We cannot deal adequately with mind without dealing with the nature of knowledge and truth, as well as the nature of reality.  Interestingly, I don’t think that we can deal adequately with the nature of knowledge and truth without dealing with the nature of intentional beings with minds.

I’m going to propose that we tend to conflate two separate models of reality, both true, both necessary, and inherently incapable of unification.  In doing so, I delve into areas of epistemology that are not my field.  Although I think that my position is fairly solid, I recognize that I do not always make it easy to compare my assertions to positions taken in the current literature.

The Knowledge Relation

I want to analyze the relation between meanings and reality itself.  I will try to decouple the physical from the nonphysical, arguing that all nonphysical referents are human inventions, having no mind-independent reality (no existence).  In doing so, I will try to undermine a widespread, implicit assumption that there is Ultimate Knowledge (the real story, to which our model-dependent stories are to be compared), or even any “what is the case” that goes beyond the limits of raw data and its model-dependent organization.  I will show that dualists pay homage to Ultimate Knowledge in much the way that Kant did, and that Dennett seems to make a similar mistake, in claiming that we are merely syntactic engines.

I will treat the intentional relation as a subject using a meaning to believe or desire as to an object, such as, “I assert my meaning apple to refer to that object and to have content that is true of it”. 

Mind-independent (appearance-independent) reality is reality as it is inherently, uninfluenced by our meanings and models.  We think about and model mind-independent reality and some of our meanings truly describe it.  But unmodeled (meaning-free) reality itself is unimaginable by definition, making it useless as a standard for truth.  If there are competing ways to model reality, we are stuck with comparative functionality as our standard for deciding which is the truer. 

I will develop why this is so, but if I am right we must re-conceptualize mind-independent reality as somehow fixed in form and yet meaningless, until intentional beings invent discriminations and test them for power.  Because it is logically impossible, then, to imagine mind-independent reality, we sometimes imagine it from a God’s eye view.  This is not a belief as to God’s reality, but the assumption that there would be a fact of the matter about things if there were a God’s eye view – a seeing how things are mind-independently, from a perspective that is able to stand outside of reality and see it as it is.  For example, a realist as to the Many Worlds Interpretation implies a God’s eye view observing an indefinite number of new universes being created in each second, from outside all of them.  There is sometimes value in the God’s eye view, but only if you make your assumptions about it explicit as to the vantage point, the characteristics of the viewer and the assumed basis for the viewer’s understanding.

One valid God’s eye view, which I will call the Viewer, is a subject who stands outside reality, has an unlimited mind and collects all possible data sensorily, organizing it into an absolutely unimprovable model of reality, made up of meanings.  We might think of the Viewer’s unimprovable model as simply the ideal of the human model.  As such, some of its referents are physical, but there are surely others that are necessary to the model, but are not existent, such as logical and mathematical axioms.  The Viewer lacks perfect knowledge, not knowing, for example, where a photon will hit in a double slit experiment, insofar as data and ideal theory are inadequate to make reliable predictions.  If there are multiple adequate ways to model reality (such as the Martian model being as perfectible as ours while remaining different), we can consider the Viewer to be aware of them and able to switch from one to another, noticing their virtues and limitations.  It is legitimate and useful to consider what the Viewer knows, as the limit that we approach in understanding, since the Viewer and we produce models in similar ways.  We might call this a mindful Viewer.  I doubt that there is any legitimate way to use a mindless Viewer who need not collect and analyze data.  God seems sometimes to be thought of as such a mindless Viewer, Knowing without collecting evidence, and having Truth, as though truth were inherent to mind-independent reality, rather than a quality of assertions.

When we refer to a piece of reality itself as a fact, a state of affairs or what is the case, we might mistakenly imagine it to have mind-independent Truth or Meaning to which we can compare our assertion about it.  This particularly comes up when we consider any fact of the matter for which there is no possible way to collect objective evidence.  If, for example, you claim that there is a pink elephant in the room for which there will never be direct or indirect evidence, you assert a correspondence between your claim and reality, but you further claim that the mindful Viewer could not tell if my claim is true.  Presumably, then, you claim that a mindless Viewer knows the pink elephant.  I propose that there is no valid sense in which there can be any fact of the matter at all beyond the limits of evidence.  There is no noumenon in the Kantian sense, without Kant’s mindless God to know it.

In the example that we will particularly consider, the claim that red qualia are existent properties despite being entirely nonphysical (and that it is logically possible for your red quale to be like my green quale) must, in order to be legitimate, be interpreted as a claim that the mindful Viewer somehow collects data on my qualia, with at least a supposition as to how such data might be collected.  For example, perhaps the Viewer takes on my subjective perspective, and discovers informational content in my qualia by bouncing nonphysical “photons” off them, in much the way that we imagine souls in heaven detecting each other. 

A model of reality has various purposes, but the central one is what I will call prediction, by which I mean prediction of the future, prediction of what will turn out to have been true as to the past, and prediction of what will turn out to be true about the present, whether or not currently hidden from us.  Predictions, then, are assertions as to what will turn out to be the case, as measured by data.  Prediction encompasses explanation, in this slightly unconventional use of the term. 

Modeling reality is an inductive, data-driven process, where there is flexibility in inventing classifications and meanings.  As a model is constructed, weaknesses are found, and meanings are refined.  If we think of this model-building process as approaching unimprovable predictive power as a limit, we can see that there come to be fewer and fewer degrees of freedom in how the model is modified to account for new data, with existing meanings limiting how new discoveries must be framed.  We can imagine that two species might develop models that are superficially very different.  Martians might focus on instability and flux, and on the interrelatedness of entities more than their separateness.  They might detect the way small particles and waves moving in one direction interfere with other waves and particles with which they cross paths, such that Martians detect gravity, photons and electromagnetism at a distance.  They might focus on the gradually diminishing density of gases beyond what we treat as the perimeter of a star as a transition rather than an edge.  Despite these and even greater differences in how reality seemed, if Martians and humans each achieved models of the world that were unimprovable as to prediction, the two models would make identical predictions, sometimes in very different ways.  (If we found test cases in which they differed in prediction, we would find at least one of them to be improvable).  Notice, by the way, that the two models are necessarily inter-translatable insofar as they predict, using their identical predictions as a Rosetta Stone, with any indeterminacy of translation no longer applicable in the case of unimprovable models, as far as prediction is concerned. 

This says something fundamental about knowledge.  If the Martian model of reality has reached unimprovability, it correctly predicts everything that can be predicted based on data.  Among other things, it correctly predicts how our model works, and how we use any given meaning.  Suppose that, although their model is unimprovable in terms of predictive power, there remain aspects of reality that can only be predicted statistically, and other aspects that are utterly random.  With unimprovable models, Martians and we could not have differing speculations about what is the case in these murky areas.  Instead, we must agree that there is no possible truth beyond our unimprovable truth (to the degree that truth is measured by predictive power).

The implication is that truth is a function of modeling, such that we approach perfect truth as we approach an unimprovable model.  I propose that we ought not to mean anything by truth beyond predictive power, and that all models that approach unimprovable predictive power as a limit also approach perfect truth (whatever its limits), even if they seem to disagree in fundamental ways.  Although their unimprovable models are identical in prediction and thus intertranslatable, they might have rather different functions, and might not be collapsible into a single model that worked for all.  For example, one might be more elegant (or simple) than another; two races might have very different neural structures, with models that reflect differences in what is easy or difficult to understand.  They might also serve different purposes above and beyond prediction, leading to differences in form, as we will see.

The human model of reality describes physical objects, their qualities and their relations (all of which are existent), among other things.  We take a particular interest in fixed relations (laws of nature, mathematics, logic, etc.), such as the ratio of mass and energy as two forms of the same thing, or the ratio of the sides of a right triangle.  Any unimprovable model inevitably accounts entirely for all of these relations.  But that is very different from saying that they will appear in every unimprovable model.  That is, there is an indefinite number of possible relations between any two things (or parts of things), and they are derived as needed.

Each model names referents, and we usefully determine which of those referents are existent (leave physical traces that can in principle be collected and analyzed), and which are simply inventions of the model.  Any referent that will not, even in principle, be detectable is an invention, even if necessary to all possible unimprovable models.  Examples might include the perfect circle, the laws of motion and intentional entities such as meanings.

If there is more than one possible unimprovable model of reality, and if truth is a correlation, it is between an assertion made within a given model of reality and how the unimprovable version of that model of reality would state what is the case.  This suggests that some assertions are true in one model of reality and false in another (or at least that you can only test an assertion after translating it into the model against which it is to be tested).

If our unimprovable model asserts that E = MC² and the unimprovable Martian model denies the validity of that relation, both are correct.  Strong Truth-as-Prediction makes the metaphysical assertion that there is no “what is the case” beyond unimprovable prediction.  Weak Truth-as-Prediction acknowledges that there might be an ultimate Reality beyond what can be known, but that any such “what is the case” is beside the point as to truth, because its nature is inherently unknowable.  The strong and weak versions are functionally equivalent. 

Modeling As Data Compression

There seem to be some aspects of reality that can (in principle) be perfectly predicted, others that can only be predicted statistically, and perhaps still others that inherently elude all prediction.  And this suggests an analogy between information theory and the modeling of reality.  A key aspect of information theory is the attempt to compress information such as that found in photographs, so that it takes up minimal digital storage space (as in a computer).  Some information is ideally susceptible to compression, such as a patch of uniformly blue sky.  Other information is statistically compressible, such as white specks randomly distributed through that blue sky, where the programmer can compress by specifying the average density of white specks, but not individual locations; the result will not be identical to what is in the photo, but will seem identical for all practical purposes.  Still other data is not in any way compressible:  each pixel requires a complete string for its location and color.  Compression, then, takes advantage of non-randomness.

Compression is not a science:  creative programmers find clever ways to compress based on the nature of a particular data set, and there is the possibility that someone else will find an even better algorithm for compression, especially if we permit a trivial loss in accuracy.  We need not assume that the programmer has found the inherent nature of the underlying information.  In fact, if two programmers find very different compression algorithms with equally optimal characteristics, we will not even wonder which one found the “true” solution.  We will simply acknowledge that the data was inherently compressible, without pretending that the compression brought out its “real” nature.

Further, suppose that the algorithms of one programmer allow a far greater compression than those of another programmer.  Both algorithms are nonetheless entirely valid.  The real question is whether unzipping either compressed file fails to reproduce the original data set adequately. 

I suggest that making sense of the world is highly analogous to compression in all these ways.  Rather than uncovering the inherent
“nature” of reality, we are trying to take advantage of non-randomness for practical purposes, having especially to do with prediction.  If modeling is analogous to data compression, there might be multiple unimprovable models of reality, each superior in its own way for certain purposes, but with no “reality itself” as the standard for determining which is the truth.

The notion that meanings are creative inventions rather than discoveries of the inherent “meaning” of reality is especially obvious in the nature of classifications.  A great many classifications have vague boundaries but a fairly clear epitome – an idealized exemplar that is at the norm of the various relative qualifying characteristics for that class.  A typical mountain is this size, shape, composition, and so on.  As we decide which entities to include or exclude in the class of mountains, we find boundary problems with each of its defining qualities.  We are forced to pigeonhole reality into our meanings (counting one entity as a mountain, and another almost the same size and shape as only a hill), suggesting that the meaning is in some ways an invention rather than a discovery.  For example, there are boundary problems as to a great number of qualifying characteristics for being human, although the boundary problems are so rare that we seldom think about it (proto-humans that are neither human nor nonhuman; no-longer-breathing humans; embryos, people less than an inch tall, laboratory creations, and so on).

Natural selection favors any productive tendency to force reality into neat classes.  In the evolution of a sunflower, any tiny change in structure that increased the flower’s tendency to turn its photosynthesizing surface toward the sun might have enhanced survival value.  Although the sunflower is not intentional, we might assert metaphorically that turning toward the sun is like the belief that the sun’s rays are in the class of desirable things.  Any accidental tendency to turn toward another light source (such as the sun’s reflection off a lake) could be classed as a false belief.

Whatever the truth about inherent meaning in mind-independent reality, organisms will tend to develop classifications (where a ‘classification’ is performing a certain behavior in response to a certain range of stimuli) that have greater than zero influence on their survival.  However weak the value of those classifications, subsequent refinements can increase their power, until classifications develop that are highly adaptive.

If classifications develop inductively, and if there is flexibility in model-building to accommodate strengths and weaknesses in our classes, then there could in principle be multiple unimprovable models of reality, identical in prediction. 

All your discriminations are in your mind, as tools you use to force structure onto reality wherever that brings power.  This is, for many, a disagreeable conclusion:  it implies that, without minds, reality would be without any discriminations at all – no galaxies, no laws of nature, no passage of time.  Interestingly, this is a common view in Asian philosophy.  Sam Page’s “Mind-Independence Disambiguated” (2006) clearly describes anti-individuative realism, such that one can believe in the mind-independent reality of much in the world, ontologically, causally and structurally, but deny that there are any natural joints (such as the joints found in carving a turkey).  He calls this view “blob realism”:  the world is there just as it is, mind-independently, but is in no way inherently individuated.  He ascribes this view to Putnam, Rorty and others.  I am a blob realist, although nothing in this article depends on that view.  Whether or not there are inherent joints, the joints that our meanings pick out are invented.  Even if all models necessarily picked out the same joints, that fact would only prove them necessary as invented meanings rather than as evidence that blob realism is mistaken – that they have mind-independent existence.

Let us say, for example, that all possible unimprovable models contain the identical entities in their classes of stars and planets.  Further, let us assume that all such models declare the identical perimeter for each of these stars and planets.  Those entities and perimeters are certainly existent (whether or not universal to all models), but the classification (a meaning) is invented, even though all models gradually converge on it.  That would even be the case if the classification were also the precise meaning that God gave in Creation.  In that case, joints would, indeed, be real, but our inductively refined classifications would still be our inventions, with us having no way to know that our construct precisely matched God’s meaning.  Similarly, even if God constructed or proclaimed the laws of nature (such as cause-and-effect), we have invented those notions, and maintain them only because of their predictive power.

The question, then, is not whether blob realism is the sole ontologically accurate description of the world.  Rather, the question is whether blob realism properly describes our functional relation to the world:  all of our distinctions being inventions, independent of whether there are joints.

Who or What Is a Knower?

As I discuss elsewhere (“Agency”), the human brain presumably can be modeled microphysically, with our overt and covert behaviors potentially explained without recourse to intentionality.  There is a powerful model of the world in which we have no beliefs, and are fundamentally automata.  This is why I say that one fully adequate model of the world is materialist.

Certain neural events may occur when an apple comes within your visual field. Such neural events tend to lead to appropriate behavior (such as picking and eating the apple).  But the neural events are not intentional in the microphysical model.  They aren’t about the apple at all; rather, they are rule-based covert behaviors that are only accidentally adaptive.

