I'm not a philosopher and am mostly willing to accept this criticism in good humor. The one thing I will say in my defense, however, is that there is a kind of unity to bad arguments, as much as there is to sound thinking. Bad arguments have a family resemblance. And therefore, it shouldn't surprise us to see similar argumentative moves coming up frequently against them. They can often be defeated with a similar set of tools.
Bad arguments seem to flourish best -- like cave salamanders -- in the most extreme environments. They are particularly plentiful at the outer edges of what our consciousness is able to conceive.
This makes sense, because it is very often -- if not universally and by definition -- the case that we are only able to reason about things at the borderlines of conceivability by using arguments, examples, and ideas drawn from the realm of the conceivable (since what else would we have?). As a character -- an old hermit-- says toward the beginning of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: "A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with."
Therefore, it seems I may overuse the "sawing off the branch"-style argument, but it's partly because it so often works against exactly the type of pseudo-ponderings that proliferate at the outer reaches of our capacity to reason. Take, for example, human attempts to think about the possibility of our own annihilation as a species. It's very difficult to think rationally about our own non-existence, since all the concepts and images we have to think with -- as well as our act of thinking itself -- depend on the fact of our existence.
Example. The New York Times ran a very annoying op-ed recently with the headline, "Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?" We learn that yes, in the author's view, it would be, but it might also be a good thing too. The argument for this position is what you might anticipate: humans harm the environment and animals, and are likely to keep doing so to a horrifying degree for the foreseeable future; in effect, we are bad news.
It is certainly true that we humans behave with ghastly and manifest injustice to our fellow species. Here's the problem though. The scale according to which it is measured unjust, however, is that of our human values. It is because we as a species have concepts of justice and compassion that we are able to judge our own actions harshly. To damn ourselves to annihilation, using the court of our own values, would truly be to saw off the branch on which that very condemnation is sitting.
As the author of the piece acknowledges, the argument he is making occurs "within the human practice of philosophy" to start with. He notes as well that the "cruelty" we perceive in animal behavior in the wild -- red in tooth and claw, etc. -- is cruel only by the standards of human beings, not by those of the animals engaged in hunting, stalking, and eating one another.
Why wouldn't he proceed one step further, then, and note that the "cruelty" of human behavior toward animals is likewise judged cruel according to our own, human standards? We need humanity and its system of values in order to hold our own species accountable for its moral failings.
There's a passage I'm fond of quoting from Zola's Germinal because it speaks so well to a certain type of perennial self-defeating radicalism one encounters on the Left, especially among environmentalists. The anarchist Souvarine declares: "if justice was not possible with man, then man must disappear." [Ellis trans.] But here's the self-defeating part: exactly whose justice is it, according to which Souvarine would sacrifice us, if it is not "man's" -- meaning humanity's?
Mao Zedong was willing to approximate something like this view as well. In a speech that has been interpreted as an effort to dare his Soviet colleagues into a more radical stance, and to establish himself for negotiating purposes as the globe's new loose cannon, he once took exception to the argument that nuclear war must be ruled out of the question because it would lead to human extinction. Not so, argued Mao. Half the world might be dead after a nuclear holocaust, he said. But "Imperialism would be gone, and a world of socialism would remain."
What could it possibly mean to achieve a world of "socialism," and the end of conquest and domination, if it entails the annihilation of whole societies along the way -- surely the ultimate and worst form of "imperialism" of which human beings are capable?
When Albert Camus spent much of the end of his great essay, "Neither Victims or Executioners," arguing against the position that we should welcome a final world war that would pit socialism against capitalism, he was not erecting a straw-man. He was taking issue with the de rigueur radical pose of many of his contemporaries. What we might call the apocalyptic radicalism that has its analogue today among the extreme anti-humanist fringe of the green movement.
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There seems to be a certain apocalyptic mood in the air, though, and not just in the pages of the New York Times. The political crisis of Trumpism has brought with it a host of end-times speculations, and with them the usual bad arguments in their train.
Sharing to some extent in this Zeitgeist, I was drawn recently to a podcast on the subject of "The End of the World." The series promised to be a serious, "scientific" look at a number of possible scenarios for how humanity might manage to destroy itself in the next few years. I was intrigued. I figured I would enjoy this, in a bracing, at-least-I'm-listening-from-the-comfort-of-my-own-kitchen kind of way.
Instead, this podcast annoyed me -- to borrow a phrase from Kingsley Amis -- in more ways than I'd have thought possible.
Approaching a conversation about the end of the world, there are certain things you expect to hear. You anticipate a somber discussion about the security weaknesses in our existing nuclear infrastructure, say, or the possibility of future great power conflicts that involve atomic weapons. You think there will be an episode, surely, about the dangers of catastrophic climate change, if nothing else. And so forth.
