School Of Life Melbourne. Essayist for Dumbo Feather magazine, author of Fault Lines (fiction).
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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評帕特蘭「心靈-大腦功能論」 -- Paul Austin Murphy
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我在哲學論文和書本中看過帕特蘭的大名；但沒有讀過他的書，也沒有花時間去了解他的思想。在社會學領域，我大致接受帕森斯的「結構-功能論」；對意識(心靈)方面的「功能論」則沒有接觸。
從下文的簡短說明看，帕特蘭這類「哲學家」不過是有資格在校園混飯吃(行騙？)的「狡辯士」或「言語魔術師」；後者為相對於「道具魔術師」而言。
索引：
isomorphism：一個系統及其模型間的「異構同質關係」；比較：Homomorphism (一個系統及其模型間的「異構同形關係」)
outré：荒誕、怪胎
Putnam’s Immaterial Brains and Material Souls
The American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926 — 2016) is vitally important in the history of functionalism, at least as it applies to the human mind. Interestingly, he turned against functionalism in the late 1970s. The paper analysed in this essay (‘Philosophy and Our Mental Life’ — 1975) is only mildly critical of functionalism. (Putnam specifically argues against his former position of machine-state functionalism.) In any case, in order to get his functionalist point across, Putnam discussed what he called “immaterial brains” and “material souls”, stressing that in both cases if what matters are “functional states”, then such entities are possible.
Paul Austin Murphy, 11/17/25
See my follow-up essay, ‘Functionalism vs Materialism’.]
One central idea of functionalism was expressed very simply by Hilary Putnam. He wrote:
“I explained the most general notion of functional isomorphism by saying that two systems are functionally isomorphic if there is an isomorphism that makes both of them models for the same psychological theory.”
Putnam then really got down to the nitty gritty of functionalist isomorphism. Take his own example:
“[A] computer made of electrical components can be isomorphic to one made of cogs and wheels. In other words, for each state in the first computer there is a corresponding state in the other, and, as we said before, the sequential relations are the same — if state S is followed by state B in the case of the electronic computer, state A would be followed by state B in the case of the computer made of cogs and wheels.”
More importantly and relevantly, Putnam continued: “[I]t doesn’t matter at all that the physical realizations of those states are totally different.”
This is all very well when it comes to computers made of electrical components and computers made of cogs and wheels. However, does all this pass over to minds, brains and mental states? Indeed, even in the case of computer states, we’d still need to know exactly what they are regardless of the fact that state S is followed by state B, and state A is followed by state B.
Putnam on Souls in the Soul World
Bizarrely, Putnam discussed “souls in the soul world”. These souls are “functionally isomorphic to the brains in the brain world”. Yet souls are supposed to be non-physical (or non-corporeal). This means that the pains of souls can’t be realised by physical brains. (They aren’t realised by anything!) Souls may not be abstract, but they aren’t physical either. The fact that souls aren’t brains wasn’t important to Putnam’s functionalism. Indeed, Putnam continued by asking the following questions:
“Is there any more sense to attaching importance to this difference than to the difference between copper wires and some other wires in the computer? Does it matter that the soul people have, so to speak, immaterial brains, and that the brain people have material souls?”
Putnam brought in soul people to get his point across. It’s rather an extreme example. Talk of “immaterial brains” and “material souls” certainly seems very odd. Yet from a functionalist perspective, it isn’t. After all, Putnam interprets brains and souls functionally. That means that brains can be immaterial, and souls can be material. What matters to a brain being a brain, and a soul being a soul, is their functions. And, in this case, their functions are the same, or at least similar.
Actually, in this case, Putnam concluded by referring to a “common structure”, not common functions. He told his readers that “[w]hat matters is the common structure [ ] and not the hardware”. That’s not a problem because functions have structural explanations.
Putnam on Clairvoyance, Telepathy and Reincarnation
It’s worth adding here that Putnam’s talk of “souls” and the “soul world” didn’t mean that he had gone all religious, and then dressed that conversion up with technical talk about “functions” and “states”. Instead, this example (as already stated) was his outré means to get his point across. After all, Putnam wrote:
“If it is built into one’s notions of the soul that the soul can do things that violate the laws of physics, then I admit I am stumped.”