In order to understand the knowledge relation, we usefully explore what it means to be intentional, or, almost the same thing, what it means to be conscious.  In particular, we need to explore who or what is added on top of neural events to make for I/it relations such as the belief relation.

Early in The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers defines consciousness as “what it is like to be a cognitive agent”.  Later, he speaks of conscious experience as “the phenomenal concept of mind”, or the agent approaching mind experientially, rather than just by scientific explanation.

I want to focus on who experiences mind phenomenally, or who we mean by the cognitive agent – the believer. 

The Agent

Of what does an agent consist, and how does agency come into being?

If we accept that independent reality is an undiscriminated, physical whole, with everything in it causally interrelated, then we can imagine it to have reached its present state with no agents – no originators of causes.  We can model living things, including humans, as automata, mere cogs in a clockwork, mere links in the causal chain, mere rule-based systems.  We can imagine intelligent life with no one to believe or know personally.

Even in such a world, automata can evolve to have highly sophisticated response tendencies that we could call conceptual models of the world (making functional use of “concepts” despite the lack of aboutness).  Simple organisms without central nervous systems have behaviors that we can interpret to be a model of the world that includes food, predators, things to mate with and hostile environments.  The reason is obvious:  mimicking intentionality is highly adaptive – accidentally promotes survivability.

Such “modeling” can advance without limitation (see the article, “Agency”).  This might result in beings who issue words that declare personal intentionality, but who actually mean nothing by those words.  That is, there can be an automaton with overt and covert behaviors identical to yours and mine, based solely on automatic rule-following and the mere mimicry of intentionality.

My thesis, roughly, is that we are precisely such organisms, when modeled microphysically.  One who believes in a single, objective truth about the nature of reality (residing, perhaps, in the mind of God) will conclude that the truth, if I am right, is that we are merely automata.

To the contrary, I suppose that there is no truth about the nature of reality until there are believers.  I further suppose that the sole measures of the adequacy of any model are its power in prediction and explanation.  If that is so, then there can be more than one true explanation of reality.

It is certain that we have evolved as self-modelers, whether or not we are meaning-users (where a meaning is a mental entity with aboutness).  We model ourselves as believers who experience our surroundings and develop beliefs about the world.  As such, we model that each of us encounters our surroundings from a particular context – a first person perspective that implies a subject (agent, observer).

Our model of reality, then, includes not only the physical world, but two other elements:  an agent and beliefs with meaning.  Our model creates the belief relation: I-assertion-object.  This model, then, is distinct from the microphysical model, in that it includes the agent as a necessary construct, and intentional relations as functional relations between agent and objects.  I’ll call this the agent explanation.

Whether or not we are automata, this model is powerful in both prediction and explanation, and accounts for entities that are central to us but missing from the microphysical model. 

There Must Always Be Two Models

As it happens, we have also developed a second, equally adequate model of the world that leaves out both agent and mental entities, and is consistent with what we imagine the microphysical model to be.  This, the automaton explanation, turns out to be more powerful than the agent explanation, given our current level of knowledge, for certain narrow purposes.

In the automaton explanation, our apparent intentionality is illusory, a mere artifact.  In the agent explanation, the automaton explanation is inadequate, in that it doesn’t account for knowledge, belief, concepts, aims, etc.

It is our natural tendency to assume that one of these models is mistaken, or even to believe that they are somehow subsumed by a unified model.

But I propose that there is no single, true model; rather models are only models, and have varying power to produce true assertions. 

I propose that the primary difference between these two models is the use of agency as a (particularly inflexible) necessary construct (along with agentic intentions).  The two models share a great many other necessary constructs in common, such as the laws of physics, the axioms of logic and all mathematics.

As such, we can map either model onto the other, making them inter-translatable.  This does not, however, make them compatible or combinable.  It simply means that the predictions and explanations of one can be reliably translated by rules into the predictions and explanations of the other.

The agent explanation asserts genuine agency and intentionality.  It claims free will, awareness that there is a world out there, awareness of mental entities including qualia, and that things really do matter.

As an agent, according to this model, I am an originating cause; my desires make a difference.  With some effort, I believe, we can define how that is translatable into the automaton explanation.

An agent, in this model, is a necessary construct, and not an immaterial entity.  Qualia are valid/real, functional relations to the agent, and not immaterial entities.  No dualism is implied.

As I discuss in the “Agency” article, the only real difference between the two explanations is the context from which the world is explained.

Which Model Is True?

There is independent reality, but there is no independent truth.  The automaton explanation asserts that we are merely fooling ourselves when we treat ourselves as believers.  In the agent explanation we are genuine agents.  There is no independent standard against which to compare these models as to which is better, other than power in prediction and explanation.  It is our false view of the nature of truth that leads us to ask whether we really are automata.

The better question is, under which circumstances is it useful to use or not to use the agent construct with all that it implies?

These articles are designed for professional philosophers.  Modern philosophy is stuck on a dilemma.   We experience being intentional:  personally believing and choosing.   But science suggests that our brains are wholly physical, with no room for intentionality beyond the automatic neural processes.

In these articles, I show that the solution is epistemological, in our false notions of what knowledge is.  We can’t help believing in the God’s eye view, in which there is genuine knowledge to which human belief can be compared.
There is, indeed, objective reality against which we bump.  But there are no meanings or models until we invent them to try to make personal sense of the world.

I show that we need two models of the world, differing only by the inclusion or exclusion of the necessary construct of agency.  In one model, we are automata and in the other we are agents.  In one model there is monism, and in the other dualism.   I propose dramatic consequnces to such a view, particularly in the article, "God, Purpose and Good".

Each article stands alone, but I suggest you read them in the following order, rather than in the order published:  “Dualism”, “Knowledge”,  “Agency”, "God, Purpose and Good", and "Desire, Fear and William James".

I invite your comments after each article, or to me at ChuckTphd@gmail.com.

 

Chuck Turner received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from UCLA in 1986. The articles on
this site provide a theoretical base for his work in ethics and the meaning of life.
Dr. Turner has also pursued a career in business. He has been Vice President for
Marketing for Global Marine Drilling, and President of Meyer Properties, a diversified
company of 800 employees in California and Nevada.

He lives in Newport Beach, California.

God, Purpose and Good

 The Intentional Relation

I will try to show that understanding of God, purpose and good revolves around the intentional relation (agent-intends-object), such as, I see a rock.  Intentionality is commonly treated as the quality of aboutness in mental entities, usually as to meanings.  I will use it as any belief, longing or aiming relation of an agent to an object[1].

As I have proposed in the articles “Agency” and “Dualism”, there are two explanations of human behavior that, in principle, have equal predictive power, differing only in whether we treat people as agents, or as mere links in a deterministic chain of causes (which links I call zombies).

In the zombie explanation we ignore intentionality, treating people as having brains but no minds.  A zombie’s neural activity amounts to a model, which (insofar as we treat it as not being intentional) is not a model about the world, but is simply a model, in the sense that a toaster has a model for determining when your bread is adequately toasted.  The most basic missing ingredient in treating people like zombies is having their meanings be about objects in the world.  When you add this aboutness relation, you inevitably imply a subject:  the one who personally means something.

If we alternate between treating a person as a zombie and an agent, we simply add or remove the construct that the person is a subject, in a personal relation of using its model as being about the world.  That is, the objective description of the person remains constant:  no content of the person as object has changed.  Instead, intentionality is a three-part relation of subject using meaning to intend about its object, and so adds the necessary construct that the person is acting personally as subject.  There is no physical evidence to distinguish whether someone is a subject or a zombie. 

We often think of intentionality as an effortless meaning relation:  that meaning apple is about that apple.  But an agent is distinct from a zombie in that the agent strives.  Being a zombie is by definition effortless and directionless, mindlessly responding according to built-in rules.  Intending implies striving to identify by the application of meanings; it implies desiring change and striving to influence the natural course of things.

The Wise Self

In the agent explanation, the agent is the whole person, including both brain and mind.  The agent’s intentionality is supervenient on the zombie brain.  The agent, then, is not an adversary of the zombie brain, but that very brain, by means of a different level of explanation.   This suggests that most human actions are intentional.  However, many intentional acts are irrational, thoughtless or intentionally self-destructive.

The self is none of zombie, agent or subject; rather it is merely one’s self-concept.  We can designate as the wise self that sophisticated processing within a person that tends to give precedence to benefiting oneself as a whole, rather than blindly being devoted to a foolish urge or self-defeating attitude (as we all are sometimes).  There is no tension between agent and zombie brain, but there is a decided tension between use of the zombie brain by one’s wise self and by the rest of oneself (such as lethargy and foolish impulses).

Various factors reinforce the power of the wise self.  First, wisdom is adaptive:  it tends to increase survival to consider the big picture, so that it is in some ways part of our evolutionary design.  In fact, it seems to be a consistent aspect of maturation to take future consequences increasingly into account.  Second, society (such as parent or teacher) reinforces this viewpoint.  Third, it is just good sense.  The person learns that one’s current circumstances and attitudes were impacted by past choices, and wants to cultivate a desirable future.

This tendency to benefit the whole self is commonly described as part of wisdom.  Wisdom includes book knowledge about the world, but only insofar as one has learned to use it to the benefit of oneself or one’s community.  Wisdom also includes self-understanding:  what do I want and what benefits me?  And it implies integration: allowing self-defeating (suboptimal) tendencies to wither, and developing techniques for overcoming other self-defeating tendencies. 

The agent explanation treats any intentional behavior as being underlain by a personal valuing (desire):  if I reach for this food, I explain that striving in terms of values, such as being hungry.  When the wise self is fully activated, all of one’s values are projected onto a single, one-dimensional scale of net value (desirability), balancing various desires according to their overall value to the whole self.  Even when we make self-defeating choices, there is commonly some semblance of the wise self in the background, beckoning us to consider the consequences.

The notion of benefiting one’s whole self suggests a scale of desirability for one’s life considered as a whole.  Such a scale is part of conventional thought:  if your choices lead you to addiction, homelessness, depression and chronic physical suffering, you are thought to have contributed to a less desirable life than if you had made choices that led to financial security, excellent health and energy, a close and functional family, feeling successful in your career and having a positive attitude most of the time.

Of course, life choices are fraught with trade-offs.  If you commit to a career in academics, you give up your dream of being a ski bum.  We can model you as using your wisdom to compare all your possible life paths from here.  We can even extrapolate to an imagined unimprovable wisdom that unimprovably rates these possible paths.  (Given randomness, even unimprovable wisdom is probably limited, so that each life path would be predicted in terms of statistical likelihood.)  Each possible life path will have relative value (relative desirability) in an indefinite number of aspects.  The notion of a scale of overall desirability for your life path implies that all such values are projected onto a single scale, to whatever degree that is practical.  We might think of there being a scale along which each possible life path is rated between 1 and 100.  Suppose that a particular possible life path occupies a smudged range of values from, say, 60 to 80, because of inherent indeterminacy in combining incomparable dimensions of desirability.  Surely there are alternative possible life paths that are clearly less desirable than this one, such that the rejection of these other paths is objectively justified.  That is, I propose that there is nontrivial, objective truth as to which life path is more desirable.

Each choice made by the wise self is of just this sort, given one’s current wisdom.  It is the nature of decisions to cut off the alternatives, and, by default, we are appropriately modeled as projecting all the values we are able to take into account onto a single scale of overall preference.

Strictly, each of us is defined as a whole person.  But I might wisely choose to identify as much as possible with the wise self in me, intentionally distinguishing myself from automatic, self-defeating tendencies of the zombie brain and the agency that is used in the execution of those suboptimal tendencies.

The Context For Intentionality

The fundamental difference between agents and zombies is that agents personally strive.  They develop beliefs, striving to understand, and striving to attain what they think will be valuable.  Striving assumes that there is objective success and failure.  In order for there to be beliefs, some beliefs must be mistaken.  In order for there to be striving to control, I must sometimes fail.  In order to picture a possible future state as satisfying, its attainment must sometimes differ from the expected satisfaction.

Beliefs and desires are in some ways predictions, implying an objective world that can in reality differ from the prediction.  Thus, belief and desire are possible only in the context of truth and objective personal good (or value, or desirability).  But there is no truth or objective good except as functions of the intentional relation.  Truth and good are values, founded on agents who value.  Truth is a quality of assertions or propositions, personally asserted or proposed.  Good is that which benefits, so that good is impossible in the neutral world that exists in the absence of agents who care.

The implication is that you can only have belief and desire within the context of the assumption that there is objective truth and good – that one might, ideally, see truly and desire that which is objectively good.  If there is striving, there is relative success, and so scales of adequacy of belief and adequacy of desire.  Those scales are anchored by true belief and desire for the ideally good.  But these are not impersonal qualities; accurately these scales are anchored by the ideal of personally knowing truly and desiring the objective good.

Unimprovable Wisdom

The agent personally intends (believes, longs and aims).  (Note that I break desire into two components:  longing independent of any intention to fulfill, and aiming as purposes, plans and execution on behalf of one’s desires.)  Experience and maturation promote progress toward believing truly and longing/aiming wisely, including

            Understanding how the world works

            Understanding what will really satisfy you (what is genuinely desirable);

            Preferring those things that will satisfy your whole self;

            Having the power to resist desires for that which doesn’t really satisfy; and

            Understanding how to get what you desire.

This is much like what we commonly mean by wisdom, except that I have so far limited its applicability to the selfish interests of a single person.  I will focus, then, on those aspects of wisdom that have to do with living successfully.

I have described the knowledge relation as a subject using an unimprovable model of reality.  It is apparent that, if you and I each had unimprovable knowledge, we would have identical knowledge.  That is, if we each have unimprovable knowledge, we have the same knowledge.

We can broaden that to the desire aspect of unimprovable wisdom, including ideal longing and aiming from each subject’s perspective.  I will use the term “unimprovable wisdom” for knowing and wanting unimprovably.

Suppose that you and I each had unimprovable wisdom, but continued to have idiosyncratic interests.  Nonetheless, by stipulation we would each have at least some desire from every possible perspective, even if our actions differed because of the particular perspective to which we are attached (wanting selfishly more intensely than we want from other perspectives).  The intending subject in the unimprovable wisdom relation is without content (and merely implied), and is thus identical for all agents prior to considering the influence of that agent’s own perspective.

This I-unimprovable wisdom-world relation will never occur.  But it is given in the I-it relation to the world.  It is the unimprovable relation that provides the standard that is the context for our fallible intentionality.  As we conceptualize what the world is really like for agents, we imagine this ideal as what we approach as a limit.  We can conceive it as what any subject (or subjects-in-general) would desire and know with unimprovable wisdom.

There is, then, a scale of wisdom, approaching unimprovable wisdom as a limit.  Your wise self benefits by any increase in wisdom, since it will tend to produce choices that lead to a more desirable life overall. 

The notion of unimprovable wisdom captures the assumptions of intentionality that there are some outcomes in the objective world that are better for us than others, and that we have relative accuracy in knowing what will be good.  It also captures that we sometimes want things that are genuinely bad for the whole self (things we will regret).

