In a podcast interview with Kara Swisher, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, talked about naming their large language model (LLM) GPT-4 using a combination of “letters plus a number” to avoid people from anthropomorphizing the AI. This has not stopped other AI companies from giving their creations human names. Naming aside, it is almost impossible to avoid using human terms to describe AI. The use of the word “agentic”, with quotation marks, points to how the development of AI is butting up against our current vocabulary. We use words that are conventionally reserved for human minds. When chatbots take time to respond to prompts, it is difficult not to label that processing of information as some form of “thinking”. When a chatbot is able to process our prompt in the way that we intended, it makes it feel like it “understands” what we are communicating. The leading issues around AI similarly use human terminology. “Hallucination” occurs when a chatbot confidently provides a response that is completely made up. A huge area of AI research is dedicated to the “alignment” problem, which according to Wikipedia, “aims to steer AI systems towards humans’ intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles.” To the uninformed, this sounds very much like civic and moral education for students.

Humans tend toward anthropomorphism. We explain things for human understanding and often anthropomorphism helps to communicate abstract ideas. Nature documentary hosts would give names to every individual in a pride of lions and lionesses, describe their fights as familial or tribal feuds, and dramatize the animals’ lives from a human perspective. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith uses the term “invisible hand” to describe how self-interest can lead to beneficial social outcomes. Researchers have found that anthropomorphic language can help us learn and remember what we have learned. As AIs exhibit increasingly human-like capabilities, it will be a challenge for people to not anthropomorphize them because we will use human-analogous words to describe them.

If we are not careful in delineating AI, which is ultimately a set of mathematical operations, from its human-like characteristics, we may become more accepting of using it for other purposes. One particularly tricky area is the use of AI as relational agents. The former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy called loneliness a public health “epidemic”, this view is echoed by many. A 2019 survey by Cigna, a health insurer, found that 61 percent of Americans report feeling lonely. It is not unimaginable for people to think that conversational AI can help relieve loneliness, which the US CDC reports is linked to serious health conditions in older adults. If there is demand for such services and money to be made, businesses will meet that demand, especially since most cutting-edge AI research is conducted by commercial enterprises. In fact, there are already similar situations occurring. In Japan, owners of the Sony Aibo robot dog are known to conduct funerals for their robot companions. While the robot dogs are definitely not alive, they have touched the lives of their owners in a real way. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle reported on how a Canadian man created a chatbot modeled after his dead fiancé to help with his grief. If chatbots were to make it easier for people to feel less lonely, would it lower the effort that people put into forging real relationships with actual full human beings, which may not be as acquiescent as their artificial companions? How would human society evolve in those circumstances? As technology has been often used as a wedge to divide society, would AI drive us further apart?

Besides the more overt issues that come with anthropomorphizing AI, there may able be less perceptible changes that occur beneath our noses. Machines are tools that humans use to multiply and extend our own physical and mental efforts. Until now, the user interface between humans and machines was distinct from human communication. We turn dials and knobs, flick switches, and push buttons to operate physical machines. We drag a mouse, type into a screen, and use programming languages to get computers to do our bidding. Now, we use natural language to communicate with chatbots. For the first time in history, the medium in which we interact with a machine is the same as that of cultural communication. We may eventually come to a point where most natural language communication takes place not between humans, but with a machine. How might that change language over time? How would that change the way that humans interact with one another? In a TED talk by Greg Brockman, President of OpenAI, he joked about saying “please” to ChatGPT, adding that it is “always good to be polite.” However, the fact is that machines do not have feelings — do we dispense with courtesies in our communication with AI? If we continue to say “please” and “thank you”, are we unwittingly and subconsciously anthropomorphizing AI?

Perhaps we need to expand our vocabulary to distinguish between human and AI behavior. Instead of using quotation marks, perhaps we could add a prefix that suggests the simulated nature of the observed behavior: sim-thinking, sim-understanding, sim-intentions. It does not quite roll off the tongue, but it may help us be more intentional in our descriptions. In response to an interviewer’s questions about how LLMs are “just predicting the next word”, Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in AI research, responded, “What do you need to understand about what’s being said so far in order to predict the next word accurately? And basically, you have to understand what’s being said to predict that next word, so you’re just autocomplete too.” Hinton got into AI research through cognitive science and wanted to understand the human mind. His response just goes to show how little we comprehend whatever happens in our heads. Hopefully, AI can someday help us with this. The tables might flip and we may see AI as our reflection — maybe we find out sim-thinking and thinking are not that different after all — if we survive the AI upheaval that is.

In the previous two parts of the essay, I’ve discussed how our senses and mind could limit our ability to understand the world. I will be concluding this three-part essay by turning my focus to culture. First, a working definition of culture: “The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.” This is one of the broader versions of the word, which encompasses all collective human creation (including technology) and across different geographical areas. 

No man is an island. I think it is important to state the significance of this, even though it seems plainly obvious. All of our thoughts are shaped by prior thinking conceived by someone else. For instance, when we try to communicate and manifest abstract thoughts and feelings verbally, we use words that we did not invent. When collectively aggregated, the whole of this precedent thinking is equivalent to culture. 

One approach to wrap our heads around this is structuralism, which began in the early 20th century (unsurprisingly) within the field of linguistics. Structural linguists realized that the meaning of a word is dependent on how they relate to other words in the language. Earlier, we defined the word “culture” using a string of other words. Every word is defined by other words. We can imagine language as a network of relationships between words. The implication of this is that a word has no meaning on its own, except where it fits structurally in the system. Over time, this idea became applied in other fields like anthropology and sociology, notably by figures like Claude Lévi-Strauss. Structuralism then became a “general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader system.” Structuralism, simply put, is an approach to understanding cultural “phenomena using the metaphor of language.”

The structuralist approach can be similarly applied to what we think, feel, know and understand. Coming back to the main thesis of this essay — what and how we understand is shaped and limited by culture. Several thinkers have explored this in their own ways. Zeitgeist, a German word that literally translates as “time spirit” (or less clunkily, “spirit of the time”) is a term that is commonly associated with Hegel. The term is defined as “the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.” This shows that there is an acknowledgment of how certain ideas and beliefs are bound to a specific time at least since the 1800s. Marx later built upon the idea with the bedrock concepts base and superstructure. He defined base as the economic production of society and superstructure as the non-economic aspects of society, like culture, politics, religion and media. (Do note that my definition of culture includes both base and superstructure, but we can continue for the time being.) Marx’s thesis is that products of culture (superstructure) are shaped by means of production (base). This, to some extent, was built on Hegel’s zeitgeist and explains how and why ideas and beliefs change over time. 

The two (similar) concepts that are most relevant to this essay came later. The first is episteme, coined by Michel Foucault. The second and perhaps more popularly known idea is paradigm (shift) by Thomas Kuhn. In Foucault’s book, The Order of Things, he describes episteme: “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.” In other words, Foucault claims that the episteme sets the boundaries of what can be even thought of by individuals of a culture – a sort of ‘epistemological unconscious’ of an era. Kuhn, a historian of science, described paradigm shift in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as “the successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution” and claimed that it “is the usual developmental pattern of mature science.” While Kuhn used the term purely within the scientific context, it has become more generally used over time. Examples of scientific paradigm shifts include the Copernican Revolution, Darwin’s theory of evolution and, more recently, Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Each of these shook the scientific establishment of the time and, in the case of the former, resulted in banned books and Galileo’s house imprisonment. We can see from the first two examples that society can be resistant to change, despite overwhelming evidence. This further cements the notion that ideas can sometimes be too far beyond what can be accepted by predominant culture. 