More relevantly to functionalism:
“There cannot be a soul which is isomorphic to a brain, if the soul can read the future clairvoyantly, in a way that is not in any way explainable by physical law.”
However!
Putnam provided his readers with a big but. He continued:
“On the other hand, if one is interested in more modest forms of magic like telepathy, it seems to me that there is no reason in principle why we couldn’t construct a device which would project subvocalised thoughts from one brain to another.”
And then Putnam became even sexier:
“As to reincarnation, if we are, as I am urging, a certain kind of functional structure, there seems to to be in principle no reason why that could not be reproduced after a thousand years or a million years or a billion years. Resurrection: as you know, Christians believe in resurrection in the flesh, which completely bypasses the need for an immaterial vehicle.”
It’s not immediately clear how adopting functionalism would help with projecting subvocalised thoughts from one brain to another via some kind of physical device. Unless seeing such thoughts in exclusively functional terms (i.e., as functional states) would help with this project. After all, the physical basis of such thoughts couldn’t be projected from one brain to another.
As for reincarnation.
If the mental lives of human persons are given an entirely functional description, then that description can be captured in a program. (Spiritual and religious thinkers stress “information” when it comes to reincarnation, not functional states.) This example, then, clearly relates to the one just given about the projection of subvocalised thoughts. In both cases, a functionalist account and approach makes everything so much simpler. The messy details of the body and brain can simply be dispensed with.
Putnam on Martian Pain
Putnam then brought on board the multiple realizability argument again. He wrote:
“It is as if we met Martians and discovered that they were in all functional respects isomorphic to us, but we refused to admit that they could feel pain because their C fibers were different.”
Readers may wonder how human persons could ever discover that Martians are in all functional respects isomorphic to us. After all, Putnam wasn’t hinting at analysing their brains. Instead, he must have meant that they (may) behave like human persons when they’re in pain. Thus, such functional respects must be derived from the behaviour of Martians.
Putnam’s point was that pain is multiply realizable. Yet how could he have known that? Was it entirely due to the behaviour of entities which aren’t human persons?
Putnam never actually mentioned behaviour in these passages. However, the gist of what he did say is indeed Wittgensteinian and/or behaviourist. In other words, if Martians behave as if they’re in pain, then they must be in pain. Yet Martians’ brains don’t contain C fibers. [See note.] So their pains must be realised by physical elements which aren’t C fibers. The upshot here, then, is that pains can’t be identical to the “firing” of C fibers.
Note:
The idea of “C-fibers firing” was often used in the philosophy of mind. It’s still used today as an example of mind-brain identity, even though many philosophers (including materialists/physicalists) now view it as being too simplistic.
Written by Paul Austin Murphy
MY PHILOSOPHY: https://paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com/
My Flickr Account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/193304911@N06/
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現實的客觀性--Ethan Siegel
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請參見本欄上一篇《引言》以及此文(該欄2026/01/15)。
Does our physical reality exist in an objective manner?
We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.
Ethan Siegel, 12/25/25
The idea that two quanta could be instantaneously entangled with one another, even across large distances, is often talked about as the spookiest part of quantum physics. If reality were fundamentally deterministic and were governed by hidden variables, this spookiness could be removed. Unfortunately, attempts to do away with this type of quantum weirdness have all failed, as any experimental difference between the Copenhagen interpretation and hidden variable theories has only supported the standard picture of quantum mechanics.
Credit: Alan Stonebraker/American Physical Society 示意圖
Key Takeaways
* The old philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the forest but there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” seems to obviously have an answer: yes.
* Whenever a tree falls, its trunk snaps, its branches collide with others, and it collides with the ground. Each one of those actions should make a sound.
* But relativity teaches us that the sound each observer experiences is relative to their position and motion, and quantum physics tells us that the act of observing changes the quantum state of this system. What does that all mean for the existence of “objective reality?”