In the zombie explanation there are no values.  In the agent explanation the fact of striving creates values, both as to truth and as to good.  You tend to view yourself as a whole entity, and to order your values according to their effect on that whole entity.  With wisdom, you work to overcome false beliefs and suboptimal desires.

Purpose And Obligation

I want to introduce the notion of your cared-about lifespan, as how much of your own future you care about in considering the impact of your decisions.  Your cared-about lifespan varies from one circumstance to the next.  Your cared-about lifespan and mine might differ, with you genuinely caring less about future consequences (having a steeper decline in caring versus time) than I.  Thus, your cared-about lifespan is idiosyncratic, as to length, weighting across time and your emotional variability.  You might wisely like living in the moment, spontaneously choosing whatever comes up most of the time.  Even so, you have a cared-about lifespan, and will wisely avoid making it impossible to continue that lifestyle due to short-sighted choices.

You surely make many choices that are against your overall interests across your cared-about lifespan, such as when you act impulsively or are influenced by a powerful mood.  However, you are wise to try to benefit your cared-about lifespan at all times, and foolish to sabotage it when you know better.

If your impulsive act is thoughtless, you might simply have forgotten to consider possible consequences.  If your impulsive act is in the face of knowledge of its damaging future consequences, we can usefully assess your behavior as a temporary shortening of your cared-about lifespan:  discounting future consequences as being beyond the period you care about, or as having lesser relative weight than they normally have for you.  This is what I called emotional variability.

As your wisdom grows you increasingly have the purpose in life of optimizing the desirability of your life path over your cared-about lifespan.  Since your cared-about lifespan is variable, increasing wisdom will tend to lead you to define as your genuine cared-about lifespan that which you care about during rational moments, and to class as foolish those impulsive times when you dismiss the future as unimportant.

My conclusion is that, considering one person in isolation, it is the overriding purpose of life to maximize the desirability of your life path across your cared-about lifespan.  As a shorthand, I will say that the purpose of life (when one person is considered in isolation) is to benefit one’s whole self.  I assume, in this conclusion, that to be intentional is to be a striver, and thus to have purposes.

I say that this is the overriding purpose because it is implied in other purposes.  If it is your avowed purpose in life to read all the entries to Wikipedia, this is easily expressed as benefiting your whole self. 

We can model most choices as purposeful toward benefiting one’s whole self, if we acknowledge radical variability in the span we care about, and factor in failure to consider consequences.  The distinction, then, of the wise self is that you utilize your maximum available wisdom.

Let us assume that your avowed purpose is to read all of Wikipedia, and that you clearly see two things:  this purpose will never be of much value to anyone but you, and there is a different life path available to you that is more desirable to you. This suggests that your avowed purpose is mistaken:  if you were wiser, you would reject it; if you found yourself stuck in it, your wise self would want to get unstuck.  Here are two ways in which you might deny that your purpose is mistaken:

Adopt the automaton explanation:  all possible paths are of zero value; or value is wholly relative, so that whatever you choose is right; or

  Deny the validity of the concept of the whole self:  there is no integrated person with inherently more value than any persisting desire, even in people in whom wisdom tends to lead to valuing the whole self.

I think it is apparent that neither of these approaches is adequate.  Agency is inherently intentional (purposeful), and wisdom leads to a unifying self-concept that enables us to make wise trade-offs between conflicting desires.

With wisdom, you come to understand that (isolated from social considerations) your overriding purpose in life is to benefit your whole self.  But your agent is not always dominated by your wise self; you are often foolish, or unable to force yourself to work optimally for your own good.  You are wise to self-impose an obligation to work consistently to benefit your whole self, trying to bring your self-defeating tendencies under control.

You ought (have a self-imposed obligation) to work to fulfill your inherent purpose of benefiting yourself as a whole.  That is, when you are not in the mood to benefit your whole self, or when you want to do something self-defeating, you ought to resist.  There isn’t simply a tendency to have a certain purpose in life; there is an obligation to pursue that purpose vigorously.  Since it is self-imposed, this obligation would not exist for anyone who lacked the desire to benefit the whole self.

 

If there are objective values and undermining tendencies, then there is value to there being obligation.  This is even more obvious in a community, as we will see.

 

The world is without values until there are agents with intentions.  This suggests that (considering the individual in isolation) wise desire, objective value and genuine good are co-incident.

Free Will

An agent always has free will (as I discuss in “Agency”), and the agent is normally active even in our most self-defeating choices.  But I like a narrower use of the notion of free will, as the freedom of the wise self, limited by the power of suboptimal tendencies.

If you choose to accept the wise self as who you really are, then you properly ask to what degree your wise self has free will.  Taking this viewpoint, you can consider your intentionality to be highjacked from time to time by suboptimal tendencies, during which time the wise self is disempowered.  The wise self loses its free will whenever intentionality attaches to suboptimal tendencies.

This approach casts the interests of the wise self (you) against the suboptimal aspects of the zombie brain (tendencies to follow one’s foolish urges and moods, independent of their overall consequences).  The zombie brain does self-defeating things against your will, having shanghaied your intentionality in the process. 

When you do self-defeating things there is a powerful sense of yourself as agent-with-brain being in full charge, personally wanting to do just those things.  And that is, of course, true, except that your wise self – who you might wish to be in rational moments -- is not complicit in such an act.

I like this approach, distinguishing will (tendency plus intentionality) from free will (tendency consistent with wise self).  It has the value of highlighting that much of what I do is not wholly self-determining, but is under the control of suboptimal automatic tendencies of a zombie brain.

The wise self tends to

have goals that are beyond survival and procreation,

 

guide one’s whole life direction,

develop rationality and ethics, and

experience being outside the causal web as an initiator of causes. 

To the degree that the wise self exercises free will, the automaton explanation misses the point of human life.

Good

 I propose that the good is positive contribution to one or more present and future cared-about lifespans.  Of course, something can be good for group AA (Ann and Andy, but a net bad for group AB (Ann, Andy, Britt and Bill).

If I struggle to complete an unpleasant college course and later conclude that it was a good course, I am asserting that the course had the quality of improving the life path of my whole self.  If I decide that a tryst with Trixie today is a good thing to do, even though I know it will ruin the rest of my life, I assert that the tryst has the quality of improving my life path when I consider my cared-about lifespan in extremely narrow terms.  If I say that this apple is good, I assert that it has a quality that would contribute positively to the desirability of one’s life path if eaten.

 

In saying that your purpose is to benefit your whole self (to choose the most desirable life path), I am saying that your purpose is to maximize your good.

 

Good is always subjective, in that it relates to the subject’s (agent’s) desires.  It is objective in the sense that what is genuinely good is what you would recognize as good with unimprovable wisdom.  There is an objective standard – the world in its unimprovable wisdom relation.

Proof of God

The assertion that there is no hidden, mystical spiritual realm is a null hypothesis that cannot be proven.  The only evidence for the positive existence of such a realm, I believe, would be scientific – the causal influence of nonphysical things on the physical, such as precognition and physical miracles.  I assume that there is no such mystical influence, and I assume further that no such realm exists.  The evidence that I present for God’s reality is entirely consistent with materialism, and is perhaps unaffected by the dualist position as to qualia.

I don’t pretend to present an incontrovertible proof of God.  But I think that the evidence for God’s reality is strong, and I summarize it here. 

The basic argument is this:  you are an agent with free will and at least a little of your intention is devoted to building a life that works.  Your striving to do so necessarily assumes that there is a degree of objective truth and objective personal good, such that failure is possible.  Relative intentional success is underlain by a scale of adequacy of intentions, anchored by the construct of an unimprovably intentional entity that understands truly and desires what is objectively good for you.  I propose that, insofar as the popular concept of God is accurate, it points at this construct of unimprovable mind as its object.  God is the foundation for intentionality, including understanding and desire.  God defines our legitimate purposes, and is what calls us beyond our automatic response tendencies.

I’ll try to flesh that out a little.  There is a microphysical explanation of human behavior that ignores our minds completely.  In that explanation, though, there are no meanings[2], truth or striving, and nothing matters, because the microphysical explanation excludes intentionality, and thus meanings and personal assertions.  In the microphysical explanation, brains are what Searle calls syntactic engines[3].

By the simple addition of the construct of intentionality (aboutness) to the microphysical explanation of the brain, we add minds, meanings and a great deal more, where minds are what Searle calls semantic engines.  We can call this the agent explanation, where the microphysical and agent explanations are simply two levels of explanation, not conflicting in any way, but not combinable[4].)  In any materialist version of this explanation, minds, meanings and such can only be necessary constructs[5] for making sense of the world in a way that includes first person experience, whether or not they imply something real about the very structure of reality. 

 

We are not agents (do not have free will) in the microphysical explanation.  You personally cannot avoid taking the stance of being an agent, but the only real evidence for that is subjective (your own private experience), and agreement with others.  To be an agent is to have personal values toward which you strive, resisting the natural flow of things.  If we take as given that you are one who values personally, the details of what you value can in principle be inferred objectively (especially from the corresponding neural states), such that some possible states are measurably more desirable to you than others.  There is a nontrivially objective level of desirability to how your life turns out, and you sometimes strive to craft a more desirable life.  In other words, the day will come when scientists can know you well enough to know whether would prefer a well-rounded, successful life over poverty, disease and isolation, in a way that combines your various short-and long-term interests into overall preference.  You sometimes have an interest in the general desirability of your life over a period of time, such that you strive to resist momentary impulses as having objectively undesirable overall consequences, and the underlying values are objectively investigable.

A great deal in your makeup is designed to contribute to controlling your own future.  We can use the term ‘wisdom’ for the qualities of mind that contribute to success in attaining what is desired overall, where the primary aspects of wisdom are

  understanding what is objectively so about the world, and

 

having desires that are aligned with what actually benefits overall (ie, having few or weak self-defeating impulses).

Striving for wisdom is founded on the assumption that there is genuine truth, and genuine personal good when defined as what one would desire overall in rational moments (even if there is inherent fuzziness to both truth and goodness).

We might distinguish first- and second-order intentions.  First-order intentions are such things as striving for a particular morsel of food and believing that a certain approaching organism is a predator.  Second-order intentions are striving to improve one’s own tools, such as growth in understanding, and eliminating foolish impulses.  Striving to grow in wisdom, then, is a second order intention.

 

You cannot strive to grow in wisdom without assuming an objective scale of wisdom that approaches unimprovable wisdom as a limit.  The very foundation of such second order intentions is the assumption that there is mind with unimprovable wisdom as an ideal – a construct that is the very context for being an agent.  Our striving to learn is a stretching to see with the perspective of that mind; our striving to find out how to make our lives work is a stretching to discover and achieve the genuine personal good that is understood and sought from the perspective of such a mind.  I call that mind God, so that God is simply the construct that underlies all agency, all belief in truth and good as objective values.  Because we cannot make sense of minds without a standard in relation to which we strive, God is a necessary construct for any materialist model of reality that includes intentionality, and so is as real as meanings, minds, etc.

 

Since wisdom is simply a tool for making lives better, we are wise to try to align ourselves with God.

This approach to God captures most of what is meant by God by many Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians.  God is the one who is all-knowing and all-present (although not all-powerful, as many theologians would contend).  One can properly argue that this approach leaves out God’s traditional role as Creator of the physical universe, but it leaves God as Creator of the meaningful (intentional) universe, leaving out only creation of that meaningless unity that we cannot imagine.

God is the very context within which we live and move and have our being.

Possible Objections To This “Proof”

We will look at various potential attacks on this whole approach to God.

The Self-Centered God

As I have so far stated it, this sounds like a God for any one person’s selfish interests, but not the God of tradition who demands selflessness and a communal spirit.  Elsewhere, I more carefully develop the view that this one construct applies to every possible perspective, including communal perspectives such as that of a family, community or species.  Briefly, our mutual obligations are founded on the genetic and learned sense of “we”.  I argue that we grow in commitment to our various communities as we discover our own natures and interests.

Metaphysical Implications

It might not be clear whether I am making an argument that God is objectively real, or merely that God is assumed in the way we think.  I suggest that it is a mistake to make too sharp a distinction here.  Dennett argues that intentionality is purely a stance.  If his implication is that there is therefore no such thing as mind, intentionality or truth, his approach will turn out to collapse under its own weight.  But there is a different, epistemological interpretation. 

If our knowledge of reality is limited to physical evidence, a materialist approach will find direct evidence only of physical entities, with their qualities and relations.  But in addition to these entities, we must account for consistencies in their relations and behavior, by positing additional nonphysical entities, such as the laws of physics and the principles of mathematics and logic.  I call such entities necessary constructs, such as

             E = MC2

            A2 + B2 = C2

            D = 1/2Gt²

We properly assume that these constructs capture something in the very structure of reality.  But whatever they point at is nonphysical, and can only be inferred.  Perhaps, for example, the structure of reality is a unity, and we must artificially break it into separate entities in order to approximate it.  When we point at inferred or imagined nonphysical entities in reality, we are pointing at real entities (such as forces or systematic relations), but we must call them necessary constructs, constructed to fill in blanks in our model of reality.  We can never determine the nature of the underlying reality, but only the relative utility of the construct.

The notion of necessary constructs plays a central role in all that I have said.  We must first distinguish between concepts and constructs.  A concept is a mental entity that points outside itself, while a construct is something that is pointed at by a concept.  Concepts such as infinity and the law of gravity point beyond the mind to constructs in the modeled world.

Most necessary constructs should be taken to be part of the very structure of reality, and might be generalized as:

There is something about the very structure of reality that assures that X will always hold.  The simplest way to capture this consistency is to posit that there is the necessary construct C.  

For example, we find that energy and mass seem to have had a constant relation to date, and posit a “regulation” that this relation must continue in the future.  We posit intentionality as a necessary construct, a quality of meanings of pointing beyond themselves.  Again, we posit that parallel lines never meet (or that they do meet).

Intentionality is such a construct.  Among the entities that must be accounted for in an adequate model of reality are mind, meanings, desires, pain and so on.  In granting them reality, we recognize that they are necessary constructs, but assert that we cannot make sense of our world without them.  God is just such a construct, and is neither more nor less real than are minds and the laws of nature.

The Notion Of Scales As Necessary Constructs, And Thus As Real

We necessarily treat E = MC² as real – as part of the structure of reality.  We cannot make sense of reality in the absence of its nonphysical structural qualities being anything but real.  Mathematical principles are a little less obvious, because they are obviously constructions of the mind.  As such, we can create competing mathematical structures, such as Euclidean and Reimannian geometries.  One is thus tempted to deny that mathematics is part of the structure of reality.  But one cannot consistently take the position that they are unrelated to the inherent structure of reality.  Somehow reality is such that various forms of mathematics add power to prediction.  We must conclude that our invented mathematical concepts somehow point (however imperfectly) at the real structure of reality.  Whatever the hidden, underlying reality, our necessary constructs are approximations of it, and must be considered to be real.  Whatever the case ontologically, we must, epistemologically, grant reality to the various constituents that are necessary to our making sense of the world.

