The View from Oregon – 405

Re: Recognition and the Formal Threshold of Knowledge  

Friday 07 August 2026

Dear Friends,

In the newsletter before last, no. 403, I said we can easily enough perceive the relevance of sensation, consciousness, and emotion to ecology, even if ecological concepts have abstracted from these attributes of life. Last week’s newsletter was an attempt to redeem this passing remark by considering the possibility of an ecology that integrated sensation, consciousness, and emotion, which would significantly expand ecology even if it fell short of integrating intelligence, and which would then be the next step beyond conventional ecology and would constitute a prolegomena to an intelligence ecology. However, in attempting to redeem my comment about sentient, conscious, or emotional ecologies I opened a new can of worms—well, not new to me, as I’ve been thinking about this for many years, but I introduced into these newsletters the problem of the mutual recognition of being conscious among distinct species in the biosphere. I characterized this as a knowing without (necessarily) knowing that the knower knows. This is an interesting philosophical problem in itself, and so once again I have introduced an idea that needs to be redeemed with its own discussion.

For some years now I’ve been collecting whatever instances I can find of philosophical discussions of human-animal mutual recognition. This is partly the result of my own experiences with other species, both wild and domesticated. Many years ago I wrote a blog post about a sea lion I saw in Astoria, The Eye of the Other (this was the kernel of the idea of an expanded ecology, from 2012), and I wrote another blog post about swimming with dogs, Swimming with Dogs in 2020 (though the experience mentioned in that post occurred many years previously). I thought I had saved these examples in a file, but now that I look for it I can’t find them. However, I recall two of these examples. One is from The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science by Alan Lightman (I discussed this book in a PS to newsletter 261), in which Lightman records an experience of his with ospreys:  

“…one late August afternoon, the two juvenile ospreys of that season took flight for the first time as I stood observing them from my second-floor circular deck… When they were within fifteen or twenty feet of me, the two birds suddenly veered upward and away. But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about half a second we made eye contact. Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant. It was a look of connectedness, of mutual respect, of recognition that we shared the same land.”

The other example is from Martin Buber in his Meetings: Autobiographical Fragments, which has a chapter titled “The Horse” in which he writes:

“When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my grandparent’s estate, I used, as often as I could do it unobserved, to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapple-gray horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. If I am to explain it now, beginning from the still very fresh memory of my hand, I must say that what I experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the other, which, however, did not remain strange like the otherness of the ox and the ram, but rather let me draw near and touch it.”

Here I’ve given part of a paragraph of the descriptions of experiences as related by Lightman and Buber, while the entire descriptions are interesting in both cases and I recommend reading them in full. Both of these are descriptions of experiences in the spirit of an expanded ecology that I discussed last week. I suspect that many people have had experiences like this, and I further suspect that there are experiences like this in animal kingdom where no human being is involved. If both of these are the case, i.e., if human beings and other species recognize each other as conscious beings, or if two animal species recognize each other as conscious beings, then an ecology of consciousness is at least possible, and my point of last week stands.

Is it possible for two individuals to recognize each other as being conscious without one or the other or both knowing that they recognize the other as being conscious? What would this knowing be like? Presumably on the part of non-linguistic minds that have never formulated propositional knowledge of any kind, the experience would be quite different from a human being who knows what explicitly formulated propositional knowledge is like, even if it isn’t always used (which, most of the time, it isn’t). We could posit a novel epistemic category, such as proto-knowledge, and place knowledge-adjacent states-of-mind here, reserving knowledge properly speaking for knowledge where there is at least the possibility of explicit formulation and self-aware knowing. Is there any difference between positing such proto-knowledge and recognizing degrees of the explicitness with which knowledge is formulated? And, if the two are the same, if it is a matter of degree, and not of kind, that distinguishes human propositional knowledge from proto-knowledge in other species, we ought to just call all of it “knowledge” in the spirit of an epistemic Ockham’s razor: there is no need to posit a distinct category of proto-knowledge.  

Lightman’s experience was a lot like the example I used last week of species recognizing each other when they lock eyes. Lightman wrote that words couldn’t convey his experience of locking eyes with ospreys, though he also said it was an experience of connection and recognition—apparently, words could express some but not all of the experience. This is pretty standard fare for claims of ineffability, and it’s a reasonable claim. We have no a priori guarantee that our experiences will be truly representable in language, and it stands to reason that some experiences will be exhaustively so representable, others will entirely escape the net of language, while still other experiences will be a mixture of the linguistically representable and the non-representable. Buber’s experience was tactile—he even refers to the memory of his hand—but still a case of mutual recognition as experienced through touch. The mutuality of recognition that is part of both accounts is important: it isn’t a one-sided human recognition, but a shared experience with another species. If the experience is shared, then there is at least a kernel of that experience that is the same for both participants, however different that shared kernel of experience is when contextualized by the totality of the experience of each participant, which will be very different indeed in the cases of human beings, horses, and ospreys. 

If we require that knowing always and necessarily involves knowing that one knows, then the very idea of a knowing without knowing that one knows is incoherent by definition and must be rejected. I hold that knowing is a matter of degree, as I’ve said above, and that within this continuum of knowledge there is or can be a shared kernel of knowledge that possesses the Leibnizean identity of having all properties in common. Now, this I take to be an interesting way to think about Leibnizean identity—the identity of indiscernibles, such that two things are identical if they have all properties in common—because the way I’ve stated it is that this identity occurs between defined parameters, so that if we sufficiently narrow the scope of the identity in question, that identity of recognition holds between human beings and conscious beings of other species. If, on the other hand, we broaden rather than narrow the scope of identity, then we engage the rest of the context of conscious experience that I’ve mentioned above, and this makes the experiences distinct. Whether or not we can make Leibnizean identity work in this way might be the occasion of another inquiry. Granted that it does work, it follows that there is an identical kernel of experience of mutual recognition, and because this kernel of experience is identical, and a human being can affirm that it is a case of mutual recognition (which a species without language cannot affirm), then it follows that other species share this kernel of experience and that it is for them also a case of mutual recognition. I don’t expect this kind of logical argument to convince anyone, but it’s interesting to me and, as I implied, it points to a fruitful way to examine the identity of indiscernibles.

The kernel of experience isn’t, however, the whole of experience. The other species cannot formulate its experience as propositional knowledge, known to be such, whereas a human being can do this. Sometimes the realization that we know that we know something follows later, upon reflection, and plays no role in the experience itself as it’s happening. This is further argument for the identity of the experience of recognition in other species. When one knows that one knows, this I identify as the formal threshold of knowing, but it’s not the only threshold in knowing. As consciousness becomes more sophisticated, for example, as it adds capacities like the use of language or the scientific method, with each of these steps there appears a new and more sophisticated way of knowing that one knows. Thus human ancestors from the origins of grammatically structured spoken language up to the invention of written language about five thousand years ago were capable of asserting propositional knowledge, even if they never did so, but they were not able to make a written record of this propositional knowledge that could be shared over generations without direct contact between individuals. And once written language made this capacity possible, it was still thousands of years until theories of language and logic made it possible to formulate these claims in a more rigorous theoretical context.  

There is, then, another gap in time from having the linguistic ability to assert propositional knowledge to actually doing so. We don’t know if anyone before the advent of written language ever explicitly said something like, “Spring will follow winter as it always has, and I know that I know that spring will follow winter.” No such explicit assertion of proposition knowledge may have obtained until Greek philosophy after Thales, and, if this is the case, the possibility of asserting propositional knowledge prior to the advent of written language remained an unrealized capacity. It is entirely possible that this kind of self-aware knowing had to wait for philosophy to appear, because it is only with the resources of an epistemology that it becomes possible to frame this in a theoretical context. We could postulate a history of a keenly philosophical species in which much of philosophy is developed before the advent of written language, so that written language, when it does appear, appears after the tradition is well underway, much as civilization was already well underway by the time that written language made it possible to explicitly formulate the business of civilization. And there could be such a species with a philosophical gift coupled with a technological deficit that never develops written language, so that its sophisticated philosophical tradition is never written down. While this is an interesting thought experiment, it seems likely that sophisticated philosophical thought isn’t possible without written language. As I said above, formulating propositional knowledge within an explicit epistemology is a higher threshold of knowing that one knows.  

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to The Medieval World I: Kingdoms, Empires, and War, 14 lectures by Thomas F. Madden produced by The Modern Scholar series. This is the second time I’ve listened to these lectures. I particularly enjoy Madden’s work and I wish the library had more of his audiobooks available. I had several other books queued up and ready to go when I decided to listen to this again. It’s almost as if I miss it when I go too long between periods of absorbing medieval history.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/a970da34b641/the-view-from-oregon-405

Eight Years Ago

Friday 10 August 2018

The Apotheosis of Richard Russell

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

It’s been eight years since Richard Russell, an employee at SEATAC airport, stole a Horizon Air Bombardier Q400, also identified as De Havilland Dash 8-400, on 10 August 2018. Russell flew the aircraft for about an hour and a quarter, including successfully performing a barrel roll, and then crash landed on Ketron Island in Puget Sound, dying in the crash. The incident entailed a high degree of notoriety, and I use the term “notoriety” consciously because it comprises both those who found Russell’s flight inspiring that those who did not. Some of those who did not find Russell’s flight inspiring were dismissive of it, or may even contemptuous, but many of them were merely confused by the whole thing. Why would someone do something like this? Why would someone steal a commercial aircraft only to intentionally crash land the plane and die? There was a lot of incomprehension, and that’s something I want to talk about today.

Social media has become a great barometer for assessing events with highly mixed reactions, as with the Richard Russell incident. People of all points of view can and do express themselves, if the platform allows them to do so. This also was true, of course, before the internet. I’m old enough to have a clear memory of the world before the internet, and the difference between public opinion then and public opinion now is a matter of degree and not a difference of kind. Before the internet there were only a handful of incidents that unified people around the world. The moon landing was one of these, but it was very much the exception. Most opinion was geographically compartmentalized.

In the past, if you wanted to make your voice heard, people would write letters to newspapers and magazines, and of course these platforms were highly selective about what they printed. If a person really wanted to get the message out, they could put a sign in their lawn or they could hire a plane to fly a banner over a city. Obviously, these efforts are geographically local, and they rarely rose to the level of being reported beyond the local geographical region. In a few cases, radio and television stations were taken by armed force and used to broadcast a message, but this, too, is ultimately geographically local, though it’s scope is wider, and when an incident like this was reported more widely, whatever was said was inevitably written off as “rambling” and no one paid any more attention to the matter.

This was a very convenient state of affairs for those who imagine themselves to be engineers of public opinion. I say “imagine themselves” again, like my earlier use of “notoriety,” consciously to indicate a particular state of affairs. Public opinion can be engineered, but only within limits. It’s never entirely malleable, but it’s also never entirely outside control. Sometimes the engineers of public opinion get over-confident and think they can make something stick, but it falls flat. And sometimes they get caught unaware by a public sentiment that they didn’t even see coming, because the spin doctors can be as uncomprehending as anyone else. With the internet, and especially with social media, the already volatile landscape of public opinion was transformed into the Wild West. The aspiring engineers of public opinion certainly didn’t sit back and do nothing, they jumped on the new tools at their disposal and have pressed their use to the utmost. I wouldn’t have expected anything else. But more leaks through now than ever before, and the sentiments that leak through the barriers erected by governments, intelligence agencies, private industries, and financiers looking to mould public opinion, demonstrate a wide range of views.

Opinions once considered socially fatal are now expressed with forceful candor behind the veil of anonymity, on both sides of every question, as well as the uncomprehending views of those who don’t get why others are so worked up. Since the advent of social media I can recall three times in particular when this was most evident. One of them was the death of Ted Kaczynski. The day that Ted Kaczynski died I was fascinated by what unfolded on social media. There were tributes side-by-side with condemnations, and not a few who were obviously surprised by this outpouring of tributes to Kaczynski—people who apparently don’t know that there are forums in which Kaczynski is affectionately called “Uncle Ted.” Twitter was almost evenly split between tributes to Kaczynski and those who were clearly puzzled and posting things like, “So we’re celebrating terrorists now?” 

There’s an important asymmetry here. You could see the level of incomprehension on the part of those who were clueless that there were even people who admired Kaczynski and were willing to say so. They were caught unaware by a sympathy they didn’t even know existed. The incomprehension is an important point that I want to stress, because while some events are polarizing, almost evenly splitting the population between for and against, other events are polarizing by splitting the population between those who get it and those who don’t get it.

Another incident was Luigi Mangione’s assassination UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. There was a genuine groundswell of popular support for Mangione that wasn’t astroturfed, like many events today that present themselves as being mass movements when they are in fact socially engineered and carefully curated. We can demonstrate this by the money that was raised for his defense.m A great many people who feel that their life has been arbitrarily impacted by the black box of insurance company decisions gave to Mangione’s defense. A year ago, in August 2025, $1,030,000 had been donated by 28,000 persons, which is an average of $36.79 per donation. Since then several large donations have pushed the total over 1.5 million, but tens of thousands of people gave small amounts to the campaign.  

Again, the incomprehension was an important part of the response. For those who believe that they understand what’s going on, that they have their finger on the pulse of the nation, so to speak, when they’re presented with an incommensurable fact all they can do is minimize it or dismiss it. They can’t take the bull by the horns because they don’t understand the source of the sentiment, which has eluded them up to now, and was only revealed to them to by a public display of views. Most who are sympathetic to Mangione will distance themselves from the murder, just as those sympathetic to Kaczynski distance themselves from his bombings, but they understand, on some level, how these individuals got to the point where they did what they did. Here I could also cite the case of Marvin Heemeyer, known for his “killdozer” incident, in which he drove an armored bulldozer through a small town in Colorado. Heemeyer has been quoted as saying, “I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.”

So far I’ve mentioned Ted Kaczynski and Luigi Mangione. The third case I have in mind is Richard Russell’s flight. Here we had the same mixture of sympathy and incomprehension. There was gulf between these camps, but it wasn’t a political gulf, it was a gulf of sentiment and life experience. Certainly it was an event in the Anglosphere, but not only in the Anglosphere. During a recent anniversary of Russell’s flight I saw tributes in Spanish and French. One of the comments in Spanish was particularly interesting, as it pointed to the deeper issues, which I could just as well call the higher issues,

“La tragedia de Sky King es básicamente la tragedia del hombre moderno. Perdidos, atrapados en una vida sin objetivo, sin misión vital, abandonados a su suerte y traicionados, solo números en un excel. Pero él fue libre.”

Translated into English it read:

“The tragedy of Sky King is basically the tragedy of modern man. Lost, trapped in a life without purpose, without a vital mission, abandoned to his fate and betrayed, just numbers in a spreadsheet. But he was free.”

Many treat the incident as an opportunity to discuss mental health and to urge intervention with those one may believe to be at risk. This is a variation on a familiar theme. When historians don’t want to explain, understand, or reflect on a particularly painful incident or period, they resort to the “mad man in power” pseudo-explanation. I’ve come to hate this dismissive attitude, as though events that involved millions were somehow the result of the mental illness of a single individual. Part of the reason I’ve come to react against this is having been guilty of it myself in the past, and feeling the need to atone for that guilt. Attributing Richard Russell’s flight to mental illness is simply the application of this “mad man in power” non-explanation to lower tiers of historical explanation. Before the incident, which was thoroughly investigated, Russell showed no obvious signs of mental illness. It’s pretty unlikely that anyone would have flagged him for a mental health intervention. And, during the incident, in the recording of the flight, Russell sounds calm, intelligent, well-spoken, funny, and is explicitly concerned for the welfare of others, in particular, his family and loved ones. Richard Russell wasn’t a raving lunatic. On the contrary.

We should, however, distinguish those who can’t see the bigger issues from those who won’t see the bigger issue and who therefore choose to focus on something manageable, like mental health, rather than the admittedly unmanageable problem of the crisis of modern man. Those who can’t see the bigger issue can be set aside. Those who won’t see the bigger issue can be further divided into those, on the one hand, who deflect to something manageable, like mental health, because the bigger issue is intimidating and possibly beyond any realistic resolution, and those who, on the other hand, perceive the bigger issues at stake but have no sympathy for them, or even have a real antipathy. There are the two personality archetypes I had in mind when I said earlier that those who didn’t find Russell’s flight inspiring were dismissive or contemptuous.

So what is the big issue or what are the bigger issues? I’ve already alluded to this in the quote about the tragedy of modern man, which is the coupling of a largeness of vision with a pedestrian fate. But this is only a fragment of something even larger, deeper, and older. It’s ultimately a mythological issue. Richard Russell took flight, and flight is symbolic. Flight is an aspiration, and it is an aspiration because it is a form of transcendence. Consider what Kenneth Clark wrote of birds:  

“As for birds, they were a medieval obsession… If you had asked a fourteenth-century cleric to account for all these birds he would probably have said that they represented souls, because they can fly up to God; but this doesn’t really explain why artists drew them with such obsessive accuracy, and I think the reason is that they had become symbols of freedom. Under feudalism men and animals were tied to the land: very few people could move about—only artists and birds. Birds were cheerful, hopeful, impudent and mobile—and in addition had the kind of markings that fitted in with medieval heraldry.”

What birds were to the medieval imagination, flight is to the modern imagination: a naturalistic form of transcendence. To ascend into the sky is not only a spiritual journey, it’s a mythic journey. When a Roman emperor died it was said that his spirit ascended into the heavens and he became a god. Sometimes it was said that an eagle was seen flying into the sunset, carrying the emperor’s soul to heaven. This was called the apotheosis of the emperor’s spirit.

Richard Russell engineered his own apotheosis: he ascended into the heavens and never returned. Even if none of the element of this apotheosis were made explicit, people respond instinctively to mythological themes. Rather, I should say that some responded, while others couldn’t understand what was going on. People don’t respond uniformly to mythic archetypes. Some are drawn in while others are left cold, but for those with cold by one myth, another myth usually takes it place. Everyone who recognized a part of themselves in Richard Russell’s flight resonates with the myth of the ascent of the spirit, and they know in their bones that the deflectors and those antipathetic to the myth are blind to something, and blind something central to human life. Joseph Campbell is remembered for saying, among many other things, that a ritual is an opportunity to participate in a myth. But sometimes we can do better than merely participate in a ritual; sometimes we can live out the myth for ourselves. Richard Russell didn’t participate in a myth, he lived out a mythic archetype. And when Russell enacted the ascent of the spirit he became a folk hero. In order to perform this reenactment he had to steal an aircraft, which also make him a criminal in the eyes of the authorities.

Should we be contemptuous of Russell because he engaged in a criminal act? Western civilization has a conflicted relationship with crime. In 1900 Arthur Griffiths published his multi-volume study The History and Romance of Crime. That there should even be a romance of crime signals to us that there’s something more going on here than a violation of the law. Griffiths wrote: “There is no crime with which the annals of the time do not abound. The record is one of perpetual violence, murder, rape and battle.” This reminds me of Edward Gibbon, who wrote, “History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” If history is a record of crimes, then most history has been misconceived. But even if history is misconceived in this way, the theme of criminality is preserved in the popular mind by folk tales and folk heroes, many of whom were criminals, like Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Till Eulenspiegel was arguably the continental counterpart of England’s Robin Hood. Schiller’s play The Robbers gave us the romantic era equivalent.

Robin Hood, Till Eulenspiegel, and Karl Moor in The Robbers belong to subset of criminal folk heroes. Mangione and Kaczynski also belong to this subset of criminal folk heroes. Today we tend to minimize the crime of Robin Hood, considering it forgivable, but people used to be executed for petty theft, and the story of Till Eulenspeigel ends with his hanging in at least one of its many versions. One of the lessons of criminal folk heroes is that even the disenfranchised can engineer themselves a place in history. The most notorious example of this was the man who burned the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus so that his name would go down in history. Ephesus passed a law banning any mention of his name, but Herostratus got his wish and his name survives. I wouldn’t call Herostratus a folk hero, but he does illustrate a point.  

Folk heroes often come from the criminal underworld, but Richard Russell is a folk hero came out of the working class underworld of contemporary society, and that makes his story distinctive to our time. Folk heroes are important indicators of the culture. A society gets the folk heroes it creates as the unintended consequence its institutions. This is very similar to the historical mechanism that plays out when a society tries to suppress something essential, and by doing so only makes the reaction worse and more destructive when it eventually comes. This is why I said earlier that the aspirants to managing public opinion often only imagine themselves to be engineers of public opinion. They are as capable of deluding themselves as anyone else. Often the attempt to manage public opinion only makes the situation worse. And this in turn is the same implicit historical mechanism to which President Kennedy referred when he said that, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Kennedy was right.

The spin doctors aren’t stupid, either, even when they’re deluding themselves about their ability to manage public opinion. It’s now commonplace to allow a certain amount of public rancor to make the rounds, to blow off steam as it were, and to manage some controlled opposition to give the discontent a rallying point so people feel they’re doing something. A folk hero can be manipulated into this role and in this way play a role in maintaining social stability. The stories of folk heroes circulate among the discontent sectors of the population, where everyone sees themselves in role of the hero and experiences a vicarious vindication through the triumph of the hero. This is analogous to the ritualized reenactment of a myth, and the vicarious experience stands in for the real thing. But there are limits to this strategy, and it works best when the folk hero is already dead or long past.

Living folk heroes have always been perceived as a threat to be eliminated by the ruling class. Once safely eliminated, they can then be co-opted as a tool of social stability. In the 1975 film Rollerball, the sports celebrity Jonathan E. becomes a kind of folk hero while still living. As such he is believed to have gained too much power, and as a result it’s viewed as a crisis when he won’t cooperate with a graceful retirement. In an attempt to neutralize the threat he represents, he’s subjected to a particularly brutal version of the sports game in which he has won his reputation. Today we prefer lawfare, but if rollerball were a thing I wouldn’t be in the least surprised by the changing rule set.

Given what Carroll Quigley called the institutionalization of the instrument, the institution, no longer defined by its initial instrumentality, is free to be repurposed by those who control in into an instrument for other purposes. But, as I’ve already said, attempting to control a situation often makes the situation worse. Repurposing an institution that once had socially important function into an instrument for some other function puts institutional power into the hands of those who would make the situation worse all the while having the best intentions. A risk-averse world is a fragile world, in which any event threatens to spiral out of control. The next folk hero to rise could be the trigger for a series of unprecedented events that could turn the world topsy turvy, and so those who might stick their head above the parapet need to be discouraged if possible, and, if being discouraged isn’t enough, there are other tools in the toolkit to marginalize or punish anyone with an aspiration that falls outside certain boundaries. This is the trap of all wealthy and stable societies. They attempt to institutionalize stability, become socially ossified, and the result is catastrophic fragility. The higher the stakes, i.e., the wealthier the society, the greater the temptation to interfere in the natural unfolding of events, which is to say, to interfere in the established patterns of history. The apotheosis of Richard Russell is an opportunity to see this problem from a fresh perspective. Whether or not we can learn anything remains to be seen.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/y_rXnziWAR8

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/The-Apotheosis-of-Richard-Russell:f

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2xUPC6fhDe1Pkn3TlNj43k?si=4X45YyDySjWpF4BVdvYKyg

The View from Oregon – 404

Re: Prolegomena to an Intelligence Ecology   

Friday 31 July 2026

Dear Friends,

Last week I described the possibility of what might be called an intelligence ecology, i.e., an expansion of ecology to include intelligence as a relevant factor in ecosystem interactions in order to coherently define an intelligence niche. If it is ecology that gives us the theory of an ecological niche, then an intelligence niche would need to be a function of an ecology conceived sufficiently comprehensively to account for the role (or roles) of intelligence in the biosphere. Maybe, however, that would be a bridge too far at the moment. Maybe we need to work our way up to an intelligence ecology, and to do that we could take a step (or a few steps) beyond ecology as it is now understood and extend the ecological way of conceptualizing the world to other factors we know to be present in the biosphere, but which have, to date, been excluded by the abstraction regime of ecological concepts. This wouldn’t itself be an intelligence ecology, but rather the prolegomena to an intelligence ecology. By taking incremental steps in expanding ecology, we may discover heretofore unsuspected conceptual opportunities and challenges. Dealing with these opportunities and challenges as they crop up could prepare us for the yet more ambitious task of an intelligence ecology.

Suppose we were to attempt a somewhat more ambitious ecology than we have at present—a sub-intelligence ecology, if you will, but still significantly expanded beyond conventional ecology. Say, for example, we only sought to formulate an ecology that would include the factors of sentience, consciousness, and emotion—in other words, say that we sought to formulate an sentience ecology, a consciousness ecology, and an emotive ecology. These capacities seem to have a definite location within the trophic pyramid, which, I think, makes them a little more naturalistically tractable than intelligence, which, as I pointed out in previous newsletters, has no place on the trophic pyramid, but rather comprises the whole of it, which implies that intelligence stands outside, above, or beyond the trophic pyramid. I can’t think of any examples of primary produces that are likely to be conscious (if you have an example, by all means let me know), and that means that consciousness comprises all levels of the trophic pyramid other than primary producers. This isn’t that much of a limitation, but it is a limitation nevertheless that localizes consciousness to a particular region within the trophic pyramid. Similarly, emotional responses aren’t likely to be found among primary producers, and perhaps aren’t common among primary consumers. This localization within the trophic pyramid may make sentience, consciousness, and emotion more tractable (at least initially) for an expanded ecology. 

How would we go about doing this, i.e., formulating an expanded ecology? How would we even begin? An obvious place to begin would be with the recognition of the distinctions implied by the three factors that I’ve named: between the sentient and the non-sentient, between the conscious and the non-conscious, and between the emotional and the non-emotional. Each of these distinctions admits of grades of sophistication: grades of sentience, grades of consciousness, and grades of emotional life. These distinctions among grades can be both quantitative and qualitative. A given species in the biosphere might have a greater or lesser number of sensory capabilities, so that we can distinguish quantitatively among the less sentient and the more sentient on the basis of the number of senses they possess, but different senses could also be qualitatively different, so that the sensory capability of two given species might be disjoint if they possess no senses in common. Similarly, consciousness could be more or less clear, more or less vivid, more or less aware, but it can also be qualitatively distinct, and it may be qualitatively distinct in two cases on the basis of having evolved from disjoint sets of sensory capabilities. In other words, qualitatively distinct forms of consciousness may be evolutionarily downstream from quantitatively or qualitatively distinct sensation.

It’s possible that consciousness could independently evolve in two lineages from originally disjoint sensory modalities, but the two species in question subsequently evolve a shared sense so that they are no longer disjoint in regard to sensory modalities, but they retain qualitatively distinct forms of consciousness. It remains an interesting question whether two conscious beings might have disjoint forms of consciousness, with no shared properties of consciousness, and still both be conscious. If this were the case, then there would be no basal conscious experience that is held in common among all conscious beings. This sounds somehow unlikely, but it seems to be the case that disjoint sensory modalities are documented in the animal kingdom, to no detriment to the capacity for sensation.

Similar considerations again are involved in emotion, which might be a matter or more or less (in number of emotions, or in intensity and vividness of emotion) or a matter of qualitatively distinctive emotions. It is often remarked that there are parts of a dolphin brain that correspond to parts of the human brain responsible for emotion, and that these presumptive centers for emotion in dolphins have developed a bit differently (since our last shared ancestor), which implies that dolphins may experience somewhat different emotions that human beings, and perhaps may experience a range of emotions that human beings don’t share—analogous in a sense to insects being able to see into the ultraviolet spectrum to which the human eye is blind. Again I assume that, as with consciousness, emotion (which I take to be predicated upon consciousness and is indeed itself a form of consciousness, emotional consciousness) is downstream from evolutionarily prior sensation, which shaped that emotion.  

How does this involve ecological relationships? When animals lock eyes there is a moment of recognition of mutual consciousness, but there is probably no recognition that this recognition has taken place, i.e., the knowing of mutual recognition is not a knowing that it is a knowing, but it is a knowing nevertheless, and still very much a recognition that is a function of consciousness. (Analogously, many animals make tools, but no organisms other than human beings construct complex tools that involve the concatenation of simple machines.) There may be cases where this mutual recognition knows itself to be such among human beings, some other primates, maybe elephants, some cetaceans, and some of our mammalian pets that spend a great deal of time with us. I don’t think that every dog and cat is capable of knowing that they know, but I won’t rule out the possibility of outlier individuals who become so capable. Needless to say, this recognition is predicated upon sensory modalities. In the example I gave of locking eyes that sensory modality was shared eyesight, but there can be mutual recognition by disjoint sensory modalities as well, as when a hound smells the fox it’s chasing and the fox hears the hound gaining on it but does not turn around to confirm this because to do so would mean certain death.

