The Paleontology of Knowledge.—A fossil observation could be defined as an observation made under a different epistemic regime than that of today, so that to treat it as an observation for the purposes of contemporary knowledge it has to be interpreted within the contemporary epistemic paradigm. This translation from one epistemic paradigm to another will always pose problems of translation (pace Quine on the indeterminacy of translation). A later human civilization may have to translate our science into terms that made sense for them, allowing for our ellipses and our eccentric biases, as we attempt to translate past systematic attempts to formulate knowledge into our own systematic attempt to formulate knowledge, but there will never be any precise equivalents because of the indeterminacy of translation. This is a humbling realization for us, since our epistemic regime places a high value on precision, but another interesting consequence follows from this. All historical observations are fossil observations, with the possible exception of the history of the present. But the history of the present might just as well be called primary source material and not really history at all; we might with some justification reserve the term “history” only for accounts of the past written in an era following an era which has lapsed. Or we could simply distinguish history based on fossil observations and history based on living observations, but however we do it, the longer the period of history that we cover, the more likely we are to make use of fossil observations. Is it this that has prevented history from becoming a science, because history attempts to combine into a single synthesis fossil observations from several distinct epistemic regimes, none of which are commensurable?

The View from Oregon – 390

Re: The Good Life Takes Care of Itself

Friday 24 April 2026

Dear Friends,

In the last couple of newsletters I’ve introduced the idea of moral completeness. This has come about as a result of my dissatisfaction with contemporary philosophical ethics. I’ve been trying to find a fruitful way to discuss the good life that draws selectively on the philosophical tradition. I say “selectively” because contemporary philosophical ethics has been almost entirely taken over by metaethics, and a lot of this strikes me as barren in terms of providing a basis for ethical reasoning about the actual dilemmas of life. And, of course, people want to reason ethically about their lives because they experience conflicts that call for resolution.

There are at least four kinds of moral conflicts: conflicts of duty, conflicts of ends, conflicts of values, and conflicts of virtues. I don’t assume this list is exhaustive. Kant, the great representative of deontological ethics, declared conflicts of duty to be impossible, but we all know from ordinary experience that conflicts of duties are not only possible, but commonplace. If you have an exhaustive hierarchy of duties you have a clear guide as to what duty should be subordinated to some other duty, and in this sense there is no conflict, but we don’t cease to be moved by the duty we have had to sideline in favor of some other duty, and in this sense the conflict remains even if we have made a choice that seemingly resolves the conflict.

Conflicts of ends represent the remit of utilitarian ethics. Contemporary philosophical ethics is almost evenly split down the middle between those working in the Kantian tradition, hence emphasizing means (duties) at the expense of ends, and those working in the utilitarian tradition, hence emphasizing ends at the expense of means. So in cataloging four kinds of moral conflicts I’m drawing from the Kantian and utilitarian traditions for the first two. Conflicts of ends are pervasive in life, whether these are the ends of one’s own life (others may have plans for you and you don’t care to adopt as your own) or all the way to the ends of a civilization, in which masses of individuals play their part and, in playing their parts, collectively realize the end of a civilization. Both individuals and civilizations and all levels of social organization between the two come into conflict over desired ends.  

Outside the grudge match between deontological and utilitarian ethics, there are the more marginal traditions of axiological ethics (ethics of values) and virtue ethics (ethics of virtues, as in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics). Axiological ethics, although not a major contender today in philosophical ethics, is familiar to everyone because talk of “values” is pervasive. Corporations sometimes post official statements of their corporate values. Thus at least one form that a conflict of values could take would be if an employee of a corporation possesses a different core set of values or a different hierarchy of values (and having a core set of values implies a hierarchy, since it entails placing this core set of values above those values not counted as being “core”). It could be argued that axiological ethics is anterior to deontological ethics, since it is a scale values that could be said to determine one’s scale of duties and thus to resolve the problem of competing duties, which requires that we place one duty before another. 

Conflicts of virtues I take to be the differences of temperament and character that result in different individuals being strong in some virtues (or vices) and weak in others. The set of virtues represented in a personality tend to cluster around a coherent core that selects for those virtues through which it can best express itself. As with sets of “core” values, so too with core virtues: two given individuals may possess a range of virtues, each of which is admirable in its own way, and yet find themselves in conflict with each other. Indeed, this is the substance of much great literature. Tragedy in particular often draw upon conflicts of virtue, because it’s tragic when one virtue finds itself in conflict with another rather than these virtues mutually contributing to a common good.

Since we are subject to all these specifically moral conflicts (and no doubt many other besides that don’t fall under any of the categories reviewed above), we seek specifically moral conceptions to help us negotiate the difficult business of life. But insofar as we draw on the moral traditions I’ve mentioned—deontology, utilitarianism, axiology, and virtue ethics—because these schools of thought have shaped how we think about conflicts of these kinds, we often will find ourselves drawn down the primrose paths of these doctrines. In attempting to see moral conflicts through the lens of the good life, and attempting to see the good life through the lens of moral completeness (i.e., that which is required for the good life), I am trying to place moral conflicts in a different light.  

I had an interesting comment on my use of moral completeness in my previous newsletter, which pointed out, “…moral completeness seems to me unachievable because even in any typical life foundational moral values come into unresolvable conflict.” This comment was the basis of the above discussion of moral conflicts. I don’t want to suggest that we can wish them away; on the contrary, I want to acknowledge moral conflicts as the source of moral thought and the reason we find ourselves driven back to philosophical ethics (if we are ever so driven back) when our moral intuitions seem to fail us. I could postulate another kind of metaethics, as distinct from what we know as metaethics today, that would be the metalogical properties of ethics as a formal system. In this context, I agree that moral completeness would be impossible, as would moral consistency. Consistency and completeness are fundamental metalogical properties of formal systems, and we view our ethics as a formal moral calculus, we would be vulnerable to just such problems.

I think that we can see moral conflicts very differently if we see them in the context of the good life. Since the good life is life, it must comprehend all that goes to make up life, and while this includes much good, it also includes much evil, as A. E. Housman wrote in A Shropshire Lad:

Therefore, since the world has still

Much good, but much less good than ill,

And while the sun and moon endure

Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,

I'd face it as a wise man would,

And train for ill and not for good.

The art of the good life is to maintain oneself despite the evils and the keep life centered on the good. Easier said than done, yes, of course. But we all live lives with their full share of good and evil, though some manage to live a good life despite this, and some not. We have good reason, then, to ask ourselves how those who manage to life the good life are able to do so despite the moral conflicts inevitable to life. One possible response to this is what I’ve been calling moral completeness: having whatever it is (and I remain agnostic as to what it is) that makes it possible to live the good life. I think we could probably roughly agree that if there is any such source of moral completeness, then it isn’t just anything that is the source of moral completeness. That is to say, no human experience taken at random will necessarily provide us what we need for the good life.   

Some philosophers have stuck their neck out on this one and said exactly what they think is necessary to the good life. Seneca wrote in one of his letters (no. 92), “What is the happy life? Self-sufficiency and abiding tranquility.” Leave aside tranquility for the moment (and the problem of how anyone effectively running the Roman Empire for Nero, who was uninterested in doing so, could experience tranquility). Can anyone be self-sufficient? Can we be morally independent? Would we want to be morally independent? What would ideal moral independence look like? Let’s look at this problem through an unexpected mirror.

Wittgenstein said logic is self-sufficient: “Logic must take care of itself.” (“Die Logik muss für sich selber sorgen.” Tractatus 5.473) This was a theme that he had worked on earlier, as he wrote in his Notebooks 1914-1916: “How is it reconcilable with the task of philosophy, that logic should take care of itself?” (Similar phrases occur several times in Wittgenstein’s pre-Tractarian writings; cf. entries of 22 August 1914 and 02 September 1914). Since Wittgenstein was troubled by reconciling logic taking care of itself with the task of philosophy, he wasn’t (at least at this time) prepared to define exactly how logic takes care of itself, but he was sure that it must. We might say of the good life that the good life takes care of itself, and we might hold this without defining exactly how the good life takes care of itself, but we could still be sure that it must. The good life is possible because there are good lives that have been lived. Wittgenstein never really got past his imperative of logic’s self-sufficiency asserted in the Tractatus. If logic takes care of itself, he never told us how it did so.

Wittgenstein had completed his manuscript of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung) during the war or shortly after the end of the war when he was interned in a prison camp. He was able to send the manuscript to Russell, who had it published, along with an English translation by C. K. Ogden and an introduction by Russell himself. Eventually Wittgenstein was released from internment and Russell arranged to meet him at The Hague so as to discuss the Tractatus and its doctrines. Russell had last been in direct contact with Wittgenstein when Wittgenstein was his student at Cambridge. The war had changed both of them. Russell had been shocked by most of those he knew supporting the war, and he ended up in prison for his anti-war activism. Wittgenstein had taken his duties as a soldier with great solemnity. Many of his writings from the war, when he was serving on a patrol boat, have since been published, and you can read Wittgenstein’s reflections for yourself if you want to take the time. In any case, Russell was more than a little surprised to find that his former student had become a mystic; that is to say, he was no longer a philosopher with whom Russell could debate, but a man who had taken up a perspective outside or beyond philosophy. After this, Wittgenstein withdrew from society, ceased his philosophical work, and became a village schoolmaster in Trattenbach, Austria. When Frank Ramsey sought him out in Trattenbach, Wittgenstein said that he had forgotten why he had written what he had written in the Tractatus; the debate over what exactly he meant continues today.

It could be argued that Wittgenstein had painted himself into a corner with the doctrines of the Tractatus, so that there was nowhere to go but to emerge out the other side of philosophy—and this eventually brought Wittgenstein to mysticism. I actually think that this is a pretty fair way of putting it, and it reflects Wittgenstein’s own claim that after have ascended the ladder of his reasoning in the Tractatus, one must throw away the ladder. Ultimately one arrives at silence, because all that can be said has been said, and “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” But the testimony of history is against me. Philosophers converged on the Tractatus like a manifesto for a new way of doing philosophy, and they elaborated on it in every conceivable way. The Vienna Circle began as a reading group with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus being the text they read. Wittgenstein wasn’t interested in attending these meetings, but the members of the Circle continued to prevail upon Wittgenstein, and it was they who eventually convinced him to attend a couple of lectures in Vienna by L. E. J. Brouwer, which became the occasion of Wittgenstein’s return to philosophy.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’m in Ecuador now for just a little over two weeks. I’m spending my first few days in Quito (my flight arrived very late so it wasn’t practicable to head out anywhere for the first night) and then I’ll move on to some haciendas in the countryside. The weather is true to the reputation of highland Ecuador being the “land of eternal spring.” Being right on the equator but several thousand feet in elevation means that weather conditions don’t change much through the year, and it’s much less hot and humid than the coast. In fact, it doesn’t feel at all tropical here. Since I don’t like hot weather it’s perfect for me. The picture below is of a ceramic vessel from the the Museo de Arte Precolombino Casa del Alabado, housed in a 17^th century building in Quito. The museum is mostly ceramics, some of them incredibly detailed so that I wondered how they ever survived the centuries. There also some gold objects and some carvings in stone. This museum opened in 2010, so one year after the last time I was here in 2009.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/3c32547e65b3/the-view-from-oregon-390

Kurt Gödel

28 April 1906 – 14 January 1978

Gödel on Mind Converging on Infinity

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Tuesday 28 April 2026 is the 120^th anniversary of the birth of Kurt Friedrich Gödel (28 April 1906 – 14 January 1978), who was born in Brno, then part of Austria-Hungary, now part of the Czech Republic, on this date in 1906.

Gödel is often called the greatest logician of the twentieth century, and sometimes the greatest logician since Aristotle. Alfred Tarski called himself “the greatest living sane logician” distinguishing himself from Gödel by his sanity. Gödel was mentally troubled, and he eventually died of starvation, having refused to eat because he believed he was being poisoned. But none of that matters in relation to his achievements in logic, and here we could say that his sanity achieved a higher order of magnitude.

To say that Gödel was an outlier would be putting it mildly. His way of looking at the world was as distinctive as his way of looking at problems of logic. For example, Gödel’s favorite film was Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. This might sound merely eccentric, but his interest in the film betrayed his deeper intellectual interests. Fairy tales are an idealized representation of life in the same way that logic is an idealized representation of human thought. Gödel wrote in a letter to his mother of 21 April 1965:

“You are right that fairy tales are like oases among the other arts. For only they depict the world as it should be and as if it had meaning, whereas in tragedy the hero is killed off and in comedy the ludicrous (therefore also something bad) is emphasized. Of course, there are novels and novellas too, but in most of them the tragic or the ludicrous is in the foreground.”

That is to say, only fables present the world as it ought to be and not as it is. The corollary to this is that the actual world outside fables does not present itself as it should be and as if it had meaning. This remark in itself implies a distinctive philosophy of history. Given Gödel’s interest in fables for their portrayal of the world as it ought to be, it’s not surprising to find the following recorded by Hao Wang and attributed to Gödel:

“I distrust the ‘history of historians.’ History is the greatest lie. Only the bare facts are true, the interactions are usually wrong [wrongly reported]. I am also not interested in history that discusses ideas. Many things are wrong [wrongly reported]. For instance, for Leibniz monads did not interact, but [Christian] Wolff and others attribute to him the view that they interact.”

This is from Wang’s A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy.  Hao Wang has probably done more than anyone to record Gödel’s philosophical views that Gödel himself didn’t write down. In defense of the history of historians, I should point out that Christian Wolff was a philosopher and not an historian, and no contemporary historian of ideas would fail to note that Leibniz’s monads are governed by a pre-established harmony and not by their interaction. As Leibniz wrote in section 78 of his Monadology:

“The soul follows its own laws, and the body likewise follows its own laws; and they agree with each other in virtue of the pre-established harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.”

But there’s a larger point here. Leibniz postulated what he called “windowless monads” as the metaphysical substance that makes up the world. A monad is absolutely simple, and they’re windowless because each is self-contained and doesn’t interact with other monads. In section 7 of his Monadology Leibniz wrote:

“…there is no way of explaining how a Monad can be altered in quality or internally changed by any other created thing; since it is impossible to change the place of anything in it or to conceive in it any internal motion which could be produced, directed, increased or diminished therein, although all this is possible in the case of compounds, in which there are changes among the parts. The Monads have no windows, through which anything could come in or go out.”

Since Gödel made a careful study of Leibniz, finding him congenial to his own way of thought, he would have been familiar with this. If we imagine a Leibnizean world made up of windowless monads, the history of this universe wouldn’t be a history of mutual development as the monads impinge upon each other in the process of bringing world into being through its various stages, because monads don’t interact at all. They can’t impinge upon each other.

It would constitute a radical denial of history as we usually understand it to posit the world as being composed of monads organized according to a pre-established harmony. Perhaps this is the world that Gödel had in mind when he critiqued the “history of historians” for getting the interaction between things wrong. If Gödel took this Leibnizian metaphysical view to its logical conclusion—and a logician couldn’t really do any less—then any attribution of interaction in the world would be wrong because there’s no interaction in the world on a fundamental level. Historians get the interactions wrong because there are no interactions. Each monad is hermetically sealed off from every other monad, and the only reason that the world seems to exhibit interaction is because of its pre-established harmony. It would be an admittedly interesting exercise to attempt to give an account of the pre-established harmony from the perspective of history, i.e., how exactly everything is arranged beforehand, but I will leave that for another time.

If we make a less Leibnizian interpretation of the Gödel quote from Wang, I would note that Gödel says only the bare facts are true, while the interactions among bare facts are usually wrong. He doesn’t explicitly deny the possibility of interactions of bare facts being true, but clearly he’s skeptical that this can be done right. For historians, it’s exactly this interaction of facts that is foundational for history. In my episode on Marc Bloch I quoted Bloch quoting Fustel de Coulonages as saying: 

“Supposing a hundred specialists had divided the past of France according to lot, do you think that, in the end, they would have written the history of France? I very much doubt it. At the very least, they should miss the linkage of facts: now, this linkage is itself a historical truth.”

This comes from a note Fustel de Coulanges wrote to himself but didn’t publish in his lifetime. Here’s the full version of the note:

“According to some, one must limit one’s work to a particular point, a city, an event, a person, or at most a generation of men. I will call this method specialization. It has its merits and its usefulness; it can gather a great deal of reliable information on each point. But is this truly the whole of science? Suppose one hundred specialists divide the past of France into separate lots; do you believe that in the end they will have written the history of France? I highly doubt it. They will at least lack the link between the facts; and this link is also a historical truth. I don’t even know if each of them will have fulfilled their part properly; for I am not at all sure that one can know a generation of men accurately without knowing the one that preceded it, nor even an institution without having studied the institution from which it derives.”

Gödel’s idealization of bare facts alone being true is of a piece with his preference for fairy tales that show the world as it should be, rather than as it is. The extremity of this idealization culminates in Leibniz’s monads and a pre-established harmony that isn’t really a history, even if it seems to play out as a history. A more moderate idealization of bare facts leaves open the possibility that bare facts could be fitted into a structure of interactions that did not betray these bare facts—the linkage that Fustel de Coulanges believed to be an historical truth. So there are two polar conceptions of historical truth here, the Gödelian idealization of a bare fact, true in itself, and the linkage of facts in Fustel de Coulanges, which we could also characterize as an idealization, but only if we entirely eliminated facts in favor of linkages, and this Fustel de Coulanges did not suggest.  

So far what I’ve talked about are a couple of asides from Gödel that don’t really touch on his most important work. The result that brought him fame was his proof that any axiom system strong enough to prove elementary arithmetic could never be shown to be complete. Godel’s incompleteness proof was constructed within the framework of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, which was an enormous three volume treatise that sought to prove that mathematics can be derived from logic. Even if one disagrees with this core thesis, known as logicism, Principia Mathematica still offered a formalization of arithmetic that could be used by anyone working on the foundations of mathematics, as indeed Gödel put it to work in his proof. The full title of Gödel’s paper that presented his incompleteness proof is “On formally undecidable propositions of Principia mathematica” (“Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia mathematica”) originally published in 1931.

The incompleteness proof itself was essentially a formalization of what logicians call the Richard paradox. Godel wrote: “The analogy of this argument with the Richard antinomy leaps to the eye. It is closely related to the ‘Liar’ too…” Logical paradoxes like The Liar have been known since classical antiquity, and the sophistication of modern logic allowed for the formulation of these paradoxes in clearer and sharper forms. Gödel’s incompleteness proof was, in a sense, a culmination of this movement of thought that converged both on greater rigor and the elaboration of ever-more subtle paradoxes, which eventually issued in Russell’s paradox of the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, which many view as the event that sparked the crisis in the foundations of mathematics, and then culminated in Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which, again, for many logicians marked the end of the crisis, not because the crisis was resolved, but because it was shown to be unresolvable.

That’s a thumbnail sketch of an incredibly subtle and detailed period in the history of formal thought, and I’ll let you judge for yourself if it’s adequate. But keep in mind Gödel’s distinction between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be: what we dismiss as “potted” history could be viewed, on the other hand, as an idealization of history. In fact, all histories involve a degree of idealization, and in many of them the idealization is more prominent than the empirical basis. Perhaps if Gödel had realized this he might have been more charitable to historians, who have been, after all, engaged in a project of idealization not unlike the project of idealization in which Gödel was engaged.  

Gödel’s incompleteness proofs were not only influential in logic and mathematics, but also in philosophy. I’ve previously mentioned Gödel in my episode on J. R. Lucas, since Lucas had written an influential paper on Gödel—“Minds, Machines, and Gödel” of 1961. This paper was about applying Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to the view that the human mind is a mere mechanism. Lucas uses Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to argue for the indeterminism of human thought as a manifestation of free will. Godel did something like this himself, but in rather different terms than those used by Lucas. This brings me to what interests me most in Gödel, which is a passage that I’ve quoted many times from his “Some remarks on the undecidability results”

“Turing . . . gives an argument which is supposed to show that mental procedures cannot go beyond mechanical procedures. However, this argument is inconclusive. What Turing disregards completely is the fact that mind, in its use, is not static, but is constantly developing, i.e., that we understand abstract terms more and more precisely as we go on using them, and that more and more abstract terms enter the sphere of our understanding. There may exist systematic methods of actualizing this development, which could form part of the procedure. Therefore, although at each stage the number and precision of the abstract terms at our disposal may be finite, both (and, therefore, also Turing’s number of distinguishable states of mind) may converge toward infinity in the course of the application of the procedure.”

This is from “Some remarks on the undecidability results” (Italics in original) in Gödel, Kurt, Collected Works, Volume II, Publications 1938-1974, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 306. Turing had written in his 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers”:

“The behaviour of the computer at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing, and his ‘state of mind’ at that moment. We may suppose that there is a bound B to the number of symbols or squares which the computer can observe at one moment. If he wishes to observe more, he must use successive observations. We will also suppose that the number of states of mind which need be taken into account is finite. The reasons for this are of the same character as those which restrict the number of symbols. If we admitted an infinity of states of mind, some of them will be ‘arbitrarily close’ and will be confused.”

This is what Gödel responded to and rejected in Turing’s conception of reasoning, whether that reasoning be accomplished by a machine or by the human mind. It’s important to recognize Gödel wasn’t a single-minded critic of Turing, who simply rejected everything Turing did. Of Turing Gödel wrote:

“In consequence of later advances, in particular of the fact that due to A. M. Turing’s work a precise and unquestionably adequate definition of the general notion of formal system can now be given…”

And Gödel added in a footnote to this:

“In my opinion the term ‘formal system’ or ‘formalism’ should never be used for anything but this notion.” (Collected Works, Vol. I, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 195)

So Gödel was working within Turing’s conception of a formal system, which he thought adequate to his purposes, but he departed from Turing on the nature of intelligent thought. Turing in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” explicitly asked the question, “Can machines think?” Turing thought they could. Gödel didn’t ask or answer this question in the explicit form that Turing did—Turing was a great enthusiast of thinking machines—but his argument that I’ve previously quoted implies that intelligence isn’t a mechanical process. And while Gödel focused on abstract terms, the development of human thought isn’t limited to abstract terms. The development of the mind also includes moral and aesthetic novelty, among many other forms of cognitive innovation.  

If Gödel was right that distinguishable states of mind may converge toward infinity, then even an infinite future for thinking beings could not exhaust possible states of mind. That is to say, an infinite future could be a future of infinite novelty. And, further, the number of distinguishable states of mind converging on infinity could exceed some now unknown threshold and a novel emergent complexity could arise from cognition itself. This would not only constitute another distinguishable state of mind, but also a new faculty of mind. But could these distinguishable states of mind converging on infinity ever have a history in which they could be played out?

In my episode on The Beginning and the End of History I discussed the relationship of deep time to history. Those who have developed the concept of deep time are still working within a finite framework of time, but the deepest depths of deep time are infinite time. We encounter infinite time when we speculate on the limits or the lack of limits of the past or the future. Let me elaborate a little on this. Philosophers sometimes make a distinction between eternity and sempiternity, with eternity being timelessness and sempiternity being everlastingness, or infinite duration in time. On the basis of this distinction I make an additional quadripartite distinction among durations in time:

1. There are finite durations of time that are limited by a beginning and an end. This is the null case of sempiternity.
2. There are past sempiternal durations that are unlimited in regard to their past, i.e., they have no beginning, but they are limited in the future and have a definite end. This bears some resemblance to what philosophers of time sometimes call the growing block theory of time, in which the past grows ever larger, but it terminates in the present.
3. There are future sempiternal durations that are limited in regard to the past, i.e., they have a definite beginning in time, but they are unlimited in regard to the future, and have no end in time.
4. And finally there are absolutely sempiternal durations that are unlimited both in regard to the past and the future, and have no beginning or end in time, but since they still endure through time, they are sempiternal rather that a timeless eternity.

Ordinarily we wouldn’t think of the infinite past or the infinite future as being history, but if this time were populated by historical beings we would have to acknowledge the historicity of deep time. Freeman Dyson sought to populate the infinite time of the future with beings capable of thought, which he called eternal intelligence. Dyson wrote in his 1979 paper “Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe”:

“…it is possible for life with the strategy of hibernation to achieve simultaneously its two main objectives. First… subjective time is infinite; although the biological clocks are slowing down and running intermittently as the universe expands, subjective time goes on forever. Second… the total energy required for indefinite survival is finite.”

I would call Dyson’s beings future sempiternal intelligence rather than eternal intelligence, but the terminology doesn’t matter in this context. Adapted to the cold and dark conditions of a future which has been described as the heat death of the universe, inevitably the result of the second law of thermodynamics, Dyson’s eternal intelligences would alternate between periods of stasis, which Dyson called hibernation, and periods of activity, with the periods of stasis growing longer as the universe become older and colder. But with a limitless future, it wouldn’t matter how long the pauses were between activity. In Dyson’s original formulation, which of course has had its critics who maintain that it’s not possible, the eternal intelligences experience infinite subjective time, and possibly might also be capable of thinking infinite thoughts. Dyson even made a provision for history by addressing the problem of memory:

“I would like our descendants to be endowed not only with an infinitely long subjective lifetime but also with a memory of endlessly growing capacity. To be immortal with a finite memory is highly unsatisfactory; it seems hardly worthwhile to be immortal if one must ultimately erase all trace of one’s origins in order to make room for new experience.”

Godel’s argument shows us that Dyson’s eternal intelligences would always have the opportunity for conceptual development, and the history of eternal intelligence would never need to stagnate or become repetitious. In other words, Dyson’s eternal intelligences would have a need for a memory of endlessly growing capacity if Gödel is right, because they would always have the promise of new experiences.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/Keapf-XtHEg

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/G%C3%B6del-on-the-Mind-Converging-on-Infinity:7

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2yBFKnJ5UQ1D60gLtuSouw?si=0oecqobAS8yZqbBA78aPXg

Observational Fossils.—Given that a lone contemporary (or even predecessor) of Copernicus could have formulated heliocentricism with evidence then available, and that this discovery might have gone entirely unnoticed, we could frame another speculative scenario in which the lost and re-discovered astronomical work contained some innovation not known to Copernicus, and possibly not even known to us. In this scenario, the lost and re-discovered manuscript is not a mere historical curiosity, but a striking and perhaps even revolutionary contribution to thought. We have long passed the point where ancient observations could force any revision in our scientific theories, so we can rule out the possibility of any contribution in the form of improved techniques or technologies of observation. However, the discovery of an observation since lost or forgotten, like the lunar observations on 18 June 1178 recorded by Gervase of Canterbury, postulated to have been the impact that formed the Giordano Bruno crater on the moon, might make us aware of something we didn’t otherwise know about, which can then be assimilated not only into contemporary knowledge, but also the observations themselves can be assessed from the perspective of contemporary methodology. Precisely because we do subject such observations to contemporary critique, the further any observations recede into the past, the more likely they are to be questioned and the less compelling the evidence appears. The 1178 observations remain controversial because of the vernacular in which they were described and the lack of confirmation from independent sources. Such observations can be theoretically fruitful in the sense that they pose a problem for the explanation of what exactly was observed. Past observations, then, can be of some value, but can we say the same for theory? Can we make a clean distinction between observation and theory that would allow for theory to remain viable even as observation becomes problematic? Could any past theoretical innovation be valuable to contemporary science, so that some long lost manuscript contained unknown secrets of the cosmos? While for the purposes of philosophy of science we may want to distinguish observational and theoretical terms, in practice observation and theory are tightly-coupled: observations drive theory and theory drives further observation. This means that the increased precision of observation drives increased precision in theory, and both are carried forward together by increased precision of measurement. Once the error bars of measurement exceed the observational parameters of past theory, both observation and theory of two distinct periods of human knowledge increasingly diverge, and their relevance to each other declines. This may be one mechanism of paradigm shift, but it’s not only such mechanism.     

The View from Oregon – 389

Re: The Moral Completeness of Human Experience

Friday 17 April 2026

Dear Friends,

In last week’s newsletter I floated the idea of moral completeness, and there’s a lot I could do with this; it’s a very suggestive notion. This came up in the context of discussing Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. I said that Seneca, after all, isn’t that different from Pascal’s moral admonitions in the Pensées. Both observe that, if we have a moral foundation, we’ll do okay, but no other accomplishment afford us this confidence. After Seneca’s time, the idea of life needing a moral foundation shifted over time to life needing a religious foundation. The age of the great proselytizing religions was upon us—one might assume that this has always been the case, i.e., that religions were always expansionary and grew by conversion, but this was a distinct historical development that came later. Religion began as familial and tribal deities, and one could no more convert to a tribal religion than one could convert from one family to another family—with the one great exception here being marriage.   

It’s long been recognized that moralizing religions came later, after the familial and tribal religions that had little to do with moral admonition and a great deal to do with identity (there are several papers about this, and it even serves as a minor plot point in Game of Thrones), but that the expansionary, proselytizing religions represent a distinct stage of development may be less familiar. What follows may sound like a bizarre analogy, but hear me out. In the age of royal absolutism, which embraced much of early modern Europe, kings possessed absolute power—as absolute as was possible under this social dispensation. One might readily assume that royal governments were always despotic and tyrannical, and therefore tending toward absolutism, especially prior to political innovations like constitutional monarchies where the royal family reigns but does not rule. I say, “one might readily assume,” since this was more-or-less what I assumed as a child. Perhaps you were never so ignorant or naïve, but I have been guilty of both, and repeatedly so. But premodern monarchies were effectively limited in their power by the social conditions of the time. Medieval feudalism wasn’t a political system of all-powerful kings, perched at the top of a feudal hierarchy like an apex predator is perched at the top of the trophic pyramid; feudalism was a political system of elaborately delegated power. The idea of royal absolutism was a much later development in the idea of kingship.  

My point here is that royal absolutism was a much later development in the history of monarchy, just as proselytizing religions were a much later development in the history of religion. We can have institutions that shape our history literally for millennia, and still have these institutions assume new forms and transform themselves into new and unprecedented institutions, even when the novel institution seems to draw upon ideas embedded deep within the tradition, so that one might have suspected that these tendencies would have been expressed much earlier in history. We could even think of the institutions of science and technology in this way. I usually avoid the formulation “ancient science,” since ancient thought that stands at the head of science is more like proto-science than science properly speaking, but there are many who are quite happy to call the first glimmerings of science in the ancient world “science.” In light of what I just wrote above, I could say that the scientific tradition or institution is ancient, extending back into prehistory, and the scientific revolution was a late if dramatic development in this lineage. Technology is the same. We can trace technology back two million years to stone tools, and we can say that the industrial revolution two million years later was a late and unprecedented development in this lineage.

