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哲學 – 開欄文
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瀏覽5,012 ｜回應24｜推薦2 |
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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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記憶並非儲存於大腦--Victoria Trumbull
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Memory is not stored in the brain
Time, not space, contains memory
Victoria Trumbull, 11/17/25
Editor’s Notes：The leading theories of memory describe it as being stored in the brain – similarly, some argue, to the way a computer stores memory. But this assumption relies on materialist assumptions and problematically bypasses the hard problem of consciousness. Memory is not stored in space, but in time, argues philosopher Victoria Trumbull, in the first article of a new IAI series on memory.
From ancient times, philosophers have used the “storage” metaphor to describe the phenomenon of remembering. Memory is often pictured as a vast warehouse or library of experiences. In the past century, this “storage” metaphor has come to be taken literally: neuroscientists today maintain that a “memory” is simply a given pattern or collection of patterns of neural activity. This hypothesis forms a key part of the greater worldview known as “materialism” or “physicalism”: in brief, the idea that reality consists solely in physical stuff, and, correspondingly, that the human mind is reducible or equivalent to the body or the brain.
The central problem with this picture of memory is that, like many descriptions of the mind, the storage metaphor is only a metaphor. It feels intuitive to say that we “store” memories like books in a library or files on a hard drive. While this is a useful metaphor insofar as it helps us to describe and express what it feels like to remember, it cannot be anything more than this.
In order to prove that memories are stored in the brain, we would need to be able to observe this. But this is not a fact that belongs to the order of observation and experimentation. The most that neuroscientists can do is track cerebral activity and attempt to correlate the physical brain state to a description of concurrent mental experience. In carrying out experiments of this kind, however, the neuroscientist has already provisionally assumed that there is an exact identity or perfect equivalence between the mental state and the cerebral state. In other words, the hypothesis of localization that the neuroscientist has set out to prove has already been assumed as an initial axiom of his or her research. The correlation between brain activity and memory reports doesn’t prove that memories are stored in the brain any more than the correlation between footprints and walking proves that walking is stored in footprints, or the correlation between the piano and a sonata proves that the sonata is stored in the piano.
If we assume that the brain stores up discrete, localisable memories, it then becomes extremely difficult to explain how the brain can be said to generate, preserve, and reconstruct “representations” of this kind. How can the brain translate an image of experience, itself intangible and invisible, into a physical record or neural pattern? The neuroscientist is left with the philosophical challenge famously known as the “hard problem of consciousness”: given the complex physical machinations of the brain, whence arises the conscious experience of remembering?
It does not make sense to say that we “store” the smell of coffee, the face of our mother, or the sound of a Mozart symphony “in” the brain. But can a pattern of neural firings, like the embossed print of Braille or the successive taps of Morse code, indicate or contain these prior events, or even mark their salient outlines? In recent years, the idea of “neural code” and the general hypothesis that the brain operates like a computer has been offered as one way of trying to solve this puzzle. But this framework simply provides us with another metaphor; the computer model is no more explanatory than the storage metaphor itself. Neuronal configurations may very well be a biological prerequisite for remembering, but it does not follow from this fact that these configurations are the memory, nor that they can be said to “represent,” “portray,” “depict,” or “contain” what is being remembered.
In truth, the theory of localization far exceeds the facts of current neurobiology. When neuroscientists locate memory “in” the brain, what they’re really finding is that certain brain regions are active during remembering. But being active during a process is not the same thing as being the storage location for that process. The brain is undoubtedly involved in remembering, but involvement does not necessitate containment.
In most neuroscientific experiments intended to prove that memories are stored in the brain, the researchers study habit, not recollection proper. Habit is a motor attitude or pattern retained by the body or nervous system; it is characterized by repetition and acquired by motor education. Memory is personal recollection, involving the persistence of the past under the form of an image, reflecting a unique moment of our original history. In famous experiments with rats and sea slugs, the kind of “memory” being studied is nothing more than a physiological response. What has been shown successfully in experiments of this kind is that physical conditioning produces a regular motor reaction to a given external stimulus, and that brain activity prepares and paves the way for the systematization of this motor response. In other words, what has been proven is that habit is effectuated via lasting changes in synaptic architecture. But to move from the fear response of a mouse to a human episodic recollection would require more than an increase in the number and complexity of neurons: it requires a distinction in kind, a categorical leap from motor habituation to conscious evocation.
Furthermore, if localization theory were true, and if memory-images are indeed “stored up” as cellular or neural traces, then the impairment of certain brain regions should definitely correspond to the destruction of certain well-defined recollections. But this is precisely not the case. For example, on a timescale varying from weeks to years, many patients who have suffered from a stroke come to recover their once-lost ability to speak and comprehend words. Similarly, certain objects or sound-based triggers can cause patients suffering from Alzheimer’s to suddenly recover memories that were previously lost in obscurity. Perhaps what we find to be impaired by brain lesions is the mechanism required to recall or express certain kinds of memories, rather than a firm and final destruction of the recollections themselves.
What, then, are memory-images? First of all, it is important to note that the objects of memory are not like the objects of perception. They are neither visible nor tangible. The remembered thing or event is not found in the present, except somehow intangibly “in” the mind, while the perceived object is present physically and externally. Second, memory-images essentially bear the mark of “pastness.” They are attached to the past by their deepest roots, so that we immediately recognize a memory as distinct from a perception and thus know it as “memory.” An individual recollection points to the wealth or totality of the past that it belongs to and from whence it originates; it points to the total history of the personal life we have lived since our birth.
For these two reasons, our desire to think of memories as “things” that are capable of being “stored” in a receptacle is what we philosophers might call a “category error.” Memory-images are not objects or things. We thus cannot apply to them the same categories, such as the necessity of “being contained somewhere” that we apply to the things of space. The relationship of “container” to “contained” here arises from a misguided analogy with material objects. Why should recollections, which are neither visible nor tangible, need a container, and how could they have one? We could say, again metaphorically, that they exist “in” the mind, but “mind” is not a literal container for mental experiences any more than the number 10 can be said to be a “container” for the series “1, 2, 3…etc.”
Memory is, essentially, a fact of time—it is the persistence of the past—and, because it is a temporal phenomenon, it is fundamentally extra-spatial. To extend to memories, to a series of moments in time, the obligation of “being contained” in a place is to transfer to a temporal phenomenon a quality which applies only to the collection of material bodies perceived in space. And it is this series of observations which leads us directly to the reality of the mind: because the past overflows the present, memory overflows the brain; and because memory overflows the brain, mind overflows the body.
Perhaps what the brain does in all of this is far less extravagant. The body or brain can be said to retain and resume specific habits, patterns, or motor attitudes. Most importantly, the brain provides the motor basis for recall. The capacity to remember certainly depends functionally upon the health and integrity of certain brain regions. Thus, if you damage certain parts of the brain, then you diminish the capacity for recollection within the present; you do not, however, destroy the images themselves. If we go further than this, if we say that a brain injury abolishes individual recollections, then we are forced to assume that psychological states are miraculously capable of springing about from anatomical configurations, and thus to consequences that partake of the metaphysical rather than observational order. The invigorating opportunity for neuroscientific research is to determine by what mechanism the brain concretely serves the dynamics of remembrance, but the storage hypothesis will only hinder neuroscience from pursuing its natural course.
If we assume from the start that everything mental must be reducible to something physical, then we close the possibility of understanding the mind on its own terms. We have consigned ourselves to translating the wealth of subjective experience into impoverished neural patterns, only to then realize that this has not helped us to “explain” memory in any meaningful sense of the word. A genuine science of memory would begin by questioning the storage metaphor itself. Perhaps memories are not stored “anywhere.” Perhaps the brain’s role is not to house the past, but to facilitate our engagement with it.
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Victoria Trumbull is an Oxford Philosopher working at the intersection of philosophical psychology, metaphysics, and the history of philosophical thought.
On 1st December at 17:20, the IAI will return to the theme of memory in a live online debate between Iain McGilchrist, Oliver Hardt, Catherine Loveday and Charan Ranganath, hosted by Jessica Frazier. The topic will be: I Forget Therefore I Am: Does the Self Arise from Forgetting?
Book your tickets on IAI Live here.
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意識不是現實的基礎 -- James Cooke
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下文屬於「本體論」和「認識論」，旁及「方法論」。我曾用庫克教授的論述策略，批評「唯心論」和「知識/意義『不定』論」。此「策略」要點請見全文的最後一句話；相關拙作一時找不到，容日後補上。此外，我恕難苟同庫克教授在倒數第2段對康德「認識論/本體論」的詮釋。
Consciousness is not fundamental
Consciousness is the foundation of knowledge, not reality
James Cooke, 10/17/25
Editor’s Note：In order to know anything, we must be conscious of it. This simply idea, combined with a recent modern move away from metaphysical physicalism, has led many to claim that consciousness itself is fundamental; fundamental not only to our experience of reality, but fundamental to reality itself. But, argues neuroscientist James Cooke, this is to mistake the foundations of knowledge with the foundations of the world.
For centuries, philosophers have wrestled with a simple but unsettling question: if all we ever know of the world comes through consciousness, how can we be sure there is anything beyond it? If reality comes to us through the filter of our fallible minds, how can we know that we are actually experiencing something real in this moment? How do you know that this is not a dream that you are about to wake up from?
In light of this possibility for doubting reality, how can we begin to assess what is real? One approach is to throw out everything that can be doubted until one settles on a bedrock undoubtable truth. This is the skeptical approach that Descartes took. He settled on experience as the one undeniable truth, proclaiming cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. Even if all else were illusion, the fact of consciousness itself could not be doubted, as doubt would be an experience arising in consciousness, and this would demonstrate its existence. For Descartes, this became the unshakable ground of all knowledge in his philosophical system.
This is an important insight for understanding how it is that we can know reality, but it is sometimes confused as having implications regarding the nature of reality itself. This leads some to the conclusion that only mind exists, a metaphysical stance known as idealism. Consciousness, under this view, is not merely epistemically primary, it is ontologically fundamental. Reality, idealists argue, is mind-like at its core.
The logic often goes like this: have you ever encountered anything outside of consciousness? Everything you have ever experienced arises within experience, by definition. If you cannot step outside consciousness, how can you justify claiming that anything exists beyond it?
The flaw in this reasoning is the assumption that knowledge must be direct, but there is no reason to believe this to be the case. If knowledge of reality is assumed to be direct, then only experience can be real. If knowledge of reality is indirect, then it is possible that there is more to reality than experience.
The key point here is that epistemology and ontology are different things. The insight that our experience of reality arises in the mind tells us nothing about the nature of reality itself; it is a claim about epistemology, not ontology. It tells us about the standpoint from which we know, not about the nature of what is known. Using this insight to bridge from epistemology to ontology is like saying that because every map is drawn on paper, the territory itself must be made of paper.