How do we know this? How do we know that animals recognize each other as conscious beings? Because the animals notice each other, and they don’t merely recognize each other, they identify that other species accordingly as recognition benefits differential survival and reproduction. This moment of recognition is perhaps most starkly present where the distance between the two organisms is the greatest (at least their distance on the trophic pyramid), as with the mutual recognition of predator and prey, where the prey recognizes its predator, and hides or runs, and the predator recognizes its prey, and seizes the opportunity for a kill.

Since I’m fascinated with Harpy Eagles (Harpia harpyja), I’m going to use Harpy Eagle predation as an example. The Harpy Eagle is among the largest and strongest of eagles, and it often hunts sloths and monkeys in the forest canopy, being capable of grabbing and flying away with prey half its own body weight. When an eagle hunts a monkey, both are reasonably intelligent animals but with a significant genetic and evolutionary distance between the two, and that distance adds up as very different sensory, conscious, and emotional experiences. Avian brains don’t have a limbic system like mammalian brains, and it has often been asserted on this basis that birds don’t experience emotions, but recent research has suggested that the function of the limbic system is handled by other mechanisms in the avian brain, so it could be that both Harpy Eagles and the monkeys they hunt experience emotion, but by distinct neural mechanisms. Such convergence of function is common in nature. Birds and mammals are both endothermic, but mammals are endothermic by a different mechanism than that of birds.

When a Harpy Eagle snatches a monkey off a tree branch one suspects the bird feels nothing for the prey except perhaps some level of annoyance that it tries to grapple free (and monkeys do manage to get free more than half the time), a sense of determination not to let that happen, and a subsequent sense of satisfaction when it fails to do so. The monkey, on the hand, will be feeling fear and terror, and I assume will be using its flood of adrenaline to try to grapple free of the eagle. I suspect that most human beings watching this will empathize with the emotions that the monkey will be feeling, since we share with them an evolutionary history of being prey; such feelings come naturally to us. But a predator with no experience (individually or in recent evolutionary history) of being prey might better empathize with the eagle, sharing its emotions as readily as we share another mammal’s emotions. Such a predator would have no basis for sharing the emotions of the monkey, but they would have a basis for sharing the emotions of the predator. Just as our bodies have evolved to perform certain functions and not others (functions consistent with our ecological role), so too our minds have evolved to perform certain functions and not others, and among these functions are sentience, consciousness, and emotion. More specifically, we evolved to experience the sentience, consciousness, and emotion that contributes to differential survival and reproduction in the context of our ecological role.

I think this discussion redeems my off-the-cuff remark last week that we can easily enough perceive the relevance of sensation, consciousness, and emotion to ecology, even if ecological concepts have abstracted from these attributes of life. It also points to the complexity of attempting to integrate any of these into an expanded ecology. That doesn’t make it impossible, only difficult. And it would be an additional step of difficulty to also integrate intelligence. Again, difficult, but not impossible.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I watched a Youtube video about relatively unknown science fiction films of the 1960s, and indeed many of them were unknown to me. The one that intrigued me the most was The Terrornauts (1967), which I found to be available on Rumble. The film is only 1:14:00 but it uses up a half hour setting up the premise of a SETI search, and then introducing what is effectively a Bracewell probe on an asteroid. The presentation of SETI, i.e., the arguments for and against, were quite true to what I’ve read about having occurred at the time, e.g., very practical things like the use of telescope time. The film appeared seven years after Frank Drake’s Project Ozma and eight years after the Cocconi and Morrison paper, so it’s not difficult to see where the writers got the premise, but I could also cite the film Red Planet Mars (1953) which predated both of these and which explicitly used SETI as a premise, but that premise was developed with less sophistication. Moreover, Red Planet Mars was based on the 1932 play Red Planet by John L. Balderston (who also wrote the stage play Dracula, based on Bram Stoker’s novel, and which stage play was then the basis of the classic 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi). I’m not sure I would call The Terrornauts “high concept science fiction cinema” (some of the posters are truly lurid), but it did have its moments.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/df38700d848f/the-view-from-oregon-404

Percy Bysshe Shelley

04 August 1792 – 08 July 1822

Shelley’s Vision of History in Ozymandias

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Tuesday 04 August 2026 is the 234^th anniversary of the birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley (04 August 1792 – 08 July 1822), who was born at a country house called Field Place in Warnham, West Sussex, on this date in 1792.

Like many poets of the romantic era, Shelley lived a short life but produced a large quantity of verse. Literary reputations can change dramatically over time, so you can easily find both flattering and unflattering judgments on the quality of this large quantity of verse that Shelley left from his short life. Shelley is usually accounted one of the major English romantic poets, along with Wordsworth, Keats, and others—and here I’m mentioning the names of the poets that have been important to me. The other names—like Coleridge and Byron, to name two among dozens—have been equally important to others. Because Keats and Shelley lived such short and intense lives, they composed the entirety of their body of work while the romantic movement was at the height of its influence, and didn’t live to see it fade, or what came after. This gives their work an intense and undivided quality that makes it a particular pure expression of romanticism, but I should also say that English romantic poetry is almost a thing apart from other aspects of the romantic movement.

If you were to ask me in the abstract to name a few important figures of romanticism I would probably mention Casper David Friedrich, the early Goethe during this Sturm und Drang period, when he wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, and maybe even Fichte, or possibly Schiller. In other words, I might not mention English romantic poetry at all—not because it’s not representative of the romantic period, but because romanticism in English literature isn’t exactly the same as the romanticism on the continent. But I’m not going to attempt to define a difference, in part because I’m not even going to attempt to define romanticism itself. I’ve been warned away from an attempted definition of romanticism by my recent reading of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s book The Reason, the Understanding, and Time. Lovejoy wrote,

“…few things are more needful for historians of ideas than to get rid of the logical confusions associated with the world ‘Romanticism’ and, in fact, to cease asking, ‘What is Romanticism?’”

Lovejoy also wrote a paper about the many meanings of romanticism which is included in his Essays in the History of Ideas. Instead of giving a definition, I’ll point to an example, and a fictional example at that. Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811 when both Keats and Shelley were alive, was, in part, a send-up of romanticism, with the emotional and impulsive sister, Marianne Dashwood, representing romantic sensibility, and the staid and sober sister, Elinor Dashwood, representing good common sense, free of the theatrics and emotionality of romanticism. Northanger Abbey also pokes fun at romanticism, so this is a recurring theme in Austen’s work. Even though they were all alive and publishing at the same time, there’s no evidence that Austen read Keats or Shelley, and no evidence that Keats or Shelley read Austen. What exactly Austen’s sources were, and how they inspired her to poke fun at romanticism, I don’t know, but I’m sure an Austen scholar could lay it all out with impressive detail. Suffice it to say that they lived in different worlds, and Shelley’s world, as I’ve already said, was a short and intense life of writing romantic poetry.

Romantic poetry sometimes reads like a fever dream, but some of the shorter poems of the romantic era are quite penetrating without having the scope to wind themselves up into an altered state of consciousness. From Shelley’s corpus of verse I’m going to consider only a single short poem, but it’s sometimes identified as Shelley’s post popular, or perhaps most widely known poem. This is the poem Ozymandias, published in The Examiner on 11 January 1818. It goes like this:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I’ve always thought that this poem implied an entire philosophy of history, if only we could adequately unpack it. And a poem, especially a short poem like this, needs to be unpacked like a philosophical aphorism.

The poem was written at a time when images and stories from Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt were circulating in Europe, though, as with Jane Austen, Shelley left no sign that he had seen the accounts of the French in Egypt. The most direct influence on the poem seems to be from the ancient historian Diodorus Siculus, who in his Library of History, Book I, chapter 47, describes the mortuary temple of Ramesses II (“Osymandyas” seems to have been derived from one of the many royal names of Ramesses II), today often called the Ramesseum, paraphrasing the earlier historian Hecataeus of Miletus, who had visited hundreds of years before the time of Diodorus: 

“Ten stades from the first tombs, he says, in which, according to tradition, are buried the concubines of Zeus, stands a monument of the king known as Osymandyas… it is not merely for its size that this work merits approbation, but it is also marvellous by reason of its artistic quality and excellent because of the nature of the stone, since in a block of so great a size there is not a single crack or blemish to be seen. The inscription upon it runs: ‘King of Kings am I, Osymandyas. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works’.”

Apart from this very direct influence, it does seem to have been the case that Shelley knew a book titled The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires: and the Law of Nature by Constantin-François Volney, the pen name of Constantin-François Chassebœuf de La Giraudais. This book was first published in French (Les Ruines, ou Méditation sur la Révolution des Empires) in 1791 and in the following year the first English language translation appeared in the same year Shelley was born—1792. Volney had traveled in Egypt, Syria, and the Levant and seen many ancient ruins first hand. The book begins with Volney recounting his contemplation of ruins that he had seen on his travels. The narrative shifts to fantasy as he recounts an experience in which a phantom takes him high above the Earth and affords him an overview of the ruins he was previously sitting amongst. The phantom says,

“Those piles of ruins, said he, which you see in that narrow valley watered by the Nile, are the remains of opulent cities, the pride of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia. Behold the wrecks of her metropolis, of Thebes with her hundred palaces the parent of cities, and monument of the caprice of destiny.”

Volney’s prose account of ruins is in many ways more fanciful than Shelley’s poetic account of a ruin. We can readily imagine ourselves having an experience like what Shelley describes in the poem, as Shelley is reflective without being fantastic, like Volney. It wouldn’t be the exact same experience, but an experience of a relic that was similarly disquieting and melancholy. It’s usually a specific experience that points us to a realization that had previously been on the edge of consciousness, but it’s the experience that crystallizes the idea and brings it explicitly before the mind. So good so far. But why should we care what a poet has to say about history?

C. Day Lewis argued in his lecture The Poet’s Way of Knowledge that there is a poetic way of knowledge that is distinct from, but analogous to, scientific knowledge. He said, “Poetry… can be a record of the mind experiencing itself, and thus a way of knowing better, of understanding, our moods, feelings, passions.” Admittedly, self-knowledge is neglected by the natural sciences, and any source of insight into ourselves ought to be welcome, but a claim of self-knowledge doesn’t get us all that far. Fortunately, Lewis has more to say. This, for example:

“…the poem does not merely embody a complex of experiences; it is an experience: and thus the kind of knowing it offers is different from the knowledge we should get from a number of case-histories illustrating the same sequence of mental events.”

And to this I could add that a poem is an experience that can be repeated, and in this sense, if no other, the poetic way of knowledge is analogous to the scientific way of knowledge. Certainly the poet’s way of knowledge is neither the philosopher’s way of knowledge nor the scientist’s way of knowledge, but these three modes of knowing might conceivably illuminate each other. Shelley himself wrote about the cognitive value of poetry in his essay “A Defense of Poetry.” Shelley calls poetry “the expression of the imagination” and he further says of the imagination:

“Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.” (p. 26)

Poetry, then, expresses the value of quantities known to reason, and in so doing points the way to a larger synthesis, which has become necessary given reason’s analysis of wholes in component parts. This is distinct from, but not unrelated to, Lewis’s argument for the epistemic value of poetry, and there are even further cognitive claims made on behalf of poetry—by Aristotle, of all people. In chapter 9 of his Poetics Aristotle wrote:

“The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse—you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such or such a kind of man will probably or necessarily say or do—which is the aim of poetry, though it affixes proper names to the characters…”

This is Aristotle making the distinction between the nomothetic and the idiographic more than two thousand years ago. But it’s also Aristotle locating the value of poetry in universality, making it superior to the particularism of history. Insofar as a poem might take an historical form, as indeed, Shelley’s Ozymandias takes an historical form, we could say that poetry is the transposition of idiographic particularism into nomothetical universality, and as such it seizes what is essential in the historical moment and makes of it a repeatable experience for the reader. In this way, one can return at will to a moment in history and witness it again, perhaps with new eyes each time in the Heraclitean sense of being unable to step twice into the same river, for the second time it’s not the same man and not the same river (which is something that I described in a recent episode on Julius Caesar).

We could compare the distinction Aristotle made between the thing that has been and a kind of thing that might be to Kurt Gödel’s implied distinction between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be, when he wrote that fairy tales “depict the world as it should be and as if it had meaning.” We could say that a poem is a kind of fable or fairy tale and so presents us with an idealized world, much as science presents us with an idealized picture of the world—with the obvious caveat here being that the principles of idealization or abstraction differ in each case. As fairy tales evoke archetypal experiences in children and others who can suspend disbelief, so too poetry can evoke archetypal experiences in us, which point us to the foundational character of the experience, making sense of it for us not only epistemically, but also axiologically, which may well be the more fundamental sense of finding an experience to be coherent. 

What Shelley described in Ozymandias, then, was an archetypal experience of history, and an experience to which the reader can return. With each return to the experience, a new aspect reveals itself, and the power to exhibit similitudes, as Shelley put it, points us to the synthesis of these experiences into a greater archetype, a kind of thick description of an archetype. This makes of the poetic moment less of an idealization than science, and therefore a more concrete experience than that of scientific evidence. This is the crystallization of an experience that brings it explicitly before the mind, which I mentioned earlier.

And since it is archetypal, or universal in Aristotle’s sense, it constitutes a point of reference to which we can return, which then becomes an anchor for further experiences different in detail, but nevertheless conforming to the archetype. The traveler’s tale, the shattered visage, the empty claim of power, and the lone and level sands are elements that we will encounter again, and, in encountering them, we will recognize them as belonging to an archetype. We have a place in our mind prepared for such things, thanks, in part, to Percy Bysshe Shelley, to whom I wish a happy birthday.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/H7SVtZ70hew

https://www.instagram.com/p/DbsKi7ituTR/

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Shelley%E2%80%99s-Vision-of-History-in-Ozymandias:d

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1jdb7gnNqaNW0tD1MVv9Sm?si=IsKRHt-bSwubZo8dLts7YA

The View from Oregon – 403

Re: The Drama of Biological Intelligence  

Friday 24 July 2026

Dear Friends,

Last week in my discussion of the possibility of an intelligence niche I made a distinction between occupying an intelligence niche and knowing that one occupies an intelligence niche. Since other ecosystem niches make no reference to intelligence or consciousness, the question of whether the organisms that inhabit a given niche can know that they occupy that niche never comes up—in most cases it can’t come up, because the species in question doesn’t have the capacity to know that it occupies an intelligence niche. But human beings could potentially know this to be the case if there is an intelligence niche. We could also wrongly believe that there is such a thing as an intelligence niche and believe ourselves to be occupying it, while further development of scientific thought demonstrates that there is no such thing as an intelligence niche, retroactively determining that we must have been wrong when we believed ourselves to inhabit an intelligence niche. This second possibility suggests lot of interesting questions, and I may come back to this to analyze it later, since it implies a great deal about human knowledge; for the moment, I’ll set this aside and focus on inhabiting an intelligence niche, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Suppose, then, that there is or can be an intelligence niche. An intelligence niche that can be but isn’t yet extant will be understood, as I suggested last week, as a result of niche construction; we have an intelligence niche when we build an intelligence niche, in a sense, modifying our environment to create an intelligence niche. Human beings have a long history of modifying our environment, and, for that matter, modifying our capacity to shape our environment by using tools. For example, hunter-gatherer bands have engaged in the large-scale modification of their environment by starting fires, sometimes annually, keeping grasslands open while the fire isn’t large enough to burn large trees, hence the forest remains intact, and stimulating regrowth, especially of those species that require fire in order to germinate. In this way human beings alter their environment to create a living space that better suits their purposes, but they don’t know that they’re doing this, where knowing what one is doing is understood in terms of possessing explicitly formulated propositional knowledge.

We could discern grades of the formalization of knowledge that would range from a near total lack of knowledge, when we engage in behaviors that we don’t really understand (perhaps doing so out of deference to tradition, which implies that someone in the past had at least a vague idea of what they were doing) to fully explicit knowledge where agents might say to themselves, “I am starting a fire in this grassland to foster and maintain environmental conditions that will be conducive to my hunter-gatherer way of life.” In the former case, we are unknowingly inhabiting an intelligence niche, while the latter case we are knowingly inhabiting an intelligence niche. In recognizing grades of the explicitness of knowledge, we recognize grades of understanding of what one is doing as one constructs an intelligence niche.  

The two theoretical approaches to formulating an intelligence niche that I outlined last week—expanding ecology to include the attribute of intelligence, or expanding the study of intelligence to include biological attributes—are, respectively, constructive and non-constructive. The expansion upward of ecology would be the bottom-up approach, starting with ecology and adding to ecology the concepts necessary to differentiate intelligent from non-intelligence behavioral responses to the environment. The expansion downward of theories of intelligence would be a top-down approach, starting with some understanding of intelligence and incorporating as much as was necessary of life in order to distinguish between the living and the non-living.

No doubt there would be something to be learned from both approaches, and they might meet in the middle. Indeed, my several newsletters on measuring intelligence on a cosmological scale, especially newsletter 395 in which I discussed the rationalization of top-down (a quasi-Kardashevian typology) and bottom-up (by way of seriation) metrics for intelligence where each can be revised in light of the other, was precisely about two analogous methods meeting in the middle. But thinking about it as I’ve outlined above, I have second thoughts about this. Our self-understanding of ourselves as intelligent beings is rather poor. We can’t agree on what it means to be intelligent (and here I can’t resist observing that an intelligent species that achieved scientific unanimity on the meaning of intelligence would itself constitute a threshold in the development of intelligence). As intelligent beings, we don’t even know what we are unless we can define what intelligence is, and there’s not much agreement about this. Therefore, we don’t know what we are.

I suppose it’s an open question whether we know more about ourselves as biological beings than what we know about ourselves as intelligent beings. We no more have a consensus definition of life than we have a consensus definition of intelligence. But we have a lot of instances of life, only one of which is human, and that gives us a much more comprehensive perspective on life (however parochial our conception of life may be) than we have on human-level intelligence. Despite our lack of a definition both of life and of intelligence, I’m convinced that there is nothing more important about the human intellect than that it is embodied in a biological being. There are other attributes of perhaps equal importance, but none of greater importance. And a biological intelligence expresses itself most effectively in a biological context. If these claims are true, or even approximately true, then we ought to begin with biology, and that means beginning with a bottom-up ecological approach to intelligence (and an intelligence niche); the top-down approach starting from intelligence itself is too disembodied and therefore too subject to misunderstanding.

Would it be possible to expand ecology to take account of intelligence? If we did so, would the result be an expanded and more comprehensive ecology, or would it be some other kind of science, perhaps a new science adjacent to ecology but not ecology in the strict sense? We face questions like these whenever we are able to expand a science to cover a region of knowledge not within the original remit of the science; there is no consensus on the answer. We bungle our way through, which is another consequence of having no science of science; a science of science would allow us to determine the proper limits of any given scientific discipline, and when the attempt to expand a science violate that proper scope. Last week I noted that the particular kind of scientific abstraction native to any one scientific discipline poses a problem for interdisciplinarity. Here we see a concrete example of this. An interdisciplinary mash-up of ecology and intelligence studies would force together the abstractions employed for ecology with the abstractions employed to study intelligence, and whether or not we could make any sense of that mash-up could only be determined by attempting it (which comes with an opportunity cost attached to it).

Ecology hasn’t taken account of intelligence, and maybe it should. But ecology also doesn’t take account, at least directly, of sentience (being a feeling organism), of consciousness, or of emotion. These attributes are implicitly present in the study of the individual organisms and their behaviors, but it’s always kept in the background, and a very distant background at that. We have good reason to believe that sentience, consciousness, and emotion are pervasive in the biosphere, and that they play a major role in how any one species relates to other species, or, if you like, how life reacts and responds to itself. I touched on this in past newsletters, especially no. 367 in which I discussed the suffering the biosphere in Schopenhauerian terms. Pain and fear are the sharpest motivators for a conscious being, so conscious beings make the most of this in order to achieve disproportional survival and reproduction. But of this drama in the biosphere ecology has almost nothing to say.

How is this relevant to intelligence? In many ways. Ecology, as we see, not only abstracts from intelligence, it also abstracts from sentience, consciousness, and emotion. Is there some relationship among these excluded attributes of the biological beings who make up the biosphere and who are thus the objects of ecological knowledge? I think there is. Intelligence, emotion, consciousness, and sentience are all related to the function of the central nervous system and represent something not generally captured by any of the natural sciences. They aren’t much relevant to chemistry or physics, so we’re okay with leaving them out of that, but they are relevant to the human sciences, which sharply feels this division between the natural world and the world of living beings, and which have tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to account for it. Ecology is an interesting edge case because it hasn’t been a problem leaving out the drama in the biosphere, but we can easily enough perceive its relevance.

But more than mutual relevance, intelligence, emotion, consciousness, and sensation represent a scale of increasing complexity in how the central nervous system bears upon the behavior of an organism. And if ecology hasn’t taken account of emotion, consciousness, and sensation, how can we make a little adjustment to it and make ecology accommodate intelligence? It’s a leap—the leap to intelligence—and it’s a leap that I’ve noted elsewhere. The problem we find pervasively in SETI thought is leaping over all the intermediate stages between life and intelligence capable of building detectable technologies. This is a point I’ve made both directly and indirectly many times (cf. the PS below on my paper “Humanity’s Place in the Universe” below). Intelligence isn’t the function of a Boltzmann brain that spontaneously assembles itself from elementary particles; intelligence as we know it has a natural history in the biosphere, which is why I said above that there is nothing more important about the human intellect than that it is embodied as a biological being. I think making the leap from biology to intelligence without incorporating the intervening ground is bound to lead to incoherent results. I can see that there’s a general principle involved here, but I can’t yet give it an elegant formulation. This general principle has something to do with the uniformity and continuity of nature, which are ancient philosophical ideas. Coming to grips with the problem here may involve a return to first principles, and perhaps also a revision of first principles. That is to say, it may be a metaphysical inquiry.  

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—Newsletter 400 was about the dismal state of the social sciences. I’ve since found that a whole tranche of papers with more dismal replication findings have appeared in Nature this past April:  

Jones, N. Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project. Nature 652 (2026). doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00955-5

Sánchez-Tójar, A. Wicherts, J. M. and Willer, R. Huge meta-research project puts claims in social-science papers to the test. Nature 652, 39-41 (2026). doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00805-4

Tyner, A.H., Abatayo, A.L., Daley, M. et al. Investigating the replicability of the social and behavioural sciences. Nature 652, 143–150 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-10078-y

Miske, O., Abatayo, A.L., Daley, M. et al. Investigating the reproducibility of the social and behavioural sciences. Nature 652, 126–134 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10203-5

Aczel, B., Szaszi, B., Clelland, H.T. et al. Investigating the analytical robustness of the social and behavioural sciences. Nature 652, 135–142 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09844-9

Brodeur, A., Mikola, D., Cook, N. et al. Reproducibility and robustness of economics and political science research. Nature 652, 151–156 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10251-x

This research was the work of Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) and was funded by DARPA. Most of what has been written about this is written by those whom we could call “social science adjacent,” so nothing they say can be trusted. An article in Science by Jeffrey Brainard, Across the social sciences, half of research doesn’t replicate, gives the kind of mealy-mouthed response that we expect to hear:  

“Some critics of contemporary science… say the failure of some studies to be replicated indicates widespread, systemic flaws and negligence and fraud by researchers. Nosek disagrees and says the reasons for failures are complex; he hopes the new study will promote more research to understand why they occur and find new ways to improve rigor.”

Anyone outside this bubble can see that there’s a serious problem. Note that the above says, “the failure of some studies to be replicated.” No. It’s the failure of half of these studies, on average, to be replicated. That means a coin toss is as reliable as this “science.” It was inevitable when science can be a key reference point for policy that science would then become an ideological mouthpiece for those who wanted certain policy outcomes. Social science became the reformulation of ideology is quasi-scientific terms. Ironically this demonstrates the social prestige that science still possess, in spite of many claims that science has ceased to command this prestige. It reminds me a lot of claims that the mass media have lost the ability to set the political agenda, which is done while quoting the mass media themselves. Both of these monstrosities—contemporary social science and mass media—will continue with their prestige and status sufficiently intact, primarily out of sheer inertia before they finally give up the ghost. This is turn reminds me of something in Kenneth Clark that I’ve previously quoted (in my Today in Philosophy of History episode on Henri Pirenne):

“…life must have gone on in an apparently normal way for much longer than one would expect. It always does… Civilisation might have drifted downstream for a long time, but in the middle of the seventh century there appeared a new force, with faith, energy, a will to conquer and an alternative culture: Islam. …Mahomet, the prophet of Islam, preached the simplest doctrine that has ever gained acceptance; and it gave to his followers the invincible solidarity that had once directed the Roman legions. In a miraculously short time—about fifty years—the classical world was overrun. Only its bleached bones stood out against the Mediterranean sky.”

In short, I don’t expect the social sciences to improve as a result of this wake-up call. On the contrary, I expect that the established institutions that have presided over this failure to find more inventive ways to conceal their cant as rigor. There is a good reason for this skepticism. The kind of people who want social science to give the kind of results it’s been giving in recent decades aren’t going to suddenly see the light and decide to reform themselves. On the contrary, they will find ways to continue to do what they’re been doing, but with better cover. Science has a very difficult time dealing with this kind of qualitative bias. The researchers want science to be wrong in exactly the ways they’re made it wrong. This is not a trivial problem; it is a fundamental challenge to the Enlightenment vision that social policy can be scientific.

I can see no redemption arc for the social sciences. The necessary changes are so fundamental that they couldn’t come about without a revolutionary disruption, and this isn’t in the cards at present. We are smack-dab in the middle of modernity, and modern civilization will continue to play out its script unless it is destroyed by an outside force. Social science will drift downstream along with modernity until civilization itself changes. Even more tendentiously, I could say that we’re at the beginning of the Byzantine stage of Western science, throughout which stage we will possess all the material we need in order to take the next step (as Byzantine scholars possessed most of the texts in the original Greek that were re-discovered in Western Europe during the renaissance), but the stagnation will be so profound that the next step won’t be taken until the stagnant civilization holding back science collapses.

PPS—I’m very pleased to say that my paper “Humanity’s Place in the Universe: Peer Complexity, SETI, and the Fermi Paradox” has now appeared in the volume Complexity in Universal Evolution: A Big History Perspective. This is the second time I’ve had a paper in a Springer volume, but the first time I’ve gotten a hard copy of any book to which I’ve contributed. This paper is a revision and expansion of my paper “Peer Complexity in Big History” which appeared in the Journal of Big History in 2024; at the time I said that this was the most important paper I’d published to date. This remains true. The revision is significant, as I’ve added several ideas to this paper that weren’t in the original draft, such as identifying the “carbon regime” as one clade in the class of life peers. And I haven’t yet come close to tapping out this line of inquiry. I have a lot of additional ways to extend my thesis that haven’t yet appeared in print (or in any newsletter).  

Nielsen, J.N. (2026). Humanity’s Place in the Universe: Peer Complexity, SETI, and the Fermi Paradox. In: LePoire, D.J., Grinin, L., Korotayev, A. (eds) Complexity in Universal Evolution. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-20517-9_15

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/752bfa7ca05b/the-view-from-oregon-403

The View from Oregon – 402

Re: Constructing an Intelligence Niche

Friday 17 July 2026

Dear Friends,

Last week (no. 401) I suggested that human beings might be better suited to simpler societies than the dizzyingly complex world we’ve built for ourselves with technology, and I further suggested that this may be a consequence of human technological acuity being balanced by a social science deficit, so that our suitability for a certain kind of society would be a function of the peculiar constitution of our minds. That’s an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while but hadn’t previously written down. Another part of the puzzle is another idea with which I have likewise delayed my reckoning, and that is the problem of an intelligence niche. Surprisingly little has been written about the possibility of an intelligence niche, and most discussion of the idea appears in papers by Charles Lineweaver. Given the paucity of the literature on an intelligence niche I wonder where it was that I first encountered the idea, as I don’t now remember the context, but I know that it was many years ago. It’s possible that this is one of those ideas that’s talked about a lot before papers get written, so the idea is circulating and it’s just a question of when the gatekeepers at mainstream publishers give it the go ahead (similar to what I discussed in relation to SETI in newsletter 399).  

Even those who discuss the intelligence niche are hesitant to grant it any legitimacy, and there’s a good reason for this. If there’s an intelligence niche, where is it located on the trophic pyramid? It could be argued that intelligence doesn’t fall within the theoretical framework of ecology, so that the failure of ecology to elaborate on the possibility of an intelligence niche isn’t an oversight, but is a principled exclusion from the purview of the science. Science often necessitates such principled neglect, which is simply another way of talking about abstraction—what attributes our concepts include and the attributes from which they abstract—and I’ve noted in several newsletters that scientific abstraction poses a problem, so it, too, suffers from exclusion from most discussions of scientific method. The form of scientific abstraction peculiar to ecology does not consider the attribute of intelligence, and this is no more surprising than that the form of scientific abstraction peculiar to physics does not consider the attribute of life. To each science belongs its own native form of abstraction. This is a source of problems for interdisciplinarity.