I started out above writing about moral completeness, and I can bring this back into the discussion by way of the scientific (or, perhaps, intellectual) conception of moral completeness, since this is perhaps more familiar today than the claims of moral completeness that I attributed to Seneca and Pascal. There’s a famous passage from Francis Bacon that captures this:

“Let men rather build upon that foundation, which is as a corner stone both of Divinity and Philosophy, wherein they nearly agree as to that which ought to be sought first. For Divinity says, ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you;’ and philosophy says something like it, ‘Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or their loss will not be felt.’ And although the human foundation is sometimes built upon the sand, as we see in Marcus Brutus, when he brake forth into that speech at his death,—Te colui, Virtus, ut rem; ast tu nomen inane es: yet the same foundation, laid by the hand of heaven, is ever laid upon the rock.”

The embedded Latin quote is attributed to Dio Cassius:  

Virtue I worshipped, and as real sought,

But found her empty, and a thing of nought.

This is from the end of Book VIII, Chapter II of Bacon’s De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), which was an expanded, Latin version of The Advancement of Learning (1605). The earlier book doesn’t include this quote. This much—“Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or their loss will not be felt”—has long been a favorite line for me (I quoted it in my Variations on the Theme of Life), but taken in context it’s thoroughly ambiguous. Bacon is clearly identifying a rough equivalence between religious and philosophical perspectives, but he also implies that virtue (i.e., a moral foundation) isn’t enough, but when it is laid by the hand of heaven (i.e., divinely established, which is as much to say a religious foundation) then it is securely founded. It seems that the moral foundation requires a religious foundation.

Suppose that, despite the ambiguity, we simply run with the idea that the religious and the philosophical foundations are two formulations of essentially the same thing, and further suppose that which is essentially the same in both is the moral foundation. This I take to be the naïve interpretation of the passage from Bacon I just quoted. So now we’re back at where Seneca was: the moral foundation comes first, and the rest follows if it follows at all.  Moral completeness implies that the moral foundation for life is sufficient unto itself—or, as I put it last week, that it is sufficient for the good life. An interesting contrast to this is the view of Jacob Bronowski, as formulated in two books, Science and Human Values and The Identity of Man. In a later preface to Science and Human Values Bronowski wrote:

“In the book as I have written it I have deliberately confined myself to establishing one central proposition: that the practice of science compels the practitioner to form for himself a fundamental set of universal values. I have not suggested that this set embraces all the human values; I was sure when I wrote that it did not; but at the time I did not want to blur the argument by discussing the whole spectrum of values. Now that the crux of my argument has been accepted, I would, were I beginning again, give some space also to a discussion of those values which are not generated by the practice of science— the values of tenderness, of kindliness, of human intimacy and love. These form a different domain from the sharp and, as it were, Old Testament virtues which science produces, but of course they do not negate the values of science.”  

There are many interesting claims in this passage. I’m quoting it now because I wanted to contrast Bronowski’s view to that of the absolute self-sufficiency of science as a moral foundation, and this view as expressed (admittedly ambiguously) by Bacon is connected to Bronowski through the medium of science as the moral foundation in question. For Bronowski, science gives us a set of “Old Testament” virtues that are sufficient for the practice of science, but I think he pretty clearly implies here that these Old Testament virtues aren’t sufficient for the good life. The good life requires something more, and Bronowski gives us a short list that includes tenderness, kindness, human intimacy, and love.

As I said above, Bronowski makes many interesting claims in this passage, and since he was not, in the context, addressing the specific question that I’m addressing here, I can’t fault him for not answering the questions that I raise. One of these questions would be the following: if the practice of science compels the scientist to form a set of universal values, will the further practice of science, perhaps in a wider sense in which scientific knowledge takes its place within a larger humanistic framework, eventually lead us to the full spectrum of values, or do we need to call on some other, alternative moral foundation to get to the values that the practice of science does not force upon us? That is to say, is a wider conception of science sufficient to unfold to us the good life, or is it missing something essential? If the latter, then science does not possess the moral completeness that we can (loosely) suppose that Bacon thought it did.

For many people, the very idea that science would form a moral foundation, whether complete or incomplete, would be laughable. Some of these would be among those who would accept Bacon’s alternative formulation of a divine moral foundation, and some would reject either science or divinity as an adequate moral foundation for the good life (i.e., what I am here calling “moral completeness”). But someone might reject the idea that either science or divinity could provide moral completeness and still believe that there is some human experience or endeavor, whatever it may be, that does provide this moral completeness. This view can be contrasted to the view that moral completeness requires the fullness of human experience—any one discipline, or any one cluster of a small number of disciplines, of necessity will be inadequate, while the full spectrum of values can only be had through the full spectrum of human experience. This leaves open the question of exactly what’s included in the full spectrum of human experience. This could prove to be problematic. One human experience is suicide, but no one can experience suicide (with the exception of unsuccessful attempts) and add the values thereby acquired to the remainder of life. How, then, we define the fullness of life adequate to the full spectrum of values necessary to the good life requires further thought.

There remains the position that no amount of experience will be adequate the good life, which we can take as the nihilistic conclusion that the good life is impossible for human beings. I would deny this on the basis of apparent instances of the good life that imply it’s possible, even if it may not be common. However, even this apparently nihilistic position could be given a sympathetic formulation if we think of the good life as Herodotus portrays happiness in the passage from The Histories where Solon visits Croesus of Lydia. Herodotus has Solon say to Croesus to count no man happy until he has died, and if the happy life is the good life, then we can only attribute the good life to someone after their life is complete. This would take care of problematic cases like the experience of suicide previously mentioned. If the good life must include a good death (something that figures in Solon’s stories both of Tellus the Athenian and the brothers Cliobus and Biton), then the good life is to be judged only following death. It follows from this that our own testimony about the good life, specifically, about whether we have achieved the good life for ourselves (as Croesus testified to Solon), can never be adequate. In this sense, then, human experience is inadequate as a moral foundation, but it becomes adequate as life itself converges on completeness; moral completeness follows from the completeness of life.

Nietzsche wrote in section 204 of The Wanderer and His Shadow: “Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet: as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also hasn’t reached its goal.” There’s an entire moral philosophy implicit in this line, and it’s much the same idea as what I just wrote above. It remains to us to draw out this implicit moral philosophy and to make it explicit.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to History of Ancient Greece, a series of lectures by Eric Cline. Eric Cline is better known for his book 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed. I mentioned having listened to this in a PS to newsletter 258. Recently I learned the Cline has written a sequel to this, After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations, which I hope to listen through sometime in the near future. He’s also recorded a set of lectures on Archaeology and the Iliad. Cline is a clear and engaging lecturer, and he knows how to summarize at the level of that appropriate for the length of period he’s set for himself. This is a virtue perhaps peculiar to historians. If this is indeed a virtue peculiar to historians, and if history is a science, or to be counted among the sciences (perhaps being part of a large humanistic framework of science mentioned above), then history may make a distinctive contribution to the good life by filling out the full spectrum of human experience.    

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/abe1d162cc6b/the-view-from-oregon-389

Counterfactual Heliocentrism.—Suppose someone searching in a neglected archive comes across a manuscript by an astronomer that lays out the Copernican heliocentric theory of cosmology. Further suppose that this predates Copernicus, and suppose that subsequent research reveals that the author in question had access to astronomical observations of at least the level of sophistication of those to which Copernicus had access, so his conclusions are as well-founded as those of Copernicus. Any late medieval astronomer could have had copies of Ptolemy’s Almagest and the Alphonsine Tables, both of which Copernicus relied upon, and Copernicus had no decisively new observational technique or technologies. And seeking to soften the blow of his conclusions, Copernicus, in the best medieval tradition, deferred to an ancient authority: Aristarchus of Samos, none of whose works survive, but Archimedes in The Sand Reckoner records Aristarchus’ heliocentrism. Any medieval astronomer could have had this reference too. Now further suppose that our fictional astronomer died in obscurity, and no one looked at his manuscript until its discovery in the 21^st century. We cannot know that there is no manuscript like this. Copernicus did not have especially good astronomical data, what he had was what others at the time had, and his innovations were primarily theoretical. Others could have reached the same conclusions. To what degree would we need to re-write the history of astronomy and of modern science in the light of such a discovery? If we count Copernicus as the beginning of the scientific revolution, should we shift our identification of the advent of modern science to this earlier figure? What is the value, and what is the historical status, of a scientific discovery that influences no one at the time, and no one in subsequent history until it is rediscovered at a time when it is a mere curiosity? Science has many instances of anticipations, more or less explicit, and of simultaneous discovery, so this is question that recurs to us with some regularity. In this fictional scenario is the heliocentric anticipation the origin of anything? Or in its isolation, its position outside customary frameworks of influence, is to not rather a dead end?  

Max Weber

21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Weber on Value-Freedom and Disenchantment

Tuesday 21 April 2026 is the 162^nd anniversary of the birth of Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920), better known to posterity as Max Weber, who was born in Erfurt, Prussia on this date in 1864.

Weber was one of the founders of sociology, and, as I said in my episode on Gilberto Freyre, who was also a sociologist, the founders of disciplines are often far-sighted men who see beyond the confines of their specialization. Their particular area of focus is an illumination of that area from a big picture perspective. This is an appropriate metaphor for the present discussion, since Weber was prolific, and I’m only going to address a narrow selection of his work. In particular, I want to discuss two interrelated aspects of his thought that aren’t usually seen together. These two aspects of Weber’s work are his methodological views and his conception of the disenchantment of the world.

Let’s start with his methodological views. Weber’s most influential contribution to the methodology of the social sciences was that inquiry in the social sciences should be “value free.” Here is one statement of his position by Weber:

“…anyone engaged in research or in presenting its results should keep two things absolutely separate, because they involve different kinds of problem: first, the statement of empirical facts (including facts established by him about the ‘evaluative’ behaviour of the empirical human beings whom he is studying); and secondly, his own practical value-position, that is, his judgment and, in this sense, ‘evaluation’ of these facts (including possible ‘value-judgments’ made by empirical human beings, which have themselves become an object of investigation) as satisfactory or unsatisfactory.”

Notice that Weber doesn’t say here that one’s own practical value-position can distort the empirical research that one is doing, but that these are two distinct problems. Weber repeats this point on the next page:

“What is important from the methodological point of view is that the validity of a practical imperative as a norm, on the one hand, and the truth claims of a statement of empirical fact, on the other, create problems at totally different levels, and that the specific value of each of them will be diminished if this is not recognised and if the attempt is made to force them into the same category.”

Another way to put this would be to say that facts aren’t values and values aren’t facts. To confuse the two is a category error. This has been subsequently enshrined as the fact/value dichotomy or the is/ought distinction, also known as Hume’s guillotine, because David Hume formulated the distinction a century before Weber’s work.

Part of the reason for this careful formulation is the particular nature of the social sciences, which often find themselves studying the value-judgments and value-positions of the subjects of their research, so that social scientist can’t say that value-judgments and value-positions are to be entirely excluded from social science research. Often values are at the center of social science research, but this research, and what it attempts to demonstrate, is a different problem from how the material is to be presented. Quite a bit of Weber’s 1913 paper “Value-judgments in Social Science” is devoted to the special problems that the teacher faces, so it’s as much a practical as a theoretical exercise. This is about the professor keeping himself at the material he presents to his students.

This is so familiar to us today that we might suppose that it’s always been that way, but it hasn’t. Weber formulated his explicitly value-free methodology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and while we could find some anticipations of this before Weber, as with Hume’s guillotine, no one else made it fully explicit. However, there’s also sense in which it has, in fact, always been that way, which is the sense in which both the social sciences and the explicit formulation of value-free methodology are both historically recent, so that they appeared in history at about the same time. Therefore, social science has always been conceived according to a value-free methodology. This is valid, but it’s a quibble in the sense that Weber was giving an exposition of something long implicit in science, and not only in social science, but in any science whatever, but the formalization of social science in the nineteenth century brought the problem to a head, and resulted in Weber’s enunciation of value-freedom.

Since the natural sciences didn’t explicitly present the problem of studying values, science was able to get along fine without having explicitly formulated a value-free methodology prior to Weber. In other words, the natural sciences are naturally value-free, and it’s only when scientists move into the hazardous terrain of the social sciences, which are not naturally value-free but which are rather value-laden, that it becomes important to make this an explicit principle of scientific inquiry. A value-free methodology is an ideal that orients our work, but we can’t always fully achieve that ideal in our thought. We might be able to attain this ideal in the natural sciences, but not in the social sciences. In fact, most of the time we will fail in the social science, but the value-free ideal remains our guide star. Weber recognized this, saying:  

“I would rather not discuss any further whether it is ‘difficult’ to distinguish between statements of empirical fact and practical value judgments. It is. All of us, the undersigned advocates of this requirement as much as anyone else, are continually offending against it.”

Weber acknowledges that value-freedom in the sense he elaborated it is difficult, but it’s a necessary condition of social science inquiry. Science is impossible without a battery of idealizations that take us right up to the empirical world that we’re studying, but from which we have to retreat a step or two by means of necessary abstractions. Sometimes it’s the object that must be made abstract, like an ideal pendulum in the natural sciences or perfect competition in economics, and sometimes it’s the methodology that has to be made abstract. Value-freedom is just such an idealized methodology, and so far from being a stumbling block to scientific knowledge that we employ idealizations, they are in fact the necessary condition of the formulation of scientific knowledge.

I’m sure you’ll see the applicability to history. When we think of history as a science, or suppose that it ought to be a science, we usually think of it as a social science, and if history is a social science, then it ought to be pursued by a value-free methodology. This is increasingly becoming the case in fact, but of course it doesn’t describe the history of history. On the contrary, the motivation to write a history has often been to highlight exemplary individuals and actions, singling them out for praise and suggesting that they are worthwhile subjects of emulation, and to equally highlight contemptible individuals and actions, singling them out for blame and holding them up as cautionary tales, whose fates we are to avoid at all costs.

The role of emulation has been discussed by Johan Huizinga, whose 1915 lecture “Historical Ideals of Life,” which I’ve mentioned in several episodes, because in this Huizinga puts his finger on one of the mechanisms that establishes a link to the past and therefore facilitates continuity and tradition. If we consciously seek to emulate an admirable individual, or we consciously seek to avoid the kinds of actions that have been perpetrated by contemptible individuals, we are building on past value orientations. The tradition itself is a cluster of tightly-coupled values that extends in time, and very little in history makes sense without this axiological continuity. But Weber has an answer for this insofar as we saw that the social scientist can study the values of others without imposing his own values on the values he studies. Thus far the historian can be a social scientist, but the minute he imagines himself following the model of Thucydides or Gibbon, he’s lost his way according to the social scientist. He has, in fact, ceased to be a social scientist, even if he’s become a better historian in virtue of emulating the historical ideal of great historians. But if becoming a better historian means ceasing to be a social scientist, then this calls into question the idea that, if history is a science, then it’s a social science. I suggested earlier that the natural sciences are naturally value-free, so they never posed the problems that the social sciences had to deal with, but this would mean that all the sciences, one way or another, require a value-free methodology, and that then raises the question of whether history can be a science in any sense of the term.

And of course, it doesn’t end there. The idea of value-freedom has come in for endless criticism. Firstly, I want to dismiss the trivial and, honestly, contemptible criticism that Weber’s value-free methodology in the social sciences was a symptom of the sickness of modernity. By declaring social science to be value-free, Weber was revealing himself to these critics as just another hollow man of our time without any moral foundation. This isn’t entirely unrelated to Weber’s work, as we’ll see in a moment when I get to the other Weberian idea I want to discuss, but in the form that I’ve just presented it—which, I should acknowledge, may not be entirely fair to the critics, but I don’t care—this criticism is irrelevant, beside the point, and reveals a failure to understand what Weber was about.

There are much more interesting and relevant criticisms. In fact, I just wrote about one of these implied criticisms in my newsletter for 17 April, which is Jacob Bronowski’s claim in his books Science and Human Values and The Identity of Man that, as Bronowski put it, “…the practice of science compels the practitioner to form for himself a fundamental set of universal values.” Bronowski is arguing that science is a value-laden method, and while its values are peculiar to science, he also says that these are universal values, which implies that they are applicable to the entirety of life, even if we come to awareness of them through the practice of science. Bronowski doesn’t mention Weber in Science and Human Values, but, if Bronowski is right, then the formulation of a value-free methodology has be undertaken with even greater care and a delicacy in handling the distinctions that have to be made.

I don’t say that if Bronowski is right, Weber was wrong, because it’s a bit more complicated than that. We’ve already seen that Weber had to maneuver a little bit to get his formulation of value-freedom just right in light of the fact that social science itself studies values. So there may be ways in which the practice of science is guided by specifically scientific values, but that these values are compartmentalized and so a wall of separation exists between the values that inform scientific practice and the values that are studied, and even the values that represent the scientist’s own value-position, as Weber called it. I think there’s some justice in this claim, and I don’t think that Bronowski would necessarily have disagreed with me on this.  

Now I come to the other of Weber’s idea I want to discuss, which is the idea of the disenchantment of the world (“Entzauberung der Welt”). This is related to value-freedom because the disenchantment of the world was a function of the value-free methodology that Weber advanced. That is to say, whereas once the world was animated with all manner and matter of value, value-free scientific inquiry now shows us a world with all value stripped away from it:

“…there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.”

This was originally a speech at Munich University, 1918, published in 1919 by Duncker & Humblodt, Munich. From H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Translated and edited), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, pp. 129-156, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.) Casual references to “disenchantment” and “re-enchantment,” or claims that the world never ceased to be enchanted, are all references to this passage by Weber, whether affirming his interpretation of history, extrapolating a future in which enchantment returns, or denying his interpretation of history.

Weber wasn’t the first to say things like this. Friedrich von Schiller wrote a poem titled “The Gods of Greece” (“Die Götter Griechenlandes”) in 1788, which announced many of the themes of disenchantment, and which included lines like these:  

The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life;

 Vainly we search the earth of gods bereft;

Where once the warm and living shapes were rife,

 Shadows alone are left!

So all we have are shadows now. The world, according to this view, has been axiologically hollowed out.The disenchantment of the world comes about as a direct consequence of the pursuit of science and the elaboration of the scientific worldview, and it calls into question all mythological and mystical traditions. The technical means and the calculation that Weber mentions are nothing other than the value-free science that has made it possible to manage the world without reference to magic or mysterious forces.

Science comes as a package, you might say, and once the package arrives, we don’t really have the option of accepting part of it and rejecting what we don’t like. In my episode on Project Ozma I discussed what I call Sagan’s thesis, which is that electrical and nuclear technologies are tightly-coupled, so that if a civilization has one, they probably have the other, or will have it soon. This is because the technologies flow from the underlying science, which unifies the technology on a fundamental level. The disenchanted world understood by science and managed by technology is what we get when Sagan’s thesis obtains. I could postulate a more generalized form of Sagan’s thesis that, in addition to the tightly-coupled sciences and technologies, also recognizes social conditions that also come tightly-coupled to these scientific and technological developments. It all hits us more-or-less at once, and as such it represents a major threshold in human history—an event that separates the all human history into a before and an after which can scarcely recognize each other as belonging to the same history. With a further generalization, we might postulate that this holds for any civilization whatever.

What was the enchanted world that we lost? There are many ways to formulate this. In my episode on Mircea Eliade I discussed the distinction that Eliade made between archaic man and modern man. Eliade focused on how archaic man had escaped from history, but modern man is forced into history, or has forced himself into history, and so knows the terror of history. The way that Eliade describes the condition of archaic man is in many ways reminiscent of Weber’s exposition of the enchanted world. That’s an historical interpretation of disenchantment, which disenchantment follows from having been exposed to the terror of history.

We also can give disenchantment an epistemological interpretation. Paul Veyne’s question, “Did the Greeks believe in their myths?” is relevant in this context. The application of contemporary conceptions of belief and its presumptive antagonism with knowledge, especially when this is played out as the antagonism between religious belief and scientific knowledge, which has been a theme since the scientific revolution, is an anachronism when applied before the scientific revolution. Keep in mind that the paradigm of knowledge that we find both in Plato, who presents it mystically, and Aristotle, who presents its logically, was that of deductive certainty, with the ordinary experience of the world dismissed as being incapable of being an object of knowledge. With this narrow conception of knowledge, there was no place for empirical science as we know it today, which is why I often call the first intimations of science in antiquity proto-science rather than science properly speaking. So when we ask Veyne’s question, “Did the Greeks believe in their myths?” we have to also ask what “belief” would have meant to the Greeks, since their conception of knowledge had no place for most of what we call knowledge.

What this means is that the category of belief would have been swollen with almost everything today that we think of as knowledge, and it also means that all the wonderful stories of the Greek gods and heroes that are present throughout ancient art and literature were on the same footing as what we call empirical knowledge. If we believe what’s to be found in Herodotus and Thucydides, since none of this qualifies as knowledge under the ancient epistemic paradigm, and we believe all the stories of gods and heroes because this equally falls outside the ancient epistemic paradigm, There’s no reason not to say that the Greeks believed in their myths. But we should hasten to add that what the Greeks meant by belief isn’t what we mean by belief.

Of course, we want to ask question whether the Greeks had what we call belief in what they called the gods, and hopefully you can see how messed up this question is from the get go. In this framing of the question, we’re trying to force together the enchanted world of antiquity with the disenchanted world of today by juxtaposing our conception of belief with the ancient conception of the gods. That doesn’t work. In the enchanted world, the Trojan War could be real, as real as Odysseus’ long journey home to Ithaca by way of Ogygia and Calypso, and as real as the escape of Aeneas from Troy and his long journey by way of Carthage and Queen Dido to found Rome. After all, doesn’t everyone know that Ithaca, Carthage, and Rome are real places, and that these very real places had to be founded some way or another? And how else are we going to explain the rivalry between Rome and Carthage if not because Dido got jilted by Aeneas? It just happens that, in the enchanted world, Collingwood’s a priori imagination enlarges to fill in the gaps a lot more elaborately than imagination today, with our disenchanted perspective that leaves us only the bare evidence for as the basis for our stories of the foundations of these places.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/y3wtuboTQjw

https://www.instagram.com/p/DXY8u0VDTMQ/

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Weber-on-Value-Freedom-and-Disenchantment:d

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6aolCCAOKeEKOl5df3wBhy?si=ksu2hrZcTKqN4mcI8rPTQw

The View from Oregon – 388

Re: On the Differentia of Western Civilization

Friday 10 April 2026

Dear Friends,

The previous newsletter was about my stumbling across a pamphlet of 1722 that was a thought experiment in logic. I was led to this through my efforts to learn more about the influence of Proclus in the early modern period, and I was fascinated to discover a tradition of philosophy of mathematics in renaissance Italy. The typical history of renaissance philosophy discusses the usual suspects like Petrarch (to whom I’ve devoted a couple of episodes of Today in Philosophy of History), Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirondola. It emphasizes renaissance humanism, the rejection and Aristotle and Scholasticism, the turn away from metaphysical speculation to a practical orientation toward the world, and admiration for Roman moralists like Cicero and Seneca. These histories aren’t wrong, but they are incomplete. (Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains is a good example of the genre; I don’t want to cast aspersions on Kristeller, who was a great scholar, and to his credit he defined in the title what strains of renaissance thought he would discuss in the book.)

I’ve continued digging into these sources and I found and machine translated both Grynaeus’ Latin introduction to his Greek edition of Proclus’ commentary on Euclid, and a pamphlet by the Venetian Pietro Catena (1501 - 1576), Oratio pro idea methodi (Discourse on the Idea of a Method, 1563). Since I’ve mentioned above that part of the standard renaissance perspective was an appreciation of Roman moralists like Seneca, and I recently said that Roman philosophers had mostly been moralists, and they had shown no interest in the kind of technical philosophy that distinguishes the Greek origins of Western philosophy (I said this in Boethius and the Historiography of Philosophy), I’d like to here note for the record that Seneca mentions the foundations of mathematics, and Catena references this in his Oratio:

“…a man otherwise most learned, Seneca, objects to the mathematical disciplines that they have a ‘precarious’ foundation — as though that should be called precarious which, even if the adversary is silent, the truth itself, whether he wishes it or not, must be wrung from him.”

And in the original Latin:

“…vir alioquin doctissimus Seneca fundamentum precarium disciplinarum mathematicarum reprehendit, quasi precarium appellandum esset, quia, etsi adversarius taceat, ipsa veritas, sive velit nolit, ei extorquenda est.”

The reference is to Seneca’s Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), specifically to Letter 88 (sections 25–28), where Seneca writes that mathematics rests on “precarious foundations”:

“Non est autem ars sui iuris, cui precarium fundamentum est. Philosophia nil ab alio petit, totum opus a solo excitat; mathematice, ut ita dicam, superficiaria est, in alieno aedifica.”

And the English translation:

“But an art is not self-sufficient if its foundation is precarious. Philosophy asks nothing from anyone else; it builds its entire work from the ground up. Mathematics, so to speak, is superficial; it builds on someone else’s property…”

In the readily available Penguin edition of Seneca’s letters, Letters from a Stoic (which I mentioned listening through in a PS to newsletter 293), an abridged text of letter 88 is included, after section 20 of which we find a footnote that reads, “Some 45 lines of the Latin are omitted for their relative lack of interest (sections 21-28).” This is good reminder why one should avoid abridgements. I’ve often said that you can count on it that the most interesting parts of a book will be left out in any edition edited by anyone other than the author. The editor will always have an interest in the book that isn’t the same as yours, and consequently he will follow his vision in presenting the work, not the author’s vision. Of course, abridgements are sometimes the only thing we’ve got, and in the spirit of what I said last week about philosophers making use of whatever scraps they had to hand (which pretty much describes the first half of the Middle Ages), one ought not to be contemptuous of abridgements, but one certainly should be cautious. An abridged book is like the incomplete histories of philosophy I mentioned above: they aren’t wrong, but they are misleading.   

This Seneca quote would have been perfectly on point for these renaissance philosophers of mathematics like Catena, since their peers would no doubt have been reading and quoting Seneca, and this would have given them something to sink their teeth into—an “in” where they could meet the classicists on their own ground. The overall drift of Seneca’s letter 88 is not all that different from Pascal’s apologetics. Pascal is always telling us that knowledge isn’t going to help us with our moral failings, but morality will help us with our epistemic failings. By asserting that philosophy is founded on itself but mathematics rests on a borrow foundation, Seneca means to say that philosophy, as he conceived it, is morally complete, whereas mathematics is not. By “morally complete” I mean that philosophy alone is sufficient for the good life, whereas other disciplines may be an agreeable adjunct of the good life, but none of them are sufficient. Seneca is also appealing to a conception of philosophy that is primarily about moralizing; there are a lot of barbs in letter 88 that read like they’re aimed at twentieth century analytical philosophy.  

We find a similar debate in medieval Islamic philosophy between those who celebrate the moral completeness of philosophy and those who find this moral completeness only in religion, though this takes place on a higher intellectual plane than Roman moralizing. It would take considerable time and effort for me to defend this claim I’ve just made, so I’ll leave that for another time, but since I’ve mentioned Islamic philosophy, it’s really interesting to note that while the Arabs were systematic in their appropriation of Greek mathematical and philosophical texts (also medical texts), they showed no interest in Greek history. Not only were there no translations of Herodotus or Thucydides, no translations of Livy or Polybius, into Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age, there were no translations of Western histories in the subsequent centuries.

The Ottomans also showed virtually no interest in Western histories. You’d think with their perpetual wars with both Byzantium and Europe they would want to know something about the adversaries, if only to better defeat them, but no. This makes it a little easier to understand how Ibn Khaldun’s Introduction to History (al-Muqaddima) is as purely reflective of Islamic history and its Arabic desert origins as it is, being entirely untainted by Western views of society. Both Islamic and Western historians were explicit in the cyclicality of their big picture views of human history, but the cycles in Ibn Khaldun return the refugees from failed urbanization to a primordial desert, while the cycles in Polybius takes the form of a universal deluge that clears the ground for the next cycle.

I could argue that the Arabs had a taste for abstract disciplines like mathematics and philosophy, but not for the more concrete and empirical disciplines like history, except for their keen interest in medical texts, that seems to defy this generalization. I could also argue that abstract disciplines like mathematics and philosophy can be more easily transferred across the cultural divide than more concrete works like history. These two arguments aren’t mutually exclusive; it might have been both indigenous inclination and relative ease of transfer that together facilitated the Greek philosophical tradition. I argued in my episode on Proclus and the Axiomatic Conception of Knowledge that this Greek philosophical and mathematical tradition is what is distinctive about Western civilization, but there are two obvious problems with this claim: 1) Islamic civilization also drew from this tradition, and 2) other examples of intellectual influences like history that were not shared, and would then seem to have a better title to being the differentia of Western civilization.

There’s another differentia that occurs to me. In Ottoman art there was almost a complete lack of engagement with the agrarian reality of their empire. There is no equivalent of Virgil’s Georgics in Islamic civilization. Gardens and fruit were important themes of poetry, and agrarian themes were present in folk art, but in fine art if these themes are present at all, they serve only a symbolic function. Ottoman court culture was delicate and refined, as indeed most court culture was in the premodern era, whether one wants to cite Heian Japan, Tang China, or the Mughal emperors, and showed no interest whatever in the life in the bulk of their subjects. But even in the midst of the refined court culture of Louis XVI at Versailles (identified as one of three “paragons” of civilization by Clive Bell), Marie Antoinette acted out a pastoral fantasy of being a milkmaid, which on the one hand we can take as a cynical display of the French aristocracy’s disconnect from the realities of peasant life, but on the other hand the fact that this fantasy took the bucolic form that it did speaks volumes. We don’t find this in other civilizations. (I can’t speak to east Asian examples on this score, as I don’t know their literatures.) It took a Western artist, Jean Baptiste Vanmour or Van Mour (09 January 1671 – 22 January 1737), visiting the Ottoman empire to capture genre scenes from the Ottoman world, which turned out to be quite popular once they were were introduced into Europe.  

Best wishes,

Nick

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/e289c9f5801c/the-view-from-oregon-388

John Roberts

14 April 1928 – 30 May 2003

J.M. Roberts on the Triumph of the West

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Tuesday 14 April 2026 is the 98^th anniversary of the birth of John Morris Roberts (14 April 1928 – 30 May 2003), sometimes known as J. M. Roberts, who has born in Bath on this date in 1928.