So we have the claim that we can’t directly confirm anything outside of consciousness, because knowledge of reality comes to us through consciousness. What if we flip this claim? Given the experiential nature of consciousness, could it be possible that something exists outside of it? When in a dream, could it be possible that a person in a bed with a dreaming brain exists, even though it can’t be confirmed in the dream? Of course it is possible. And so it is possible that being can exist beyond knowing. If we accept the indirect nature of knowledge then there is no problem at all in being open to the possibility of something existing outside of consciousness.
We know from our understanding of science, perception, and even life itself that knowledge is arrived at in an indirect rather than direct manner. Science does not simply look at the world directly and record its essence. It works by constructing hypotheses, models of how the world is, and testing them against evidence. Scientific theories are not windows onto reality but stories that are tested and refined through experimental feedback. These stories succeed when their predictions survive error-correction, tuning them to wider reality. This correspondence can give the impression that the map is the territory when a good fit is achieved, but this is not the case. Science does not give us direct contact with reality but constructs a model of reality that is always open to further refinement.
This indirectness is not confined to science—it applies to perception as well. According to the predictive processing framework, the brain does not passively register the world but instead actively predicts it. Based on past experience, the brain builds models of the world and generates expectations about what sensory inputs should arrive based on these models, much like a scientist using their hypotheses to make predictions. Where sense data shows the predictions were wrong, errors are registered to further tune the model. Perception consists of top-down expectations and bottom-up inputs meeting to produce a guess that is both educated and informed.
The Free Energy Principle generalizes this principle across all life. Every organism persists by minimizing the gap between its internal model and its sensory environment. This gap, formalized as “variational free energy,” must be minimized or the organism dissolves into disorder. From a bacterium swimming toward sugar, to a human navigating a conversation, to a scientist testing a hypothesis, the same recursive process plays out: prediction, error correction, and updating of one’s model in order to come to know the world in an indirect manner.
In The Dawn of Mind, I argue that this epistemic behaviour of life is what consciousness is. Experience is a relational process between organism and environment, one in which the contents of experience reflect constructed models that resonate with reality. From the organism’s perspective, all that it knows directly is its own consciousness. It never knows the molecules of its body directly, but that does not negate their existence. There is no need to conclude that reality is made of mind simply because knowing occurs in the mind.
Immanuel Kant distinguished what he called “the phenomenal world” of experience from “the noumenal world” outside of experience. We come to know reality, the noumenal world, by inferring its structure by tuning models of it in our phenomenal world. This is a kind of transcendental inference, an intuiting of what might be the case in reality beyond direct experience. With this idea of knowledge, everything falls into place. Even though we cannot detect the dreaming brain from within the dream, our model that a dreaming brain nonetheless exists feels very satisfactory for most of us. The same is true for a world that extends beyond the appearances of our individual minds.
It makes sense that we would be trapped in the phenomenal world when it comes to what we can know directly, yet there is no reason for this to be an issue when inferring the nature of wider reality. In the extreme, this particular argument for the world being mental collapses into solipsism, as you have never known anyone else’s mind directly, or even the reality of another being outside the appearances in your own mind. It is trivially true that everything we have ever known must be known in experience, but that need not be surprising or informative when it comes to the nature of reality itself. Yes, all knowledge arises in consciousness, but to conclude that reality itself must be consciousness is to mistake the map for the territory. Experience is the means of knowing, not the substance of what is known.
James Cooke is a neuroscientist, writer & speaker, focusing on consciousness, meditation, psychedelic states, science and spirituality. He is author of 'The Dawn of the Mind: How Matter Became Conscious and Alive'.
Related Posts:
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Patterns are alive, and we are living patterns
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SUGGESTED VIEWING
A landscape of consciousness With Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Hilary Lawson
The language of the unconscious
Consciousness pre-dates life
Consciousness beyond the brain
Electricity creates consciousness
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「自私基因」錯了嗎？-- Chris Earl
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多金斯教授這本書甚是有名，也頗具爭議；我沒有讀過。我是生物學和基因學兩個領域的門外漢，毫無資格或功力對此議題置喙。只是直覺上感到：
這個「比喻」或許說得通；拿它來給中學生和大學生闡明「演化論」或基因機制應該很生動。但如果根據它來導出任何屬於社會科學/人文科學領域的「說法」，則是一種「撈過界」謬誤。
刊出此文，謹供參考。
Is Richard Dawkins wrong about the nature of life?
Dr Chris Earl MOL-BIO, 10/10/25
Is it time to abandon the metaphor of “The Selfish Gene”?
Richard Dawkins is one of the best science writers of all time. Many know of him through his vocal, sometimes controversial opposition to religious doctrine. However, those who have read his books will know he is the written word equivalent of David Attenborough’s nature documentary narration, extracting every ounce of joy and wonder from the natural world. He published his first book, “The Selfish Gene”, almost 50 years ago in 1976, and it was the first popular science book that I read, 16 years ago. The way he combined science and philosophy to offer profound insight into the nature of life, my life, and every living thing on planet Earth was awe-inspiring.
The book, along with his many others, served as a powerful source of motivation in my decision to study Molecular Biology as an undergraduate, and later as a PhD student.
My personal copies of: The Selfish Gene (left) (1). I am a big fan of the black colourway on this 40th anniversary edition. I have re-bought this book multiple times; the original version that I owned was the 30th anniversary edition (bought in January 2009), which I gave away as a gift. And my personal favourite of Richard Dawkins’ written works is The Ancestor’s Tale (right) (2), which is a journey back in time meeting our common ancestors (or concestors) with other animal groups at several key branching points in the history of life on Earth, all the way to single-celled organisms. 請至原網頁觀看多金斯教授此著作封面
My decision to study life at the molecular level, the realm of atoms and molecules, including DNA and proteins, was intentional. This was where the most exciting advances in our understanding of life seemed to be coming from. The idea of “The Selfish Gene” served as a framework throughout my studies and in my time as a professional research scientist, adding clarity to my thoughts. It does this so well because it is a simple idea; however, I have now come to abandon the concept altogether. This article is about why I have reached this conclusion.
What is The Selfish Gene about?
In Short, The Selfish Gene Metaphore is：
That humans and all living organisms are survival machines constructed by DNA, for the benefit of the DNA. The mortal body is transient and temporary, but the gene may be passed on to the next generation. In this way, genes are considered “immortal,” outliving the organism and surpassing it in terms of importance. Information is king, specifically inherited genetic information in the form of gene.
(以上這段話應為此文作者翻印自多金斯教授原著某一頁。)
In a previous article, The Illusion of Meaning, I described how, from the 1600s onwards, the Scientific Revolution has given us many humanity-decentering moments. First, in 1543, astronomer Nicolas Copernicus displaced the Earth, and with it all of us, from a privileged place at the centre of the Universe, demonstrating instead that the Earth revolves around the Sun. There were many other moments where the illusions we held about our place in the cosmos were shattered by scientific discovery. Not least of all, when Charles Darwin (and Alfred Russel Wallace) proposed the theory of natural selection to explain how species evolve in 1858. This demonstrated how the non-random but blind force of natural selection could result in the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that we see around us today in the natural world. (and this quote is an excerpt from Charles Darwin’s beautiful closing words from On the Origin of Species, 1859). This helped shatter the convincing illusion that the complexity of life can only be explained by the work of an intelligent designer. Fast forward over a hundred years to the 1970s, and Richard Dawkins further extended evolutionary theory, bringing us arguably the most humbling moment so far.
The metaphor of The Selfish Gene was born out of the theory of kin selection, which helped to explain animal behaviour and sociality by calculating the relatedness of the actors. Altruistic, or selfless behaviour, could be described mathematically because there is a shared proportion of genetic material between individuals of the same species, and this proportion increases the more closely related they are, as does the level of co-operativity. One of the most compelling aspects of the book is the explanation of how social insects, such as termites and ant colonies, function.
“the majority of individuals in a social insect colony are sterile workers. The ‘germ line’ — the line of immortal gene continuity — flows through the bodies of a minority of individuals, the reproductives. These are the analogues of our own reproductive cells in our testes and ovaries. The sterile workers are the analogy of our liver, muscle, and nerve cells.” The Selfish Gene, p 224 (40th anniversary edition).
It seems nonsensical as to why the sterile workers forego the opportunity to reproduce (a right reserved for the Queen and short-lived drones). Still, it turns out, according to Dawkins and others*, that this co-operative behaviour could all be explained by the “self-interested” propagation of genes** (for a more detailed treatment please see: “What is a Gene?” below the article).
The Selfish Gene perspective minimises the importance of the organism, demoting it to the position of a “survival machine” that exists only to propagate its genes into the next generation. It turns out that, even as I sit in a chair writing this sentence, I am not the most important thing in the chair. I am merely a vessel constructed by genes to ensure their efficient propagation into the future. Or in Dawkins’ own words, found at the beginning of his book The God Delusion, “The ultimate purpose (gene survival) hides behind a more up-front ‘design’” which is “you and I, and every other living creature…machines of ineffable complexity” (3). This could be another one of those humanity-decentering moments; in fact, it is moving towards full-on dehumanisation. Life could now be reduced to its core genetic basis, and isn’t that the whole point of science — to provide a mechanistic description of life?
The world could now be divided into those people who can accept reality as it is and those who require delusion to dull the ensuing existential pain.
Reductionism is indeed an integral part of science. But there is a rich ongoing discussion as to whether the complexities of life, from a single bacterial cell all the way up to the holy grail of understanding human consciousness, can be explained entirely by the laws of physics. Scientific reductionists would argue that our failure to provide a complete account of the phenomenon of life is merely a limitation of our current state of knowledge (4, 5, 6).
Others argue that an alternative approach to reductionism, known as holism, will always be necessary, as is the case in systems biology (7, 8, 9). I still don’t know exactly where I stand on this topic, and I look forward to exploring it in detail here on MOL-BIO in the near future.
Regardless of the outcome of that debate, which may never be resolved (6), the type of reductionism that Dawkins pursued with The Selfish Gene is not wrong because it is reductionism. It is incorrect because it misapplies reductionism. The metaphor sets up a false dichotomy between the organism, on the one hand, and the genes, on the other hand. If we place the 1970s in a bit more historical context, we can see why this might have occurred.
I previously wrote about the history of the molecular revolution in biology. The revolution saw many monumental discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the discovery of the structure of DNA and the mechanism by which the genetic code is replicated, wherein it serves as a template for its own replication. Note, though, that serving as a template for your own replication is not the same as self-replication and we will discuss the myriad other factors required for replication later in this article. Nonetheless, scientists now had a molecular basis for how organisms were encoded by digital information. The genetic code, DNA, was the inherited material that linked Darwinian evolution with genetics (and genetics, up until this point, was the study of how traits are inherited, without knowing the chemical basis of inheritance, which we now know to be DNA). As organisms evolve or change over time, so does the genetic code that contributes to their form and structure.