Similarly, scales of relative value seem to be inventions of the mind.  But consider a sorting task, placing things in either to two piles:  real entities and mental entities.  Concepts, of course, are mental entities, and rocks are real entities.  Concepts point outside themselves, at real or imaginary entities.  Imaginary entities belong in the pile of mental entities, but what about scales?

Relations are real, and scales are merely a systematic ordering of relations.  Our concept of a scale points at something in reality.

We define quantity such as mass relatively, on a scale anchored by zero and infinity.  Our concepts of such scales and endpoints do not point at physical things, but they do point beyond themselves.  They are three necessary constructs, and reflect something fundamental in reality.

There is the tendency to ask whether such entities exist in mind-independent reality.  But we can only conceive meaningful (knowable) reality.  What is real is unimprovably modeled reality, including both constructs and physical things.

 

This is especially obvious for mind.  Even if a complete model of reality is possible microphysically, any model that includes mind must include striving within the context of the objective standard provided by mind knowing truly and desiring genuine personal good.

 

The Possibility Of Intentionality Occurs Only In The Context Of Unimprovable Mind

 

I have proposed that there can only be striving if there is the assumption of an objective measure.  The automaton in you simply modifies behavior according to rules, never right or wrong, accidentally surviving or not.  Any mind is appropriately characterized as a hypothesizer, striving to find the truth.  It hypothesizes that sour apples make you sick, and then tests that hypothesis.  Hypothesis testing can occur only in the context of there being an unimprovably accurate proposition that you approach as a limit.  A mind that strives to improve fallible beliefs implies the context of a scale of adequacy of mind, anchored by unimprovably believing mind.  The very striving of the most primitive intentional organism implies that scale.  For example, the notion of striving would be meaningless in either of two possible worlds:

A world in which the very fact of believing is the sole criterion for truth, so that there is no fallibility, or

 

A world in which a belief being true is solely a function of chance.

Similar reasoning applies to desire.  Your mind is a seeker of satisfactory states, both present and future.  You have mistaken desires, and you refine or replace those desires as they prove misdirected.  You have impulses that you know to be foolish, implying an objective scale of the wisdom of your desires, anchored by unimprovably desiring mind – wanting just the right things to guide you to subjective overall success (with ‘overall’ defined according to your idiosyncratic interests).  It is not possible to strive without this assumption of an objective standard; and it is not possible for there to be intentionality or mind without striving.

If we define wisdom as following the soundest course of action based on judgment and knowledge, we can say that striving implies an assumption of unimprovable wisdom as its very context.  Note that wisdom is irreducibly intentional – a state of mind.

Mind-Independent Reality As The Standard For Adequacy of Mind

A more substantive objection might be that we strive in the context of how things actually are, rather than in the context of how an unimprovable mind understands things.  I do not believe that there is any substantive notion of non-intentional meaning.  If I am right, then pre-intentional reality is meaningless. Let us assume that I am wrong about that.  Let us even assume that there is precisely one set of true mind-independent meanings and one true mind-independent model of reality.

It is nonetheless true that our sole path to finding those meanings is by hypothesis-testing.  The only way we can guess that we have found true meanings is by failure to find any exceptions to their adequacy.  If we imagine having reached unimprovable understanding, we will nonetheless have only our invented model with its necessary constructs, and no way to tell how well the hidden structure of reality corresponds to it, other than unimprovable adequacy in getting the job done.

The measure of intentional understanding is the version that we approach as a limit – not a perfect model, and not reality itself, but the unimprovable version of our model.

In summary, the assumption of a mind that knows truly and desires wisely is the necessary context for intentionality.

Rounding Out This Approach To God

Much that has traditionally been said of God is true.  God beckons you (unimprovable wisdom attracts you), both to take the whole self perspective and to keep growing in wisdom. 

One might appropriately ask in what ways God, then, differs from ideal good.  In contrast with good, which is not intentional, God implies the inherent directionality of agency:  striving toward (desiring) what is good and what is true.  Good, properly, is a quality of things that can only be defined in terms of unimprovable wisdom from a given perspective.

It is possible to have an adequate model of reality without God, such as the zombie explanation.  But this is of less interest than it at first appears.  The zombie explanation excludes all that is not causal.  This is a powerful model, especially useful in some scientific investigations.  But it is a fiction.  It can occur in only two ways.  The first way is that zombies, never having achieved the use of meanings, nonetheless fully model the world.  They have no idea that there is a world, have no interest in truth or investigation, but more or less accidentally develop a “reaction” model that contains no meanings, but has great predictive power.  There is no place in such a model for agency, God or meanings.

The second way for there to be a zombie explanation is the real one.  We develop it intentionally, by means of meanings, leaving agency out as a fiction.  We develop a fully adequate model that excludes God, but we do so as an exercise, from our agent-explanation stance.

The traditional belief in God is highly speculative, dependent on blind faith.  But it is not at all speculative to assert that God is agency with an unimprovable intentional relation to the world-in-itself, and thus is the ideal that anchors our scale of wisdom:  God is a necessary aspect of our whole belief system. 

God In A World Of More Than One Agent

In order to simplify the presentation, I have until now focused on the interests of each solitary agent in isolation.  But we are social animals with social interests.  Although it is beyond the reaches of this article, I propose that an attractive ethical system emerges from the foundations I have suggested.  In this final section, I want only to outline the basis for these social implications, which are even more dependent on empirical facts than is the rest of this article.

I have proposed that each person ought to follow God for his or her selfish benefit.  I will now suggest what is a far more common approach to God:  we also ought to follow God for our mutual benefit.

In a world without agents, there is no wisdom, desire, value, direction or good, all of which occur in your private perspective of the world, and in mine.  They are functions of intention, experienced by one agent at a time. 

In expanding beyond the individual, we will first look at the community as agent, and then consider the individual as one who experiences being community in some ways.  I use the term community for any community of interests, whether a nation, a marriage or the temporary common interest of two strangers.

We are free to attribute joint agency to a community, as we believe, or we want, or we choose.  This is a concept that has considerable power when properly used, taking the intentional stance as to communities (as we commonly do, most obviously in using the term ‘we’).

The genuine (first person) agency of a community is derived from the first person perspective of its individual members insofar as they have community interests that tend to unite them.  Assume that ants are individual agents whereas the ant colony does not itself have agency of the sort that allows it intentional relations to its surroundings.  Still, the ant colony has genuine meanings, desires and aims, as that which is in common between its individual agents.  That is, because the agency of individual ants is so solidly aimed at the common good, the colony can be modeled as having derived intentionality.  This is simply a more powerful tool for modeling than would be the focus on individual ants.  In particular, individual ants have the tendency to sacrifice their own interests for the community interest, making it important to treat many intentions as held by the community.

With people, we can think of any communal agent as a joint perspective.  That perspective is created in each of our individual minds, in interchange between us and in the facts that create a common interest, even if we don’t recognize it.  We have shared knowledge, common interests, joint purposes, and we work together to process information.  We are wise, sometimes, to recognize the community interest as taking precedence over our own.  We can powerfully model this joint perspective as intentional, with wisdom that approaches unimprovable wisdom as a limit, including the ideal good from that perspective.  For example, a community has beliefs (to which individual beliefs tend to conform), interests (such as joint security) and aims (joint projects and plans).

We might make an analogy between a whole community and an agent’s whole self, made up of conflicting urges.  Suppose you treat each of your present interests as a separate self.  In this moment, you want to sleep in, missing a day of work.  The sole basis for your obligation to your whole self is desire for a good life, and your desire to sleep in is more powerful than your desire for a good life at the moment.  Hopefully, though, you have developed the habit and good sense to fulfill your obligation to your whole self.  If not, you (both the whole self and various narrow interests that are impacted) are later likely to have regrets.

We will consider, then, the community’s attempts to have you work for the common good, and then the forces upon you individually to do so.  Success on either side will be impacted by the degree that the community has structured itself so that the individual benefits by working toward the community good.

From the perspective of a community, there are members whose behaviors are destructive of the joint good, or are otherwise suboptimal.  Because the community wants the joint good, it is likely to impose on its members an obligation to benefit the community, trying to bring their destructive tendencies under control.  This occurs through education and pressure.

In the Dilemma of the Commons, a village benefits by sharing a communal pasture, unless a selfish shepherd develops so large a herd as to use up most of the grass.  Avoidance of this selfish undermining of community interests is fairly simple in a rural community of shepherds, through subtle but powerful social pressure such as shunning.  In the parable of the spoons, Hell is depicted as a long table with a magnificent banquet, in which each person has so long a spoon as to be unable to feed himself.  Heaven is depicted as the same banquet table, with each person feeding someone else.  Again, we can imagine that social forces would have a large impact on a hell-bound person accidentally finding herself in heaven, even if there is no talking.  She is likely to experience powerful pressure to conform to the group if most people are busily feeding others.

We can also look at intentional and unintentional social pressures from the individual standpoint.  You are embedded in a social environment, in which your personal desirable life path is profoundly affected by social considerations.  You are wise to be loved, admired and trusted, to fit in, and so on.  You are subject to a social contract, and there are consequences to fulfilling it half-heartedly.  A successful life path is likely to be outwardly oriented, with reduced self-absorption.  There are benefits to interdependence, to loving and being loved, etc.  We find a desirable personal identity through social roles.  For example, your self-esteem is impacted by how you are seen by others, by your own views of yourself in social roles and how you make any difference to others, and by minimizing the tension between you and others.  Some of your more subtle social interests become evident in emergencies, when friends or community are in trouble.  There are a great many powerful socializing tendencies.  A successful life path takes full cognizance of them.

Some of these social influences are extremely powerful in unusual circumstances, where it seems clear that the individual’s self-concept extends to being “we”.  Consider a mother who sacrifices everything for her congenitally handicapped child, a soldier who willingly takes on a suicide mission for his country, or someone who risks her own life to save a stranger.  Some of this is genetically influenced.

Pure rationality also sometimes supports working for the good of various communities.  We are embedded in a society with significant interdependence.  Sometimes we are wise to recognize our selfish interest in the common good or in our consistent fulfillment of social roles.  For example, sometimes sacrifice is wise, knowing that we are likely to benefit later from others sacrificing on our behalf.

It is conventional wisdom that the wisest selfish route is to be two-faced:  pretend to be a good citizen in order to reap all the benefits of being loved, admired and trusted, while secretly lying, cheating and stealing.  I suspect that this is a very short-sighted view.  Each of our actions has unseen consequences in helping to shape our own character, and I doubt that there are many people who can be two-faced without becoming twisted.  I suggest that a major challenge in building a successful life is in shaping your own nature. 

For all these reasons, I wisely obligate myself to contribute to the good of family and community.  In addition, it is society’s job to instill such a sense of obligation, enhancing the powerful forces that make it wise for me to work for the common good.

With this brief look at the empirical forces underlying community, we can look at where God stands.  I have proposed that God’s viewpoint is the standard of good from every possible individual and community perspective, such as the unimprovable path from here for humankind taken as a whole. 

Consider a conflict between you and me with exactly three possible resolutions: 

a life-changing sacrifice by me (your ideal selfish solution),

a life-changing sacrifice by you (my ideal selfish solution), and

a compromise entailing a trivial sacrifice by each of us (our joint ideal solution).  

We look for a larger principle (such as the mathematics of the greatest good for the greatest number) to resolve such a conflict.  Alternatively, we wish to discover a universal demand for a certain ethic.  It simplifies things for God to provide both a set of rules and pressure to obey them.

But I don’t see how such overriding ethical principles emerge from an intentionality that is based on one’s individual first person experience.  God is the standard for every possible perspective, and is not the arbiter between perspectives.

Instead, God beckons us to wisdom, and wisdom leads us to lives that are mutually beneficial.  God beckons us to life paths that will succeed across a wide range of future contingencies, and that means a life path where we are successful, contributing members of society.  My sense is that those who follow God are not only increasingly happy with their own lives, but are increasingly committed to the common good, for the empirical reasons outlined in this section. 

I have proposed that each of us is wise to make God central to our lives, and that doing so greatly enhances one’s benefit to the community.  I have also proposed an alternative to basing belief in God on speculative faith.

Agency

 A key premise of this article might seem absurd on its face:  biological evolution will only produce automata.

The apparent absurdity rests especially on one’s personal experience of feeling, believing, desiring and choosing freely.  So I ask that you suspend your disbelief that you are an automaton, briefly.

I will try to show that our intentionality makes a lot more sense (and many of the problems of philosophy disappear) if we start with our automaton natures, and back into our subjective experience.

The modern age has an advantage in this kind of thinking, with artificial intelligence (AI) as a model of automatic processing.  Descartes, of course, developed his hydraulic model of brain functioning based on the hydraulic automata in the French Royal Gardens.  But we have robots with cameras and audio sensors that respond appropriately to sensory input but do not see or hear intentionally; robots that process data and solve problems but have no beliefs.

Robots mimic intentionality, but are mere rule-followers, utterly lacking in personal awareness. 

Agents are sometimes future-driven (have intentions), while automata always respond to stimuli according to built-in rules.  The classic example is a chess computer program.  It mimics the desire to win, and it mimics peering into the future (at all the possible sequences of move-and-counter-move).  But in reality its behavior is entirely determined by rules the results of which could be calculated with paper-and-pencil.  A chess computer mimics intentionality, but entirely lacks awareness of past, present or future, the use of mental entities that are about something, aims, free will or anything mattering in the least.  I lump all such characteristics together as intentionality.

My premise, then, is that biological evolution produces only automata, so that you and I are, in a key sense, automata.  Our overt and covert behaviors are determined by neural processes that can in principle be explained by microphysical processes.  Our obvious intentionality is actually (in a key sense) simulated intentionality, brought to wonderful sophistication by the forces of evolution, because organisms that work together in producing civilizations and science are more likely to survive.

I’ll try to show that it’s valuable to accept all of this as true, and only then try to deal with the personal experience of intentionality.  Ultimately, however, I hope to turn that order of things on its head.

Let’s be clear what automata lack.  They

do not feel pain or have perceptions

         have no idea that they exist

  have no sense that there is a world, no semantic relations

  have no interest in survival or in the avoidance of suffering

  have no goals of any sort; no desires or aims

  are not originating causes; that is, their overt and covert behaviors are like that of a cog in a clockwork, simply producing such outputs as are determined by their inputs.

In saying that automata are not agents, we imply that the world, in the absence of agency, is simply a causal chain, an interconnected whole with everything having causal relation to everything else, the entirety simply playing out the inevitable given the original causes.  (I ignore randomness, in that I don’t think it impacts questions of free will or intentionality).

How Evolution Might Produce Humanlike Automata

There is all sorts of mimicry in nature.  Some fish are camouflaged as rocks.  Some orchids have petals that mimic the appearance of female flies, thus attracting male flies that pick up their pollen.  An anglerfish dangles a lure.  Evolution, of course, has no intention of mimicking.  It’s just that whatever works tends to stick.