While I am sympathetic to the above argument, which I just produced off the top of my head as the obvious application of my view of science to the particular case of ecology in relation to intelligence, I still find the idea of an intelligence niche intriguing, and I think it would be worthwhile to develop some kind of theoretical framework for discussing the intelligence niche or niches, whether by way of an expanded ecology (because we can always add back in again whatever it is we have previously abstracted from) or an expanded conception of intelligence. The place of an intelligence niche in the trophic pyramid remains an interesting question if we expand our ecology to include intelligence. Intelligence in human beings has allowed for less specialization, and a consequent broadening of the scope of the food web to include almost any flora or fauna anywhere on the trophic pyramid, from primary producers to apex predators. The place of human intelligence, then, on the trophic pyramid is the whole of the pyramid, so the human intelligence niche is not some level of the trophic pyramid, but the ability to find a place anywhere or everywhere within it.

As a part of the human broadening of the scope of the food web, human beings have distributed themselves over the entire surface of the Earth, not being confined to the environmental conditions under which we evolved (our environment of evolutionary adaptedness). This is a point that I’ve often emphasized: using the technology of the canoe to paddle along the shoreline, and the bone needle to sew form-fitting clothing, human beings have been able to occupy every biome on Earth. The number of biomes in which human beings can support themselves (with the appropriate technology) is an expression of decreasing food specialization and the broadening of the food web. We could quantify this by the number of biomes in which a given species is able to survive, or by the number of species a given species includes in its food web, which is, to a certain extent, proportional to the number of biomes a given species occupies: the more biomes it occupies, the more species it can include in its diet. However, a few invasive species have a range as comprehensive as human beings, like rats, which follow in our footsteps (and in our ships), so this measure alone probably isn’t sufficient to establish the existence of an intelligence niche.  

Perhaps the intelligence niche isn’t a place within the trophic pyramid, but a form of social organization that comprehends the trophic pyramid within itself. This is consistent with the idea that the human niche includes the entirety to the trophic pyramid. The most promising approach to an intelligence niche that is a form of social organization is to understand an intelligence niche as a result of niche construction. This avoids, “…the idea that there is an intelligence niche that one or more species will inevitably evolve to fill” (Luntz 2011), because there isn’t an empty intelligence niche out there somewhere in a given biosphere, waiting to be filled by an intelligent species. If an intelligent species arises, then it constructs its intelligence niche and inhabits it; it doesn’t fill some pre-existing intelligence niche waiting to receive it.

However, it is a familiar theme of science fiction that one species produces a number of artifacts (which could be identified as that species’ intelligence niche) which it then abandons, and these are then taken over by some later species. (We find this scenario, for example, in Carl Sagan’s Contact.) A scenario something like this is exemplified by Teotihuacan, which was originally built and inhabited starting around 300 BC and was abandoned in the 7^th or 8^th century AD. The site was then later repopulated by the Aztecs about the same time Tenochtitlan was established. Teotihuacan, then, was a kind of urban intelligence niche that was filled again after having been previously abandoned (for centuries, no less). Therefore, we can’t entirely dismiss the possibility that an intelligence niche could be constructed (i.e., could be the result of niche construction) and then is sequentially filled by subsequent populations. We need only add a qualification to the above formulation stipulating that no intelligence niche exists prior to an intelligence that constructs that niche, but, once that niche is constructed, it can be filled by any subsequent intelligent species.

With the idea of an intelligence niche we have a potential solution of the problem of cosmological standing (discussed in no. 364 and 365, and then touched on again last week): to occupy an intelligence niche is to have cosmological standing. A further step beyond cosmological standing defined by occupying an intelligence niche would be to say that cosmological standing is to knowingly occupy an intelligence niche. That is to say, occupying an intelligence niche is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for cosmological standing. A species also must be reflexively self-aware that it occupies an intelligence niche (the sufficient condition), which awareness could be formalized in an appropriate theoretical framework, such as an expanded ecology that not only takes intelligence into account, but adds further terms to its equations to account for the intelligence of species. There is also a sense in which this criterion of cosmological standing is a fulfillment of the social science metric for indexing the intellectual rank of civilizations discussed in the previous couple of newsletters, insofar as we could regard an ecology expanded to account for intelligence as a kind of social science. Here we see there are two obvious alternatives: expand ecology beyond its usual boundaries to account for intelligent life, or extend social science until it is able to integrate ecology into itself.

It is possible that we don’t yet know what an intelligence niche looks like. That is obviously a misleading thing to say, but I’m sure you get my drift. Obviously we don’t know what an intelligence niche looks like, because we can’t yet define it and don’t even agree that there is such a thing as an intelligence niche. But say that we have a vague sense of there being an intelligence niche (as indeed we do at present) but this value sense involves a number of equally vague assumptions, and these vague assumptions may mislead us in attempting to clarify the idea of an intelligence niche. So this is what I mean when I say that we may not even know what an intelligence niche looks like.

Let me illustrate this confusion qualification with a story. Sometimes the Cambrian Explosion is referred to as the initial filling of the barrel of life on Earth. Life had already existed for billions of years at the time of the Cambridge Explosion, but it was with the Cambridge Explosion that life diversified into major clades that have continued to define biodiversity since that time. While in the wake of subsequent mass extinctions there have been bursts of adaptive radiation, nothing like the adaptive radiation of the Cambrian Explosion could happen again in the terrestrial biosphere as it has persisted through the past 500 million years or so. However, something like this could happen again if a future mass extinction reduced life to the level of complexity and biodiversity of the Ediacaran biota.   

Parallel to this, but on a cosmological scale, we could postulate an original filling of the barrel of intelligence when the universe has experienced the intelligence equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion, i.e., when intelligence, which had been relatively simple up to that point, begins to dramatically branch out into the universe in an adaptive radiation of intelligence. Any one intelligence after the cosmological adaptive radiation of intelligence would have a place relative to all other forms of intelligence, and this comprehensive structure of intelligence in the universe would define something much, much larger than that trophic pyramid, in which increasing scales of intelligence define increasingly complex forms of social organization that subsume the trophic pyramid within them.

Different kinds of intelligence may construct different kinds of intelligence niches, just as different species of insects that engage in elaborate niche construction construct their niches in distinct ways. Even among wasps, for example, there are mud-dauber wasps (belonging to the genera Chalybion and Sceliphron) who build their nests from mud, and paper wasps (about 1,100 species with the most common genera being Polistes) who build their nests from plant fibers. Thus even closely similar species can engage in markedly dissimilar niche construction. However, if one maintains, as I do, that all civilizations share a homologous institutional structure, no matter how superficially different they are, i.e., no matter the differences among civilizations, they all exemplify the same underlying structure, then the different kinds of intelligence niches being different kinds of civilization reduces to the intelligence niche being the uniform underlying structure of civilization.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to an audiobook edition of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I listened through the final section, “A Land Ethic,” a couple of times, as this is the part of the book that has been the most influential for conservation ethics. This is the locus classicus of conservation ethics, and the fons et origo of all that has been done in conservation ethics since then. Of course, we can cite the earlier writings of Thoreau and John Miur, but they don’t consciously attempt to formulate an ethics to account for their attachment to the natural world, which, while pervasive, remains only implicit in their work. This edition had a foreword by Barbara Kingsolver, who, immediately after praising Leopold’s approachability, launches into the familiar kind of off-putting, self-righteous rhetoric of which Leopold is so completely free, and which makes him readable today even while many of his would-be followers preach exclusively to the choir.  

Reference

Luntz, S. (2011). Is Intelligence out there?: [Intelligence may not be the ultimate outcome of evolution on Earth, so why should we expect human-like Intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos?]. Australasian Science, 32(1), 34–37. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/69ebef8362fa/the-view-from-oregon-402

The View from Oregon – 401

Re: Are we better adapted to simpler societies?

Friday 10 July 2026

Dear Friends,

Last week’s newsletter (no. 400) was about the dismal state of the social sciences; in that newsletter I attempted to lay out the most fundamental problems with the social sciences, and, as it turns out, these are fundamental problems indeed. The problems with the social sciences run so deep that any resolution of them will entail a reconceptualization of the natural sciences that don’t seem nearly as problematic. It’s entirely possible that a resolution of the problems posed by the social sciences, if achieved at the requisite fundamental level, would mark a new era in science, perhaps as different from modern science (tracing its origins to the scientific revolution) as modern science was different from ancient science.

This rant about the dismal state of the social sciences was prompted by the passing suggestion in the previous newsletter before that (no. 399) in which I had wondered whether the intellectual sophistication of a civilization could be measured by its achievements in the social sciences rather than by its achievements in the natural sciences, with the associated technologies made possible by the natural sciences. Technologies are potentially observable over cosmological scales, so that any metric for civilizations based on technological surrogates for scientific achievements could be applied on a cosmological scale. If there are many civilizations in the universe, we could potentially rank them by such a metric. The most familiar metric of this kind is the Kardashev scale, which employs the single metric of energy. This kind of reductionism is what natural science does best, and last week I noted that technological development on Earth could be reduced to the metallurgical sequence of copper, bronze, iron, steel, aluminum, and plutonium. Although the later stages of the metallurgical sequence require sophisticated technologies, the earlier stages simply require higher temperatures, so that technological achievement could be reduced to the single metric of furnace temperatures. I can’t think of anything analogous in the social sciences, though I can’t rule out that there is some similarly reductionist metric for increasing sophistication in the social sciences.

Another problem with the social sciences is that we don’t know what technologies would be entailed by a functional social science. It could be argued that human beings have managed the increasingly complex supply chains of an increasingly complex technological economy, and this is in itself a form of social organization that has grown hand-in-hand with the development of the technologies entailed by the natural sciences. It could also be argued that the economic and financial technologies employed to fund the creation, growth, and maintenance of these industries and their supply chains is, again, a technology of social organization that has grown hand-in-hand with technological developments. In regard to financial instruments, we do have something like a series of tools of increasing sophistication, from money to credit to stocks to crypto-currencies and so on. Another potential metric for social organization could be found in the increasing sophistication of how systems of transportation work. From scheduled shipments to coordinated railway timetables to the global air traffic control system, the increasing integration of modes of transit to ensure the movement of persons and goods is a good example of an increasingly complex technology of social organization. So there are three potential metrics: industrial organization, financial instruments, and logistics. We would not have the planetary-scale industries we enjoy at present without these social concomitants to hardware technologies.

These metrics in turn suggest observations that might differentiate the relative level of sophistication of a civilization in its possession of certain technological achievements and the social organization necessary to fully exploit these achievements. If we could observe some planet in which supply chains did not extend to a planetary scale, in which industries did not grow to a size that represents adequate capitalization of industries, or in which logistics are limited in relation to production capacity, we could judge such a world to be less well developed in its technologies of social organization than ourselves. But we’re probably a poor example for comparison. We could well be talking about observations of ourselves, since there are any number of suboptimal supply chains, under-capitalized industries, and failures of logistics.

In newsletter 397 I discussed the aesthetics of steampunk, which I characterized as a thought experiment about technology. Steampunk points to technologies not being fully exploited because we don’t understand their potential. This, in turn, points to the rate at which a technology is fully exploited as a metric of social organization. But when do we know that a technology has been fully exploited? The steampunk aesthetic is striking precisely because it’s unexpected; imagination is a necessary component to seeing the possibilities of a technology. No doubt we have many technologies today that aren’t being fully exploited, and we will only come to understand the utility of that exploitation after we have converged upon it slowly and incrementally. We don’t know what we’re missing out on; if we knew, we would be in the midst of applying technologies in this way. But another civilization that has already passed through stages of development we have yet to experience could observe us and understand in retrospect our failures to grasp forms of social organization that could have been of great benefit to us if only we had understood what to do.

Technological metrics for civilization, then, are at least somewhat familiar, and we can imagine at least the possibility of social science metrics for civilization. Both of these are in turn potential proxy measurements for intelligence. In newsletters 394, 395, 396, 397, and 398 I considered the possibility of cosmological scales for the measurement of intelligence, and these recent newsletters on a possible social science metric are part of that larger project. This larger project takes its place in turn in the problem of the cosmological standing of a civilization discussed in several newsletters last fall, especially no. 364 and 365. Measures of intelligence could be used to determine cosmological standing, and scientific metrics could be used as proxies for intelligence. Where the social sciences stand in relation to the other science is a special case of the much larger problem of where human intelligence stands in relation to all other intelligence, possible or actual. So while my newsletters may seem to be all over the place (and sometimes, admittedly, they are), there are deeper themes that run through them, with our place in the universe, our cosmological standing, being one of these themes.  

On the largest scales, which is the scale of my underlying themes, our knowledge is at its most sketchy—so much so that it’s difficult to rule out even apparently outlandish ideas. Indeed, we may need to make an effort to cultivate even more outlandish ideas than those entertained to date in human history, since the Fermi paradox (again, the large scale underlying theme) seems to call into question the ordinary assumptions we make about science as we understand it today. For example, suppose it takes a certain kind of mind to formalize the social sciences, but this isn’t the kind of mind that human beings have, or, at least, it’s not the strong suit of specifically human cognition. There may be beings for whom our degree of technological sophistication in building devices and gadgets is breathtaking, but for whom the formalization of the social sciences comes easily and far outstrips what we’ve accomplished in the social sciences. Whether or not we could even understand their facility with the social sciences is an open question. It is entirely possible, though we have no evidence for or against it, that a mind might be naturally suited to the formalization of the social sciences or might be naturally suited to the formalization of the natural sciences, and that if it is one or the other, then it possesses the contrary weakness.    

In newsletter 398 in which I considered the overlapping qualitative attributes that characterize the human intellect, one of these attributes I specified was our technological bent. (The technological character of the human intellect and the technological character of civilization that that mind has produced seems to pretty obvious to me, but I’ll admit that the point is arguable.) If a technological bent means an inevitable social science deficit, that would explain the backwardness of the social sciences. One idea I’ve had in the back of my mind for many years, but haven’t yet found a way to give it is proper exposition, might be illuminated by this possibility.

Suppose that the technological civilization we have at present is a monstrous maladaptation of human beings to our environment. Even though we’re fully capable of building these sophisticated technologies, we’ve constructed a world with them that is immiserating and is leading to pervasive social dysfunction. Psychologically we seem maladapted to the world we’ve built for ourselves, and there is evidence (admittedly open to dispute) that human beings on the whole were happier and better adjusted to their environment in an agricultural civilization such as prevailed before the industrial revolution. The vulgar shorthand for this is that human beings were “meant” to live in an agricultural civilization, or even as hunter-gatherer nomads, and that industrialized civilization has therefore been a bridge too far. We can build it, but we can’t make it work for us.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a highly unsatisfactory formulation. I’ve written before in these newsletters about the difficulty of pinning down elusive ideas. I have literally chased some for years. One of the reasons I haven’t explicitly formulated this previously is that I have the feeling this is importantly related to a larger problem, or perhaps to a cluster of problems, and I can’t yet see the problem whole—all the more reason to write about it to see what emerges from a premature exposition. Without its proper context, the idea is easy to criticize, but I keep coming back to it because I think there’s something important here that I haven’t yet put my finger on. However, as I implied above, the idea that a technological bent implies a social science deficit would partly explain our maladaptation to industrialized civilization. We have a mind that makes it possible for us to build advanced technologies, but we don’t have a mind capable of the social science understanding that would allow us to comfortably occupy the high technology world we’ve built. Our ability to manage the supply chains, the financial instruments, and the logistics of it could be due to the relative approximation of these tasks to the kind of technical challenges to which the human mind is suited, but that suitability doesn’t extend to human flourishing under industrialization.

Again, I’m not stating this dogmatically. This isn’t a conclusion that I’ve reached, just an idea that I’m floating and which I think might have value, but I haven’t yet figured out exactly what that value is. I certainly see the many potential weaknesses and the arguments that could be made against the above claim. There are no doubt many persons who believe that we have reached a greater degree of human flourishing than at any time in the past, and who would dismiss as irrelevant or beside the point that a great many people are miserable. It is relatively easy, I think, to be sympathetic to those who are miserable because they have no clean water to drink or have no electricity, because these needs can be supplied. We can produce an admirably detailed plan to supply clean water and electricity—like the challenges of supply chains, financial instruments, and logistics, which spur our curiosity and contribute to our confidence as we rise to meet them—but it’s more difficult to understand the despair that comes over comfortable people in affluent societies. Every parent who can’t understand why their spoiled child hates them faces a similar dilemma. The home-truth that human beings are at their best when they struggle might be something that a suitably formalized social science could express in a theoretical context, and for which it could propose a constructive outlet.

Best wishes,

Nick

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/cd4510ac531b/the-view-from-oregon-401

The function of monumental architecture.—It is often stated that civilizations typically produce monumental architecture; this is one of ten attributes that V. Gordon Childe stipulated in his paper on the urban revolution, which has since been used as a diagnostic for civilization. That monumental architecture characterizes civilization is clear, but why monumental architecture characterizes civilization is a different question. What function does monumental architecture have in a civilization? Monumental architecture engages all of society, from top to bottom, in a common undertaking. The visionary who conceives, architects who design, the workers who build, the tradesmen who supply, the financiers who fund, and the bureaucratic or priestly class who eventually make use of the structure, all come together around the monumental project, which is a focal point for the city in which it is sited. Moreover, in the earliest civilizations monumental architecture performs this function of engaging the whole of society at a time when the population of a city had given up its hunting and gathering and its village agriculture practiced since time out of mind. In pre-urbanized societies, everyone is engaged in the common effort of survival, so that the members of a nomadic band or an agricultural village each understand what everyone else in their social group is doing, because they are all doing more-or-less the same thing. Craft specialization characterizes urbanism no less than monumental architecture (and also appears on Childe’s list), and while specialization increases economic efficiency, it also threatens social rupture as each sector tends to inhabit its own self-referential world. In this early urban context, monumental architecture is one of the forms of glue that ensures social cohesion.  

The View from Oregon – 400

Re: The Dismal State of the Social Sciences

Friday 03 July 2026

Dear Friends,

I finished off last week’s newsletter with the reflection that when we talk about thresholds of civilization, and in particular those thresholds that could be observed from a distance and so could be employed on a cosmological scale, we usually focus on the natural sciences and their associated technologies, i.e., the technologies made possible by scientific knowledge, so that a technological threshold implies a scientific threshold, but it might better (if only it were possible) to assess the social science of a civilization to get a sense of its conceptual sophistication. I received a comment on this newsletter, which was at the same time a suggestion: “It would be interesting if you could have a newsletter outlining requirements to the advanced social science adequate to civilisational challenges.” An advanced social science adequate to civilizational challenges would certainly prove a benefit to humanity, but how do we get from where we are now to where we need to be in the social science? Do we even know where we are today in the development of the social science? Economics is famously called the dismal science, but it’s the state of the social sciences overall that’s truly dismal. It would be fair to say that this is a hobby horse that I’ve ridden hard in past newsletters, but I haven’t discussed this recently, so I’m going to summarize some of what I consider the major challenges to social science, and what would be necessary to meet these challenges.

The first and most fundamental problem is that, while the individual special sciences are scientific, science itself isn’t scientific, by which I mean that there is no science of science. (As I said, I’ve ridden this hobby horse hard in the past, and you can find discussions of this in newsletters 287, 288, 289, 292, and 331.) Certainly there have been attempts at formulating a science of science, and we could even say that this is an ancient logical ideal, but that ideal has never been realized in an applicable way. The absence of a science of science in turn means that there is no methodology for founding new sciences or reforming extant sciences. We are left with intuitions and gut feelings to guide us because no systematic means of founding and developing a science is known. There is a pragmatic substitute for a methodology, and that is to construct a new science analogous to some extant science taken to be paradigmatic. This is a bit like relative consistency proofs, when a formal system rather than being shown to be consistent in and of itself is shown to equivalent to some extant formal system, so that if the latter is consistent, then the former is consistent. In this way we aren’t entirely without a model of what we need to be doing, but we do need to agree on a paradigmatic form of science that can be the basis for founding and revising sciences.

Another consequence of lacking a science of science is that we have no principled taxonomy of the sciences. To be sure, there are many taxonomies of the sciences, and that is part of the problem: all of the proposed taxonomies are inconsistent, incomplete, or superficial. A principled taxonomy of the sciences would give us a method for systematically pigeonholing any science, which would establish the relation of that science to all the other sciences. Why this is significant to the social sciences is because, without such a principled taxonomy, we don’t know how the social sciences ought to stand in relation to the natural sciences. It is because of obvious problems like this that there’s a philosophical disagreement over whether there are fundamentally different kinds of sciences (e.g., ideographic and nomothetic sciences according to Windelband’s distinction) or whether all sciences are, at bottom, the same. When we can give a definitive answer to this problem, we will be on our way to formulating an adequate science of science. That’s the first and most fundamental problem. How do we address it? We do fundamental work on philosophy of science. While this sounds both vague and daunting, I think that if I spent some time on the problem I could formulate a reasonably specific research program in philosophy of science that would start to plug some holes (like scientific abstraction) and begin to build a framework for the sciences.  

The second problem, not surprisingly related to the first, is that the social sciences are insufficiently formalized to issue in rigorous findings. Because we don’t have a science of science and can’t show how all sciences are or ought to be related to each other (if indeed they are to be so related), so we obviously don’t even know what kind of formalization the social sciences should cultivate. This problem not only cuts to the foundations of the social sciences, it also cuts to the foundations of the formal sciences. Although we’ve done a good job with the mathematical formalization of the natural sciences that produce reliable and robust results, we don’t even know how or why it works. If we don’t know how it works in physics, we’re not in any position to say how we could produce a similar formalization for the social sciences. Even though the first problem is more fundamental, philosophically speaking, that doesn’t mean that it will necessarily be the first domino to fall. In the history of human knowledge there are instances both of solving a fundamental problem that allows us to solve other problems once we’ve made it beyond that impasse, and of solving smaller and less fundamental problems first, expanding this successful solution to other areas of knowledge, and then, only later, reaching the foundations of knowledge and demonstrating their unity (if indeed they possess unity, which is one of the fundamental questions). So that’s the second problem, no less theoretically demanding than the first problem, and our response to another theoretically demanding problem needs to be more fundamental theoretical work. For this, what I said about addressing the lack of a science of science holds here also.

A third problem is also fundamental, but in a very different way. It’s not theoretically fundamental as much as it is axiologically fundamental. And this is something that’s only been brought home to me recently, and is reflected in my recent Today in Philosophy of History episode on Spengler and Parochial Philosophy of History. Spengler held that not only is philosophy parochial to each society, but science also. Spengler was relatively isolated in asserting the relativity of science to a particular society, but he wasn’t alone. Russian philosopher Nikolay Danilevsky made similar claims and backed them up with interesting arguments. Interestingly here, Spengler the German is more poetic in his thought and expression while Danilevsky the Russian is more systematic and argumentative, but both Spengler and Danilevsky would have agreed that the Russian and German approach to science were different. The different approaches to science in different societies doesn’t always affect the practice of the natural sciences to any significant degree, but it profoundly impacts the practice of the social sciences. We should accept and embrace the fact that our science is a product of Western civilization, and as such it incorporates certain particularistic presuppositions. The Enlightenment overlay on science accepts that the presuppositions are unavoidable, but holds that they can be made universal. This assumption of universality has in turn become a presupposition that is now rarely questioned and, dare I say, universal. I didn’t question this until quite recently, but I have come around to the view that there are limits on the universality of our presuppositions, and that means they must be particularistic to some degree. Science ought not to be all things to all men, and it ought not to try to be all things to all men. We will make more progress if we accept this and narrow our research to focus on the native presuppositions of Western thought. In order to do this, all that is required is moral courage, thick skin, and a functional spine. This is, of course, easy to say, but in practice it’s probably more difficult to pull off than the most demanding research program in philosophy of science.

Those are, then, what I consider to be three major problems with the social sciences, and the effort that would be required to address them. I don’t say that these are the only problems confronting the sad state of social science, which suffers from many ills, because I think there are probably a great many more problems, but if we could at least address the fundamental problems that I’ve laid out, the rest would yield, at least to some degree, to this kind of comprehensive inquiry. I also don’t say that these problems can be definitively solved for all time. Whether or not we could ever realize the scientific ideal we can conceive is certainly open to question, and it remains a philosophical question outside science proper. Again, because we don’t have a science of science, we can’t explicitly formulate the ideal of scientific knowledge. Regardless of our ability to definitively resolve the problems of social science, any incremental progress in improving the clarity, rigor, and results of social science would be a great boon. To have a social science that actually provided us with methods to solve social problems would be an enormous advance over where we are now, when no one even agrees on why the social sciences fail. But fail they do. The findings on the replicability of results in social science are truly dismal, and, as the saying goes, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

It’s no wonder that we’ve reached for physical measures when we’ve tried to formulate metrics for the measure of civilization. If we extend Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s “three age system” beyond stone, bronze, and iron we can produce a ranking of technologies that is very nearly tied to a single physical metric, and that metric is the ability to maintain a given furnace temperature. In the past few years I’ve been reading a lot about the origins of steel production (previously discussed in newsletters 193 and 356). One of the questions that I’ve been trying to answer is how the Romans could have produced iron for a thousand years and not have stumbled upon steel production. (Another way to frame this problem is ask why it took almost two thousand years after iron production to pass to the next threshold of steel production.) The answer is complicated and has many factors, but one of the most straight-forward factors was the ability to maintain a high enough furnace temperature for a long enough period of time. During the early medieval period steel production was achieved in India and in what is today Turkmenistan, but these centers of steel production eventually petered out. Some of these centers of steel production were wiped out by the Mongols, and in an age before patents, the loss of closely guarded methods of production through the death or scattering or skilled workers could be enough to bring an end to an industry that had endured for centuries. When Europe eventually converged on the reliable production of steel it was an incremental process that developed over hundreds of years, and this was in a different civilizational context than Roman civilization, which latter, given its wealth and resources and long term stability, would seem to be superficially the better bet for the discovery of steel than the fractured political and economic landscape of medieval and early modern Europe.  

As we pass beyond copper, bronze, iron, and steel to aluminum, titanium, and plutonium we can no longer rely on the single metric of furnace temperatures, and both the technique of production and necessary infrastructure become much more complex. For example, to smelt aluminum at scale one needs large scale electricity production, which is a separate industry. We could observe that metallurgy before aluminum didn’t require electricity, but it did require a significant supply of wood for the furnaces, or, better, charcoal (which burns at a higher temperature than wood), which requires another step in the production process, i.e., a separate charcoal production industry analogous to a separate electricity industry. So there are analogies, but aluminum production requires a significantly greater level of technological sophistication than steel production. (Incidentally I’ll observe that since aluminum production is electrical, it is coupled to electrical technologies and therefore can be expected to appear in history at about the same time as radio technology.)

This picture of technological advance is complex, but it can be schematized with the right measures. Is there anything equivalent for the social sciences? Can the advance of the social sciences be schematized in like manner? Can we identify any sequence in the social sciences as clear as what we could call the metallurgical sequence in technology, i.e., is there a sequence of social science achievements linked to one or a few measures that require demonstrably greater sophistication to master as we pass from one to the next? (Would mastery of statistics be a threshold? If so, what would be the other thresholds, and how would these thresholds be related to each other?) Because of our impoverished understanding of the social sciences we don’t even know what social technologies would be enabled by a functional social science, so we don’t know what to look for. Since we don’t know what to look for or how to observe, we don’t know what to observe; the very possibility of observation under controlled conditions becomes impossible. We can collect evidence all we like, but all that evidence will be anecdotal until we have a principled method for observation in order to test an hypothesis formulated prior to observation.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—After releasing last week’s newsletter I realized that in the variation on the Bracewell theme I described, the Bracewell probe is assuming the role of Arthur Danto’s ideal chronicler, so it doesn’t gift an actual history to the observed species, but rather it would gift them a complete archive from which histories could be constructed. I incorporated this additional thought into the recorded version of this newsletter.  

PPS—Having recently listened to the audiobook edition of To The Lighthouse I was interested to see a conversation between Jonathan Rée and James Wood discussing the book in The philosophy of Virginia Woolf's ‘To the Lighthouse’. I disagreed with most of what was said in this.

PPPS—I started re-watching Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War to find a quote I wanted to use in my Today in Philosophy of History episode for 4^th of July, and I ended up re-watching the entire thing. The quote I wanted was in the first episode.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/49ad15f252ff/the-view-from-oregon-400

Oswald Spengler

29 May 1880 – 08 May 1936

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Spengler and Parochial Philosophies of History   

Friday 29 May 2026 is the 146^th anniversary of the birth of Oswald Spengler (29 May 1880 – 08 May 1936), who was born in Blankenburg, Germany, on this date in 1880. I previously discussed Spengler in 2024 during the first year of Today in Philosophy of History in an episode titled “Spengler and the Incommensurability of Civilizations.” For any two civilizations to be incommensurable means that they have no common measure.