If there’s one thing most of us can be certain of it’s this: that our observed, physical reality actually exists. Although there are always some philosophical assumptions behind this conclusion, it’s an assumption that isn’t contradicted by anything we’ve ever measured under any conditions: not with human senses, not with laboratory equipment, not with telescopes or observatories, not under the influence of nature alone nor with specific human intervention. Reality exists, and our scientific description of that reality came about precisely because those measurements, conducted anywhere or at any time, are consistent with that very description of reality itself.
But there had previously been a set of assumptions that came along with our notion of reality that are no longer universally agreed upon, and chief among them is that reality itself exists in a fashion that’s independent of the observer or measurer. In fact, two of the greatest advances of 20th century science — relativity and quantum mechanics — specifically challenge our notion of objective reality, and rather point to a reality that cannot be disentangled from the act of observing it. Here’s the bizarre science of what we know, today, about the notion of objective reality.
During Voyager 1’s 1979 flyby encounter with Jupiter, a brief “point” of light was seen on Jupiter’s surface, representing the first observed bolide event in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Jupiter experiences several thousands of times as many such events as Earth does, at minimum, as its gravity draws large numbers of objects into it that wouldn’t strike it, despite its massive size, otherwise. We think these objects strike Jupiter whether we observe them doing so or not.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Voyager 1 視頻
Objective reality
Put simply, the big idea is that reality exists, and it exists in a fashion that’s independent of anyone or anything that monitors or observes reality. Particles have masses, charges, and other intrinsic properties that don’t change, regardless of:
* who measures it,
* where they are,
* how fast they’re moving,
* which property gets measured,
* or by what means the measurement is acquired.
This is a big foundational idea of science: that something’s “realness” is completely independent of whether or how it’s being examined.
But this idea is only an assumption. Sure, we can see that the laws of physics and the fundamental constants of nature don’t appear to change over time or space: an atom of hydrogen here has the same set of emission and absorption lines as an atom of hydrogen many billions of light-years away or many billions of years ago. A proton has the same rest mass in Antarctica as it does on the International Space Station as it does in a galaxy anywhere within the Universe. As these examples show, we can only state that this assumption is good to the degree we’re capable of putting it to experimental and observational tests.
Different frames of reference, including different positions and motions, would see different laws of physics (and would disagree on reality) if a theory is not relativistically invariant. The fact that we have a symmetry under ‘boosts,’ or velocity transformations, tells us we have a conserved quantity: linear momentum. The fact that a theory is invariant under any sort of coordinate or velocity transformation is known as Lorentz invariance, and any Lorentz invariant symmetry conserves CPT symmetry. This notion of invariance under constant motion dates all the way back to the time of Galileo. Credit: Krea/Wikimedia Commons 坐標系示意圖
This was borne out extremely well by physics over most of its history, from Galileo to Newton to Faraday to Maxwell. The law of gravity appeared to be the same universal law everywhere we could see, from objects here on Earth to objects that orbited around the Earth to planets and moons and comets that orbited objects other than the Earth. The gravitational constant was truly a constant; the laws of motion appeared to be the same for everyone, and if two different people measured the position, motion, or acceleration of an object, as well as the duration it took to go between different points, they’d both get the same answer.
This appeared, initially, to apply just as well to electromagnetism as it did to classical mechanics. The laws of electricity and magnetism were the same everywhere we looked, and applied to charges at rest and in motion — at any speed — equally well. It didn’t matter whether these were radioactive particles like alpha particles (helium nuclei) or beta particles (electrons), or whether these were enormous collections of charges like one might find on a charged-up van de Graaf generator. Charges might behave differently within conductors or insulators, and the nature of those materials might affect how charges move within them, but the laws, constants, and who measured what would all be consistent regardless of the setup.