“gene and organism are candidates for different, and complementary, roles in the story, the replicator and the vehicle.” -- Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
But in reality, things are not so simple as this “quote” would have you believe! The DNA and the cell structure are replicated together. It is not just the DNA that is inherited, but also the cell structure. Furthermore, DNA by itself is pretty much inert; it doesn’t do very much unless it is inside a cell. This is not inconsequential; even the most primitive bacterial cell is hideously complex. And when it comes to actually doing things, then that tends to be done by other biological molecules, such as RNA and proteins. Proteins are much more chemically diverse than DNA, and they are essential for reading the genetic code, and, with the help of RNA, they make other proteins. (Proteins are produced by ribosomes, which are themselves made up of RNA and protein components). And most importantly for our current focus, proteins are responsible for the process of DNA replication; in other words, DNA is not a replicator (or more specifically, it is not a self-replicator), nor is the cell or organism a mere vehicle for that replication.
“Calling organisms “machines made by genes” is a metaphor for how life might be productively regarded by an evolutionary geneticist. But if they come to believe that this is what organisms really are, they have indeed lost sight of their object. I don’t just mean that we are also breathing, feeling, imaginative, social beings (although this is true); I mean that we are not literally machines, nor “made by genes,” at all, any more than a tree can be called a “device for pumping water vapour into the air”. Philip Ball from his book How Life Works (10).
I wholeheartedly agree with Philip Ball here. The Selfish Gene is an oversimplification, and it achieves this by downplaying the role of the above processes. It also fails to give due attention to the role of energy in maintaining life, which is another huge oversight. Through the lens of thermodynamics, we can envisage life as a process. That is to say, that the word life should be used as a verb (or doing word), rather than a “thing”, or a noun. Life requires a constant source of energy to support its processes, including the replication of DNA.
This is what we mean when we use the term genetic reductionism; Dawkins has over-emphasised the role of the gene and overlooked the importance of the organism. But we need not make the same mistake in the other direction. We can provide a more complete and meaningful description of what life is when we integrate energetic considerations in combination with the informational storage capabilities of DNA. By virtue of being copied with high fidelity (by an army of proteins in an energetically demanding cellular process), information, in the form of DNA, plays a crucial role in renewal (which is replication for single-celled organisms or reproduction for complex multicellular organisms) and in the complexification of life over evolutionary time.
“The energy-chaneling capabilities of life…are destroyed by death. But living matter, to its perhaps everlasting credit, has found a way to cheat the inevitable entropic decay of its degrading systems: reproduction. In reproduction, new bodies, new natural metabolic machines, are produced that carry on the work of degradation.” Schneider and Sagan, Into the Cool, 2005.
Why do so many scientists still support The Selfish Gene, if it is wrong?
The Selfish Gene was also famous for introducing the world to the concept of the meme. This was an expansion of Dawkins’ ideas about genetic “replicators” to include cultural replicators called memes, which include phenomena such as tunes, fashions, ideologies, and, in the current age, viral internet content.
Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body, via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” The Selfish Gene 40th anniversary edition p 249.
Dawkins has often talked about the alternative name that “The Selfish Gene” nearly had, which was to be called “The Immortal Gene”. The almost affrontive tone of the former was likely a crucial factor in the book’s memetic power and success, in terms of sales and cultural impact.
There have been many detailed and comprehensive critiques of the idea. In particular, from Denis Noble (8, 11) and others, but these have been culturally impotent by comparison with the fecundity of The Selfish Gene. I don’t say this as a criticism of this honest and vital work. These books are of interest to academics and professional scientists (like myself), but lack the “best seller” potential of widely read popular science. It is a tall order to capture the imagination of the broader public by disproving a well-established, exciting, and controversial idea. Here is an example of how The Selfish Gene metaphor has permeated into the field of existential philosophy:
“Stephen Law says that every other living organism has a purpose, namely, “to reproduce and pass on its genetic material to the next generation.” He says that we “each exist for a purpose, a purpose supplied by nature, whether or not there is a God.” David Benatar’s- The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.
But the power of the meme is not the only factor; another significant disadvantage to its successful challenge results from scientific tribalism. Many authors take issue with genetic reductionism, such as origin of life researcher Nick Lane, science historian Michel Morange (13), systems biologists like Stuart Kauffman (9) and the aforementioned Denis Noble, alongside many, many others. To take a recent example, author Philip Ball, in “How Life Works,” provides an extended critique of the idea, which I would highly recommend (10).
I’ll provide some examples to illustrate my point. For instance, Denis Noble favours his own concept of biological relativity, which takes a systems biology and integrated holistic perspective on life, but this is likely to be disagreeable to those who identify themselves as scientific reductionists, even if they agree with his challenge of Dawkins.
Furthermore, Nick Lane outlines the difficulties that have been created as a result of genetic reductionism:
“Bacteria are autonomous self-replicating entities — cells — whereas genomes are not…Proteins may set to work on it, transcribing and translating genes; the host cell may divide, powered by the dynamism of its proteins and metabolism, but the genome itself is wholly inert, as incapable of replicating itself as the hard disk of a computer.” Nick Lane in The Vital Question (12).
However, Lane is a vocal proponent of the alkaline hydrothermal vent origin of life, which posits that energetic considerations are the fundamental factor in life getting started. This hypothesis conflicts with other origin theories, such as the idea that life arose instead in volcanic ponds. As such, any agreement between these camps on the limits of genetic reductionism is obfuscated by their differences.
Then there is the divide in evolutionary biology between those who support the modern synthesis (like Dawkins himself) versus those who believe we need something else, such as the extended evolutionary synthesis, to take its place. Again, these ad hoc areas of departure between different schools of thought shield The Selfish Gene from effective challenge.
The true reductionist would have to acknowledge that Dawkins has misapplied the tool of reductionism. Systems biologists would generally disagree with reductionist views, but they would take even more issue with genetic reductionism specifically.
It is incontrovertible to say that we must think of life, not just as being produced by genetic information, but as a complex arrangement of matter, a diverse range of biological molecules (not least of all lipids, proteins, DNA, RNA, metabolites, and many others), animated by the flow of energy. Where the control of gene expression (which genes are switched ON or OFF at any given time) is in constant dynamic conversation with environmental signals (transmitted to the genome via forms of biological information other than genetic code).
Summary
Even though I disagree with the premise, I believe that “The Selfish Gene” should be celebrated in its 50th anniversary year, 2026. It will continue to inspire scientists and philosophers to ask those big questions about the nature and purpose of life for many, many years to come. It tested the limits of how far we could use our knowledge of information stored in the form of DNA and genes to explain life; it was a necessary exercise. In saying all of that, I believe it is time for us to recognise that we have reached the ceiling of genetic reductionism, and this wonderfully written book may be immortalised as the place where it was reached.
References, further reading and acknowledgements
1. Dawkins, R. (2016). The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary Edition. Oxford University Press.
*The gene’s eye view of evolution emerged from the population genetics work of J.B.S Haldane, R.A. Fisher, and Bill Hamilton (kin selection and altruistic behaviour). The 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection by George C. Williams was a particular inspiration for Dawkins. John Maynard Smith’s mathematical exploration of game theory in evolution was also critical. Note that a fair bit of the criticism of the gene-centric perspective came from developmental biology, but see the 2016 book by Yanai, I., & Lercher, M. (2016). The society of genes, which takes a systems biology approach to incorporate these discoveries within the framework of The Selfish Gene.
2. Dawkins, R., & Wong, Y. (2017). The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
3. Dawkins, R. (2016). The God Delusion: 10th Anniversary Edition. Transworld.
4: Graham, L. (2025). Physics Fixes All the Facts. Springer Nature Switzerland.
This book provides a detailed analysis of the power and/or limitations of reductionism. Importantly, there is an extensive look at the term “emergence”, which is a term used by holists to capture properties that are (or appear to be) displayed by systems, for example, consciousness. For Graham, describing something as an emergent property is an elaborate way of saying we don’t really know how something works.
5: Rosenberg, A., & Walsh, D. M. (2007). Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology. ISIS, 98(4), 886–886.
6: Hossenfelder, S. (2023) Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions (p. 89). Atlantic Books.
“In summary, according to the best current evidence, the world is reductionist: the behavior of large composite objects derives from the behavior of their constituents”. Hossenfelder expresses open-mindedness as to the future limits of the explanatory power of reductionism. Noting the principle of the decoupling of scales as you move up through the levels of reality.
7: Walker, Sara Imari. (2025) Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (p. 134). Little, Brown Book Group.
“what assembly theory is telling us is that complex matter is complex because it has a physical extent not just in space, but in time too.” Walker takes a nuanced approach, acknowledging different frames of reference for various types of objects in the universe, for example, life. I agree with Walker that the “historical contingency” of life is required for us to understand the complexity that we see around us. For example, the details of Earth at a particular time in history are important, such as the sudden increase of oxygen in the atmosphere and how this changed the landscape of possibilities for life on this planet. I think the committed reductionist would categorise this type of explanation as an example of where our knowledge of physical laws, or a theory of everything, is limited and requires these higher-level descriptions.
8: Noble, D. (2017). Dance to the tune of life: Biological relativity. Cambridge University Press.
This is the most comprehensive challenge to The Selfish Gene to date, it is also a challenge to reductionism, or the limits of reductionism, in general.
9: Kauffman, Stuart A. (2019) A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
“We think that in physics — Special and General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory with the Standard Model — we will find the foundations from which we can derive the world, the ultimate becoming. We cannot. The ultimate may rest on the foundations, but it is not derivable from them. This ultimate, an unknowable unfolding, slips its foundational moorings and floats free.”
Kauffman shares my feelings, which Denis Noble and Philip Ball also share, that: “Richard Dawkins has famously written The Selfish Gene, stating that evolution is a more or less brutal race for the survival of genes, and further, that organisms are merely the vehicles that carry the genes to be selected. But the story is deeply inadequate…Dawkins has forgotten the organism.”
10: Ball, Philip. (2025) How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology (p. 97). Pan Macmillan.
11: Noble, Denis. (2008) The Music of Life: Biology beyond the Genome. OUP Oxford.
12: Lane, Nick. (2015) The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? (p. 295). Profile.
13: Morange, M. (2020). The black box of biology: A history of the molecular revolution. Harvard University Press.
**The term gene is not straightforward, which has been a critique of the gene’s eye view, but I won’t explore this angle in detail for this current article. A gene often encodes a protein, but it can also encode a functional piece of RNA, where the RNA, rather than being a messenger for the code, actually does something in its own right. Important RNAs are involved in bringing amino acids to the ribosome (tRNA or transfer RNA), others are found in the ribosome (rRNA or ribosomal RNA), and others still can regulate the expression of other genes. There is even more to be said about what a gene is, and we will have to devote specific time to explore that question effectively in another article.