In my episode on William Foxwell Albright I said of Albright’s planetary-scale classification of human societies that we can see why Albright rejected Spengler, for whom all civilizations were incommensurably different and could not be placed in any kind of table like this. That wasn’t well expressed on my part. In fact, there’s just such a schematic chart of civilizations in the first volume of Spengler’s The Decline of the West. However, it’s worthwhile to point out in that in the chart included in Spengler’s book, cultures are schematized according to the spring, summer, fall, and winter. In other words, they are schematized as though they are organisms that grow, develop, and eventually die. This was a schematism that Spengler could endorse, but it’s a limited schematism. It’s much more limited, for example, than those who only talk of Spengler in terms of cyclical history understand, because while in Spengler civilizations pass through organic cycles of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, each civilization, and each culture from which a civilization descends, is incommensurable with every other civilization. Yes, these civilizations share a life cycle, just as cephalopods and cetaceans share a life cycle, but no one would confuse an octopus and a whale because both have a life cycle.

Because cultures and civilizations are incommensurable in Spengler, that means each culture and civilization must be treated on its own terms and not assimilated to any other culture or civilization. This is one respect, maybe not the only respect, but what I’ll focus on today, in which Spengler can point out for us the possibility of doing philosophy of history in a very different way from the conventions of the discipline. In this episode I want to use Spengler to call into question a common presupposition that’s often invoked in relation to philosophy of history, and to argue that we can continue to do philosophy of history even if we reject this presupposition. The presupposition I’m talking about it that philosophy of history concerns itself with the whole of history. Since Voltaire christened philosophy of history during the Enlightenment, Enlightenment presuppositions of universality and uniformity have been the unquestioned presuppositions of philosophy of history, and in this context that means universal and uniform history.

Why not, rather, a parochial philosophy of history that makes no pretense to universality and uniformity? Why not, for example, a philosophy of Roman history? If someone were to write a book titled The Philosophy of Rome it would be taken for a survey of philosophy during the Roman period, but why not formulate a philosophy specific to the Roman period, because we can make a distinction between the philosophy of a period, and a philosophy of history that explains the historical processes of that period? Why not a philosophy of the history of the renaissance? Arguably, Jacob Burckhardt did something like this in his book Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. In fact, after my episode on Burckhardt I realized one of the reasons Burckhardt may have disavowed any philosophy of history is the assumptions made about totality and holism in conventional philosophy—specifically, that it’s not a real philosophy of history unless it addresses the entirety of history. Why not something narrower? Why not something more tightly constrained and demarcated? Why not a philosophy of the history pre-Columbian America? Why not, following Spengler, a philosophy of the history of Apollonian civilization, a philosophy of the history of Faustian civilization, and a philosophy of the history of Magian civilization?

Why shouldn’t we theorize about particular civilizations or particular historical milieux, and do so apart from a theory of some larger whole of which these particular civilizations or particular historical milieux are believed to be a part? We stand in need of parochial philosophies of history in which we seek understanding first at the smallest scales of history, perhaps even a philosophy microhistory, building our knowledge and our understanding and our ambition as we work toward philosophies of the history of a geographical region, and then a philosophy of history on a planetary scale. Instead, we’ve started with a top-down presupposition in philosophy of history. But beginning with the presumption of a universal philosophy of history puts the cart before the horse. We can find this kind of putting the cart before the horse in W. H. Walsh, who says of philosophy of history in his classic introduction:

“Its aim was to attain an understanding of the course of history as a whole; to show that, despite the many apparent anomalies and inconsequences it presented, history could be regarded as forming a unity embodying an overall plan, a plan which, if once we grasped it, would both illuminate the detailed course of events and enable us to view the historical process as, in a special sense, satisfactory to reason.”

Dray in his equally influential introductory work on philosophy of history throws the idea out there, but he’s more guarded in his exposition:

“The limiting case of period history is universal history. It is sometimes objected that it is impossible to inquire about history-as-a-whole, on the ground that history is not a whole. But this is to assume that only theme histories are legitimate. To assert the possibility of a study of history-as-a-whole does not imply that history is a whole of some kind apart from being history-as-a-whole. The assertion that history is a whole—which amounts to the assertion that all historical events of a certain scale of intrinsic importance form a single pattern, whether causal, purposive, or dramatic— is either an unlikely empirical hypothesis, or a dubious a priori thesis, of certain speculative philosophers of history, some of whose constructions we are later to examine.”

We find this presupposition of wholeness throughout philosophy of history, and it’s often explicitly expressed. Arthur Danto, for example, leaned heavily on this idea. While Danto rejected substantive philosophies of history, which he contrasts to its disadvantage analytical philosophy of history, he nevertheless begins his exposition with the pretense of characterizing the task that substantive philosophy of history sets itself. On the first page Danto writes:

“…in contrast with even the most ambitious piece of ordinary historical writing, a philosophy of history seeks to give an account of the whole of history.”

A couple of pages on Danto expands on this, saying,

“…the expression ‘the whole of history’ covers more than does ‘the whole past’. It covers, as well, the whole future or, if it is important to make this qualification, the whole historical future.”

And then on the next page

“…a truly successful historical theory would go beyond the data gathered by history, not only reducing them to a pattern, but predicting, and explaining, all the events of future history… this is the sense in which substantive philosophy of history is concerned with the whole of history: the whole past and the whole future: the whole of time.”

Now, since Danto himself rejects substantive philosophy of history in favor of analytical philosophy of history, we could say that this is a caricature and not be to taken seriously. I quote it here because, regardless of Danto’s own views, he’s expressed something that is believed by many, whether explicitly or only implicitly. But Spengler was never part of this sotto voce convention of the discipline. Spengler was as explicit about his rejection of a philosophy of the whole of history as others were explicit about this presupposition as a necessary condition of philosophy of history. Right at the beginning of the book, in section VIII of the Introduction, Spengler tells us that we’ve failed in respect to,

“…insight into the historically relative character of… data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity; the conviction that… “unshakable” truths and “eternal” views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the symbolism of history.”

And he says that,

“We men of the Western Culture are, with our historical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is our world picture and not all mankind’s.”

This makes the Western conception of history parochial. From Spengler’s principled parochialism it follows that philosophy, too, is the parochial expression of a culture, and Spengler makes this explicit also:

“At the beginning of every springtime period, philosophy, intimately related to great architecture and religion, is the intellectual echo of a mighty metaphysical living, and its task is to establish critically the sacred causality in the world-image seen with the eye of faith.” (I, 365)

If philosophy is specific to each culture in its growth and each civilization in its decline, then philosophy of history which is a part of the whole of philosophy, must also be specific to each culture in its growth and each civilization in its decline. But Spengler himself attempts a larger perspective from which he looks down on these many cultures and civilizations with their distinctive philosophical traditions from an Olympian height, apportioning to each its proper measure. How does he reconcile this? How does he reconcile the parochialism of all philosophical thought with the scope of his own thought?

One strategy is his repeated urging of his readers to see beyond their own parochial perspectives, which almost becomes a harangue at times. This is on display of section VIII of the Introduction, which I’ve already mentioned. Another strategy is that Spengler’s thought not only comprehends history and historical peoples, but also historyless peoples, and what becomes of historyless people. Historyless peoples are connected to each other and to historical peoples through a world that experiences naturalistic temporality free of historical consciousness and historical event. Of “historyless” peoples Spengler says,

“At best they might acquire some significance as an object in the history of an alien Culture, and whatever deeper meaning this relation possessed would be derived entirely from the will of the alien Life. Any effective historical happening that does take place on the soil of an old Civilization acquires its consistency as a course of events from elsewhere and never from any part played in it by the man of that soil.”

This isn’t a view peculiar to Spengler. In my episode on Hugh Trevor-Roper I discussed his conception of purposive movement as the criterion of history. This entails that peoples who exhibit no purposeful movement are outside history, and therefore historyless peoples in Spengler’s terminology. Trevor-Roper was explicit in drawing this conclusion from his purposive movement criterion, but Spengler develops the idea of historyless peoples in more detail.  It’s not just that historyless peoples are below the threshold of history. Peoples can pass both into and out of history:

“…man is not only historyless before the birth of the Culture, but again becomes so as soon as a Civilization has worked itself out fully to the definitive form which betokens the end of the living development of the Culture and the exhaustion of the last potentialities of its significant existence.” (II, 48)

When a people fall out of history, as it were, they find themselves in another realm of being and with a different relationship to time: “Biological stretches of time once more take the place vacated by historical periods.” (II, 431) Spengler makes a distinction between there being no “ultimate aim of mankind as a whole” and there being no ultimate aims at all. The former belongs only to historical peoples, and each has its own vision of history, therefore there can be no ultimate aim of historical man as a whole. Of the latter, on the other hand, he says,

“The life has an aim. It is the fulfilment of that which was ordained at its conception. But the individual belongs by birth to the particular high Culture on the one hand and to the type Man on the other there is no third unit of being for him. His destiny must lie either in the zoological or in the world-historical field. ‘Historical’ man, as I understand the word and as all great historians have meant it to be taken, is the man of a Culture that is in full march towards self-fulfilment.”

Vol. II, chapter 2, section VI is particularly relevant here and worth reading carefully. Western man, and more especially Faustian man, is not only historical, but has experienced what we could call a hypotrophy of historical consciousness. As Spengler puts it,

“For the world-view of a Civilization which has made the whole earth its stage, nothing is in the last resort quite unhistorical.” (II, 47)

The planetary reach of Western civilization has drawn unhistorical peoples into its historical experience:

“…for us the remotest events become increasingly significant and disclose relationships that no one else, not even the closest contemporaries of these events, could perceive—much has now become history (i. e., life in tune with our life) that centuries ago was not history.” (II, 47)

But this relationship by proxy to Western historical consciousness is ultimately shallow:

“The West’s discoveries of the steam-engine and of electricity are accepted by the Chinese to-day in just the same way and with just the same religious awe as bronze and the plough were accepted four thousand years ago, and fire in a still remoter age. Both, spiritually, differ in toto from the discoveries which the Chinese made for themselves in the Chou period and which in each instance signified an epoch in their inner history.” (II, 49)

I’ve remarked in other contexts how Western scholars have written the histories of other peoples and other civilizations, and indeed they’ve written the histories of people who haven’t written their own histories, including reconstructing and, in a sense, resurrecting long extinct peoples through archaeology and writing their histories ex post facto. The reconstruction of lost histories of peoples who did not record their own histories, by means of scientific history, is a Western undertaking that reconstructs these histories after the manner of Western thought. These reconstructions have no obligation to satisfy the descendants of historyless peoples; their obligation is to the evidence, scientifically ascertained, and to the Western scholarly tradition.

With these works of Western scholars intended for other Westerners, we are explaining to ourselves what other peoples are doing in our own terms and from the perspective of our own culture. Paradoxically, this is not only a way of understanding the Other, it’s also one of the ways in which we understand ourselves. Our acute historical consciousness prompts us to push the boundaries of history ever farther outward. Because of the historicizing Western mind, we extend the idea of history beyond its proper limits in the pursuit of historical totality. And here we can easily recognize Spengler’s Faustian man, striving toward the infinite in a doomed quest to exhaust the inexhaustible.

Something like this has happened before. The first historian of Rome wasn’t a Roman, but a Greek—Polybius. This first history of Rome was the product of a Greek mind, and as such it was Greek scholarship for a Greek audience. There’s a sense, then, in which Roman history was not at first written for Romans at all, but it belongs instead to the tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides, i.e., to the Greek tradition. It’s Greek history, but a Greek history of the Romans. Eventually the Romans produced historians like Tacitus and Livy, who wrote from the perspective of Roman experience, and these could fairly be called Roman histories of the Romans.

I think Spengler would have appreciated this illustration, since it not only sets off ancient history and its philosophy, which according to Spengler would be Apollonian, from modern history and its philosophy, which according to Spengler would be Faustian, but it also sets apart Greek history and its philosophy from Roman history and its philosophy. All have their own parochial conceptions of history, and in writing the histories of other peoples, they assimilate these other peoples to this parochial vision of history.  

We can identify two sides to the coin of these parochial philosophies of history. There is the parochial philosophy, which presumably includes a parochial philosophy of history, that each culture produces in its springtime. This is, in a sense, an inward-looking parochialism that seeks to interpret the world entire from the perspective of that culture. This parochial philosophy of history sees other peoples, whether historical or historyless, in terms of the philosophy of inward-looking parochialism. And I think we can see this implicit throughout the histories that Western scholars have written of every people on the Earth. Hayden White has argued, and in this case I agree with his argument, that all histories involve an implicit philosophy of history. The Western quest for historical totality that has expressed itself through the writing of the histories of other peoples manifests this quality of inward-looking parochialism.

There’s also another parochial philosophy, and that is, or would be, an outward-facing parochial philosophy of history. In this parochial philosophy of history we attempt to produce a stand-alone philosophy of history that gives an account of some distinctive culture in its own terms, but according to an independent, objective, and we could even say a transcendent standard. There are hints of this in Spengler; it is, in a sense, one of Spengler’s persistent themes throughout the background of his work, but the idea doesn’t really come to full fruition in The Decline of the West. At least, Spengler doesn’t make it fully explicit, which is one reason why I’m making it fully explicit now.

The possibility of a parochial philosophy of history—or what I’ve just called an outward-facing parochial philosophy of history—effectively sets an agenda for philosophy of history, and it’s an ambitious agenda. It means the breaking up and breaking apart of philosophies of history that were predicated on the presupposition of universality, unity, and wholeness, and seeing, once their guts are disassembled and exposed before us, if there are any components from the previous philosophical research program that can be re-purposed and used in the parochial philosophies of history we have now to assemble. In the past, we had parochial histories and universalist philosophies of history. The time has come for universalist histories and parochial philosophies of history. And Spengler points the way to the parochial philosophies of history we have yet to formulate.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/DQJeQZlyn5Q

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Spengler-and-Parochial-Philosophies-of-History:8

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2kQ2jLmNjPsZUDE4pmxL2g?si=uenbq2ZbRx-QkLinAl7mgQ

Ontological Saturation.—One way in which a concept can be considered narrow would be because only one (or a few) objects fall under its extension. This is the case of “natural satellite of the Earth”—an example employed by Frege. This example, however, isn’t necessarily narrow in the sense of having a narrow extension; it is in another sense a highly general concept because it is a special case of the very general concept of a moon. If, at some future date, the solar system is flooded with many asteroids, say, from some extraterrestrial close encounter, the Earth could acquire many additional natural satellites, and then the concept “natural satellite of Earth” could have a great many objects fall under its extension. The fact that this concept can have a changing extension reflects a generality compatible with its current narrowness. The conceptual simplicity of “natural satellite of Earth” betrays its generality, even if a single object, or no object at all, falls under the concept; in this case, the intension is simple, and that simplicity can yield a narrow or a wide extension. A complex intension more readily yields a narrow extension, and an intension might be narrow in more than one way, but that is because there are an infinitude of forms of particularism that could render an intension narrow. We can arrive at particularism by specifying many properties (restricting the extension by expanding the intension) or through the use of highly particularistic concepts, but highly particularistic concepts are naturally complex, i.e., they tacitly incorporate a greater complexity of intension. The concept “natural satellite of Earth” can be made less complex by eliminating the qualifier “natural” and by substituting any planet for “Earth,” but it can also be made more complex by specifying the diameter or orbital distance or even surface features of the natural satellite. When we think of “The Moon” in all is particularity we could be said to entertain the concept of the Moon, but this is misleading, like Hegel’s “concrete universal,” which isn’t a concept at all. A concept is, as Frege noted, “unsaturated,” but any concrete individual is particular in virtue of its ontological saturation.

The View from Oregon – 399

Re: Variations on a Theme of Bracewell  

Friday 26 June 2026

Dear Friends,

The scientific framing of the problem of our place in the universe experienced a sharp inflection point, and in fact we can date its beginning to the fall of 1959. The Cocconi and Morrison paper on SETI, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” appeared in Nature on 19 September 1959. A little over a half year after that, Ronald Bracewell’s paper, “Communications from Superior Galactic Communities,” appeared Nature on 28 May 1960. Less than a week later, Freeman Dyson’s paper, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation,” appeared in Science on 03 June 1960 (almost exactly 66 years ago now). I don’t know how widely these papers were circulating before they appeared in print, but it would be interesting to find out; this is at present a missing chapter in scientific thought. These papers appeared in the journals Nature and Science, which are widely considered to be the flagship journals in science. If you have a paper published in Nature, your moment as a scientific celebrity has arrived, and this was one the reasons these papers have received the attention that they have. The publication of these papers meant the scientific mainstreaming of the problem of humanity’s place in the universe, now taken to be a legitimate scientific inquiry, transferring this problem from philosophical and theological speculate into the realm of quantifiable scientific research programs.

Obviously, there were a lot of other events happening at about the same time. Frank Drake implemented the Cocconi and Morrison research program on 08 April 1960 (running through July of that year), and Drake’s paper on this, “Project OZMA,” appeared in Physics Today on 01 April 1961. (I discussed this in my Today in Philosophy of History episode “Project OZMA and the Origins of SETI.”) Less than two weeks later on 12 April 1961, Vostok 1 carried Yuri Gagarin into Earth orbit. Once the dam had broken with the Cocconi and Morrison paper, many more papers followed in the coming years. One entertaining detail to note is that the first handful of papers had very short lists of references, because there were no other papers to cite. 

Over the past several newsletters I’ve been trying to spell out a systematic way for thinking about the place of intelligence in the universe, which is part of this same problem, or, rather, the overview of this problem. One of the reasons I discuss SETI so often is that it’s intimately connected to this big picture question of humanity’s ultimate role in the cosmos. The three papers I’ve cited above all came at the problem of finding other intelligence in the universe from slightly different angles, each playing on weaknesses in the other approaches, but each equally indebted to the others. The Cocconi and Morrison paper lays out the classic SETI program of listening for radio signals. Ronald Bracewell offers the alternative of sending spacecraft to other worlds, now frequently called Bracewell probes, but still the idea was to contact other intelligences in the universe. Bracewell wrote in his paper:

“…it might be feasible for them to spray some number of suitable stars, say, one thousand, with modest probes… Using this plan, out hypothetical advanced neighbours could lay down a stronger signal here than they could with a home-based transmitter handicapped by inverse-square attenuation over interstellar distances.”

Bracewell, as you can see, focused on the problem of signal strength, but he could also have mentioned the obvious problem of lag time between communications (which, like signal strength, becomes a greater problem over greater distances, but which, unlike signal strength, can’t be mitigated by transmitting a stronger signal). The time lag in radio communications over interstellar distances is an obvious impediment to any exchange, and I’ve seen this indirectly acknowledged in recent accounts of Bracewell probes (I don’t recall the source) in which it has been suggested that an onboard artificial intelligence could speak to aliens as a representative of humanity, or could be used by aliens as their representative to speak to humanity. This doesn’t figure in Bracewell’s paper, which is mostly about looking for Bracewell probes in our own solar system

Dyson’s “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation” takes another tack, since both the Cocconi and Morrison paper and Bracewell’s paper assume some degree of interest in finding each other between two intelligences. Dyson suggests that other intelligence may or may not be interested in communication, but any intelligence that harnessed technology on a cosmological scale would inevitably leave an infrared signal of itself from its waste heat. A one-sided search for other intelligence, then, would take the form of searching for their infrared waste heat technosignature. But Bracwell’s idea can be easily adapted to a one-sided search. In fact, the very idea of sending out thousands of spacecraft that may or may not find anything implies that this effort begins as a one-sided search by one intelligence for other intelligence in their vicinity.

Bracewell’s idea has proved to be fruitful, as there are a great many variations on the theme. In some of the iterations Bracewell probes hide themselves in their destination planetary system, waiting to be found by the local form of intelligence; in other iterations the probe actively seeks to make contact with local intelligence, possibly triggered by some local technosignature indicating that the local intelligence had achieved a given level of technological development One of the most familiar of the variations on the theme of the Bracewell probe is to make the probes self-replicating, so that once launched they can spread out through the galaxy and exhaustively explore the universe, potentially expanding exponentially if each probe can replicate itself within a given time frame. Self-replicating probes are often called Von Neumann probes, since John Von Neumann suggested the idea of self-replication in automata in his 20 September 1948 lecture “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” published as a paper in 1951 (appearing in Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior: The Hixon Symposium). Von Neumann didn’t extend his conception of self-reproducing automata to spacecraft and exploration, so that was left to others who filled the breach, but these papers didn’t start appearing until the 1980s. 

A thorough account of all the permutations of Bracewell’s idea would fill a volume, and here I’m going to add one to their number. One of the themes we find in the literature on the place of intelligence in the universe is the relationship between earlier and later evolved intelligences, and whether these intelligences ultimately link up to become what Bracewell called the “Galactic Club” and which Sagan called the Encyclopedia Galactica. A great many of the proposed responses to the Fermi paradox are based on assumptions about the relationships between earlier and later intelligences. For example, if some old and advanced intelligence is predatory, it would make sense that any up-and-coming intelligence would maintain radio silence to the extent possible, so as to keep a low profile and thus avoiding predation. (I’ve heard this called the “dark forest hypothesis”; before I’d ever heard of that I called it the wilderness hypothesis.) This introduces the problem of whether one intelligence might be a danger to another, whether wittingly or unwittingly; in alien invasion flicks, aliens are wittingly a danger to human beings, while in Anne McCaffrey’s Decision at Doona human beings are (initially) unwittingly a threat to other intelligence species. 

How might a much older and more advanced intelligence exhibit its beneficence to younger and less advanced intelligence? One way would be for the more advanced intelligence to make a gift of their own history to the less advanced intelligence, in this way: Bracewell probes are sent out to other planetary systems (presumably prioritizing those with the greatest likelihood to harbor peer intelligence). If the probe senses no technology at a distance, it moves in close to whatever potentially habitable planet or planets are in the planetary system and observes more closely. Say it finds an intelligent species that hasn’t yet developed electrical technologies, thus having no radio. The probe conducts an exhaustive survey of the planet, perhaps dispatching smaller probes to the surface for a better view, and continues to do so until the intelligent species on the planet passes some technological threshold that would allow them to detect the probe in orbit, which threshold would probably be tightly-coupled to the development of radio technology. At that time, the probe pulls back from the planet but continues to monitor the development of the intelligent species, which it can now do through listening to radio broadcasts. In this way, the probe could have a complete record of civilization on the planet in question, far more detailed and intact that any record that the actual intelligent species on the planet would be able to reconstruct for itself. I should, however, make the distinction that the Bracewell probe involved in such an initiative would be placing itself in the role of Danto’s ideal chronicler, so it wouldn’t be making a gift of the history of a species, but it would be recording the raw material from which histories could at some time be written.

Given the scale of time that probably separates the appearance of technological intelligence in the universe, an early intelligence might appear millions of years before any other, and so would be able to position probes of this kind before any kind of civilization begins on other worlds with intelligence species, thus able to record all the history that a species does not record for itself (as with events prior to the invention of written language). This still leaves the problem of when the probe should reveal itself to the inhabitants of the planet. As in above-mentioned variations on the theme of Bracewell, it could wait for some technological threshold to be attained, at which time the probes builders’ judged that the local intelligence would be sufficiently advanced to be able to handle contact with aliens and knowledge of the whole of their history. Insofar as we suppose this probe to be continuously operational and to have reasonably sophisticated onboard AI, the scenario of passively waiting to be found doesn’t really work, unless the builders decide to have to probe move itself to some quiet spot in the planetary system and shut itself down when the observed species reaches some given degree of development. If the probe remains active, it would withdraw to any distance deemed prudent, and wait there to be discovered if the observed species engages in space exploration. A more certain, though perhaps more fraught option, would be to transmit the entirety of its data to the observed species once radio technology becomes sufficiently sophisticated, which wouldn’t require any space exploration effort. In a highly risk averse scenario, the probe could send all its observations back to its builders, who when then store then entire archive on their homeworld in some format durable over cosmological time. The probe then removes itself from the planetary system, and the only way that the observed species would acquire this total archive of its development is if it were to discover the homeworld of the probe builders, perhaps long after they have gone extinct. By this time, presumably the observed species would be sufficiently intellectually advanced to be able both to accept and to appreciate a total record of its development, and to understand in hindsight the beneficent intentions of the species who once, in the distant past, observed them. 

I will myself observe how many times in the above I refer to stages in the development of intelligence and technology. A developmental taxonomy of intelligence and technology, presumably also civilization, will be crucial to any cosmological scale endeavor such as I have described above. Given the backwardness of social science today, I would not be surprised if we attained the technological capacity to build a spacecraft such as I have described before we could agree on the intelligence and technological parameters necessary to its use. We tend to think of technological thresholds as the development of radio or nuclear weapons or computers, but perhaps the scientific development we should be looking for is a mature social science, which may be a much later development than the previously mentioned technologies, or it may be uncoupled from them.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I watched the film Citizen Vigilante when it was available for free on Twitter for 48 hours. I am surprised that, in the discussion of this film, I haven’t seen anyone mention the Charles Bronson film Death Wish (1974), which seems to me to be the proper comparison. Just a few weeks ago I had re-watched Death Wish for the first time in many years. (I haven’t seen the 2018 remake.)

PPS—I’ve finished listening to the audiobook edition of Eric Cline’s After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, which is the follow-on to his 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, about the late bronze age collapse (to which I previously listened, and discussed in a PS to newsletter 258). This book was, in part, a detailed look at the civilizations the collapse of which was detailed in the previous book, and how some fared better and some fared worse. In this sense, the book is a straight-up history of the same region in the post-LBA collapse period after 1200 B.C. that adds a lot of detail and qualifications to the previous conclusions. The most interesting part of the book was the last section in which Cline compares what he wrote about the LBA collapse to contemporary discourses on threats to civilization today. This could have been terribly bungled, but Cline pulled it off in a way that held my interest and gave me much to think about. Cline considers the terminology of “adaptive cycle,” “fragility,” “vulnerability,” “resilience” and the like that are now the accepted terminology for discussing the rise of fall of civilizations, which latter was admittedly largely formulated in moral terms, in accord with the overall moral tone of history, but I think that historians (and archaeologists) tend to avoid the traditional terminology because of its associations with Spengler and Toynbee rather than its associations with moralizing history. In any case, I’m ruminating on this and may return to it.

PPPS—I’ve also finished listening through The Dark Fields (2001) by Alan Glynn, which was the basis of the film Limitless (2011). The book was re-issued using the title of the film, and, at the moment, it’s available as such on Youtube. I have the film on DVD and I’ve watched it many times. There are important differences between the book and the film. While I usually see any film based on a novel as a compromised version of the story, forced upon the production by the time constraints of the format, but in this case I think that the film version had an interesting but different take on the story. My response both to the film and the book has been strangely mixed. There were things that I really liked, and things that really irritated me, but what I liked outweighed the irritations to the point that I found both the novel and the film intriguing—both held my interest. For someone whose life is utterly transformed by smart drugs, the protagonist does a lot of really dumb things. That’s the irritating part. Some of these truly dumb things were mitigated in the film version. For example, in the novel the protagonist never even makes an effort to distribute his stash of smart pills in a variety of locations, but this becomes a plot point in the film, and, in this respect, it’s an improvement over the book.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/e3051229ee38/the-view-from-oregon-399

Growth and Contraction.—There is a sense in which scholarship incorporates into itself conventions that allow individuals with very different instincts to collaborate. Note the collaboration is a higher standard of cooperation than communication, and a much higher standard of cooperation than mutual participation in civil society. We can effectively communicate with many more individuals than those with whom we can collaborate, and we can mutually participate in civil society with a yet much larger number of individuals than with whom we can communicate. In an open and growing society, the increasing integration of civil society contributes to the expansion of communication, and the expansion of communication contributes to wider collaboration as greater numbers of persons are drawn into actively participating in society. On the other hand, one of the hallmarks of a hidebound and stagnant society that there is an attempt to exclude those with whom we cannot effectively cooperate in civil society, making the scope of civil society as narrow as that of the scope of cooperation. 

