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Knowledge

chuckturner — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:03:12 GMT

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?

Overview

chuckturner — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:13:00 GMT

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

chuckturner — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 22:59:00 GMT

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.

[1] I will simplify things for most of this article by dealing with an agent in isolation from other agents. For example, I will talk about good exclusively in terms of what is good for that agent alone. I will eventually take some steps toward correcting the misleading effects of this selfish approach.

[2] See “Knowledge” on howitallcomestogether.com

[3] See “Dualism on howitallcomestogether.com

[4] See “Agency” on howitallcomestogether.com

[5] See “Knowledge” on howitallcomestogether.com