Culture shapes and, therefore, limits our understanding in a variety of ways. Culture defines who gains access to knowledge and understanding. According to UNICEF, only 49% of countries have equal access to primary education for both boys and girls. The numbers only get worse higher along the educational pathway. The gender disparity in education can be traced back to gender stereotypes and biases. Such implicit biases extend to inaccurate and unfair views of people based on their race, socioeconomic status and even their profession. They are insidiously absorbed through experience based on the social norms of our time and go undetected unless they are specifically made conscious. A form of philosophy and social sciences known as critical theory, started by the Frankfurt School in the early 1900s, aims to free human beings from prevailing forms of domination and oppression by calling attention to existing beliefs and practices. A development known as critical race theory, which seeks to examine the intersection of race and law in the USA, has recently been facing pushback in states such as Texas and Pennsylvania through book bans or restrictions within K-12 education. In this, we see a formal restriction of understanding by culture (in the form of a public institution). Further upstream in knowledge production, research deemed to be socially taboo can be severely limited. An example is the legal contradiction faced by scholars looking into the medicinal benefits of marijuana. The issue is nicely summed up by the following sentence from this article by Arit John: “marijuana is illegal because the DEA says it has no proven medical value, but researchers have to get approval from the DEA to research marijuana’s medical value.” 

Beyond such visible examples, I think it is important to emphasize that a majority of how our individual understanding is shaped by the culture we are embedded in is hidden in plain sight. It is only in retrospect that misguided views and practices may seem obvious today. Up until the 1980s in the UK, homosexuality was a mental disorder treated by electroconvulsive therapy. Homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) only in 1992. Besides comparing cultural attitudes with those from the past, they can also be identified through intersubjectivity by comparing different cultures. In Singapore, homosexual acts are considered illegal based on Section 377A of the Penal Code, an inheritance from its past as a British colony. Other former colonies like Hong Kong and Australia have since repealed the law. Culture implicitly and explicitly defines what is normal within a group or society. As stated by Marshall McLuhan in his book The Medium is the Massage, “Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns of environments elude easy perception.” This echoes a story from a speech by David Foster Wallace in which an older fish asks younger fishes about the water, to which they later respond, “What the hell is water?” Normality is invisible in our daily lives, we do not notice it because it is the ground on which we (and all of our perceptions and thoughts) stand.

Like words, culture is self-referential. Culture shapes culture. This not only applies to how current culture gives rise to future culture but also operates in the reverse direction, where today’s culture can be used to look at yesterday’s culture. This reminds me of how the art critic Jerry Saltz says in this lecture that “all art is contemporary art because I’m seeing it now.” Strangely, our visions of the future and our recollection of the past are and can only be done through the filter of the present moment. To repurpose a famous quote on McLuhan by his friend John Culkin — culture shapes the understanding of individuals, and individuals go on to shape culture. It is our collective human enterprise. Talks about culture often lead to the distinction between nature and culture, which distinguishes what is of/by human beings. Funny thing is, the nature-culture discourse is itself facilitated through culture. It seems, therefore, that all understanding is filtered through culture.

As I wrap up, I would like to address some issues that have increasingly become noticeable while writing this essay. First, I have rather simplistically equated knowing and understanding when they are differentiable mental processes. Second, there seem to be different flavors of understanding, which can be mostly grouped into two categories: objective and subjective. The physical sciences fall into the former, while the humanities and social sciences seem to fall into the latter. The issue here is that interpretation seems to play very different roles in either. For objective questioning (e.g. why does an apple fall toward the earth?), there is usually a convergence towards a single theory, whereas, for subjective questioning (e.g. why do people generally think that babies are cute?), there is a divergence in different approaches to understanding a single issue (sometimes even opposing viewpoints within an approach), none of which is definitive in explaining a phenomenon. Third and finally, how much of our understanding is motivated by our perspective and how much of our perspective is derived from understanding? Perhaps I will attempt these questions in future essays.

For the second part of this essay, I will be looking at the limitations of the mind in facilitating the processes of knowing and understanding. To narrow the scope of this part, I will be limiting the discussion to mental processes at the individual level and how our minds process and extend information. That said, this essay can only visit these topics in a cursory manner and some of them will be explored in greater detail in future essays. Aspects of the mind that will be considered are its relationship to senses, conscious mental phenomenon (like rationality and more broadly cognition), and less conscious ones (like subjectivity).

As mentioned in part one of this essay, the senses are the connection between the outer world and inner experience. Without such inputs, there are no stimuli for our minds to process. If the mind was a food processor, the senses are akin to the opening at the top of the machine, allowing food to be put into the processor chamber, where the magic happens. Without the opening, the food processor is as good as a collection of metal and plastic in a sealed vitrine and rid of their functional purpose, almost like the objects in works of art by Joseph Beuys or Jeff Koons. Similarly, the mind will not be able to work its magic without information provided by the senses. Consequently, the ability of the mind in processing and creating mental representations is limited by the modality of our sensory experiences. If we were to try to imagine a rainforest in our mind, we would likely visualize trees and animals or perhaps recall the sounds of insects and streams. However, we will not be able to mentally recreate it in terms of its magnetic field, which other animals may be able to. 

Rationality

One possible escape path from the limitations of sensory experience is rationality. To be rational is to make inferences and come to conclusions through reason, which is mainly an abstract process (as opposed to concrete sensory experiences). A definition of reason is to “think, understand, and form judgments logically”. Through reason, humans can identify causal relationships through observation and formulate theories to extrapolate new knowledge; this process is also known as inductive reasoning. Theories of causality are the basis of science, which has enabled us to build the modern world. However, we often make mistakes with causation. One type of error is the confusion between correlation and causation. An often-used example is the correlation between ice cream sales and homicide rate. Ice cream does not cause homicides, neither do homicides cause increased interest in the dessert. What explains this correlation likely has to do with hot weather instead. The Latin technical term for such causal fallacies is non causa pro causa (literal translation: non-cause for cause). Our thinking is riddled with fallacies — so many that there is no way that I can cover even a fraction in this essay. 

The notion of causality itself has even been called into question by the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. He pointed out that causality is not something that can be observed like the yellow color of a lemon or the barking sound made by a dog. When a moving billiard ball hits a stationary billiard ball, we may conclude that the first caused the second to move. If we examine our experience closer, we realize that we have made two observations: the first ball moving, followed by the second. However, the causal relationship connecting them is an inference imposed by our mind. Our senses can be easily fooled by magnetically controlled billiard balls that sufficiently replicate our prior experiences. In which case, our inference would be completely incorrect. Hume points out that what we usually regard as causal truths are often just conventions (also referred to as customs or habits) that have hitherto worked well. We are creatures of habit — we do not reason every single situation we are faced with — most of us would very much prefer to get on with life by relying on a set of useful assumptions. However, we have to be aware of these shortcuts that we are making. 