Automata have no awareness of their surroundings.  Instead, they have fixed outputs that are triggered by various inputs.  But evolution rewards mutation in the direction of mimicry of belief.  A housefly seems to believe that your moving hand represents danger, and we can easily imagine this as no more than rule-following mechanisms of a system that lacks sentience or awareness.

Biological evolution is likely to reward any simulation of intentionality, including the ability to learn.  The ganglion of a cockroach’s leg joint is capable of learning, but is surely not conscious or intentional. 

In any event, we can imagine evolutionary processes creating ever more sophisticated response tendencies, until there are automata that write operas and produce word strings that mimic philosophy, without intentionality.

There are few areas where I find value in Freud’s models, but I like his distinction between id and ego, and it can be useful in making a modern distinction between one’s discovered urges and the highly intelligent processing that we do to achieve them.

Roughly, Freud might say that our urges are more likely to be discovered than chosen, and are often rather primitive.  He likens the id to a blind beast, desiring, but unable to model the world and figure out the best ways to get what it wants.

The ego, then, is a sophisticated processing capability.  Activated by the id, it processes the various alternatives, and comes up with plans to get the id what it wants.  Perhaps Freud would treat id and ego as agentic.  But we might equally treat them as automata.  The lower brain simply produces automatic behavioral tendencies that we interpret as urges.  The cortex simply processes alternative execution strategies.  It doesn’t originate motivations, but is enslaved to the motivations produced by the id.

What Leads Us To Assert Agency?

Why should we insist that we are agents?  I submit that it is not our intelligence – akin to Freud’s ego.  Contrary to the world according to Star Trek, neither is it our human emotions – the id. The emotions and intelligence of a system can be accounted for by automatic processes.

But we might add another outdated term:  the will.  In self-modeling, I note external pressures toward certain behaviors, along with my personal power to resist.  I note barriers to my goals, but personal power to persevere.  I note the capacity to imagine possible futures, and my power to strive for what I want.  Whatever the reality, it is both adaptive and consistent with such personal experience to model oneself as an agent.  It’s also the simplest, most powerful self-model.

In addition to noting acts of will, we cannot help noting that we have conscious streams, including mental entities that have aboutness.  There is the tendency among some philosophers to deal with consciousness as though it were a free-floating entity, able to be analyzed separately from the subject who experiences it.  But I think that conscious experiences are inextricable from the one who produces or observes them.  The key is to have somebody home who is conscious, who is intentional, who genuinely desires, who is sometimes able to manipulate the environment to achieve his or her ends.  Insofar as I claim to experience a conscious stream, I seem to imply being an agent.

An agent is one who actually means anything, who is aware that there is a world out there, who personally experiences, believes and desires, and who is sometimes an originating cause.  An agent is whatever is personally conscious in these various ways.

I doubt that there is meaning to pure consciousness without agency.  There is no conscious stream of mental entities such as perceptions without there also being personal experience, belief and desire.  Consciousness implies a personal perspective.

The Declaration of Agency

We are self-declared agents.  Is our claim true?  Imagine Robbie, an early 21st Century robot, designed to learn to operate successfully in a simplified environment.  Robbie has processing software for each of the following:

Receiving and processing data from its (controlled) surroundings and fitting them into a relatively sophisticated model of its world

 

Having goals and rules for prioritizing them

 

Having modestly effective models of what will influence the accomplishment of those goals

 

The tendency to execute behaviors that move it closer to its goals

 

Having a primitive model of itself, including all the above, and the tendency to modify that self-model with new data.

Let’s stipulate that Robbie is not remotely an agent.  It is built within the technological limits of AI at the beginning of the 21st Century.  But asking whether we would grant it agency is, I think, the wrong question.  We will learn something by asking, should we design Robbie to “conclude” that it is an agent?  I think that we would be twisting things strangely if we did otherwise.  Look at it from Robbie’s “viewpoint”.  In its self-model, Robbie would in the normal course of things model that it interferes in the course of things (its own processing is a determinant of its behaviors).  It properly models that it directly perceives the world, and has beliefs about it (it cannot effectively model itself to be unaware).  It has a modest model of the future with itself included, and it would be natural for it to model its choices as reflecting internal preferences (in that it discovers “preferences” (priorities) that are predictors of its behaviors).

Robbie is designed to model future outcomes and their consequences as to Robbie’s goals, and to behave appropriately.  Modeling itself as an automaton might actually stand in the way of this sort of processing, leading Robbie to await its next behavior, rather than actively “choose” it.  Robbie’s design powerfully mimics intentionality, and modeling itself as an agent is by far the simplest and most powerful model.

Let us say that we build the processor for Robbie with the syntactic equivalent of semantic space.  For example, it has a “semantic space” for colors, such that its receipt of a given wavelength by its camera activates a location in a simulated multi-dimensional space, relative to red, yellow, blue, black, etc.  If asked to describe the relation of this wavelength to any one of those colors, its processor produces an answer based on this “semantic space”.  Similarly, its “semantic space” for sounds locates a tone relative to frequency, amplitude and timbre.

We would appropriately design it to assert that it perceives color and sound directly, and that redness, “semantically”, is more closely related to blueness than to the sound of a trumpet.  When it recalls redness, it will activate the identical “semantic space” that it uses for seeing the color of an apple, and will truly “assert” that it recalls the same red.

I propose, then, that we can imagine designing a robot that takes the intentional stance as to itself.  It might not at all pass muster for our criteria for sentience, intentionality or agency.  In fact, we could predict its every string of words, because it is only outputting by means of rules that we created.  Nonetheless its design has it declare itself to be an agent, and to declare that it has the direct, subjective experience of redness when it processes its camera’s input from an apple.  It might have no way of finding out whether its assertion of subjective experience means anything like what you and I mean.

In summary, a robot that is not in the least intentional can be designed to self-analyze and declare its own intentionality for appropriate reasons.  Such a design is highly adaptive, and it would not be surprising to find that nature favors such a design as it mimics intentionality.

Because we designed Robbie to mimic intentionality, it is natural for its self-model to take the intentional stance.  In the same way, because evolution tends to produce systems that mimic intentionality, it is natural for us to use the intentional stance in self-modeling.

You have the option of using the intentional stance with me, or not.  But you don’t have that option with yourself.  Given your design, you will model yourself to personally experience, believe, desire and interfere in the course of things, because no other model does remotely so well in fitting your design or needs. 

I feel certain that I am an agent, because of my own subjective experience.  But we now add the caveat that Robbie might assert having precisely the sort of subjective experience that you and I have.  One must conclude that I can no more tell whether I am an automaton than Robbie can.  (This conclusion leads one to ask, what is it about a belief that makes me so sure that I am personally believing, rather than doing something akin to what Robbie does.)

It Is True That We Are Agents

One is tempted to conclude that materialism holds, and that we are merely automata, with our claims of agency being false.

But such a conclusion depends on the false notion that there is a single truth that alone can make sense of everything in the world.  To the contrary, we require two explanations of reality:  the agent explanation and the automaton explanation, because there are valid purposes to each (see the “Knowledge” article), and neither can ever be adequate to describe all that is to be described.

The automaton explanation is radical materialism.  If we ignore randomness, I suspect that the ideal version of this explanation is complete, able to predict and explain the physical world, including human behavior, ideally. 

But it has a fatal weakness, in that it asserts that there is no one to make assertions.  Once we stop conflating it with the agent explanation, it fails to allow for meanings, belief, the semantic relation, pain, desire, things mattering and more.

The agent explanation properly accounts for all of those things.  It asserts that we are genuine agents with free will who use genuine semantics and have genuine qualia.  Assuming that the agent explanation otherwise mirrors the materialist explanation, it can successfully explain both the physical and the mental.  The weakness of this model is that it is difficult to picture oneself as both an originating cause and as a mere link in the causal chain.

Dennett uses the notion of an intentional stance as a mere strategy.  I will use the term ‘subjective stance’ as a genuine belief as to oneself – that I am an agent.  Taking this stance creates a personal perspective that makes knowledge possible.  We can produce a true explanation of the world from that perspective, but a different true explanation if we simulate taking no perspective at all, in the automaton explanation.

The subjective stance is a declaration of separateness.  Whereas the automaton is a cog, this stance is a claim to be a surroundings, observing and influencing them from a particular perspective.

The very declaration creates separation in a manner that did not previously exist.  The automaton model implies that the world is a unity, with everything causally inter-related and no present-time originating causes.  But the subjective stance is a personal perspective that creates an observer, outside of the world and modeling it.  It creates an agent, an originator of causes, interfering in the course of things.

That is, by casting yourself as personally perceiving the world and pursuing aims, you become one who breaks the causal chain, within the agent explanation.

This becomes well defined only as you develop a sophisticated model of the world.  Such a model makes assertions about the world, and must include you as a believer of them.  It must take your personal perception of your surroundings to be I/it claims about the world.  It must include your aims as powerful personal relations to the world, as in, I desire that.  And it must include you as an agent with free will, personally being pulled by your aims, personally considering alternatives, and sometimes in charge of choosing your path.

Knowledge is a three-part relation that entails agent, meanings and world (see “Knowledge”.)  The agent explanation, in order to be complete, must adequately account for agent and meanings, as well as the world.

Of course, you are free to model yourself, simultaneously, with the automaton explanation.  You can acknowledge the power of that model, but you cannot take it on for your personal experience.  That is, the automaton explanation will inevitably seem fatally flawed from the subjective stance, because it fails to deal with agent, meanings and the various intentional relations.

The effect is that each subjective stance (yours or mine) is the very basis for our known world.  It creates semantics – the I-meaning-object relation.  In doing so, it also creates free will, pain, the future, knowledge and anything mattering.

We don’t need to endow it with metaphysical mystery to see that it is the sine qua non.  We can acknowledge ourselves as automata with one explanation.  But we must acknowledge our agency with an even more fundamental model of reality.

I doubt that there is independent truth as to whether a housefly is an agent, or as to whether it feels pain.  A housefly is certainly an automaton in one sense, and one that nicely simulates intentionality.  It has neural processes that act as though they are entities that are about its surroundings, asserting that this is food, that is danger and over there is something to mate with.  When injured, the housefly writhes.  But we can guess with confidence that it does not have a self-concept, and doesn’t distinguish between the injured body part and the pain.

If pain is a real, immaterial entity, then there is truth about whether the fly feels pain.  If pain is, instead, a relation between an injured body part and an agent created by a self-concept, then there is no independent truth about whether the fly (or anything else that lacks a self-concept as agent) feels pain.  Rather, it is a matter of convention in how we apply the term ‘pain’.

Dennett seems to imply that the intentional stance is a mere cognitive strategy.  The implication is that there might come a day in which the single correct way to understand ourselves is from the automaton explanation.  I don’t think that works.

I personally feel pain, and it would be silly to take the stance that I am an automaton that is incapable of pain (see “Dualism” for a discussion of pain and other qualia).  However, like Dennett, I acknowledge that I can without contradiction treat people other than myself either with or without the notion of intentionality.  Only by inference from my own case can I conclude whether there are other agents.

I conclude that there is a true automaton explanation.  However, that explanation is inadequate to explain key aspects of experienced reality, and must be rejected as the sole explanation.  We require two non-combinable explanations, both of which are genuinely true (see “Knowledge”).

By the way, the conventional scientific explanation, in my view, fails to carry materialism nearly far enough.  It ought to deny that there are knowers, and therefore that there is knowledge.  It ought to deny that there are intentional creatures, and therefore any meanings.  That is, it ought to deny that there are genuine semantic engines.

The conventional scientific explanation does not at all reach those conclusions.  Perhaps the typical thoughtful proponent would assert that evolution somehow brought about genuine meaning users, in a way to be determined some day.  This is a position I can’t easily refute, but I suggest that it leads to all sorts of problems that philosophers today struggle with.

Context

Note that my model of the world is private to me, even if innumerable others use the identical model, each from their own perspective.  My model occurs only in my experience, even though it is heavily influenced by society, and is known to be shared to a large degree.  We know by inference that there are other agents, but all that happens appears within each person’s private experience.

This is important because it means that my awareness is the very context for experienced reality.  When I’m unconscious, that experienced reality disappears (although I can later infer that a great deal happened while I was unconscious).

Agency is the very context for perception, belief, desire and choice.  There can be a model of reality in the absence of agency, but one cannot adopt that model consistently for oneself.

So what do I mean, here, by context?  The automaton explanation is provided from no given context.  But in my personal experience, I as subject am a given, even in extreme circumstances.  For example, when I introspect on my own conscious stream, it occurs in an I/it relation, with the “I” as the very context.  If I were to have an out-of-body experience, suffer complete amnesia, or have a psychotic break where I find myself to be Napoleon, the “I” would remain as the very context.

In any given first person perspective, the context is one of I/it relation to one’s surroundings, including, I perceive, assert, intend and initiate causes.  There can’t be semantics outside of this context. 

 Roughly, context means perspective.  The world occurs for me from my first person perspective.  I am the subject who observes, experiences, etc.  In addition to the self-as-object, there is the self-as-subject.

Note that grammar leaves us unable to say anything about the subject (I) without making it into an object (me).  The subject is the very context for experienced reality, rather than something that can be analyzed as an object.  When I say, “I am a man”, the predicate, “man”, is something I have.  If I awakened in a female body, I would say, “I am now a woman, but I am still I”.

The context about which we’re talking is not a mind-independent part of reality.  Rather, I’m talking about the practicalities of how we self-model, whether or not it is legitimate.  My model includes me in two ways, as a subject and as an object.  The object has mind, personality, etc.  But the subject is the one experiencing from my perspective, and is fundamental to there being knowledge and agency.

When Robbie self-modeled as an agent, it created a model of the world in which Robbie as subject is the very context for all that occurs, and so is outside of that modeled world.  Robbie can develop a true model of the world from that context, in which Robbie genuinely believes, experiences, desires and chooses.  There is no model that is inherently more adequate than that one.

Cogito ergo sum might simply mean, I think therefore my mind must be real.  But it might also mean, I think therefore there is a subject.

In the automaton explanation, there is no separation from the causal web; there are no originators of cause.  In the agent explanation, context implies separation, with the observer being outside of what is observed (and in that sense free of the causal web).

I suggested that the automaton and agent explanations are non-combinable.  I argue elsewhere (the “Knowledge” article) that the two explanations are precisely mappable onto each other – in no way conflicting as to the world.  They can be equally accurate in prediction.  But they differ fundamentally in the context from which the world is modeled.  Agency as a context is fundamentally separate from the physical world, permitting personal belief and experience, and being the foundation of free will.

Free Will

It is true in the automaton explanation that I lack free will, and it is true in the agent explanation that I have free will, despite the fact that the one explanation can be accurately mapped onto the other.  The difference that matters is that there is no inherent context for the automaton explanation, whereas the agent explanation takes the context as primary. 