Apollo 10, known as the ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Moon landing, was actually equipped with all the apparatuses that would have allowed them to land on the lunar surface themselves. They came closer to the Moon than any previous crewed mission, and paved the way for the actual moon landing which took place with Apollo 11 in July of 1969. The entire endeavor required only Newtonian physics, and astronauts in orbit around the Moon experienced themselves as completely weightless. Credit: NASA/Apollo 10 照片
Relativity
Things began to change with the discovery of length contraction and time dilation, however, which would eventually lead to the revolution of Einstein’s relativity. If you fired a projectile from rest here on Earth, everyone standing around would be able to measure how fast it went and would measure the same speed; the only differences would be in the direction they saw the projectile moving, as someone “behind” the projectile would see it moving away from them, while someone “ahead of” the projectile would see it moving toward them.
If the projectile was on a moving platform, and/or if the observers were on a moving platform, they might now measure different speeds from one another as well as different directions. However, if you knew how fast the various platforms were moving, each observer could easily reconstruct what any other observer would see.
However, what if, instead of a common projectile like a cannonball, this was a particle that was moving close to the speed of light? In fact, what if it actually were light itself? All of a sudden, these older laws didn’t work. For everyone who observes light always sees it moving at precisely the same speed: c, or 299,792,458 m/s.
A “light clock” will appear to run differently for observers moving at different relative speeds, but this is due to the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein’s law of special relativity governs how these time and distance transformations take place between different observers. However, each individual observer will see time pass at the same rate as long as they remain in their own reference frame: one second-per-second, even though when they bring their clocks together after the experiment, they’ll find that they no longer agree. Credit: John D. Norton/University of Pittsburgh 不同運動速率觀察結果相異的動態示意圖
All of a sudden, notions like space and time weren’t objective parts of reality, but rather only existed relative to the observer. In the thought-experiment above, two observers measure how much time it takes for light to travel up from the floor toward a mirror at the top, and then back down toward the floor again. This type of setup — known as a light-clock — should yield the same result for any observer, whether in rest or in motion.
But to the observer at rest, the light-clock in motion would appear to run more slowly, and in fact time would appear to pass more slowly for the person in motion relative to them. Similarly, for the observer in motion, their light-clock would appear to run at the normal rate, but the light-clock at rest — which would appear to be in motion relative to them — would appear to run more slowly, and time would appear to pass more slowly for everyone who wasn’t in motion along with the observer and their clock.
Similarly, how far apart two objects were, a measure of distance, could only be defined relative to an observer. And notions like “simultaneous” could again only be defined for two observers at rest in the same location. In fact, if we could measure “time” precisely enough, observers at different locations or in motion with different speeds or directions would even measure different results for the simple example of, “When did this projectile hit the ground?”
In Newtonian (or Einsteinian) mechanics, a system will evolve over time according to completely deterministic equations, which should mean that if you can know the initial conditions (like positions and momenta) for everything in your system, you should be able to evolve it, with no errors, arbitrarily forward in time. One cannot describe the position of an object accurately without including a time coordinate in addition to the spatial ones. In our practical Universe, due to the inability to know the initial conditions to truly arbitrary precisions, including when we factor in the presence of quantum uncertainty, this is not true to arbitrary accuracy. Credit: ESO/M. Parsa/L. Calçada 「宇宙事務前定論」示意圖
As it turns out, it isn’t just changes in position or motion that can affect questions such as, “How distant is this object?” “How long did this phenomenon last?” or “Which event happened first?” In addition, changes in the curvature of spacetime itself — i.e., the effects of gravitation — can impact the answer. Time doesn’t just dilate when you move close to the speed of light, it also dilates when you’re in a stronger gravitational field. The presence and distribution of matter and energy impacts how we experience space and time, which is why light bends when it passes too close to a mass and why time slows down when you approach a black hole’s event horizon.
In fact, some very bizarre and counterintuitive observations can arise as consequences of the fact that an objective measure of “space” or “time” doesn’t exist. If you have a supernova go off in a distant galaxy, you might expect that light to arrive at your eyes at one particular, pre-determined time. But if there’s a large mass between you and that supernova, it can actually distort the intervening space, resulting in multiple images of the same galaxy and supernova: with the light from the supernova arriving at different, non-simultaneous times in each image where it appears. Space and time might be real, but they’re not objectively real; only real relative to each individual observer or measurer.