Most definitions of the word “reason” include the term “logic”. The most rigorous type of logic known to humans is formal logic, which is the foundation of many fields, such as mathematics, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy. Logic provides practitioners across these different fields with watertight deductive systems with which true statements can be properly inferred from prior ones. While logic is traditionally thought of as a primarily abstract and symbolic mental process, I believe that logic has a profound relationship with concrete sensory experiences. A popular form of a logical argument is syllogism (although it is antiquated and no longer used in academic logic). Here is an example: All cats are animals. Jasper is a cat. Thus, Jasper is an animal. Research has shown that people are generally more accurate at deducing logical conclusions when the problems are presented as Venn and Euler diagrams instead of words and symbols. This suggests that even for such seemingly abstract and symbolic mental tasks, our minds find visual representations more intuitive and comprehensible. It is for the same reason that humans find it so difficult to understand any dataset that has more than three variables. We are bounded by three dimensions not only physically but also mentally — at most, we can create a chart with three axes (x, y, z) but we are just not able to envision four or more dimensions. This is the same reason why we can know about a tesseract (or any higher-dimensional hypercube) but can never picture it and therefore never fully understand it. While we are on the subject of diagrams and logic — do you know that a four-circle Venn diagram does not completely show all possible sets? The closest complete representation requires spheres (3D) or ellipses (2D). Even more astonishing are the Venn diagrams for higher numbers of sets. Perhaps the comprehension of abstract logic does not require these concrete diagrams, but without them such ideas are far less understandable, especially for people who are not logicians. Reason has led us to be able to create machine learning models and scientific theories that utilize high-dimensional space but we are ultimately only able to grasp them through low-dimensional analogs, which to me suggests that complete understanding is impossible.

A fascinating development has occurred in logic in the past century — we now know through logic that there are things that cannot be known through logic. In the early 20th century, David Hilbert, a mathematician who championed a philosophy of mathematics known as formalism, proposed a solution known as Hilbert’s program that sought to address the foundational crisis of mathematics. Simply put, the program stated that mathematics can be wholly defined by itself without any internal contradictions. More generally, Hilbert was responding against the notion that there will always be limits to scientific knowledge, epitomized by the Latin maxim, “ignoramus et ignorabimus” (“we do not know and will not know”). Hilbert famously proclaimed in 1930, “Wir müssen wissen – wir werden wissen” (“We must know — we will know”). Unfortunately for Hilbert, just a day before he said that, Kurt Gödel, who was a young logician at the time, presented the first of his now-famous Incompleteness Theorems. (At the risk of sounding simplistic here,) the theorems essentially proved that Hilbert’s program (as originally stated) is impossible — neither can mathematics be completely proven, nor can it be proven to be free of contradictions. In 1936, Alan Turing (the polymath behind the Enigma machine) proved that the halting problem cannot be solved, which paved the way for the discovery of other undecidable problems in mathematics and computation. (Veritasium/ Derek Muller made a great explanatory video on this topic.)

Logic (especially the formal variant) is a specific mental tool. It has limited use in our everyday lives, where we are often faced not only with incomplete information but also questions that cannot be answered by logic alone. Most of us are not logical positivists — we believe that there are meaningful questions beyond the scope of science and logic. That is why we turn to other mental tools in an attempt to figure out the world around us.

You may have noticed that I used various metaphors to describe the relationship between the senses, the mind, and culture twice in this essay. I first compared it to a computer and later invoked the somewhat absurd analogy of a food processor. Metaphors work by drawing specific similarities between something incomprehensible and something that is generally better understood. Language is not only used literally, it is often used figuratively through figures of speech. Metaphors belong to a subcategory of figures of speech called tropes, which are “words or phrases whose contextual meaning differs from the manner or sense in which they are ordinarily used”. While tropes like analogies, metaphors, and similes are used to make certain aspects of an object or idea more relatable, they can ironically also cause us to misunderstand or overconstrue the original thing that we are trying to explain. If I were to take the earlier metaphor that I used out of context — the opening of a food processor is like the relationship between the senses and the mind — what am I really saying here? That the mind reduces sense perceptions into smaller bits? Or that senses are just passive openings to the outside world? Metaphors can easily break down by overextension beyond their intended use. This finicky aspect of metaphors was discussed by the poet Robert Frost in a 1931 talk at Amherst College, where he brought up the metaphor of comparing the universe with a machine. Later in the talk, he states that “All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it.” While metaphors can clarify a thought at a specific moment, they can never explain the idea in totality.

This substitutive or comparative approach to thinking extends beyond metaphors and related rhetorical devices. We often approximate understanding by substituting an immeasurable or directly unobservable phenomenon with an observable one that we deem is close enough. An example of this is proxies, which I explored in a previous essay. Another close cousin is mental models, which attempt to approximate the complex real-world using a simplified set of measurable data connected through theory. General examples are statistical models and scientific models; more specifically applied ones are atmospheric models, used to make meteorological predictions, economic models, which have been criticized time and again for their unreliability, and political forecasting models, which delivered two extremely historic upsets in the UK and USA in 2016. The statistician George Box said that “All models are wrong, but some are useful”, a view widely held by his forebears. Models may get us close to understanding our world but are unlikely to ever fully encompass the complexity of reality. A visual model that we use every day without s second thought is maps. As maps are 2D projections of 3D space, they will never accurately represent the earth. The Mercator projection that we are most familiar with (used on Google Maps) is egregiously inaccurate in representing relative sizes of geographical areas. This topic has been explored by many (National Geographic, Vox, and TED). In particular, some have pointed out how such misrepresentations can undermine global equity. 

Another way that the mind approximates the understanding of complexity is through heuristics. American Psychological Association (APA) defines heuristics as “rules-of-thumb that can be applied to guide decision-making based on a more limited subset of the available information.” The study of heuristics in human decision-making was developed by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman discusses many of their findings in his bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow, including various mental shortcuts that the mind takes to arrive at a satisfactory decision. One example is the availability heuristic, “that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic.” Are there more words that start with the letter “t” or have “t” as the third letter? We may be inclined to pick the former since it is difficult to recall the latter. However, a quick google search will show you that there are many more words that have “t” as the third letter (19711) as opposed to the starting letter (13919). This example shows that our understanding is limited by how our mind usually recalls ideas and objects by a specific attribute — in this case, how we remember words by their starting letters. Tversky and Kahneman’s work was inspired by earlier research done by economist and cognitive psychologist Herbert A. Simon. Simon coined the term “bounded rationality”, which is the notion that under time and mental capability constraints, humans seek a satisfactory solution rather than an optimal one that takes into account all known factors that may affect the decision. 

When faced with a complex world, our minds simplify phenomena into elements that we can understand. Kahneman states that “When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” He calls this process attribute substitution and believes that it causes people to use heuristics and other mental shortcuts. More broadly, simplification is a key pillar in the way that we currently approach our world; this attitude is known as reductionism. It is defined as an “intellectual and philosophical position that interprets a complex system as the sum of its parts.” However, in this process of reduction, holistic aspects and emergent properties are overlooked. Critics have therefore referred to this approach with the pejorative nickname “fragmentalism”. The components that comprise our understanding have gone through a translation from complexity to simplicity. It is not ridiculous to suggest that things are lost in that translation, thus impairing our understanding.

Non-rational processes

Thus far, we have mostly discussed rational (both formal and informal) and conscious mental processes that may inhibit understanding. We will now take a look at how the contrary can do the same. There are two non-rational phenomena that we can explore: intuition and emotion. 