The agent explanation grows out of my having personally modeled the world.  I am the creator of the experienced world:  it actually occurs within the context that I am.  The objects in that world might be caused, but I am not an object.

Now, I do discover myself as an object in that world, and I might well discover that object to be a mere cog.  But my use of the automaton explanation cannot legislate me out of my inherent position as subject, agent, context for the experienced world.

Without me, there is only an undiscriminated, meaningless whole.  Only my context allows for the I-meaning-object relation that creates semantics, and so creates a discriminated, meaningful world.

As agent, I have intentions – aboutness that enables the semantic world, and aims that drive my behavior.  When I encounter genuine alternatives, I choose teleologically, according to my purposes and forecasts, rather than as a mere relay of prior causes. 

For example, suppose that I gain access to a computer that perfectly predicts my every behavior, based on the automaton explanation.  This would simply be added data, which I would use for my purposes, sometimes doing as predicted, sometimes seeing my predicted folly and avoiding it, and sometimes doing otherwise just to be contrary.  It is my very semantic relation to those predictions that illustrate my agency.

I can acknowledge that my mental processing is supervenient on neural processing, and is thus fully determined.  My free will, then, is not a breaking free from the causal chain.  I, as agent, do freely choose what is to my benefit, using neural processes to do so.  From my personal perspective, I must analyze my situation and direct my course, unable to surrender my agency to the causal chain.  Knowing that others have already determined which choice I will make is interesting, but it doesn’t free me from the responsibility of determining my own future.

Do we, then, have free will in each other’s agent explanations?  In principle, I can model myself as an agent and everyone else as automata.  In practice, we almost universally model each other as agents, each creating his or her own experienced world, and each having purposes.  We have thus created a true, shared agent explanation.

 The Intentional Stance

In The Intentional Stance, Dennett describes the marvelous power of treating entities as though they were intentional.  He seems to imply that there are no truly intentional creatures, and no genuine semantics.  He is correct that I am merely a rule-following system in the automaton explanation.  What he misses is that I am also truly a user of semantics in the agent explanation.  I personally mean something by my mental contents.  I have a rich mental life of genuine and sometimes visual meanings.  My words have full, rich semantic implication, both denotative and connotative, whereas my syntactic events have none at all, being merely complex aspects of an automatic reaction that will generally lead toward survival.

You and I acknowledge each other’s subjective manifesto, granting agency to one another, and building on the assumption that each has a full mental life.  Out of that granting comes the fullness of civilization, the building of meaning across generations. 

But the foundation is a single agent’s subjective manifesto, and all that it implies.  I can grant agency or not to anyone else.  But my own agency is a certainty, in the only possible known world:  the one experienced by me personally.

 

 

Contents of Consciousness

When I see a red apple, my system asserts it to be red.  That is, there is a mental entity with aboutness that mediates my relation to the color of the apple.  When I become alert, feeling like I heard or felt something, my system is asserting that something experiential occurred.  These are perceptions.

 

When I imagine a red dragon, I employ such a mental entity, asserting redness of something imaginary.

 

I believe that the contents of consciousness are limited to perceptual entities such as these – that everything in the conscious stream is an intentional entity related to perceptual claims.  Thus, when I think verbally, any consciousness of my processing might employ visual or aural perceptual entities, but not wholly abstract entities.

 

When I ride a bicycle, my mind employs proprioception and motor skills that are outside of consciousness.  On the other hand, proprioception might be accompanied by a visual sense of being tilted (perhaps in your imagination when your eyes are closed).

 

This suggests that a great many mental items are not directly conscious, such as desires, emotions, beliefs and choices.  This view has been around a long time, and is expressed in the James-Lange theory of emotion.  That theory proposes that the appearance of a predator produces the tendency toward certain physiological responses and flight.  Those tendencies then promote the inference of fear in consciousness by means of cues, such as a racing heart, hair standing on end and possible ways of fleeing arising in the imagination.

 

The notion that action tendencies can precede consciousness suggests a reduced role for the conscious self in choices.

 

William James, (Psychology), in support of his view that a thought is causal of behavior unless inhibited, described the decision to get out of bed into a cold room in the morning.  His point was that he got up, not as a result of a conscious act of will, but as an automatic consequence of some thought of an action planned for that day, in cases in which that thought was not then inhibited.  In modern terms, he seemed to see the thought of arising as the stimulus and the arising as the response, with no intervening variable; or, more carefully, the neuron cluster of the thought automatically activates the efferent nerves which innervate movement out of bed.  Of course, his emphasis was on all of the exceptions to this:  to the inhibitions to movement which are activated before the thought becomes the action.

 

But one does get up, despite the cold floor and the comfort of the covers.  James nicely described the getting up as a connectedness to the day, which has been my own experience.  Lying there, a succession of thoughts passes through my mind.  One thought, of an expected event or a job to be done, suddenly thrusts me from my bed.  Presumably, the facilitations and inhibitions to arising were fairly well balanced, so that this one thought, used by the active decision rule, overcomes the reluctance to get up.  The point is that the conscious portion of my self discovers me getting up; this is very different from the popular image that I force myself up through an act of will.  Perhaps, then, there is no conscious experience of desire in the chain of covert events.  It is a future goal which leads me to rise, and there is consciousness of that goal, but without additional consciousness of desire or decision.

 

Consciousness of Desire to Breathe

 

I have done personal introspection on the conscious correlates of desire over a ten year period, often convinced that there must be direct consciousness of desire itself, but never quite able to find it.

 

Most of this work has been done with oxygen deprivation, which is a tissue deficit.  That is, I have held my breath, watching for the arousal of desire, and trying to determine how I could tell whether it was present, and how intense it was.  More recently, I discovered a Buddhist monk who has run the same sort of experiments on himself.  His results seem entirely consistent with what I will now report.

 

Holding one's breath activates internal conflict.  Some parts of the decision system push toward breathing, while other parts push toward continuing to hold the breath.  Much of what is considered conscious desire occurs when there is internal conflict or a barrier to one’s goal.  In my breathing trials, the intense desire to breathe was, for a while, fully offset by an intense determination to continue not to breathe (I call each instance of holding my breath a "trial", which it certainly was).

 

In my early experiments, my recordings of self-ratings as to the changes in intensity of my desire to breathe on each trial closely tracked with certain more-or-less involuntary behaviors.  As the desire to breathe arose, I would begin to tense various muscles.  As the desire increased, I would begin to fidget, and then experience involuntary movements reminiscent of the attempt to escape being physically restrained.  Finally, my legs would begin to flail wildly.  Over several hundred trials, these muscular activities continued to decline, until they disappeared almost completely.  Similar diminutions in panic and gross reaction over many trials are experienced in various sorts of psychological experimentation, such as with the application of pain to nonhumans.

 

In the early trials, when I began to be desperate to breathe, I would ask myself, "do I want to breathe now?  How can I be sure?"  These questions struck me rather funny, at first.  Any doubt that I wanted to breathe was purely academic.  And yet, I could never quite answer the second question.  My legs would flail wildly, but I was able to watch them objectively, and I could never figure out what about them could give me assurance that I wanted to breathe.  Sometimes I was able to see my flailings as automatic, conditioned responses, perhaps with no current meaning or value.  What made me so sure of my desire?  Was there a sensory element of desire in consciousness -- a direct neural firing analogous to green, or middle C, or the smell of turpentine?

 

It always seemed that my estimates of the intensity of the desire were pretty accurate, because the course I charted was reasonable; because the course correlated well with actual oxygen starvation (that is, when I took in less air, the course was proportionately steeper), and because I had some tendency to give up at fairly similar levels of subjective intensity.  This ability to note my subjective desire led me to believe, for a long time, that there was a pure experience of desire, and that my problem in noting it was simply in expecting it to resemble other sorts of sensory elements.  But I was never able to discover any conscious content which seemed to be a pure desire.  From time to time I came to suspect that there was no more to the experience than the ability to record its intensity, although I could never make any sense of such a statement.

 

Unfortunately, the experience of desire tended to vary with my latest hypothesis.  With no hypothesis at all, I seemed to make no progress in its investigation.  With a given hypothesis, I tended at first to see confirming results; that is, watching for symptoms in the chest usually resulted in accurate observation of such symptoms; watching for the tendency to gasp for air usually found such a tendency; that these things were there is not in question, but whether any one of them was the desire itself was more difficult to determine.  In each case, persistent observation would lead me to realize that there was actually no objective support for the hypothesis.

 

It seems clear that my desire does not occur as images or memories or thoughts.  I watched with great care for any of these, but they rarely came.  Physiological symptoms were all that I regularly observed.

 

Affected by James' views, I believed for some time that the desire might exist in subtle tendencies to move, faintly recognized in consciousness by changes in muscular tension.  In the early years of doing these trials, there was clearly a tendency to remove my fingers from holding my nose.  The strength of these tendencies did vary directly with what I felt was the intensity of my desire; I was quite convinced that such tendencies were some or all of the desire.  But as I relaxed into the experiments, such muscular activities disappeared, while the nature of the desire did not change.

 

I also dealt for some time with the view that careful introspection weakens the desire, and its indicants.  This is very likely true, up to a point.  Much of what seems to be the desire is panic, and it is difficult to maintain panic at full force and also watch it dispassionately.  But when all the effects of introspection are at their maximum, in the genuine absence of panic, there continues to be a gradual rise in intensity of the tendency to start breathing again.  The gross indications decline with introspection, but the ability to notice subtler indications increases.

 

Throughout the trials, I repeatedly came back to the hypothesis that the desire was identical to the physical symptoms.  Two fairly consistent symptoms were a "burning" sensation in my lungs, and a vacuum-like pressure on what felt like a diaphragm voluntarily closed to block the passage of air to my nose.  Other symptoms that commonly appeared and increased with desire were involuntary attempted inhalation and exhalation in my lungs, head pressure near my forehead, stomach tension, and so on.

 

While there were strong physical symptoms for every trial, which symptoms would appear, or in what order, was not consistent.  Sometimes there was virtually no lung burning throughout; on other trials, lung burning was almost the only symptom.

 

After ten years of trials, off and on, I performed an intensive course of almost two hundred trials.  In these, I eventually made the discovery that a very subtle breathing rhythm (ie, a continued breathing motion of my chest and diaphragm) always seemed to remain present as I held my breath.

 

It occurred to me to play on this subtle breathing tendency.  When the desire became intense, I would voluntarily initiate simulations of inhalation and exhalation in my lungs.  As soon as I began to "breathe", the desire would decline.  I would feel myself relax, and the period of ability to hold my breath would extend.  This trick, of course, would succeed only for a short time, but I was able a couple of times to hold my breath for three minutes, and when I started to breathe, I was neither desperate nor gasping.

 

On some trials, I charted my involuntary tendency to simulate breathing, and found that it declined briefly after voluntary simulations.  On other trials I charted my sense of the intensity of desire; there appeared to be a close correspondence between ups and downs of desire and of breathing tendency.  I do not assume that my conscious sense of desire always depended entirely on this subtle cue; there is lots of evidence that grosser physical symptoms were key on earlier trials; but I do find it likely that, after careful observation increased my sensitivity and decreased the power of some of the other symptoms, this involuntary, simulated breathing tendency was the primary determinant of my consciousness of desire.

 

After many years of searching, I have become convinced that there is no sensory element of desire.  Instead, the inferential processes of consciousness create the construct "desire" to denote increasing motivational tendencies.  Any sort of clue might activate the "desire" construct as, "maybe this physiological sensation (or whatever) means that I want X", and any additional clues will reinforce that hypothesis.  In other words, you don't need consciousness to have the increasing motivation to breathe.  If it appears in consciousness, it appears as an inference from physiological and other cues.  Motivation is not an event or a feeling at all.  It is a state -- an increased likelihood of attempting something.  And likelihoods are constructs -- invented entities.  Desire to breathe need be no more than a "priming" of thoughts about breathing, searches for techniques for making air available, certain body motions, etc.  As such primed clusters actually activate, one after the other, it is rather obvious that the desire must be there.

 

The human system is designed such that increasing oxygen deficit tends to result in such tendencies becoming increasingly dominant, until all of one's attention is taken up by breathing-related activations.  Some of these are powerful physiological symptoms, evolved to be effective warning signals.  But even the associated panic is not a conscious desire.  It is consciousness of a generalized syndrome of extreme behavioral tendencies and physiological activity.

 

Calling desire and panic constructs makes it seem like they should feel less real than the solid things of which people are conscious.  But a large portion of what is real is mirrored in consciousness as constructs, to one degree or another.  The self, for example, is a construct.  So is pleasure; so very obviously is happiness.  So are truth, morality, the universe, science, and the mind itself.

 

There is, of course, an experience of desire, but that experience is inference:  it is a proposition.  It need not be verbal, but it is pretty well represented in words by "I want".  This experience is different from what a sensory element of desire would be, in that it usually comes after the actual desire.  The desire arises, and then makes itself known by whatever means, such as physical symptoms; consciousness then infers the desire from the clues.  This is important because the desire often takes a different course from the conscious "I want".  People say in all honesty that they don't want something, but outside observers are able to note indications that are very opposite.  I am convinced that I want something desperately, but as it becomes available, I realize that I don't want it at all:  this was only a false inference.

 

When I imagine a piece of chocolate, sometimes it is a cold, neutral representation; at other times, it is accompanied by a sense of either "revulsion or desire.  In people for whom all body sensations have been blocked off, either by means of a drug, or as the result of severance of the spinal cord, desire still occurs; it is, however, diminished.  Those who lack physical symptoms learn to watch for other sorts of clues.

 

But what can I possibly mean by the claim that there is no conscious desire?  How else can my self control my direction? The self is made up of all that is involved in intentionality, rather than primarily that which is conscious.  Motivation, emotion and pleasure originate outside of consciousness, and are not directly represented there.  Intelligent behavior is initiated by a whole self which uses consciousness, rather than consciousness always using the rest of oneself.

 

I argue that my subjective experimentation is evidence that there is no sensory element of desire.  But "no sensory element" is what is called a null hypothesis:  a claim that something does not occur.  There is no way ever to prove a null hypothesis.  Although my diligent searching failed to turn up a sensory element of desire, that result might simply have resulted from my prejudices, or my formulation of the question.  The sensory element might have been completely obvious all the time, but in a form that I never looked for.  Others may be able to report on the sensory element in a manner that makes it easy for each of us to identify it in ourselves. 

 

Acrophobia

 

One difference between a concept (including a construct) and a desire is that the desire is actually motivating, while the concept is merely a neutral representation.  Part of my view that desire is outside of consciousness is inter-related with my belief that everything in consciousness is perceptual in nature, and thus is neutral.  We turn now to the discussion of non-neutral things other than desire, such as an emotion.

 

Emotions such as fear are powerful, but are not conscious entities.  I don't deny that there can be the sequence, "That's a dangerous dog, I am scared, I will run".  I do deny (with William James) that the "I am scared" is necessary to cause the running.  And I say that the conscious sequence can be merely, "That is a dangerous dog, I will run", without consciousness of fear as a causal factor.  Measuring one's internal state consciously is not always necessary.  The fear is the motivation, and need not always pass through consciousness in order to activate a response.