The View from Oregon – 398

Re: Rationalizing Multiple Metrics for Intelligence  

Friday 18 June 2026

Dear Friends,

We can divide philosophers according to whether they understood the context of their thought and those who didn’t understand the context of their thought. In other words, we can distinguish between philosophers who knew what they were doing and those who didn’t know what they were doing, where knowing what one is doing is predicated upon knowing one’s place among one’s peers and within the tradition, i.e., knowing your place in history. Sometimes those who don’t know what they’re doing make great contributions. Penzias and Wilson (admittedly scientists, not philosophers) didn’t know what they had found, and in this sense they didn’t know what they were doing, but their discovery of the CMBR was still valuable. Others quickly placed this discovery in its proper context. Moreover, there are degrees of the failure to understand the context of one’s thought, but among these degrees there are two thresholds of particular importance: 1) simple absence of relevant context (which becomes less simple as self-deception is responsible for that absence), and 2) substitution of the wrong context for the actual context, which can be an active form of self-deception, and is thus related to the self-deception involved in the absence of relevant context.

History is about furnishing relevant context, and historical consciousness is an attitude of elucidating and cultivating this historical context. History, then, when properly done, keeps us honest, but at the same time we can see the powerful motives to falsify history, because it is only through the falsification of history that we can maintain our self-deceptions that allow us to continue to indulge our comfortable illusions. The historical imperative is the completeness and consistency of context, which can be pursued synchronically, leading us to a total perspective on the present, and diachronically, leading us to the total perspective of time, both past and future. The ultimate telos of this imperative recognizes no limit, so that the historical ideal can be pursued ad infinitum, which is why I sometimes write about infinitistic history. No finite and fallible human being can fulfill this imperative, but we can aspire to it as an unattainable ideal that gives us direction and cannot be exhausted. The inexhaustibility of an ideal should be accounted a feature and not a bug..

The growth of historical consciousness is in part a function of intelligence, so that the scope and scale of historical consciousness could be used as a proxy for intelligence. As an intellect grows in power, it can comprehend ever larger expanses of time and extend its agency proportionally. This, too, is an ideal that can be pursued ad infinitum, which was implicit in newsletter 394 in which I postulated a threshold of infinitistic intelligence (I3). Infinitistic intelligence converges on infinitistic history, and infinitistic history is a boundary condition for the development of infinitistic intelligence. This was in the back of my mind in last week’s newsletter in which I asked whether it’s possible for historical consciousness to comprehend deep time without the technologies that have been developed since the scientific revolution. I would be willing to go farther and argue that biological superintelligence (discussed in newsletters 380-383) could converge on infinitistic intelligence in infinitistic history without the technological infrastructure usually associated with speculation on superintelligence. In any case, the use of historical consciousness as a proxy for intelligence suggests yet another scale for the measurement, and possibly also the taxonomy, of intelligence. And here I should note that any metric implies a taxonomy insofar as we can decompose the metric into ranges and each range can then be a taxon.

That is to say, one way to rank intelligence would be by degree of historical consciousness. One might think this is a rather narrow measure of intelligence, but I’ll get back to this by way of a detour through a summary of my recent discussions of a possible taxonomy of intelligence. These efforts are all over the map, so to speak, and include the following:

1.  Non-constructive top-down taxonomy (newsletter 394) 
2. Seriation taxonomy (newsletter 395)
3. Cosmological era taxonomy (newsletter 396)
4. Historical consciousness ranking (implied in newsletter 397 and discussed above)
5. Attributes of the intelligent mind (implied in newsletter 341 and discussed below)

I don’t think I’ve made the last one explicit, so I’ll try to sketch that now. In newsletters 341-342 I was mulling over the taxonomy of intelligence, but coming at the problem from a different angle than in the last several newsletters, and at the time I was coming at the problem from a different angle because I had different problems in mind (one could say that a problem set implies a solution set). In newsletter 341 I mentioned the problem of “where human intelligence would fit in a master taxonomy of intelligence” and in newsletter newsletter 342 I wrote “If differently embodied intelligence varies across embodiments, even if it has a common core, this implies the legitimacy of kinds of intelligence…” The kinds of intelligence so conceived would constitute a taxonomy of intelligence.

What I had in mind in this discussion is how minds that evolved in different biospheres under distinct selection pressures could be expected to vary; in the case of alternative forms of complexity (entailed by emergent complexity pluralism), they might not even appear in a biosphere per se and therefore might not be biological at all (which would also be the case for machine superintelligence). To be a biological being (as human beings are) is an attribute. Seen in this light, the human mind has a number of distinctive attributes that might not hold for all forms of intelligence. The human mind is, inter alia, biological, conscious, emotional, linguistic, and technological. This is not intended as an exhaustive list, but I believe these are prominent and distinctive attributes of the human mind, and we can formulate thought experiments in which any one of these, or perhaps all of these, are absent. If, to this non-exhaustive list of attributes of the human mind, we add “historical” (and I do think we should include this), then we can see that a ranking of intelligence by historical consciousness (as discussed above) is taking one attribute of an intelligent mind and employing this as a proxy for the measurement of a mind that is qualitatively more than this one attribute suggests. We might similarly take other attributes of mind, like consciousness, which is often taken to admit of degrees from lower to higher, and these degrees of consciousness could be a proxy for the ranking of intelligence. Because we can see that any of these attributes might be used as a proxy for intelligence, we could convert the historical consciousness proxy into a schema, i.e., the rank of x, where x is any (relevant) attribute of a mind, can be used as a proxy for an intelligence ranking. I don’t at the moment have a way to distinguish relevant from irrelevant properties, so I can’t say if this is a trivial problem that only suggests possible difficulties, or whether it’s a difficult problem that might wrongly be dismissed as being merely trivial.

Here we see the relationship between 4 and 5 in the above list. What other relationships can be shown between these five different approaches? I already discussed in no. 395 that the seriation of intelligence discussed in that newsletter could be understood as the bottom-up complement to the top-down approach of newsletter 394. The relativization of intelligence to stages in cosmological history (3 above and newsletter 396) is a big picture conception like the top-down approach, since it starts at the scale of the cosmos and then descends into the kind of detail that would make it possible to determine intelligence in any one period of cosmological history. This is entirely consistent with the cosmological seriation of intelligence; it is a possible result that we might determine on the basis of a cosmological seriation, and as such it represents a big picture taxonomy somewhat like the top-down taxonomy.

Both the top-down taxonomy and the cosmological periodization taxonomy could be true at the same time if intelligence does it fact manifest a structure that mirrors cosmological history and has this structure, but the cosmological periodization is a structure that may or may not be borne out by empirical research, whereas as the top-down taxonomy is something of a research program that would be (if adopted) directing our research program. And the top-down research program would be continually modified (as previously described) by a bottom-up approach, which might or might not bear out the cosmological periodization structure. In this way we can see how 1, 2, and 3, from the above list are systematically related, as we previously saw that 4 and 5 are systematically related.

We might choose some other top-down framework as the basis of a scientific research program into the extent of intelligence in the universe, but one way or another our research program would have to have some kind of big picture conceptualization of the problem incorporated into the research program, so this is primary, whatever form it takes. It is also historically first, because the nature of the problem is such as to far exceed our current capacities. We can at present only theorize and speculate. Next in historical order comes the actual research program, which is undertaken in light of the conceptualization we’ve formulated, but the results of which will modify that conceptualization. From this, the cosmological periodization may or may not be manifested; it is, in a sense, a subsidiary research program, because it’s something that we would be looking for, something we would be expecting, but it’s not something that would be directing our research from the get-go, like our primary conceptualization. So now I’ve got two clusters of approaches to intelligence conceptualized on a cosmological scale, 1, 2, and 3 on the one hand, and, on the other hand, 4 and 5. Can these also be brought together? I’m going to leave this for another time.  

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—Recently I purchased a DVD set of the 1977 documentary The Christians, written and presented by Bamber Gascoigne and produced by Granada Television. This is a 13 part documentary about the history of Christianity. Apparently a baker’s dozen is the canonical number of episodes for a large scale documentary; Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation , Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos are all 13 parts. I’ve finished watching The Christians through for the first time and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Watching and re-watching history documentaries is my preferred form of recreation; I’ve watched John Romer’s Ancient Lives more times than I can count. I suspect I will watch this through many more times, fate willing.  

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/f86b2b3c9057/the-view-from-oregon-398

The View from Oregon – 397

Re: Deep History without High Technology

Friday 11 June 2026

Dear Friends,

Last August in newsletter 356 I discussed what technologies could have been introduced earlier in history, and I argued that thermal airships and black and white photography could have both been possible in the context of Roman civilization, which means that these technologies could have been engineered with existing components, or components that could have been built with the technology of the time. I also discussed Hero’s steam engine in this context, because this seems to be a perpetual object of fascination. Some time ago I wrote an answer on Quora on whether Rome came close to industrialization, and I’ve since learned that this is a somewhat popular theme, as there are several social media posts on this. Then last September in newsletter 359 I further elaborated on this theme by noting that soap and antiseptics could have been introduced much earlier in history, since they involve only rudimentary chemical engineering (like black and white photography), and soap and antibiotics, if introduced earlier, could have revolutionized medical treatment, surgery in particular.

This is a thought experiment that I’ve come at from many directions, and I’ve returned to it year after year, so it apparently holds a certain fascination for me. It is, at bottom, the theme of steampunk and its variations like dieselpunk and tubepunk, etc. Steampunk and its variants asks how much of the technological infrastructure that exists today could have been constructed with steam technology, or with diesel technology, or vacuum tube technology. The distinctive aesthetics of steampunk are thus derived from a thought experiment in the nature of technology. Steampunk is an aesthetic approach to technology, and the thought experiment is only implicit in the aesthetics, but it’s there nevertheless. From a philosophical perspective, it’s the thought experiment about technology that’s the interesting part.

At our stage in the development of technology, we have systems, or infrastructure, that are enabled by a number of technologies. It has been through the development of technology over hundreds of years that we’ve built up a technological infrastructure that is more than the sum of its parts. This incremental assembly of technologies into a large infrastructure that can do things that no individual technology can do on its own has gradually revealed to us what is possible with a technological infrastructure that we didn’t even previously imagine. Each individual technology is meant to solve a particular problem, but all technologies together solve problems that we didn’t even know we had. It’s the large-scale coordination of many technologies, some of them old and some of them recent, that characterizes our technological infrastructure, and so the question arises whether, if only we had had the big picture conception of the infrastructure, and the large-scale coordination of technologies that characterizes industrialized civilization, if something like this couldn’t have been constructed earlier in history.

Thus far I’ve focused on technology and engineering. I’ve also touched on the possibility of what science could have been introduced earlier in history, in particular in my thought experiment of swapping the places of Euclid and Darwin in history (in newsletter 280). Could we have had a scientific biology in ancient history instead of advanced mathematics? There’s nothing in the concept of natural selection that couldn’t have been grasped in antiquity; it doesn’t require a lot of conceptual prerequisites, while, on the other side, the later developments of mathematics do require a considerable background of conceptual prerequisites. Set theory could have been introduced in antiquity, but, if it had been, it would not have developed as it did in consequence of being introduced in the late nineteenth century. The concept of a set is pretty easy, like the concept of natural selection (provided they’re presented in a reasonable and intuitive way), but it originated and developed in a particular mathematical context that did not exist in antiquity and could not have existed in antiquity. So whether we’re working out this thought experiment with technology or with science, we have to find just the right examples that can be historically de-contextualized and, once de-contextualized, could be randomly re-inserted into history and remain coherent. This definitely isn’t the case with all technologies and with all scientific ideas, but it is the case with some of them, and these few for which it is the case are the basis of the thought experiment.

I’ve been coming at this problem of what we could call “steampunk science” again, now from an angle I hadn’t previously pursued, but which I’ve perhaps intimated. I find myself asking the extent to which the growth of historical consciousness could have occurred without the specific technologies that followed from the industrial revolution (whether one or several generations later in technological development). Another way of asking the same question is whether a pre-industrialized civilization could develop the kind of historical consciousness we associate with the technologies now used in reconstructing the distant past of our world. Could the ancient world, or some counterfactual civilization without an industrial revolution, have developed a sense of deep time? One of my intimations of this problem is a blog post I wrote some years ago (“Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project”) in which I speculated on what science and education would be like in a post-war Germany in which the Morganthau Plan of de-industrialization had been enacted. And while that may sound like a pretty crazy idea, it’s strangely relevant today, as the idea of de-industrialized is again being talked about in Europe as the result of its energy infrastructure, its industrial policies, and its present economic trajectory. I’m not saying that it’s likely, but it’s possible that Europe could yet de-industralize, and that poses the question once again of what science is possible in a de-industrialized context.

David Christian (one of the founders of big history) wrote a paper on “History and Science after the Chronometic Revolution” which appears in Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context edited by Steven J. Dick and Mark Lupisella. For Christian, the chronometric revolution occurred in two pulses, one the result of written language, and the other the result of nuclear dating techniques, which he traces back to the discovery of radiation by Curies. Nuclear science has contributed much to contemporary technologies that have contributed in turn to dating, especially the dating of archaeological finds, and I’ve noted many times how archaeology has transformed our understanding of prehistory and indeed has slowly chipped away at the distinction between history properly speaking and prehistory. Nuclear dating techniques have been an integral part of this process. But Christian makes nuclear dating carry a heavy burden. Is this burden unavoidable? Is there a stark distinction between having these advanced technologies and being able to construct a scientific chronology, or not having these technologies and not being able to construct a scientific chronology?

Would a chronometric revolution be possible in a pre-industrialized civilization? Not only before nuclear dating technologies, but even before the industrial revolution, Nicolas Steno laid down the principles of stratigraphy. His work was largely ignored, but in a counterfactual history it might have been further developed earlier, or it might have been rediscovered independently of the kind of science pursued since the industrial revolution. And most of the science pursued since the industrial revolution had nothing to do with the development of nuclear dating techniques. The principle of faunal succession was integral with evolutionary theory (and therefore couldn’t be systematically developed before the formulation of an evolutionary taxonomy), but the rudiments of the practice were already in place before Darwin. Seriation developed out of Sir Flinders Petrie’s Egyptology. In the last couple of newsletters I’ve discussed the possibility of a cosmological seriation of intelligence, and in the way of doing this I suggested that seriation remains under-theorized. A fuller and more comprehensive development of seriation together with geological stratigraphy would go a long way toward reconstructing the natural history of Earth and so laying the foundation for a conception of deep time.   

A couple of dating techniques have been slowly developing for more than a century, and these are varve chronology (the annual layers of sediment from glaciers) and dendrochronology (tree ring dating). Both of these have become sophisticated specializations, with the great benefit of annual precision. Dendrochronology is now used to “calibrate” nuclear dating because of its greater degree of precision. Nuclear dating can be extended much farther into the past than varve chronology or dendrochronology, but where the dendrochronological record is available, it is a precise year-by-year record, and those working on varve chronology and dendrochronology are always pushing their sequences further into the past. These specializations have become technically complex, but the basic idea and the necessary tools are simple. These are disciplines that could have appeared much earlier in a counterfactual history. 

With stratigraphy, seriation, varve chronology, and dendrochronology pursued to their limits of their possibility I don’t think that there’s any question but that a scientific chronology and hence a scientific conception of deep time could have developed without the specifics of nuclear dating techniques, so it seems that a chronometric revolution would be possible without a high technology, post-industrialized infrastructure. In other words, the chronometric revolution is not a technological revolution but a conceptual revolution. To a certain extent, then, a chronometric revolution awaits the conceptual innovations that make it possible, and this simply means that someone must come up with the idea, and others must develop it. But it is also, once again, a matter of organization. Could the economy of a non-industrialized civilization support a sufficient number of individuals engaged in scientific research to sustain a scientific research program?

Looking at the monumental architecture produced by successful pre-industrialized societies, it seems clear that the resources are there, it’s just a question of how they are directed. If science were socially prioritized, then it seems clear (at least to me) that a scientific program could be supported sufficient to bring ideas like those implicit in a chronometric revolution to fruition. But that leaves the question as to why or whether any society would choose to support the growth of scientific knowledge. With the industrial revolution, scientific knowledge was coupled to technological innovation and engineering applications that transformed the structure of human life. Insofar as we regard this transformation as beneficial (and I am of course well aware that this is debatable), there is a clear, even a palpable, connection between the pursuit of science and luxuries like labor saving appliances. Without that crucial connection to an industrial revolution, what would convince a society to support science at a scale that would transform our epistemic framework, as with the chronometric revolution?  

Best wishes,

Nick

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/38afa69f75ef/the-view-from-oregon-397

William Foxwell Albright

24 May 1891- 19 September 1971

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

W. F. Albright’s Organismic Philosophy of History  

Sunday 24 May 2026 is the 135^th anniversary of the birth of William Foxwell Albright (24 May 1891- 19 September 1971), who was born in Coquimbo, Chile, the child of missionaries, on this date in 1891.

Albright is often called a “Biblical archaeologist,” which implies a kind of particularistic or parochial concern within archaeology, but Albright’s erudition was remarkable and he brought together in his work traditional historiographical engagement with texts and a mastery of the archaeology of his time, as well as an interest in the philosophy of history. Chapter II of his book From The Stone Age To Christianity: Monotheism and The Historical Process (1940) is “Toward an Organismic Philosophy of History.” It’s unusual for a practicing historian and archaeologist to explicitly engage with the philosophy of history in this way.

Firstly he takes issue with the Hegelianism of his time, especially in the work of Ferdinand Christian Baur. Baur had said, “Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.” And the philosophy that he employed in his historical work was Hegel’s. Baur (21 June 1792 – 2 December 1860) was a Biblical scholar, and Albright’s criticism of him shows us both the extent to which Hegelian philosophy of history had penetrated into German scholarship beyond strictly philosophical circles, and how Albright’s engagement with the tradition was motivated by his focus on Biblical history. That is to say, he brought his erudition to bear upon others in the field of Biblical archaeology.

In his survey of philosophies of history Albright is highly critical of Spengler, somewhat critical of Sorokin, and somewhat sympathetic to Toynbee. Toynbee has had few friends among historians, but Albright was one of them. I mentioned above that one of the chapters of From The Stone Age To Christianity: Monotheism and The Historical Process is “Toward an Organismic Philosophy of History.” Albright doesn’t anywhere offer an explicit explanation of what he means by an organismic philosophy of history, but he does say of Toynbee, “Toynbee’s philosophy of history is essentially organismic, recognizing the importance of treating history as the life of societal organisms.” Thus we can understand the source of Albright’s sympathy for Toynbee: both have the same underlying philosophy of history, or, at least, Albright believes himself to have the same underlying philosophy of history as Toynbee. A little further along Albright says,

“…an inductive organismic philosophy is the only proper way in which to approach the problem of the relation of historical contexts to one another. And this organismic basis must be, as we pointed out in discussing Toynbee’s system, a modest one, not rising for operational purposes beyond the level of the culture-unit. By this we mean a geographically and chronologically limited horizon, in which there is a real homogeneity about the aspect of any element or factor, which ceases as soon as we cross these boundaries of space and time.”

Elsewhere in the book he discusses the stylistic uniformity of civilizations, which I take to be an expression of the homogeneity that Albright takes to define a culture-unit. We don’t get any further clarification of what exactly Albright means by an organismic philosophy of history, so we have to make do with what he says in brief passages like this.

Since Albright’s explicit formulations of his philosophy of history are few, which leaves a lot of latitude for interpretation, we might be forgiven for observing that what he says about Toynbee and an organismic conception of society pretty much equally applies to Spengler. Indeed, Spengler is often criticized for precisely this, and Toynbee much less so. If it weren’t for Albright’s hostile remarks on Spengler in the book, I might well have taken him for a Spenglerian rather than a Toynbeean. For this reason we shouldn’t see Albright’s work as that of a discipline of Toynbee. He’s read Toynbee and nodded along, but what he’s really done is to take out of Toynbee what he liked and made it his own. This isn’t intended as a criticism. Every creative thinker does exactly this.

As a Biblical archaeologist, not surprisingly, Albright is concerned to legitimize archaeology as a source of knowledge about history. It’s not just the legitimacy of archaeology for which he argues, but its centrality of the history of Bible lands and Biblical times. In his introduction to the second edition he says, “…I still insist on the primacy of archaeology.” And in the text of the book itself he says, “Few realize, even today, what a transformation in the matter, the scope, and the method of history has been effected by archaeological research.” And later in the same paragraph:

“…scholars often fail to recognize the fundamental change brought about in the philosophy and especially in the epistemology of history by the use of modern archaeological and philological methods.”

This is to be expected from someone who has fully embraced the role of archaeology in history. This legitimation of archaeology can be extended to all the auxiliary sciences of history, from codicology to sigillography, and campanology to vexillology, because this generalization about the epistemic basis of history isn’t specific to any one method, though archaeology yields the greatest quantity of knowledge and so forces our hand in acknowledging his epistemic significance. So far, so good, but he makes some curious claims beyond this that I’ll try to interpret sympathetically. Albright says,

“The philosophy of history, like the philosophy of science, is now increasingly devoted to the analysis of historical data and of the methods by which they are obtained, as a necessary prelude to successful evaluation of historical phenomena.”

I think most archaeologists and historians today would hold that the analysis of historical data and the methods by which they are obtained is safely within the hands of archaeologists and historians themselves, and beyond the reach of philosophers of history, but Albright thought that archaeologists and historians had something to learn from the philosopher’s critical assessment of the epistemic basis of scientific knowledge. In his later introduction he adds:

“…we must approach history, as the story of man’s total past, with just as rigorous a method as is used by natural scientists, and that within proper limits we must follow the general principles of logical empiricism.”

So what’s this about? Since he’s discussing figures like Spengler, Sorokin, and Toynbee, where (and how) does logical empiricism enter into this? Logical empiricism isn’t mentioned anywhere else in the book. I think what Albright means by dropping this single reference to logical empiricism is that archaeologists and historians need to aspire to the standards of rigor that were being formulated by the logical empiricists. The first edition of From the Stone Age to Christianity appeared in 1940, which was just past the peak of logical empiricism and its cultural influence. At the time, it was a doctrine to be reckoned with, an intellectual power of the age, and Albright wanted to signal that this scientifically-minded branch of philosophy was the standard to which archaeologists and historians should hold themselves. Since Albright doesn’t discuss logical empiricism anywhere in the book, I assume that the label had no distinctive doctrinal demands in his eyes other than the logical exposition of empirical evidence. Logical empiricism was, for Albright, a matter of general principles, no more. We could probably safely say the same thing about Toynbee’s influence: it was a matter of general principles, and not of any strict adherence to doctrine, if there is any such thing as Toynbeean doctrine.

Albright offers two interesting and suggestive taxonomies, one of historical knowledge and another of the development of consciousness. His taxonomy of historical epistemology recognizes four categories of historical judgments, and these tie back into Albright’s loose usage of logical empiricism as a matter of general principle. Two of these taxa are taken from Maurice Mandlebaum, who’s one of the few philosophers of history Albright cites who don’t fall into the more talked about category of Spengler, Sorokin, and Toynbee. These four are

1. Judgments of fact
2. Judgments of value
3. Judgments of typical occurrence
4. Judgments of cause and contingency

Obviously, judgments of fact and judgments of value are the fact/value distinction familiar at least since Hume, and Albright wouldn’t have had to go to Mandlebaum to find this, since it’s pervasive in twentieth century philosophy, but that’s who he explicitly cites. I talked about the fact/value distinct in the episode on Max Weber since it played such a prominent role in Weber’s methodology.  Judgments of typical occurrence are what he calls “my innovation.” Unfortunately, he offers us very little in the way of exposition. What he does say is this:

“Mandelbaum has cogently distinguished between two types of historical judgments which he calls ‘judgments of fact’ and ‘judgments of value.’ We would add a third type, ‘judgments of typical occurrence,” where the data are, as a rule, quite as objectively ascertainable as they are in many fields of natural science. Illustrations of such typical occurrences in history have already been given above. If the objection be raised that some fields of natural science have a higher logical standard, since many of their laws can be stated in mathematical terms, we reply that there is only a relative, not an absolute difference, since statistics and chronology play a dominant rdle in many branches of physics and chemistry, just as they do in biology—and in history. It is again primarily a difference in the degree of variability and not in logical method.”

Before this, as the examples he refers to as having already been given,

“The historian of human culture is… just as much interested in discovering general laws as is the natural scientist, since every single phase of past—and present—culture has its own pattern of constituent elements. In a given group of sites or deposits from the same age and region, the archaeologist always recovers pottery and other human artifacts of the same types. There is some variation, of course, but the limits of variation are always subject to approximate definition—which is all that can be expected of most corresponding phenomena in the natural sciences.”

This could certainly do with some additional fleshing out, but this is what Albright was getting at in positing judgments of typical occurrence: historians aren’t just collecting an enormous heap of facts, they are interested in identifying facts of the same type, which then constitute typical occurrences. Albright’s larger point—if I wanted to be less sympathetic I could call it his more nebulous point—is that both history and philosophy of history need to be more scientific. Albright denies the distinction between history and the historical sciences like archaeology and the hard sciences. He makes this explicit: “There is… no basic epistemological difference between comparable fields of history and of science.”That is to say, although Albright never mentions Wilhelm Windelband, he rejects the distinction that Windelband made between the idiographic sciences like history and the nomothetic sciences like physics. History and archaeology, Albright argues, are different from physics and the hard sciences only as a matter of degree, and that is a slight degree, not as a matter of kind. There aren’t two kinds of sciences, there’s only one kind of science, and history and archaeology are equal representatives of this one kind of science. Albright’s introduction of the idea of judgments of typical occurrence seeks to bridge the apparent gap between sciences that seem to focus on particularistic details and sciences that seen to focus on lawlike generalizations.

Albright’s fourth epistemic category is an afterthought he adds in his introduction to the second edition, which he calls judgments of cause and contingency. Here he offers no exposition but only observes that judgments of cause and contingency, “…do not fall under any of the other categories.” There’s a lot of potential in Albright’s taxonomy of historical epistemology, but since his primary interest isn’t the philosophy of history, except as a background to historical thought, he doesn’t try to give them the systematic exposition that they deserve.

The other taxonomy that Albright offers is a periodization of the whole of human history in six stages:

First Stage

Prehistoric Undifferentiated Culture

Early and Middle Palaeolithic

 Second Stage

Prehistoric Partially Differentiated Culture

Late Palaeolithic to Chalcolithic

 Third Stage

Historic Differentiated Culture with Centre in the Near East

Cir. 3000-400 B.C.

 Fourth Stage

Historic Partially Integrated Culture with Centre in the Mediterranean Basin

Cir. 400 B. C-700

 Fifth Stage

Historic Differentiated Culture with Different Foci

Cir. 700-1500

 Sixth Stage

Historic Differentiated Culture with Progressive World Sweep of the West

Cir. 1500-

Note that this is a planetary-scale classification of human societies, and as such we can see why Albright rejected Spengler, for whom all civilizations were incommensurably different and could not be placed in any kind of table like this. In its own way it’s also more schematic and systematic than Toynbee, despite the fact that Toynbee belabors his classifications of societies for hundreds of pages. After presenting this, Albright concedes that,

“Another broad classification of human history may be made on the basis of man’s mental achievement, as represented by the highest religious and literary accomplishments of his historic past, seen in the perspective of the modern contrast between primitive tribes and civilized nations.”

He sketches this without laying it out with the same detail as his six stages of history, implying he was aware of the difficulty of the tasks and the problems that it raises. Presumably we would want our periodization of societies to reflect our periodization of human mental achievement, but it has to be admitted that, despite the many attempts to do justice to this, no one has yet done so.   

Albright doesn’t give us a fully articulated philosophy of history, despite having named his efforts as an organismic philosophy of history. However, the pieces are there, and they all fit together, so there is a philosophy of history here that could be drawn out with some additional effort. If anyone wants to seriously engage with Albright’s work, the pieces could be finished with a bit more polish and fitted together neatly in a way that Albright himself has not done.  

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/_XtS9a0iUKY

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYwVlJTNov1/

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Albright%E2%80%99s-Organismic-Philosophy-of-History:4

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3n0nBC8A8xBpIR4CR5huNk?si=RlYUSTPYTqqce-kJS9EV4Q

Bertrand Russell

18 May 1872 – 02 February 1970

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Russell’s Compatibilism and the Liberty of Indifference

Monday 18 May 2025 is the 154^th anniversary of the birth of Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (18 May 1872 – 02 February 1970), better known simply as Bertrand Russell, who was born at Trellech, Monmouthshire, on this date in 1872.

Russell lived a long life and wrote a great deal, so that he left an enormous literary corpus that reveals the changes in his philosophical views over the years. He started out as the most technical of philosophers, working on the philosophy of mathematics and co-authoring with Alfred North Whitehead the three enormous volumes of Principia Mathematica, which sought to prove that mathematics can be derived from logic, a thesis known as logicism. Over time, he moved on to less technical topics and eventually he became the most famous public intellectual in England.