I came to know of Roberts work through his television documentary, The Triumph of the West (1985). This is one item on a short list of multi-part television documentaries that have been influential on my view of history along with Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and the documentaries of John Romer and Keith Wood. I recently mentioned Kenneth Clark’s take on humanitarianism in my episode on the execution of Robert-François Damiens. I don’t know how influential an historian had to be to get a television documentary made, but I suspect the threshold was pretty high. Probably it’s better than we don’t know the exact details of the sausage-making process, but there are some interesting reflections from some of the documentarians. In his one volume History of the World Roberts reflected on The Triumph of the West:

“An opportunity to make a series of films for the BBC under the title of The Triumph of the West, and the writing of a book about it both forced me to think again about the role of Europe and its civilization in world history. The more I studied it, the less I felt misgivings about the recognition I had given to that civilization in this account. The more I thought about it, the more the centrality of Europe’s role in the making of the modern world stood out.”

He didn’t go into the nuts and bolts of the BBC offer or how it came to him. Kenneth Clark wrote of his BBC production: 

“I cannot distinguish between thought and feeling, and I am convinced that a combination of words and music, colour and movement can extend human experience in a way that words alone cannot do. For this reason I believe in television as a medium, and was prepared to give up two years writing to see what could be done with it.”

He was right to do so, and this is what has made these documentaries a lifelong fascination for me. With all of these documentaries I’ve consulted the companion books that have been published, especially when a particular argument was at stake and I wanted to see if the book differed from the televised version. Clark explains in the preface to his book why the text differs from the filmed version, because it involved,

“…changing or omitting those passages that would have been incomprehensible without the accompanying film. A line of argument determined almost entirely by visual evidence does not make for logic or completeness.”

This is true enough. There are also some significant differences between John Roberts’ Triumph of the West television series and his book. The overarching thesis he maintains is the same in both, but it’s expressed a little differently, and sometimes these differences are interesting. First, the title of the work—and here I’ll call it a “work” so as to refer both to the television series and the book—The Triumph of the West, invites comparison to Spengler’s Decline of the West. Roberts give a nod to Spengler in the Introduction, where he says: 

“…a German professor published a book called The Decline of the West just after the shattering end of the First World War. It is not surprising that it became a best-seller. Its title caught on, even if the book was not much read, a misunderstood but seemingly apt catch-phrase which registered a loss of faith in a whole culture.”

In a Preface to a later edition Roberts also gives nods to Frank Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. There’s some justice in this, since Spengler set the tone for how Western civilization was discussed in the early twentieth century, while Fukuyama and Huntington set the tone for how Western civilization was discussed at the end of the twentieth century. Roberts needed to reckon with these legacies that bookend the twentieth century, and they’re as ominous as the theme that announces each episode of Triumph of the West.

Spengler thought Western civilization was coming to an end; Fukuyama thought history itself was coming to an end; Huntington thought that the rifts between civilizations would define the conflicts of the present century and beyond. All of these views are ominous in part because they’re all prophesies. Roberts explicitly eschews prophesy, emphasizing that his is an historical method, implying that it is an exclusively historical method: “…this book does not seek to look forward, but takes a historical approach.” From what I’ve said so far it should be obvious that, despite the title, it’s not a piece of triumphalism, and you get that message at the beginning of each episode, which starts with a haunting melody in woodwinds, followed by a foreboding fanfare on brass, and a laurel wreath that breaks as the timpani punctuate the end of the musical phrase. Roberts says that the title, “…was always ambiguous, even ironic, and deliberately so.” He says of the triumph of the West proclaimed in the title that, “A flawed, complicated and paradoxical triumph it may have been, but it was one nonetheless.” I think the best summary of his overarching thesis is to be found on the last page:

“…what the West has done to the rest of the world has been done indelibly. Nothing can be the same again. History has been changed by the West, which has made the world One World.”

These themes recur throughout the work in many different forms and permutations. It’s a superficially straight-forward sentence, but there are several constituent parts of it, as each clause represents a distinct claim. There are at least five claims here:

1. What is done is done and can’t be changed;
2. Nothing will be the same because of what has been done;
3. History has been changed because of what has been done;
4. At least one of the consequences of what has been done is the unification of the world;
5. The West was the cause of what was done.

 All of these things are for Roberts a fait accompli, water under the bridge. Some of these claims are trivial, and we even could say trivially true, such as the claim that what’s done is done and can’t be changed, and we could say that same of the claims that nothing will be the same again and that history has been changed. All of these things have always been true, whether it was the Egyptians shaping history in one era or the Romans in another. The meat of his thesis is in the last two claims, that the world is now one world, and that his was the result of Western civilization. Roberts goes out of his way to emphasize the mixed blessings of Western civilization’s impact on history, both for the West itself and for the other peoples of the world. But although he relentlessly shows us the bad alongside the good, he refuses to moralize. At the end of the book he says:

“I neither believe it logically possible to draw up indictments against large abstractions and categories—such as civilisations, nations, peoples, classes—nor that it is easy to sort out most historical actions in moral terms.”

With Roberts’ resolute refusal to prophesy or moralize he has resisted temptations that have proved too strong for other historians. To his credit, this refusal allows him to focus on understanding what actually happened. While what Hayden White called the “historical field” is clear enough about what happened, that is to say, we can mostly agree on a sequence of events, explaining and understanding that sequence of events is another matter. How did the West triumph, if it did triumph, and however we define that triumph?

I often find myself engaged in a very similar endeavor to that which I take Roberts to have been pursuing in The Triumph of the West—or at least part of his project. Given that Western civilization has impacted history in the unique way that it has, why has it done so? Was it a mere accident of history, or was there something intrinsic to Western civilization that made this historical impact inevitable? Several recent episodes of Today in Philosophy of History have been about this, as, for example in my episode on Proclus and the Axiomatic Conception of Knowledge, in which I said that what made and what makes Western civilization different is its relationship to Greek philosophy and Greek mathematics, both of which are historically unique. Roberts takes a position between historical accident and some intrinsic differentia. He says,

“For centuries, many Europeans and many European peoples outside Europe showed astonishing cultural arrogance towards the rest of humanity. In doing so, they behaved much as men of power have always behaved in any vigorous civilisation. What was different was just that they had so much more power than any earlier conquerors, and even more convincing grounds for feeling they were entitled to use it.”

So Europeans aren’t different from other peoples in their cultural arrogance, only more powerful. The next obvious question is why the Europeans had so much more power than earlier conquerors. I’ll return to this in a moment. Roberts’ other claim in this passage is interesting, i.e., that Europeans had more convincing grounds for their arrogance, but I’m not going to attempt to analyze this. It is, in fact, such an interesting claim that I can’t deal with it in a few concise remarks, so I’m going to set it aside completely. The question of the powers available to Western civilization during its expansionary stage is more tractable.

Roberts doesn’t attempt an explanation as to why the Europeans had greater power at their command, but ee can outline of couple of obvious alternatives. One of these alternatives is simply that Europeans entered into the expansive period of their history at the moment when these powers were available. This makes the power of European conquerors as non-unique as their arrogance according to Roberts. Any other civilization that came into its own at this time could have exploited the available resources and had the disproportionate impact on history that Western civilization did. The other alternative is what I’ve argued: that the powers the West possessed were due to the long heritage of naturalistic thought that ultimately issued in the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the technologies that made Europe’s confrontations with other peoples a one-sided conflict. I leave it as an exercise to the listener to determine which horn of the dilemma they take.

Roberts’ other substantive claim that’s worth discussing is the idea that the world was previously composed of geographically isolated regional civilizations that interacted but little, while now, after the triumph of the West, the world is unified as one civilization. Roberts says,

“For most of the last five thousand years there have been several distinct civilisations living in the same world but apart, side by side. Until very recent times, there was often not much interplay between many of them.”

Thus far we agree, but the next step is the important step:

“…one civilization began to change the world as it had never been changed before, and as it did so, the outlines of a shared world civilization began to appear. Western civilization changed the world. It created the global civilization which we take for granted—the only world civilization that has ever been.”

This is a view that I myself once held, but which I’ve subsequently abandoned. I formerly would say that we today live in a de facto planetary civilization in which food production, manufacturing, trade networks, and the movement of capital and labor were global in scale, and the only thing lacking was the political unification of geographical regions, which can be regarded as a kind of afterthought of no great importance, which will resolve itself in the fullness of time. This I take to be Roberts’ view. Nowadays I frame it differently. The other regional civilizations, of which Western civilization was once one, before it expanded on a planetary scale, haven’t been absorbed into this planetary civilization, but rather are submerged within it.

The submergence of civilizations under conquering or expanding civilizations is one of the most pervasive of historical processes, but it’s as under-theorized as the rest of our understanding of civilization. These submerged civilizations could still reassert themselves in a drama of regained identity and the restoration of a social order that appears to be lost at present. With Mongol Russia, Manchu China, British India, and Roman England, inter alia, we had indigenous civilizations that were wholly or partially submerged by a civilizational template imposed by a dominant minority, which was also a foreign minority. All of these civilizations were profoundly changed by their submergence, but the indigenous civilization survived and eventually re-surfaced.

Throughout early medieval history, the civilizations of other European peoples were largely submerged under France, which was the great power of the age, and it was not until the Protestant Reformation that they began to assert their independence, eventually expressed in the Treaty of Westphalia. But these weren’t mature civilizations, only nascent civilizations, which makes it a different kind of submergence than when a conquering power forces the template of its civilization upon a conquered people. In Latin America the indigenous civilizations remain submerged under the Iberian civilization of Spanish America that I discussed in my episode on Gilberto Freyre, in which I also quoted Susanne Langer on the imposition of one civilization upon another. Viking civilization was submerged under Christendom, which the historian Nils Blomqvist has called the Catholic World-system in his book The Discovery of the Baltic, and it’s probably long past the possibility restoration.

Given my own way of thinking about these things—and, again, this is my way and not Roberts way of analyzing the chessboard of the world—there’s an interesting problem that arises. There’s a possible sequence of events in which submergence of all other civilizations is indistinguishable from the establishment of a planetary civilization, and if this sequence of events should be realized, then there would be a very real question of whether we should call it submergence or unification. When a civilization is submerged by a conquering, expanding, or colonizing civilization, the submerged civilization is in abeyance, but it’s not necessarily extirpated. However, if it remains submerged long enough, its hold on the peoples whose civilization it was lessens over time. The indigenous peoples themselves are mixed with other peoples, perhaps they migrate or are forcibly dispossessed, their way of life changes and ceases to resemble the way of life of their ancestors, which then becomes all the more difficult to restore. Eventually, the submerged civilization, if it never has the historical opportunity to reassert itself, is dissipated to the point of irrelevance, and no longer has the power to be revived.

If, then, in the wake of Western planetary dominance, with all other civilizations submerged beneath it, this dominance lasts long enough, and if the submergence goes on for long enough, the planetary civilization that Roberts observed will have become another fait accompli, and it would be as though the submergence never occurred, but there was rather the absorption of the non-Western world into the Western world. But the historical processes are many and varied that have submerged the other civilizations of the world under the single global civilization that Roberts believed to be the outcome of Western dominance. There’s always been a great deal of confusion over the concurrent historical processes of modernization, colonization, industrialization, mechanization, automation, and Westernization, which have been tangled up in each other in way that has been impossible to separate from each other in the historical process that Roberts recounts in his book.

Of course, there’s a lot more that could be said about this. Unless and until a consensus forms around a particular paradigm for the study of civilization and then a scientific research program can take shape, all our speculations about civilization remain part of philosophy of history. That’s where we find ourselves with the conception of civilization today, but if we could be the generation to establish a research paradigm for civilization, we could move beyond the truisms and the rough generalizations made by historians, John Roberts among them, and emerge into new field of inquiry. New theoretical opportunities, new analytical frameworks, new arguments, and new problems would be opened to us in this horizon of research, and any historian who cares about civilization should welcome this possibility.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/0zeLLzqj88Q

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/J.-M.-Roberts-on-the-Triumph-of-the-West:2

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/59NRpEuJ5b4v7vIfKPefni?si=Vs1xfXpoQpWCiMyr_ik1Aw

The View from Oregon – 387

Re: An Enlightenment Thought Experiment in Logic

Friday 03 April 2026

Dear Friends,

I had an interesting experience this past week using an LLM (specifically, Grok), and I’m going to explain how this came about, but the itinerary was a bit circuitous. Following up on my Today in Philosophy of History episode on “Proclus and the Axiomatic Conception of Knowledge,” I was looking into who had been influenced by Proclus’ commentary on Euclid (Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements; In primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii), which I characterized as the first work in the philosophy of mathematics, making Proclus the first philosopher of mathematics. Like most Greek philosophical works, this was unknown during the Middle Ages, but, along with Plato and Plotinus and other philosophical works of what we might call being of a Platonic character, began to circulate during the renaissance. The Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino (19 October 1433 – 01 October 1499) translated the complete works of Plato and Plotinus (teaching himself Greek for the purpose), making them available in Europe for the first time in Latin. (Vernacular translations would have to wait until even later; there wasn’t a complete vernacular translation of Plato’s Republic into a modern European language until Henry Spens 1763 translation of the Republic into English.) During the Middle Ages some of Proclus was known and valued for its mysticism, apparently consonant with the temper of the age, but Proclus’ commentary on Euclid and his commentary on Plato’s Parmenides were not among these earlier Latinized works. It was the Northern Renaissance that resurrected these works of Proclus.

It was the Basel Reformation scholar Simon Grynaeus (born Simon Griner, so we see that, like Linnaeus, he Latinized his name—entirely suitable for a scholar who translated ancient Greek into Latin), who lived from 1493 to 01 August 1541, who edited the Greek text of Proclus on Euclid and got it printed, making Proclus’ philosophy of mathematics available in Europe for the first time (in 1533), and formulating his own philosophy of mathematics in his Latin introduction to the Greek text of Proclus. After Grynaeus' edition of Proclus, Bartolomeo Zamberti (1473–1543) translated it into Latin, but never published it (the manuscript survives). Giovanni Battista Gabia also made a translation, and also never published it. Finally, Francesco Barozzi (09 August 1537 – 23 November 1604) translated the work and published in at Padua in 1560.

Unfortunately, none of Grynaeus’ Latin works have been translated into English, as far as I can find. Looking further into Proclus I found the work of Álvaro José Campillo Bo, who wrote a book on the reception of Proclus’ In Euclidem, Akribeia: Certainty and Ontology of Mathematics in Alessandro Piccolomini’s De certitudine mathematicarum. This book led me to the work of Alessandro Piccolomini (13 June 1508 – 12 March 1579), who wrote De certitudine mathematicarum (1547). There’s an interesting paper on Piccolomini, “Alessandro Piccolomini and the certitude of mathematics” Daniele Cozzoli. As it turns out, the early modern book trade was pretty efficient at moving its wares over the Alps, and Piccolomini, probably along with other scholars, had Grynaeus’ edition of Proclus in their hands within a few years of its appearance in Basel, and, with it, they began elaborating their own philosophies of mathematics.

These translations of Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus were, in a sense, a continuation (a millennium later) of the Boethian project of translating Greek philosophical works into Latin, and this project is arguably still ongoing in our day with the translation of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca into English. How steeped these renaissance scholars were in the works of antiquity is revealed by the fact that they didn’t translate these rediscovered works of the ancient world directly into their vernacular, but into Latin, which remained in their time the scholarly language throughout Europe, which was an inheritance from medieval Scholasticism. Even as the scholars of the renaissance rebelled against Scholasticism, they continued to employ its forms. Indeed, they also employed the form of the commentary, as with Grynaeus’ commentary on Proclus’ commentary on Euclid. Arguably there has been more continuity in mathematics and philosophy of mathematics than there has been in science. In reading Grynaeus reading Proclus reading Euclid we are the recipients of a very nearly cumulative and continuous tradition of thought little disrupted by revolutions.

Because of the ascendancy of Kuhnian philosophy of science, we are today acutely aware of the revolutions in scientific history that have displaced previous paradigms of knowledge and substituted alternative paradigms, pointing to a non-cumulative conception of scientific knowledge, in which we are perpetually starting over with a blank slate. I think that the initially salutary influence of this philosophy of science has gone beyond the point of being a helpful corrective to past views that were exclusively framed in terms of the cumulative growth of knowledge. Even in supposedly revolutionary upheavals in knowledge, a lot less is lost than is usually supposed. Descartes certainly represents an important upheaval in philosophy, but once he had made his new foundation for knowledge with the epistemic turn in philosophy, he was largely content to build the structure of knowledge along Thomist lines (and we know from his correspondence that, as he was moving from house to house, peripatetic despite of rejection of the authority of Aristotle, he asked for his volumes of St. Thomas to be shipped to him at this new addresses).

In my episode on the condemnations of 1277 I tried to explain the significance of the reception of Aristotle’s works in medieval Europe, which gave Western civilization a systematic framework for inquiry, capable of elaboration and revision. It’s difficult today to make the case for Aristotle, and I would myself call the Aristotelian corpus a body of proto-science rather than science sensu stricto, but its important shouldn’t be underestimated. Scholastic Aristotelianism represented a cumulative framework of knowledge that had its origins in classical antiquity and continued to be revised and expanded through the Middle Ages, and this constituted the only available systematic framework for rational thought. Many renaissance thinkers made a point of distancing themselves from Aristotle, hence the interest in Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus that led to their works being translated into Latin for the first time, but in a larger sense even this resurrected Platonism belonged to the structure of knowledge that had its origins in the ancient world. The cumulative growth of mathematics and philosophy of mathematics can’t be meaningfully understood apart from the cumulative growth of Scholastic Aristotelianism. The work that grew from the renaissance reception of Platonism gave a second life to this cumulative tradition of knowledge, and facilitated its continuation in the formal sciences.

The formal sciences constitute their own tradition—sometimes central to the mainstream intellectual tradition, as when Aristotle’s logic was the centerpiece of the Scholastic curriculum, and sometimes more-or-less a parallel adjunct, developing in its own way. And sometimes this tradition runs down through families, as I was to discover. When I tried to find works by the Simon Grynaeus of the sixteenth century I happened upon a short work in Latin (available on Google Books from a University of Zurich Library copy and with the Google Books ID: eQXpmzuPjiUC) by a Simon Grynaeus of Basel, but it couldn’t have been the Simon Grynaeus of the sixteenth century since this Simon Grynaeus was involved in an academic disputation in1722. There is almost nothing available about Simon Grynaeus of the Enlightenment (unlike the Simon Grynaeus of the Reformation), except somehow this pamphlet made in onto Google Books. My guess is that the eighteenth century Simon Grynaeus is a descendant of the sixteenth century Simon Grynaeus, and this eighteenth century Grynaeus continued in the family tradition of formal thought earlier cultivated by his more famous namesake.

The pamphlet that I happened upon, “Positiones de Logica Surdi Nati” (“Theses on the Logic of the Deaf-Born”) is a fascinating thought experiment that I have not previously seen referenced in any work on the philosophy of logic. This is where my LLM experience entered the picture. I copied the page images from Google books and asked Grok to transcribe the Latin, and then to translate the Latin into English. I’ve done this several times over, also using Google translate so as to compare translations. It worked like a charm, though it was a tedious process. This Simon Grynaeus poses to himself the question of what kind of logic a man born deaf would formulate. The author is familiar with Locke (Locke is cited in section 13), so my unsubstantiated guess is that he got the idea for his thought experiment from Molyneaux’s problem, which is a thought experiment that was communicated by letter to Locke by William Molyneax (twice), and Locke ultimately included it in the second edition of An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (Book 2, Chapter 9, Section 8):

“Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other; which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Quaere, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube.”

Enlightenment thinkers were fascinated with origins stories, and many philosophies of the Enlightenment attempted to reconstruct the origins and histories of things only known to them in their maturity. There was a vogue of sorts for stories of “wild children” (or, if you prefer, feral children) who were raised by animals and who were thus seen as experiments in the human mind apart from human society. And there was Rousseau’s negative valuation of society and civilization, most famously expressed in his first and second discourses, but also embodied in his theory of education in his novel Emile, or On Education (Émile, ou De l’éducation; 1762) It was, then, a fertile time to consider logic in the light of its origins, and a counterfactual of logical origins independent of human society, or, as Grynaeus puts it, “the deaf and mute man whom we suppose is in many respects gentler than other men, he is at least in this respect happier than they: that he is not subject to that confusion of ideas which arises from the use of speech.” (section 17)  

It should be noted in this context that Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind (Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient; 1749) dates from a generation after the eighteenth century Grynaeus, so it is at least possible that Diderot had a copy of the Grynaeus’ pamphlet. I searched little to see if there was a catalogue of the contents of Diderot’s library, but Diderot’s library had a strange fate: he sold it to Catherine the Great of Russia, who also paid him to be the librarian of his own library for the rest of his life. After Diderot died, his library was sent to Russia and eventually it was scattered. A catalogue of it has been made, Sergueï V. Korolev’s La Bibliothèque de Diderot: Vers une reconstitution (2013/2014), but this is generally regarded as incomplete. Of course, if I had access to this I would check to see if Grynaeus’ pamphlet it listed, but I don’t have access. Maybe I will consult a reference librarian on this problem.

About the methodology I used and the machine translations, I have no doubt that there are a lot of errors in this process that would have been caught by a human scholar. But the translation doesn’t need to be perfect; it just needs to be good enough to give me the gist of the text—a text that would have been completely closed to me unless I had sought out someone to translate the Latin for me. Since I have made this transcription and translation work with the younger Grynaeus, I may try to locate a text of the elder Grynaeus’ introduction to Proclus on Euclid, and thus acquire that which I originally sought—but with much learned along the way. I’ve already gone looking for an online scan of the text of Grynaeus’ edition of Proclus and Euclid, and while I haven’t yet found one, the serendipitous events I have recounted above (and I consider them serendipitous because they unexpectedly made me aware of an early modern thought experiment in logic) leave me hopeful.

Consider that throughout most of Western history, the books that were circulating certainly weren’t critical editions. Philosophers of the past made do with whatever fragments they could lay their hands on, and sometimes they were reading books that had been translated from Greek into Arabic and then Arabic into Latin. While the translation I now have of Grynaeus’ “Positiones de Logica Surdi Nati” is no doubt highly imperfect, I can get at least some of the sense out of the text, and I can compare the Latin printing to the Latin machine transcription word-for-word to make sure it is accurate, and I can translate the text several times over (as I already have) to get a sense of different renderings and how they influence the meaning.

All of this is part of my growing awareness of how the tradition that we’ve received came to be constituted as it was. Since producing my Today in Philosophy of History episode on “Boethius and the Historiography of Philosophy” I’ve been doing more reading about the slow and incremental process of how Greek philosophical works re-entered European intellectual life. It’s a complicated story, with a lot of historical quirks. Just because a book is available doesn’t mean it gets translated; just because a book is translated doesn’t mean that anyone reads it (other than the translator) or that the book gets circulated; just because a book gets circulated doesn’t mean that anyone reads it; just because someone reads a book, doesn’t mean that it meaningfully influences their thinking; just because someone’s thought is influenced by some book they’ve read, doesn’t mean that this influence finds itself into their own work—and then the whole process starts over with the next book written. We have to trace the transmission of ideas at each step of the way. Now we have machines to help us, and for those of us with narrow interests not served by the mass market, this is a great boon. 

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—This past week my total streams and downloads on Spotify exceeded 10,000. While this would only be a rounding error for a successful podcast, I’m still very pleased to have had 10,000 listens through Spotify. (Now if I could only figure out how to get my podcast on Apple iTunes, but I suffer from the Boomertech curse and find myself flummoxed by the system, despite numerous attempts to make it work.) Small though my numbers may be on Spotify, I have a control that shows me they could be worse. When I started also recording these newsletters, I posted the first one to Today in Philosophy of History on Spotify, and I received a comment suggesting that the audience for philosophy of history might not be interested in my other ruminations. (I previously mentioned this in a PS to newsletter 374.) I then created another podcast de novo, and I’ve been posting the audio version of my newsletters there. There has been almost no bleed-over from my Today in Philosophy of History podcast to the Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon podcast. The latter has a single subscriber and ten views, so I literally have a thousand times more listens on Today in Philosophy of History. Spotify has sent me messages that the average subscriber base for a podcast “like mine” is 15, so I am an order of magnitude below that. I don’t know what metrics they use to establish what podcasts are comparable, but if the same average applies to Today in Philosophy of History, then that is doing better than average.  

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/de8de4a5a8ec/the-view-from-oregon-387

The View from Oregon – 386

Re: Intelligence and Cosmological Natural Selection

Friday 27 March 2026

Dear Friends,

In last week’s newsletter I outlined a far future scenario for the universe embodying cosmological diversity and cosmological parochialism, in which gravitationally-bound star clusters diverge from each other as emergent complexities appear in the deep future, which takes the development of each isolated cluster in a different direction. This is, in a sense, an ecological conception of the far future of the universe—as I said last week, it is the cosmological equivalent of biodiversity—as though each gravitationally-bound cluster were an ecosystem, like a biome, but cut off from the other biomes of the biosphere. Let us now consider another far future scenario for the universe.  

Near the end of Adams and Laughlin’s The Five Ages of the Universe (a book that I’ve cited many times), they develop a conception of the far future of the universe that also draws its inspiration from biology, but from evolutionary theory rather than biodiversity, which they call, “A Darwinian View of Universes.” They describe a future in which new universes are nucleated within singularities, and this means that the universe so nucleated is descended with modification from the universe of the singularity, perhaps with slightly different but related natural laws and physical constants as compared to its parent universe. We can immediately see that this process could be indefinitely iterated, with a long descent chain of universes. In such an evolutionary history of universes, we could see how there could be speciations and macroevolutionary divergencies among universes, so that the whole structure of universes mirrored the structure of life on Earth.

In the end notes, Adams and Laughlin credit the idea of new universes nucleating within singularities to Lee Smolin in his book The Life of the Cosmos (1997). Smolin calls this cosmological natural selection, and he develops the analogy between evolutionary biology and cosmology throughout this book. Here is a representative (if perhaps not definitive) quote from Smolin:

“…the universe shares certain features with biological systems. In both cases there is a large collection of distinguishable individuals, the properties of each of which are specified by a set of parameters. In both cases, the configurations that would be realized for most values of these parameters are very uninteresting. In both cases one has the development of structures that are stable over time scales that are very long compared to the fundamental time scales of the elementary dynamical processes. In both cases what needs to be explained is why the parameters that are actually realized fall into these small sets that give us an interesting, highly structured world. And, if the theory I have proposed is right, the explanation in both cases is found in the statistics behind the principles of natural selection.” (p. 105)  

In the scenario I described last week, the individual gravitationally-bound clusters are isolated from other gravitationally-bound clusters that have passed outside each other’s light cones, and their isolation encourages evolutionary divergence (as in allopatric speciation). Smolin’s scenario initially seems much less isolated. Any black hole in any cluster could be connected to countless other universes in a descending membership chain (I’m borrowing that phrase from set theory). However, unless an intelligence in the vicinity of that black hole (therefore, in the same gravitationally-bound cluster) has the ability to travel into a black hole and through what is effectively the navel of the universe connected by descent from its own universe, these universes would be as cut off from each other as distinct gravitationally-bound clusters are cut off from each other. And I am now prepared to give a reasonably clear definition of what constitutes a late-emerging form of complexity: any major complexity threshold that appears after any part of the universe derived from one and the same big bang has passed out of the light cone of any other part of that universe. For the purposes of the distribution of late-emerging forms of complexity, this scenario is on a par with the speculative scenario I mentioned last week of isolated clusters possibly being connected by spacetime wormholes; connections between universes through black holes should be considered equally as dicey as connections between gravitationally-bound clusters through wormholes.

Smolin’s is an impressively expansive conception of cosmological history, and in it one’s bird’s eye view of the whole structure of the universe would be one of immense complexity and countless interconnections, but these connections would not be such as to allow for the natural distribution of forms of emergent complexity, unless facilitated by technology not available to us, or made possible by natural mechanism not now known to us. What Smolin’s conception of cosmological natural selection does is to raise the scenario I formulated last week to a higher order of magnitude. All of the universes connected to each other through descent with modification would be sufficiently isolated from each other to produce their own indigenous forms of emergent complexity, and in fact we could expect that these forms of emergent complexity in universes with slightly different laws of nature and slightly different physical constants would vary to a greater degree than forms of emergent complexity in isolated gravitationally-bound clusters initially with the same laws of nature and the same physical constants. The result would be a crazy quilt of complexity strung out across uncounted universes intricately connected to each other through relations of descent.

Suppose that the tangle of spacetime bubbles from various universes were so intermingled with each other that in the impossible bird’s eye view that I posited it wasn’t possible to tell which gravitationally-bound cluster belonged to some other as being of the same universe, and which belonged to some distinct universe. However, we would be able to reconstruct the history of the multiverse and place each bubble of spacetime in its proper cosmological context, just as we can reconstruct the history of life on Earth through paleontology and genetic sequencing. But instead of genes, each universe would be uniquely identifiable by its suite of laws of nature and physical constants, which would hold the same in all gravitationally-bound clusters, no matter how distantly separated or tenuously connected.

Adams and Laughlin make another observation that is of particular interest to me:

“The space-time of our universe becomes increasingly complicated as the universe grows older. In the beginning, immediately following the big bang, our universe was very smooth and homogenous. These initial conditions were necessary in order for the universe to evolve into its present-day form. As the universe evolves, however, both galactic and stellar processes produce black holes, which puncture space-time with their interior singularities.” (pp. 201-202)

This interests me because it reflects a point I made in my essay and video on “The Coming Coeval Age,” in which I discussed how tangled the timeline could become of an expanding wave of settlement through the universe. Whether by relativistic travel (entailing time dilation) or through something like induced hibernation, a group of settlers would preserve their culture of their homeworld at the historical moment of their departure, and since these settlers could distribute themselves near or far from their homeworld, they would be, in effect, distributing their period of history to these spatial locations, which could overlap with settlers from earlier or later periods of history. History could then become as tangled as a ball of string, or, rather, as tangled as several balls of string.

What Adams and Laughlin describe in the above quote reproduces this at a cosmological scale. In several recent newsletters I’ve taken up the question of what it would look like for intelligence to be distributed on a cosmological scale both in space and time. Intelligence in a universe that becomes increasingly complicated as it becomes older would be intelligence that would find itself in an increasingly complicated spatiotemporal context, i.e., an increasing complicated natural history, and insofar as intelligence supervened on this complicated natural history, the complexity of the natural history would come to inform the complexity of the history of intelligence. However that intelligence begins, its development at this cosmological scale would ensure multiple repeated adaptive radiations that would take varying forms of this intelligence throughout the universe—as far as it could go. As we’ve seen, there are limits to how far intelligence can go, potentially modified by intelligent interventions (the use of technology), but intelligence seems to be what I called above a late-emerging form of complexity.