 

I had a fascinating experience some years ago, on a visit to the top of Half Dome, which is a rock rising thousands of feet above the floor of Yosemite National Park.  I love to climb, but I have acrophobia.  My specific fear is that the structure on which I am standing, if at a great height, will give way under me, allowing me to plunge to my death.  At the top of Half Dome, my ten year old son and twelve year old daughter spent a lot of time leaning over the overhanging edge, looking at the valley below.  Watching them, I was terrified that they would fall.  At last, I tried to look over the edge myself.  My fear stopped me.  Even lying on my stomach, I could not get my head within two feet of the edge.

 

This struck me funny, and was of great interest.  I asked my kids to hold my feet as I lay there, thinking (correctly, as it turned out) that this would give me a false sense of security.  For twenty or thirty minutes, I worked to convince myself to inch forward.  At all times the experience was enjoyable; there was great repartee with my kids; but I could not overcome my fear sufficiently to get my head out beyond the edge of the overhang.  When I finally gave up, I found myself very glad to quit.

 

During the entire experience, I had been unable to locate my fear in consciousness.  Seven years later, with considerably more background on the whole subject, I decided to repeat the experiment.  This time, I went to Eagle Rock, a smaller version of Half Dome, near Pasadena, California.  On two occasions almost two months apart, I conducted an intensive investigation of the contents of my consciousness while trying to approach the edge of Eagle Rock.

 

When I first reached the top of Eagle Rock, my heart rate was about 100 beats per minute -- not surprising for the climb.  For the hour and a half I stayed up there, my heart rate never slowed.  Clearly fear had an impact.  Interestingly, my heart neither raced nor slowed from that 100 beats per minute in response to momentary increases and decreases in the fear.  At some moments, I was in great terror as I tried to take a step, or seemed to have gone too far, but my heart seemed to be at a steady state of racing.

 

As with Half Dome, images of the ledge crumbling and of me tripping played a large role.  My fear would intensify as a result of graphic images appearing.  It is interesting that no memories seemed to occur:  only images based on the current topography.

 

I recorded both experiences on audiotape.  The notable feature of each tape is the repeated groaning of all kinds.  I pushed myself to the point that these more or less involuntary groans interrupted my words at the rate of perhaps a dozen groans per sentence, as I reported the contents of consciousness.  It may be that the fact that I was verbalizing facilitated a verbal expression of fear as a groan.  What I later found to be the role of my stomach muscles may also have had an influence.

 

After many trials, it became clear to me that the images were not the primary causes of the fear:  it came often in the complete absence of imagery.  There were many physical symptoms, but they changed from one trial to the next, much as with the breath-holding trials.  Also like desire, I found it easy to report fine discriminations in the intensity of my fear.

 

By the end of the second trip to Eagle Rock, I was convinced that there is no conscious sensory element for fear.  What finally convinced me was a discovery that was similar to the discovery of breathing rhythms that correlated with my breathing desire.

 

In the middle of the second trip, I began to focus on contractions of my abdominal wall of muscle (and perhaps my stomach diaphragm as well).  These contractions were not rhythmic. But as I observed, I realized that their intensity seemed to correspond very well to my fear.

 

Recalling my simulation of breathing, I tried to exaggerate the stomach contractions; it did not seem to affect my fear, but it is possible that I did not succeed in mirroring the particular kinds of contractions that were occurring.  Then I tried focusing on complete relaxation of all my abdominal muscles; with my meditation background, I did not find this difficult.

 

Remarkably, as I relaxed the stomach muscles, my fear disappeared.  Completely.

 

There was a nail driven into the rock right at the edge of the overhang at which I had been doing my trials.  My goal, in the more than two hours I had spent on that ledge, had been to reach out to touch that nail with one finger, while lying on my stomach.  I had succeeded once.

 

Now I pulled myself up on all fours and moved my head up and out over the nail, looking approximately straight down at the ground below.  No fear.

 

I stood up, and walked almost to the edge, again looking out and almost straight down.  I felt great amazement.

 

To be fair, it took effort to keep relaxing my stomach muscles.  I didn't feel fear, but I still had feelings of some sort:  I took great care not to slip.  When I left the ledge completely, still with stomach muscles relaxed, I discovered that I was very glad to be away from it.

 

As I began my descent from the rock, I realized that I should try to replicate my experiment.  I returned to the ledge (with a little hesitation).  I allowed my muscles to contract, and tried to repeat my acts of bravery of a moment before.  My fear had returned, probably at slightly less than its old level.  After carefully assuring that all my old symptoms were there, and that the fear limited what I could screw up my courage to do, I again relaxed my muscles.  Again the fear disappeared, and I demonstrated my ability to approach the edge.

 

Then I tried to allow my stomach muscles to contract once more, but was not very successful in doing so.  I remained relatively fearless.

 

I have become convinced that my consciousness of breathing desire and of ledge fear were each largely underlain by their own  dominant physical symptom, at least after a lot of observation (which may have changed the cues), plus an array of less dominant physical symptoms.  I don't know how universal my symptoms might turn out to be across other people, but I find it interesting to speculate that groans may tend to relate to stomach contractions under certain conditions of tending to verbalize.

 

In both cases it seems like it was the physical sensation which created a conscious inference, and the inference seemed to be implicated as a cause of my behavior.  Breathing simulations enabled me to hold my breath longer, apparently by reducing the desire to breathe.  Stomach relaxation allowed me to approach the edge, clearly as a result of reducing the conscious fear.  One might well conclude that the only fear that existed was the conscious fear.  Clearly, consciousness is implicated, at least some of the time, in desire and fear.

 

Where was the limbic system (the emotion center) in my fear-ending relaxation of stomach walls?  My fear may have been a self-perpetuating loop, with physiological cues being part of the causal chain.

 

But there is a subtle homunculus fallacy in the idea that there is a feeling in consciousness (in this case, the feeling of the fear), which causes behavior. It is natural in our society to have the vague idea that there is a "me" in the mind which experiences the fear, and decides to run (or whatever), in order to reduce the fear.

 

No such model is necessary.  There is nothing added to our understanding of motivation by assuming that there are feelings in consciousness.  A simple model of the relationship of events to one's choice of behavior is that the mind (conscious and/or unconscious) develops the model of the situation, and a model of a possible response.  The model of the situation includes associations and beliefs.  We might well characterize a given model as, "that is a life-threatening situation" -- still a neutral representation.  The nature of the model of the situation associates to a possible behavioral response, and may also associate to various action-enhancing responses, such as limbic activity (emotion), and the flow of adrenalin.  The activation of possible responses typically associates to any known undesirable consequences to that response, which tend to inhibit its use.  If no inhibitions occur, the very activation of a possible response leads to its occurring.

 

In the case of my ledge fear, I knew that the fear was irrational, but somehow continued to create mental representations of the situation which activated the limbic system.  It is possible that the stomach contractions themselves were my mental representation of the danger, when combined with the view of a precipice, leading to an irrational, self-perpetuating loop.  Thus, contractions caused fear, which caused further contractions.

 

Psychological researchers in the area of emotion have given a little credence to the argument that emotions do not occur in consciousness.  There is some evidence that people depend heavily on external cues to infer the nature of their own emotions.  That is, an outside observer and I will each reach the same conclusions about my emotions, and investigation will suggest that we each depended on the same evidence:  the nature of the situation, and behavioral cues such as movement and facial signals.

 

In some cases, there is also evidence that outside observers are more accurate in inferring a person's emotional response, at first, than is the person.  Of course, this is partially explainable by the fact that emotion tends to turn one's attention to the stimulus, and away from self-awareness.

 

 

As a psychologist doing philosophy, I offer this essay on the centrality of one’s subjective experience, focusing on its implications as to qualia and dualism.

My conclusions as to dualism are difficult to classify.  The world in itself is monistic (wholly material), but lacks agents to have knowledge of it, and so is unknown.  As soon as anything models itself as an agent with beliefs, that model includes an implicit, necessary assumption of dualism.  One might say that there is no inherent dualism, but that any adequate model of the world must be dualistic, in order to include the possibility of knowledge.

 

We will see that this approach to dualism leaves the basic implications of materialism intact.  Materialism denies the reality of immaterial mental entities such as your red quale when you fantasize a red Ferrari.  Further,it suggests that everything that happens either has a physical cause or is random -- that neural processing always follows the laws of physics,leaving no room for us to be initiators of causes.  Ignoring randomness, which limits predictability but is simply a further limitation on free will, the implication is determinism:  all human behavior, overt and covert (thought, dreams, intentions), could in principle be predicted, so that science is adequate to understanding human behavior.  (See the article, “Agency” for how all of this is compatible with our having free will).

 

For the most part, I believe, philosophers fail to take the implications of materialism far enough.  There is, I propose, a key sense in which you and I are automata:  rule-based systems with no slightest awareness – no beliefs, no hopes, no awareness of pain.  In that view, there are no meanings, no knowledge or intentionality.

Evolution tends toward rule-based systems that mimic intentionality.  Amebas and jellyfish, although lacking central nervous systems, find food and flee from danger, as though they knew and cared.  In the natural course of things, there is increasingly sophisticated mimicry of intentionality, and one might expect the evolution of an organism which, like a chess computer, produces possible future scenarios and has automatic systems for choosing the most adaptive.  For all you know, other humans than yourself might be such systems, utterly lacking in intentionality, but mimicking beliefs, hopes and awareness of their surroundings.

Of course, evolution doesn’t intentionally mimic intentionality.  More accurately, sophisticated systems are more likely survive and reproduce.  The simplest way to model such systems, as Dennett says, is by taking the intentional stance with them.

Such a position works wonderfully to explain all that is, with one glaring exception:  it ignores one’s own subjective experience.  I propose that we should take this automaton position as one adequate explanation of reality with a fatal flaw.  Beginning with that viewpoint we can then look at the origins of subjective experience.

It is difficult even to conceive that intentionality might not be real, in that we deny its reality intentionally and by conceiving.  Here is a science fiction illustration of how there might be a complete model of the world without conception, intentionality or actors.

                                                                   Temnons
 
  A Temnon lives for a billion years or more.  Its body is a thousand light years in diameter.  Most of its body is of unimaginably low density, but a small portion is extremely dense, and records sub-nuclear activity.  A Temnon travels rapidly through space, with whole galaxies passing through it, doing the Temnon no harm.  It records only whatever interacts with its body.

   We might imagine that Temnons evolved conventionally into highly advanced processing systems, never achieving intentionality.  If so, they eventually reached the point where all their needs were automatically supplied, such that their sole remaining behavior is an aimless processing of data.  A Temnon doesn’t act, think or predict, but merely amasses and processes its data as 0s and 1s.  Still, we might describe the sort of processing it does in intentional terms, as we do with artificial intelligence.  It processes information selectively, organizing it into a model of the world, utterly without intention.

   Over a billion years, one Temnon developed a model of the world that is generally superior to our own.  It modeled human civilization thoroughly, without recourse to the notion of intentionality, tending to model at the microphysical level.  In its radical translation of human terms such as ‘pain', 'hope', etc., it modeled humans as mere links in the causal chain, without feelings or aims.

   It was entirely successful in modeling the debates of philosophers of mind, including detailed conversations about qualia, consciousness and mind.  But, not having personally experienced such things, it neither used nor needed any semblance of what we mean by the subjective aspects of such terms.  For example, it “interpreted” the discussion as to what it might be like to be a bat in a way that modeled both sides of the argument functionally, missing what we consider to be the point.  Not having experienced subjective entities such as qualia, it failed to recognize the subjective aspects of the issue.  Yet it succeeded in modeling the full functional content of each side of the argument.

** ** **

I believe that the Temnon’s model of people could be fully adequate, such that adding intentional terms (pain, meanings, belief, purpose, etc.) would in no way increase its predictive power.  This suggests that such terms point at entities that are either non-existent or epiphenomenal (without causal influence).

Notice that the Temnon could not possibly notice our intentionality.  Our sole basis for supposing that there might even be awareness, meanings or aims is each person’s subjective experience.  There is no hint for a non-intentional system that there might be intentionality.  Writing operas and producing philosophy can be interpreted as rule-based behaviors of wonderfully sophisticated automata, evolved as the result of social interaction being adaptive.

Such a position is, of course, unsavory, counterintuitive and apparently ridiculous.  It implies that you and I don’t know that we are alive, that we have no interest in affecting the future, that death and suffering are no worse than life and comfort.  It implies that we simulate having aims in precisely the way a chess computer does:  running possible scenarios and choosing one by built-in rules, while having no idea that we are doing so.

Just what-all is missing from this materialist view?  I don’t think that anything physical is missing.  Only the thinnest veneer of personal experience is left out of the Temnon model: that related to the intentional aspects of perception, belief, desire and choice.  In particular, the Temnon model is missing intentionality – the quality of aboutness in a mental entity, such as my meaning apple being about that apple.  Let’s try to characterize this veneer by distinguishing mind from brain.

Mind and Brain

The brain has been described as a syntactic engine, with its neural processing fully controlled by proximate causes, distal causes (such as operant conditioning and the evolution of the brain), and some randomness.  ‘Syntax’, here, is “the rules governing construction of an orderly system of information, whether in sentence structure, logic or elsewhere”.  A syntactic engine, then, is a mere rule-following device such as a chess computer.  The brain is an input-output system, structured through evolution and learning to make certain sorts of responses to stimuli, without aim or awareness.   The implication is that the brain is not a true meaning-user that comprehends and chooses, but is a mere rule-based processor.

The mind has been described as a semantic engine (a user of meanings), intentional but supervenient on the brain – a flow of epiphenomenal mental states that have no causal power – have no impact on succeeding mental or physical states. 

This view creates a basic problem for the thin veneer of intentionality, making it epiphenomenal (utterly outside the causal chain).  As an apple comes into my field of vision, my brain activates processes for identification; the only epiphenomenal part is my personally meaning anything by that neural process.  I fantasize a red Ferrari.  The mental redness (the quale) is epiphenomenal.  You stick a needle in my arm.  The wince and squeal are physical; only the mental quality of the pain is epiphenomenal.  One ought to conclude that the intentional aspects, being without causal influence, are superfluous.

However, the claim that they are epiphenomenal is thought to imply that mental states are both real and immaterial.  I’m going to try to show that mental entities are real but not immaterial.  They are merely special ways of describing neural entities.

Agency

I find it useful to divide reality into two levels:  the physical and agency, where agent is simply a necessary construct that creates the possibility of personal experience, belief, desire and free choice. (I more fully describe necessary constructs in the article, “Knowledge”).  Any complete model of reality (including the Temnon’s), requires necessary constructs.  Examples of necessary constructs include the perfect circle, the axioms of geometry, and the surface of a star.  They are invented entities, and are modifiable to varying degrees.  Different models of reality will make use of different necessary constructs.  In my own terminology, a necessary construct is valid/real:  not physical, but an integral part of reality within the given model.