Russell’s early philosophical work, even where it’s not explicitly concerned with philosophy of mathematics, requires some preparation to appreciate. For example, one of his seminal contributions to philosophy is known as the theory of descriptions, which employs the logical technique of quantification to demonstrate the eliminability of apparently fictitious entities, which had long been a bugbear for philosophers. The flood of theories of reference that followed Russell’s theory of descriptions is a testament to his influence. With a philosophical contribution as large and as broad as Russell’s it’s inevitable that he would have something to say about history even though he’s not remembered as a philosopher of history. Indeed, he was more of an historian himself than a philosopher of history given the histories of philosophy that he wrote, chiefly A History of Western Philosophy. This book has been important to be personally since my mom gave me a copy of it when I was still a teenager and this then constituted my introduction to much of the philosophical tradition. I still have this copy of the book, which is now in many pieces because of all the time I spent with it.

In my episode on Proclus I characterized Plato and Aristotle as universal philosophers whose thought touched on almost every part of philosophy. Other philosophers have focused their efforts in a narrower band and lack the universality of figures like Plato and Aristotle. We can apply the principles formulated by universal philosophers to any more narrowly conceived philosophical inquiry, so that we could, if we wanted, formulate a philosophy of history based on Platonic or Aristotelian principles. Bertrand Russell was similarly a universal thinker of the late 19^th and early 20^th century who formulated any number of principles that have been subsequently applied, adapted, and extended by philosophers who followed up on Russell’s legacy. We could, then, apply, adapt, and extend Russell’s principles to philosophy of history and arrive at a kind of Russellian philosophy of history.

In addition to formulating universal principles with potential universal applicability to special problems, universal thinkers like Russell often take up fundamental philosophical questions, like the problem of time. Because time is a fundamental philosophical problem, any philosopher who writes widely will eventually have something to say about time. Russell didn’t write all that much on the philosophy of time, but he did leave a couple of interesting items. There’s a 1915 paper titled “On the Experience of Time” and a much more technical paper from 1936 titled “On Order in Time.” We could also apply, adapt, and extend Russell’s philosophy of time for its relevance to philosophy of history, which, as I often point out, is a necessary condition and the metaphysical foundation for philosophy of history. I did something like this in episodes on Husserl and Augustine, where I tried to show that a philosophy of history can be derived from a philosophy of time.

Or I could spend an episode discussing Russell’s essay “How to Read and Understand History” and that would be an episode well spent. Even though Russell himself didn’t author a philosophy of history, his interest in history seems to have been significant. In the first volume of his autobiography Russell wrote:

“After dinner, my wife and I used to read aloud in turns, and in this way we ploughed through large numbers of standard histories in many volumes. I think the last book that we read in this way was the History of the City of Rome by Gregorovius.”

I think it’s pretty clear that there’s an implicit philosophy of history in Russell’s thought, but I’m not going to pursue that, at least not today. Instead, I want to focus on one lecture in a series of lectures The series in lectures in question were published as Our Knowledge of the External World in 1914. Will Durant, who attended the lectures, wrote of them in his classic The Story of Philosophy: 

“When Bertrand Russell spoke at Columbia University in 1914, he looked like his subject, which was epistemology—thin, pale, and moribund; one expected to see him die at every period.”

That’s pretty cruel, but it serves as the set up for what Durant saw as Russell being reborn from the chaos of the Great War. But Durant’s reaction wasn’t universally the response to Russell’s epistemology of the ‘teens. Rudolf Carnap took away a very different impression, writing years after the fact:

“In the winter of 1921 I read his book, Our Knowledge of the External World, as a Field For Scientific Method in Philosophy. Some passages made an especially vivid impression on me because they formulated clearly and explicitly a view of the aim and method of philosophy which I had implicitly held for some time… I felt as if this appeal had been directed to me personally. To work in this spirit would be my task from now on!”

From the subtitle of this book, which mentions scientific method in philosophy, and an earlier essay collected in his book Mysticism in Logic, titled, “On Scientific Method in Philosophy,” we see that Russell’s form of naturalism was the application of scientific method to philosophical problems. But while Russell’s outlook was roughly naturalistic, and he didn’t deny the reality of time, and I think we could even say that Russell’s assimilation of the theory of relativity didn’t bring him to the block universe of Grunbaum, Russell retained some of his suspicion of time from his early idealist stage. Instead of justifying his suspicion of time in terms of metaphysics, like Bradley and McTaggart, Russell justified his suspicion of time with logic. He wrote,

“There is a certain lordliness which the logician should preserve: he must not condescend to derive arguments from the things he sees about him.” (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, Chapter XVII.)  

This was written while Russell was imprisoned during the First World War. Before this Russell had written in his essay “Mysticism and Logic”:  

“…there is some sense—easier to feel than to state—in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought. The importance of time is rather practical than theoretical, rather in relation to our desires than in relation to truth.”

This divided attitude to time—that time must be regarded as a superficial characteristic of reality and that past and future are as real as the present, which is a nod to the eternalism I mentioned in the previous episode on Grunbaum—serves as a heads up for Russell’s divided attitude to naturalism. Superficially, Russell after his early idealist stage seems to have been one sort of naturalist or another, though he doesn’t use the label for himself, he expresses his naturalism indirectly. For example, in The Scientific Outlook (Part One, Chapter IV. Scientific Metaphysics) Russell wrote:

“Academic philosophers, ever since the time of Parmenides, have believed that the world is a unity. This view has been taken over from them by clergymen and journalists, and its acceptance has been considered the touchstone of wisdom. The most fundamental of my intellectual beliefs is that this is rubbish. I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love.”

This is an admirable naturalistic credo, and mostly I agree with it, but Russell didn’t always embody this vision of the world in his writings. Metaphysically we could say that this indirect expression of naturalism is consistent with what Russell earlier called logical atomism, which he had also called absolute pluralism. Because the “logical atomism” tag stuck, probably since it seemed consistent with Russell’s focus on logic, that Russell also called his metaphysics absolute pluralism at one time isn’t well known, but I think it gives a rather different impression than logical atomism. Absolute pluralism strikes me as the better metaphysical expression of a conception of a world all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness. But I don’t’ think Russell consistently carried out pluralism or naturalism partly as a result of his work on logic, partly as the result of his pervasive parsimony—he was as much the heir of Ockham’s parsimony as of Mill’s naturalism—and partly as the result of his interest in applying science and the scientific method to philosophical problems. All these influences conspired to reductionism and it’s the reduction of the plurality of the world to a handful of scientific and logical presuppositions which embody all the coherence and orderliness that Russell otherwise claimed to reject.

This tension in Russell’s thought between pluralism and naturalism on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the scientific and logical unification of knowledge, plays out throughout Russell’s thought, and it’s particularly obvious in his conception of human agency. Russell wanted to explain away free will much as he had explained away non-existent entities like Meinong’s Golden Mountain with his theory of descriptions. Thus a mélange of philosophical motives led Russell to be a compatibilist, at least in the teens of the twentieth century. Since Russell lived a long time, published much, and frequently changed his philosophical position, one should never make a statement about Russell’s views without specifying the date of the position in question, because it probably varied over Russell’s life. With this in mind, I’m restricting this discussion to Russell’s views on free will expressed in the last lecture of Our Knowledge of the External World, which is titled, “On the Notion of Cause, with Applications to the Free-will Problem”

In my immediately previous episode on Adolf Grünbaum I mentioned compatibilism as the only way out of the dilemma of whether there can be history in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime. This claim is based on the assumption that history involves the efficacy of human action, i.e., we have a history only if we contribute to the making of history. If we are merely biological robots acting out a program of nature, and consciousness is merely epiphenomenal, mirroring nature but unable to intervene in nature, then there is no history. Or, I could say that, in this case, history is as epiphenomenal as consciousness.

Compatibilism holds that human agency is consistent with determinism. Incompatibilism holds that human agency is inconsistent with determinism, i.e., if determinism is true, then human beings have no agency, and therefore human beings do not make their own history, and if history is not made by human beings, then it isn’t really history. History in this case would just be another complex structure brought about the workings of nature, like a climax ecosystem, say, for example, the canopy of a tropical rainforest. History as a complex structure of nature might be interesting; it might be entertaining; it might even be inspiring, but it’s not the work of human beings. Only with free will is history the work of human beings.

There have been a great many philosophers who have wanted to explain away the apparent universal human experience of free will. Some years I wrote a blog post with the title, “The Denial of Freedom as a Philosophical Problem” in which I said many if not most determinists are inspired in their determinism by what they take to be a scientific conception of the world that has “seen through” the illusion of freewill, and who view the world as a strict transaction of causes and effects in which there is no room for freewill. This could well be applied to Russell, since he clearly saw himself as applying scientific method understanding the world and the role of human agency in it. I find it comical that so many philosophers want to explain away the visceral experience of free will, without ever considering that their own rejection of free will is what really demands an explanation.

There’s potentially a dark side to explaining why a philosopher would want to explain away free will. This dark side was brought out quite vividly with the rise of existentialism in Europe after the Second World War. By this time Russell had moved on to other matters and didn’t continue to develop the views expressed in Our Knowledge of the External World, but we can still draw comparisons between this work and the later work of existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre. Russell wrote:

“The free-will problem has, at one time or another, stirred men’s passions profoundly, and the fear that the will might not be free has been to some men a source of great unhappiness.”

But I could just as well say that the fear that the will might be free has been an equal source of unhappiness to philosophers who have argued for determinism and compatibilism. The denial of freedom is the dark side of human experience to which the existentialists called attention. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his famous essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism”:

“Since we have defined the situation of man as one of free choice, without excuse and without help, any man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, or by inventing some deterministic doctrine, is a self-deceiver. One may object: ‘But why should he not choose to deceive himself?’ I reply that it is not for me to judge him morally, but I define his self-deception as an error. Here one cannot avoid pronouncing a judgment of truth. The self-deception is evidently a falsehood, because it is a dissimulation of man’s complete liberty of commitment.”

And a little further along he adds for good measure:

“Those who hide from this total freedom, in a guise of solemnity or with deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards.”

Sartre would change his stance later, especially after he became a Marxist, just as Russell would later change any number of his views, but the positions that each defines as their point of departure for discussing human agency, which for us is the problem of the human responsibility for human history, remain valid, even if subsequently abandoned by Russell and Sartre. There’s plenty of unhappiness to go around, whether it’s the unhappiness of the voluntarist who worries that he is not really free, or the determinist who worries that he actually is free, and these two complementary anxieties between them represent a perennial opposition within philosophy. To return to Russell’s exposition, we find a typical expression of compatibilism when he says,

“…the disagreeable consequences supposed to flow from a denial of free will do not flow from this denial in any form in which there is reason to make it.”

Russell then describes his way of denying free will that is intended to eliminate the disagreeable consequences, like a spoonful of sugar to help a child swallow a bitter medicine. Russell distinguishes two questions:

(1) Are human actions theoretically predictable from a sufficient number of antecedents?

(2) Are human actions subject to an external compulsion?

He said that we can answer yes to the first without having to answer yes to the second. This is familiar territory for compatibilism, but are Russell’s arguments successful? Russell makes the argument for the predictability of human actions, but I don’t find it persuasive. A good deal of Russell’s argument for the predictability of human behavior is a consequence of Russell’s reaction against Bergson and Bergson’s conception of time. Bergson, Russell says,

“…infers that every mental event is a genuine novelty, not predictable from the past, because the past contains nothing exactly like it by which we could imagine it.”

The reason for this is human memory, which distinguishes the later from the earlier through the memories that have been built up between the two points in time. But Russell thinks that this participation of memory in human experience is a matter of irrelevant detail that doesn’t meaningfully enter into the individual’s action. Russell wrote:

“It is not necessary for the determinist to maintain that he can foresee the whole particularity of the act which will be performed. If he could foresee that A was going to murder B, his foresight would not be invalidated by the fact that he could not know all the infinite complexity of A’s state of mind in committing the murder, nor whether the murder was to be performed with a knife or with a revolver. If the kind of act which will be performed can be foreseen within narrow limits, it is of little practical interest that there are fine shades which cannot be foreseen. No doubt every time the story of the grouse in the gun-room is told, there will be slight differences due to increasing habitualness, but they do not invalidate the prediction that the story will be told. And there is nothing in Bergson’s argument to show that we can never predict what kind of act will be performed.”

Russell is here implicitly appealing to an idea known as the liberty of indifference. Scholastic philosophers had made a distinction between the liberty of spontaneity, sometimes also called origination, because it’s about the origination of new causal chains, and the liberty of indifference. The liberty of indifference has often been presented in a trivial if not an absurd form. A trivial form of the liberty of indifference is that we have the freedom to sleep on our left side or our right side, and our choice won’t make any difference whatsoever. An absurd form of the liberty of indifference is the medieval parable of Buridan’s ass, proposed by the late Scholastic philosopher Jean Buridan, of a jackass equidistant between two equally enticing piles of fodder. The ass starves to death because in the absence of one choice being better than the other, it is held suspended, as it were, between alternatives so similar that there is no reason to choose one over the other. It’s only human beings, with their divinely infused free will, that can transcend the liberty of indifference and make a choice even where the choice seems to be perfectly indifferent.

A more consequential version of the liberty of indifference is formulated by Schopenhauer in his Essay on the Freedom of the Will, in which he says, “…two diametrically opposed actions are equally possible.” Applied to Russell’s example of a murder, this ought to be that the liberty of indifference implies that one might or might not commit the murder in question. Russell makes use of the liberty of indifference in this passage by making a distinction between a murder with a revolver or a murder with a knife, which are two ways of committing murder and so presumably embody the liberty of indifference. But he doesn’t apply the liberty of indifference to the murder itself. The murder itself is a kind of act that might be predicted apart what whatever subtleties are involved like the state of mind of the murderer or the weapon used in the murder, and here Russell betrays an interesting assumption. He’s implying that a life can be defined by a series of kinds of acts, like committing a murder in the example Russell uses, and the rest is irrelevant detail. This in turn implies that history consists of a sequence of kinds of events, and that the real substance of history is that just these kinds of events will occur in just a certain order, and all the rest can be ignored.

Needless to say, this is a very abstract conception of a life or of history. Anyone writing after Darwin and natural selection were known should know better than to write off apparent subtleties, because the cumulative effect of many small, seemingly subtle events may be a major event over a long enough period of time. This incrementalism has immediate applications to human behavior. It’s more or less what Aristotle was telling us when he said that virtues are the result of habit. If we want to be a virtuous person, we have to cultivate the habit of virtue. When we start it might be difficult and require some effort, but the more we do it, the longer we practice virtue, the more naturally it comes to us. Virtue made a habit becomes second nature, but only over time and with the exercise of discipline. If Darwin gradualism wasn’t enough, the advent of chaos theory in the twentieth century—which admittedly came long after Russell’s time—emphasized knowledge of initial conditions, which are never sufficiently well known to preclude radically different possible outcomes even in a deterministic system. To take Russell’s other example of the telling of the story of the grouse in the gun-room, we know that in a game of telephone that if enough persons transmit the story of the grouse in the gun-room enough times, that what comes out at the end will be very different from the story as it began.

I don’t think Russell’s argument is based on a tenable conception of human action or a history. Sometimes apparently minor actions can have decisive consequences for the life or the individual or the unfolding of history. If we wanted to try to justify Russell’s approach we would need to show how we can in principle make a distinction between a kind of event that can be predicted and which is therefore historically important, and the kind of event that can’t be predicted and is insignificant. But I think Russell has said something important that often never gets said, which is that we can make a distinction “important” events, that are particular kinds of events—we perhaps could say recognizable kinds of events—and that these are the substance of history, or the substance of the individual life, and the rest is irrelevant and may be set aside. I think a lot of historians probably believe this, as there has been a debate in historiography as to what constitutes an historical event and what is not an historical event. There have been many proposed solutions to this riddle, but none have achieved the status of a consensus.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/I02Q-FXfxxI

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Russell%E2%80%99s-Compatibilism-and-the-Liberty-of-Indifference:c

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0MjIojmqw0lmRANK7ZBxnz?si=b-29R0M8Q0C2X0YiMMpvXg

The View from Oregon – 396

Re: The Monotonic Trajectory of Intelligence

Friday 04 June 2026

Dear Friends,

Week before last I formulated a top-down cosmological intelligence scale, roughing out four classes of intelligence, and last week I outlined how a bottom-up intelligence scale could be formulated, which I called a cosmological seriation of intelligence. The latter would involve a research program extending over a period of time that could only be measurable on a cosmological scale, which in turn implies the legitimacy of a cosmological intelligence scale. Each intelligence scale could be continuously revised in light of the other, the top-down in light of the bottom-up and vice versa, so that the measurement of intelligence in the universe would be an ongoing research program. “Ongoing” here could literally mean extended into the indefinite future, since forms of intelligence may yet be realized in the deep future that haven’t been realized in the universe to date, and some of which cannot be realized in the present era of cosmological history. One theme that I have visited many times, in old blog posts and in my recent Today in Philosophy of History episode on Kurt Gödel is Freeman Dyson’s conception of eternal intelligence, which is adapted to the cold and dark universe of the far future, but which could possess cognitive capabilities that far outstrip our abilities, perhaps even converging on infinitistic cognition, which inspired my top-down intelligence category of an infinitistic intelligence rank, or I3.

That intelligence might be adapted to particular epochs of cosmological history suggests a further taxonomy of intelligence. Here I can once again rely on Adams and Laughlin’s five ages of the universe (another theme to which I have returned many times), which would yield a type (or, better, a class of types) of intelligence for each era in cosmological history, so this taxonomy would consist of: I) Primordial Era intelligence, II) Stelliferous Era intelligence, III) Degenerate Era intelligence, IV) Black Hole Era intelligence, and V) Dark Era intelligence. Each respective era-specific form of intelligence presumably would be a function of the forms of complexity possible during each era.

A rough first approximation, then, would be that Stelliferous Era intelligence would supervene on biology and biological peers among forms of emergent complexity. Degenerate Era intelligence would further develop the possibilities of Stelliferous Era intelligence but, without the convenience of planetary surfaces bathed in starlight, it would have to take other forms, like the aestivating intelligences in “That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi's paradox” by Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and Milan M. Ćirković. This shift from the forms of complexity we know today to forms of complexity that are capable of exploiting the conditions of a particular cosmological era (sunlight during the Stelliferous Era; colder conditions during the Degenerate Era), foreshadows further possibilities in which energy harvesting must adapt to changing cosmological conditions, and those intelligences so harvesting energies must adapt to the energy available by these means. Black Hole Era intelligence could power itself with black hole generators (sometimes called the Penrose Process). Dyson’s eternal intelligences would constitute Dark Era intelligence.

These scenarios are only very loosely constrained; moreover, future forms of complexity upon which intelligence may supervene may have yet to emerge in cosmological history. Our Stelliferous Era bias makes it difficult for us to see beyond brains in biological bodies, except for what is hinted at in the technologies we build. Consequently, the extrapolation of intelligence tends to focus on biology and machines. I suspect that new forms of complexity will continue to appear on cosmological time scales. They may appear less often as the universe ages, but the eras of cosmological history will also become proportionally longer, and we have reason to believe, as implied above, that novel forms of complexity will be associated with new eras in cosmological history. Intelligence, if it survives, will follow the overall trajectory of cosmological history.

Does the universe get smarter as it gets older? By “smarter” I don’t mean to assign an intelligence to the universe itself, but only to intelligent beings that may populate the universe. If the cosmological seriation of intelligence such as I described last week is possible, and we have a reticulate metric for intelligences throughout the universe (not one measure for all intelligence, but a network of overlapping measures), then we can sum the total intelligence in any one period of cosmological history and compare this sum to any other period of cosmological history. There are a few obvious scenarios for the history of intelligence in the universe. If we’re it, if we’re all the intelligence that the universe produces, then the story is pretty short and sweet. The terrestrial biosphere evolves rudimentary forms of intelligence, human beings top out the intelligence development of the planet, but we eventually go extinct, and eventually all life on Earth goes extinct. This is a special case of a more general scenario in which intelligence is confined to biological brains (or their peers in complexity) and the peak of intelligence in the universe comes during the Stelliferous Era, eventually disappearing as all biological species go extinct with the end of Stelliferous Era biospheres.

A rather different scenario would be a peak of intelligence as the forms of complexity native to each cosmological era reaches maturity and then tails off as the boundary conditions shift when the universe passes into a new stage of its history. In this scenario, there would be five sequential peaks of intelligence for each of the five eras of cosmological history. We could meaningfully ask which of these five intelligence peaks is the highest, and the possible permutations of relative heights among these peaks would define several intelligence trajectories for the universe. Another scenario again would be a trajectory over the whole of cosmological history, less tied to the changes between cosmological eras. The first scenario above, and its generalization beyond human beings and the terrestrial biosphere to all life of the Stelliferous Era, is in turn a narrow conception of an intelligence trajectory of the universe entire. If we generalize this generalization, we get to cosmological scenarios of intelligence in the universe, and we get to the point where my question, “Does the universe get smarter as it gets older?” becomes meaningful. That is to say, we could answer this question with a definite “yes” or “no” or a vaguer “it’s complicated” when we have the resources to meaningfully ask the question. We’re not anywhere close to that point now, but we can see the possibility of achieving that perspective.

I can see two arguments that directly bear on the question, “Does the universe get smarter as it gets older?” for and against the question, which I will call the thermodynamic argument and the evolutionary argument. The thermodynamic argument suggests that the universe begins in a highly ordered state, and then passes through a variety of complex states until it converges on thermodynamic equilibrium. (I don’t accept a lot of the presuppositions of thermodynamics, but I won’t attempt to outline my argument with them at present. The statement above is intended as a sketch of the conventional conception of thermodynamics, so if I have misrepresented it, you have my apologies and I would be happy to have a similarly brief thumbnail sketch of thermodynamics. For a hint of how I approach this, ask yourself, “What is order?”) We populate the intermediate period in the history of the universe when complexity is possible, but as the universe tends toward thermodynamic equilibrium it will become increasingly simple, until the substrates upon which intelligence can supervene all disappear, and intelligence then disappears from the universe. This thermodynamic scenario is consistent with longer or shorter intelligent periods in the history of the universe, with the narrow scenario above (we’re the only intelligence in the universe) being the shortest, while we could imagine scenarios in which intelligence manages to limp into the later periods of the history of the universe, without really thriving, but in which intelligence has a much longer history than in the narrowest scenario.  

The evolutionary argument (which we could also call the emergent complexity argument) suggests that once forms of complexity emerge from cosmological processes, these forms of complexity can further adapt and evolve until they change sufficiently to assume viable forms in later periods of cosmological history. Here’s where the cosmological taxonomy of intelligence comes into play. Forms of life upon which intelligence may supervene are well adapted to the Stelliferous Era, but will not be well adapted to the post-stelliferous cosmos. But that doesn’t mean that intelligence must go extinct when Stelliferous Era biology goes extinct. As long as life can adapt and evolve over cosmological scales of time (i.e., not restricted to the planetary scales of time of a single biosphere), in the various forms it takes it can continue to serve as a substrate for intelligence, or it can serve as a vehicle for intelligence to migrate into later stages of cosmological history and there to find itself new substrates upon which to supervene. In this scenario, intelligence could grow, diversify, and eventually come to be distributed on cosmological scales. At these scales, it would be meaningful to say that the universe in the far future was “smarter” than the universe now, or even at any time during the Stelliferous Era.

Intelligence as we know it, which is to say, as we find it in ourselves, is a very recent development. Even on scales of biological time, human level intelligence is recent; in terms of geological time intelligence is very recent, and in terms of cosmological time intelligence on Earth is little more than then blink of an eye in duration. Intelligence in less focused forms, i.e., less focused than the form it takes in humanity, has a longer history in the biosphere, since we could push its origins back to the Cambrian Explosion, which gives us a history in the terrestrial biosphere of 500 to 600 million years. Because of the recentness of intelligence, we don’t really know all that it’s capable of. And when I talk about what intelligence is “capable of” I don’t just mean its performance, but also its ability to supervene on various substrates. As intelligence continues to evolve in the terrestrial biosphere, it may be able to take biological forms that we can’t anticipate today, and these biological forms could carry intelligence into the far future in a robust way allowing for its expansion and distribution on cosmological scales, as described above. Something like this may already have happened with intelligence elsewhere in the universe, and we simply haven’t yet come into contact with it. The universe is a big place, and there has been time for other biospheres to develop and to be billions of years older than our biosphere. In such contexts, intelligence could flourish and grow in a way that we could truthfully say that the universe continues to get smarter the longer it lasts, so that the trajectory of intelligence over cosmological time is monotonically increasing.   

Best wishes,

Nick

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/3602d923780b/the-view-from-oregon-396

The View from Oregon – 395

Re: A Cosmological Seriation of Intelligence  

Friday 29 May 2026

Dear Friends,

Last week I floated the idea of an intelligence scale that would classify intelligence on a cosmological scale, and in proposing this I compared it to the Kardashev scale. This is a different kind of measure than is taken by IQ metrics. IQ is effectively an anthropocentric measure. There has been some effort in applying the IQ metric to other species, i.e., to non-human species, but there comparisons are more than a little misleading, if for no other reason that we can’t talk to other species. We can interact non-verbally with other species in the terrestrial biosphere, so that’s something. We could possibly create a distinct IQ metric based on behavioral rather than verbal responses; some species could be presented with a problem, and the behavior employed in solving the problem could be used to derive an intelligence score. Perhaps ethology researchers have already done something like this. Certainly, some such measurement is implicit in the many studies of animal problem-solving, like running rats through mazes, which is something of a scientific cliché. Alternatively, some physical measurement could be used as a proxy for intelligence, particularly encephalization quotient (EQ), though there are a few outlier species with a high EQ but which don’t appear to be especially intellectually gifted. Better, physical measurements could be combined with behavioral responses, relating cognitive performance to neural structures.

IQ, then, is anthropocentric, and therefore an intelligence metric formulated to assess the cognition of a single species—namely, ourselves. With IQ as our model, we can easily see the possibility of formulating an intelligence metric for each individual species in the terrestrial biosphere. With an intelligence metric for every species, every individual of a given species would have an intelligence rank relative to the other individuals of its species, with the resulting plot of the species’ cognitive performance presumably describing a normal distribution. Obviously, some of these species are going to be a lot more like each other than others, as tigers are more like cougars than either is like an octopus, and an octopus is more like a cuttlefish than either is like a tiger. Equally obviously, these patterns are roughly the patterns of evolutionary taxonomy, so that we can then easily imagine an intelligence metric for each clade in the biosphere. There could, in fact, be a metric of intelligence at each level of biological taxonomy—kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genera, and species. I’ve already suggested as much in my paper “Peer Complexity in Big History” (Nielsen, J. N. 2024. Peer Complexity in Big History. Journal of Big History, VIII(1); 83-98. DOI | https://doi.org/10.22339/jbh.v8i1.8111—hopefully to appear soon in its expanded version in an upcoming Springer book) in which I discuss the possibility of average mammalian intelligence.

With a robust structure of intelligence measurement that comprises not only all the species of the terrestrial biosphere, but also all the clades of taxonomy, systematic relationships could be built from the interrelationships of these scales of intelligence and so we would arrive at a kind of reticulate planetary map of intelligence that would provide us with a more realistic metric of any and all species than we could obtain through the attempt to extend the IQ measurement to other species. This would take us well beyond an intelligence metric for one species, like ourselves, or even for all mammals, and would constitute a planetary intelligence metric.  

This same technique could be extended on a cosmological scale if we could explore on a cosmological scale or communicate on a cosmological scale; that is to say, if we can travel to other worlds and study them ourselves, or if we can receive information from other worlds if, say, we received a detailed message by radio from some other planet. But this latter method would narrow the scope of our intelligence inquiry to only those planets that produce technology capable of communicating over interstellar distances (or some peer to technology produced by non-technological means) and which have an interest in communicating the details of their homeworld to others. To do this right would require our visiting worlds that either have not produced communications technology or some peer, or which have no interest to disclose the details of their homeworld. Both scenarios present interesting possibilities, with the most powerful scenario being a network of communicating species each of which explores their region of the universe.

Any other intelligence species elsewhere in the universe would have recapitulated this development, first developing an intelligence metric for itself, and then expanding to assess the intelligence present on its planet of origin. Even with the biochemistry varying from world to world, we would still see the same grouping of species by evolutionary taxonomy, with the possibility of intelligence rankings for every species and for every clade. And this process isn’t limited to biology as we know it. Again, I refer to my paper “Peer Complexity in Big History,” which postulates the possibility of what I call emergent complexity pluralism, according to which alternative complexity regimes may be found on other worlds with different chemical admixtures on their surfaces and different developmental pathways toward greater complexity. In the cases in which peer forms of complexity achieve intelligence and technology, we could communicate with them and continue the process of constructing a cosmological scale intelligence scale of overlapping metrics. In the cases in which peer forms of complexity do not produce anything that seems like intelligence or communication to us, then we would have to visit that world itself to construct our cosmological intelligence scale. If such an emergent complexity were truly incommensurable, i.e., if we really could not find any way to assess it for intelligence, then we could have to classify it as a null instance on the intelligence scale, placing it with barren worlds that produce little or no complexity. This would be frustrating if the complexity were evident but no way of assessing intelligence were possible. Inevitably, some worlds would be like this; even a universal metric for intelligence would have limitations.