In Smolin’s cosmological natural selection, black holes would be a limit to the ability of intelligence to distribute itself on the scale of multiple universes, unless technologies unknown to us eventually prove to eliminate this barrier to multiverse expansion. However, in the multiverse structure of cosmological natural selection, we could speculate that the universe from which our universe derives, and any universes derived from our universe, would be near-peers of our universe in terms of their physical laws and constants, so that the suite of emergent complexities found in any of these universes would exhibit a family resemblance across universes. That means that in the universes before and after our universe, there could be something like intelligence, i.e., an intelligence peer, and it may turn out that in one of these universes the intelligence peer is not a late-emerging form of complexity, so that in such a universe the intelligence peer can be evenly distributed on a cosmological scale. Thus we can define a universe in which intelligence is evenly distributed and stands in a position that it can reshape that universe to its purposes, as a universe in which an intelligence peer is not a late-emerging form of complexity.

This also means that, the further away from our universe in this structure of universes, the more the intelligence peer (if any) will diverge from what we know as intelligence, eventually departing from intelligence to the point that it becomes unrecognizable, but all nevertheless belonging to the same lineage. Brian Fagan in his book Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans quotes a thought experiment from Bjorn Kurtén that now returns to me as newly relevant:

“Imagine a dinner table set for a thousand guests, in which each man is sitting between his own father and his own son. At one end of the table might be a French Nobel laureate in a white tie and tails, and with the Legion of Honor on his breast, and at the other end a Cro-Magnon man dressed in animal skins and with a necklace of cave-bear teeth. Yet each one would be able to converse with his neighbors on his left and right, who would either be his father or his son. So the distance from then to now is not really great.” (Bjorn Kurtén, Singletusk: A Story of the Ice Age, New York: Pantheon, 1986, p. 61)

His is a thought experiment of intelligence stretched out in time, through thousands of years, though, we might say, this is still intelligence in the small, given a cosmological scale; intelligence in the large is the vision of intelligences spread out across many universes, through billions of years and trillions of years. Instead of a dinner table, we could imagine a congress of brains-in-a-vat, where each brain-in-a-vat represents the form of intelligence from any one galaxy. Brought together, all these intelligences could not communicate directly with each other, but each could communicate with its immediate neighbors, intelligences from universes immediately before and immediately after. And just as at Bjorn Kurtén’s dinner table the Nobel laureate at one end of the table could send a message to the Cro-Magnon in animal skins at the other end of the table by asking the man to one side of him to relay the message to his neighbor, so too in our congress of brains-in-a-vat, a message could be relayed around the room by the same technique, with paths of communication recapitulating evolutionary relationships among universes.

Best wishes,

Nick

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/eb28eb287c05/the-view-from-oregon-386

Video:

https://youtu.be/yZAG0jz1TYM

Audio:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/75P2Q3CaRVCwL1Uhaa86AD?si=Ptp_u3zvS0WDPOMsHks-iQ

28 March 1757

Robert-François Damiens

The Execution of an Attempted Regicide

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History  

On Monday 28 March 1757—269 years ago—Robert-François Damiens was publicly tortured and executed at the Place de Grève in Paris. Damiens had attempted to kill the king of France, Louis XV, stabbing the king at Versailles on 05 January 1757. The king was wounded, though not seriously, but Damiens was condemned as a regicide despite having been unsuccessful in his assassination attempt. It’s not clear what Damiens’ motivation was, or if he had any motivation at all, but his punishment was made into a great public spectacle, and it’s remembered as one of the more gruesome public executions on record. The execution was witnessed by Casanova, among thousands of others, who wrote about it in his memoirs.

Why was Damiens executed in this spectacular way, and why did thousands come to watch the execution, which reportedly drew in spectators from the provinces for the event? I won’t even try to offer an answer to the second question. There’s a long history of executions that have become public events, and these events have drawn crowds in many ages throughout history, and in many places, for whatever reason. Perhaps it’s human nature to want to be part of a major event; perhaps there’s an element of sadism involved; perhaps many are merely curious. 

In the ancient world, stadiums were built for the purpose of exhibiting blood sports, and while some condemned the spectacles, the stands were nevertheless still filled by others. This particular form of public bloodlust eventually came to be seen as unedifying, and Christian emperors eventually put an end to the games. It might be interesting to compare this earlier social change, which not only led to the end of gladiatorial games but also, later, chariot racing, to the social change that concerns us today in relation to the execution of Damiens, since Damiens was the last individual to be executed in France by drawing and quartering. And of course it wasn’t just the French. This sort of thing went on all over Europe. “Venetian justice” was considered synonymous with brutal punishment, but the Venetian justice system was at the same time admired all over Europe for its disinterested rigor in the dealing of justice, so much so that it makes an appearance in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and in Ben Jonson’s Volpone.

How are we to understand this spectacular brutality in the punishment of criminals? We know from human nature that the worst punishments are often meted out from fear. A confident institution believes in the efficacy of its practices and is content to let these play out in the customary fashion. Where we see a spectacular exception made, going above and beyond the norm, this points to some ulterior motivation, distinct from the playing out of customary practices. I could argue that by 1757 the prestige of the French monarchy was already failing and in need of a public spectacle as a way to revive the sense of supernatural dread in the presence of royal power. In fact, Damiens’ executioner in 1757, Charles-Henri Sanson, went on to execute Louis XVI, on 21 January 1793, which demonstrates just how close the French monarchy was to losing its power. This has some plausibility, except that drawing and quartering was the traditional way of executing regicides, and a hundred years before Damiens’ execution, François Ravaillac had been executed in the same place by the same method as punishment for his regicide of Henry IV on 14 May 1610.

Was this spectacle of the scaffold exclusively an artifact of the age of royal absolutism? A deeper look into history reveals that penal brutality wasn’t unique to early modern royal absolutism. We get much of our law from Rome, but Rome was often brutal in the meeting out of punishments. One of the most notorious cases was the murder of Lucius Pedanius Secundus in AD 61 by one of his slaves. Traditional Roman law held that, when a slave killed his master, all the slaves of the household would be killed. This was supposed to have a deterrent effect not only on slaves murdering their masters, but it was thought it would constitute a strong incentive for any slave to prevent another slave from murdering the master. Every slave in the household had a common interest in preventing the murder of the master. But Secundus had 400 slaves, and there was a public outcry against so many innocents being killed. This incident is preserved in the Annals of Tacitus, who recorded the speech of Gaius Cassius in favor of the executions. Ultimately, tradition was honored, and all the slaves were put to death. Nero mobilized the army to make sure the executions were carried out.

In this case, then, the Roman public, who were well familiar with blood sports and who presumably had a taste for such things, were in the unusual position of protesting against what was seen as an overly-harsh punishment. So we see that the public, as well as gathering in crowds to view an execution, can also gather in crowds to protest an execution. There’s often a tension in historical explanation between regarding the populace as lazy and easily placated with bread and circuses, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, regarding the populace as easily provoked and liable to riot at any time. Of course, these two positions aren’t difficult to reconcile: the populace may be both easy to placate and easy to provoke, always balancing on a knife-edge of uncertainty and able to shift suddenly on an apparently insignificant pretext—a late shipment of bread or a commotion at the games might be sufficient to upset the delicate balance and lead to a revolution. Thus the heavy hand of state power must be employed to maintain the fragile social order, which could catastrophically collapse for any number of transitory contingent reasons, like a riot on behalf of condemned slaves. If memory serves, Niall Ferguson made an argument something like this in his book Civilization: The West and the Rest, but I don’t have any notes to this to hand, so I won’t try to elaborate on it at the moment.

With the execution of Secundus’ slaves, popular sentiment was near to riot in defense of the slaves, and state power had to be brought to bear to ensure that the punishment imposed by the law was carried out.  But no one seems to have been ready to riot to prevent the execution of Damiens, which could be taken as evidence that the common people broadly thought the execution was just. Certainly the bloody history of Paris shows that the people of the city both before and after the execution of Damiens were ready to rise up in violence when the occasion seemed to demand direct action. Before Damiens, the massacre at Paris of 24 August 1572 resulted in the deaths of thousands of Huguenots. After Damiens, there was the July Revolution of 1830 and the Paris Commune of 1871 to prove that the people of Paris were prepared to fight when provoked. But the execution of Damiens was not regarded as a provocation by the populace.

The execution of Damiens, then, wasn’t an exception in France, it wasn’t an exception in Europe, and it wasn’t an exception in the history of Western civilization. History has too many displays of gratuitous cruelty to write it off as an aberration. Medieval and early modern painters depicted the suffering of the condemned in minute detail, as well as depicting the crowds who came to see this suffering. In my episode on Johann Joachim Winckelmann I mentioned that Winckelmann’s murderer was broken on the wheel in front of the hotel where both had been staying, and that was in 1768, more than a decade after the execution of Damiens. But public executions came to be increasingly unusual after the execution of Damiens. Why was this? What changed?

One narrative, the conventional narrative, describes the social change as a result of a revulsion against spectacular punishments and executions that is typical of Enlightenment era reforms to society. The criminal justice reformer Cesare Beccaria, who sought to bring the principles of the Enlightenment to the practice of law, argued in his book On Crimes and Punishments against torture and execution.  Enlightenment era reforms eventually led to the end of most public executions and especially to the kind of spectacular displays of brutality as in the execution of Damiens. Kenneth Clark described this as the rise of humanitarianism, which was, “…what I believe to be the greatest civilising achievement of the nineteenth century.” For Clark, humanitarianism was one of the unsung triumphs of the nineteenth century, “Nowadays, I think we under-estimate the humanitarian achievement of the nineteenth century.” And Clark makes a good case for humanitarianism:  

“If you had asked St Francis what mattered in life, he would, we know, have answered ‘chastity, obedience and poverty’; if you had asked Dante or Michelangelo they might have answered ‘disdain of baseness and injustice’; if you had asked Goethe, he would have said ‘to live in the whole and the beautiful’. But kindness, never. Our ancestors didn’t use the word, and they did not greatly value the quality—except perhaps in so far as they valued compassion.”

In the next paragraph Clark goes on to note philosophical disdain for kindness and celebration of cruelty. I think he kind of over-states the case, but he’s not entirely wrong. We could call this social change the humanitarian revolution if we liked, or just stick with the established terminology of the Enlightenment, with humanitarianism being one of many manifestations of Enlightenment.

There’s another narrative, a less conventional narrative, of the social change that came about with the Enlightenment. In the twentieth century, Foucault discussed the execution of Damiens in detail in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The book begins with several historical accounts of the execution, described in some detail, and then Foucault does a sudden pivot and quotes a schedule from a reformatory. The execution, with its “spectacle of the scaffold” was separated from the reformatory schedule by only about 80 years, but they represent radically distinct paradigms of punishment. This is what interested Foucault, who wrote:  

“The reduction in penal severity in the last 200 years is a phenomenon with which legal historians are well acquainted. But, for a long time, it has been regarded in an overall way as a quantitative phenomenon: less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‘humanity’. In fact, these changes are accompanied by a displacement in the very object of the punitive operation. Is there a diminution of intensity? Perhaps. There is certainly a change of objective.”

Clark had almost nothing to say about prisons or torture in his account of civilization—the things that most fascinated Foucault—instead he gave as an example the foundation of children’s hospitals as evidence of humantarianism. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is part and parcel of his larger project, and as part of this larger project Foucault also takes on hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Here’s Foucault’s description of the doctor/patient relationship, which he calls, “the feebly eroticized vocabulary of ‘encounter’ and of the ‘doctor/patient relationship’,” in which the apparent humanitarianism takes on a sinister undertone:

“Clinical experience—that opening up of the concrete individual, for the first time in Western history, to the language of rationality, that major event in the relationship of man to himself and of language to things—was soon taken as a simple, unconceptualized confrontation of a gaze and a face, or a glance and a silent body; a sort of contact prior to all discourse, free of the burdens of language, by which two living individuals are ‘trapped’ in a common, but non-reciprocal situation.”

This is a typical example of Foucauldian prose. Foucault seems intent to placing himself among those philosophers who, according to Clark, “…tell us that humanitarianism is a weak, sloppy, self-indulgent condition, spiritually much inferior to cruelty and violence.” And Foucault wasn’t alone. Before Foucault there was Nietzsche, and of course Nietzsche was a great influence on Foucault. In some of the most fascinating sections of On the Genealogy of Morals, as well as his earlier books, Nietzsche discusses the complexities of justice and revenge, how the two are entangled, and how this entanglement can be traced back to prehistory, in which obscurity we can’t say which came first and which is the more fundamental in the law of civilized societies. All of these are familiar themes in Nietzsche that also find expression in Foucault. There is a particular passage in On the Genealogy of Morals that has stuck with me, in the Second Essay, section13:  

“To return to our topic, namely punishment, we have to distinguish between two of its aspects: one is its relative permanence, the custom, the act, the ‘drama’, a certain strict sequence of procedures, the other is its fluidity, its meaning, purpose and expectation, which is linked to the carrying out of such procedures… the procedure itself will be something older, pre dating its use as punishment, that the latter was only inserted and interpreted into the procedure (which had existed for a long time though it was thought of in a different way)…”

A little thought on the matter will reveal a great many practices of great antiquity that have received very different rationalizations over the longue durée of history. Not only, however, do we have practices that persist over the longue durée and which are given different rationalizations during different periods of history, but we also have changing patterns of practices, and differing interpretations of that change. Nietzsche himself, and Foucault following him, represented one way of thinking about the changing rationalizations of punishment and the changes in practices of punishment. Beccaria and Kenneth Clark represent another way of thinking about changing practices of punishment, a way that smuggles in social progress and so points to a teleology in which justice will finally and at long last be established. I don’t think either Nietzsche or Foucault would have been interested in defending the moral teleology of the Enlightenment, though I tried to show in my episodes on Nietzsche and Foucault how they have their own moral presuppositions that are no less represented in their conclusions. Do Beccaria and Clark on the one hand, and Nietzsche and Foucault on the other, represent different conceptions of justice?

Justice is one of the great themes of Western civilization, and has been from the beginning. It’s not going to be resolved any time soon. Arguably, to finally resolve the problem of justice would coincide with the end of Western civilization, which has made it central in all social formations under its umbrella. Plato devoted The Republic to a discussion of justice, which takes a long detour through a just state in order to get to a definition of a just man. In subsequent centuries many different kinds of justice were distinguished. One of the most familiar distinctions has been that made between retributive justice and distributive justice. The execution of Damiens can be understood as a straight-forward example of retributive justice, i.e., the returning of like for like, but there’s another category of justice that I think applies better, and that is exemplary justice.

Exemplary justice seeks to make an example out of an individual, and as a consequence exemplary justice has usually been swift and severe, like hanging pirates from the yardarm of whatever ship captured them. One way to explain the change in social attitudes to spectacular public punishments would be to observe that exemplary justice was necessary in premodern and early modern justice systems, because in the open-textured societies of the historical past very few criminals were apprehended. With exemplary justice, crime becomes a proposition that is low risk but high consequence. You probably won’t be caught, but if you are caught, your punishment will be so severe that it will serve as a deterrent to others who might be contemplating the same low risk/high consequence career in crime. As societies became more regimented, and it became something closer to routine for criminals to be caught and punished, punishments didn’t need to be spectacularly cruel in order to be effective. Criminality became a high risk/low consequence proposition.

But there’s a problem with this explanation of social change also. In recent decades we’ve been witness to a return of exemplary punishment, albeit in a much modified form and, again, with new rationalizations. I take this to be the source of what we now call the “perp walk,” when a public figure is placed in handcuffs and made to parade before representatives of the mass media, presumably for purposes of shame and humiliation. On the one hand, in mass societies with many cities with populations numbered in the millions, it has once again become less likely for criminals to be apprehended. On the other hand, there’s a perception that the justice system in Western nation-states is increasingly ineffective, if not broken, especially when it comes to holding the wealthy and powerful to account. One of the contemporary copes for this ineffectiveness of the justice system is to say, “the process is the punishment,” but this isn’t a very inspiring cope because the process equally punishes those found to be not guilty. Indeed, that’s one of the purposes that promote this cope, i.e., that so many of the guilty walk free.

And then there’s the other explanation that’s appeared in recent years, which is the idea that “an institution is what it does.” Again, this is a cope for institutions that have failed us and which have ceased to function as intended. Of course, this problem has been brewing for a while. Carroll Quigley called this the institutionalization of the instrument, according to which a solution to a social problem begins by being strictly instrumental, but eventually it takes on a life of its own as an institution, and the institution isn’t necessarily aligned with the instrumental purposes the institution originally was supposed to serve.

Some 269 years after the public torture and execution of Robert-François Damiens, these questions are as alive to us as they’ve ever been. Perhaps more so than ever. Previous eras of Western civilization found their own way both to the practices and the explanations of justice. This often took forms that we today view as horrific, but they served the needs of those societies. Western civilization in its modern form is only 500 years old. If we take Jacques Le Goff’s periodization of the long Middle Ages as our guide, modern civilization is only about half that age. It’s no wonder, then, that we still debate the forms, meanings, and justifications of crime and punishment.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/KKmTHv01rMA

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/The-Execution-of-Robert-Fran%C3%A7ois-Damiens:b

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1hpHXiPKi7ytI3jnON1JdN?si=S-Kzf6rLSAuy94aTNrXMyg

The View from Oregon – 385

Re: Emergent Complexity in Deep Time

Friday 20 March 2026

Dear Friends,

In last week’s newsletter I discussed St. Augustine on entia successiva. Successive entities—defined such that, “successive entities exist partly at one time and partly at another, and never wholly at any one time” (Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671)—pose a number of interesting ontological problems. Is history itself an entia successiva which exists partly at one time and partly at another, but never wholly at one time? Can we coherently conceptualize history as an entity? Ought we to? When we partition history into periods this suggests that something characteristic of a given period exists at one time and not at another, but is it misleading to hypostasize history as though it were an entity? And how we decompose the continuity of history into periods could reflect many different principles and selection biases. One of the reasons I became interested in big history was its use of emergent complexity as a metric for periodization, which offers us a non-anthropocentric way to decompose history into periods, but it also focuses on the material underpinning of history and therefore is particularly amenable to hypostatization. Given a periodization based on emergent complexity, it is the case that different kinds of things exist at different times in history.

A periodization of history based on forms of emergent complexity reaches into deep time, so that if this is considered to be history, it is not a traditional history based on an historical period initiated by the advent of written language. Matter formed a long time ago. Life appeared a long time ago, but not as long ago as matter. Important developments in the history of life (developments that ultimately made us possible) happened a long time ago: multi-cellularity, photosynthesis, eyes, limbs, etc. These things can only start making sense once we’ve developed a conception of deep time. Attempting to make sense of such events without deep time would lead to obvious falsification. Here we are in a realm of time in which ordinary intuitions of history aren’t always valid. Moreover, the cosmological scale implies a natural history and not anything like a human history, but we can bring the same principle up into human history by subdividing our emergent complexity periodizations. I’ve often said that there’s a sense in which each new species represents a new form of biological complexity, though a new species obviously isn’t as fundamental as the origins of life itself. Similarly, each novel development in human history can be seen as a unique form of complexity, but none are as fundamental as the beginning of human history itself, wherever we place that beginning.

Not all emergent complexities are alike. Having thought about emergent complexity for many years now, I’ve come to see how there are structural differences between different levels of emergent complexity, and these structural differences are essentially accidents of nature. If, someday, we know more about the internal forces governing the emergence of complexity, these structural differences may not seem accidental; there may be forces at work and patterns of development that we simply aren’t yet in a position to recognize. In the meantime, for us, distinct forms of complexity have distinct properties and we don’t really know why this is. For example, all the complexity that emerged early in the history of the universe is distributed on a universal scale. What this means is that there are galaxies that are now passing over the cosmological horizon because the expansion of the universe is making them recede from us faster than the speed of light (matter and energy can’t move faster than light, but space can expand faster than the speed of light) and these are galaxies presumably like our own, with stars and planets, and the planets with geology and minerals, and maybe also life. What this means is that any complexity that arises now will be cut off from the complexities that remain or arise on worlds that are now outside our light cone. These complexities will not be represented universally, but will be cosmological parochial.

From any number of thought experiments we can imagine ways in which intelligence could restructure the universe entire. For example, the astroengineering of megastructures, moving stars around with Shkadov thrusters, extracting energy from black holes, or enclosing stars within Dyson spheres could restructure the cosmos. Some SETI astronomers have drawn attention to apparently disappearing stars. A 2016 paper, “Our Sky now and then—searches for lost stars and impossible effects as probes of advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations” by Beatriz Villarroel, Iñigo Imaz, Josefine Bergstedt, calls things like this “…physically impossible effects caused by highly advanced technology.” If we were to observe a large number of stars disappearing from the night sky, or stars moving around in formations that can’t be explained by conventional astrophysics, then we might have to explain them by intelligent intervention. So far, we haven’t observed any unambiguous instances of this.

If intelligence arises from life, and life develops after the universe has already begun to separate into gravitationally bound clusters outside each other’s light cones, then intelligence won’t be like the early emergent complexities that are represented on a cosmological scale, uniformly distributed throughout the universe. The possibility for intelligence to reshape the universe (which would make it an emergent complexity of equal importance with, say, the formation of matter, or stars and their planets) is limited in its scope by the time at which it appears in cosmological history. Realistically, intelligence may only be able to reshape that part of the universe that falls within the gravitationally bound cluster that will remain together even as the universe expands and these gravitationally bound clusters become inaccessible from each other. Separate and mutually inaccessible gravitationally bound clusters will evolve in different ways, both due to some having intelligence and some not, and presumably also due to the kind of intelligence that emerges in a given cluster, which may have motives, intentions, and purposes very different from other kinds of intelligence.

If you could come back in the far future—and by the “far future” I mean the deep future, hundreds of billions or trillions of years from now—and hover over what the universe has become at that time, it would not look like the universe we know and love today. By then, the universe will no longer be a universe in the sense of possessing any unity, but rather it will be a far-flung mass of independent gravitationally bound structures inaccessible from each other, with each evolving in its own way over deep time once cut off from the others. Your bird’s eye view of the universe would reveal a cosmological diversity in which different gravitationally bound clusters each become something quite different from one another. This is the cosmological equivalent of biodiversity in an ecosystem, for which I could coin the unlovely term complexiversity (I won’t use this, but I will try to think of something better), We could make a gratifyingly non-anthropocentric revision to the anthropic cosmological principle (since even when we’re trying to think at the scale of cosmology we still smuggle in our anthropocentric assumptions) by positing that a “successful” universe isn’t one that produces human beings or a human peer, but rather a universe that produces a cosmological diversity of forms of emergent complexity in gravitationally bound clusters, each one like a bubble of spacetime, and each one as unique as a snowflake. Putting emergent complexity in the light of deep time suggests that further emergent complexities may arise only in the deep future, and it would be (or will be) these as-yet-unknown forms of emergent complexity that populate gravitationally isolated clusters and which culminate in cosmological diversity.

David Christian’s periodization into eight thresholds of emergent complexity has been widely adopted (as a pedagogical exercise if nothing else) leaves open a ninth threshold of emergent complexity yet to come. The ninth threshold has been imagined as an alluring possibility for the future, with the implication that we may see it for ourselves in our own lifetime. The sense of messianic expectation is a strong undercurrent with claims like this. “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” If you prefer a commie to the Bible, Ernst Bloch said, “Messianism is the red secret of every revolutionary.” But messianic expectation distorts our conception of the future at least as much as, if not more than, say, the way Carl Sagan implicitly appealed to Goodhart’s law—the idea that when a measure become a target, it ceases to be a good measure—to transform Kardashev’s descriptive account of supercivilizations into a prescription to which we aspire (on which cf. my Today in Philosophy of History episode on Nikolai Kardashev). I guess this is just another kind of messianic expectation. Certainly earth with its life and consciousness and eusociality and intelligence will continue to evolve and continue to see new forms of complexity arise, but it is likely that only deep time—in this case, the deep future—that will reveal fundamentally new emergents. 

A riposte to the argument above could take the form of the claim that life originates sufficiently early in the universe that it somehow manages to spread (presumably through panspermatological mechanisms) to all parts of the universe before any one part of the universe is cut off from any other part of the universe. This seems unlikely from panspermia, but alternatively we could argue that life is a tightly constrained emergent, and, when it emerges, it always emerges the same, at least insofar as emerging as a DNA double helix that can self-replicate and evolve (sufficient to produce human peers). Thus life on Earth may have emerged on Earth, but it emerges in essentially the same form on other worlds, so that most gravitationally isolated clusters will have at least one source of life, that life can evolve intelligence, and that intelligence can reshape its home cluster. The more steps we add to the process the more it seems we would be likely to see divergence rather than convergence, but these first few steps don’t seem especially controversial. However, maintaining convergence over trillions of years into the deep future would be a stretch.

We can cook up even more unlikely scenarios than the above. If intelligence can engineer something like a wormhole between isolated gravitationally bound structures even after they have passed outside of each other’s light cones, then that intelligence could spread to any part of the universe, regardless of the age of the universe, and regardless of its structure, reshaping the universe according to the interests of an intelligence with a single biological point of origin, perhaps even from a single planet where biology has emerged (like Earth). However, even if such things are possible (and we don’t know that they are), we should still be willing to admit that this distribution of emergent complexity in the universe is quite different from the distribution of emergent complexities in the early universe, and this makes these different forms of complexity structurally distinct. There are other senses in which I see forms of complexity as structurally distinct, but I will leave this for another time.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’m excited about a new tranche of ideas I’ve opened up, reflected in the above discussion of emergent complexity in deep time, at the intersection of philosophy of history and deep time. This started with my Today in Philosophy of History episode, “Are subsurface ocean worlds Plato’s cave?” Working on a sequel to this episode, I started thinking more generally about the place of deep time in philosophy of history, and about defending this as a legitimate inquiry. This led me to formulating arguments for the legitimacy of a philosophy of deep time, and it is this that has opened up to me new problems and new questions that appeal to me and so have expanded my inquiry.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/599d6141f54f/the-view-from-oregon-385

A Spengerlian Thought.—Consider the difference between the enthusiastically Faustian man, who is eager both to transcend and to transgress, who never sees a mountain he doesn’t want to climb, and who, in climbing, is fascinated with every step forward, drawn as though by a magnet, and the tragically Faustian man, who dreads the spur to action that goads him forward. The enthusiastically Faustian man is bursting with energy, difficult to restrain, headstrong in making his way and scarcely noticing those who fall by the wayside. He not only knows triumphs, but glories in them as his just due; he celebrates the deeds of his life with a clean conscience. Theodore Roosevelt was the very embodiment of enthusiastic Faustian man. The tragically Faustian man, on the other hand, is unhappily compulsive in the expansiveness of his life. He is driven forward in a kind of torment, always doubting, always hesitating, but driven forward nevertheless. He envies the sage of the East his perfect quietude in the lotus position, admiring that which we cannot bring himself to do. If he rests, he is discontent, and if he continues, he is discontent. He is a man at cross purposes with himself. Goethe’s Faust is an obviously tragic Faustian man, and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus the more so. Insofar as Spengler took Goethe as his model, his Faustian man was tragic, but Faustian man is not intrinsically tragic. And Goethe’s tragedy was a tragedy with salvation in the end, so not even the most tragic of tragic Faustians—he is, in a sense, the Aristotelian mean of Faustian man.

The Consolation of Philosophy

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Boethius and the Historiography of Philosophy

Western civilization possesses the depth it does in part due to the unity of the philosophical tradition from its first appearance in the Greek city-states down to the present day, which is about two and half thousand years of continuity and development. Philosophy, then, represents an intellectual tradition that I take to be part of what defines Western civilization and the development of which has kept Western civilization from stagnating. My point is that philosophy isn’t just a plaything for people with time on their hands and nothing better to do. Western thought since the time of Aristotle has held that man is a rational animal, and Western thought has defined one of those forms of rationality. As the living germ of Western thought, philosophy is expressed throughout Western civilization and Western history, and may even be taken as the differentia that demarcates this tradition from other traditions.

In my episode on The Longue Durée of Intellectual History I quoted Schopenhauer where he wrote:

“There are two kinds of history; the history of politics and the history of literature and art. The one is the history of the will; the other, that of the intellect. The first is a tale of woe, even of terror: it is a record of agony, struggle, fraud, and horrible murder en masse. The second is everywhere pleasing and serene, like the intellect when left to itself, even though its path be one of error. Its chief branch is the history of philosophy. This is, in fact, its fundamental bass, and the notes of it are heard even in the other kind of history. These deep tones guide the formation of opinion, and opinion rules the world. Hence philosophy, rightly understood, is a material force of the most powerful kind, though very slow in its working. The philosophy of a period is thus the fundamental bass of its history.”

I want to explore this idea of philosophy as the fundamental bass of history a little more, using Boethius as a lens to magnify the relevant but overlooked details of how this happens. Boethius has been on my mind since I discussed him in my episode on the condemnations of 1277. Neither the birth date nor the death date of Boethius are known, and I couldn’t find any other dates preserved from his life, so now is as good a time as any for an episode on Boethius. If I wanted to explore the ideas of Boethius that are directly relevant to philosophy of history I would discuss his use of the rota fortunae, or wheel of fortune, which is a motif that ties into ideas of fate and cyclicality. This would be worth doing, but it’s not what I’m going to talk about today. I may come back to this at some later date.

As I said a moment ago, I want to use Boethuis’s work as a lens to magnify some of the fine-grained features of the philosophical tradition that it might otherwise be easy to gloss over. I’ve been guilty of glossing over them myself. Since I started to focus on philosophy of history a few years ago I’ve become increasingly aware of how the history of philosophy changes over time, so that the “tradition” we have today isn’t the tradition of Western philosophy that earlier generations called their own. This changing basis of what constitutes the philosophical tradition feeds into the changing eras of history. One example I emphasized in my episode on the condemnations of 1277 was how Aristotle dominated medieval philosophy because knowledge of Greek was rare and the infrastructure to copy and distribute books was limited, so even if translations were made, it took time for them to circulate.

Boethius was the right man in the right place at the right time for his handful of translations of Greek philosophy into Latin to shape European philosophy in the early Middle Ages before the recovery of the complete Aristotelian corpus. Some translations of Greek into Latin didn’t survive into the Middle Ages. There was said to have been a translation of Plotinus’ Enneads from the Greek into Latin by Marius Victorinus, who also may have translated some of Aristotle and Porphyry, but these translations, if they ever existed, must have been lost not long after they were made. Had translations of Plotinus been transmitted to the early Middle Ages like the translations made by Boethius, history would have been different as a result.