Final thoughts:
This article was not intended as a comprehensive catalogue of all the scientists, philosophers, writers, or commentators who have contributed to a more complete understanding of life as we move away from the limited perspective of The Selfish Gene. First and foremost, I wanted to provide the rationale for why I have abandoned this metaphor with as much clarity and with as little additional baggage as possible.
Written by Dr Chris Earl MOL-BIO
Scottish scientist, who believes that the profound philosophical implications of our modern scientific understanding of life have yet to be realised by society.
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課程介紹：唯心論 - Bernardo Kastrup
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身為一個「唯物論」者，我只「介紹」這個課程給對哲學有興趣的朋友；而不是「推薦」它。畢竟，不論接受或反對，都需要對各相關理論的淵源、基本主張、和主要論點等有所了解。
The Case for Idealism
Bernardo Kastrup, 10/2025
About the Course
The idea that reality exists outside and independently of our minds seems so obvious as to be indisputable. Yet in philosophy, there is a rich tradition of turning this model on its head – arguing that reality is not fundamentally material, but fundamentally mental. While this idea, metaphysical idealism, has gone out of fashion, evidence is beginning to mount up suggesting it might actually be right.
What exactly is materialism, and why is it so popular? How can we rate a metaphysical system, and why does materialism fail? What is the hard problem of consciousness, and why is it important? What is panpsychism, and does it succeed where materialism failed? If there is only one consciousness, why does it seem like we are separate beings? Why do hallucinogens reduce brain function, and why does this matter?
World-leading defender of metaphysical idealism Bernardo Kastrup, author of The Idea of the World and Meaning in Absurdity, draws upon analytic philosophical arguments, his scientific background, and a deep knowledge of the philosophical tradition of metaphysical idealism to explain why reality is fundamentally mental.
By the end of the course, you will have learned:
* Why materialism is unscientific.
* What it means to have a good metaphysics.
* Why panpsychism is more similar to materialism than is commonly thought.
* Why the similarities between the universe and the brain are no coincidence.
* How dissociative identity disorder can explain more than we realise.
As part of the course, there are in-video quiz questions to consolidate your learning, suggested further readings to stimulate a deeper exploration of the topic, discussion boards to have your say, and an end-of-course assessment set by Bernardo Kastrup.
AI Academy courses are designed to be challenging but accessible to the interested student. No specialist knowledge is required.
About the Instructor
Bernardo Kastrup
"The brain doesn't generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn't generate water."
Bernardo Kastrup is a Dutch computer scientist, philosopher, and one of the most prominent defenders of "metaphysical idealism" - the notion that the world originates in the mind, instead of being independent of our experience - in the academic world today.
Bernardo has worked as a scientist in leading laboratories across the world including CERN and the Philips Research Laboratories, and he is a regular contributor to Scientific American.
As developed in such texts as Why Materialism is Baloney and The Idea of the World, Bernardo's stance is that "the body is in mind, not mind in the body."
Course Syllabus
Part One: Materalism's Mistakes
Some think consciousness arises from the physical, others think that the physical is itself conscious. In part one of this course, Kastrup deconstructs the missteps of materialism and the mistakes of panpsychism.
Part Two: Why the Evidence Points to Idealism
What do new developments in neuroscience suggest about the nature of reality? In part two of this course, Kastrup explains the fresh evidence that vindicates idealism.
Suggested Further Readings
* Kastrup, B., The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality, (Winchester: IFF Books, 2019).
* Kastrup, B., Meaning in Absurdity: What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us About the Nature of Reality, (Winchester: IFF Books, 2012).
* Chalmers, D. J., The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
* Nagel, T., Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
* Strawson, G., Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism, (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2006).
* James, W., Essays in Radical Empiricism, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976 [1912]).
* Schopenhauer, A., The World as Will and Representation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1818]).
Subscribe to enrol
Purchase individual course
Instructor：Bernardo Kastrup
Categories：Mind & Reason
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基於量子物理學的本體論 ---- Olimpia Lombardi
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請參見此文(該欄2025/07/17)。
Quantum physics reveals there is no such thing as things
There is no such thing as individuality in the quantum realm
Olimpia Lombardi, 07/25/25
Editor;s Notes：Quantum physics doesn’t just rewrite our equations—it dismantles our ontology. From uncertainty to entanglement, the theory breaks the classical idea of the world as made of individual objects with identities and properties. In the quantum realm, philosopher of science Olimpia Lombardi argues, there are no separate things—only an undivided whole. On the most fundamental level, there is no individual.
When we talk about what it is that makes up the world, we tend to talk of the “building blocks” of reality. When we ask what kind of thing those things are—the question of their ontology—and what properties they possess, we might picture solid, distinct individual pieces, like particles, that make up the fabric of reality. It is precisely these features that break down when we talk about quantum systems. Can we still understand objects as being individual, completely definite, and distinguishable when we look at the world through quantum physics? There are several reasons to answer no.
Ontological categories
Quantum theory introduces a deep break with respect to the classical view of reality. To understand the extent of this, we first must recall what an ontological category is.
A category is not a class defined by a concept, like “yellow” or “round,” gathering objects together because they possess certain properties in common. Nor is it a taxon, like “mammal,” classifying objects into well-defined kinds. Categories are prior to classification, since they are what endow reality with a certain structure: the conditions of possibility of any classification.
Ontological categories are shown by language structure, telling us whether reality consists of individual objects, properties, relations, and causal links. The ontological category of individual has its linguistic correlate in “singular terms” (‘this’, ‘she’, ‘the richest person’, etc.) that serve as logical subjects, complemented by properties represented as linguistic predicates. The most traditional metaphysical picture underlying classical physics is that of an ontology of individuals and properties. Quantum mechanics challenges this picture due to four features: uncertainty, contextuality, non-separability, and indistinguishability.
Uncertainty
The first challenge comes from quantum uncertainty. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle can be expressed very simply: quantum systems always have incompatible properties, properties that cannot simultaneously acquire precise values. This is not trivial; the incompatibility between properties is an essentially quantum feature, completely absent from the classical world.
The paradigmatic example of incompatible properties in quantum physics is the pair of position and kinetic momentum (mass times velocity). In classical mechanics, the state of a system at some time is given by its position and momentum, both of which are completely determined. The state at a given time uniquely fixes the state at all subsequent times, so that the trajectory of the system is completely determined by the state at the initial time. In quantum mechanics, by contrast, the Heisenberg Principle states that if the value of the position of a quantum system is determined, the value of its momentum (and therefore its velocity) is not, and vice versa. Consequently, it is not possible to assign definite trajectories to quantum systems. Consider an electron at a given initial time: its state at that time does not simultaneously determine the values of its position and momentum; therefore, the motion of the electron cannot be “tracked” through space and time in so that we could say that, if the electron was at a precise position at the initial time, it will be at another precise position at a later time.
The Heisenberg Principle is also known as the “Uncertainty Principle.” This imbues the phenomenon of incompatibility with an epistemic connotation: if we know the value of one property with precision, we cannot know the value of an incompatible property with precision, e.g. if we know exactly where an electron is, we cannot know how it moves, expressing a limitation of knowledge and not an ontological feature of the quantum domain. The epistemic reading of the principle, popular in the early days of the theory, faces an obstacle that arose from a formal result demonstrated in 1967, long after the theory’s first formulations.
Contextuality
The second challenge involves contextual properties. According to the epistemic reading of the Heisenberg Principle, quantum mechanics could always be completed by assigning definite values to all properties; this was Einstein’s idea in 1935, when he asserted the “incompleteness” of quantum mechanics. The coup de grâce for the idea of incompleteness was the 1967 Kochen-Specker Theorem, which demonstrated the logical impossibility of completing the theory with definite values for all the system’s properties.
This is not just an epistemic limitation that could be overcome by somehow assigning definite values to incompatible properties; rather, any assignment of definite values to all properties leads to a logical contradiction. This formal feature of quantum mechanics, not perceived by the founding fathers of the theory, is a consequence of the theory’s mathematical structure. Kochen and Specker’s result is a theorem within the formalism of quantum mechanics and, therefore, if quantum theory is accepted, we must also accept that the uncertainty principle is not the expression of imperfect knowledge. It is regrettable that Einstein was no longer alive when the theorem was formulated, as we will never know his reaction to this result, which is stronger than the Heisenberg Principle.
Let us compare classical items with quantum items with respect to this quantum feature. For a classical object, if it has the property of position, it will necessarily have some definite position: even though we may ignore the precise position of the object, we do not doubt that it is in some position, regardless of the object’s other properties. However, in the quantum case, given that the properties of position and momentum are incompatible, if the system has a definite value for kinetic momentum, it does not have a definite value for position. The system has no definite position, because if we assigned one, no matter what it was, we would generate a logical contradiction within the theory.
Does this mean it is impossible to simultaneously assign definite values to the properties of a quantum system under any circumstances? No: it is possible for the properties of a system that are compatible with each other, those which form a “context.” In quantum mechanics, the assignment of definite values to properties cannot be performed globally, to all properties of the system simultaneously, but is always contextual.
This quantum feature generates great ontological perplexity as it violates the “Principle of Omnimode Determination” historically widely accepted in philosophy. The idea is that, in any individual object, all its determinables are determinate: if the determinable “color” applies to an object, the object necessarily has a certain determinate color, say, red, regardless of its other determinate properties such as round, solid, etc., and regardless of our knowledge of what that determinate color is. While this intuitive principle holds in the classical world, quantum contextuality throws it into crisis: according to the Kochen-Specker Theorem, a quantum system always has determinable properties that are not determinate, that is, that do not have precise values.
Non-separability
The third challenge concerns quantum entanglement. Certain interactions between quantum systems lead to a state of the composite system, resulting from the interaction, which cannot be “decomposed” in terms of the states of the component systems. In these cases, the state is said to be “entangled,” and therefore “non-separable.” This central feature of quantum mechanics leads to challenging consequences.
Entanglement leads to surprising correlations between the properties of distant non-interacting systems, such as those of the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) experiment. Taken at face value, EPR correlations strongly suggest non-locality, that is, non-local influences between spatially distant systems, i.e., systems between which no light signal can travel. However, since this idea is incompatible with special relativity, which says no causal influence can travel faster than the speed of light, the exact nature of those quantum correlations is subject to ongoing controversy.
According to certain interpretations, EPR correlations imply a certain action-at-a-distance which, nevertheless, does not allow sending information at a superluminal velocity. From another perspective, those correlations are consequences of the holistic nature of quantum systems. Separability implies that, if a physical object is constructed by assembling its physical parts, then its physical properties are completely determined by the properties of the parts and their relationships. Holism, by contrast, is the characteristic of physical objects that are not composed of physical parts, but are indivisible wholes, so that EPR correlations are correlations between properties of a single holistic object. From this perspective, it has been claimed that entanglement is evidence that the whole universe has ontological priority with respect to its parts: the parts derive their identity and properties from the whole, rather than the other way around.