No. Instead, we learn than the great "existential threats" -- and the podcast here follows closely the arguments of one Nick Bostrom -- are as follows... the creation of a malevolent and all-powerful machine superintelligence, the possibility that we will accidentally end the universe in a high-energy particle accelerator (I don't know how this would work exactly, but I vaguely imagine it's like "crossing the streams" in Ghostbusters), and out-of-control swarms of nanotechnology that will develop minds and a predatory hive culture of their own.
In one particularly weak episode -- the particle accelerator one -- it is gradually revealed that every physicist who's ever inquired into the matter has concluded that there's no danger of this happening -- but our podcaster goes on to assert that, because of the fundamental principle of uncertainty at the heart of quantum mechanics, there's still a chance -- however slight-- that we could accidentally end the universe. Which is true in the same sense that gravity could reverse polarity tomorrow, or the Earth could cease to spin, that is, true, in the sense that anything is "possible," in the weakest sense of the word. None of which would merit a podcast episode if we were talking about something other than a field -- participle physics -- that the general public does not understand and has invested with an aura of awesome mystery.
The larger framework of the series' argument was perhaps even worse than its specific examples of "existential threats," however. The premise of the show depends on the so-called Fermi paradox, which wishes to assert that there's something astounding in the fact that our planet has not yet been contacted by an extraterrestrial civilization -- at least to our best knowledge.
Why ought this to surprise us? Many of us would, after all, think intuitively that the odds are rather better than worse that we will never meet aliens, even if they do exist in some far corner of the universe, due to the vast, imponderable distances separating us.
Well, the argument goes, aliens ought to have reached us now because presumably, given the innumerable alien civilizations that are likely to exist in such an enormous universe, surely some of them -- or at least one -- have been around for a lot longer than we have. And surely such an alien civilization has -- given their longevity -- had time to develop the advanced technologies needed to reach us.
There are many problems here. I won't bother listing most of them, however, because they all seem trivial compared to the chief overarching objection to this supposed "paradox": namely, that it assumes the particular direction that "technology" has taken in the last two hundred years among a small number of organic hominids on earth -- and which may not do us ultimate good, however much it has plainly improved the human prospect thus far, in terms of caloric intake and life expectancy -- is some kind of inevitable telos that other life-forms would follow, if given enough time.
And admittedly, the podcast grapples with the thought that alien civilizations might be "very different from ours." Like, they might enjoy leisure more than they do space travel, etc. The podcast does not, however, probe just how profound those differences are likely to be (if any "alien civilizations" exist in the first place).
Life on planet Earth happens to be based on amino acids, etc., and to have led to the gradual development of animal life, humans, conscious intelligence, and all the rest, because these are the forms of life which Earth could support. This has led among humans to millennia of wonder and metaphysical speculation about how unlikely this seems -- the modern version of this being the cosmological "fine-tuning" argument deployed by contemporary Christian apologists.
All of which is of course setting the cart before the horse. We keep marveling at the mystery of the fact that we should have found ourselves surrounded by conditions that suit us so well -- missing the crucial fact that it was we who had to adapt ourselves to the conditions in which we were located, not the other way around.
As John Davidson, that great Scottish 19th century poet once put it, speaking in the personified voice of the life principle itself: And everywhere I found myself at home,[...]/ in whatever shape of mollusc or of ape/ I always went according to the laws. This is the principle of Darwinian natural selection. It does not have a plan. It does not reach a goal. It simply illustrates the consequences that could follow from an indisputable -- nearly tautological premise: i.e., that life-forms suited to survival do in fact survive; while those that are not perish. Living things find ways to adapt to the conditions in which they find themselves -- because what other choice is there?
The rub of this is that life on other planets and worlds, if it exists at all, could well be based around entirely different molecules, exhibit utterly different properties, and do things that were unintelligible to us. The notion that, given enough time, they will all be working their way up to 1960s American technological aspirations is maddeningly self-satisfied.
My friend Seanan -- the same one who accused me above of overplaying certain philosophical tricks -- also pointed out to me when I was ranting about this podcast the other day that there's a term for my objection: the anthropic principle. And our "End of the World" podcaster does even acknowledge the existence of the anthropic principle. What he doesn't appreciate is how much it torpedoes the whole rest of the podcast's argument.
One wants, after all, to just embarrassedly wave aside the lousy Fermi paradox argument so we can get along with the rest of the show (at this point, after all, one is still expecting that the podcast will eventually get around to the dangers of the nuclear arsenal, etc., and other topics of real concern). But it turns out that all that comes later in the series depends critically on swallowing this one argument, on which we are presently gagging.