Intuition refers to “the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.” A more colloquial definition is a “gut feeling based on experience.” While intuition is useful, most notably by the writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink, it has also been shown to create flawed understanding. Herbert Simon once stated that intuition is “nothing more and nothing less than recognition” of similar prior experience. In his research, Daniel Kahneman found that the development of intuition has three prerequisites: (1) regularity, (2) a lot of practice, and (3) immediate feedback. Based on these requirements, Kahneman believes that the intuitions of some “experts” are suspicious. This was shown by research done by psychologist James Shanteau, who identified several occupations where experienced professionals do not perform better than novices, such as stockbrokers, clinical psychologists, and court judges. In scenarios where intuition cannot be developed, it becomes merely a mental illusion. Kahneman cites a now well-known example in investing that index funds regularly outperform funds managed by highly paid specialists. Intuition can also often lead us away from correctly understanding the world. This can be demonstrated by the field of probability, which can be very counterintuitive. The Monty Hall problem is a classic example of how our intuition, no matter how apparent it seems, can fool us. To me, the term “intuitive understanding” may be an oxymoron or a misnomer because our intuitions are not understood by ourselves. One way to demonstrate understanding is through explanation. A gut feeling may compel us to act in a certain way but crucially we are not able to explain why. If we are, then it is no longer intuition and resembles rationality instead. When looked at this way, intuition is good for taking action and making quick judgments but at best only provides a starting hypothesis for actual understanding.

Some may argue that emotion does not belong in a discussion about the mind as we tend to associate the mind with thoughts and not feelings. However, we cannot deny that emotion shapes our thoughts and vice versa. Emotion can move us to seek knowledge and understanding but can similarly deter us from them. When we are anxious, we may rush to conclusions without complete understanding. Fear can cause us to accept superstitions that undermine factual understanding. Sometimes, we may refuse to understand something if it can cause us to have a fundamental shift in the way we approach the world (I touched on this in a previous essay). This attitude is summed up by the saying, “ignorance is bliss.” The relationship between emotion and understanding often extends into wider society and will be revisited in the next part of this essay when I discuss culture.

Less conscious phenomenon

There are less conscious parts of our mind that impede understanding. There seems to be an inherent structure to our mind and consciousness, which could limit our ability to understand. Historically, there have been two methods to approach this: the more philosophically-inclined phenomenology or the more empirical study of cognitive science. One idea from phenomenology is the notion of intentionality, which “refers to the notion that consciousness is always the consciousness of something.” This suggests that we cannot study consciousness directly, but through how it conceives other things. An analogy for this is the light coming out of a headlamp — I am not able to see it directly since it is strapped on my head, but I can understand its qualities (e.g. color and brightness) through the objects that it illuminates. Therefore, we may never be able to fully understand our consciousness. From cognitive science, there are concepts like biases and pattern recognition. Cognitive biases refer to “systematic pattern[s] of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment”, there is a long list of them. Biases can lead us to only seek information that confirms our prior knowledge, which can be wrong in the first place. The same information, when framed differently, can also appear to us as fundamentally distinct, which seems to reveal a glitch in our understanding. Our mind is also constantly recognizing patterns in our daily life, it is a way in which the mind incorporates new experiences with prior ones. Pattern recognition is also fundamental to essential aspects of being human, like recognizing faces, using language, and appreciating music. However, our minds can also erroneously notice patterns where there are none, a condition known as apophenia. We experience an everyday variant of this whenever we perceive a face in an otherwise faceless object. This can cause us to misunderstand reality, a dangerous example being conspiracy theories that cause people to believe in absolute nonsense.

The mind is always positioned from a subjective perspective. We will never be able to think outside of our self. Our personal experiences and temperament can lead us to very different understandings of the world. The sociologist Max Weber pointed out that “All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.” How do we determine the accuracy of our understanding when there are multiple perspectives? Given the unfeasibility of capturing every unique perspective, can we claim to understand subjective experiences? Subjectivity also suggests that there is a limit to the understanding of psychological phenomena. Many subtopics that we have discussed in this essay — senses, rationality, intuition, emotions — are ultimately internal experiences that cannot be confirmed by third-person objective observation. When someone says that they feel happy and another person says that they feel the same, would we ever know if they are experiencing identical feelings? 

Similar to how our senses are limited, our minds likely have constraints — we will never know what we cannot know. Our minds are a result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution to ensure survival; the ability to know and understand seems to be a nice side-effect from this perspective. As far as we can tell, human beings represent the epitome of the universe in understanding itself but it is not difficult to fathom our mental capacity as being just a point in a long continuum. While we will continue to know and understand more, we should never let hubris deceive us into thinking that our minds will be able to understand all that there is.

Writer’s note: this is part two of a three-part essay. Click here for part three.

To use the analogy of a computer, our senses are the hardware, our culture is the software and our mind is the operating system, mediating the two. From an anatomical standpoint, humans have not changed for about 200,000 years. For most people, our senses are unchanging biological facts, although we may lose our senses partially or completely due to accidents or through plain senescence. Senses form the connection between our internal and external worlds. Without the ability to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, our mind is cut off from our environment, which causes a break in the feedback loop for us to perceive our actions. Imagine the simple task of eating using a spoon without any of your senses — not only would the task be impossible to accomplish, but the premise of taking any form of action would also be completely absurd since there is no experience to begin with. This shows how fundamental our senses are to our being. 

While our senses are reliable enough for us to conduct our everyday lives, we know that they are by no means transparent communicators of objective reality. Perceptual illusions show that our senses can often be fooled. (It is important to note here that perception is not exclusively within the domain of senses but emerges from the interaction between senses and the mind.) In 2015, “the dress” made huge waves around the internet, dividing netizens into two camps (as the internet does). Half of the internet argued that the image depicted a black and blue dress while the other believed that it was white and gold. (Spoiler alert: it is the former.) In 2018, a similar meme rocked the online world. Instead of an optical illusion, it was an auditory one, known as “Yanny or Laurel”. It got the internet similarly divided. These illusions are not new, however, and are generally known as ambiguous images. The classic “rabbit-duck” illusion was published in a German humor magazine in 1892.

Our vision is the most studied among the senses, possibly due to humans’ outsized reliance on sight. This has led to quite an exhaustive list of optical illusions over the years. Josef Albers, a renowned artist-educator, published his insights on color in his seminal book Interaction of Color in 1963. His theories are inspired by Gestalt psychology while he was at the now-legendary Bauhaus. When I first read it in art school in 2013, I was struck by how timeless it was. Within the book, Albers discussed how color “is almost never seen as it really is” and that “color deceives continually.” Through visual examples, he shows the phenomenon of simultaneous contrast, in which an identical color is perceived as different when placed within different colored backgrounds. Besides color and tone, our eyes can also misperceive relative sizes; examples of this include the Ebbinghaus illusion and Shepard tables. 

Besides perceptual effects of ambiguity and relativity, our perception can also be altered. A few years ago, I tried a miracle berry, which is a fruit that contains the taste modifier miraculin. Eating this berry causes sour foods to taste sweet. Hallucinogens contain psychoactive compounds that cause people to have perceptions in the absence of real external stimuli (i.e. see objects that do not actually exist). Such perceptual alterations may also be a result of illness or physiological processes and responses. Hallucination is a known symptom of Parkinson’s disease and can also be experienced by people right before falling asleep, a phenomenon known as hypnagogia. Research has also shown that our perception of time can change when we experience danger, possibly due to the adrenaline rush caused by the fight-or-flight response. In popular culture, this is sometimes called the slow-mo effect (a metaphor borrowed from video editing).