The terms ‘locality’ and ‘separability’ can be clearly distinguished. The “Locality Principle” asserts that the state of a system is unaffected by events in regions of the universe so removed from the given system that no physical signal could connect them. The aim of the Locality Principle is to rule out physically objectionable kinds of action-at-a-distance. The “Separability Principle” is, by contrast, a fundamental ontological principle: it asserts that the presence of a non-vanishing space-time interval is a sufficient condition for the individuation of physical systems. Einstein's dissatisfaction with quantum mechanics is closely related to the violation of the Separability Principle: “If one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I do not at all see what physics is supposed to describe.”
Indistinguishability
The final challenge involves identical particles. As we have seen, quantum contextuality is manifested in a single quantum system, and quantum non-separability appears when two systems interact and their states become entangled. Quantum indistinguishability, on the other hand, appears when statistical conclusions are drawn about a collection of many systems.
Most discussions about the ontological commitments of quantum mechanics focus on the challenge posed by the indistinguishability of so-called “identical particles”—particles with the same state-independent properties—to the ontological category of individual. The usual story begins by counting how many ways of distributing two identical particles over two states are possible. The classical answer is given by the Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics, where there are four possible distributions of two individuals over two states, each with a probability of 1/4. By contrast, in quantum statistics (Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac), the exchange of identical particles does not lead to a different distribution since they are “indistinguishable.” Although the theory has formal resources to deal with quantum statistics, from a conceptual viewpoint the problem is to explain why exchanging particles does not count as a different distribution in the quantum case.
Consider the case of two photons, distributed over two states. Here, there are only three possible distributions: (i) either both photons are in the first state, (ii) both are in the second state, or (iii) each photon is in a different state. Each of the three quantum distributions has a probability of 1/3. This means that the particles are indistinguishable: it cannot be said that one particular particle is in one state and the other in the other state; it can only be said that there is one in each state.
Indistinguishability cannot be thought of as a mere limitation of our knowledge about the identity of particles because, if that were the case, there would still be four ways to distribute the two systems over two states (see the classical example in Figure 1). Quantum indistinguishability is an ontological feature of quantum systems: it is not merely epistemic indiscernibility, since an epistemic feature cannot have consequences in the real world regarding how physical systems behave statistically.
Figure 1.
It is precisely the ontological nature of quantum indistinguishability that has led many authors to claim that identical quantum particles, being indistinguishable, violate the “Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles” which states that if two individual objects have all their properties in common, then they are actually the same object: without any actual differences between them, their numerical distinction has no basis in reality. Quantum mechanics constitutes a strong challenge to the validity of this traditional principle of metaphysics for reasons that are not exclusively metaphysical.
Because of this not merely epistemic indistinguishability, quantum particles cannot be named, that is, they cannot be identified by means of labels: it is not possible to speak of particle “a” and particle “b”; it is only possible to say that there are, for example, two particles. Precisely for this reason, traditional logical systems, which include variables and individual constants, are not suitable for speaking of indistinguishable particles.
On the ontological category of quantum systems
After this review of the ontological challenges of quantum mechanics, we can return to the initial question: what kind of entities are quantum systems?
Classical systems can easily be subsumed under the ontological category of “individual”. An individual is an entity that possesses properties, but requires additional characteristics to be such. Principal among them is “numerical identity”, which is a relation that an object has only to itself. There are two ways in which numerical identity is manifested: as “synchronic identity,” which identifies an individual by distinguishing it from all others at a certain time, and as “diachronic identity,” which reidentifies an individual over time. On the other hand, in an individual, all determinable properties are always determinate: it is not possible for an individual to lack all the determinate properties corresponding to a determinable property. In turn, individuals form aggregates, in which they can be counted. In the case of individual material objects, they can be identified by their spatial and temporal position: under the assumption of impenetrability, it is not possible for two material objects to be in the same place at the same time.
Quantum mechanics challenges the ontological category of “individual” of traditional metaphysics: unlike classical systems, quantum systems do not fit comfortably into such a category. Both synchronic identity and diachronic identity cannot be ascribed to a quantum system: synchronic, because a particle cannot be named or labeled to distinguish it from other particles in the case of indistinguishability; diachronic, because the Heisenberg Principle prevents the system from possessing a definite trajectory that would allow it to be reidentified through time. Quantum contextuality inevitably leads to quantum systems having determinable properties that are not determinate. Non-separability and entanglement impose obstacles to the possibility of identifying a quantum system by its spatial and temporal position. Finally, when quantum particles are aggregated, they cannot be reidentified in the aggregate and, consequently, cannot be counted: strictly speaking, an aggregate of quantum particles cannot be represented by a set in traditional set theory.
In conclusion, the ontological category of individual turns out to be inadequate to deal with quantum systems. Different strategies have been deployed to recover this category; however, in general, each of them focuses on a particular problem and proposes a specific solution to that problem. Perhaps, if all the ontological challenges posed by quantum mechanics were considered at once and a single global solution were sought for all of them, it would be rather more difficult to retain the category of the individual for the quantum ontological domain.
Olimpia Lombardi is a philosopher of science whose research involves ontology in chemistry and in quantum mechanics.
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從爵士樂和海豚談何謂意識 – Tim Bayne
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貝因教授不愧是哲學系出身；「範疇」混亂不說，基本概念都搞不清楚。
Kind of confusing
Is consciousness like jazz, something hard to pin down? Or is it more like the biology of dolphins, odd but natural?
Tim Bayne, Edited by Edited byNigel Warburton, 07/17/25
It’s not just AI systems that raise questions about consciousness – the products of synthetic biology do too. In recent years, researchers have discovered how to grow cerebral organoids – self-organising three-dimensional cellular systems derived either from human pluripotent stem cells or, more recently, human fetal cells. Increasingly, organoids are being fused to create ‘assembloids’, complexes of interacting organoids. For example, Sergiu Pasca’s laboratory at Stanford University has created an assembloid that models the human spinothalamic pathway, a neural circuit critical for the transmission of sensory information from the body to the brain. Does this assembloid merely model the generation and transmission of sensory information, or might it actually have conscious experiences of its own?
Although questions about consciousness in assembloids and AI systems are novel, they are instances of a more general question that is as old as the study of consciousness itself: what kinds of entities have the capacity for consciousness? It’s now generally accepted that mammals and birds are capable of consciousness, but there is little consensus about consciousness in fish, reptiles, amphibians, cephalopods or insects. Pressing questions about the distribution of consciousness arise even within our own species. For example, there are long-standing debates about whether consciousness might be present from (or even before) birth, or whether it arises only weeks, perhaps even months, after birth.
Most discussion of the distribution problem has focused on how we might identify consciousness in systems that are very different from ‘us’. There is, however, a more fundamental issue raised by the distribution question: what do we even mean when we ask whether bots, bees or babies are conscious? This is not an epistemic question but a semantic one. Although semantic questions are often derided as sterile and unfruitful (‘That’s just semantics,’ typically said with a withering roll of the eyes), they are unavoidable. If we’re going to take seriously the question of what kinds of systems belong with us in the ‘consciousness club’, we need to ask not only what ‘consciousness’ means, but how it comes to mean what it does.
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Like many natural language terms, ‘consciousness’ is polysemous, having multiple (albeit related) meanings. In one sense of the term, ‘consciousness’ is a synonym for wakefulness. Consider, for example, the following sentence, taken from The Logic of Definition (1885) by the Scottish philosopher W L Davidson: ‘The mind’s wakeful activity is consciousness – consciousness as opposed to dormancy, dreamless sleep, swoon, insensibility …’
It’s clear, however, that debates about the distribution of consciousness aren’t about wakefulness. When the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton claims that AI systems are already conscious, he surely isn’t suggesting that they are awake; conversely, those who reject the possibility of neonatal consciousness don’t deny the obvious fact that neonates undergo periods of wakefulness. But if the distribution problem isn’t about wakefulness, what is it about?
There are two strategies for answering this question. One strategy appeals to synonyms: bits of language that purportedly capture the intended meaning of ‘consciousness’. Popular synonyms for ‘consciousness’ (in the relevant sense) include ‘awareness’, ‘sentience’ and ‘subjective experience’. Another frequently invoked synonym is the phrase popularised by the philosopher Thomas Nagel: to be conscious is for there to be ‘something it’s like’ to be you.
Appealing to synonyms may help to clarify what it is that we’re not talking about, but there are serious limits on how much illumination we should expect from this approach. For one thing, if a term or phrase really is synonymous with ‘consciousness’ then it should be as mysterious as ‘consciousness’ itself, in which case it’s hard to see how helpful appeals to it could possibly be. More fundamentally, synonyms take you from one piece of language to another but what we really want is something that takes us from language to some aspect of reality itself.
This is where the second strategy for defining ‘consciousness’ enters the picture. Don’t know what ‘consciousness’ means? It’s the ‘experience of dark and light … the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs … the felt quality of emotion; and the experience of a stream of conscious thought’ (David Chalmers). It’s the experiences associated with ‘tasting a lemon, smelling a rose, [or] hearing a loud noise’ (Frank Jackson). It’s ‘the pain felt after a brick has fallen on a bare foot, or the blueness of the sky on a sunny summer afternoon’ (Patricia Churchland).
This is definition by pointing. Instead of explaining what ‘consciousness’ means by relating it to another piece of language, one captures its meaning by relating it to something non-linguistic – the experience of dark and light, the taste of a lemon, the blueness of the sky on a sunny summer afternoon.
This approach to defining ‘consciousness’ is intuitively compelling, but how exactly does it work? And what kind of insight into consciousness might it deliver
One widely held view is that attending to examples of conscious experience enables one to grasp its essence. The idea here is not that we can tell whether something is conscious merely by attending to our own experiences. Rather, the idea is that attending to our own experiences enables us to grasp the concept of consciousness, and grasping the concept of consciousness in turn reveals what it is to be conscious. As a parallel, consider what is involved in grasping the concept of triangularity: if you’ve grasped the concept of a triangle, then you know what it is to be a triangle. We might call this the manifest understanding of consciousness, for it holds that pointing to examples of consciousness makes manifest its very nature.
There is much that is appealing in this conception of consciousness. As countless philosophers have pointed out, introspective access to our own experiences does seem to provide us with direct access to the very nature of consciousness. But, for all that, the manifest account of consciousness may well be wrong. To see why, consider jazz.
Suppose that someone asks you what jazz is. Rather than attempt to define ‘jazz’ by providing synonyms, you’re more likely to point to instances of the genre. ‘There,’ you might say to your audience as you put on (say) Ella Fitzgerald’s Like Someone in Love, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue or John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme – ‘that’s jazz.’ As the philosopher Ned Block once noted, the question ‘What is consciousness?’ can be answered much like Louis Armstrong reportedly answered the question ‘What is jazz?’: ‘If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know.’