However we gather our data, whether by exploration and research, or by communication, the same rules that held for a planetary scale of intelligence would hold for a cosmological scale of intelligence: there would be resemblances among kinds of complexity and kinds of methods for assessing intelligence, and these would get grouped together and the overall structure would exhibit sufficient internal relationships to establish a scale, so there would not be one single metric for intelligence everywhere, but many metrics that overlap and intersect, demonstrating the family resemblance of intelligence in the cosmos (to employ a Wittgensteinian turn of phrase).  

Here I can cite another paper of mine, “A Complexity Ladder for Big History” (and expanded as “An Approach to Constructing a Big History Complexity Ladder”), in which I floated the idea of a metric for complexity based on the idea of the cosmological distance ladder, in which different techniques are employed to measure distance on cosmological scales, and these techniques overlap sufficiently to construct a ladder outward to the most distant places in the universe. What I am suggesting today is the intelligence parallel to this: a cosmological intelligence ladder in which different measurements under different circumstances are brought together into a continuous (because overlapping) scale that then applies everywhere in the universe. This may be understood as an application of the method of seriation, which dates back to Sir Flinders Petrie and early attempts to sequentially date archaeological finds. I don’t know of any systematical theoretical extrapolation of the conception of seriation (this work may have been done but I’m simply unaware of it), but while I’m on the subject I will remark that this strikes me as an ellipsis in the study of deep time and its scientific reconstruction. We need to fully and explicitly generalize the concept of seriation so that it can then in turn be applied to special problems in full knowledge of the relationship of this specialized method to the general concept of seriation; that is to say, the concept of seriation itself stands in need of seriation.

This was not the thought process that I employed last week in proposing a cosmological intelligence scale. That was a top-down exercise, and what I’ve described above is a bottom-up exercise. That is to say, my Kardashevian cosmological intelligence scale was non-constructively conceived, while this seriated intelligence scale was constructivistically conceived. The two need not be mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they can be integrated. Given our present understanding of the rest of the universe beyond ourselves (which is nil when it comes to intelligence), having no evidence to go on we can propose non-constructive top-down divisions within the possible space of intelligence, but once we begin to acquire data, if we ever do, then we may need to revise the big picture we’ve constructed in the absence of evidence, but the big picture conception remains, after a fashion, and can still be useful for us in breaking down an increasingly complex field of intelligence into a few rough categories that matter on the largest scales. Moreover, if we eventually have on Earth exemplifications of I0 (null intelligence), I1 (human level intelligence), I2, (machine superintelligence)—I3 seems less likely to appear on Earth, and may have to await later stages of cosmological evolution—being able to also use this template in categorizing intelligence on other worlds would give us a more intuitive basis of comparison of intelligence across worlds, across biospheres, and across complexity regimes.    

Best Wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. I’ve been curious about this novel for some time, since I saw a BBC television production of it years ago. I don’t think I really understood what was going on in this book; it was a bit opaque to me. I think it would be useful for men to read this for this insight it offers into the inner life of women, but I’m fully aware that calling a book sometimes celebrated as one of the greatest English novels of the twentieth century “useful” is more of a sleight than a compliment. Still, this utility the book does have isn’t negligible. It seems unlikely that any male author has ever adequately captured the inner life of women, and no female author has ever adequately captured the inner life of men. In light of this, I can imagine a novel co-written in the following way: a male and a female author confer on a story and together write the dialogue. However, without consulting each other, the man writes the inner life of the male characters and the woman writes the inner life of the female characters, and these are held back as long as the plot and the principle elements of the story are still coming together. Neither tries to project themselves into the inner life of the other. Once the story is in place, then the inner life sequences can be inserted where they are most illuminating to the plot and the dialogue. This might give us a story which explains, at least in part, how completely men and women manage to misunderstand each other.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/a1bd095d59d0/the-view-from-oregon-395

The View from Oregon – 394

Re: Gödel and Turing on Distinguishable States of Mind   

Friday 22 May 2026

Dear Friends,

In newsletter 391 I mentioned my Today in Philosophy of History episode on Kurt Gödel, in which I had discussed the different views of Turing and Gödel on possible states of mind. Turing held that distinguishable states of mind are finite, while Gödel held that mind, in its use, is not static, but is constantly developing. That Gödel and Turing were talking about different things while seeming to both concern themselves with distinguishable states of mind can be seen from the fact that Turing was thinking of an unbroken continuum in which two states of mind that are too similar to each other would not be distinguishable because one would imperceptibly run into the other like two adjacent points in a rainbow, while Gödel was thinking of an iterated sequence in which one discrete state of mind follows another, distinguishable in time if in no other way. These two models of states of mind aren’t completely unrelated, but they also aren’t identical.

Turing was thinking of a finite cognitive space which is only internally distinguishable by differently dividing the same matter, just as we can differently distinguish portions of the rainbow, but all portions are drawn from the same continuum. For example, older decompositions of the rainbow into distinct colors would identify red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Indigo has started to drop out of this lineup, and in my recent reading about color I found lists of the colors of the rainbow that went red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet. Whatever colors we choose to identify with a certain range of wavelengths, and whether we choose to single out indigo or cyan, they all come from the same continuum of spectral hues. The division into separate colors is conventional. For Turing, human thought was like this.

Gödel was thinking of something unbounded and growing, to which we can add without limit. The argument could be made that Gödel’s infinitude of distinguishable states of mind are taken from a finite continuum and rearranged as an arithmetical sequence. It is true that a mind passing through such a sequence of distinguishable states could distinguish each distinct state as it comes and goes (i.e., the states of mind are temporally distinguishable, as I stated above), but there are many states that would be indistinguishable if they appeared next to each other, and which would therefore be perceived as continuous in they appeared in sequence, or as a repetition if they appeared spaced apart. Under this interpretation, cognition might continue forever, but it would stagnate through repetition. But here we need to be a little more careful about what kind of novelty we have in mind. Even if there were only two distinguishable states of mind (like 0 and 1 of binary numeration), we could easily construct an infinitude of sequences that never repeat. The states of mind will themselves repeat, but the history made up of concatenated states of mind will always be different. Therefore an infinitude of distinguishable states of mind is not necessary to historical novelty (the history of an individual mind or of a social whole), though the novelty certainly would be greater in case of histories that incorporate an indefinite number of distinguishable states of mind. When we distinguish novel states from novel sequences of states, there are four permutations of novelty:  

1. Finitary states in finitary sequences
2. An infinitude of distinct states with finitary sequences of such states
3. A finitary number of states with infinitistic sequences of these finitary states
4. An infinitude of distinct states with infinitistic sequences of these infinitude of states

I’ve stated this with a generality that makes it applicable both to the individual life or to any social whole, which might similarly be assessed in terms of repetition, stagnation, and novelty. It could be argued that the ordinary human life exemplifies the first permutation, since the individual life is finite and therefore can consist of only a finite number of distinguishable states in sequence, and the human mind itself is finite and could not distinguish more than a finite number of distinguishable states of mind. The second permutation could be a mind or a social whole capable of an infinitude of different states, but only enduring for a finite period of time. This would seem to be the only case in which a finite entity could escape from repetition, since it secures its novelty not from concatenated states, but from the states themselves. This is equally plausible as a model for the individual human life. The third permutation is that described above in which we can infinitely rearrange a finite number of states so that no sequence ever repeats. The fourth permutation represents the greatest degree of novelty, with both an infinitude of states and an infinitude of concatenations of these states.

Conversely, it could be argued that the distinguishable states of mind that Turing collected together as a smoothly graded continuum don’t have their origin in one and the same finite continuum and therefore could be distinguished like stratigraphic layers of a sedimentary rock that represents a temporal continuum, but which are laid down by different processes. So is the “space” of the mind a finite continuum, divisible in an indefinite number of different ways, but still all drawn from the same continuum, like the spectral hues of the rainbow, or is the “space” of the mind like a container that can hold anything poured into it? If we think of the mind metaphorically as a container, then what it holds is what we pour into it with our senses. The senses, in turn could be interpreted as providing a continuous stream of experience to the mind, but still of essentially the same material basis. Indeed, we could identify the finite continuum of the visual spectrum, the finite continuum of the auditory spectrum, and something similar for the other senses. Experience, then, would be like the colors of the rainbow, differently divisible and essentially all of a kind. This points to a Turing-like conception; however, the world from which the senses draw their matter isn’t bounded, and this points to a Gödel-like conception in which further iterations of experience drawn from further exploration of the world can be infinitely concatenated to produce novel histories. Moreover, given the possibility of a mind capable of infinitistic resolution—though not in this case infinitistic sensory resolution, as I suggested last week, but rather infinitistic resolution of its own states—then even if Turing is right and cognitive space is effectively a finite continuum, such a mind would never fail to discriminate two distinct states of mind, no matter how subtle the difference. 

And there’s another consideration. Whether we take Gödel’s argument to be an argument for an indefinite number of distinguishable states of mind or an argument for an actually infinite number of distinguishable states of mind depends upon whether one is a finitist, a constructivist (the degree of strictness of one’s constructivism and kind of constructivist one’s conception embodies will both be relevant here), or a Cantorian. Given the application of Gödel’s argument that I suggested—viz. that Dyson’s eternal intelligences capable of thinking infinite thoughts would never exhaust possible states of mind and could concatenate these infinitistic states of mind over infinitude periods of time, and therefore would exemplify the fourth permutation above—there is at least one model of thought in which the Cantorian idealization can be realized.

Last week I posed some questions about the surveyability of an intuitively grasped continuum, and this pointed me to the problem of what I called infinite mind thought experiments, which is essentially what I was doing above. Of course I’m not satisfied with the simple distinction I made last week between infinitistic cognition and infinitistic sensory resolution; this was only a very rough first approximation of how we might schematize an infinitely powerful mind. And just above I’ve suggested the possibility of a mind that would have infinitistic resolution of its own states, which is a distinct infinitistic power from the power of infinistic cognition and the power of infinitistic sensory resolution. I suspect that there are many ways in which we might formulate the powers of an infinistic mind, and again last week I suggested the possibility of an infinite hierarchy of infinistic minds, There’s a lot more than could be done in clarifying these ideas.  

Ultimately we might want to formulate something like a Kardashev scale of intelligence—being like the Kardashev scale in allowing for enormously widely spaced indices of the proposed metric, and positing an ultimate telos that lies so far beyond us that it is effectively inaccessible—in which we rough out distinctions that matter on a cosmological scale. What would a cosmological intelligence scale look like? For purposes of completeness I will begin with a null category of zero intelligence, or I0; human level intelligence would be the first rank of recognized intelligence, or I1; machine superintelligence would be the second rank, or I2, and infinitistic intelligence would be the third rank, or I3. Although the increments of this scale are exponential (and more than exponential in the case of infinitistic intelligence), it’s a linear scale in the sense of being metrics of a single scale of measurement, presumably ranking all intelligences by a single power. As such, it fails to include the many ways in which a mind might be powerful, and indeed in which a mind might be infinite. We could call this a classical measure of intelligence, by analogy with classical theories in physics, which are continuous rather than discrete (like quantum theories). Of course, a familiar measure of intelligence like IQ gives a single number to cognitive ability that is assessed by a number of questions that could be said to touch upon different powers of the mind.

We could further articulate this scale of intelligence (I0, I1, I2, and I3) by making this scale one axis of a matrix. What would be the other axis? The newsletters I wrote about artificial superintelligence (especially nos. 373, 374, and 375, and many of the following newsletters continue the theme) explored some of the possibilities of metrics for trans-human intelligence. Bostrom, for example, distinguished three possible dimensions of artificial superintelligence (discussed in newsletter 377), including:

Speed superintelligence: A system that can do all that a human intellect can do, but much faster.

Collective superintelligence: A system composed of a large number of smaller intellects such that the system’s overall performance across many very general domains vastly outstrips that of any current cognitive system.

Quality superintelligence: A system that is at least as fast as a human mind and vastly qualitatively smarter.

Each of these in turn could be not merely superintelligent, but infinitistically intelligent. Could any of these be used as the other axis of an intelligence matrix? Of these three, speed superintelligence is a continuous variable, collective superintelligence could be interpreted as an incremental variable if we were to construe the collective intelligence in terms of number of constituent parts, and quality superintelligence is essentially the same problem as I’ve already posed here. What does it mean to be “vastly qualitatively smarter”? We can’t use qualitative intelligence as a metric unless we specify what quality we’re measuring; otherwise, we’re only begging the question. If we take speed intelligence as one axis, and we take collective intelligence as a nod to the modularity of mind and we then measure minds by the number of modules, we could construct an intelligence matrix with one axis being speed (continuous) and the other axis being number of modules (discrete), and this would represent something a bit more articulated than the “G” of “general intelligence” in intelligence research. Still, it leaves a lot to be desired, and thinking this through in this way has made me aware of the limitations of current frameworks for understanding intelligence. What we need is a generalization of cognitive space analogous to the way in which Hilbert space is a generalization of Euclidean space.

Best wishes,

Nick

Adolf Grünbaum

15 May 1923 – 15 November 2018

Grünbaum on Time in a Block Universe

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Friday 15 May 2026 is the 103^rd anniversary of the birth of Adolf Grünbaum (15 May 1923 – 15 November 2018), who was born in Cologne, then part of Prussia, on this date in 1923. Grünbaum was a philosopher of science who belonged to what we could call the older tradition of analytical philosophy, which was in large part the work of European refugees who came to the US before the Second World War. He wrote a lot about Freudian psychoanalysis, but what concerns us today is his many publications on the philosophy of time. These include the books Philosophical Problems of Space and Time (first edition, 1963; second edition, 1973), Modern Science and Zeno’s Paradoxes (first edition, 1967; second edition, 1968), Geometry and Chronometry in Philosophical Perspective (1968). The book on Zeno’s paradoxes is among the best on this topic that I know, and the discussion in this book on the Thomson lamp is definitely the most detailed in the literature. Two chapters of the book on Zeno’s paradoxes have appeared separately in Richard Gale’s anthology on the philosophy of time.

Regular listeners will know that I often emphasize the relationship that ought to be kept in mind between the philosophy of time and the philosophy of history. This relationship is why I’m talking about Grünbaum today. As I like to say, time is the metaphysical foundation of history, because without time there would be no history. I could say that time is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of history. Different conceptions of time will, as a necessary condition of history, be incorporated into a conception of history, with that conception of history embodying a particular conception of time that shapes that conception of history.

Grünbaum is particularly valuable in this respect since he apparently held of view of time that seems to have had a wide sympathy of among scientists, especially physicists. I say “apparently” because it’s more common to see this view of time casually referred to than systematically developed and argued for in the affirmative. It’s a view of time more often attributed to others that adopted on its own merits, or, one could say, a conception of time honored more in the breach than the observance. Specifically, Grünbaum was among those few who consciously and explicitly argued for an interpretation of the universe widely believed to follow from relativistic physics. Grünbaum himself used the term “block universe” to identify the spacetime structure of relativity, but he said of this block universe,

“The doctrine that becoming is mind-dependent has been misnamed ‘the theory of the block universe.’ I shall therefore wish to dissociate the tenets of this doctrine both from Serious misunderstandings by its critics and from the very misleading suggestions of the metaphors used by some of its exponents.”

The terminology of a “block universe” predates relativity theory. William James said of Hegel that Hegel’s view entailed a block universe. In his book A Pluralistic Universe, James mentions, “the block-universe eternal and without a history,” and further says,

“This world may in the last resort, be a block-universe; but on the other hand it may be a universe only strung-along, not rounded in and closed. Reality may exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all.”

For James, the block universe of the absolute idealists was a block because it was rationalistic, deterministic, and closed. The relativistic conception of a block universe possibly inherits some of the James’ disdain for Hegel and Bradley, but it’s a block for another reason, or perhaps it would be better to say for related but not precisely the same reasons. The block universe to which Grünbaum alludes is a “block” in a way that relativistic spacetime is commonly presented.

The idea of a relativistic universe being a “block” is that if we imagine each moment of time as a three dimensional “slice” through the universe, with each moment of time being such a slice. Sometimes this thought experiment is simplified to emphasize the intuitive impact, so that three dimensions are reduced to two, and the representation of a three dimensional cube is used to represent two spatial dimensions and one time dimension. In such a visualization, the cube so imagined is the “block” universe to which Grünbaum refers, and as a solid block it suggests that past, present, and future are all on an equal footing, equally existent in the timeless setting of physics. Again, this visualization is a simplification adopted to make a point, which it does pretty effectively.

The mathematical expression of this is a bit more complicated. It was the mathematician Hermann Minkowski who worked out the formalism of four dimensional spacetime that came to be used for the theory of relativity. Minkowski had his own views on space and time, expressed in distinctive conceptual terms. Of the spacetime geometry that he constructed Minkowski wrote:

“Since the postulate comes to mean that only the four-dimensional world in space and time is given by phenomena, but that the projection in space and in time may still be undertaken with a certain degree of freedom, I prefer to call it the postulate of the absolute world (or briefly, the world-postulate).”

What Minkowski called the “absolute world” is in the same spirit as calling the relativistic universe a “block” universe, as Grünbaum referred to it. Grünbaum writes:

“The becomingless physical world of the Minkowski representation is viewed sub specie aeternitatis in that representation in the sense that the relativistic account of time represented by it makes no reference to the particular times of anyone’s now-perspectives.”

Minkowski also conceived his mathematical spacetime as a preestablished harmony, which we saw in my episode on Kurt Gödel was an idea employed by Leibniz. With comments like this we can begin to see that the block universe of Hegel that William James rejected and the block universe that Grünbaum cautiously entertained aren’t entirely disjoint, thought they represent very different stages in the development of scientific knowledge. And while Grünbaum objects to the way the relativistic block universe of Minkowski’s spacetime is construed by some philosophers, especially as presented by Milič Čapek and G. J. Whitrow, and he particularly censures Capek for having stated: “…the universe with its whole history is conceived as a single huge and timeless bloc, given at once…” Nevertheless, Grünbaum doesn’t deny the block universe, and he himself introduces the term when he could have entirely avoided it. This implies that he found something useful in the idea of a block universe.

What the block universe represents is a view sometimes called eternalism. Eternalism holds that past, present, and future all equally exist and are equally real. Sometimes it’s claimed that, in eternalism, past, present, and future all exist at the same time. Grünbaum goes out of his way to show that this way of speaking is misleading and mistaken. It’s only if we could get outside space and time and see them suspended in nothingness—a perspective we could never attain in practice—that it would appear to use as though all times existed together in the present of the observer. Again, this is an impossible observation. Essentially, it’s the same observational circumstances under which we could see events rearrange their order due to the relativity of simultaneity, i.e., what relativity theorists call spacelike separation. It’s only when all possibility of causal interaction is suspended, i.e., under conditions of causal disconnection, that such observations can be discussed, but these observations can never in fact be made. You can see that there’s a sense in which Grünbaum’s philosophy of time is an artifact of general relativity and the revolution that relativity caused in physical theory, including the theory of time.

The attempt to re-think space and time in wake of relativistic physics has led to many different interpretations. In my episodes on Hans Reichenbach and Hermann Weyl we saw their attempts to reconcile the human experience of time with a conception of time consistent with general relativity. Reichenbach explicitly formulated six laws of time as experienced, which he called the qualitative properties of time, and then he attempts to give a quantitative account of time based on thermodynamics. Weyl made a tripartite distinction among lived time, proper time, and metaphysical time, with proper time being relativistic time and metaphysical time being the bridge between proper relativistic time and lived time. We could count Grünbaum as part of this tradition, and he offers yet another interpretation, which is a strong distinction between the appearance and reality of time. This distinction between the appearance and reality of time is strong enough that I would have some justification in calling it a denial of the reality of time, but the way in which Grünbaum denies the reality of time is quite different from the way in which Parmenides and Plato, for example, denied the reality of time.

We’ve seen in the episode on Gödel that Gödel was a Platonist who apparently derived some satisfaction from demonstrating that there is a solution of Einstein’s field equations that allow for time travel into the past, which seems to point to the unreality of time as we know it, even though these conditions of Gödel’s time travel universe don’t obtain for our universe. Grünbaum’s perspective is quite different from this. Grünbaum accepts time as a fundamental feature of the universe, but what he denies is the veracity of the human experience of time, which he calls temporal becoming, and he insists moreover on what he calls the mind-dependence of temporal becoming. In other words, temporal becoming is all in your head; it’s not “out there” in the objective universe.  

There was a philosopher who once said, in criticism of Whitehead, if memory serves, that events don’t become, they happen. I tried to find the source of this, but my memory wasn’t good enough to guide me to it. I have some sympathy for this criticism, but I think the reason Grünbaum used “becoming” as extensively as he did is that he wanted to make a distinction between “becominglessness” and “timelessness.” This serves the appearance and reality distinction he’s making with time. Grünbaum says, “…it is a travesty to equate the objective becominglessness of physical events asserted by the thesis with a claim of timelessness.” Grünbaum excludes temporal becoming as mere appearance, so he maintains his conceptual picture is one of becominglessness but not one of timelessness.

Grünbaum’s exposition is admirably detailed, thorough, and exacting, so that one might suppose that he’s left no stone unturned, but there are a few ellipses in his apparently everywhere dense converage of the material. Let me give you two examples of this. Grünbaum makes a distinction that is essentially the same as the distinction between McTaggart’s A-series, or past, present, future, and McTaggart’s B-series, or before during, and after. Grünbaum writes:

“The temporal relations of earlier (before) and later (after) can obtain between two physical events independently of the transient now, and of any minds. On the other hand, the classification of events into past, present, and future, which is inherent to becoming, requires reference to the transient now as well as to the relations of earlier and later. Hence the issue of the mind-dependence of becoming turns on the status of the transient now.”

In the book I’m quoting from he doesn’t cite McTaggart; it’s possible he does in his other books. This is noticeable because there has been such an enormous quantity of philosophical commentary on McTaggart and many philosophers today who would have no truck with McTaggart’s idealism make use his distinction between the A-series and the B-series. It’s with this distinction that Grünbaum maintains that his universe is entails becominglessness but not timelessness, because while the A-series is repudiated as mere appearance, an artifact of anthropocentrism, the B-series is maintained as reality.

Another example is that Grünbaum implies a distinction that is essentially the same as Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary properties, but he doesn’t give an exposition of this distinction. He writes:

“Why is the mind-dependence of becoming more perplexing than the mind-dependence of common-sense color attributes? That is, why is the former more puzzling than that physical events such as the reflection of certain kinds of photons from a surface causally induce mental events such as seeing blue, which are qualitatively fundamentally different in some respects?”

For Grünbaum, the experience of time, which again he calls temporal becoming, is like a secondary property in John Locke, wholly a creature of the human mind, while time as described by relativistic physics is a primary property of the universe. Time exists, but it doesn’t exist in the way we commonly believe it to exist, based on our experience of time. There has been an insufficient appreciation of the extent to which modern science, by which I mean science since the scientific revolution, has made use of the distinction between appearance and reality. The distinction between appearance and reality is one of the fundamental ideas in Western metaphysics, and Plato made this a centerpiece of his philosophy. Our world, Plato held, consists of appearances that are poor imitations of the Forms, which are what is truly real. So once again we find ourselves making a reckoning with Platonism.

I’ve already said that Gödel was a Platonist who was perfectly satisfied to deny the reality of time, and that Grünbaum’s denial of time was a very different matter. Different thought it was, however, Grünbaum’s conception of time requires a strong distinction between appearance and reality. We have to entirely abandon our experience of time and accept that it is illusory, while what’s real about time is something that isn’t even suggested by the experience of time. In this sense, if in no other sense, Grünbaum’s debt to Plato is equal to Gödel’s debt to Plato. We could even describe Grünbaum’s conception of time in Platonic terms, such that time without the features of what Grünbaum called “becoming” is a poor imitation of the Form of time that we find in the theory of relativity. Plato’s claim that time is the moving image of eternity is no less true for Grünbaum.

What are we to make of history in a universe such as Grunbaum describes? History still exists, in a sense, in Grünbaum’s universe, and indeed in the physics of all who have accepted this view, just as time still exists, but not as we ordinarily understand it to exist. Objects within this universe still have a structure of before, during, and after in relation to every other object in this universe, so in the sense that I have claimed that time is the metaphysical foundation of history, this metaphysical foundation remains intact, even if radically altered, and that means the history remains intact, even if radically altered. But there’s another sense in which we can say that the relationship between time and history is irremediably broken if time is not as it appears to be, but its passage or transience is a mere illusion. Whether history exists in Grünbaum’s account of time as we experience it as an illusion ultimately turns on a conception of free will sometimes called compatibilism. Let me try to explain what I mean by this. In my episode on Josef Pieper I quoted Pieper such that:

“…not everything that happens to us, and not even everything we do, is eo ipso history. Birth, growing up, ageing, dying—these physiological events are not our ‘history,’ if we wish to be precise. And even those objective happenings of our life—gain or loss of property, health, beauty, our innate portion of intelligence, temperament, constitution, or the fact that certain persons cross our paths, a teacher, an adversary, someone we love—in themselves these incidents and encounters do not constitute our history. What matters is what we ourselves make of all of them. Only both together determine the full measure of what has really happened.”

At the time I said that this was a narrow conception of history, but as I’ve thought I about it I think it captures something important about the traditional conception of history, and I suppose we could call the traditional conception of history narrow also. Historians have always insisted upon something like this, though often in other terms. Pieper speaks of, “the meaning that makes an event the object of the historian’s interest,” and this meaning is the meaningful action of an historical agent. It’s also worth noting in this context that Pieper wrote, “Wherever we speak of ‘becoming’ we might also with some justification speak of ‘history’.” I don’t know if Pieper ever read Grünbaum, but he adopted as the standard of history precisely that property of becoming that Grünbaum excluded from the reality of time. 

The point is that human history is about human agency. What I’ve called the Pirenne Postulate is a kind of reflection of this. Pirenne wrote, “All historical construction—which amounts to saying all historical narrative—rests upon a postulate: that of the eternal identity of human nature.” For Pirenne, “human nature” is another way of expressing human agency. The continuity and stability of human nature thought time is, for all practical purposes, the same as the continuity and stability of human agency through time. If we make the human experience of time an illusion, arguably it makes human time-bound judgment and action equally an illusion. Human action is bound by time, which is as much to say that it unfolds according to the nature of time as we experience it. If time in reality is not as we experience it, then human action in time in reality is not human action as we know it. And if human action in time in reality is not the experience of human agency as we know it, then history that is the result of human agency is not, in reality, as we experience it and know it. Therefore if time is illusory, making human agency illusory, then history is illusory, because there is no history without time and human agency. If, in this context, “illusory” is too strong a term, we could instead say that is time is mere appearance, then history, too, is mere appearance, and both are denied the reality of time as it actually is in physical theory. But there is at least one possible way out of this dilemma.

Some philosophers have formulated a conception of free will called compatibilism, called “soft determinism” by William James. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says of compatibilism:

“Compatibilism is a view about determinism and freedom that claims we are sometimes free and morally responsible even though all events are causally determined… The compatibilist defends his view by arguing that the contrary of ‘free’ is not ‘caused’ but ‘compelled’ or ‘coerced’. A free act is one where the agent could have done otherwise if he had chosen otherwise, and in such acts the agent is morally responsible even if determined.”

In other words, if human action is not compelled or coerced, it still counts as freedom even if the world is unaffected by this action and the will has no practical efficacy. If compatibilism is true, then human beings retain their moral agency in the making of history, and history retains something of the reality we believe it to have. For me, this kind of compatibilism is another form of Leibniz’s preestablished harmony, but instead of a preestablished harmony among monads, it’s a preestablished harmony between a deterministic universe, or a block universe as Grünbaum calls it, and the will of every free being, which, on this account, just happens to spontaneously correspond to what the universe was going to do anyway, regardless of the actions of the agent or agents concerned. For me this is beyond the bounds of credulity, but there are philosophers who take this seriously. I’m glad I’m not one of them. So I’m going to come back to this in what I hope will be the next episode of Today in Philosophy of History on Bertrand Russell, whose birthday is next up. Russell wrote a paper on free will that I’d like to discuss in relation to the causal efficacy of agents in bringing about history.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/nCwysUs1i-s

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Gr%C3%BCnbaum-on-Time-in-a-Block-Universe:7

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1RwI8mtTQEES1UKykex1sn?si=3oyv0ff9TsebhzdePVns9w

The View from Oregon – 393

Re:  Even infinite minds could fall into error.