In some scenarios, one sense can override another. I got to know about the McGurk effect when I was taking a cognitive science class at college. I encourage you to try it for yourself before you continue reading. Go to this YouTube video, click play but do not watch the video. Instead, just listen to the sound and try to identify the sound that is being spoken. (The video is about 1-minute long.) Now, play the video again. This time, listen to the sound while watching the video. You may notice that the sound seems to have conformed to the mouth shape of the person who is speaking. This is to say, the sound that we perceive has changed due to a visual inconsistency. In this case, our sight has overridden our hearing to produce a different perception of the same sound. Another instance of this is best summed up in a well-known adage among chefs, that “we eat first with our eyes”, first coined by first-century Roman gourmand Apicius. Research shows that the manner in which food is arranged visually affects our perception of flavor and can cause people to alter their food choices. Sometimes, even different aspects of the same sense can override each other. This is demonstrated by the Stroop effect, in which the name of a color like “green” is colored with another color, like red. We take much longer to name the colors of these words, as there is incongruent perceptual information.

Beyond the tendency for illusory perceptions, we know that our senses are simply unable to perceive otherwise undetectable phenomena, which can now be measured using scientific instruments. Our eyes can only observe a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our ears can perceive only frequencies between 20Hz and 20 kHz. Our sense of smell is deficient compared to dogs, whose incredible noses help humans with law enforcement and even perhaps identify COVID-19. The limitations of our senses lead us to an even bigger question — are there phenomena that we just cannot know simply because we have no way of detecting its existence?

Writer’s note: this is part one of a three-part essay. Click here for part two.

The Enlightenment and the project of modernity sought to achieve a universal understanding of the world through reason. A part of this project included theorizing the goals of various academic pursuits. In Aristotelian terms, this is known as the final cause, which Aristotle used to derive the purpose of any given object or animal. For instance, the webbed feet of a duck has the purpose of wading through water. Another term for this approach to understanding is teleology. Teleology is applied to various fields in modernity to gain clarity of how civilization should proceed. For instance, within the natural sciences, the fields of physics, chemistry and biology differ by their defined goals of inquiry. Physics is concerned with answering questions about matter, motion and energy. If all of the unsolved mysteries of physics are explained (and assuming that no other questions emerge in the field), one can say that physics has ended. To put it another way, this ultimate resolution can be called the “end of physics”. Such proclamations have been made before, not by crackpots but by well-respected experts. Albert Michelson, the first American physicist to receive the Nobel prize, stated in 1894 that within physics, “most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established” and “the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” Michelson’s claim, therefore, is that physics no longer requires additional explanatory theories and that progress in the field is limited to more precise measurements. (This claim is often misattributed to the British physicist Lord Kelvin.) 

For hundreds of years, philosophers and other intellectuals have made claims to the “end of history”, which is the concept that there is an end-point in the evolution of political, economic and social systems, which manifests itself as the ultimate form of human organization or government. Beyond this “end of history”, major changes in human systems will cease to occur. In his controversial 1989 essay “The End of History?”, Francis Fukuyama claimed that the combination of liberal democracy and market economy seems to be the final form of human organization. He based this theory on the fall of fascism and communism in World War II and the increased liberalization of the market in the USSR respectively. Almost like clockwork, the Berlin Wall fell a few months after his essay was published and the USSR dissolved two years later in 1991. In the remaining years of the 90s and up until the mid-00s, Fukuyama’s idea seems to hold. Even Slavoj Zizek said in 2014 that “in a certain sense, almost all of us were Fukuyamaists” as “most of the left, was not raising fundamental questions… They were just trying to make the existing system more just. And more efficient.” The belief in Fukuyama’s claim may have created a blindness to the effects of neoliberal policies, which contributed to the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The economist Joseph Stiglitz, responding to Fukuyama, titled a 2019 essay “The end of neoliberalism and the rebirth of history.” It is important, therefore, to be skeptical about suggestions that humanity has reached the final stage of its development. Gradual shifts that occur under our noses and unchallenged assumptions can lead to significant societal upheaval.

A related strain of inevitability is the cynical view that nothing fundamentally changes. In response to the French Revolution of 1848, the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” He is arguing that sweeping societal change only serves to cement existing injustice and inequality. The phrase rings true to many today in the US, who feel that their government only serves to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Despite being bailed out by US taxpayer money in 2008, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon got a bonus of almost $16 million in 2009. One could argue that it pales in comparison to the $27.8 million that he received in 2007 but it leaves a bad taste, especially for the millions of people who lost their jobs or their homes. However, in the book Factfulness by the physician and statistician Hans Rosling, the world as a whole has improved immensely over the past century. Some of these improvements include a decline in child labor, nuclear weapons and smallpox. 

For some, the fact that the world is improving causes them to believe that there is a natural course that history takes. This position may be best represented by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who (citing the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker) said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” These words inspire hope, but they may also cause people to feel that there is a natural tendency toward universal human progress that is separate from individual or collective agency. A similar form of optimism was criticized by Voltaire in his satirical novel Candide, whose main character became unable to reconcile the suffering that he observed in the world with the Leibnizian optimism that we are living in the “best of all possible worlds.” 

Our discussion leads us back to the intellectual heavyweight who shaped current thought around the “end of history” — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For Hegel, “World history… represents the development of the spirit’s consciousness of its own freedom and of the consequent realization of this freedom.” This means that he believed that freedom is an essential quality of humanity and that sociocultural evolution will always proceed in a way that increases freedom for all people. Similar to Karr, Hegel was affected by the events of the French Revolution but had an almost opposite interpretation. For Hegel, Napoleon’s conquest of much of Europe was one of many world-historical events that allowed humanity to get closer to the final stage of history. Today, some popular interpretations of Hegel view his work on the philosophy of history as a form of inevitable progress, whereas others claim that agency is central in his work. What is apparent to me is how certain groups of people adopt a somewhat Hegelian explanatory approach to justify certain supposed “inevitabilities”. For instance, the rise of automation and its replacement of human labor is increasingly assumed as inevitable. Why is that the case? To me, this so-called inevitability can be explained by the Friedman doctrine that a company’s only goal is to increase shareholder value. Costs are reduced by cutting jobs and investing in automated production capability, which increases company productivity and ultimately enriches shareholders. Therefore, it is important to question the underlying assumptions of people who sell us their version of the future. When necessary, we have to muster the courage to imagine and actualize our own vision.

Let me start by saying that this essay will adopt a somewhat unconventional structure. I will state upfront my position on a matter and get toward that destination through a process of elimination. If that sounds like an ignorant student attempting to answer a multiple-choice question by a process of elimination because he is unsure, well yes — today, that student is me.

The topic for today is an individual’s capacity for change. This reminds me of an assignment that I did for my philosophy professor, Prof. James Yess, when we were discussing the topic of free will vs determinism. We were challenged with describing our position with six words, as a sort of homage to Hemingway’s six-word story. I wrote something along the lines of, “Freer — but not free — will exists.” My position here is that of a compatibilist, in short, I believe that individual agency can exist alongside determinism. As it relates to today’s topic, I believe that an individual should only be judged based on the things that they can reasonably change about themselves.

Let us begin by first unpacking the term “self”. We can think of the self from a first-person perspective: a physical body that can be moved by our volition and a conscious mind that thinks, imagines, and remembers, among many other mental actions. Between the false dichotomy of mind and body, we have senses that can receive and interpret external stimuli, feelings that can experience the greatest joy and deepest sadness, and beliefs that seem so deeply ingrained in ourselves that they seem like second nature. Then there are aspects of ourselves that we are often unaware of — the unconscious mind. Before we go through this laundry list to evaluate which elements of the self are more changeable, let us quickly discuss why we would consider changing ourselves in the first place.