But although treating jazz as a manifest concept is undeniably tempting, it’s at odds with the historical record. What counts as ‘jazz’, even as ‘bad jazz’, has been a matter of debate – some of it humorous, much of it heated – since its very beginnings. (I’m indebted to Graeme Boone and Michael Ullman in what follows.)
‘Livery Stable Blues’, recorded by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917, is commonly regarded as the first jazz recording ever made, but there is much debate about who first played jazz. In 1938, an episode of the radio show Ripley’s Believe it or Not! described William Handy as the originator of jazz in the early 1900s. His rival Ferdinand (‘Jelly Roll’) Morton rejected that claim, arguing in a letter to the jazz magazine DownBeat that he himself was the first to play jazz. Happy to cede that claim to Morton, Handy responded with a letter to DownBeat entitled ‘I Would Not Play Jazz If I Could’. The debate wasn’t so much about who had played what notes first, but whether what they had played qualified as ‘jazz’. (Incidentally, the ‘If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know’ line is sometimes ascribed to Morton rather than Armstrong.)
The swing craze of the 1930s generated renewed debate about the boundaries of jazz. Was Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’ jazz? Some argued that it wasn’t; others had little doubt that it was – and was great jazz to boot. Debate about the boundaries of the category was reignited with the arrival of bebop in the mid-1940s. Jazz, many felt, was essentially music for the dancehall and, whatever else it was, bebop wasn’t danceable. By the late 1950s, the question of what counted as jazz had moved on from bebop to what we now know as ‘free jazz’. Ornette Coleman’s provocatively named The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) was lauded by many – ‘[He’s] doing the only really new thing in jazz since … the mid-40s,’ claimed the pianist John Lewis – and frequently appears on lists of the greatest jazz albums. However, at the time, many refused to recognise it as jazz. ‘I don’t know what he’s playing,’ said Dizzy Gillespie, ‘but it’s not jazz.’
These debates undermine the idea that jazz has an essence – something that determines whether or not we ought to apply the term to new cases. Instead, they suggest that the concept of jazz is governed by a cluster of loosely related properties – what Ludwig Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblances’. Sometimes those resemblances are strong, and the case in question obviously falls within the relevant category. Davis’s Kind of Blue and Coltrane’s Giant Steps, highly innovative albums recorded in the same year as Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, clearly qualified as jazz, for their innovations fell within familiar parameters. But the innovations of Coleman’s work – its ‘organised disorganisation’, as Charles Mingus put it – were more fundamental, raising genuine questions about whether the label of ‘jazz’ was appropriate.
The concept of ‘jazz’, I suggest, isn’t a manifest concept but a conventional concept. Although particular instances of jazz are real enough, what bundles them together as instances of jazz is heavily dependent on our decisions. As it turned out, the relevant gatekeepers (music critics, jazz musicians, record label executives) decided to recognise The Shape of Jazz to Come as jazz, but had they withheld that honorific they wouldn’t have been making a mistake. Prior to their decisions, there was simply no fact of the matter as to whether The Shape of Jazz to Come was jazz.
Although ‘jazz’ might seem to be a manifest concept, I’ve argued that it’s better thought of as a conventional concept. But what about consciousness? Perhaps Block was right to suggest that there’s a parallel between ‘consciousness’ and ‘jazz’, not because they are both manifest concepts, but because neither is.
While the conventionalist account of consciousness is less influential than the manifest account, it should be taken with equal seriousness. As we have already noted, ‘consciousness’ is not a piece of specialised scientific vocabulary (like ‘gene’, ‘proton’ or ‘quantitative easing’) but a term of ordinary English. And ordinary language terms are often conventional – or, at least, have aspects that are heavily conventional. They are designed to deal with the warp and weft of everyday life, and we shouldn’t assume that they legislate for every possible case. Perhaps the rules governing the use of ‘consciousness’ apply only to us (and systems that are relevantly like us), and are not what Wittgenstein called ‘rails invisibly laid to infinity’.
If conventionalism is right, then complete knowledge of the physical and functional properties of a system might fail to deliver an answer to the question of whether it’s conscious. That’s not because the question of whether something is conscious involves some ‘further fact’ that is unconstrained by its physical and functional properties (such as whether it has a soul), but because the rules governing ‘consciousness’ simply don’t apply to it. If that’s right, then decisions about whether to admit bots, bees or babies into the ‘consciousness club’ may be less a matter of what the world turns out to be like and more a matter of how we decide to use words.
Many factors might be relevant when considering whether to ascribe consciousness to a system, but the dominant driver is likely to involve the normative dimensions of consciousness: the bearing that consciousness has on an entity’s moral and legal status. Here, conventionalism inverts widespread assumptions about the natural order of things. Intuitively, we tend to assume that figuring out who’s in the consciousness club is the task of science, and that ethicists, lawyers and policymakers ought to respond to the scientific verdict (whatever that turns out to be). Conventionalism, by contrast, allows normative considerations to drive verdicts about the distribution of consciousness. Want to provide newborn human beings with a suite of ethical and legal protections? Ascribe consciousness to them. Want to withhold those protections from the most recent AI systems? Refrain from ascribing consciousness to them.
So, we’ve got two models of the concept of consciousness on the table: the manifest view (‘consciousness as triangularity’) and the conventional view (‘consciousness as jazz’). If you don’t find either view compelling, you wouldn’t be alone – but what might an alternative look like? A foray into the history of biology furnishes some clues.
Following the death of his teacher Plato in 347 BCE, Aristotle spent time on the Aegean island of Lesbos, birthplace of the poet Sappho. Lesbos is dominated by an enormous lagoon, now known as ‘Aristotle’s Lagoon’, and it was here that Aristotle encountered three members of the cetacean family: dolphins (probably striped dolphins and common dolphins), the harbour porpoise, and the fin whale.
Cetaceans puzzled Aristotle. Although he occasionally described them as fish, he also recognised that they have lungs and breath air (unlike fish), noting that dolphins had been observed with their noses above the water snoring. He also knew that cetaceans resemble us and other mammals in giving birth to live young and feeding them with milk. But despite an awareness of these facts, Aristotle couldn’t quite bring himself to classify cetaceans with other mammals, instead treating them as a class in their own right, alongside fish, birds and what he called ‘viviparous quadrupeds’ (terrestrial mammals).
Despite increasingly detailed knowledge of their anatomy, cetaceans continued to baffle scientists long after Aristotle’s time. For example, the 16th-century French naturalist Pierre Belon distinguished between ‘fish with blood’ and ‘fish without blood’. The former category included cetaceans, together with fish, turtles, pinnipeds, crocodiles and the hippopotamus; the latter included aquatic invertebrates such as squid and octopuses. Indeed, it wasn’t until the 18th edition of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1758) that science finally recognised cetaceans as mammals, albeit ‘the most peculiar and aberrant of mammals’, as the 20th-century palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson once put it.
What motivated this recognition? Was the classification of cetaceans as mammals akin to the classification of Ornette Coleman’s music as jazz, or are the two cases fundamentally different?
The standard view here – and one to which I subscribe – is that the two cases are very different. The classification of cetaceans as mammals was motivated by the realisation that the commonalities between cetaceans and (other) mammals are more fundamental and extensive than the commonalities between cetaceans and other aquatic animals. Linnaeus had, in effect, discovered that the class of mammals reflects a ‘joint in nature’, and that cetaceans fall on one side of that joint and other aquatic animals fall on the other. Cetaceans were mammals before 1758, and they would have been mammals even if biologists had never realised this. By contrast, musical categories such as jazz are not constrained by joints in nature in the way that biological terms are.
This, then, gives us a view on which ‘consciousness’ picks out a genuine joint in nature – what philosophers call a ‘natural kind’. The natural kind account agrees with the manifest account in holding that there is something like an ‘essence’ to consciousness, but it rejects the assumption that grasping the concept of consciousness acquaints us with that essence. Instead, this account holds, our current situation with respect to consciousness is akin to the situation that Aristotle found himself in with respect to cetaceans. In the same way that empirical investigation was needed to reveal what it is to be a cetacean, so too (the natural kind account holds) empirical investigation is needed to reveal what it is to be conscious. Until we have a scientific understanding of consciousness, we won’t really know what it means to say that bots, bees or babies are – or, as the case may be, are not – conscious.
It might seem obvious that ‘consciousness’ is a natural kind concept. After all, one might think, a commitment to the natural kind view is implicit in the very idea of a science of consciousness. (There isn’t, of course, much sense to be made in the idea that there might be a science of triangles or jazz.) Of course, even if ‘consciousness’ is used with the intention to pick out a natural kind, that intention may not be successful. Perhaps ‘consciousness’ will turn out to resemble other ordinary language terms such as ‘fish’ or ‘tree’ – terms that are undeniably useful in many everyday contexts, but don’t capture deep joints in nature. Alternatively, consciousness might turn out to involve not one but multiple natural kinds, much in the way in which the folk notion of heaviness suggests both mass and weight. At this point, we simply don’t know what the science of consciousness might uncover. In this sense, then, the very language of consciousness is, to some degree, hostage to the fortunes of consciousness science.
As the attentive reader might have guessed, my sympathies lie with the natural kind account. My primary aim, however, has not been to argue for the superiority of that view over its rivals, but to explain what this debate is and why it matters to the question of how consciousness is distributed. That question is not merely epistemic (‘How might we tell whether something is conscious’) but also semantic (‘What does it mean to ascribe consciousness to something?’) That semantic question is challenging not just because it raises a meta-semantic question (‘What determines what “consciousness” means?’), but also because that meta-semantic question raises, in turn, a meta-meta-semantic question (‘How should we go about figuring out what determines what consciousness means?’)
Debates about semantics (let alone meta-semantics or meta-meta-semantics!) might seem far removed from the serious, and increasingly urgent, questions concerning the possibility of consciousness in bots, bees and babies. Rather than amuse ourselves with forays into the philosophy of mind and language (it’s often said), we should instead focus on trying to grasp what these systems can do and how they function. That desire is understandable, but it is also mistaken, born of a failure to grasp the complexity of our words and the concepts they embody. Philosophy alone won’t solve the problems of consciousness, but if you’re serious about trying to figure out who’s in the ‘consciousness club’, you can’t afford to ignore the question of how words lock on to the world.
Tim Bayne is professor of philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a member of the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies, and co-director of the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He is the author of The Unity of Consciousness (2010), Thought: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Philosophy of Religion: A Very Short Introduction (2018), and Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction (2022).