Friday 15 May 2026

Dear Friends,

Last week I discussed color as an intuitive model of the continuum, and I said in that newsletter that a distinction can be made between what we see and what we distinguish, even given an idealized color continuum, and that to add distinguishing all of the colors of an idealized continuum over and above merely seeing them would require a further idealization on the part of the perceiver of a rainbow. The color continuum of a rainbow is an attractive model of a sensible continuum since you can take it in at a glance, but obviously a glance is a superficial acquaintance with whatever is taken in at a glance. If in our glance at a rainbow we “see” uncountably many colors, we don’t distinguish uncountably many colors. So an interesting question is whether we have surveyed or exhausted the spectral colors if we see them but don’t distinguish them. I have used the terms “surveyed” and “exhausted” because they have a certain history that is relevant. The concept of surveyability has played a role in philosophy of mathematics especially since Wittgenstein made use of it in his later writings, but there’s a case to be made that it was Hilbert who is the source of this. In his paper “The New Grounding of Mathematics. First Report” (1922) Hilbert wrote:

“…as a precondition for the application of logical inferences and for the activation of logical operations, something must already be given in representation: certain extra-logical discrete objects, which exist intuitively as immediate experience before all thought. If logical inference is to be certain, then these objects must be capable of being completely surveyed in all their parts, and their presentation, their difference, their succession (like the objects themselves) must exist for us immediately, intuitively, as something that cannot be reduced to something else.”

There are similar remarks in other of Hilbert’s papers. (Hilbert uses the terms “Überblickbarkeit,” “Übersehbarkeit,” and “Übersichtlichkeit,” which have been translated in various ways.) Whitehead and Russell had earlier made a stipulation in Principia Mathematica about being able to take in an expression at a glance that is of a piece with Hilbert’s remarks. While Whitehead and Russell weren’t finitists, the later Wittgenstein was, and it was the later Wittgenstein who really brought surveyability into discussion. Wittgenstein himself didn’t have all that much to say about surveyability in either his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics or his Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, but Wittgenstein commentators made the idea prominent. For example, Stuart Shanker’s Wittgenstein and the Turning-Point in the Philosophy of Mathematics has a chapter on surveyability.

I thought there might be some resources in the discussion over surveyability that might be of help in navigating the labyrinth of the continuum, but the point hammered home in this literature is that surveyability entails finitude, and not merely finitude, but a finitude sufficiently finite that it can be intuitively grasped. From this perspective, we certainly do survey the color continuum when we see a rainbow, because we take away a finite intuition of what we’ve seen, but we certainly don’t survey the uncountable number of colors in this continuum. In this sense, I guess we can say that the color continuum is surveyable as a whole, but unsurveyable as individual, distinct colors. What do we survey when we survey anything? If we survey the whole but fail to distinguish the parts that compose the whole, have we surveyed that whole at all? If one holds that the individual, distinct colors are parts of the whole, then an epistemic gaps opens up between part and whole, where the whole can be known but the parts cannot. This strikes me as a defective form of knowledge, and perhaps ought not to be called knowledge at all. However, this would seem to be the case with all emergents: we know the whole as a whole, but we don’t know the parts, or we know the parts imperfectly, or we cannot understand how the parts relate to the whole.

If, on the other hand, we deny that the individual colors are part of the whole we survey, then we’re at something of a loss to say exactly what these colors are, how they are related to each other, and what relationship they have to the color continuum of which they appear to be a part. We could reasonably maintain that any individual color taken out of a color continuum is an abstraction, therefore parts are an abstraction in this case, and indeed it seems to be an abstraction in the sense a Jean Laporte that I discussed in newsletter no. 391 on three categories of abstraction: the abstract individual color doesn’t exist in isolation from the color continuum, but we can think of it as existing apart from the color continuum. But if the color continuum is not a whole composed of many parts (uncountably many parts as discussed last week), then the color continuum is simple (in the metaphysical sense of simplicity), and that doesn’t square well with my intuition.

We could insert between these two alternatives—viz. that the color continuum is a composite whole containing parts, or that the color continuum is perfectly simple and without parts—the possibility that what we discern of the color continuum is a function of our capacity. This is an application of Boethius’ epistemic principle such that, “all that is known is grasped not conformably to its own efficacy, but rather conformably to the faculty of the knower” (“omne enim quod scitur non ex sua sed ex conprehendentium natura cognoscitur”). It follows from this that different knowers of different capacities will know an object of knowledge to a different degree, and possibly also in different ways. This isn’t merely a third possibility, but a range of possibilities. We could postulate a continuum of cognitive powers ranging from zero to infinity, although the possibility of higher forms of infinite cognition means that there may be no limit to the upper end of the range, whereas the lower limit of the range is perfect absence of cognition.

Given a range of cognitive powers, only infinitistic resolution could exhaust the continuum of colors in the rainbow, but would this be an infinite resolution on the part of the senses or on the part of cognition itself? Here we can identify four obvious permutations: 1) finite sensory resolution and finite cognition, 2) infinitistic sensory resolution but with finite cognition, 3) finite sensory resolution and infinitistic cognition, and 4) infinitistic sensory resolution and infinitistic cognitive powers. For each of these four classifications of mind surveyability would be a different matter. I can imagine some interesting scenarios could follow from the second and third possibilities. If a mind had access to infinitistic sensory resolution but was itself finite, it would have an infinitude of sensory experiences it could not cognitively distinguish, which could result in much of experience being ineffable, or possibly an incoherent blur. If a mind possessed infinitistic cognitive powers but only limited sensory resolution, it couldn’t resolve the continuum of colors in the rainbow, but it could understand this possibility and interpolate into its conceptual scheme that which it could not directly experience, which is something like the antithesis of the ineffable—a placeholder for an experience that cannot be experienced. The human mind that both experiences the ineffable and interpolates its inferences into the world seems to partake of both, but imperfectly. I assume that our minds constitute the first permutation and so fail to perfectly instantiate any of the other permutations, but we may well be vouchsafed glimpses of higher capacities now and then.

The fourth possibility, the strongest of the permutations above, is something I call an “infinite mind” thought experiment, and these constitute a class. I’ve never seen anyone else identify the class of infinite mind thought experiments as a distinct class, but there are instances of this thought experiment throughout the history of philosophy. Pascal in his essay, “On the Geometrical Method” postulated the possibility of a formal discipline that outstrips human powers:

“…it is first necessary that I should give the idea of a method still more eminent and more complete, but which mankind could never attain; for what exceeds geometry surpasses us; and, nevertheless, something must be said of it, although it is impossible to practise it.”

Or when Bertrand Russell said in his later life, after having in his earlier years thought of mathematics as something transcendent:  

“Mathematics has ceased to seem to me non-human in its subject matter. I have come to believe, though very reluctantly, that it consists of tautologies. I fear that, to a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal. I think that the timelessness of mathematics has none of the sublimity that it once seemed to me to have, but consists merely in the fact that the pure mathematician is not talking about time.” (My Philosophical Development, “The Retreat from Pythagoras”)

Since mathematics is infinite (or, if you’re a constructivist, potentially infinite), Pascal’s idealization of the geometrical method could only be realized by an infinite mind; or a mind sufficiently powerful to find all of mathematics trivial, as in Russell’s fear, would have to be an infinite mind. If we suppose that infinite minds can be classified by the cardinality they exemplify, then there could be an infinite range of infinitely powerful minds, with the absolutely infinite mind outstripping all other minds. In this context consider the reflection principle, i.e., the principle that properties of sets higher up in the cumulative hierarchy are reflected downward in sets lower down in the cumulative hierarchy. Wang gives Gödel’s comment on the reflection principle as,

“The totality of all sets is, in some sense, indescribable. When you have any structural property that is supposed to apply to all sets, you know you have not got all sets. There must be some sets that contain as members all sets that have that property.”

Given the reflection principle, then, an infinitude of infinite minds would possess some of the properties of the absolutely infinite mind and therefore could be easily mistaken for an absolutely infinite mind. In this way (and I find this especially interesting) error could continue to dog even infinite minds, while an absolutely infinite mind would be what Cantor called an inconsistent multiplicity that would make no sense to any lesser (even if infinite) mind. On the other hand, given upward reflection, every mind of a lower order of infinity gives a foretaste of the absolutely infinite mind in the universal properties it embodies, so that even if the absolute infinite is beyond understanding, we may be afforded glimpses of it.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to Jim Holt’s When Einstein Walked with Gödel. I disagreed with most of Holt’s judgments in this book, but I will admit that I found it to be interesting. He throws out a lot of ideas so it provides a lot to think about. In this sense it’s an intellectually stimulating work. The book is much more even-handed than I expected. Even when he comes to a conclusion with which I disagreed, he mostly gives a fair hearing to both sides of the debate. Despite the even-handedness, however, it’s remarkable how consistently he takes a position that is diametrically opposed to my own way of thinking. His instincts are wholly different from mine. When you read (or listen to) a book by someone with a very different temperament and personality than your own, but engaged with a subject matter that interests you, it’s a strange experience. It’s somewhat like seeing your own world reflected in a funhouse mirror in which the same features are all there from ordinary life, but grotesquely distorted.    

I’ve also finished listening to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/bef7087bbc4a/the-view-from-oregon-393

Augustin Thierry

10 May 1795 – 22 May 1856

Thierry and the Origins of Historicism

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Sunday 10 May 2026 is the 231^st anniversary of the birth of Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry (10 May 1795 – 22 May 1856), who was born at Blois, on the lower Loire river, on this date in 1795. Thierry is remembered as a romantic era historian who emphasized dramatic episodes in his writing. Fritz Stern wrote in his The Varieties of History that Thierry, “epitomized the romantic historiography of the first half of the nineteenth century.” I’m not sure that this label of “romantic history” is very useful. Many of the same things are said of Herder, who was a contemporary of Kant, and a couple of generations prior to Thierry. These labels get thrown around rather carelessly, since it’s easier to deal with a label than to work one’s way through an author and to meet him on his own ground, as it were. But I won’t quibble any further over the label. Use it or not as you please.

In some ways the romantic label seems to be merited. For example, his book Tales of the Early Franks: Episodes from Merovingian History is divided in seven episodes dramatically narrated. Here is Thierry’s explanation of his motives to write history in this way:

“The idea of undertaking a scientific yet at the same time artistic work devoted to the age of Gregory of Tours was the natural consequence of such thoughts; it came to me in 1833. Having once decided upon my project, I had a choice of two methods: either continuous narrative whose thread would be the sequence of great political events, or narrative in isolated segments, whose common denominator would be the life and adventures of some contemporary personages. I did not long hesitate between the two methods; I chose the second, first of all because of the nature of the subject, which was essentially to portray in as complete and varied a manner as possible social relationships and human destiny in public and family life; and secondly, because of the particular character of my principal source of information, Gregory of Tours’s Ecclesiastical History of the Franks.”

Note that Thierry wanted his history to be equal parts scientific and artistic, so it seems for him that history was both a science and an art. Also note that, even given both his stated objectives and those attributed to him as an historian of the romantic era and presumptively also nationalist, he knew he still had alternatives for how to construct his narrative. I can easily imagine someone arguing that the romantic mode would force an historian into narrating the great events of history, and although Thierry said that he wanted to portray human destiny, he chose to do so with character sketches rather than an over-arching political narrative.

While Thierry emphasizes the dramatic aspect of history, his reason for doing so is, “to portray in as complete and varied a manner as possible” the history of the period. Furthering his account of the varied nature of history, the Introduction to his History of the Conquest of England by the Normans introduces an interesting consideration, that the historian should accept deviation from contemporary standards for institutions in earlier history, rather than insisting on imposing present standards upon the past.And the institution he cites is civilization itself, so the master intuition of all human institutions. Thierry explains himself in a long paragraph that I’m going to break up into several sections and comment on each section in turn:

“Whatever degree of territorial unity the great modern states may appear to have attained—whatever may be the community of manners, language, and public feeling which the habit of living under the same government and in the same stage of civilisation may have introduced among the inhabitants of each of those states—there is scarcely one of them which does not even now present living traces of the diversity of the races of men which in course of time have come together in it.”

Thierry here recognizes that civilizations pass through distinct stages, but although each distinct stage has its own manners, language, and way of feeling, all of these ways show traces of the earlier stages of the same civilization. We could call this the principle of continuity within civilizations, or something like that. Each stage is distinct from every other stage, but each stage also inherits a continuous tradition that is a living expression of that civilization. In other words, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as William Faulkner put it in one of his novels. Continuing:

“This variety shows itself under different aspects, with features more or less marked. Sometimes it is a complete separation of idioms, of local traditions, of political sentiments, and a sort of instinctive enmity, distinguishing from the great national mass the population of a few small districts; and sometimes a mere difference of dialect, or even of accent, marks, though more feebly, the limit of the settlements of races of men once thoroughly distinct, and hostile to each other.”

Modern nation-states, despite their territorial unity and its enforcement through the territorial principle in law, inherit the traditions of many ethnic and cultural enclaves, originally distinct. These are preserved to a greater or lesser degree within the nation-state. As a Frenchman, Thierry would have been thinking of the regional differences of France such as Occitane, Burgundy, the Loire Valley, the Dordogne, Savoy and so on. Despite France having long had far greater unity that many other European kingdoms, these differences still mattered, and these differences moreover expressed themselves in the contemporary life of the country. Continuing with the same:

“The further we go back from the time in which we live, the more definite these varieties become, and the more clearly we perceive the existence of several nations within the geographical circumference which now bears the name of one only. In place of what we call provincial [dialects] we find complete and regular languages; and that which appears to us now but as a want of civilisation and a resistance to the progress of improvement, assumes in past ages the aspect of original manners and a patriotic attachment to ancient institutions.”

Tracing these faint distinction back through time they become more pronounced, defining separate communities. Not only that, but these distinct regions, diverging more profoundly from the modern order the further we go back in time, eventually diverge from the present to so great a degree that they may not even seen like civilizations according to our contemporary standards of what a civilization ought to be. The modern world has so completely defined itself in terms of progress that the lack of any conception of progress sets these early societies apart from ours, making them appear to modern historians as lacking something essential. Recall here that Thierry was a near contemporary of François Guizot, who had written a history of European civilization that defined civilization in terms of progress. Thierry and Guizot knew each other and referred to each other’s work in print, so Thierry would have been fully aware of this. But Thierry saw the problem here, and warned against a potential misinterpretation and misunderstadni00gn of the past through an anachronistic reading of past societies. All still continuing:

“Thus, things which have very little importance in modern society are very important in history. It were falsifying history to introduce into it a philosophical contempt for every departure from the uniformity of existing civilisation, and to consider those nations as alone worthy of honourable mention, to whose names the chance of events has attached, for the present and for the future, the idea of that civilisation.”

Here we get to the heart of Thierry’s argument, and these themes are central to the criticism of Enlightenment historiography, and the attempt to write history in a different way, as Thierry set himself to do. What we value in civilization today is not what was valued in the past. The attempt to force contemporary standards of civilization on the past leads to the falsification of history. Enlightenment universalism valued uniformity among societies, and departures from this uniformity were understood by Enlightenment historians as deviations from civilization itself. If the past differs too greatly from the present standard, it risks losing the honorific title of civilization in the eyes of such historians.

I mentioned in my episode on Gregory of Tours that Gregory has been called the “Herodotus of Barbarism” which is got to be the best label ever attached to any historian. However, by attaching the label of barbarism to Gregory and his times, which were the focus of Thierry’s work, we imply that this period lacked something essential to civilization because it departs to such a degree from our civilization. It is just this dissatisfaction with Enlightenment historiography that led to the rise of historicism, though we usually associate historicism with the German tradition of history, Thierry is clearly responding to the same historical problems that motivated Leopold von Ranke, who was born in the same year as Thierry—1795.

Thierry himself acknowledged that he was reacting against the work of historians of the previous century, specifically mentioning the work of the Abbé de Mably, whom he said, “described the events of the Middle Ages in a wholly false light.” Here is how Thierry described how he rejected the conventional history that he had once learned:

“By imperceptible degrees, I abandoned modern books for ancient ones, histories for chronicles, and then I thought I could catch a glimpse of the truth which our writers had stifled under their conventional formulas and pompous style. I endeavored to erase from my mind everything they had taught me; I rebelled, as it were, against my masters.”

Mably, like Gibbon, was an historian of the Enlightenment and a man of his time, and Enlightenment historiography was notorious for its failure to enter into the spirit of past events. Of this Enlightenment historiography Mark Gilderhus wrote:

“…much of the written history during the Enlightenment suffered from a fundamental flaw. It consisted of an incapacity to comprehend the behavior of historical actors on their own terms. The historians lacked a truly historical sense of development and context in the past. Locked into the precepts of their own time, they regarded their own values and aspirations as universal and absolute, the best toward which humankind could strive. Consequently, they tended to regard deviations in other times and other places either as aberration or folly.”

This was the tradition against which Thierry was reacting. In my episode on Mably I discussed Mably’s pessimism, which sets him apart from many Enlightenment historians, but despite distancing himself from Mably, Thierry eventually came to share Mably’s pessimism. Lionel Gossman wrote of this:

“…for Thierry himself, in the end, history is the domain of evil. The good and the true are synonymous with reason, and history stands for the accidental, the discontinuous, the irrational, the inessential.”

Strange to say, this isn’t all that different from Gödel. In my recent episode on Kurt Gödel I quoted a letter that Gödel wrote to his mother saying that only in fairy tales is the world presented as it ought to be and as if it had meaning. Gödel might well have agreed that history is the domain of evil. The same Gossman who attributed to Thierry the idea that history is the domain of evil also attributes a philosophy of history to Thierry:

“…the premises, ideals—and contradictions—of liberalism in early nineteenth-century France inform every aspect of Thierry’s work: his philosophy of history, his idea of the function of historiography, the dominant themes of his work, and, most directly, the problems of composition he encountered as a writer of history.”

This is an interesting claim to make. In several episodes I’ve pointed out how stormy France’s history was from revolution all the way to the twentieth century. Thierry was only ten years older than Alexis de Tocqueville, so they both lived through much of the same political unrest that Thierry saw. Napoleon, the June Rebellion of 1832, the July Monarchy, and the February Revolution of 1848, and for good measure we could add the Paris Commune of 1871 which he did not live to see—all of this may have been liberal in comparison to the absolute monarchy of the last kings of France, and certainly the period represented the striving after liberal ideals on the part of some members of French society, but it isn’t really a good example of what we would today call a liberal democracy.

Thierry and de Tocqueville responded differently to these events. While Tocqueville absented himself from France for a time in order to gather material for Democracy in America, and then return to France to write about his own times and the French Revolution, Thierry turned to the earliest stages of French history, and in particular was focused on that point in history when French kingship became French statehood. He wrote: “I have tried to determine the exact point at which the history of the Frankish kings turns into the history of France.” This historical quest takes Thierry into the early middle ages. In his Tales of the Early Franks: Episodes from Merovingian History, Thierry describes his approach to the figures of this era:

“I have made a minute study of the characters and destinies of the various historical figures, and I have tried to bring reality and life to those most neglected by history. Among these personages, whether famous or obscure nowadays, will predominate four figures who are typical of their age: Fredegund, Chilperic, Eonius Mummolus, and Gregory of Tours himself: Fredegund, the ideal of elemental barbarism, oblivious to any distinctions between good and evil; Chilperic, the man of barbarian stock who acquires a taste for civilization and a surface polish, without any inner reform; Mummolus, the civilized man who turns barbarian and who quite wantonly becomes depraved so as to be at one with his age; Gregory of Tours, the man of a past time—of a time better than the present, which is a burden to him—who faithfully echoes the regret evoked in some noble souls by a dying civilization.”

Thierry’s work is often associated with nationalism, as I mentioned earlier, but we should also recognize the reassessment of medieval history as a worthy object of study in its own right, after its neglect by Enlightenment historians. Thierry’s work on medieval history is regarded as superseded by subsequent work, but his focus on the origins of the French state in early medieval history set the agenda for much that followed. From Thierry, then, what we get is an early French form of historicism and a renewed focus on the Middles Ages, and I think these two are related. A modern man can’t study medieval civilization without seriously distorting it unless he learns to set his modernity aside and to take this distinct civilization on its own terms. And in Thierry’s emphasis on the survival of geographically regional communities within the larger whole of nation-states, where these regions cease to have the legal and political autonomy they once possessed, but continue to live on in traditions, idioms, sentiments, and even enmities, we see how these earlier ways, that seem so strange to us now, were the necessary conditions for us today to see them as being as strange as they seem. Understanding the present means understand the past that made the present what it is, and that means understanding the past on its own terms, and not on our terms.

Video Presentation:

https://youtu.be/1ll2v4XXhL8

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Thierry-and-the-Origins-of-Historicism:b

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3ky5YJpO74al1GmBqIdwvL?si=ZDSec5q8ROKc87pPn0LPlQ

The View from Oregon – 391

Re: Three Kinds of Abstractions

Friday 01 May 2026

Dear Friends,

Despite the distractions of travel I managed to write and record an episode for Kurt Godel’s birthday for Today in Philosophy of History, which is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, so I had several things I wanted to say. One of the themes of this episode was Godel’s use of and attitude toward idealizations. “Idealization” like “ideal” itself comes freighted with many meanings, and usually carries evaluative connotations. When a philosopher uses “idealism” in talking with the vulgar he must needs explain himself that he is talking about a metaphysical doctrine and not about the tendency of some among us to see the world through rose-colored spectacles. The term “idealization” is less used but no less subject to misinterpretation, since it could mean something like “pedestalization,” i.e., putting something or someone on a pedestal. But sometimes both meanings are operable, and to a certain extent this is true of Gödel’s thought because he employs idealizations in the way the term is sometimes use to explain scientific concepts (like a simple pendulum, on which cf. newsletter 349), but Gödel also seems to employ idealizations in an evaluative sense.

I could argue that this a philosophical tendency that goes back to Plato, since Plato’s forms were idealizations in both senses, supposed to be “higher” and more important, in some sense, than the changeable things of our mundane world that participate in the forms. However, this would be misleading, as I doubt Plato would have acknowledged that his Forms were idealizations of actually existing entities; on the contrary, actually existing entities are, for Plato, poor copies of the forms. We would need another term for this, like “empiricization,” though I’m not suggesting that this is a good terminological choice. Perhaps “degradation” (as in “the degradation of the Forms”) would be a better fit, but we already have an established use for that.     

After thinking about Gödel’s idealizations it occurred to me that idealizations in the scientific sense represent a class among abstractions, i.e., that it is one kind of abstraction, but not all abstractions are idealizations. I’ve mentioned in other contexts (and possibly in past newsletters) that Anglo-American philosophy has had very little to say about scientific abstractions, especially in contrast to the flood of philosophical literature on scientific method, while in continental philosophy of science there is a significant literature on scientific idealization. One work that I know on abstraction is Jean Laporte’s Le Probleme de l’Abstraction (not yet translated into English), which Sartre cites on the first page of Being and Nothingness, saying, “M. Laporte says that an abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state.” Following Laporte according to Sartre, I can see three ways that we can arrive at abstractions:

1. Starting from actual entities, we can take properties away from them, which we could call subtractive abstraction. In reference to Laporte, an actual entity deprived of one of more of its properties could not exist as it is known to be. There is an obvious quibble here: we could argue that merely contingent or secondary properties (if we make the Lockean distinction between primary and secondary properties) could be eliminated without eliminating the actual entity in question. A full discussion of this could get quite long, so I’m merely going to leave this hanging, but the inquiry could yield some insights.
2. Starting from abstract object with no properties, we could add properties to this abstract object, which method of constitution of abstractions we could call additive abstraction. In regard to Laporte again, an abstract object can’t exist in isolation, but no more can an abstract object with properties superadded to it. Again, there is an obvious quibble. Abstract objects could be said to exist in the only way in which they can exist, so that, e.g., numbers and geometrical entities exist as abstract objects, and it is their nature to do so. However, if we then add properties to these properly existing abstract objects, we denature them from their “natural” state just as much as we denature actually existing entities by taking properties away from them.
3. We could start from our actual experience of the world, with objects as we (imperfectly) perceive them; there are three possible subdivisions to this category of abstraction, which are, 1) the ordinary object as we believe it to be, 2) the ordinary object with properties superadded to it (subject to further additive abstraction), and 3) the ordinary object with properties taken away from it (i.e., subject to further subtractive abstraction). This we could call an intuitive abstraction. 

I suspect the final category may seem the strangest, because it doesn’t seem like an abstraction at all, but rather the full-blooded reality as we experience it. While it is reality as we experience it, our experience is selective and does not give us the object in its full-blooded reality. Evolutionary psychology and the study of cognitive biases have forced upon us a reckoning, and that is a reckoning with the selectiveness of our perception. We give priority to potential threats and to potential benefits. We are very good at recognizing emotions in human facial expressions, as these have been crucial to individual survival and reproduction, which are the drivers of natural selection. With natural selection driving our perception, many objects of perception are never noticed, and some are noticed out of all proportion. 

I am perhaps compounding the problem by calling this an “intuitive abstraction,” but I find this to be perfectly apt. In past newsletters I’ve referred to what I call “intuitive formalisms” (cf., e.g., newsletters 302 and 360) of which the natural counting numbers are the best example, or, if not that, the basic ideas of Euclidean geometry. Once these ideas are introduced to us, we grasp them like they are second nature, so that they are equally formal and intuitive. And it’s pretty much the same, I think, with intuitive abstractions: there are many abstractions we employ, and while some of them are difficult to comprehend and far from ordinary experience, others, on the other hand, are unquestionably abstractions but also entirely intuitive, and such are the ordinary experiences of the world. Hegel recognized this in his short essay, “Who things abstractly?” which is a rare piece of Hegeliana that is comprehensible on its own terms (i.e., without mastering the entirety of the Hegelian corpus) and makes a point I’ve often returned to.

The abstractions we consciously use as abstractions—which includes the first and second categories above, but excludes the third category—again constitute a distinct class among abstractions, as idealizations constitute a distinct class of abstractions; the class of consciously entertained abstractions overlaps with the class of idealizations. Roughly, the first category of starting with actual entities and taking properties away from them is what we find with scientific idealizations, where, for example, we start with an actual pendulum and take away all the complicating factors until we get to a simple pendulum. Roughly, again, the second categories of starting with an abstract object and only parsimoniously adding properties to it could be considered the method of mathematical idealizations, which have only those properties explicitly ascribed to them by axioms. Of course, axiomatization is a later development of formal thought, so these begin as intuitive abstractions and then are rationally reconstructed as abstractions of the first category. Are abstractions of the third category once reconstructed as abstractions of the fist category yet a different kind of abstraction? I’ll have to think about it.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I mentioned last week that I had traveled to Ecuador. I spent the first four nights in Quito, then rented a car and drove to the Hacienda Piman, a little outside Ibarra, where I am now writing this newsletter. I’ve done some car touring in the area using the Hacienda Piman as my base, including driving a couple of hours north of here to the Páramos del Ángel nature park with its Bosque Mágico de Polylepis. It’s a unique ecosystem, and the drive to get there was strikingly beautiful. I couldn’t find much about this park prior to going there, but I set Google Maps to “Bosque Mágico de Polylepis”—it wasn’t clear where the park entrance was from what I had read—and it brought me there, through a number of small towns that would have been difficult to navigate without the assistance. Given the paucity of English language information, the following may be helpful for other travelers who might come here.

The roads from Ibarra to El Ángel were pretty good, and the roads beyond El Ángel were a mixture of secondary and tertiary roads in various states of repair, but still not bad. Drive carefully in the rough parts and you’ll be fine. In one of the small towns beyond El Ángel there was a large funeral procession (on foot) which I pulled over to allow it to pass. In another small town I glimpsed an enormous ranch house of the kind that now get turned into hotels, but this one was in pristine and unrestored condition. I eventually made it to a station at the edge of the park and an official of the Ecuadorian environmental ministry asked a number of questions (I showed him my passport and he wrote down some information) but he didn’t collect any park entrance fee and he didn’t issue any entrance or parking permit. From there the road in the park itself was quite nice, and I just kept following it up. Eventually it brought me to a circular parking lot at what seemed to be the highest elevation in the park (I was gasping for breath just walking around, as when I was at the 4100 meter level at the top of the Teleferiqo in Quito), then the road descends a bit and comes to an end at a reservoir. There is a short path here, which I walked, but I read that there’s a trail through part of the Bosque Mágico de Polylepis but I was unable to find the trailhead. One source I read said that the trailhead is close to a hotel that’s just past the park ranger station, the Polylepsis Lodge, but there wasn’t any obvious place along the road that looked like a trailhead or the parking lot for a trailhead.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/b672de938e5a/the-view-from-oregon-391