Because, you see, the show's proposed answer to the Fermi "paradox" is something called the "great filter." If none of the other technologically "advanced" civilizations have reached our planet, the argument runs, it may be because they all died out. And they may all have died out because technology -- in every society in which it reaches a certain stage of development -- leads to mass destruction and mass extinction (through a super-intelligence, killer nano-bots, particle collisions, and the rest of our sci-fi terrors).
Once again, the ghost of teleology is hanging over us. Why would "technology" always follow some singular path, wherever it develops in the world? Why would it look and behave anything like the technology of our twenty-first century, and why would it follow the rough direction in which some of our own computing technology has moved in the last few decades?
All of this stuff annoyed me in a way that felt vaguely familiar, although I couldn't quite place my finger on it. As I got to the end of the series, however, the mystery was solved. In a final, "bonus" episode, we learn about something called "the simulation argument" -- which doesn't relate quite to the possibility of human annihilation, but is "similar," we are told. Similar in the sloppiness of its thinking.
Have you heard this one before? The simulation argument -- and you will soon discern the ungainly family resemblance to many of the terrible arguments that have been featured in this post already -- runs as follows: Advanced human or alien civilizations of the future have surely perfected the digital technologies that -- among us -- are still in their relative infancy. Therefore, they must have the ability to create a perfect digital simulation of their own pre-technological "ancestors" -- that is, people like us. Therefore, it's possible that we are living inside a computer simulation.
And sure. Okay. Anything's possible.
The computer simulation wants to go a step further than this, however. It wishes to tell us that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. Because the number of simulations that could be created by a future civilization, given sufficiently advanced technology, is enormous -- in the hundreds of thousands. So the odds are surely slim that we happen to be living in the one real version. It's far more likely to be the case that we are in one of the multitude of simulations. So much more likely, in fact, that we can almost accept it as a certainty. In a bizarre sort of parody of the anthropic principle, the argument wishes to assert that it would be a kind of egocentric and wholly unjustified delusion on our part to imagine that we were living in the one real version of reality, rather than the countless digital ones.
Oh, and it turns out -- we learn from the podcast -- that the creator of this simulation argument was none other than Nick Bostrom -- the same Swedish ponderer from whom practically all the other arguments in the podcast are derived. No wonder they seemed familiar!
You see, I had encountered the Bostrom arguments, long before I knew their provenance. My friend Ajay and I had after all encountered the simulation argument once upon a visit to the undergraduate philosophy club in college (the sort of place where this argument belongs -- and where it ought to stay).
I felt strongly at the time -- and still do -- that the simulation argument was abusing ideas in probability, in a way that seemed related to the underlying misconceptions in the cosmological "fine-tuning" argument, and most other arguments that fall afoul of the anthropic principle.
All of these arguments make a similar move, after all. They wish to construct a near infinite panoply of alternative universes, which have been thought into hypothetical existence. Then they wish to settle on a single characteristic of these alternative universes -- namely that they are not our own -- and therefore lump them together into a separate category. Over here, there is just our one lonely Earth as we know it. Over there, there are a near-infinite number of not-Earths.
For the fine-tuners, the non-Earths are all the universes that could have existed without our cosmological constants that allow for our existence -- the point being that our universe is fundamentally unlikely, that it is rather suspiciously perfect for us as we exist and know it, and therefore that there was probably a metaphysical intelligence working behind our conscious reality in order to construct it.
The Bostroms of the world attempt something equally brazen. They have labeled an infinite number of hypothetical universes as "simulations." And then, because there are so many of these invented worlds, and they have all been labeled as a package together, they would have us believe that they are more "likely" than our own world - or rather, than the world we currently believe we occupy.
Surely the failing of both arguments -- or one of many -- is that they employ an impermissible understanding of probability. The way I tried to formulate this at the time of the college meeting was by talking about a 60,000-sided die. Suppose we rolled this die, I said, and it landed on 516. We would be right to say that the there was a 1 in 60,000 chance that the die would come up 516. But we wouldn't have any right to be astonished at the fact that it did come up this way, despite the slight odds, since it had to come up as some number, and 516 is as good as any other.
This is our situation in the universe. To exist in any universe at all, it would have to be one with fundamental constants that were compatible with one another, and that allowed for existence in the first place. The fact that those constants are so particular shouldn't surprise us any more than should the fact that the die would happen to come up as the specific number of 516. In both cases, the final number would have to be something.