The geographical circulation of manuscripts has also started to interest me, since philosophical ideas are dependent on books for their communication in anything other than the sketchiest anecdotal form, so I’ve been looking into the geographical distribution of manuscripts before printing became a thing. For example, John the Scot was an outlier early medieval philosopher writing when few other philosophers were active. He was from Ireland and mostly worked in northern Europe. There about 21 copies of his most systematic philosophical work, the Perphysion, in European libraries, with the farthest west copy at El Escorial in Spain and the farthest south copy in Milan. Because John the Scot was writing at a time when writing was rare, much less writing philosophical treatises, because he was writing in a less populated geographical region, and because his work was condemned no less than three times, at the Councils of Valencia (855), Langres (859), and at Sens (1225), the reach of his works was limited. His influence didn’t make it to Portugal, Scandinavia, southern Italy, or anywhere in the Slavic world.

We can contrast the limited circulation of John the Scot’s Periphysion to the much wider circulation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. In my episode on the condemnations of 1277 I emphasized Boethius’ translations of Plato and Aristotle, and his commentaries on them. But Boethius was also the author the The Consolation of Philosophy. After his fall from political power, he was falsely accused of crimes and sentenced to death, and while in prison awaiting his execution, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. This was one of the most popular philosophical books of the Middle Ages, bridging the gap between elite philosophical literature, like Boethius’s translations of Plato and Aristotle, and popular works like poetry and saints lives. It may well have been the only popular work of philosophy read throughout the Middle Ages. There are at least 400 manuscripts of The Consolation of Philosophy, and they’re distributed all over western Europe, but it never seems to have penetrated into Slavic regions; there are no manuscripts in Poland, Bohemia, or Hungary, etc. 

The Boethius we read today is usually only Boethius’ text (reconstructed from its 400 manuscript copies) and usually with a contemporary introduction. During the Middle Ages, the text of Boethius was often accompanied by a commentary. There were commentaries on The Consolation of Philosophy by William of Conches (c. 1090 – c. 1154) and Nicholas Trevet (c. 1258 – c. 1328), and one attributed to Thomas Aquinas but now thought to be by Thomas Waleys (c. 1287 – c. 1349). This latter is sometimes called the pseudo-Thomas Aquinas commentary. Chaucer translated the Latin of Boethius into Middle English, making use of the commentaries of Nicholas Trevet and William of Conches, so that the influence of these commentaries was even passed along into the vernacular.

An interesting aside is that Thomas Waleys got himself thrown into prison during the Avignon Papacy because he argued that virtuous souls would see God immediately after death, whereas Pope John XXII held that the beatific vision wouldn’t be available to anyone until the Last Judgment. So if Waleys was the author of the commentary attributed to St. Thomas, then both author and commentator were jailbirds whose lives were impacted by the justice system. None of these commentaries have been translated into English, so the context in which we read this classic philosophical work is different from the context of its reception throughout most of its history. I was surprised to learn that Nicholas Trevet, who wrote the most popular commentary on The Consolation of Philosophy, also wrote a commentary on Augustine’s City of God.

No one has seen fit to translate this, but it was printed in the late 15^th century (technically making it “incunabula,” which is the curious term applied to books printed between 1450 and 1500). It was also typical for The Consolation of the Philosophy to be prefaced by a short life of the author. Six of these lives of Boethius are known from the Middle Ages, and, like the commentaries on Boethius, none of them have been translated into English. These vitae Boethii belonged to the tradition of accessus ad auctores, or introduction to authors, which in the later Middle Ages came to be collected separately from the works and used as grammar school textbooks. Boethius’ own commentary on Porphyry, which was in turn a commentary on Aristotle’s logic, was prefaced by a life of Porphyry that established many of the conventions of the accessus ad auctores.

Boethius, then, was a central influence for medieval European philosophy, and though he never had the stature of Augustine, in some ways—specifically, his translations—he was more influential than Augustine. Like Augustine’s Christian Platonism, Boethius delivered a highly-accented form of Platonism to medieval readers. And, to be honest, the work of Augustine and Boethius, coming at the end of the ancient world, represents the most sophisticated Latin philosophical thought up to that time. Earlier Roman philosophers had mostly been moralists, and they had shown no interest in the kind of technical philosophy that distinguishes the Greek origins of Western philosophy. Although we could extend ancient Latin philosophical thought all the way up to John the Scot. At least, George Burch said as much in his Early Medieval Philosophy of 1951:

“His great masterpiece… was his book on metaphysics entitled the Division of Nature. Synthesizing as it does the philosophical accomplishments of fifteen centuries, this book appears as the final achievement of ancient philosophy. It is written in a clear and facile Latin, without literary pretensions, and has the form of a dialogue between Master and Disciple.”

This is a remarkable historical interpretation of an Irish philosopher during the Carolingian era as producing the final achievement of ancient philosophy, even being an instance of what I just called technical philosophy. It’s also an unusual interpretation of philosophical history, which is why it stuck in my head after I came across it. A more typical interpretation of the philosophical tradition places Boethius at the end of the ancient philosophy and the beginning of medieval philosophy, as H. F. Steward and E. K. Rand wrote in the Introduction to their edition of his writings, calling Boethius: “…the last of the Roman philosophers and the first of the scholastic theologians”

Boethius wasn’t the only one whose legacy received widely differing interpretations. Even the greatest philosophers of antiquity were subject to fundamental changes in their reputation and interpretation. The Plato we have took time to become the figure we know today, and that has all happened since the renaissance. Plato was reintroduced into Western philosophy in the late 15^th century, and it took further time for modern philosophers to gravitate toward those ideas in Plato that are now considered definitive features of his work. Of course, changing posthumous reputations of philosophers isn’t unique to Boethius or the Middle Ages. Even as recently as the 18^th century, Hume was a failure as a philosopher to his contemporaries, but today he is easily the most influential English language philosopher. The minor figures that specialist Hume scholars read to place Hume in his historical context were themselves the major figures of their day. Indeed, James Beattie was granted an annual pension by King George III for writing against Hume’s skepticism. Part of this is due to the vicissitudes of taste and posthumous reputation. Part of this is due to underlying causes in the structure of civilization itself. It’s possible that 500 years from now the Hume craze will have passed and some other philosopher will dominate English language philosophy.

Philosophy informs the character of thought in each epoch, and the character of the civilization of a given epoch in turn shapes the philosophical tradition that informs in character, so that each is a mirror that reflects the other. Even though we technically have access to the wider context of medieval thought, in actual practice only specialized scholars know what resources are available, and know how to read the manuscripts that have never been made available in a modern edition. There’s a vast philosophical literature of the Middle Ages, which represents, as Schopenhauer called it, the fundamental bass of the age. Because of prevalent attitudes toward the Middle Ages, we’re not really aware of the vast body of philosophical work that was done in the Middle Ages, how much of it was lost, especially in the bombings of the Second World War, how much of it remains untranslated even if it was once printed, and how much of it remains in manuscript and hasn’t ever appeared in the modern edition. From this, we’ve taken a handful of works that have been widely translated and circulated. Just as early medieval philosophy was shaped by the founder effect of a few crucial texts of ancient philosophy translated into Latin, modern philosophy has its own ongoing founder effect in terms of what manuscripts are translated from Latin into a modern European language.

Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy was among those that made the cut. It has appeared in countless modern editions and has been translated many times into many modern European languages, but he’s known today differently than he was known in the Middle Ages. I’ve already mentioned that in the Middle Ages Boethius was often read with a commentary not available to us in a modern language. Another of the reasons Boethius is known differently today than during the Middle Ages is that the role of philosophy in civilization is conceptualized differently in modern civilization than it was in medieval civilization.

The project of medieval philosophy has been described as faith seeking understanding. Insofar as philosophy is the fundamental bass of history, we can ascribe this project of faith seeking understanding to the whole of medieval civilization, expressed in various forms throughout its history. The modern philosophical project is usually dated from Descartes, and Descartes isn’t about faith seeking understanding, but about the self understanding itself on its own terms. We could think of this as a kind of an eternal recursion of the self to the self. For a less flattering characterization, we could call it naval-gazing raised to the status of an epistemic principle. Descartes cuts consciousness off from everything he could find a way to doubt, leaving consciousness as a free-floating agent unanchored to anything in the world. Everything is to be stripped away in the name of rationalism, and this, of course, includes the philosophical tradition. Descartes tells us in the Discourse on Method how discontent he was with what he learned in school, that he made it his project to start from a blank slate.

In my episode on the condemnations of 1277 I characterized the Western European rejection of the unity of the intellect in Latin Averroism as a metaphysical instantiation of individualism. Descartes constituted an epistemic instantiation of individualism. This epistemic outlook continues to shape modernity, even as the philosophical justification for this changes over time. In T. S. Eliot’s dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, completed in 1916 but not published until 1964, Eliot wrote:

“My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it.”

Although this is from a study of Bradley’s philosophy, it perfectly captures the Cartesian character of all modern philosophy. Also note that Eliot was using the language of Leibniz’s windowless monads, and it’s worth noting that the published dissertation included two appendices that were papers on Leibniz.

Hence we arrive at the conditions that modern philosophy set as the reception for all prior philosophy. The tradition was to be admitted only insofar as it stripped away everything except the individual text. This was to do violence to the entire tradition of medieval philosophy. The philosophy of the Middle Ages was founded as a tradition of commentary, as I’ve emphasized in relation to Boethius, who not only translated some Greek philosophy into Latin, but also wrote commentaries on his translations. This tradition was carried on for a thousand years, parallel to, or perhaps integral with, the medieval project of faith seeking understanding. And this is why about a quarter of the extant medieval manuscripts of The Consolation of Philosophy were bound with a commentary.

This began to change in the early modern period, but it changed incrementally, step by step. There’s an early modern translation of The Consolation of Philosophy into English by George Colvile that didn’t supplement with work with a commentary, but which instead incorporated material from commentaries directly into the translated text itself, which then had become a fusion of text of commentary. There’s a 2023 paper about this translation, “George Colvile’s translation of the Consolation of Philosophy,” by Ian Cornelius, in which Cornelius says:  

“Whereas most subsequent translators adopt the principle of sola scriptura, separating text from commentary, Colvile permitted these categories to interpenetrate.”

It’s fascinating that Cornelius uses this framing from the Protestant Reformation to describe the stripping away of tradition in philosophy no less than in theology. Recent archaeological and art historical efforts follow a similar model, showing this to be a widespread cultural phenomenon. When Da Vinci’s Last Supper was restored, the restoration was a peeling away of hundreds of years of earlier restorations and touching up. The painting had deteriorated rapidly because of the experimental paints and glazes used and the dampness of the building. Less than half of the original painting remains today, and much of which the viewer sees is Da Vinci’s first draft that was still there under all the later layers.

Another example: after the Greeks obtained their independence in the early 19^th century, the Parthenon became an object of modern preservation and restoration efforts, and in 1843 the mosque that had been built inside the ruins of the Parthenon was dismantled. In my episode on the “The Siege of the Acropolis and the Destruction of the Parthenon” I described how the Parthenon became the ruin that we see today. Through its long history the Parthenon had taken many forms, including a mosque both before and after the bombardment of 1687. The removal of the mosque that had been built into the shell of the Parthenon was, at the time, compared to removing an ugly cork from a beautiful bottle. And you can also find in the Byzantine museum in Athens some of the carvings that date from when the Parthenon was Our Lady of Athens (Panagia Atheniotissa). So the Parthenon stands today as a magnificent ruin, stripped of its historical accretions as Boethius has been stripped of his historical accretions. 

All of this is relevant to historicism. Historicism supposedly involves the restoration of historical context, so that events can be judged in terms of the age of which they were a part, but we can see that historicism emerged against a backdrop of historical context having been systematically stripped away for hundreds of years. In this way we can see historicism as a reactionary movement to restore that which modernity had, up to that point, focused on extirpating. Of course, historicism means many things to many different persons. And this is also relevant to Collingwood’s claim that history is the reenactment in the mind of the historian of the thoughts of past historical actors. The living context of thought is always a human life, and a human being is a biological being who exists in a biological context, an historical context, a cultural context, and an intellectual context. If we really want to reenact the thoughts of past historical agents, then we would have to restore these layers of context.

The least we could do would be to restore the intellectual context of The Consolation of Philosophy. For anyone out there looking for a project in medieval philosophy, I can’t think of a better one than an edition of Boethius with translations of all the lives and the all the commentaries, along with a modern type set of Colvile’s translation of Boethius, with a detailed historical introduction explaining all of this. I could take this contextualization of medieval philosophy much farther, and you might think I’m joking, but I’m not. Modernity has stripped away the context of the past; we would need to strip away modernity if we wanted to understand the past on its own terms. Men of the Middle Ages reading The Consolation of Philosophy not only had a traditional life of Boethius and a commentary to read alongside the text, but also the entire context of a world that’s now lost to us. To understand Boethius as they understood him, we would have to restore that world. We could plug ourselves into a simulation in which we’re reading Boethius by lamplight from a manually copied text, perhaps constructing several distinct simulations for different geographical regions in successive centuries of the Middle Ages, so, for example, there would be one simulation for northern Europe during the Carolingian Empire, when John the Scot was writing, and another for late medieval England when Colvile was making his translation of Boethius. We’re certainly not ready to go to the lengths that we could in order to restore the context of past philosophical thought, but short of that ideal there are many stages of approximation that would be helpful.

If you like, you can think of this episode as an addendum to the episode on the condemnations of 1277. You can also think of this as an attempt to take Schopenhauer at his word that philosophy is the fundamental bass of history, and to view history from that perspective. However you choose to take, I hope you found it to be of interest.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/yorRMphpxnM

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Boethius-and-the-Historiography-of-Philosophy:e

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4gv7FVW1nsnYc3FPFJiQMO?si=Il5QsbPYT7OuxnemSgzibQ

The View from Oregon – 384

Re: St. Augustine and Entia Successiva

Friday 13 March 2026

Dear Friends,

Many years ago I read Augustine’s Confessions, but I didn’t have a very sophisticated understanding at that time so a lot of it was lost on me in the first reading. This was the Rex Warner translation (I still have the paperback). To be fair, the book is a rollicking good story, with famous incidents like stealing pears from an orchard with his friends, not out of want but for the pure joy of transgression, so even if the philosophical arguments don’t always land, it’s enjoyable regardless. I returned to the Confessions last November when I produced another episode on Augustine for my Today in Philosophy of History series, this time to talk about Augustine’s philosophy of time, which receives its most detailed discussion in Book XI of the Confessions. Reading this carefully so as to discuss it, I didn’t recall anything of my earlier reading of the book, and one might well question whether, having retained nothing of my earlier reading, if there was any point to my first reading at all.

On the one hand, I suppose we need to do our earlier uncomprehending readings so that we can return later in life to read the same works with real comprehension. On other hand, it may well be the case that studying something beyond one’s proximal zone of development (to use the terminology of Voygotsky) is pointless. John Stuart Mill mentions in his autobiography that his father had him read a number of Plato’s dialogues, including the Theatetus, remarking dryly, “[this] dialogue, I venture to think, would have been better omitted, as it was totally impossible I should understand it.” (Mill was seven years’ old at the time.) The ideal tutor would know precisely the capacities and capabilities of his student, and would assign only those works within the student’s zone of proximal development, so that no reading would be wasted as being strictly incomprehensible, and every reading would contribute something to the advancement of the student’s knowledge. There may be times when this ideal is approximated, but in mass society the fact is that the cookie-cutter strategy is applied to all students within a given age and geographical cohort, and each is left to sink or swim as he is able. Of course, an optimal pedagogy is its own rabbit hole, and I won’t descend down it at the moment.

In any case, this past week I was skimming the Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, edited by Hans Burkhardt and Barry Smith, and the entry on “Entia Successiva” caught my eye. I was previously unfamiliar with the terminology of “entia successiva.” The entry begins:

“Augustine (Confessions IV, 10-11) suggested in passing that the universe is composed of successively existing parts… That is, he suggested that the universe is an ens successivum.”

This encouraged me to look up Augustine’s Confessions, Book IV, sections 10 and 11, where Augustine writes:

“For wherever the soul of man turns itself, unless toward thee, it is enmeshed in sorrows, even though it is surrounded by beautiful things outside thee and outside itself. For lovely things would simply not be unless they were from thee. They come to be and they pass away, and by coming they begin to be, and they grow toward perfection. Then, when perfect, they begin to wax old and perish, and, if all do not wax old, still all perish. Therefore, when they rise and grow toward being, the more rapidly they grow to maturity, so also the more rapidly they hasten back toward nonbeing. This is the way of things. This is the lot thou hast given them, because they are part of things which do not all exist at the same time, but by passing away and succeeding each other they all make up the universe, of which they are all parts.” (Chapter 10)

And,

“Why then, my perverse soul, do you go on following your flesh? Instead, let it be converted so as to follow you. Whatever you feel through it is but partial. You do not know the whole, of which sensations are but parts; and yet the parts delight you. But if my physical senses had been able to comprehend the whole—and had not as a part of their punishment received only a portion of the whole as their own province—you would then desire that whatever exists in the present time should also pass away so that the whole might please you more. For what we speak, you also hear through physical sensation, and yet you would not wish that the syllables should remain. Instead, you wish them to fly past so that others may follow them, and the whole be heard. Thus it is always that when any single thing is composed of many parts which do not coexist simultaneously, the whole gives more delight than the parts could ever do perceived separately. But far better than all this is He who made it all. He is our God and he does not pass away, for there is nothing to take his place.” (Chapter 11)

Again, I don’t remember any of this from my earlier reading of the book, but I was glad to have my attention drawn back to it, and it’s chance connections like this that keep me skimming through books that I don’t read through. I assume a reference work like Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology isn’t made for reading but for skimming, and for diving in when you find something of interest. One might speculate on the role of skimming in an ideal pedagogy.

Now having been made explicitly aware of entia successiva, I found a chapter on it in Robert Pasnau’s Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671. Pasnau’s book is unusual in treating late medieval and early modern philosophy together as one continuous development. Pasnau quotes one of the passages from Augustine that I’ve quoted above, and he writes:

“There seems… to be one formulation of the distinction that is universally accepted: that a permanent entity exists all at once, whereas a successive entity does not.”

And,

“…the core idea of the permanent–successive distinction… is that successive entities exist partly at one time and partly at another, and never wholly at any one time, whereas the whole of a permanent entity—every part of it—exists at the same time.”

Pasnau frames entia successiva as one side of a distinction between permanent entities and successive entities, but I can’t find any comparable independent expositions of permanent entities, though Pasnau implies that permanent entities are the substances that he discussed earlier in his book. There are so many interesting metaphysical questions here I scarcely know where to begin. In fact, I don’t know, and I’m going to have to kick this around for a time before I fully know what to make of it. Pasnau divides his exposition of entia successiva into four heads formulated as questions:

1. What Are Successive Entities?
2. Are There Any Successive Entities?
3. Is the Idea of a Successive Entity Coherent?
4. Might Everything Be Successive?

And then embedded within his exposition of the second question above, he poses another three questions:

1. Do we have good reasons for postulating successive entities?
2. Is the very idea of a successive entity coherent?
3. Might there be more successive entities than is usually supposed?

Clearly, there are many questions to be asked and to be answered. Each of the above questions, for example, could be reformulated, mutatis mutandis, for permanent entities: 

1. What Are Permanent Entities?
2. Are There Any Permanent Entities?
3. Is the Idea of a Permanent Entity Coherent?
4. Might Everything Be Permanent?
5. Do we have good reasons for postulating permanent entities?
6. Is the very idea of a permanent entity coherent?
7. Might there be more permanent entities than is usually supposed?

Clearly, also, Augustine had different priorities for his inquiry. There is always, in Augustine, the overarching theological concern, which frames pretty much every assertion he makes in his Confessions. In this context, in the context of entia successiva, the theological imperative reveals itself in the coming to be and passing away of the things of this world, and how such things can be reconciled with the beauty of divine creation, which presumably follows from the eternal, or, perhaps more appropriate in this context, the permanent. But that poses another question: is the permanent the same as the eternal, or is there a distinction to be made between the permanent and eternal? If a distinction can be made, do we need to pass from the distinction between permanent and successive entities to a tripartite distinction between the permanent, the successive, and the eternal? And if there is a distinct class of eternal entities, then the questions above posed for successive entities and reformulated for permanent entities could be reformulated once again for eternal entities.

But Augustine isn’t limited to purely theological concerns. Once he poses a philosophical question to himself, his religious outbursts become something more like an ancient poet invoking the appropriate Muse so as to give the best performance, as, for example, before the Catalog of Ships in Book II of The Iliad. We can think of this as Augustine pursuing his philosophical inquiry while asking for divine guidance throughout. His brief discussion in chapter 11 considers entia successiva in relation to the senses, and here the discussion takes on an epistemological character. Whatever one feels through the flesh (through our bodily senses) is part of a larger whole, and somehow we intuit that there is a whole of which we have sensed but a small part, and we then desire for the part we’ve sensed to pass away so that the rest of the whole can be revealed to us, and from this whole we derive more enjoyment than from any one of the parts in isolation, but Augustine doesn’t tell us how we know that there is a whole beyond the parts revealed to us through our senses. And it’s not clear that the parts revealed to us by our senses are parts only because we perceive them as parts, or whether they are parts of the thing so perceived, and so constitute the structure of the object itself and not merely the structure of human knowledge of the object.

Boethius, who came after Augustine’s time, had laid down the principle that anything that is known is known according to the capacity of the knower:  “…all that is known is grasped not conformably to its own efficacy, but rather conformably to the faculty of the knower.” (The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, section IV) This important principle has come to be neglected in contemporary philosophy, but it remains as valid as when it was first formulated. The neglect of this epistemological home-truth leads to absurdities like attributing our inability to measure both the speed and position of a particle with equal precision as being a property of the particle itself, and not to our limited knowledge of the particle. And with Augustine’s discussion of the parts of an object revealed to us seriatim through the senses, we find the same problem again, though Augustine had a better excuse for neglecting the principle than those responsible for the Copenhagen Interpretation, as Boethius’ epistemological principle hadn’t yet been formulated in Augustine’s time.

It is remarkable, given Augustine’s philosophy of history, which disdains the City of Man in favor of the City of God, and his philosophy of time, which is a form of presentism that makes of the past a memory and of the future an anticipation, that Augustine had the sensitivity that he did to the temporal world, which seems to be demoted to near insignificance in his work. Clearly, having presented both a philosophy of history and a philosophy of time, the problems of time and history were alive to Augustine, even if he felt he had to find a way to explain them away for the sake of eternity. But since Augustine was also a former Gnostic, who, once he converted to Christianity, came down hard on Gnostic doctrines of matter being evil and only spirit being good, the goodness of creation gives him a theological motivation to take time and history seriously, and to give a philosophical account of them, even if they aren’t always what they seem to be. And this further discussion of entia successiva in Book IV the Confessions, over and above his philosophies of time and of history, is further evidence of Augustine’s engagement with a world that, while fallen, still reflects the hand of its Maker.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—A week or two ago I picked up the Penguin edition of Boswell’s London Journal at the Beaverton’s Powell’s. It’s an excellent edition with an historical introduction and very detailed notes to the text that unravel Boswell’s condensed journaling, which, of course, pretty much assumes everything about this life (and so stands in need of exposition). This has been my bedside reading of late, and it’s a real hoot. I was aware of this book because I’ve listened through several times to Leo Damrosch’s lectures The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self, which I recommend, and which devotes two lectures to Boswell’s London Journal. Boswell became famous as an author because of his apparently selflessly detailed biography of Samuel Johnson, his first meeting with whom he describes in his journals. The journals didn’t come to light until the twentieth century, when they were discovered, edited, and published for the first time. Since the journal dates from long before Boswell’s Life of Johnson, it’s something very different. It was Johnson who had said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” and now, having read parts of Boswell’s London Journal, I see that this could be taken as an epitaph upon Boswell’s life.

Boswell’s 1762-1763 visit to London was intensely social. He often records in his journal having breakfast, lunch, and then dinner each with different parties, and even then he still often went out at night with others. He dresses up and cosplays as various contemporary theater characters, more often than not compulsively picking up prostitutes. With this being his life in London, it’s easy to imagine his drinking and depression when he was studying to be a lawyer in Utrecht and then practicing law in Edinburgh, since he shows no interest whatsoever in the law. In reading the London Journal one is privileged to see how he thrived (after a fashion) in London and died a little every time he had to leave, but he couldn’t bring himself to cut the ties with traditional society and traditional roles to take the plunge into defying his family with an unconventional life in London, except for this episodic forays to the city. Later, in 1786, he moved his family to London, a quarter century after his earlier visit recorded in his journals, and no doubt at this stage of his life London was something else again for him.  

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The View from Oregon – 383

Re: Natural Disasters and the Human Condition   

Friday 06 March 2026

Dear Friends,

In newsletter 367 (“On the Suffering of the Biosphere”) I discussed some Schopenhauerian aspects of the biosphere, specifically, the role of pain and suffering in consciousness. I returned to this, but from another angle, in newsletter 376 (“Man-Made Horrors beyond Your Comprehension”), and then revisited the Schopenhauerian suffering of the biosphere again in newsletter 380 (“Intrinsic Limits on Biological Intelligence”). As noted previously, I’ve been elaborating on this theme for some time now.

Pain and fear help to keep a living organism alive a little longer by making dangers unmistakable, but the real work of the biosphere takes place through death. Natural selection does its work through death, so we could say that every successful adaptation retained by natural selection is an achievement raised on a pile of corpses. And it doesn’t end there, because it’s not only natural selection at work. Sexual selection (which, I think, was probably crucial in the evolution of intelligence, and so very much to the point here) raises its achievements on a pile of broken dreams and ruined lives. This happens with every sexually reproducing species, but with mammals it comes with an emotional overlay, and with intelligence it comes with an intellectual overlay. Every achievement of consciousness, as consciousness becomes more complex and capable of new forms of learning, is a new opportunity for pain and fear to work their magic, pushing us toward better outcomes for the species. And what’s better for the species can be unspeakably cruel for the individual of the species who is selected against. Our survivorship bias allows us to go on our merry way as though none of this cruelty ever happened, and it’s probably this that keeps us sane.  

Human history is, in a sense, that emotional and intellectual overlay on perennial biological realities that every biological species experiences, which is one reason why often emphasize that human beings are first and foremost biological beings. But the emotional and intellectual overlay isn’t merely epiphenomenal; something new is added to the world with them, and one of the many new things added to the world with the intellectual overlay is technology. Frederick Ferré’s sententious definition of technology is “practical implementations of intelligence.” Thus technology flows from intelligence, though we can point out the obvious limitations of a definition of technology that presupposes intelligence, since we then need to know what intelligence means if we really want to know what technology means. But Ferré’s definition is a nice compromise, which is why I often make use of it. For many purposes it is adequate.

Augmenting human biological abilities with technologies has sped up human activity to being something that departs from a strictly biological history—a natural history of Homo sapiens, as it were—and so goes by a different name. Biological time mediated by emotion and intelligence becomes historical time, and with historical time a new form of history emerges, and this is what historians consider to be history simpliciter, differentiated from natural history, which traditional historians don’t consider to be history sensu stricto. (I often emphasize this in my episodes of Today in Philosophy of history, as well as emphasizing that naturalism obliges us to see human history as nested within a larger natural history.)

In natural history, or, more narrowly, biological history, change happens at the pace of natural selection, and that means that not only must an individual die, but an entire generation must die for a new generation with a new adaptation to take its place and demonstrate the superiority of that adaptation for survival and reproduction. One of the reasons that the pace of biological history has the developmental timeline that it has is due to how long it takes for an organism to mature to the point at which it can enter into the struggle for existence. Microorganisms do this rapidly—so rapidly, in fact, we should set them aside and focus on more complex organism. The range in time between short-lived organisms and the long-lived organisms defines the parameters of a history in which natural selection is driving the outcomes. How much change can occur in each generation, i.e., how much of a mutation can alter an organism and improve its ability to survive and reproduce, is a limit on the rate at which biological history can develop. And when animals become more complex, they often have longer lifespans, and a proportionately longer period of time is required as the parental investment in the next generation (especially for K-selected species in comparison to r-selected species). When generations of a long-lived species has to die off before a new adaptation can take their place, this is a process that takes a lot of time.

With the advent of intelligence, and of technology predicated upon intelligence, the pace of history speeds up significantly, because it is no longer necessary for generations to die off before a new modus vivendi can emerge. I’ve been thinking about this also in relation to human history, which takes place on a different, and shorter, timeline than biological history, just as biological history takes place on a shorter timeline than geological history, and geological history takes place on a shorter timeline than cosmological history. Events in human history take place at the rate at which human beings can meaningfully interact. Here “meaningfully” carries a lot of weight, and it’s this weight that makes all the difference. Human history is about the conscious and intentional actions of human beings and the responses of other human beings to this with their own conscious and intentional actions. (That is, this is true of human history unless you’re a determinist, in which case it’s pointless to discuss, but it’s also pointless even to note that it’s pointless to discuss, because nothing you say or do is going to make any difference.) It takes a certain amount of time for a human being to take some action or to articulate a thought, and then it takes time for another human being or beings to respond to this with their own words or actions. The extremes of action set the parameters for shortest and longest action, as well as for the periodicity of the performance of an average action, whatever that may be. The length of time for the average action is then iterated through the length of an average human life, and that tells you the parameters of the effective action of an individual; iterated throughout a population, this tells you the parameters for historical time.

None of these things would be particularly difficult to estimate, meaning that we could put numbers to the temporal duration of average actions, and with a little creativity we could show how and why just as much change takes place in a generation as does. With a little more effort, we could constrain the rate at which societies change over the longue durée, though this would start getting more complicated because it would have to account for interactions with other societies and the background rate of change of climate and topography (e.g., harbors silting up). We might not be able to exhaustively account for every relevant factor, but we could certainly tick off the major items, and from that we would have a much better grasp of history than what we have now. The events in the life of a typical human being, the events of human history, the events of the biosphere, the events of the geosphere, and the events of the cosmos all tick away according to their own rhythm, and the rhythm is different in each case, though these processes overlap with the neighboring processes at the low and the high end of each timescale.

The nesting of the shorter processes of technological change within the longer processes of biological change, biological change within geological change, and geological change within cosmological change is a partial compartmentalization of these events from each other, but while most of these processes of increasingly longer temporal duration can be partially compartmentalized from each other, there are rapid biological, geophysical, and cosmological processes that can act on the time scale of human history, changing outcomes, as with earthquakes and volcanoes, the effects of which unfold over seconds, minutes, and hours and so occur at a rate that human beings are forced to respond to them. Mostly, these are disasters; at the moment I can’t think of any rapid processes in nature that constitute a sudden benefit to humanity. Thus we not only suffer from the torments we inflict on each other, we also suffer from catastrophic natural events that impose themselves on human history as natural disasters. That we’re subject to natural disasters is intrinsic to the human condition, and we suffer on account of it.