However, the necessary construct of agent is unique, in that it is the sine qua non for the world that we know.  We can say that it is no more than a concept, but it is also the very ground of there being persons with minds that can conceptualize.

I propose that our society unknowingly uses (and conflates) two competing models of reality.  The radical scientific model (which I will call the automaton explanation) is consistent with a microphysical explanation, and ought to treat people as automata.  The other, the agent explanation, treats people as agents with minds and free will.  I will try to show that it differs from the automaton explanation primarily in adding the single necessary construct of agents, and then including functional relations to that construct.  Brain terms and mind terms tend to explain the same phenomena, and need not conflict if we keep these two explanations separate.

I suggest, then, that there are no minds (and no intentional phenomena) without agents.  Once we employ the agent construct, an intentional relation is between an agent and an object.  It is a functional relation to the degree that we accept the agent as real.  Note that the Temnon lacks agency, even in the agent explanation.  It has accidentally modeled the world, but its model is not about anything; it mirrors the world in some ways, but doesn’t assert any such relation.

Experiencing the redness of an apple is a functional relation between agent and apple, and feeling pain in your leg is a functional relation to your leg injury.

My premise, then, is that the automaton explanation can be expanded to be fully adequate for all but one’s own subjective experience.  The agent explanation is fully mappable onto the automaton explanation, so that there is no multiplication of entities, but cannot properly be subsumed by it, because there is no appropriate way for the automaton explanation to deal with intentionality.  (The automaton explanation already uses necessary constructs, such as infinity; we need only add agency.)

If you fully accept that the automaton explanation is accurate and complete for the Temnon, you are left with just two alternatives (see the article, “Agency”).  In one alternative, mind, consciousness and qualia, although epiphenomenal, have genuine existence.  They are part of reality itself, to be accounted for in any complete understanding of the world.  (Qualia are genuine entities, independent of the model used).  As I argue below, there is no evidence of such entities.  Agents and automata would report the same qualia, so that this alternative is empty of content. 

In the second alternative, the very adoption of a subjective stance by automata creates the context for personally experiencing one’s surroundings and developing personal beliefs about the world.  And that context necessarily takes account of the agent as a necessary construct, with meanings and other intentional entities as functional relations to agents, all valid/real in the only sort of model of reality in which truth is possible.  There is dualism, but only as a necessary invention of the model of reality taken when using the subjective stance.

Qualia

Perhaps the most compelling argument for dualism is the incontrovertible subjective experience of qualia.  I propose that a red quale is the semantic relation between an agent and an intended (seen, recalled or fantasized) red surface.  The quale is not, in addition, a red mental entity.

We might consider three supposed levels to qualia:  the syntactic underpinnings, the semantic relation of making a claim about the apple, and the quale itself as a mental entity. 

Let’s start with the syntactic underpinnings -- firings in a neural network, designed to facilitate appropriate responses to redness in a wide variety of ways.  I will try to describe them while relating them to their semantic counterparts that produce qualia.  Imagine a schematic of the physical structure of a neural network, with each meaning represented by a simple on/off (yes/no) switch.  When the switch for apple turns on, there is no content to it other than “yes”.  The content is merely implied by the position of the switch in the syntactic equivalent of semantic space (ie, in the neural network with its primings of other neurons).  For example, the redness of an apple is represented in a space for color, defined in relation to blue, yellow, brown, black, etc.  There is, then, another syntactic/semantic space for sound, somewhat similar in structure.

But how can a mere position in syntactic/semantic space imply genuine content?  The content is in the associations, supported by the priming of connected switches.  We might say that my meaning apple has its content in what I tend to do after that switch turns on – take a bite, recall what apples taste like, categorize it as a fruit, etc.

It might feel to me like I’m holding the full meaning of apple in my mind at a given moment.  The reason is that this content is immediately available to me, with no delay when I look to see that the content includes its typical shape, color, taste, etc.

We can model a thought process syntactically as a succession of switches being turned to the “on” position (or being slightly activated with priming that affects which switches turn on next).  It’s a succession of covert and overt behaviors, such as priming the William Tell story, or reaching out for the apple.  The covert can be explained not only as neural behaviors but also as a thought process -- a path through semantic space, where the active content is always thin and the richness is in the full complexity of directions the mind can turn, relating my current situation to my whole history of experience and knowledge.

Said differently, my mind has a whole model of the world.  My current situation (seeing this apple) makes sense because I position it within my model.  I have a sense of knowing, because of the availability of the various potential directions, but I don’t have the full content as a single mental entity.

Mirroring the syntactic underpinnings of qualia is one’s semantic relation to the red surface:  a personal assertion of redness (utterly different from perceptions of saltiness or stinging), or an identification by placing this sensory quality in the semantic space for color.  The content of this assertion is its placement in my model of the world, suggesting all the appropriate ways I might want to respond.  A perception is the sort of assertion that even the most primitive sentient creature makes.  The semantic relation is the syntactic process described from a personal perspective.

The personal relation to an elemental sensible quality such as color must mirror the mere on/off switch underlying it, as a simple assertion:  that’s red, or that’s salty, or that’s stinging.  It isn’t yet a red quality in the mind, but is a yes, an assertion of that redness being found out there.  The relation is one of intending a unique location in syntactic/semantic space to be about the real color, identified within the context of one’s model of the world.

Suppose for a moment that you have no immaterial qualia, but only on/off switches that position visual wavelengths in a syntactic/semantic space for color.  As you scan a horizon, your system instantly recognizes hundreds of colors and shades, knowing their inter-relations, and activating connotations such as liking certain colors.  Given your intimate familiarity with each color and the ability to recognize it instantly, it would surely present to you as an inherent perceptual quality of some real surface – the barest recognition, a simple that is unique; that apple is red with the slightest purplish tinge.  When you later recalled it, it would still hold that quality.  Red would seem like a simple, like one of the elements that make up the visual world.  I propose that discussion of the qualia of direct perception is about exactly that.

The third supposed level to the qualia discussion is the epiphenomenal, immediate content – its mental redness, in addition to the real redness of the apple that I am seeing or recalling, and in addition to my assertion of familiarity with it (my assertion of where it fits within my model).

There is the tendency, then, to want to identify the qualities of the quale:  boy, this mental redness is really red.  But that can only be done by asserting about the quale, and that assertion must be mediated by locating the color of the quale in semantic space.  Whether or not that can be done introspectively, we must recognize that it would be a new assertion – “perceiving” the quale in an I-meaning-quale relation.  That is, an on/off switch for red would mediate my relation to the quale.  The implication is that the quale is not epiphenomenal, but is noticed (generated by the appropriate neural processes for noticing, such as electrical connections from the quale to the appropriate part of the neural network).

We are capable of introspection, and we take an interest in qualia as entities in themselves.  But it is easy to show that, if qualia are epiphenomenal (if our relation to a quale is not mediated by a new meaning through neural connections), we have no way of knowing whether we are really introspecting qualia.  The argument goes as follows.

Suppose that there is this third level of qualia – immediate, conscious mental contents without added processing – in addition to the semantic relation of asserting.  Suppose further that there is a defect in my brain that causes my qualia to disappear for minutes at a time.  Let’s say that I happen to be introspecting during my fantasy about a red Maserati when my red quale suddenly disappears.  My neural processes would, of course, be unaffected by the absence of something epiphenomenal.  Thus, I’d think, “yep, there it is, red as ever”.  If, soon after my qualia returned, I recalled that little attempt at introspection.  I would be able to recall the redness of the previously introspected quale nicely, underlain by the same neural processes that would have occurred had there been no temporary absence.
 
Whatever epiphenomenal qualia are, even the most careful introspection and retrospection would miss their blinking into and out of existence.  Introspection of your epiphenomenal qualia, then, provides you with no evidence of whether they occur.

The semantic relation to the redness of an apple is an assertion with genuine mental content (that apple is red), limited to a spot in semantic space and all the connotations thereto.  That spot in semantic space can only be a simple, a declaration of semantic location (a yes with its content being implicit).  The same, then, can be said of a pain, if we separate the pain itself from its entire connotation, such as the attendant suffering.  The pain itself is neither unpleasant nor pleasant, but is a simple.

Consider the pain of a wasp stinging me.  Underlying it is neural processing, tending to lead to appropriate responses such as wincing.  In addition, there is a semantic relation, asserting a certain physical location and a unique simple, somewhat related to an ache or to tactile pressure, but far away from redness.  Is there, in addition, a pain quale in consciousness?

If there is such a pain quale, am I in an intentional relation to it, mediated by another meaning, as in, I-characterize-quale?  Or is the pain quale a mere content of consciousness, not noticed by the agent, but mere consciousness-in-itself?  It can only be the latter if its disappearance would fail to alter the neural flow.  And in that case, we have no private evidence of whether or not we have such qualia.

But why does red have just the “feel” that it does, and green such a different “feel”?  As an agent, I directly experience the world, including elemental experiences in which the assertion is no more than a “yes” – empty of content but in a precise location in my model of the world.  This gives rise to the sense of immediate recognition.  The question of whether we could switch the mental experiences of red and green for each other falsely Implies that they have content.  One must take a stand.  If my qualia for red and green were switched, would I notice?  If so, then they are not epiphenomenal.  Neurally, I am thus in an I-assert-greenness relation to the quale.  If, instead, they are epiphenomenal, I could not notice the switching in any meaningful way.

When I say that the elemental assertion has no content, I am ignoring its connotation (primings), which includes the complexity of my history of seeing this color.

I experience pain and imagine red dragons in ways that are inherently private.  There is no question that these are real relations, but they are not relations to me as automaton.  They are relations that are dependent on my necessary construct that I am an agent.   Given that necessary construct, I make use of a true explanation that I experience the world directly, have beliefs and desires, and influence the course of things.  None of that is true in the automaton explanation, but all of it is a different way of describing the physical events that can also be described neurally. 

My leg is injured and my automaton reacts accordingly, neither knowing nor caring that it is injured.  In the agent explanation of the same event, I personally experience the injury by means of a system that gives it a place in a semantic space for tactile sensation and/or pain.  The pain has instant familiarity, and is nothing like a sound or a color.  That is, it’s an ineffable simple of a perceptual sort.  Besides its location in semantic space, it has all sorts of connotations.  Typically (but not always) pain is accompanied by suffering, which provides most of its content.

Science might one day be able to read my thoughts precisely, finding the precise neural activity underlying my claims of redness and pain, and being able to decipher my thoughts in far greater detail than I can.  Science will have unraveled my automaton, but will miss the intentional relations – what it means to be an agent experiencing a red apple.  It is not missing an additional, immaterial entity.  Rather, it is missing the perspective:  being an agent who is thinking and experiencing.  This is just a different explanation of the same things, but the perspective is fundamental to our design, and will never be replaceable by automaton explanations.
 
Consider Mary, a scientific investigator of color, locked for all her life in a black-and-white room, so that she has full objective knowledge of the color red, but no subjective experience of it.  Now she comes out of the room and sees a red rose.  At the syntactic level there is a neural activation in a previously unused part of her brain that is reserved for the semantic space for color.  We need not even consider the question of qualia to understand that this is radically new information to her.

I proposed early on that the agent is a necessary construct, and that all intentional terms are functional as relations to the agent.  The implication is that we can map the agent explanation onto the Temnon explanation by adding a single necessary construct (and working through all its implications). 

More obviously, belief and desire are genuine functional relations, although they imply the agent as a necessary construct as one of the terms of the relation.  (I explore these sorts of functional relations in “Desire, Fear and William James”).

The term ‘supervenient’ is commonly used to describe the relation of brain and mind in a dualist model.  I like the term for describing the relation between the agent and automaton explanations.  The two are arguably not combinable (see “Knowledge”), but attempt to describe identical events.  In either model, the competing explanation can be seen as supervenient on it, not having causal power.  From the viewpoint of the automaton explanation, meanings are epiphenomenal, and are merely supervenient on neural events.  In the agent explanation, my meaning is intentional with causal power, and the neural event underlying it is supervenient – not causing it, but parallel with it.  That is, my intending that meaning will always be underlain by that precise neural event as a mere co-occurrence (rather than as a subsequent effect, caused by my meaning). 

The agent explanation fully acknowledges the neural.  Whereas the automaton explanation can deny all agency, the reverse is not true.  But causally, the agent explanation assigns real causal power to the agent, with the neural as the necessary collaborator, neither causing nor caused by the meaning, but the meaning itself in its physical aspect.  That is, a meaning is a neural event described with a model that includes agency. 

The two explanations can be mapped onto each other, with neither one adding to the functionality of the other.  I mean no more than that when I say that they are epiphenomenal on each other.

Independent Reality

We are mistaken to think that there is a single true version of independent reality (see the article, “Knowledge”).  Truth is inherently relative to the inter-relation between independent reality and the model in which it occurs.  What is true about human agency is a function of which model is used.

Dennett treats the intentional stance as a mere stance.  I can imagine accepting his view for all cases except for oneself.  My view of myself as an agent is not a convenient fiction, nor an error of folk science.  It is true.  And since I believe that you and I are fundamentally alike, I can hardly help but believe that you, too, are truly an agent.

The agent is a necessary construct, only as real as entities such as the laws of physics and the axioms of geometry.  But that is an entirely different thing from calling it a mere stance, because it isn’t optional.  Dennett wants to say that the microphysical model is the more accurate, with the intentional stance merely a shortcut.  In doing so, he is conflating the automaton and agent explanations.

Which of the two models of reality is primary, or is more true?  The automaton explanation contains a paradox:  it is a set of concepts and beliefs proposed by automata that are incapable of conceiving or believing.  Properly, the automaton model should be approached as the Temnon model.  The Temnon has no beliefs.  And Its model makes no assertions until agents come along to try it out.

But the agent explanation has an inherent weakness in that its implied dualism is wholly a function of the model chosen, rather than a feature of independent reality.
 
I conclude that the agent explanation is the superior model of the world for our use.  The automaton explanation can be precisely mapped onto the agent explanation, and is superior for some purposes, but is inadequate for describing knowledge, personal experience, desire, being free to choose and anything mattering.

Interestingly, I think that the ultimate version of the Temnon model would take the lack of initiating causes to the extreme.  It would model the world as a unity, with no separation, no distinctions, everything so inextricably connected that all is cause and effect of all else.  A star has no surface, but just lesser and lesser density, with its photons and gravitons extending across the universe.  This is a view that plays a prominent role in Eastern philosophy.  In some versions, they propose that the unity is broken up only by concepts.

I conclude that the key move in history was the development of a self-concept as agent (see “Agency”).  All that matters in life is a function of the subjective stance.  The automaton explanation will continue to be valuable as a tool of science, but, in its pure form, it leaves out all that matters.

Many of the problems addressed by philosophy are due to the conflation of two parallel explanations.