Consciousness and altered states
Computing and artificial intelligence
Philosophy of mind
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17世紀新教學者眼中的笛卡爾 -- Sandrine Parageau
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我自認為頗受笛卡爾的影響；我說「自認為」是因為：我不知道我對他著作的了解和詮釋是否符合主流學者的觀點(該文第 2.2小節)。
這篇文章在知識或思想層面的含金量不足，可以視為思想史篇章中的一個註腳。
The French liar
René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him?
Sandrine Parageau, Edited by Edited bySam Haselby
, 07/08/25
The French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) is generally presented as one of the founders of modern Western philosophy and science, the man who made reason the principle of the search for truth, and who formulated the cogito, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ His assertion of mind-body dualism has given rise to a great number of objections over time, from those of 17th-century theologians to those of 20th-century feminists. In France, even though the decision of the 1792-95 National Convention to transfer Descartes’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris was not followed through, the philosopher is nonetheless regarded as ‘un grand homme’, a national hero, and being labelled ‘Cartesian’ is still today a compliment that emphasises one’s common sense, good judgment and methodical use of reason.
Yet Descartes was not always the undisputed champion of reason that he is today. In 17th-century England and the Netherlands, he was publicly and repeatedly accused of being a fraud and of lying to his readers so as to manipulate them into becoming his disciples. Of course, as one would expect, many intellectual and scientific objections were raised by his contemporaries against Descartes’s philosophy. But those ad hominem allegations were of a different nature altogether: they implied that the French philosopher resorted to well-crafted and dishonest strategies to make his readers ignorant, and therefore gullible, with the aim of making them submit to his control. Thus, according to those critics, the founder of modern science was, in truth, a purveyor of ignorance.
Such an accusation was made for example by the Protestant scholar and theologian Meric Casaubon (1599-1671), a Geneva-born clergyman of the Church of England, in a long manuscript letter on ‘general learning’ written in 1668, in which he deplores what he perceives as the growing ignorance of his contemporaries. In this text, Casaubon accuses Descartes of deliberately encouraging his readers to make themselves ignorant by urging them to renounce their beliefs and forget all the knowledge that they have previously acquired: ‘a man must first strip himself of all that he has ever known, or believed.’
表單的底部
This accusation against the champion of rationalism may seem paradoxical at first, but it should not come as a complete surprise: if Descartes did not praise ignorance as such, and certainly not as an end in itself, he did encourage his readers to get rid of all their previous opinions, prejudices and false knowledge, as he himself had done after realising the uncertainty of the knowledge he had been taught as a child. Indeed, in the Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes relates how he initially loved philosophy, theology, poetry and mathematics, which he had been taught at the prestigious Collège Royal de La Flèche, before he became aware of the variety of opinions and the pervasiveness of error, which made him doubt all his knowledge and beliefs. In the Meditations (1641), a few years after the Discourse, Descartes further explains that, in the face of such doubt and uncertainty, he decided to get rid of all the opinions he had formed or acquired in order to rebuild science and knowledge on a firm basis. This experience of ‘radical’ or ‘hyperbolical’ doubt, as it has later been called, which results in the rejection of all knowledge, implying a form of self-induced ignorance, was unsurprisingly construed as an extreme stance by 17th-century commentators, and we may understand how it could be interpreted as a promotion of complete ignorance.
According to Casaubon in his 1668 letter, Descartes presents ignorance as the only way to attain the ‘mystery’ and ‘excellency’ of ‘his Ego sum: ego Cogito [I exist: I think]’, or the reassuring certainty of one’s own existence. Yet the result of this self-inflicted ignorance is nothing but solitude and despair, Casaubon adds, describing with much detail the epistemic anxiety experienced by those who fall victim to Descartes’s manipulation, and who, in the end, have no choice but to ‘adhere to him tooth and nail’, therefore becoming his ‘disciples’. Descartes and other similarly ill-intentioned men who also dream of founding their own sects (namely Jesuits and Puritans), Casaubon declares:
first … cast [people] down to the lowest pit of despair; and then with such engines of persuasion, they are commonly [well] stored with, … raise them up again, to the highest pitch of confidence: but so that they leave themselves a power still, to cast down, & to raise again, when they see cause; which must needs oblige the credulous disciple, as he has found the horror of the one, & the comfort (whether real or imaginary) of the other, to a great dependency.
As this passage clearly states, the credulous victims of Descartes’s manipulation are taken on an emotional rollercoaster, from ‘the lowest pit of despair’ to ‘the highest pitch of confidence’ and back. Once they have experienced those unbearable conditions, they are exhausted and vulnerable, and end up believing that only Descartes can save them from despair and solitude, even though, ironically, Casaubon explains, the French philosopher is the one who caused that painful condition in the first place.
The 17th-century manipulation techniques here described by Casaubon are strikingly similar to what we now call ‘gaslighting’, a form of emotional and psychological abuse that leads the victim to question their own cognitive faculties and sometimes even their very sanity. As a matter of fact, the Dutch scholar and theologian Martin Schoock (1614-1669), Descartes’s contemporary, had, even more clearly than Casaubon and 25 years earlier, accused Descartes’s ‘new philosophy’ of leading to mental disorder, because choosing ignorance, according to Schoock in his Admirable Method (1643), amounts to deliberately putting off the light of reason in one’s mind: ‘A grown man who forgets everything is ignorant of everything, and where there is ignorance of everything, there is mental disorder.’ (My translation.)
As this passage makes clear, Schoock also thought that Descartes’s radical doubt could not but result in complete ignorance – Descartes’s philosophy was therefore a mere tool devised to spread ignorance. This call for radical doubt, as Schoock understood it, was based on the Cartesian idea that certain and evident truth can come only from within oneself. The French philosopher had allegedly ‘waged a war on books and reading’ and encouraged laziness, especially among young people, who were invited to spend all day lying down and ‘meditating’, in other words doing nothing. Descartes’s victims, Schoock adds, were primarily less-educated or naive people, who fell more readily for his deceptive arguments as they were dazzled by his reputation and influence. Indeed, the example of Descartes’s alleged use of ignorance also reveals the insidious domination of the intellectual elite over less-educated people. Thus, for Schoock as for Casaubon, the aim of Descartes’s so-called philosophy was to turn ignorant people into disciples and ensure their obedience.
If we are to believe Casaubon and Schoock, Descartes’s alleged manipulation was fairly successful, and a great number of people joined ‘the Cartesian sect’. So how come Descartes could so easily dupe his contemporaries? One answer might be that his deception did not rely on lying, but on the more strategic use and abuse of doubt. Doubt is indeed more subtle than crude lies, and therefore more efficient, provided the audience who is being manipulated is not entirely ignorant at first (otherwise, lies would work just as well), yet not educated or sagacious enough to be able to detect and expose the deception straight away. The efficiency of doubt as a strategy may also reside in its versatility. Doubt is indeed both an epistemic virtue, or the first step on the path to truth (the philosopher is always initially a doubter, someone who questions what they have been taught or what seems self-evident), and an epistemic vice, as it can lead to destabilisation and even dissolution of truth and knowledge altogether when it is excessive or misplaced.
Yet we should not forget that we are here dealing with allegations and interpretations of Cartesian philosophy by intellectual opponents, and not with facts. And we can safely assume that the French philosopher was not the dark guru decried by Casaubon and Schoock, even if some of his less-infatuated biographers, like Desmond M Clarke in 2006, have portrayed him as ‘haughty, arrogant, … excessively sensitive to criticism’ and obsessed with defending his reputation. Even at the time, in the context of the 1640s quarrel – called ‘the Quarrel of Utrecht’ – with Schoock and other Dutch philosophers and theologians, Descartes was commonly nicknamed ‘the French liar’. This judgment on his morality may have been at least partly justified, but it was also and primarily the result of enduring religious conflicts in post-Reformation Europe. Casaubon’s assimilation of Descartes with Puritans and Jesuits attests to the religious motivation of the condemnation. Moreover, after his denunciation of Descartes’s modus operandi in attempting to seduce people, Casaubon adds that Cartesian philosophy does not provide solid grounds on which the soul’s immortality or ‘the existence of an omnipotent Deity’ can be built, showing that the defence of ‘the true religion’ is primarily what is at stake here.
For Casaubon and Schoock, who stood as champions of Protestantism, Descartes’s attitude to knowledge reflected that of the Roman Catholic Church, which had been accused since the beginning of the Reformation in the early 16th century of deliberately keeping their flocks in ignorance in order to secure a tight control over them. The insistence of the Catholic Church on intermediaries (the ecclesiastical hierarchy), who alone were allowed to bring the word of God to common people, was interpreted by Protestant reformers as a means to prevent those people from reading the sacred texts by themselves, keeping them away from literacy and knowledge. The deliberately produced ignorance of Catholic people was actually seen as the main tool used by the Roman Church to successfully ensure its power and authority over the centuries. Descartes was accused of resorting to similar methods to assert his own power, authority and reputation. Even among those who praised and admired Descartes in late 17th-century England, especially the fellows of the Royal Society of London, an academic institution devoted to the advancement of science, his religion remained a major flaw that could inspire distrust or at least suspicion. Each time his philosophy was celebrated, the (Protestant) author would indeed add the disclaimer that this was despite the French philosopher’s error in religion.
The condemnation of Descartes by Casaubon and Schoock should also be seen as the manifestation of a desperate effort to resist change in the intellectual context that led to the emergence of modern science. The conservative Casaubon feared and lamented the coming destruction of traditional knowledge, which he believed was brought forth by an undue insistence on method to the detriment of learning itself. One must admit that Cartesianism is indeed obsessed with method – Descartes’s famous Discourse is evidence enough. Moreover, Descartes’s call for the rejection by each individual of all their knowledge and opinions was not only interpreted as a means to get power over those who would make themselves ignorant, but also as the programmed extinction of established knowledge, which would give way to something new and therefore suspicious. Schoock shared those preoccupations but was probably even more worried about the psychological consequences of Descartes’s philosophy on his followers and the larger public if ever it managed to spread, which he seriously feared because the mere ‘novelty’ of this philosophy made it attractive to the ignorant multitude. Surprising as it may seem, Schoock’s fears about the sanity of Cartesians were not entirely unjustified. Indeed, if the allegation that Descartes deliberately produced ignorance to control people can be easily dismissed, the claim that his philosophy was likely to lead to madness is more convincing.
Most specialists of Descartes’s philosophy have ignored the affective experience described in the Discourse and the Meditations to focus instead on the order of reason in those texts. Radical doubt and the cogito have thus been interpreted as literary and rhetorical devices, or mere fables (the word is used by Descartes himself in the Discourse). They are generally seen as fictions or thought experiments, rather than as a cognitive process that Descartes actually experienced. If the autobiographical and emotional dimension of self-induced ignorance has been neglected so far, it might be because this aspect does not match the overarching interpretation of Cartesianism as the rule of reason. Descartes urged people to reject all their opinions and knowledge only as a temporary precondition to accessing truth, not as a permanent state. But still, he did encourage self-induced ignorance.