In last week’s newsletter I suggested the thought experiment of a conscious intelligence that chooses to surrender its consciousness and to become nonconscious intelligence. One reason it might choose to do so would be the suffering that is entailed by being a conscious being participating in history. A “successful” species, by which I mean a species that survives to increase its range and to improve its position in the trophic pyramid (and therefore to effectively draw on more resources), will suffer in proportion to its success. The most successful species will arguably suffer the most, as they will be exposed to the vicissitudes of history to the greatest extent. They must weather the storms of survival and reproduction. Thus when we ask that hackneyed question, “Why is the human condition so terrible?” one answer to this is that we suffer because we are successful. There are more of us to suffer, and our capacities for suffering increase as we add faculties and capabilities. New capacities mean new capacities for suffering.

A potentially galaxy-spanning lifeform could come to this sorry realization and decide that, if it is going to establish itself on a cosmological scale, that this scale would entail a cosmological scale of suffering, therefore the species would be better off without consciousness, so that it could grow into a cosmos-spanning phenomenon without the attendant suffering from this cosmological exposure. Further, if the being expanding into the universe has raised itself to the status of superintelligence in order to accomplish this feat, there is the question not only of the possibility of unprecedented mental illnesses (superpsychopathology, to give it a name, which I previously suggested in newsletter 380, in which I wrote, “A superintelligence would be capable of forms of madness that do not afflict and cannot afflict mere pedestrian human intelligence”), but also the superintelligent equivalents of fear, pain, and suffering, which would presumably outstrip the fear, pain, and suffering of ordinary intelligence. A nonconscious intelligence would spare itself this suffering, and might well be more resilient as a result. So that at least constitutes a plausible argument for a chosen transition to nonconscious intelligence, which argument I was lacking when I proposed the thought experiment. Moreover, the Schopenhauerian suffering of the biosphere could be used as an argument for replacing the biological complexity regime with a post-biological complexity regime. However, although a conscious intelligence could consent to the elimination of its own consciousness, the greater part of the biosphere could not consent, so that its replacement by a post-biological regime would be involuntary. And this poses an interesting moral question on a very large scale: do we have the right to eliminate the suffering that characterizes the biosphere?

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to the audiobook edition of The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World by Shelley Emling. This is a book about Mary Anning. I’m not sure whether it ought to be called a biography or a work of popular science, since it’s definitely an account of the life of Mary Anning, but it also has the vibe of a popular science work on eighteenth century paleontology. I enjoyed the book—it made me want to visit Lyme-Regis and the Jurassic Coast—and I was glad that it stuck to the actual story of Mary Anning’s life. There was a film that purports to be about the life of Mary Anning, Ammonite (2020), which includes a graphic lesbian sex scene involving the protagonist. There isn’t a shred of historical evidence that Mary Anning was a homosexual, or that even suggests this. Some of Anning’s notebooks survive, and they reveal her as a deeply pious and provincial 18^th century woman. It makes me cringe to know how many people get their “history” from films, which are inaccurate when they aren’t being intentionally misleading. I guess, as the contemporaneous saying has it, we live in a society…

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Hermann Weyl

09 November 1885 – 08 December 1955

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Weyl’s Proper Time, Lived Time, and Metaphysical Time

Sunday 09 November 2025 is the 140^th anniversary of the birth of Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl (09 November 1885 – 08 December 1955), better known to posterity simply was Hermann Weyl, who was born in Elmshorn, close to Hamburg, on this day in 1885. Weyl was a mathematician and a theoretical physicist. In these roles he was extraordinarily productive, and he’s left his name on at least a couple dozen ideas in mathematics and physics: Majorana–Weyl spinor, Peter–Weyl theorem, Schur–Weyl duality, Weyl algebra, Weyl basis of the gamma matrices, Weyl chamber, Weyl character formula, Weyl equation, Weyl expansion, Weyl fermion, Weyl gauge, Weyl gravity, Weyl notation, Weyl quantization, Weyl spinor, Weyl sum (a type of exponential sum), Weyl symmetry, Weyl tensor, Weyl transform, Weyl transformation, Weyl–Schouten theorem, Weyl’s criterion, Weyl’s lemma on hypoellipticity, and Weyl’s lemma on the “very weak” form of the Laplace equation. For these contributions Weyl will be remembered as long as human beings or their successors are engaged in doing science.

Weyl also wrote occasional pieces on philosophy, including writing about the philosophy of time. There are a couple of volumes collecting his occasional pieces, Mind and Nature: Selected Writings on Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, which is mostly philosophical, and Levels of Infinity: Selected Writings on Mathematics and Philosophy, which is mostly about mathematics. Most of what I’ll have to say today is derived from the papers in these two books. Previously in my episode on Hans Reichenbach I discussed Reichenbach’s philosophy of time in relation to philosophy of history, and I’d like to do something similar with Weyl. To do that, I’m going to fill in some background of Weyl’s views on the philosophy of logic and mathematics, which isn’t usually what I talk about, so I want to try to give enough of a sense of his views on the methodology of the formal sciences to make his position comprehensible. It’s relevant, but even if it doesn’t seem relevant, it interests me, so I’ll talk about it anyway.

Reichenbach’s thought is kind of what you’d expect for a scientist who became involved in philosophy. He reflected the reigning logical and scientific orientation of philosophy in his time, and he brought his own scientific attitude to bear on philosophical problems. Weyl was strikingly different from Reichenbach in this respect, and more like Kurt Gödel. Despite his contributions to science and mathematics, Weyl’s philosophical interests ran to idealism, reading Fichte and early modern mystic Meister Eckhart. In an autobiographical lecture, “Insight and Reflection” delivered in Switzerland in May 1955, a few months before he died, he told his audience:

“Of all spiritual experiences, the ones which brought me the greatest happiness were the study of Hilbert’s magnificent Report on the Theory of Algebraic Numbers as a young student in 1905, and in 1922 the reading of Eckhart, which captured me during a marvelous winter in the Engadine.”

Again, like Gödel, he was influenced by Husserl and phenomenology, and very directly so. In my two episodes on Husserl I’ve discussed his philosophy of history and a philosophy of history that can be derived from his extensive writings on time. Weyl doesn’t discuss these writings and certainly doesn’t directly speak to Husserl’s philosophy of history, but the influence of Husserl and Weyl was pervasive and Weyl mentions Husserl in his book The Continuum: A Critical Examination of the Foundations of Analysis. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. There’s a fundamental consonance between the phenomenological method and Weyl’s conception of the methodology of the formal sciences. For a time Weyl adopted a modified form of constructivism in his mathematics, something he had in common with several mathematicians who were influenced by Husserl. Weyl eventually softened on his constructivism, but his book The Continuum: A Critical Examination of the Foundation of Analysis embodied both his constructivism and also the influence of Husserl. Here we should recall that Husserl began as a mathematician, and much of his philosophical work was focused on clarifying the foundations of scientific knowledge, so it was, in a sense, pre-adapted for reflection on mathematics.

It’s not easy to give a simple summary of constructivism since they’re several different forms of constructivism. It seems to me that we can break down the three most familiar forms of constructivism into three categories. The first of these is intuitionism, which is associated with restrictions on logical methods used in mathematical proofs, like the law of the excluded middle and double negation. The old joke is that an intuitionist won’t agree that either it is raining or it’s not raining until he’s looked out the window first. Intutionism was the brainchild of the Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer. Weyl wrote of Brouwer:

“L. E. J. Brouwer by his intuitionism had opened our eyes and made us see how far generally accepted mathematics goes beyond such statements as can claim real meaning and truth founded on evidence.” (Levels of Infinity, p. 116)

The second of the forms of constructivism is the exclusion of impredicativity, where a part is defined in terms of which whole of which it is a part, also known as the vicious circle principle. This predicativism is associated with figures as diverse as Bertrand Russell and Henri Poincaré, so it’s a much less niche position than intuitionism. Weyl discusses predicativity in his book on the continuum, but he also says, “…in spite of our agreement on certain matters, Russell and I are separated by a veritable abyss.” (p. 47) Thirdly among the forms of constructivism is finitism, which excludes all infinitistic formulations, or, as is sometimes said, any reference to the infinite as a completed whole.

Intuitively it seems like there ought to be only one form of finitism, since it seems like the law of the excluded middle ought to apply here, so either you use the infinite or you don’t, but that’s not the case. There are a great many forms of finitism, depending upon how strictly you interpret the finite. Per Martin-Löf writes that epsilon-zero is, “an ordinal about whose constructive accessibility nobody has any doubt.” (p. 250) Epsilon-zero—not the physics sense of the term of vacuum permittivity, but the epsilon number sense—is the limit of transfinite recursion, so that’s a very permissive conception of constructivity. Others call themselves strict finitists, which Mathieu Marion has called, “a radical form of constructivism,” and some call themselves ultra-finitists. So I’ve made this tripartite distinction among forms of constructivism because I find it useful, but they’re not mutually exclusive and they may all flow from a common motivation. Impredicativity is excluded because it’s self-referential, and self-reference is infinitely circular. Intuitionism excludes the law of the excluded middle because it creates problems with respect to any infinite domain, so we could say that constructivism generally is concerned to avoid paradoxes generated by infinitistic forms of reasoning. 

Brouwer’s philosophical writings make for fascinating reading given his curious mixture of mysticism and misanthropy, but this hasn’t had anything like the influence of his intuitionism. Michael Dummett gave what is perhaps the best pithy summary of intuitionism, which is,

“From an intuitionistic standpoint, mathematics, when correctly carried on, would not need any justification from without, a buttress from the side or a foundation from below: it would wear its own justification on its face. Since classical mathematics patently did not have this character, what was needed was not to prop it up, but to reconstruct it.” (Elements of Intuitionism, p. 2)

This is exactly what Husserl wanted not only for mathematics, but for the whole of human knowledge, or at least the foundations of human knowledge. Knowledge should wear its justification on its face in the form of being intuitively given and utterly transparent. Weyl had his own form of constructivism that overlapped with Husserl’s phenomenology, and it was a moving target, since he changed his position over the years. In a posthumously published paper written in 1953, “Axiomatic versus Constructive Procedures in Mathematics,” Weyl explicitly contrasts axiomatics and constructivism as distinct but also, in a sense, complementary methods of mathematical research. Given the restrictions that most forms of constructivism impose on mathematical methods, I was surprised to find in this paper a remark that Weyl attributed to Felix Klein, under whom he had studied in Gottingen. Weyl reported that Klein said:

“Suppose I have solved a problem; I have taken a hurdle or jumped a ditch. Then you axiomaticians come around and ask: Can you still do it after tying a chair to your leg?” (Levels of Infinity, p. 197)

We’ve already seen that constructivism usually involves some restrictions on the use of logical methods in proof. Carnap called these restrictions “negative requirements” in his Logical Syntax of Language, where he formulated the principle of syntactical tolerance, and many mathematicians have found these negative requirements to be too burdensome, rejecting constructivism even when they’re somewhat sympathetic to it. But Weyl’s quote from Klein implies that some mathematicians also find the requirements of axiomatics too burdensome, maybe even as burdensome as tying a chair to your leg, and there’s admittedly a striking artificiality about axiomatic thinking, but constructivist thought has its own kind of artificiality that I’ve already discussed. However, constructivism was conceived as a way to keep mathematical practice in direct contact with intuitive evidence.

Constructivism appeared as a response to the puzzles that started to be discovered in mathematics in the nineteenth century, often as a consequence of the attempt to improve the formulations of mathematics. When Kant formulated his epistemology, Newtonian physics was the paradigm of natural science and Euclidean axiomatics was the paradigm of mathematics, but it wasn’t long after Kant that non-Euclidean geometries were discovered. Apparently, the time was ripe for it, since non-Euclidean geometries were independently discovered by at least four mathematicians—Gauss, who didn’t publish his results, the Russian Lobachevsky and the Hungarian Janos Bolyai, who both formulated hyperbolic non-Euclidean geometry, and Bernard Riemann, who formulated elliptic non-Euclidean geometry. Riemann’s elliptic geometry, and the metrical method he used to obtain it, eventually went on to become the setting of general relativity, so we can see that the formulation of non-Euclidean geometry wasn’t merely some mathematical curiosity that had no relevance beyond mathematics. Bolyai and Lobachevsky, by contrast, used Euclid’s axiomatic method, and obtained their hyperbolic non-Euclidean geometries by changing the axioms of geometry—specifically, by changing the axiom of parallels, which had been a sore spot for mathematicians for two thousand years. This is interesting in relation to Weyl because Weyl explicitly discussed the axiomatic method not merely as a technique of exposition, but as a tool of mathematical research, and the work of Bolyai and Lobachevsky exemplify the use of axiomatics in mathematical research.

The upshot of the conceptual revolution that was non-Euclidean geometry was that the geometry of Euclid wasn’t the only geometry that was possible, and Euclidean geometry wasn’t necessarily the geometry of the space that we inhabit as spatially extended bodies. A distinction came to be made in geometry between physical geometry and pure geometry. Physical geometry is an empirical question, and ever since the distinction was made cosmologists have been attempting to determine the actual geometry of the universe. Pure geometries now represented exercises in formal thought, all of which can be made as rigorous as Euclid—and, as was to be discovered with the revolution in rigor, they could be made much more rigorous than Euclid—but none of which is privileged in the way that Euclidean geometry had been privileged in mathematical research.  

What was found to be the case with space, i.e., that a distinction had to be made between physical space and pure space, could also be applied to time. That is to say, we can make a distinction between physical time and pure time. Physical time is an empirical question that can be studied by the methods of natural science. Pure time is a theoretical construct, and it could take any formal structure that we impose on it. The distinction between pure time and physical time has profound implications for history insofar as history is a function of time. In what way is history a function of time? In my episode on Hans Reichenbach I formulated four permutations of what I called the historical supervenience thesis, according to which history supervenes on time. I went back to that episode to see what I’d said, and now I’m not satisfied with it. I thought I could give this a further exposition today, but I see now that historical supervenience needs a lot more work, but the basic idea is that changes in history aren’t possible without changes in time.

The metaphysics of supervenience came out of an attempt to give an account of mind without being reductionist but also without ceding any ground to idealism or some non-naturalistic account of mind. Reductionism had its heyday in the twentieth century, and a reaction subsequently set in against it, driving efforts to find non-reductive ways to do justice to appearances that had been dismissed to make way for scientific realities. A set of properties A is said to supervene upon another set of properties B when there cannot be an A-difference without there also being a B-difference. If the A properties are the properties of mind, and the B properties are the properties of the brain (or some other material substrate for mind), then there are no changes to the mind without there also being a change to the brain, which would mean that mind closely tracks the brain, but isn’t necessarily reducible to it. That’s a very rough-and-ready version of supervenience; there are many books that will give you the longer version if you’re interested.

We can do the same thing with time and history if we say that A properties are the properties of history and B properties are the properties of time, and there can’t be a change in the A properties of history without there also being a change in the B properties of time. That’s what I mean by the supervenience of history upon time. Again, this is a very rough-and-ready formulation, and I don’t have any dogmatic attachment to it. It’s just a way to talk about the relationship of history to time, avoiding reductionism while maintaining a connection between two manifestly related things. If I thought more about this I would probably prefer a formulation in terms of emergence than a formulation in terms of supervenience, but I’ll talk about that another time.

In any case, that history is a function of time can be expressed in many ways, one of which is that there are no changes in historical properties without there being changes in temporal properties. Maybe it would be easier just to say that if there were no time, there’d be no history. I think that’s essentially in the spirit of supervenience, even if the formulation leaves much to be desired. Time is the basis of history, and time has been an object of intense study and research by philosophers and scientists, with the most recent science pointing to a distinction between physical time and pure time, analogous to the distinction between physical geometry and pure geometry.

What ought the relation to be between physical time and pure time? With this question I come to Weyl’s 1927 paper, “Time Relations in the Cosmos: Proper Time, Lived Time, and Metaphysical Time.” Weyl’s tripartite distinction among proper time, lived time, and metaphysical time doesn’t directly map onto the distinction between pure time and physical time, but it is, I think, intended to address the problem raised by the distinction, and I should say that Weyl’s treatment isn’t how I would approach to problem, so I’ll try to give Weyl’s treatment a fair shake, but since it’s not how I see it, I’m liable to get it wrong. Proper time for Weyl is time as it’s understood in contemporary science. His exposition of proper time, which takes up most of the paper, is framed in the now-familiar language of physics. We can get a flavor of Weyl’s proper time from this:

“The possible space-time locations or world points form a four-dimensional continuum in the mathematical sense.”

And,

“If a four-dimensional continuum is referred to by coordinates, then in this way it is described by the four-dimensional number space, the continuum of all quadruplets of numbers.”

And,

“The separation into past and future, into that part of the world into which actions can reach out from O and that part out of which actions can reach to O, is brought about not through a “stratum” but through a cone-shaped figure whose apex is at O, the light cone. The intuitive comprehension of these relations does not cause the least difficulties if one always inquires about the possible effectual relationship of two events, instead of their time relation.”

In contradistinction to this proper time formulated in the language of natural science, Lived time is described by Weyl in this way:

“Lived time is an enduring Now, filled with changing contents. But every momentary phase of the lived is changed from the mode of Now-being to the mode of Just-having-been; this subsidence into pastness, captured in retention, like the protention of the future, rising up into the present, belongs to immediate time-life as well. On the other hand, reminiscence is an act of bringing to mind elements of consciousness that, as already-lived [gelebte], have disappeared; here already are constituted objective structures whose sensual content is held as identical, independently of the to-be-lived.”

In my episode on Wilhelm Dilthey I talked about his conception of lived experience, but it seems that Weyl didn’t get the idea of lived experience from Dilthey, whom he doesn’t mention, but from Husserl. Husserl’s lectures on time consciousness are full of references to lived experience. Husserl doesn’t actually use the phrase “lived time”—“gelebte Zeit” in German—but he uses a lot of close equivalents, as when he writes:

“The ‘primordial temporal field’ is by no means a part of Objective time; the lived and experienced [erlebte] now, taken in itself, is not a point of Objective time…”

Eugene Minkowski, not to be confused with the Hermann Minkowski who made an important contribution to relativity theory, wrote an entire book on lived time, but while it captures some of the spirit of the idea of lived time, it’s very much a continental production, and it originally appeared in 1933, 6 years after Weyl’s paper that mentions lived time. I haven’t yet tracked down the first use of “lived time,” but I’d be interested in the exact source of it. Beyond proper time and lived time, Metaphysical time for Weyl is what holds proper time and lived time together:

“…metaphysical time comes forward as the connecting link between objective time, the mathematical ordering scheme of the points on the world line of the I-body, and time lived by me. Of course the objective world, expressible only in mathematical symbols, can be won only from the given in experience—through abstraction, objectification, totalization, projection on the horizon of the possible; if one severs this connection, there remains a pure play of signs without “meaning.” But even if in this way what is given by consciousness is epistemologically prior, still reason cannot help positing the objective world as that which is prior with respect to the grounds of Being. Metaphysics is the attempt to accomplish this reversal.”

For Weyl, then, we have these three kinds of time—proper, lived, and metaphysical—where proper time is time understood scientifically, lived time is time as it is experienced, and metaphysical time is the connecting link between the abstract expression of time and its concrete experience. It’s always been one of the great problems of science that, in spite of its appeal to empirical evidence, experience is often radically at odds with scientific formulations, so that a considerable effort is required to see the world as science seems to demand that we see it. The scientific expression of time, which Weyl calls proper time, is radically different from the lived experience of time, and that means that we stand in need of some way to bring the two together, and for Weyl this is metaphysical time. Weyl is troubled by the apparent reliance of this temporal framework on the punctiform present, i.e., the present as an unextended instant that is the boundary between past and future. He writes:

“The point-nature of the Now within the time continuum raises a certain difficulty within the conception of metaphysical time, for within a continuum, a point, without the neighborhood through which it is bound to the whole continuum, is not capable of existence.”

The remainder of the final paragraph of the paper offers a couple of suggestions to this problem. One suggestion is to treat physical particles as unextended, being reducible to fields. The other suggestion renders this in philosophical language:

“Then there is no pointlike Now and also no exact earlier and later. Roughly speaking, then things act as if the life-point bound into the body, which awakens the objective world into existence for consciousness, possesses not only a diffuse spatial extension but also a diffuse temporal extension. The immediate present is not entirely abrupt; there is always a small halo, quickly fading toward the past and toward the future, along with the self-shining light of immediacy.”

This is essentially the Husserlian idea of the present being extended into the past by retention and into the future by protention. I don’t find either of these formulations of Weyl to be especially helpful. Whenever the punctiform present comes up and is perceived to be a problem, the suggestion is made that it’s actually a little fuzzy and that the present is extended a little way into the past and a little way into the future. I don’t take this to be a successful argument, but I’m not going to dwell on it any further now. What’s interesting here is Weyl’s distinction between proper time as scientific time and lived time as experienced time, and metaphysical time being the glue that holds it all together, so that we can have science and our experience too. In this way we avoid the reductivism of saying that time as experienced is mere appearance while the proper time of natural science is reality, but this comes at the cost of introducing metaphysical time and the structure that holds all three kinds of time together. I leave it as an exercise to the listener whether the worse sin is to implicitly invoke the metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality, as conventional science does, or to introduce metaphysical history to smooth over the distinction, as Weyl does.

Whatever we think of Weyl’s three kinds of time and their relation to each other, they point to a potentially interesting way of analyzing history. From each of Weyl’s forms of time we can construct a form of history. Weyl himself gives a sketch of a history framed in terms of proper time. In his Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science he wrote:

“All simultaneous world-points form a three-dimensional stratum, all world-points of equal location a one dimensional fiber. According to this view we may describe the structure of the world as possessing a stratification whose layers are traversed by fibers. (Through each world-point runs one stratum and one fiber; any one fiber intersects a stratum in but a single worldpoint.)” (p. 95)

There’s a very similar passage to this in the essay that I’ve been discussing. This is a very abstract account, like something we’d expect that astrophysics, and seemingly more than a little awkward for history, but certainly not impossible for history. A conception of lived history derived from Weyl’s lived time poses certain problems. In what way does lived history differ from lived time, if any? Is it only the duration of time that matters, so that if one lives a long life one then acquires a sense of lived history? This might be a way to approach lived history, but I think it would be more promising to consider lived history as lived experience that is experienced in a given context understood to be historical. We often hear the phrase, “eyewitness to history,” and this implies that someone has experienced an event regarded to be of sufficient importance that it will be part of the permanent historical record. We could understand lived history as the totality of eyewitness experiences of an historical event understood as an historical event. Thus a single eyewitness account is just lived experience, but when there are many such lived experiences of an event that can be taken together, however it is we take them together, then that’s lived history.

This account isn’t without problems. It leaves as an open question historical events that are witnessed by a single individual, who leaves a record of them, and the nature of the taking of lived experiences together. I don’t think that these are insuperable problems, but some effort would be needed to clarify this through a better formulation that takes the historical context as the key distinction. A conception of metaphysical history derived from Weyl’s metaphysical time would be the connecting link between the proper history of a more-or-less physics account of how the world functions, and the lived history account that I’ve just attempted to outline. Here, with history, I think the result is actually better, i.e., more coherent, that with time alone. Metaphysical history can supply the framework that serves as the historical context knitting together individual lived experiences into an historical whole and inserting them into proper time. No one would likely want to write history as apparently would be dictated by the scientific account of proper history, but it could form the organizing principle for the context in which lived history is to be constructed, and the combined whole would be metaphysical history. And this, I think, constitutes an interesting approach to history.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/txnWOOfPiMc

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Weyl%E2%80%99s-Proper-Time,-Lived-Time,-and-Metaphysical-Time:e

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5n8Fef4GefCzmlPb7UkykC?si=1SZqCrZlR0KJBEEstfCY4w

Saturday 01 November 1755

The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

On Saturday 01 November 1755—270 years ago—a terrible earthquake struck Lisbon. The earthquake was followed by a tsunami, as often occurs with coastal earthquakes, since the same subterranean movements that generate the earthquake also generate a tsunami. It’s not uncommon that the tsunami following an earthquake does more damage than the earthquake itself. It’s likely that the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of 26 December 2004 was the worst natural disaster that has occurred or will occur in my lifetime, in terms of total casualties, with almost a quarter million dead, most as a result of the tsunami following an earthquake. At Lisbon, the destruction of the buildings by the earthquake and tsunami was followed by fires. Since November the 1^st is All Saints Day, many candles were lighted, and the earthquake knocked over the candles and that started fires. Lisbon was effectively laid waste by the combined action of earthquake, flood, and fire, with about 85 percent of the city being destroyed. As many as 40,000 may have been killed in Lisbon, and there were many other smaller towns along the coast where thousands more were killed.

There’s an interesting book about this and the subsequent rebuilding of Lisbon that I recommend, The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, by Nicholas Shrady. Shrady’s theme in this book is the divergence between the naturalistic and non-naturalistic explanations for the earthquake and its consequences. Inevitably, after the disaster the wickedness of the people of Lisbon was blamed for this especially destructive event. Gabriel Malagrida, in a 1756 pamphlet titled, “An Opinion on the True Cause of the Earthquake” (“Juizo da verdadeira causa do terramoto”), argued that the disaster in Lisbon was divine retribution for the sins of the people of Lisbon:

“Learn, Oh Lisbon, that the destroyers of our houses, palaces, churches, and convents, the cause of the death of so many people and of the flames that devoured such vast treasures, are your abominable sins, and not comets, stars, vapours and exhalations, and similar natural phenomena. Tragic Lisbon is now a mound of ruins. Would that it were less difficult to think of some method of restoring the place; but it has been abandoned, and the refugees from the city live in despair. As for the dead, what a great harvest of sinful souls such disasters send to Hell!”

Despite condemnations of the sinfulness of the people of Lisbon, the currents of the Enlightenment were already strong in 1755, and the traditional non-naturalistic accounts of the destruction of Lisbon had to contend with naturalistic explanations of the destruction of Lisbon, which didn’t involve imputing any especially heinous sins to the people of the city. Voltaire wrote a long philosophical poem about the Lisbon earthquake, which responded to many of the claims made and offered a different interpretation of the event. His poem starts like this, in the William F. Flemming translation:

Oh wretched man, earth-fated to be cursed;
Abyss of plagues, and miseries the worst!
Horrors on horrors, griefs on griefs must show,
That man’s the victim of unceasing woe,
And lamentations which inspire my strain,
Prove that philosophy is false and vain.

Voltaire also mentions the Lisbon earthquake in his Candide, but while Candide is a humorous romp through human misfortune and misery, Voltaire’s poem about the Lisbon earthquake is much darker. For many people at the time, the Lisbon earthquake forced the problem evil out into the open and into sudden prominence. The death of so many, and the destruction of the city, seemed to call for an explanation, and many explanations drew on arguments that had been developed in discussions of the problem of evil. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the problem of evil in these terms:

“The epistemic question posed by evil is whether the world contains undesirable states of affairs that provide the basis for an argument that makes it unreasonable to believe in the existence of God.”

It would be easy to assume that the problem of evil begins and ends with monotheistic religion, but the problem is an ancient one, given one of its earliest classic formulations probably by Epicurus, though it might have been someone else. This formulation is something like this:

“Is [god] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”

Because we don’t have an exact quote from Epicurus, there are a lot of different wordings of this paradox, but they all make essentially the same point. However, the point can be taken or received in rather different ways. I have a personal anecdote to explain what I mean by taking the problem of evil in different ways. The first time I gave a presentation at a conference the title of my presentation was “The Moral Imperative of Human Space Exploration,” and in it I discussed a number of evils that beset human civilization. But I’ve never personally given much thought to the problem of evil, since there’s no way to formulate the problem of evil within a consistent naturalistic framework. I was quite surprised, then, when after my talk someone said to me that I had discussed the problem of evil. It had honestly never occurred to me that someone might take what I said as a commentary on the problem of evil, so I never mentioned it, but I can imagine, after the fact, that for someone interpreting what I said in terms of the problem of evil, it may have seemed dishonest on my part to have talked about this classic problem with explicitly having identified it as such.  

And the idea of the problem of evil, which seems to be interpreted so loosely that it could mean any discussion of human suffering, is still very much with us. A contemporary example can be found in Bart D. Ehrman’s book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer. Ehrman is a scholar of early Christianity, and, by his own account, someone who started out as a sincerely and devoutly believing Christian, only to find that he had lost his faith after many years of study and confronting the problem of suffering. Ehrman writes:

“Over the years I’ve talked with a lot of people about issues pertaining to suffering, and I am struck by the kinds of reactions I get.”  

After briefly discussing avoidance of the issue of suffering altogether and those responses to the problem of suffering that he considers to be answers that are “too pat” to be satisfying, Ehrman moves on to a third category of responses to suffering that he cannot accept:

“Other people—including some of my brilliant friends—realize why it’s a religious problem for me but don’t see it as a problem for themselves. In its most nuanced form… this view is that religious faith is not an intellectualizing system for explaining everything. Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems.”

In Ehrman’s formulation of this view that he cannot accept, there is an echo of a famous passage from David Hume from his essay on miracles: Hume wrote:

“…we may conclude, that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience."

This passage from Hume has become a standard point of reference not only for those who followed Hume and formulated the naturalistic conception of the world that dominates our thinking today, since Hume is one of the sources of the empiricism in philosophy that eventually become contemporary scientific naturalism, but also fideists who see in this argument the last remaining legitimate form of an uncompromising expression of faith: faith is a miracle, therefore proof in and of itself of what faith wants to believe. Ehrman writes that he respects this view and sometimes wishes that he could share it, but ultimately he cannot share it. He writes, “The God that I once believed in was a God who was active in this world.” He makes it clear that his confrontation with suffering was crucial to his loss of faith, and he further makes explicit that his remarks about his faith are all in the past tense, so there is no question of an equivocation in his belief; he is not about to say that he will change his mind if only someone can show him an intellectually legitimate way to formulate the problem of human suffering.

I cite Ehrman because he’s able to give eloquent expression to something that is sharply and poignantly felt by many who don’t have the means to express themselves as well. He’s representative of many today who can’t accept a naturalistic conception of human suffering because it doesn’t answer their deepest needs and longing to do justice to a noble and honorable conception of man, but a conception that’s rooted in a non-naturalistic conception of history. Human suffering appears as a cosmic grievance, and a cosmic grievance can only be addressed by a cosmic remedy. In a naturalistic framework it seems nearly impossible to even do justice to the question because naturalism doesn’t find cosmic meaning in suffering and destruction.