If we lived in a world where we were the only human being, we probably did not need to change ourselves that much, with the exception of learning behaviors that prevent physical pain, increase sensorial pleasure and ensure survival by meeting our bodily needs. If we had an anger management problem in such a world, we may not be motivated to change because acting on it may not yield much negative impact. Perhaps we may hurt ourselves if we punched a rock — in which case we may change mainly to minimize pain, as mentioned earlier, but not to address the anger. Fortunately in our reality, no man is an island — we live in an interconnected society that is filled with rich social relationships, where individual acts can have social outcomes. Humans are social creatures and our relationships are very meaningful to us. Therefore, on top of the aforementioned reasons for change, we also try to prevent emotional pain and increase psychological wellness, not just on an individual level but expanded to a wider social dimension. The earlier example of an anger management issue would have more serious consequences due to the potential to harm others. The person would also be more pressured to change due to socioemotional mechanisms of guilt and shame. Many of our personal behavioral changes, therefore, can be traced to our desire to be good for our society.

Now, back to the laundry list – which of the previously stated aspects of the self are we more able to change? Alterations made to the body are commonplace in certain areas of the world and to specific groups of people. However, in general, it is something that is not easily changed. Procedures can be painful, expensive, and sometimes even endanger a person’s life. I guess this is why judging anyone based on how they look feels wrong. Next, the unconscious mind is usually out-of-reach to us unless we seek psychoanalytic intervention, which often requires professional help. It is important to note, however, that the psychoanalytic definition of the unconscious is still debated to this day. If we take the cognitive definition of the unconscious and extend it to the realm of implicit cognitive biases and heuristics (as pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky), we can counteract some of these automatic processes through conscious compensation. Therefore, we find ourselves in the realm of conscious thought and feeling, which includes sense perception, emotion (a.k.a. affect), cognition, and belief. By definition, we are aware of our consciousness, which makes it the most actively changeable aspect of our self relative to the previous two (i.e. body and unconscious).

We are aware of our sense perceptions, but they are generally unchanged by conscious thought. We can, however, compensate for perceptual illusions by being aware of them. Emotions, especially intense ones like anger and grief, can sometimes be felt viscerally, but they can be regulated through thought. Our emotions often come from our interpretation of certain events that occur in our life. The area of practical philosophy, which aims to aid people in living “wiser, more reflective lives,” has been a central part of philosophers’ work since Laozi and Socrates and likely predates them. Hence, even if we feel strongly about something that happened to us, we are able to respond in a measured way, sometimes by reframing the experience in different ways.

Cognition refers to the mental activities involved in acquiring knowledge and understanding. It can be strengthened through various thinking tools and approaches that we learn and then employ to solve problems and make decisions. It is probably one of the most changeable parts of our mind, as seen from the huge investments that societies around the world put into educating people, especially the young, to read, write and do arithmetic. Based on the World Bank’s figures, we spent around 4.53% of global GDP, equivalent to US$3.68 trillion ($3,682,348,740,000), on education in 2017. Generally speaking, someone who has a better understanding of how the world works should be able to behave in a way that benefits themselves and their society. They may also be in a position that helps them understand complex, strategic, and long-term decisions that require trade-offs, compromises, and short-term sacrifices. Therefore, learning — specifically the acquisition of knowledge and skills — remains to be a powerful force for both personal improvement and social mobility.

Writer’s note: I realized that this topic cannot be adequately discussed in a single 1000-word essay. Click here for part 2.

Since Nietzsche proclaimed in 1882 that “God is Dead”, we have seen the demise of Christianity and theism in general, especially within the study of philosophy. The de facto worldview currently is determinism, a philosophy built on the principle that to each effect there is always a cause. Determinism is further nestled within a naturalistic, materialistic reality that states that every single phenomenon in the world is attributed to the interaction of matter, made of atoms and molecules. Within the metaphysical context of materialist determinism, there are various views held by different philosophers, yielding separate and distinct worldviews. Generally, these worldviews belong to two groups, the incompatibilists and the compatibilists. Incompatibilists believe that free will is incoherent with determinism, and compatibilists believe the opposite, that they are not mutually exclusive. This logically follows that incompatibilists like Honderich who believe that an indeterminate self is false, that our actions are caused solely by our environment and dispositions and that an unfixed future cannot occur within determinism.

Ever since religion has been relinquished from a majority of our lives, philosophers have been trying to provide answers to the perpetual question of man’s yearning for meaning and purpose in a universe which is neither sentient nor alive. Among those who take the question sincerely, some of the more uplifting ones come from the existentialists and determinists. In general, they have stated that although life itself has no objective value, subjective value can exist. This subjective value is not found but created. The death of God requires man to take the empty driver’s seat. Instead of God’s will, we now purpose our own wills and pursue them. Man, once a creature, is now a creator. How apt is the description “Homo Faber” in our current paradigm. However, the hard incompatibilist view that Honderich and his colleagues have promoted threatens this outlook. Their belief that there is a fixed future undermines the creative potential that humans have for our future. Instead of owning these wills and pursuits, the hard incompatibilist would strike down their hopes and tell them that they have no part to play in the creation and fulfilment of their desires. The hard incompatibilist would wrongly edify that these are merely illusory, that the person has no part to play in the direction of her life and that her person is merely a combination of dispositions and environmental factors. Herein lies the space of uncertainty, which I term “breathing room”. The breathing room postulates that there is space for man to be a part of the causal process within a deterministic framework. (Within this essay the terms breathing room and space will be used interchangeably.) The exploration of this space seeks to provide an alternate narrative to the claims of hard incompatibilism through uncertainty that man has control of. It expounds a worldview that better resembles the everyday experiences of man. The gap will first be explored within the determinism and then neurology. A hypothesis behind the workings of the gap, and how it ultimately affects human meaning and purpose will be discussed.

The hard incompatibilist claim that the future is fixed is, to me, a very distant conclusion made from the deterministic basis. First, it seems apparent to me that by projecting the future from their deterministic worldview, hard incompatibilists are going beyond the boundary and putting themselves in a position of unnecessary speculation. Determinism shines most through a reflection in retrospect of events and occurrences, but it is meaningless to see its relevance beyond the present. Although it may be true that the understanding of our past can lead to a more mindful approach to the future, this is incoherent to the worldview of the hard incompatibilist. Hard incompatibilists postulate that the future is fixed but cannot be known. Due to our lack of knowledge of this future, we would live in exactly the same way as we do if there are possibilities of multiple futures. To adopt this worldview is to believe that all of our choices are illusory and that there is no way at all that man can have any level of control over their lives. The problem about this perspective though is that, like religion,  it cannot be disproven. To a large extent, it is merely a gross extrapolation of the deterministic worldview. Clearly, if the view that the future is fixed is by itself speculative, how definite is the following statement that our choices or life-hopes, coined by Pereboom, are illusory? Since our future can never be known to us, it is therefore meaningless for us to postulate perspectives that would restrict our outlook, especially ones that could lead to an attitude of passivity in life. The breathing room therefore exists in this not yet determinate space between past and future, where our choices are made and our actions decided upon.