This series of images, captured with the Hubble Space Telescope, shows four images, stretched out into arcs by gravitational lensing, of the same galaxy. In 2016, we captured a supernova in one of these images (labeled SN1), and then saw a second and third separated by a total of around 6 months. Based on the reconstructed geometry of the lensing foreground cluster, we can expect to see the fourth replay in the location labeled SN4 in the year 2037. Credit: S.A. Rodney et al., Nature Astronomy, 2021 哈伯望遠鏡照片四幅之 1
Quantum physics
In the quantum realm, things get even more counterintuitive, as the outcome of an experiment or observation depends on your method of making that observation or measurement, and on whether you make one at all.
Consider, for example, the famed two-slit (sometimes known as the double-slit) experiment. If you attempt to throw a large number of small objects through a barrier with two slits carved in it, you expect to see those objects collect against the wall behind the barrier in two piles: one corresponding to the slit on the left and one corresponding to the slit on the right. This is precisely what happens in the macroscopic world, whether you use balls, pebbles, or living organisms.
But if you use a quantum particle, like electrons or photons, you don’t get two piles. Instead, you get what appears to be a wave-like interference pattern: alternating locations, equidistantly spaced, where particles preferentially land and are forbidden from landing. The greatest “peak” of collected particles is at the midpoint between the two slits, with alternating peaks (that decrease in magnitude) and troughs (which always go all the way down to zero) as you move away from that central peak.
The wave pattern for electrons passing through a double slit, one-at-a-time. If you measure “which slit” the electron goes through, you destroy the quantum interference pattern shown here. Regardless of the interpretation, quantum experiments appear to care whether we make certain observations and measurements (or force certain interactions) or not. Credit: Dr. Tonomura; Belsazar/Wikimedia Commons 「雙縫實驗」照片5幅
It might occur to you to, then, to send the particles through one-at-a-time, instead of all at once. When you do that, the same results emerge: macroscopic objects make two piles, but quantum particles only land in the “peaks” of an interference pattern. When enough particles are tallied, the full pattern emerges.
It might occur to you, after that, to try to measure which slit each particle goes through on its way to the back wall. Perhaps surprisingly, now both experiments — the macroscopic and quantum ones — lead to only two piles. The act of observing “which slit each particle went through” destroys the quantum behavior. Somehow, making a measurement, which means inducing an energetic-enough interaction between the quantum particle you’re experimenting on with another quantum, alters the behavior of the quantum system.
We see this phenomenon rear its head in many different ways in quantum mechanics. Pass a spinning quantum particle through a vertically-oriented magnet, and the particle will deflect either upward or downward, revealing its spin. Put another vertically-oriented magnet farther downstream, and the particles that deflected upward will still deflect upward, while the ones that deflected downward will still deflect downward. But what, do you suppose, will happen if you put a horizontally-oriented magnet between the two vertical ones?
When a particle with quantum spin is passed through a directional magnet, it will split in at least 2 directions, dependent on spin orientation. If another magnet is set up in the same direction, no further split will ensue. However, if a third magnet is inserted between the two in a perpendicular direction, not only will the particles split in the new direction, but the information you had obtained about the original direction gets destroyed, leaving the particles to split again when they pass through the final magnet. Credit: MJasK/Wikimedia Commons 具「量子自旋」性質粒子通過特定方向磁場示意圖
The answer is twofold:
* the horizontal magnet splits the beam of particles in two, with one set of particles deflecting leftward and one deflecting rightward,
* but now, regardless of which sets of particles you choose to pass through the next vertical magnet, they once again split into upward and downward trajectories.
In other words, making a “horizontal” measurement (or observation) destroys the “vertical” information about the spin-orientation of these particles.