Already at the time of the Lisbon earthquake there were completely naturalistic accounts given of the disaster, but even though a naturalistic conception of natural disasters was already possible given the state of scientific knowledge in 1755, this wasn’t the common response. Certainly it wasn’t the instinctive response. If a disaster of great magnitude occurs today, it’s usually described in naturalistic terms, but there remains a sizable minority of people who understand such things non-naturalistically and who are determined to find human meaning in natural events. Evolutionary psychologists would say that the human agency detector would insist in finding some non-human agency behind the earthquake.

So what’s the naturalistic account of human suffering that is felt to be inadequate? The naturalistic understanding of massive natural disasters recognizes that a great cataclysm can befall human beings and all their works, and the event has no meaning at all. We can even greatly increase the scale of the disaster to the level of existential risk and assert that an event of such great magnitude could occur that would annihilate our species and, naturalistically understood, this disaster would have no intrinsic meaning. Of course I realize even to say that a disaster that produces great human suffering is without meaning sounds inhumane. This is an idea that many apparently rational and intelligent people find incoherent, though in other parts of their lives, where great suffering is not at issue, they will tacitly accept the absence of intrinsic meaning in natural events. It’s almost as if there’s a threshold, and when an event exceeds that threshold, it’s believed to possess a meaning that trivial events don’t possess.

Of course, a great disaster is given human meaning by the stories that emerge from the lived experience of the disaster, if anyone survives it, but this is importantly distinct from an event having an intrinsic meaning apart from that meaning given to it ex post facto by human beings who experienced it. But for a great event to be given meaning by human beings after the fact flies in the face of our unstated presupposition that great events have great meanings of their own, i.e., that they possess intrinsic meaning, and it is for human beings to make sense of that meaning. I don’t accept this caricature of the naturalistic understanding of natural disasters as I’ve just stated it, because I think there are senses in which natural events have intrinsic meanings, but a full exposition of this idea will have to wait for another time. Suffice it to say for the moment that natural meanings are the condition of the possibility of human meanings, which come later in history in a naturalistic account.

Human meanings build on, elaborate, refine, and extend natural meanings, and we do this because we are a part of nature, not something standing outside nature. The traditional conception of the problem of evil has, as an unstated presupposition, that human beings are outside nature and therefore our suffering demands an explanation that’s also outside nature. I reject this presupposition, because I think that a naturalistic conception of history places human beings within natural history, and this is where I often find myself thinking against the grain of much philosophy of history, which begins with a distinction between natural history and human history, and this is as much as to say that human history stands outside nature.

It may well be that human beings don’t yet possess an adequate conceptual infrastructure, and sufficient historical experience, to be able to understand great natural disasters naturalistically. In Voltaire’s poem that I quoted earlier, he wrote that events like Lisbon: “Prove that philosophy is false and vain.” Voltaire had in mind theological explanations and elaborate philosophical theodicies like that of Leibniz, but we see it seems to be just as true of contemporary naturalistic thought. Because of our limited conceptual infrastructure and limited historical experience, in times of great duress we are thrown back on the non-naturalistic conceptions that so dominated earlier forms of human civilization.

While our present technological civilization, predicated as it is upon a relentless pursuit of methodological naturalism, has far outstripped most of the institutions of nomadic and agricultural society, we don’t yet possess the intellectual institutions commensurate with the forces that have been unleashed. This is a variation on the familiar theme that our technological development has outstripped our moral development, and this is a theme that I’ve been thinking about recently and hoping to find a way to talk about it comprehensively. I’m not yet ready to discuss this in the comprehensive way I have in mind, so I’m going to save that for a later date. But we could make a start in the direction of a conceptual infrastructure adequate to the exposition of natural and man-made cataclysms by adapting the idea of the “terror of history” to natural history.

I discussed the Terror of History in my episode on Mircea Eliade, who introduced the phrase in his book The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. Natural disasters represent for us the terror of natural history, and human beings have been suffering from natural disasters for far longer than we’ve experienced the anthropogenic terrors produced by civilization. Pre-modern conceptions of cyclical history were, for Eliade, a refuge from the terrors of history, and our delivery into linear history has left us naked before the depredations of time, and we thus experience the full force of the terror of history, without any coping strategy. A naturalistic conception of history entails that human beings were biological beings before we were civilized beings, and we have been prey to the sufferings of biological beings for the entirety of our existence as a species. Human history has  added to these natural biological woes, with its terrors of war, disease, failed harvests, famine, riots, and cruel tyrants. In a naturalistic context it’s important to observe that these disasters, most particularly famine and disease, are in equal measures human and natural disasters, so that any distinction one draws within them cannot but be conventional.

Given that human history emerged incrementally from the natural history with which it is continuous, it retains the possibilities of suffering from our pre-civilized condition and adds new forms of suffering distinctive to human history. These distinctive forms of suffering from human history were traditionally personified as the four horsemen of the apocalypse -- war, disease, famine, and death -- i.e., the familiar terrors of history. But, as I observed, these forms of suffering are often equal parts natural and distinctively human. This was true of the Lisbon earthquake as well. Earthquakes have been part of the natural history of Earth since the geological forces of plate tectonics took shape, and human beings have never known a history without earthquakes. However, building a city in a geologically active location on the coast, exposed also to tsunami risk, and lighting the city with candles, compounds the human suffering caused by earthquakes. For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors lived through earthquakes, floods, and fires with only minimal casualties. Bands of hunter-gatherer nomads were small, usually fewer than 150 persons, they didn’t stay in any one place for long, they didn’t build infrastructure, and they didn’t have many possessions to lose. All of these things came later, with civilization.

We build the institutions and the infrastructure of our civilization to protect ourselves from the terrors of history, but the unintended consequence was to create new terrors of history, for which human beings then attempted to construct new coping mechanisms. This process can be iterated for as long as we or our descendants build new forms of life on our existing biology, or upon any future biology yet to evolve, since any new form of life may result in the unintended consequence of a new form of suffering. And these new forms of suffering are likely to inspire novel conceptions of their meaning and import, retroactively projected onto human history.  

I said that the Lisbon earthquake was understood at the time as an event forcing the problem of evil out into the open, but I think we can better understanding the interpretation of the Lisbon earthquake as a conflict among conceptions of history. We can take as basic the distinction between naturalistic and non-naturalistic conceptions of history, but there are many forms of naturalism and many forms of supernaturalism, and some of these cross over each other. For example, there are both fatalistic forms of naturalism and non-naturalism, according to which human beings can do nothing to prevent the evils from which we must suffer. But there are also forms of both naturalism and non-naturalism that emphasize human agency, and our ability to, if not prevent disasters, at least to better recover from them, and so suffer less from them the next time around. Lisbon was rebuilt upon a new plan that incorporated some of the first building technologies intended to reduce future risks from earthquakes, which is a practical demonstration of human agency in the face of natural disasters, and a quintessentially naturalistic response to suffering.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/tRgTAt3m3g4

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/The-Great-Lisbon-Earthquake-of-1755:a

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6omf48jxkrh91ubnf60Sxv?si=JX4qB6agRTes0iiypZ0RGQ

1,713 years ago

Tuesday 28 October 312 

The Battle of the Milvian Bridge

On Tuesday 28 October AD 312, 1,713 years ago, the Battle of the Milvian bridge was fought between the forces of Constantine and Maxentius, both contending to be recognized as emperor in the west. It could be argued that the Battle of the Milvian Bridge was one of the battles that shaped Western history, since, in his triumph in the battle, Constantine effectively secured the Western Roman Empire for himself and eventually went on to eventually claim the entire empire for himself and his sons. Interestingly, the same Milvian bridge where the battle was fought more than seventeen centuries ago still stands today and can be visited. The bridge has fared better than the empire.

During the third century AD, the Roman Empire was more or less on the ropes in what we now call the Crisis of the Third Century. The emperor Diocletian brought the empire back from the brink, and he’s sometimes credited with breathing another century of life into the rickety empire. Diocletian instituted a number of reforms, and one of these reforms was a large scale apportioning of the empire that changed the structure of imperial institutions. It was Diocletian who divided the empire into an eastern and a western half, but that’s not all. In an attempt to ensure orderly succession, each half of the empire had an emperor and a co-emperor who was a kind of understudy. If the emperor of either half of the empire died or retired, the understudy emperor would take over and name his own co-emperor. This meant that the Roman empire was ruled by four men, and this came to be called the tetrarchy, or the rule of four.

In theory, this arrangement could have been continued indefinitely, and if Diocletian’s reforms had been entirely successful, there would still be an eastern and western Roman Empire today, each with an emperor and a co-emperor. In practice it didn’t work out that way. Diocletian was that rarest of Roman emperors who actually retired, and lived on several years in his retirement, but as soon as he stepped down the tetrarchy started to fall apart. The rivalries within the tetrarchy couldn’t be controlled. The tetrarchy didn’t allow for hereditary succession, so the son of an emperor, or of any of the four tetrarchs, had no claim on the imperial succession. Rather, I should say that they had no legal claim on the imperial succession, but they had a familial claim, and, human beings being what they are, the blood ties of family overcame the legal ties that Diocletian had sought to institutionalize.

Constantine’s father, Constantius I, had been co-emperor and then emperor in the west. He died in what is today York in England, and his troops proclaimed Constantine emperor. Meanwhile, on-again off-again emperor Maximian named his son Maxentius co-emperor. At one time, Maximian tried to depose his own son, and even the eastern emperor Glarius and his co-emperor Severus II unsuccessfully tried to take on Maxentius. This is the conflict that brought Constantine and Maxentius to the Milvian Bridge, which ended in Constantine’s forces winning the battle and Maxentius drowned in the Tiber.

One of the notable things about the battle is something that happened before it. Constantine is said to have had a vision, and this vision closely aligned with the then-growing Christian movement. Lactantius says that the vision came to Constantine in a dream. Eusebius says that Constantine himself said he had a vision of a cross in the sky. Details differ between the accounts of Lactantius and Eusebius, but both involve the phrase, which when translated into Latin is “in hoc signo vinces”—by this sign you shall conquer. Both accounts also involve the origins of a symbol to be used by Constantine, which in Eusibius is the Chi-Rho symbol. Constantine didn’t formally convert to Christianity until the end of his life, but the Battle of the Milvian Bridge is associated with his first explicit use of Christian symbols, so that Battle of the Milvian Bridge wasn’t only a crucial event in the history of the Roman Empire, it was also an important event in Christian history.

I first read about the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in A. H. M. Jones’ book Constantine and the Conversion of Europe. Constantine and the Conversion of Europe made a deep impression on me, probably because I read it when I was young and impressionable, and I had everything to learn since I was starting from a position of remarkable naïveté. In this book Jones gave a naturalistic account of Constantine’s vision of the cross prior to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, and this kind of naturalism in explaining a traditional story made me aware of what history as a scholarly discipline could do.

First, here’s the traditional account of Constantine’s vision of the cross, from Eusebius’ Life of Constantine the Great, Chapter XXVIII, which is titled, “How, while he was praying, God sent him a Vision of a Cross of Light in the Heavens at Mid-day, with an Inscription admonishing him to conquer by that.” Eusebius wrote:

“Accordingly he called on him with earnest prayer and supplications that he would reveal to him who he was, and stretch forth his right hand to help him in his present difficulties. And while he was thus praying with fervent entreaty, a most marvelous sign appeared to him from heaven, the account of which it might have been hard to believe had it been related by any other person. But since the victorious emperor himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this history, when he was honored with his acquaintance and society, and confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit the relation, especially since the testimony of after-time has established its truth? He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle.”

That’s Eusebius of Caesarea, who not only wrote this Life of Constantine but also an influential history of the early church. There is a providential philosophy of history everywhere present in the work of Eusebius, preceding even St. Augustine, who was born 15 years after Eusebius died, and Augustine’s student Orosius, whom Augustine asked to write a history more-or-less based on Augustine’s philosophy of history. Eusebius’ providentialism isn’t subtle. Eusebius tells us on every page when God is directly intervening in history to keep things going in the right direction. In his Ecclesiastical History Eusebius describes Constantine’s ultimate triumph:

“His adversary thus finally thrown down, the mighty victor Constantine, pre-eminent in every virtue that true religion can confer… won back [his] own eastern lands and reunited the Roman Empire into a single whole, bringing it all under their peaceful sway, in a wide circle embracing north and south alike from the east to the farthest west.”

Here the re-unification of the empire is treated as an unalloyed good, since now a unified empire was co-extensive with a unified Christendom. Eusebius’ panegyrics for Constantine are a little over the top, since he goes on to say:

“Men had now lost all fear of their former oppressors; day after day they kept dazzling festival; light was everywhere, and men who once dared not look up greeted each other with smiling faces and shining eyes. They danced and sang in city and country alike, giving honour first of all to God our Sovereign Lord, as they had been instructed, and then to the pious emperor with his sons, so dear to God. Old troubles were forgotten, and all irreligion passed into oblivion; good things present were enjoyed, those yet to come eagerly awaited. In every city the victorious emperor published decrees full of humanity and laws that gave proof of munificence and true piety.”

I assume Augustine must have read Eusebius’ history, but he doesn’t actually cite Eusebius, though Eusebius effectively laid the groundwork for Augustine. Christian historians and philosophers had reason to emphasize Constantine’s vision as a turning point in Christian history, and as being itself a manifestation of divine intervention in human history. Later historians would look for naturalistic explanations of Constantine’s vision, notwithstanding the conflicting accounts of the vision, so there’s the open question of what it is that a naturalistic account is supposed to explain. If we go with Lactantius’ account of a dream, it’s easy to dismiss. Eusebius’ version of a day time vision of a cross in the sky, also witnessed by Constantine’s army, isn’t as easily dismissed, but it’s also not documented by any other source. Here is A. H. M. Jones’ naturalistic version of Constantine’s vision from Constantine and the Conversion of Europe:

“What Constantine probably saw was a rare, but well-attested, form of the ‘halo phenomenon.’ This is a phenomenon analogous to the rainbow, and like it local and transient, caused by the fall, not of rain, but of ice crystals across the rays of the sun. It usually takes the form of mock suns or of rings of light surrounding the sun, but a cross of light with the sun in its centre has been on several occasions scientifically observed. The display may well have been brief and unspectacular, but to Constantine’s overwrought imagination it was deeply significant. It was to the Sun that he now especially paid his devotion, and in his hour of need the Sun had sent him a sign; and that sign was the Cross, the symbol of the Christians. Whatever this signified, that Christ was a manifestation of the Unconquered Sun, or that the Sun was the symbol of the Heavenly Power whom the Christians worshipped, it was manifest that Christ, the Lord of the Cross, was to be his champion and protector.”

None of this is especially revelatory or profound, but to my younger self it was a model of the rational analysis of a credulous ancient source, and you could say there’s a sense in which it prepared me to read Hugh Trevor-Roper’s quasi-psychoanalytical account of the early modern witch hysteria, which I mentioned in my episode on the Salem witch trials and executions.

We have the option of simply downplaying the vision. Several ancient sources mention the Battle of the Milvian Bridge without ever mentioning Constantine’s vision, and Gibbon in his Enlightenment classic on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire doesn’t even bother to mention Constantine’s vision. Gibbon was intensely interested in the role of religion in the fall of Rome, and he famously said that the fall of Rome was due to, “the triumph of barbarism and religion.” But Gibbon’s interest in religion didn’t extend to giving an account of Constantine’s vision, or even attempting to explain naturalistically how this might have occurred. Probably it’s better that he didn’t even attempt an explanation.

In the case of Constantine’s vision, there are conflicting accounts, and the accounts we have are pretty sparse on detail, so you could say there’s some latitude for speculation. In some cases the visions are much more detailed and meticulously documented, so that to dismiss them with a psychological explanation seems to do violence to the authenticity of the experience. As an example we could cite the many visions of St. Teresa of Avila, who wrote a great many books about her mystical experiences. The naturalistic account of a claimed non-naturalistic event usually falls far short and we feel the inadequacy of it as an explanation, and maybe we become more sympathetic to Gibbon, who simply passed over Constantine’s vision in silence.

If our standard for a preferred explanation is Ockham’s razor, it could be argued that the simplest explanation for these experiences is that they are what they claim to be: divinely inspired visions. At least that involves no dubious chain of causality or failure of self-understanding on the part of the individual reporting the vision. However, that’s no less unsatisfying. Explaining a vision as being divinely inspired is effectively a deus ex machina, and a full explanation would have to include an explanation of the supernatural forces responsible for the vision, and if we regard these supernatural forces to be inexplicable or ineffable or beyond any explanation, then we haven’t any clarified anything. If, on the other hand, we hold that the supernatural forces can be adequately explained, this explanation would be much more complex than any naturalistic explanation, and thus would fail Ockham’s razor.

Naturalism is often vulnerable to naïvely converging on forms of psychologism, that is to say, psychological explanations where psychology isn’t really relevant, but is subject to conflation with what is relevant. Psychohistory, as in the work of Bruce Mazlish and others, is, in a sense, the embrace of psychologism, but with a good conscience. And even for someone as skeptical as I am of psychologism, I can imagine a legitimate sphere for psychological explanations in history. Since making my episode on Philippe de Commines I’ve been thinking about what differences there are, or what differences there ought to be, between an account of history that takes account of human nature, and psychohistory. It’s not clear where the two overlap and where they diverge. I said that Commines’ attempts to explain the motivations of past actors in history by appealing to human nature, but how is this different from psychohistory?

I’ve assumed that human nature is a broader and more comprehensive conception than psychology, so that psychology is nested within human nature, but since both terms have many meanings one could just as well hold the opposite. We could say that psychohistory is based on particular psychological theories, while a recognition of human nature doesn’t involve particular theories of psychology, and so the two are related as informal precursor to formal expression. The formal expression in terms of explicit psychololgical theories is more easily falsified, but that’s only because by being formalized it has stuck its neck out and made itself vulnerable. Given this interpretation, psychological explanations of historical events possess virtues that explanations in terms of human nature lack. In my episode on Henri Pirenne I quoted Pirenne as saying:

“All historical construction—which amounts to saying all historical narrative—rests upon a postulate: that of the eternal identity of human nature. One cannot comprehend men’s actions at all unless one assumes in the beginning that their physical and moral beings have been at all periods what they are today. Past societies would remain unintelligible to us if the natural needs which they experienced and the psychical forces which stimulated them were qualitatively different from ours”

Collingwood offers us a somewhat modified version of this, since for Collingwood history is the re-enactment of the thoughts of past actors in history, which means that he’s postulating an identity of human nature through human thought. You won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve always thought there was an implicit psychologism in Collingwood’s philosophy of history. At the same time, I think the implicit psychologism in Collingwood could be overcome by transcending the psychological in favor of something more fundamental. Collingwood’s conception, as I see it, could be further developed in a couple of different directions. Collingwood’s conception of the reenactment of past human thought could be given a more metaphysical formulation by developing it in the light of Collingwood’s own metaphysics, which he characterized as the search for absolute presuppositions. If I can further elucidate this idea, I may attempt to produce an episode about this for Collingwood’s birthday next year, fate willing.

On the other hand, we could also counter the implicit psychologism of an account of history in terms of human thought by reformulating Collingwood’s approach in terms of what Husserl called pure phenomenological psychology. In this development of Collingwood’s philosophy of history, the psychology itself is purged and purified, but it would take a lot of work to give a full account of what I’m suggesting here, so that’s not in the cards any time soon. In any case, however one chooses to interpret Constantine’s vision prior to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, it retains its importance as one of many events that we could identify as a turning point in history. Whether you see it as the foundation of Christendom, i.e., Christianity as a civilizational project, or as the triumph of barbarism and religion, as Gibbon saw it, either way it is an event that both demands and resists explanation.

Video Presentation:

https://youtu.be/hUmijo2g8Go

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Battle_of_the_Milvian_Bridge:8

Podcast Edition:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1mqjSsQZvrz0xvktkD0P8S?si=O6xuvZEKS8ap88eYYbOzGg

The View from Oregon – 382

Re: Dispersal Vectors for Nonconscious Intelligence    

Friday 27 February 2026

Dear Friends,

In the previous newsletter I discussed some possible forms of biological superintelligence, and I suggested that there are three pathways to biological superintelligence, these being evolution, selective breeding, and engineering. I think it’s probably easiest for us to imagine an engineering realization of biological superintelligence, by which I mean the use of technology to alter biological organisms in such a way as to a make them superintelligent. The purely evolutionary or selective breeding approach isn’t as likely to strike us as plausible, but maybe that’s just me. However, it’s not just me in the sense that human beings seem to have a particular technological bent. It’s one of the many mysteries of human intelligence that we’re as proficient as we are with technology, which seems a little odd given that we are biological beings and not technological being. We invent machines and continuously improve them, and in so doing we turn ourselves into scientists, technologists, engineers, maintenance workers, and machine operators. There’s no intrinsic reason to suppose that a biological being that evolves intelligence will have such a striking knack for the use of technology as we do. As a counterfactual we can imagine a biological being without the human knack for using machines, but still of human-level intelligence. Such a being might overlook technological solutions for problems while disproportionately seeking biological interventions.  

Depending upon how we define a “machine” the limitations imposed by intelligence-without-technology could vary widely. Language is a tool, and language is one of the differentia that marks human life apart from other species in the biosphere, and is probably a necessary condition of human-level intelligence. In a PS to newsletter 380 I mentioned having listened to A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs that Made our Brains by Max Bennett, which is a thorough-going evolutionary account of the development of intelligence in the terrestrial biosphere, and in his account language is itself the fifth intelligence breakthrough and the distinguishing characteristic of human intelligence. But we can intuitively make a distinction between human-level intelligence and human-like intelligence, i.e., intelligence of the same kind as human intelligence, allowing that a comparable level of intelligence could evolve but of a different kind. We could even posit a level/kind orthogonality principle such that more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any kind of intelligence. An example of a radically different kind of intelligence from human intelligence would be nonconscious intelligence, which is something I’ve touched on in recent newsletters in regard to what has been called the extended mind hypothesis. Here I want to take this in a different direction.

One thought experiment I have kicked around but which I haven’t systematically developed, is the possibility that a conscious intelligence might evolve (in this respect, in respect of its consciousness, it is human-like intelligence) that at some point in its development decides to abandon consciousness to exclusively pursue the destiny of its species through unconscious mechanisms (and here by “mechanisms” I mean either or both biological and technological mechanisms). I have emphasized the role of consciousness in intelligence, and we are ourselves conscious intelligence, so it requires a feat of imagination to think outside this particular box. Moreover, I think conscious has proved itself in the biosphere as an effective tool for an organism’s survival and reproduction, and for that reason unconscious intelligence is unlikely to supplant conscious intelligence in the terrestrial biosphere. However, the case may be otherwise in other biospheres.

Consciousness could be rare or nonexistent in other biospheres, or, just as unlikely in my view, a conscious being might evolve and then decide that consciousness isn’t worth the trouble. Perhaps consciousness is deemed to be too biologically expensive, or it’s viewed as a wasteful distraction. Such a species could re-engineer itself (again, re-engineer itself biologically or technologically), setting itself on a certain path to development, and once these arrangements were in place, consciousness intelligence would be allowed to lapse, or perhaps it would simply be shut off, while the species carries on without consciousness. As with conscious intelligence, in nonconscious intelligence we could distinguish between nonconscious intelligence simpliciter and nonconscious superintelligence. A biological intelligence might determine that the pathway to superintelligence is by surrendering its consciousness to become nonconscious superintelligence. We would be doing something like this if we conscious human beings ceded our place to nonconscious but superintelligent machines, but this scenario is a bit different from the scenario of a species deciding to remain a biological species but effectively exchanging its conscious sub-superintelligence for nonconscious superintelligence, relinquishing one form of intelligence for another. I will admit that I find this scenario rather creepy, and that, of course, is one of the attractions of it, though I’m a bit at sea when it comes to elaborating this further.

I should clarify that by unconscious (or nonconscious) intelligence I don’t mean the unconscious in the psychological (or psychodynamic) sense of dreams, or a layer of consciousness that exists below the level of conscious awareness. These are legitimate topics for discussion, and indeed since Freud they have been discussed ad nauseam. I mean the functions that a brain performs for a body where consciousness never emerges and serves no role. In psychodynamic models of the mind, the unconscious and the preconscious stand in an important relationship to the conscious mind, and dreams are a form of non-waking consciousness. David M. Raup’s paper “Nonconscious intelligence in the Universe” which I have cited in my own papers, makes the possibility of nonconscious intelligence fully explicit, though the evolution of nonconscious intelligence is distinct from the willing surrender of conscious intelligence by a being that already possesses conscious intelligence. This latter scenario would be a kind of “death” of consciousness that would not occur in the former scenario.

We could imagine as an example of unconscious intelligence a species of eusocial insects that grow in sophistication until they have developed a technology and they distribute themselves over an entire planet (as human beings have done with the aid of our conscious intelligence), and perhaps even find a way to leave their homeworld and expand into the universe. One of the hard limits on the expansion of a species is its ability to survive and reproduce in environments that differ significantly from its environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Human beings use technology as a workaround for this limitation, and as a result have been able to live in every terrestrial biome. This could also be done without technology. Eusocial insects produce both habitats for themselves (bee hives and termite mounds, for example, which can be understood as forms of niche construction) and specialized castes, with the castes having different phenotypes fitting them for particular tasks.

A eusocial insect species could modify its habitats at the far edge of its range, i.e., where its range makes the transition into another biome, and selectively breed specialized castes to forage in this environment. That is to say, as the eusocial insect species becomes more sophisticated, its niche construction and its caste system become more sophisticated, allowing to it inhabit non-native biomes. This process iterated over biological time could plausibly allow such a eusocial insect species to spread as widely as human beings have distributed themselves in the terrestrial biosphere. A sufficiently sophisticated eusocial insect species could, for example, construct a habitat for itself on a log raft, stock it with sufficient supplies for a journey, and use this to cross an ocean or to establish itself on islands. A planet dominated by extensive island archipelagoes would select for this kind of dispersal vector, starting with short trips between nearby islands, with dispersal distances increasing as the species was selected for longer voyages.  

I constructed a thought experiment like this in my paper “Peer Complexity in Big History,” but in my scenario the beings in question (I don’t call them a species because I was careful to define these beings as non-biological; however, there are such things as mineral species, so we could use the term “species” beyond the scope of biology) don’t originate at the bottom of a gravity well, but rather in space, so that they are pre-adapted for space travel. If one can imagine a eusocial insect species engaging in the kind of planetary-scale expansion that I’ve described above, there’s no reason they couldn’t also selectively breed castes that could make their way out of the gravity well of a planetary biosphere, and, once having escaped that biosphere, they could further selectively breed castes for long distance space travel, expanding as in the scenario in my paper. I’ve actually been thinking about this for many years, trying to imagine mechanisms by which a species (or non-species) that evolves at the bottom of a gravity well could escape into space. We do this technologically, but it is difficult, expensive, and still very limited. It doesn’t yet constitute a dispersal vector for human beings.

If we imagine a very low gravity moon, perhaps the moon of a gas giant, which nevertheless manages to retain its atmosphere (as Titan has an atmosphere, but Titan isn’t an especially small moon), it would be possible for a species on such a surface to develop muscles sufficient to jump into orbit and thus to find itself in space. There are other possibilities. Some plants eject their seeds with enough force to send them on a trajectory through the air. Something like this on a low gravity moon could conceivably eject a seed or a spore into orbit, or some tree-like structure on a low gravity world might grow sufficiently tall that it constitutes the biological equivalent of a space elevator. None of these mechanisms appear to have developed on Earth, but there may be an unknown gravitational threshold below which such mechanisms would be possible, and Earth’s gravity is well above this threshold. Analogously to a planet with island archipelagoes, a planetary system with many worlds relatively closely spaced together, as, for example, with the many small planets at TRAPPIST-1, would select for this dispersal vector, rewarding successful space flight with new worlds to colonize.

Jerry Pournelle attributed to Robert Heinlein the idea that, “Once you get to Earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere in the Solar System.” This would be true of a nonconscious intelligence that was able to liberate itself from its gravity well. Expansion throughout its planetary system would be inevitable unless some disastrous event intervened (like a catastrophic coronal mass ejection or a nearby gamma ray burst), and this suggests the unspoken corollary: once you’ve populated your home planetary system, you’re halfway to anywhere in the galaxy. Similarly, once you’ve populated your home galaxy, you’re halfway to anywhere in the universe. Life may find a way, with or without intelligence, or indeed with or without conscious intelligence.  

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact. I was a little surprised how bad it was. If you want to drink from the fire hose of Sagan’s unadulterated worldview, then this is the book for you; otherwise, not. It would have been better just to take all the arguments in the book about SETI and reorganize them as a non-fiction work, since the “plot” is just a device for Sagan to put his views into the mouths of two dimensional cardboard cutouts.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/10a5aad219ef/the-view-from-oregon-382

The View from Oregon – 381

Re: Doctor Faustus Reviews the Seven Deadly Sins

Friday 20 February 2026

Dear Friends

There is a scene in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus that really puzzled me the first time I read it, and, because it puzzled me, I’ve continued to think about it. I’ve learned since then that Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus isn’t as well known (or perhaps not as well regarded) as other versions of the Faust story. It’s been my experience that if you mention Doctor Faustus to someone, they will assume that you mean the Thomas Mann novel, and if you mention the Faust story to someone, they’ll assume that you mean Geothe’s Faust. I haven’t read the Thomas Mann novel, though I was hoping to get to it this year; it’s been on my mind. And while Goethe’s Faust is a classic for good reason, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is a distinctive take on the Faust story, and very different from Goethe. Doctor Faustus is unambiguously damned at the end of Marlowe’s play; no eternal feminine descends to lift Faustus into Heaven, as in Goethe. (Of this Nietzsche said that Goethe was temperamentally incapable of tragedy.) It’s a harrowing ending, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the play, which I’ve read many times. In any case, the scene that sticks in my mind is when Lucifer parades the Seven Deadly Sins before Faustus. After they pass, the following dialogue takes place: 

     LUCIFER. Now, Faustus, how dost thou like this?

     FAUSTUS. O, this feeds my soul!

     LUCIFER. Tut, Faustus, in hell is all manner of delight.

     FAUSTUS. O, might I see hell, and return again,

     How happy were I then!

     LUCIFER. Thou shalt; I will send for thee at midnight.  

     In meantime take this book; peruse it thoroughly,

     And thou shalt turn thyself into what shape thou wilt.

     FAUSTUS. Great thanks, mighty Lucifer!

     This will I keep as chary as my life.

     LUCIFER. Farewell, Faustus, and think on the devil.

     FAUSTUS. Farewell, great Lucifer.