It seems logical that we would have no control at all over our thoughts and subsequent actions if they stem from our dispositions and environmental causes. However, that claim has to be examined further. To enter our decision-making process, environmental factors have to be within the brain network. Therefore, the external factors are first sensed as stimuli that are processed into functional subconscious or conscious information. If a bat is swung quickly towards us, the brain responds by interpreting the fast-moving object as “danger”. Within the brain network therefore exists mental parallels or concepts of  “bat”, “speed” and “danger”. Instead, if it was a soft foam tube swung towards us by a child, concepts evoked within the brain could be “fun”, “squishy” and “safe”. Obviously, within a materialistic context, these mental parallels are physical phenomena most possibly occurring as neurons part of a larger brain neural circuit. Our dispositions are more tricky because they can be confused as both an internal or external factor. A view purporting that it is an external factor presupposes a self that is separate from our dispositions. This view contradicts the general deterministic view that our self emerges solely out of the activities of our brain. As put succinctly by Daniel Dennett, our consciousness arises from the intricate “ratcheting” of our brain. Hence, it seems logical that our dispositions are subconscious internal factors that, when exposed to external factors, come together to cause an action. However, a component that does not defy deterministic limits can be introduced to this system and form part of causal determination. This component could be the thoughts of the conscious self. The belief that our subconscious greatly shapes our eventual actions does not inherently deny the effects our conscious thoughts have in the formation of choices and actions. Determinists like the Stoics and Descartes maintain that we are selves distinct from our dispositions. Pereboom also maintains that nothing in determinism rules out the view that a self can select principles of action and initiate action on their basis independently of the influence of her dispositions and environment. These views validate the possible existence of the breathing room, that choice can exist within a deterministic framework, without even the introduction of compatibilist notions. Instead of Pereboom’s suggestion that a self can initiate action independently, I believe that consciousness, dispositions and environments are all part of a codependent neural system from which decisions are made. This view of the human causal chain empowers people to be active in their decision-making process and not leave all of their choices completely to impulse and chance. Not only is this model of causal determination more familiar to the common man, but it can also be observed from the beliefs of several philosophers. John Dewey, for example, stated that we do not learn from experience, but from the reflection of experience. The reflection process is a conscious phenomenon which enriches our brain’s reward centers and stimulates the learning process, calibrating the ratchets of our brain with the lessons learnt. 

In Man Against Darkness, Stace states that a man’s actions are as much events in the natural world as is an eclipse of the sun. Although I do generally agree with the naturalistic position, I doubt that an eclipse is a good analogy for the processes that occur within our brain. It has been said that there could be more neurons in our brain than stars in the Milky Way. That statement itself is probably enough to show how awesome the three pounds of matter in our cranium really is. The hard incompatibilist is awaiting the day when neuroscience provides all the answers to confirm their position. Currently, neuroscience has not painted us a complete picture of the brain’s workings. How the eventual findings are interpreted is crucial in the standings of current philosophical perspectives. It is therefore in this breathing room of uncertainty that allows multiple versions of determinism to coexist. For an object as intricate as the brain, I am not quite sure if scientists will ever be able to fully comprehend its vast, inherent complexities. In the face of that, scientists therefore create models that can closely represent how the brain works. These models can capture a part of the brain’s functional properties but not entirely. Astronomy is the oldest science and has been around for millennia, but astronomists still use ever-changing models to understand celestial objects and phenomena. Meteorology has been studied for close to a millennium, but until now weather forecasts can only do so much in predicting tomorrow’s weather. Although neuroscience would eventually get closer to understanding the fundamental mechanics of the brain, it might never be able to create a model of the brain that can accurately predict the outcomes of brain function. The unexpected or uncertain nature of its outcomes do not stem from randomness like the kind proposed in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but instead from a totally deterministic, dynamical system as can be seen from, for example, Chaos Theory, where dynamics are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Until the day that neuroscientists can predict to utmost certainty the entirety of brain function, which arguably would take a very long time, we will never truly understand our ability to choose and affect our own decisions. Therefore, the presence of this breathing room of choice does not conflict with current neuroscientific fact.

Thus far, only the existence of the breathing room has been argued for, but how it affects human meaning and purpose have not yet been discussed. The space enables consciousness to be a part of the choice-making process, therefore providing a certain amount of agency, though limited, to persons. This limited agency allows people to take ownership over their projects, purposes and pursuits. It was discussed earlier on how the brain has mental parallels of physical phenomenon which act as part of the entire neural circuitry. Thus far, we have established that consciousness, dispositions and the environment are on deck for causal determination. Within the brain, these concepts have to be a physically similar entity in order to interact with each other. Each of these concepts is material by nature. Within the current neuroscientific understanding, these concepts are either a distinct or group of neurons that are part of the entire brain network. Essentially, these neurons have the capacity to hold an idea or thought. Philosophers lament the loss of God in our increasingly secular societies, and how that has taken away universal morality and justice. However, to say that we have “lost” God is a misnomer. If God has never been there in the first place, how is it that we have lost her? I argue that what we have lost is the idea of God, and that the idea of God occupies an important space in our brains. Post-theism requires that man’s purpose comes from the aspirations that he has willed. Underlying dreams and aspirations are ideals and values. Without a set of ideals and values, we would not be able to create any purpose or meaning because they have to be put in context. As human beings, we tend to anthropomorphize all that we experience. Every religion therefore has human-like deities and Gods. This can be seen even now, when philosophers call the universe “unfeeling” or “apathetic”, which does not make sense because the use of such terms assumes a human nature in the object. This is equivalent to telling jokes to a rock expecting that it would listen and respond, it is false and illusory. Perhaps our biggest error is in our desire to humanize every single object and experience we encounter. We set up ideals in our brain and through religion, we idolize and consolidate these concepts. The power of the idea of God lies in its absolute perfection. Seen from this view, God is merely a human-like manifestation of the greatest of the greatest great. The loss of God therefore entails the loss of a vision of absolute perfection. However, that does not mean that the vacuum cannot be filled. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of human cognition is our ability to understand and communicate abstract ideas. Some of these ideas, like love, is instantly relatable and sometimes visceral to most even though they may not be able to put it well in words. Within our brains, these ideals are kept as pure abstract concepts, untainted by the forces of reality. Unlike Bertrand Russell, I believe that there is an authentic space that our ideals can occupy. Our ideals in the brain are neurons in the network like any other, being able to affect causal determination. Therefore, our ideals, consciousness, dispositions and environment all play a role in the determination of our lives and choices. Through the pursuit and passing on of our ideals, we can have a universal and, at the same time, unique purpose. This creates a narrative at both the grand and personal level. Each person, through communication and chosen actions, pass-on their ideals to the following generation and thus ensures that the goodness of man, and a part of them, exists for posterity. The younger generation, on the other hand, goes through a selection process of removing obsolete ideals and the strengthening of others to fit their newer contexts. Through a reversal, each person has now become a manifestation of their ideals, instead of the traditional opposite which gave rise to idols. Instead of false deities, we now have real-life heroes embodying certain sets of beliefs. 

The problem with this position is that abstract ideas might be less accessible to the uneducated masses as compared to anthropomorphized idols. For that reason, I will never downplay the relevance of religion, especially for those who are born into unfavourable circumstances without a chance for education. That said, the stand taken by this narrative is one that inherently values diversity and a wide variety of different ideals and values.