A year or two after this college debate, I happened to unexpectedly encounter a condensed version of exactly the point I was trying to raise against these arguments. I found it in the pages of Updike's novel Roger's Version. Arguing with the evangelical computer whiz-kid Dale, our Barthian (and Updikean) mainline Protestant protagonist offers a rebuttal to the cosmological argument:
'I do worry a bit about this concept of probability. In a sense, every set of circumstances is highly improbable. It is highly improbable, for instance, that a particular spermatozoon out of the millions my father ejaculated that day [...] would make its way to my mother's egg and achieve my particular combination of genes [...] but some such combination [...] was likely, and mine as probable as any other. No?Probability is not a science of past occurrences, which are always one-in-a-million, in a superficial sense. As Pirandello runs through the list in his One, None, and a Hundred Thousand: "being born now, and not before or after; the name and body that is given one; the chain of causality," [Putnam trans.] each one was a long-shot, if we are speaking poetically rather than precisely. I could have been named any other infinite number of names. I could have had any infinite number of parents.
Except, no. This idea of the implausibility of oneself is a fun way of speaking in a poem or novel, but philosophically it is nonsense. What I mean by "I" is simply the product of that chain of causality: my parents, my environment, etc. "I" couldn't have been anything else, without ceasing to be "I." There is nothing here to marvel at.
Probability is the science of making predictions -- there, and there alone, it makes sense to speak of odds and likelihood. If someone had predicted the cosmological constants by guess-work before we had been able to measure them, that would have been something remarkable. Just as I'd tip my hat to a psychic who could foresee that the 60,000-sided die would come up 516 before it happened. But living in a world after these events took place, we cannot look back upon them and express surprise.
Still less can we permitted the sophistry of retroactively labeling all the other numbers on the die "not-516," and thereby putting them artificially in an entirely different category from the one number that did come up.
The other problems with the Bostrom argument bear family resemblances to the other bad arguments we've been discussing too. It has an unexamined techno-teleology baked into it, for instance, violating the anthropic principle.
More fundamentally, though, it is guilty of the "sawing off the branch" fallacy. It draws conclusions about the future of our world -- the world of reality -- from what it judges to be current trajectory of some of the technology within that world. And then it uses these conclusions to argue that the world of reality it just used to advance its claims is a fictitious one.
Finally, the argument seems indifferent to the whole thrust of modern philosophy since Kant. The point of Kant's division between phenomena and noumena is that the later is unknowable. What we mean by "reality" is already filtered through our perceptions, and the categories in which it operates. Therefore, the universe we know around us is "real," in the sense of the word that can have any meaning to us, and it would be engaging in definitionally unprovable metaphysical speculation to suggest that it might "really" be a simulation (or a brain-in-a-vat, or any of the other sci-fi hypotheticals that have been advanced along these lines).
The logical positivists would take this then a step further: if what we mean when we use the word "reality" is the phenomenal world of our perception, then that makes an end of it. To ask whether this reality -- so defined -- is "real," as Bostrom would have us do, is just talking nonsense.
***
Of course, we will continue to reason about metaphysics, and about the end of the world, for all that it will continue to involve bad arguments of these sorts. One of the strangest facts about our conscious existence, to me, is that we seem to be forced to reason with concepts (death, non-existence, perpetual existence, infinity, continuous space, discrete space, timelessness, changelessness, perfect altruism, etc.) that should by definition to exceed our reason, and therefore be impermissible to thought.
The end of the world is in this category, and therefore invites the same fascination as all other metaphysics, as well as the same bad arguments. We cannot imagine what the universe would be like without us in it. The universe we know is the one that has already been interpreted by us through the mental apparatus of human consciousness.
This isn't going to stop us from wanting to know what the universe "really" is, outside of human perception, however. As Don DeLillo has David Ferrie say in his novel Libra: "Only a fool rejects the need to see beyond the screen." We will always want to probe past the reaches of consciousness, to access the noumena and the thing-in-itself, even if we, by definition, must fail in the effort.
We should be aware when we do so, however, that we are invariably importing concepts into metaphysics from the phenomenal world we can conceive. We are reasoning about things we cannot think in the only way possible to us - by using what we can think. There's a section of Van Veen's lecture on time at the end of Nabokov's Ada; or Ardor, when he condemns the use of spatial metaphors when reasoning about time. He realizes by the end of the argument, however, that even he cannot avoid doing so. So it will be with any metaphysical thought -- we will be forced to reason by metaphor.
The best we can do, in that case, is to acknowledge our imported metaphors, and be aware of which elements of our arguments depend upon them. If we wish to use our metaphors to proceed to deny their own existence, we sabotage none but ourselves.
Above all, let us acknowledge that human consciousness is the only tool we have as a species with which to reason about our own destiny and our moral worth. If anything in the entire universe -- as it is known to us -- is worth preserving, therefore, it is that consciousness. It is the basis of anything else that could ever be experienced, could ever be thought, could ever have worth or value, as we will ever be capable of understanding these things. Human existence is, by definition, a good thing.
Here at least -- if seldom elsewhere -- our podcast and I are in agreement.
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