Does this mean that there is no such thing as objective reality? Not necessarily; there could be an underlying reality that exists whether we measure it or not, and our measurements and observations are just a crude, insufficient way to reveal the full, true character of what our objective reality actually is. Many people believe that this will someday be shown to be the case, but so far — and this advance was just awarded 2022’s Nobel Prize in Physics — we can place very meaningful constraints on just what type of “reality” exists independent of our observations and measurements. To the best that we can tell, the real outcomes that arise in the Universe cannot be divorced from who is measuring them, and how.
Quantum mechanics’ entangled pairs can be compared to a machine that throws out balls of opposite colors in opposite directions. When Bob catches a ball and sees that it is black, he immediately knows that Alice has caught a white one. In a theory that uses hidden variables, the balls had always contained hidden information about what color to show. However, quantum mechanics says that the balls were gray, or a combination of black and white, until someone looked at them, when one randomly turned white and the other black. Bell inequalities show that there are experiments that can differentiate between these cases. Such experiments have proven that quantum mechanics’ description is correct, and the balls have an indeterminate color until the measurement is made. Credit: Johan Jamestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 「量子纠缠」示意圖
It isn’t the job of science, contrary to popular belief, to explain the Universe that we inhabit. Instead, science’s goal is to accurately describe the Universe that we inhabit, and in that it’s been remarkably successful. But the questions that most of us get excited about asking — and we do it by default, without any prompting — often involve figuring out why certain phenomena happen. We love notions of cause-and-effect: that something occurs, and then later on, as a consequence of that first thing occurring, something else happens because of it. That’s true in many instances, but the quantum Universe can violate cause-in-effect as well in a variety of ways.
One such question that we cannot answer is whether there is such a thing as an objective, observer-independent reality. Many of us assume that it does, and we build our interpretations of quantum physics in such ways that they admit an underlying, objective reality. Others don’t make that assumption, and build equally valid interpretations of quantum physics that don’t necessarily have one. All we have to guide us, for better or for worse, is what we can observe and measure. We can physically describe that, successfully, either with or without an objective, observer-independent reality. At this moment in time, it’s up to each of us to decide whether we’d rather add on the philosophically satisfying but physically extraneous notion that “objective reality” is meaningful.
This article was first published in November of 2022. It was updated in December of 2025.
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該文作者希苟教授是理論天體物理學家(請見本欄下一篇)；也是一位相當量產的大眾性科學類作家。他的文章有兩個特色：
1) 評論和分析在說明和教育性兩個層面都頗為深入(前者2025/05/22；後者2022/08/13第二篇)；跟其他同樣具有專業背景的大眾性科學類作家相較，也頗勝一籌；非專業出身的科學新聞報導者更難望其項背。
2) 他的作品都附有詳細的照片和/或統計圖片來幫助解說；該文自不例外，請至原網頁觀看。
希苟教授大作的主題屬於哲學，其內容則屬於「近代物理」(這是我大學時代的名詞)；置於那一欄，還真得推敲、推敲。本部落格類似的文章還有：此文(該欄2026/01/01)、此文(該欄2026/01/04)、和此文(該欄2026/01/04)等。本想另開一個相對於「形上學」的「形下學」專欄；又好像顯出我老頑童的一面。考慮再三，決定依「主題」置於此欄。
說到這裏附帶聊兩句：我的論政風格時而嘻皮笑臉，時而潑翁罵街；我論學時則一向嚴謹恭敬。話雖如此，在對待一些立論主旨在表達自己「政治正確」，或把「學術」當做「羊頭」掛在自己項上的學者(該欄2025/09/18)，我一向甚為鄙視，敵意也高；自然就從不手軟。碰到這種情況，尚請看官擔待一、二(1)。
該文從相對論和量子力學兩個角度討論：「客觀現實是否存在？」；對這類問題有興趣的朋友，不妨一讀。
附註：
1. 在以上兩者之外，對一些英文字不怎麼認識，張口就來的「學者」，我下筆也很嚴厲；請參見：《評《另類哲學》》、《評《哲學辭典》中譯本》、和《《自由的所以然》讀後》。
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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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