If we are the only conscious organisms in the world, we are the nervous system, the consciousness of the universe. Hitherto, we are the only beings able to appreciate the vastness of the universe within our brains. Given this powerful starting point, how can the ultimate narrative of man be that of any other species, to merely survive for a brief moment and perish? Most of us, despite this relatively young Godless context, would still aspire to do good. At the point of our death, most of us hope to leave the world a better place. As the late Steve Jobs once said, “We are here to leave a dent in the universe”. The claim is an exaggeration, but we all aspire to be able to affect others and create real positive changes in the world through our lives and actions. As Gandhi has stated, we need to start with ourselves to change the world around us. A hard incompatibilist notion denies completely the possibility of self-changing, which undermines our ultimate belief of making a difference, be it small or significant, in the lives of those who surround us. Even within a deterministic context, when people recognise this breathing room and start to take ownership of their lives they realise that they can truly influence their lives and the lives of others. This allows them to take an authentically active approach to their lives. One of the lessons that can be gleaned from the demise of theism is that no matter how great the promised benefits, once people start to doubt the truth of their belief, it will soon crumble. I think that there is a parallel between that and the illusory mode of living life promoted by several hard incompatibilists. The worst lie one could ever tell is the one told to herself. Through their actions, deeds and stories people become manifest of their ideals, causing them to spread good causes across the human network and allow their ideas to be carried on by the next generation.

In everyday situations, human beings are forced to make decisions based on a set of non-conscious beliefs and value systems. These form part of one’s intuition in dealing with immediate, urgent considerations, usually leaving the person no time to carefully make sense of the given scenario. These intuitions form a set of working principles with which we navigate our world.

One of these working principles that most would agree with is the idea that all lives have equal value. When this working principle is put to the test, however, we can easily see how some people are usually “more equal” than others. More often than not, this general principle is overridden by other non-conscious intuitions based on the specific situation faced by any individual. The more interesting observation is how these intuitions seem to be the same for most people. These complex, intuitive value systems appear simply as common sense to most, but the mechanics of it is completely invisible and yet generally universal.

We shall now turn to a classic thought experiment to test this guiding principle: the trolley problem. Suppose we have a train moving at an extremely high speed and reaching a fork and you are the train operator. Let us assume that the train tracks were not properly designed, and this fork leads to the same destination. It is up to you to decide which train track to use when the train has reached the fork. It just so happens that a fifty year old man and a baby were on either sides of the fork. Let us also assume that avoiding the choice of selecting one path is impossible, that you have to make a decision about who you would save. More often than not, most respondents to this question would choose to save the baby than the old man. If the guiding principle that “all lives have equal value” is true, statistically it should be proven through an equal number of respondents choosing between the baby and the old man. A preliminary conclusion at this point therefore, is that humans are predisposed to believing that the length of our life is related to its value. This suggests that it is more fair for someone to die if s/he has been able to live a relatively longer life. The first guiding principle has been easily thwarted by the introduction of age.

This scenario would be a serious dilemma for most ethical systems. Take for example both Kantian and Utilitarian ethics. A Kantian ethicist would argue that one has equal duty to save both lives, but it provides no answers as to which life should be saved. The Utilitarian argument is as feeble in this context; the decision of who should be saved has to be made based on weighing the pains and pleasures that result because of the choice. First, to make that analysis within a split second is impossible. Second, the analysis of pain and pleasure is so subjective that one case could easily be argued over the other, given ordinary circumstances (that both individuals have loved ones who still exist and would feel pain from their death).

From a purely economic standpoint, saving the baby is not a fiscally wise decision. Due to the intertwining, complex nature of modern civilisation, it is reasonable to argue that our lives are supported by the society at large. Most of our essentials are purchased and have been through the hands of many people before our use. Therefore, everyone is incurring a debt to society starting from the point at which they are born by being a dependent of the larger society until they become a working adult. A child is nurtured through the care of parents to become a responsible citizen who would eventually contribute to society and begin to pay off his dues slowly. The baby is and would remain a dependent for the immediate future of his/her life. The 50 year old however, assuming that s/he has led a normal, productive life, has already paid his/her dues to society and perhaps has already contributed a significant portion to the society’s well-being in general. The economic argument for saving the baby therefore, is the potential that s/he has in contributing more back to society compared to the old man, which is only a hypothetical possibility.

The conundrum of the relationship between the length and the value of lives continues in philosophy. As Epicurus has mentioned in his Letter to Menoeceus, he argued that death is not evil, but instead indifferent. Since Epicurus believed in the hedonistic thesis that the human experience boils down to pleasure and pain, much like the proposals of later Utilitarians, death is by itself a neutral occurrence since it takes away the possibilities of experiencing both pleasure and pain (Scarre, 87). Epicurus’ argument further extends to the implication that when we die does not matter, because at the point of death, we cease to be.

Feldman tries to refute Epicurus’ argument by proposing hypothetical possible worlds that one’s life could be compared to (Scarre, 91). Feldman argues through the analogy of the dead ploughboy the other better lives he could have led. His case falls apart easily because for every better scenario that can be imagined, a worse outcome can also be fabricated.

In Death, Shelly Kagan argues that death is bad through the deprivation account, which is essentially similar to arguments made by Feldman. He later concludes by saying that puzzles to that question remain. Before diving too deeply into the argument about the evil of death, one can clearly observe that one of the causes for all these debates is how humans are intuitively predisposed to believing that a longer life is an inherent good.

However, these do not fully explain our intuitions to choose to save the baby because both individuals have the potential to live long, fruitful lives. Even if we take into account this assumption however, the same intuitions apply: the baby would tend to be saved significantly more than the old man.

Now assume that you, the train operator can look into the future and see the lives of these two individuals. Suppose the child and the old man both have an equal amount of time left living in the world. This additional information shifts the scale, but not significantly. It is almost as if we see our lives as a time bomb, with a set-off time of the average life expectancy at any given moment. The longer the time we have left, the more valuable the life of an individual.

However, when more details are added to the situation, the balance tips. Suppose the baby and old man each have ten years more to live, but the baby died young due to a painful disease whereas the old man dies healthy in his sleep. This additional information causes us to want to save the old man more than the baby. Again, suppose the baby does not grow up to lead a fruitful life, for example s/he suffers a depressing illness throughout his/her life or mixed with wrong company earlier in his life and wastes his entire life as a criminal, whereas the old man goes on to lead a relatively shorter but happy period of time. The same intuitions to save the old man apply.

Arguably, this adds another dimension in this procession of our intuition. These series of intuition tests start to give form to our intangible, complicated intuitions. Our intuition seems to work like a non-conscious operational flow chart, driven by our values and priorities at any given moment. It accepts exceptions to rules and is extremely flexible at dealing with complex situations, and amazingly all without deliberate, rational thought. At this point, a simplification of our general disposition is that humans value the potential of lives for pleasure. Death terminates this potential, and therefore is seen as an evil.

Although our intuitions give us guiding principles which are very useful in everyday life, we should not stop challenging them through rational thought. Bringing these intuitions to light is important for us to take action. These intuition tests reveal the irrational but generally universal traits of human intuition. When we know our tendencies toward certain choices, we can make better assessment and judgment about whether they are truly good decisions. Although humans have the ability to rationalise and make good and deliberate decisions, we have to realise that much of our lives occur through intuitive, automatic reaction. The analysis of intuition could point toward a direction for more robust ethical systems. By understanding our intuitions, we can also make better sense of our impulses and direct more meaningful lives for ourselves.

Works Cited

Scarre, Geoffrey. Death. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Print.

Kagan, Shelly. Death. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Print.