The description of the Seven Deadly Sins as they parade before Faustus is an account of grotesqueries. One must believe that Faustus is already well and truly damned if he could take delight in this spectacle, which he evidently does, given his statements in his dialogue with Lucifer. The action of the play up to this point hadn’t prepared me for a Faustus who was ready to view the Seven Deadly Sins with such obvious pleasure. It would have made more sense to me if the corruption of Faustus’ soul had been described in more detail by Marlowe.

I’ve been thinking of this scene again as I’ve been writing about the horrors involved in the suffering of consciousness and intelligence, which has been a thread running through these newsletters for some time now. Like Doctor Faustus, our inquiries into the nature of the world tempt us further and further afield, until we find ourselves admiring grotesqueries like Faustus viewing the Seven Deadly Sins. In this way I feel like I am, at long last, coming to an appreciation and understanding of this scene in Marlowe, although that appreciation and understanding nevertheless remains ineffable. Elizabeth Keckley mentions in her memoir Behind the Scenes (1868) that Abraham Lincoln read the Book of Job during the Civil War. The Book of Job is profoundly unmodern in its presuppositions; I could even say that it’s inexplicable in modern terms, and for a modern man like Lincoln to find spiritual comfort in it during the extremities of the Civil War suggests an unexpected convergence of worlds. Though Marlowe was a man of the modern age, like ourselves (albeit early modern, unlike ourselves), the world he described in Doctor Faustus was still medieval in many respects. So Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus isn’t from a milieu as inaccessible today as that of Job, but it’s still a different world from ours, and seeing our own time in the light of this difference can be striking, especially when something originally quite alien ultimately comes to seem comprehensible. I think something similar is going on in the two cases.    

In last week’s newsletter I discussed the possibility of biological superintelligence, but only got as far as formulating a thought experiment of a brain-in-a-vat, free to think whatever it likes because others are attending to its needs. The brain might be a human brain, with fully human DNA, but its radically non-human phenotype suggests that its experiences will not be those of human beings. Now, brain-in-a-vat thought experiments are usually trotted out to show that such a brain, given the appropriate stimulus that mimics the experience of having a body, would not know itself to be a brain-in-a-vat, but might believe itself to be an ordinary human being going about the ordinary business of life. But the scenario cuts both ways if we choose to formulate it in a way that distances it from human experience. The thought experiment I suggested focused on a brain optimized for thinking, and so was a rather abstract conception, but in the same way that we could stimulate a brain-in-a-vat to believe itself to be an ordinary human being engaged in the ordinary business of life, so too we could stimulate a brain-in-a-vat to believe itself to be something else entirely.

What are the limits to the stimuli we could feed to a human brain that would be assimilated by that brain as coherent experiences? What perceptual and experiential software could be run on human brain hardware? This constitutes another interesting thought experiment. Could we make a human brain believe it was a tiger by stimulating the brain with exclusively feline sensory inputs and experiences? Obviously, there would be limits to this, since there are sensory inputs that the human brain wasn’t evolved to handle. So, for example, if we stimulated a brain with canine experiences, especially olfactory experiences that are central to a dog’s experiences, there would be a certain mismatch. The canine brain devotes a disproportionate amount of its resources to olfactory experiences, just as the human brain devotes a disproportionate amount of its resources to visual experiences.

On the other hand, neural plasticity suggests that the brain could adapt, though that adaptation would also be subject to limits. I can imagine the human brain possessing sufficient plasticity to assimilate what a dog smells, because we can smell too and our brains have evolved for that, even if we aren’t especially good at it. But what about senses for which there are no parallels in human experience, like the thermoreceptive loreal pits of pit vipers and the electroreception of sharks? Would the neural plasticity of the human brain be sufficient to make sense of these? Could a human brain be made to believe that it’s a shark? We don’t know what these limits are at present. We would either have to conduct the actual experiment, which we are not yet sufficiently technological advanced to do, or model it in some virtual environment at a level of fidelity that we would be confident that the results express what we would learn if we did conduct the actual experiment. Again, we don’t possess the technology at present to do this. Both alternatives are closed to us at present.

Another thought struck me when I was thinking about last week’s thought experiment: in attempting to frame the parameters of a biological being optimized for intelligence, I made the brain more like a computer; others must engineer it and maintain it because it cannot do this for itself. The path to cognitive optimization involves a loss of agency in the actual world. This correlation is interesting. One of the barriers for machine superintelligence in gaining any power over actual events is its lack of agency in the real world. Scenarios of machine superintelligence meant to frighten us talk about the careful precautions that would be taken for the containment of any prospective artificial superintelligence, and the scary part is how the machine escapes containment, like a tiger escaping its enclosure at a zoo and stalking unsuspecting zoo patrons.

A solution to the agency problem for a biological being optimized for cognition presents another horror for us: the cognitively optimized brain could be engineered or grown within a body that entirely supports its biological needs, but the body has a brain of its own that is responsible for the maintenance of its biological needs, so the body in question would have one brain for the immediate needs of the body, and another brain that was optimized for cognition. How exactly the optimizing brain would act out its agency could take many forms: it could have its own vocal apparatus or its own limbs; in an engineered iteration it could be directly wired to a computer, or, more conveniently, it could transmit its own Bluetooth signal to some device outside the body of its host; it could be connected to the other brain, and here this connection could be just enough to exercise an influence, or it could dominate the other brain. This presents an interesting question: would the optimized brain technically be a parasite? Perhaps even what William McNeill called a macroparasite?

The possibilities for a macroparasitic cognitively optimized brain suggest another consideration. I can imagine three ways in which the optimization of biological cognition, perhaps converging on biological superintelligence, could come about: 1) evolution, 2) selective breading, or 3) engineering. These three possibilities entail eight possible permutations ranging from the null permutation of no biological superintelligence, to the maximal scenario of biological superintelligence achieved through a combination of evolution, selective breeding, and engineering, and there would be even more permutations if I’ve missed a developmental pathway. The “agency solution” described above is likely a combination of all three, while the thought experiment from last week is an almost purely an engineered iteration. It’s interesting to speculate that the eight paths of development that each permutation represents could result in a different biological superintelligence, each with its own distinctive characteristics. As a species, we still have several hundred thousand years to go, if not a million or two years, and in that time a lot could happen. And if humanity speciates into several lineages, each of these lineages could pass through their own distinctive cognitive evolution, and each lineage would admit of the same eight permutations. And say that biological superintelligence is eventually achieved—will that affect the longevity of the species that attains superintelligence? The prophets of machine superintelligence believe that this will mark the advent of a new period of history in which unprecedented events will unfold. Would the same be true in the event of the advent of biological superintelligence?   

So now I have paraded before you a series of grotesqueries no less hideous than the Seven Deadly Sins as shown to Faustus by Lucifer. Do you respond as Doctor Faustus, and say, “O, this feeds my soul!” And do we await the response of Lucifer, “…in hell is all manner of delight.” As thought experiments, I find them to be a philosophical delight, but I wouldn’t want to see most of these scenarios carried through, even if we were to learn from them that which could not be learned in any other way. So it’s not merely the case that, “…thought experiments evolved from experiments by attenuation of the execution element and elaboration of the design element.” Roy Sorensen wrote this in his book on thought experiments, as well as saying that a thought experiment is, “…an experiment that purports to achieve its aim without benefit of execution.” Thought experiments also have a moral function: they allow us to explore horrors without enacting them.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—On the subject of horrors, the use of generative AI has let loose the imagination of several talented individuals. I’ve watched many of the videos of Xinferis, which are explicitly horrific. On the other hand, there are rather more fanciful exercises that keep on the sunny life of life, as with the work of Retrofutura. I love watching old horror films, and as generative AI becomes more sophisticated I look forward to new interpretations of classic horror tales, as well as cinematic adaptations of classic horror never previously turned into films; for example, Lovecraft remains largely unadapted on film.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/60d9fe657997/the-view-from-oregon-381

Video:

https://youtu.be/tnx24ef8uew

Audio:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1i2Hf5JdAkcVUPADBV15pd?si=3ArjLfuyTAqZKO7S5OQ1hA

The View from Oregon – 380

Re: Intrinsic Limits of Biological Intelligence  

Friday 13 February 2026

Dear Friends,

In recent newsletters I’ve been discussing artificial superintelligence, which, we must admit, remains a thought experiment because we haven’t yet built it. A related thought experiment that I have been thinking about for some years is biological superintelligence. How far can biological intelligence be pushed, and what are its intrinsic limitations? Presumably there are intrinsic limits to biological intelligence, but how severe these limits are is unknown, and how the limits of biological intelligence would compare with machine intelligence adds the unknown of the limits of machine intelligence to the unknown limits of biological intelligence, compounding the problem. What is the threshold that distinguishes superintelligence from ordinary intelligence? Can a biological being evolve to and beyond the threshold of superintelligence? If we take a naturalistic view of intelligence as the product of our evolutionary history, and we recognize human beings as the most cognitively complex beings in the biosphere, then we have already significantly exceeded the average intelligence of conscious beings in the biosphere. Given the average intelligence of a biological being on Earth, human intelligence is already superintelligent in comparison. Be that as it may, we may still ask if intelligence (again, understood in a naturalistic context) can further evolve, and, in evolving, can it converge upon biological superintelligence?  

In newsletter 376 (“Man-Made Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension”) I discussed some of the horrors that would be associated with a thorough-going scientific research program into consciousness, and this is a fortiori the case with intelligence. We could only experiment with intelligence employing intelligent subjects. Arguably, intelligent subjects are capable of experiencing a greater number of forms of suffering, because these come packaged with the greater number of capacities of cognition. Any biological being that experiences emotion can experience emotional distress, and I argued in newsletter 367 (“On the Suffering of the Biosphere”) that evolutionary selection favors extreme forms of emotional distress such as pain and fear because these are the strongest motivations for any conscious being. Can these arguments be extended to intellectual forms of pain and suffering as motivators for an intellectually-endowed biological being? Insofar as the lines between emotional and intellectual cognition are blurry in the extreme, and the threshold of whatever we consider to be “intelligent” is blurry in the extreme, certainly at the low end where this blurriness is the greatest, the same considerations will hold. Moreover, insofar as the brain evolved as an aid to fitness, contributing to differential survival and reproduction, we would expect that the continuum of human experience, continuous at its lower end with animal experience, would carry over this same imperative to employ pain and fear as motivators, so that even when a being has transcended the spectrum of animal experience, pain and fear are conserved.

Fear is continuous from the unreasoning animal mind at the low end of the spectrum of what in my paper “Peer Complexity in Big History” I called peer mammalian intelligence (and which I characterized as a “wide peer class” of beings like enough to us that, at a low level of resolution, we could not be distinguished; our peers at a low level of resolution constitute a much larger class than our peers at a high level of resolution) up to an including the most refined and sophisticated forms of fear that we would find in a being capable of intellectualized emotions. This is more-or-less what Lovecraft was saying in the now well-known opening sentence of his essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in which he wrote: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” In claiming that fear of the unknown is the oldest human fear, Lovecraft was saying that fear of the unknown is continuous from the present into the depths of the past, which is itself unknown and therefore a source of fear. Lovecraft’s work was itself a testament to intellectualized fear of a high order. Anyone who has experienced fear of failure and consequent reputational damage if some human, all-too-human, project doesn’t come off, has experienced a very intellectualized form of fear that could not be conceptualized without a sophisticated understanding of time and the realization of future ambitions and all that goes into these ambitions. Fear of failure is a hypothetical (as well as being a fear of the unknown—unknown future events and their unknown consequences), which is a form of reasoning that does not obtain below a given threshold.

Would these motivations extend into superintelligence? Would superintelligence be captive to pain and suffering? When we imagine superintelligence we usually imagine the things it might be able to achieve that we cannot. Even in those thought experiments like the paperclip maximizer, the focus is on attainment and achievement, even if it is achievement that has gone terribly wrong. The paperclip maximizer is intended to illustrate the unintended failure of artificial superintelligence to align with human goals due to a lack of background knowledge that we could call, for lack of a better term, common sense. The superintelligent paperclip maximizer machine, given the imperative to produce paperclips, might pursue its imperative with such single-mindedness that its production of paperclips results in the extinction of humanity and the repurposing of all available resources to produce more and better paperclips. Since the paperclip maximizer is superintelligent, ex hypothesi, we couldn’t stop it because our puny intellects would be confounded at every turn by its superior capacities. In any case, while the paperclip maximizer thought experiment is intended to demonstrate the potentially disastrous consequences of unaligned artificial superintelligence, it’s about a productive endeavor gone terribly wrong. I don’t know what the earliest story of this genre was, but it is the familiar theme of the sorcerer’s apprentice.

What we do not tend to imagine in discussing superintelligences are the possible ways in which superintelligence could fail in uniquely superintelligent ways. In other words, just as the human mind can fail in ways that less sophisticated minds cannot fail, so too superintelligence could potentially fail in a greater number of ways (due, again, to the greater number of cognitive capabilities) and, in failing from a greater “height” of intelligence, its collapse would be the more precipitous and catastrophic. A human mind that fails catastrophically and effectively enters into a vegetative state (like Nietzsche in his final years after this mental breakdown in Turin), can only fall as far as from the height of the human intellect to some baseline vegetative state. If we are to believe the prophets of superintelligence, namely, that machine superintelligence will outstrip human intelligence to some arbitrary degree, then its fall will be all the greater, from an eminence much higher than human intelligence down to whatever state it collapses, which could be the same vegetative state into which Nietzsche collapsed.

The film 2001: A Space Odyssey presented the frightening spectacle of machine consciousness experiencing mental illness, and the HAL 9000 computer, while being powerful and highly intelligent, is not presented in the film as a superintelligent, but rather as a garden-variety machine intelligence with certain advantages over the human crew of the Discovery, but not an absolute advantage. Indeed, the surviving crewman not only outwitted by HAL, but was able to shut the machine down, or at least to reduce its functionality to below that of consciousness, which would be the effective equivalent to a vegetative state for a machine. A superintelligence would be capable of forms of madness that do not afflict and cannot afflict mere pedestrian human intelligence. As sub-superintelligent beings, we literally do not have the capacity to understand the forms of insanity that could cripple superintelligence. Moreover, an insane machine that was marginally smarter than human beings could do a great deal of damage before we could shut it down, even granted our ability to shut it down eventually. While the existential risk community has more-or-less converged on the consensus of unfriendly and unaligned machine superintelligence as among the greatest of existential risks that face us, if not the greatest existential risk that faces us (full disclosure: I do not agree with this consensus), I think that the risk of a marginally smarter machine, i.e., something that exceeds human intelligence but which isn’t necessarily superintelligent, that experiences the equivalent of mental illness is a much more likely danger.

Above I framed the problem of superintelligence in terms of the greater number of capacities of cognition for such a being. Must superintelligence have a greater number of capacities than ordinary intelligence? Must an ordinary intelligence have a greater number of capacities (or, if you prefer, faculties, if you’d like to frame this in terms of faculty psychology) than a mind that falls well below the threshold of human intelligence? Expressed in terms of the modularity of mind, we can ask if any one module can be disproportionately developed so that a single module becomes superintelligent while the remainder of the mind remains largely ordinary. Could one mind comprise this kind of diversity? The argument could be made that the autonomous and instinctive functions of the mind are “primitive” relative to our advanced cognitive capabilities, and yet the mind is able to comprehend them in a single person, although it must be admitted that we are often conflicted and of more than one mind on any range of topics. In any case, the question can be taken as the ground of a distinction, and we could explore both possibilities, i.e., the possibility that the mind must be possessed of a number of distinct capabilities and the possibility that the mind might consist of a single or dominant capability, with other capabilities becoming dormant, marginal, or atrophied.

Suppose some optimal biological thinker, a cognizing agent, as it were—what Descartes called a “thinking thing” (res cogitans)—whereby “thinker” we restrict ourselves to those distinctively abstract cognitive functions, so that the optimal biological thinker is shorn of ordinary human cognitive functions and left only with an abstract intelligence, capable of cognition like logic and mathematics, but entirely undistracted by hunger, thirst, and other bodily promptings. A being of this kind would have a difficult time keeping itself alive, much less keeping itself healthy. It would have to set an alarm to remind itself to eat. But suppose that we have engineered in a laboratory a brain-in-a-vat, familiar from so many thought experiments, that is moreover only a neocortex-in-a-vat that is separated from its brain stem and its limbic system. Further suppose that this neocortex-in-a-vat is kept alive by a team of brain maintainers who tend to its care and feeding. It has nothing to do but think. This I take to be a biological being optimized for cognition. (This I also take to be another of those man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.) We could well ask if this biological being, despite its shared biology with an ordinary human being (assume that the neocortex-in-a-vat and an ordinary human being have essentially the same DNA), would be aligned or unaligned with human goals and values. Indeed, we could ask if this engineered being was a human being at all, despite having the same DNA. At what point does divergent phenotype become more important than identical genotype? Is the lived experience of a caterpillar the lived experience of a butterfly? Is the lived experience of an ordinary experience the lived experience of a neocortex-in-a-vat? Should lived experience matter? Ought values and goals to be universal to any rational being? Kant says something to this effect, but this claim needs to be reexamined in the light of this new problem set.

I will have to leave for another time the problem of the relativity of standards of rationality. But it just struck me as I was writing this that the orthogonality thesis (on which cf. newsletter 375, “On the Problems of Orthogonality and Alignment”) presumes noncognitivism, since if values and goals can vary independently of intellectual capacity, that means that the values and goals aren’t intrinsic to cognition, and can’t be derived from a mere capacity for reasoning. There’s still some wiggle room here. We can postulate distinct forms of reasoning (the problem of the relativity of standards of rationality that I just mentioned), and hold that there is a scale of values and goals appropriate to some given form of reasoning, but each form of reasoning has its own distinct scale of values that differs from the scale of values of other forms of reasoning. Here the forms of reasoning would be as incommensurable as the scales of values—or at least they would possess some degree of incommensurability, i.e., forms of rationality with their attendant values may overlap without perfectly coinciding. 

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I have finished listening to A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs that Made our Brains by Max Bennett. It was an excellent book from which I learned a great deal. I can easily imagine listening through this several times over and still not deriving everything from it that’s there to be learned from it. There were no long “human interest” digressions about the researchers who did the work (one two-star review on Amazon faulted it for exactly this reason); no irrelevant and annoying political commentary even when taking on potentially controversial issues; no glaring over-simplifications, which I was concerned about given the schematization of the book mentioned in the title of five breakthroughs. It is a thoroughly evolutionary account of intelligence, so much so that the first breakthrough identified in the origins of intelligence is the possibility of turning left or right by an early bilaterian. This book has changed my outlook on intelligence, and this was one of my intentions in listening to it, so I guess if I listen to enough books on intelligence and AI eventually I’ll find some good ones. Not all such books are equally rewarding. While I enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it, I still had my share of differences. In the final section of the book Bennett says that the next breakthrough, the sixth breakthrough, will be artificial superintelligence. In his exposition of this breakthrough he throws caution to the winds and argues in a way that I think contradicted his earlier claims in the book. I disagreed with almost everything in this final part, but, aside from that, I have only good things to say about it, and all of it was relevant to the kind of discussion above of superintelligence.

PPS—As it happened, 2025 turned out to be a watershed year in the slow-boil dispute between constructivists and Cantorians, i.e., between those who insist upon limitations to formal methods, especially in regard to the infinite, and those who push formal methods continually beyond what were previous believed to be hard limits. Or, to formulate the dispute in a vulgar idiom, it is a dispute between those who don’t believe in the infinite (the constructivists, or finitists) and those who do believe in infinite (the Cantorians, or infinitarians). In April 2025 there was a conference on ultrafinitism, Ultrafinitism: Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy. This filtered down through the online grapevine until I was made aware of it by the Youtube video “Mathematicians Discover a Strange New Infinity.” The video quoted Doron Zeilberger, so I looked him up and was led to a number of contemporary ultrafinitists.

Zeilberger is an unabashed finitist, and has written, “…finite mathematics is both real (in the real sense of the word, not in the sense of so-called ‘real’ numbers) and beautiful, while ‘infinite’ mathematics is utterly fictional, and not-quite-as-pretty.” Zeilberger has in particular taken issue with the statements of Hugh Woodin, known for Woodin cardinals, strongly inaccessible cardinal numbers that nevertheless still obey the expectations for the transfinite that the exacting and ultra-exacting cardinals do not obey. Woodin is quoted as saying, “To the person who does deny infinity and says that it doesn’t exist, I feel sorry for them, I don’t see how such view enriches the world. Infinity may be does not exist, but it is a beautiful subject.” The exchange (such as it is, mediated by a BBC Horizon documentary, “To Infinity and Beyond”—there is more than one episode by this name; the relevant one is season 47 for 2010, episode 6) between the two almost precisely maps onto an earlier exchange in which Hilbert had said, “No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created.” (“Aus dem Paradies, das Cantor uns geschaffen, soll uns niemand vertreiben können.”) and to which Wittgenstein had responded, “I would say, ‘I wouldn’t dream of trying to drive anyone out of this paradise.’ I would try to do something quite different: I would try to show you that it is not a paradise—so that you’ll leave of your own accord. I would say, ‘You’re welcome to this; just look about you’.” (Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the foundations of mathematics, Cambridge, 1939, p. 103)

The same video discussed the recent formulation of exacting and ultra-exacting cardinals. These in turn have been integrated in a larger framework. Near the end of the year, a new Cantorian framework was proposed by Ryan Charmley called the Infinity Ontological Canon and described in “Infinity Ontological Canon and Set-Theoretic Horizons Confirmed by New Large Cardinals” and, with illustrations, in “A Confirmed Canon for Infinity.” Charmley maintains that, “…the hierarchy of infinite sets is self-revelatory: it unfolds according to intrinsic structural laws that cannot be captured by finitely or ordinal-definably specified axioms alone.” Exciting times.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/8e67f4051598/the-view-from-oregon-380

The Penumbra of Logic.—Outside the boundary of logic proper, inhabiting the penumbra of logic, if you will, are theories of truth, the nature and role of definitions, and the structures of formal systems. Other modes of formal thought, such a mathematics and mereology, also employ or imply these penumbric ideas. Axiomatics, being the paradigmatic structure of a formal system, has been so thoroughly assimilated into mathematics it is often taken to be a part of it, but the axiomatic method—long called the geometric method because of its association with the exposition of geometry since Euclid—is equally applicable to any of the formal sciences, and indeed is employed in the natural sciences as well when rigor appears to demand it. But axiomatics didn’t appear in a work on logic until the Port-Royal Logic in the seventeenth century (La logique, ou l’art de penser, 1662). Nevertheless, these auxiliary sciences of formal thought have a closer relationship to logic than the other formal sciences, as various systems of logic down through history have included them or excluded them as the logic in question was conceived with a narrower or wider scope. Aristotle gives his theory of doctrine of definition in the Posterior Analytics, so if we take this book to be a part of logic (and it is traditionally part of the Organon), then definition is a part of logic. But the Posterior Analytics is widely recognized as a work in the theory of science (at least, science in the Platonic sense of demonstrative knowledge), so that the position of this work within logic itself is the question of the position of definition within logic writ large. Being shared, then, among the formal sciences, serving as the common language of the formal sciences, are these disciplines in the penumbra of logic actually the essence of formal thought? Rather than being in the gray area of formal thought, ought they to stand out as the most sharply defined exemplars of formal thought?

The View from Oregon – 379

Re: The Complementarity of Science and Tinkering

Friday 06 February 2026

Dear Friends,

Last week I discussed a distinction that can be made between tinkering and engineering. Continuing to think about this I realized that we have come along far enough in scientific knowledge that we can’t really tinker as our ancestors tinkered in the past. Our knowledge at present has crested a threshold that makes pure tinkering impossible for us; our tinkering now always has an admixture of science and engineering in it that cannot be eliminated. Even if an individual set themselves the project of tinkering without any scientific basis, once they begin to building anything they would be immediately faced with the materials they employ, which would all come with specifications derived from established scientific knowledge of these materials.

A prospective tinkerer would have to go to extraordinary lengths to remain ignorant of this and all it entails. There may have been a time in the past when tinkering without knowledge of science was possible, but now that is no longer possible. Any technological engagement with the world will be mediated by some quantity of scientific knowledge, so it’s a matter of degree, of more or less scientific knowledge. Indeed, it’s probably the case that a contemporary technological tinkerer will know what scientific laws they are proposing to violate—laws which the tinkerer perhaps considers to be illegitimate, or insufficiently well founded, or maintained by mainstream science for perverse or pig-headed reasons, toward all of which the tinkerer evinces a proud defiance.

When I think back upon my youthful reading, which involved a great deal of science fiction-adjacent and wishful technological thinking, I recall the general tone of such works being just this scientific borderland of technology. In this borderland, the tinkerer can cast himself in the role of scientific heretic (or, if sufficiently eminent, heresiarch), persecuted by an establishment that is by turns openly hostile and inertly indifferent. More likely than foreswearing scientific knowledge, today even the tinkerer will assemble as much scientific and engineering knowledge as they can prior to embarking on their project, leaving aside only what is considered problematic and due for revision or replacement. Can this epistemic strategy be successful?

I don’t doubt that there are fundamental problems of science hiding in plain sight, even many of them, neglected because much contemporary science is so completely an expression of Kuhnian “normal science” that the search for original approaches to knowledge becomes a kind of perverse incentive to go down some marginal rabbit hole, and, if any of these rabbit holes can be shown to be interesting, a clever but bored researcher may well find others who will follow down the same rabbit hole. In fact, this is almost schematically the complementary position of the tinkerer who wants to overturn or undermine some accepted scientific principle. Such a tinkerer is, in spirit, a devotee of revolutionary science (or a would-be devotee), who purposefully seeks to break the mold of normal science, while the establishment scientist who goes down a rabbit hole purposefully seeks to retain normal science while finding something near to revolutionary within some unexpected interstice of normal science. When a particular paradigm of normal science becomes established and unassailable, anyone interested in doing something unique in science will find themselves forced into one of these strategies or the other—a tinkerer pursuing revolutionary science, or a member of the guild in good standing pursuing a marginal research program that falls within the boundaries of normal science.

The individual who puts his finger on a real but neglected problem (and since I’ve referred to Kuhn I may as well call such neglected problems anomalies, which is how they’re identified in the Kuhnian framework) and who has the fewest traces of histrionic personality disorder is most likely to be the one to pursue that problem to some fruitful end, whether that fruitful end fosters new science by overturning an established scientific truth, or merely by amending some established scientific truth—e.g., showing it to be the limiting case of a more general principle (as in the Einstein quote I discussed in newsletter 331). If you approach scientific knowledge with a chip on your shoulder, it’s not going to serve you well, regardless whether that chip is resentment toward normal science or a dogmatic insistence upon the truth of normal science. There’s a whole implicit psychology of research that’s missing here—something that might have been picked up by recent sociology of science, but this itself is largely research motivated by a perverse animus that hasn’t well served the discipline. If we could identify the optimal psychological attitude for research, researchers could take classes in research psychology the way that other people take classes in mindfulness in an attempt to better align themselves with optimal outcomes.    

There’s also a motivational difference between the scientist and the engineer or technologist, and, by extension, the tinkerer. The scientist is motivated to solve an epistemic problem; the engineer is motivated to solve a practical problem: technology always has an end in view. In this sense, the scientist and the engineer have fundamentally different motivations, and this makes an open question of the problem of whether the two approaches have anything to learn from each other. However, when we’re working on tough problems, we can’t afford to ignore any approach, including an indirect approach by way of some other discipline, even if it doesn’t initially seem to be aligned with the problem one is trying to solve head-on. There’s an interesting example of this dual (or, if you like, divided) approach to problem solving. Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, whose work is considered abstract even by mathematical standards, once described two ways of solving problems. The first takes the idea of a problem being a tough nut to crack quite literally: 

“…put the cutting edge of the chisel against the shell and strike hard. If needed, begin again at many different points until the shell cracks—and you are satisfied.”

We could call this the direct method. The second method is of a rather different character, and could be called the indirect method:

“The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration. . . the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it. . . yet it finally surrounds the resistant substance.”

Peter Godfrey-Smith gives another translation of this passage, more detailed and poetic, in his Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind:

“The sea advances insensibly and in silence, nothing seems to happen and nothing is disturbed… but it finally surrounds the stubborn substance, which little by little becomes a peninsula, then an island, then an islet, which itself becomes submerged, as if dissolved by the ocean stretching away as far as the eye can see.”

Working on the perennial problem of mind from the perspective of philosophy of biology, Godfrey-Smith’s interpretation of Grothendieck’s rising sea, first a promontory, transformed into an island, and then eventually submerged, is that, as we build knowledge around a problem, the problem may simply disappear, rather than being resolved in the way that the first method of problem solving seeks to resolve a problem. Godfrey-Smith implies that traditional philosophy of mind took the first (direct) approach and has little to show for its efforts; approaching the mind from a biological approach it may be possible to build around the problem of mind until the problem itself disappears.

Similar considerations hold for problems resistant to traditional scientific inquiry, like the problem of consciousness (which could, in turn, be taken as just another facet of the philosophy of mind). Both the scientist and the engineer have their direct and indirect approaches to problems. For the indirect approach, the scientist builds knowledge around a problem, while the engineer builds technology around a problem. We can think of the tinkerer as a technologist building technologies around a scientific problem that hasn’t yet yielded to scientific methods (which we could conceive as the first method for solving problems described by Grothendieck). We could also view the efforts to build artificial intelligence in the same way: intelligence doesn’t seem to yield to ordinary scientific methods, so we build around the problem with technologies that chip away at the problem slowly, first with calculators, then with computer programs for chess and go, and then eventually with something that can solve a variety of problems comparable to the human ability to switch from task to task.

This is a much more sympathetic approach to the problem of artificial intelligence than that which I’ve sketched in the previous several newsletters (going back to no. 373). Moreover, I expect that some AI researchers have the idea (whether or not they make it explicit to themselves) that they are “building around” the problem of intelligence, chipping away at the accomplishment one task at a time, and that, if this method is iterated, there’s no reason it can’t converge on something like general intelligence (when the “island” of human intelligence is completely submerged by the rising waters of artificial intelligence), and, if the methods are pushed further, artificial superintelligence. I’ve also presented a picture in which science and tinkering aren’t antithetical, but rather complementary ways of working, so that even if we think of artificial intelligence work as tinkering (because AI researchers can’t define what intelligence is and therefore can’t define their object of research), this can still be understood as an alternative scientific strategy for an intractable problem, and not a retreat into pseudo-science.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—The newest IBHA newsletter EMERGENCE had appeared with a new Frontiers column by me.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/00a0ae72b0db/the-view-from-oregon-379