The epistemic anxiety that followed was described by Casaubon and Schoock, as mentioned above. But the origin of the search for truth is emotionally charged as well, as it is grounded in disillusionment and existential despair following the discovery that one was taught erroneous opinions as a child and was therefore deceived. This painful discovery gives rise to the need for purification through the rejection of one’s opinions and withdrawal from the world. The emotional impact of the search for truth is attested in Adrien Baillet’s late 17th-century biography of Descartes, which precisely describes Descartes’s physical and psychological distress.
As Tristan Dagron argues in his book Pensée et cliniques de l’identité (2019), or ‘Thoughts and Treatments of Identity’, the experience that Descartes relates in the First Meditation, where he describes the need for the purification of his mind, can be interpreted as a reappropriation of three dreams that he had in November 1619, which left him confused and mentally disturbed as he was confronted with radical doubt about the distinction between dreaming and waking. When he narrates those dreams, Baillet talks of Descartes’s violent agitations, exhaustion, despair and ‘enthusiasm’, some form of divine inspiration and madness (hence also Descartes’s association with religious sects by his opponents). Dagron shows that those dreams were a traumatic experience for Descartes, which is echoed in the First Meditation and its presentation of radical doubt.
The emotionally unsettling confrontation with radical doubt and madness should be acknowledged as the starting point of the search for truth in what is commonly hailed today as a radically rationalist, emotion-free system of thought – perhaps a consequence of Michel Foucault’s influential reading of the Meditations as a violent and successful attempt at muzzling madness, or a ‘coup de force’, in his book Madness and Civilization (1961). Thus, Casaubon and Schoock were right in arguing that radical doubt implied epistemic anxiety and madness, but madness is not rejected by Descartes – on the contrary, it is embraced and then healed, so to speak, by his philosophy. This might actually be the true reason why Descartes is indeed the founder of modern Western science and philosophy.
Sandrine Parageau is professor of early modern British history at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She is the author of The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France (2023).
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塞內卡9個改變你生活的忠言 - Tom Addison
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Seneca：塞內卡
塞內卡、愛皮克悌塔斯、和奧瑞尼亞斯合稱斯多噶派哲學三巨頭。
請參考本欄前兩篇。這三篇文章可以跟此欄和此欄各篇貼文相互參照。由於他們三位都是古羅馬大哲，所以將介紹其思想的文章置於此處。
9 Incredible Quotes From Seneca That’ll Change Your Life Forever
Timeless wisdom from a very wise human being.
Tom Addison, 02/07/25
Seneca was an Ancient Rome Stoic Philosopher and Statesman.
Over the past few years, my life has changed a lot and I’ve been influenced by a whole host of different people such as Marcus Aurelius and Warren Buffet to name a couple.
However, over the past year especially, I’m not sure anyone has had a greater, more profound impact on my life as Seneca.
Even though Seneca died nearly 2000 years ago (he died in 65 AD), his work is still as applicable today as it was back then.
His work is what you’d call timeless.
If you want to know how to live and become a better person, you have to read Seneca’s work. I promise you won’t regret it.
I could easily include 50+ quotes in this article but for now, I’ll keep it short and snappy with 9…
1. “The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.”
It’s time to stop procrastinating and it’s time to start living (on your terms) right now.
Don’t keep putting things off until tomorrow, because guess what? Tomorrow might never come.
You see time waits for nobody, and it definitely won’t wait for you.
Anything that can be done now, should be done now. Don’t be a fool. Start living.
2. “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
There will be days when you don’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning, where sometimes even just existing is just an immense act of bravery.
You mustn’t forget:
If you can survive the worst of the worst, when life’s at its most unbearable, and still come out the other side, you’ve won.
3. “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”
Physically, mentally and spiritually difficult things are good for you.
Difficult things are what build you as a human being. We all have the chance to do difficult things and we should choose to do them because in the long-term, and sometimes even short-term, we’ll be better off for doing them.
4. “If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
There’s one major problem with trying to ‘escape’ and ‘get away from it all.’
No matter where you go, the problem will never leave, because that problem is you.
5. “Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.”
If you were to think about it, you’d be surprised at how little of what you possess is genuinely necessary.
It doesn’t mean you need to all of sudden discard everything in sight. It means maybe taking the time to start separating the essential from the non-essential.
6. “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Suffering in imagination is easy, but reality nearly always, 99% of the time paints a different story.
All the fretting, all the worrying, and all the ‘what ifs?’ will be a total and utter waste of time.
7. “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.”
If you don’t have any form of direction of where you want to go, how do you expect to find your way to the end destination?
Planning and having some form of direction is essential.
8. “As long as you live, keep learning how to live.”
There has never been a person, ever, who has perfected life.
Why?
There is always so much to learn. No matter how brilliant or successful you are, there is always room for improvement. Never think you know everything because you never will.
9. “It’s not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it.”
How much time in the day idling around, mindlessly scrolling through your phone, and doing almost everything you can to avoid doing productive things?
I’ll hold my hands up, I’m a serial time waster. I’m no saint. But every time I do catch myself drifting, I try to remind myself that it’s not that I don’t have the time to do what I want to do, I’m just not prioritising my time to do it.
Which is your favourite quote on this list?
Written by Tom Addison
I write about personal development, books, and key life lessons I learn. Please, feel free to subscribe if you so desire!
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Read short and uplifting articles here to help you shift your thought, so you can see real change in your life and health.
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奧瑞尼亞斯的21個睿智觀察 - Tom Addison
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Aurelius, Marcus：奧瑞尼亞斯。Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’奧瑞尼亞斯是《神鬼戰士》影片中一開始時那位老羅馬皇帝；請見此文對他和他時代的簡單介紹。
本文內容請參考本欄上一篇和下一篇。
21 Marcus Aurelius Quotes You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Before
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
15. “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Tom Addison, 06/20/25
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
I was having a terrible day the other day.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
For one reason or another, I felt anxious and on edge, which is something I thankfully don’t feel all too often.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
So, I resorted to what I know and do best, and started flicking through and re-reading one of my multiple favourite books.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
In this instance, I turned to Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
It did the trick, just like it always does, and will continue to do so.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Not only did I feel significantly better for reading Meditations for an hour or so, but it also gave me the idea to write this article.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
So let’s get into it. Here are 21 Marcus Aurelius Quotes You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Before…
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
1. “There’s nothing more insufferable than people who boast about their own humility.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
If you go around telling people how humble you are, you’re not humble at all. True humility is silent.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
2. “If it’s not right, don’t do it. If it’s not true, don’t say it.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Is there any further explanation needed? I think not!
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
3. “What can even the most vicious person do if you keep treating him with kindness?”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
It’s true what they say, you know:
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Kindness kills, even the most awful people.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
4. “A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you’re in the same room with him, you know it.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Be straight up. Don’t tell any lies. Tell the truth. Be honest.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Be the person whom others can rely on for a genuine opinion.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
5. “When faced with people’s bad behaviour, turn around and ask when you have acted like that.” (「見賢思齊焉，見不賢而內自省也。」 -- 《 論語•里仁》第17)
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
If someone is behaving terribly, remember:
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
You’re not perfect either, and the chances are you’ve probably behaved the same at some point or another.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
6. “When you wake up, ask yourself: Does it make any difference to you if other people blame you for doing what’s right?” (「自反而縮，雖千萬人吾往矣。」 -- 《 孟子•公孫丑上》第2)
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Follow your inner scorecard.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
If you believe what you’re doing is right, and you have a good reason to believe that, that’s good enough. You don’t need anything else.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
7. “Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Two words: Amor Fati.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
It means love of fate.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
8. “You’ll find that none of the people you’re upset about has done anything that could do damage to your mind.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
People will try their best to hurt you, but never forget:
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Nobody can hurt your mind unless you give them the power and permission to do so.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
9. “Remembering that the whole class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.” (「一樣米養百樣人。」)
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
The world is full of people of all shapes and sizes.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
You won’t like everyone, and not everyone will like you, but you must accept people and be tolerant of the world for what it is, whether you like it or not.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
10. “All that you see will soon have vanished, and those who see it vanish will vanish themselves, and the ones who reached old age have no advantage over the untimely dead.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Everything is temporary. Nothing is, and never has been, permanent.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Just because you or someone else reaches an old age isn’t necessarily an advantage either.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Ultimately, we’re all going to end up the same way as it is, and in that sense, we’re all on a par with one another.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
11. “You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Why would you be so reliant on wanting praise and approval from people who don’t even approve of themselves?
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
It makes no logical sense whatsoever. Whatever you do, don’t misplace your need for validation in the wrong places.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
12. “Stop perceiving the pain you imagine and you’ll remain completely unaffected.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
It’s easy to suffer in imagination, but reality nearly always tells us a different kind of story.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
13. “Remember yourself that your task is to be a good human being.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Be good. Do good. Spread good. That should be everyone’s ultimate life’s task.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
14. “You’ve wandered all over and finally realised that you never found what you were after: how to live.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
We have this tendency to look high and low, and even travel to the other side of the planet to try to look for answers on how to live.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Yet we never look within, and it’s within where the answers we’ve been seeking, more often than not, lie.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
15. “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Live your life to its full capacity, with intention and on your terms, because eventually, whenever that time might be, you won’t be able to.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
16. “Our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
You ultimately become what you dedicate your time, energy, resources, and life to, so be very selective.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
17. “Think of the list of people who had to be pried away from life. What did they gain by dying old? In the end, they all sleep six feet under.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Eventually, we all end up with the same fate. Some die young, some die old; either way, we’ll all eventually come face to face with the same outcome.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
18. “Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Nobody can hurt you unless you let them hurt you. To be hurt, you have to believe you’ve been hurt.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
19. “We need to hurry. Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding — our grasp of the world — may be gone before we get there.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Death is an inevitability, and knowing that it’s forever approaching on the horizon should give us a sense of urgency.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
However, it’s not death we should necessarily be afraid of. Instead, we should be more fearful of losing our sense of clarity and direction.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
20. “You cannot lose another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one that you’re losing.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
You have one life, one mind, and one body. Cherish them. Look after them. Preserve them, because you’ll never get another one.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
21. “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
People will always be people. Some will be great, some will be awful.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Either way, it’s our moral duty to put up with them the best we can, stop being so judgmental, and maybe most importantly, not be like them.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Thank you for reading this article and spending your most precious asset on me — your time.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
I appreciate it, and I hope to see you again soon!
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Written by Tom Addison
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
I write about personal development, books, and key life lessons I learn. Please, feel free to subscribe if you so desire!
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Want to be notified whenever I publish a new article? Click here.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Also, become part of a growing community and subscribe to my Substack for absolutely free!
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Read short and uplifting articles here to help you shift your thought, so you can see real change in your life and health.
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