When I say “je n’ais pas besoin de cette hypothèse” I mean something different from what Lavoisier meant. The hypothesis is not false but meaningless. Now this sounds like old fashioned, simplistic Ayerism, which denigrated all religious assertions as meaningless, but I want to draw a distinction. Religion is basically concerned with an afterlife and what one might do to ensure a comfortable one. While I am very disinclined to pay great attention to such considerations, I would never dream of casting them out as meaningless, though no doubt some are more meaningless than others. The most devastatingly Ayer-like criticism of them was made by a classical philosopher, I forget which one. If, in modern terms, consciousness ceases at the moment of death, one will never know that it has done so. There will be no moment of saying “So there was nothing in it! They led us up the garden path!” Consciousness will simply cease. That doesn’t, of course, make it meaningless to dispute this possibility, or to dream of all sorts of alternatives.
In contrast, the most
unquestioned notion of most religions, that the universe must have come into
being by the will of an omnipotent deity, is what I now see as the very core of
meaninglessness. In an autobiographical book that I hope to publish soon,
called Born Under the Pleiades, I try to justify an alternative to
metaphysics in which arguments appeal to common sense without pretending to
have a QED at their end – which means of course that anyone who doesn’t like
them is entitled to reject them without ado. What, then, do we, at the
beginning of the twenty first century, know about the universe? Surely,
that it is a stupendously marvellous and magnificent set up. Now for my Pleiades
insight: that whatever the universe’s origin, it can only have come from
something stupendously and marvellously and magnificently good, in
comparison with which the phenomena that we are forced to call evil, and not
merely bad, must suffer under an irredeemable asymmetry, and can never,
conceivably, take the universe over.
Later, a doubt nibbled
at me. What if the universe had had no origin, and had simply happened? Where
would my neo-metaphysical insight be then? The universe would still be
incontrovertibly stupendous and marvellous and magnificent, but would it have
to be incontrovertibly good in the sense above? After a period of what I
took to be thought I came to the conclusion that it would still have to be good
enough, a decent sort of universe in which manifestations of evil would at
least have the dice loaded against them – perhaps we might need to worry about
the outcome more than Pleiades suggested, but not so very much more.
My conclusion now is
that this very distinction, between the universe having some kind of origin and
just happening, is where the real core of meaninglessness lies, making the
question of whether the origin is a designing deity, with plans and intentions,
meaningless a fortiori.
I have to admit that my
grounds for saying this depend on scientific theories that, firstly, I might
have misunderstood, and, secondly, might in the end turn out to be false. They
are therefore in no way philosophically absolute. I offer them merely as
possibly evoking sympathetic echoes with the current sceptical disenchantment
with religious dogmas and explanations.
The universe, then, I
assert in the hope of being right about it, began at what we can refer to as a
moment in time, that is to say at such and such a length of time before our
present cogitations. The phrase “in time”, however, is misleading, since it
suggests that time was already there to precede the moment of beginning,
whereas there is no meaning to time in the absence of events, and before the
beginning there were no events. We are driven to apologise for the fact that
even in saying “before the beginning there were no events” we are transgressing
against the very point we are trying to make, by encouraging people to respond
“when were there no events?”
Out of nothing, nothing
can come. Well, the universe came out of a superabundance of energy, turning
itself into matter at, and following, the big bang. But what did that come out
of? This seems the most obvious and meaningful question. What caused this
energy to appear and metamorphose? The problem is that causation requires time.
If there was no antecedent for its appearance (on the scene, one wants to say,
but there was no scene), there could be no cause of it. One is forced to say
that it just happened for the simple reason that nothing else can
reasonably be said.
And that is all I can
say now, except to quote three diary passages, written soon after Pope Benedict
appeared on the scene, out of which these ideas grew. Then I shall turn to
quasi-religious ideas that I do consider meaningful, though I must admit
in advance that the things that I not only think meaningful but actually
believe are the very ones that no-one else seems able to make head or tail of.
20.4.05 . . . So I want to declare – and I hope one day
argue – that there really is a truth, which all theological utterances
misrepresent. It is a truth that any atheist who adjusted himself to it could
agree with. The universe began with a colossal energy charge that transformed
itself into the material universe. Nothing caused this to happen. There was no
‘before it happened’ to which the concept of cause could apply. So it is
entirely reasonable to say that it ‘just happened’, because there is no other
way to describe it. Nor was there any need for ‘intelligent design’ or anything
similar, because this colossal energy charge was something so superlative that
it had no need of design. It did have qualities that we can sense,
indeed experience, and these are so real that metaphors like ‘love’ and
‘generosity’ and ‘source of moral strength’ come naturally to many people’s
lips, but the whole essence of the matter is that these arise without any need
for this goodness knows how many mega-joules of initial energy to have had the personal
qualities that these metaphors imply. Sorry, Trinity. I’m sure there is some
way in which your metaphor came to seem natural to the Fathers of the
Church, but that doesn’t make it a literal truth.
That’s got to be it. Set
theory is what I’m working on.
26.4.05 . . . I also came clean to Aaron about M’s
problems. It seems to me very likely that she has already left Montevideo.
Taking my death-bed wishes with her. It would be nice if she could pass them on
to Benedict while giving him Wittbook and telling him that if he reads it he’ll
find that modern philosophy isn’t the desert he thinks it is. The essence of
what I think comes in what one sees when one plays one of Maharaji’s CDs:
Unknown Artist. This charge of energy gets going while making it impossible to
say meaningfully that anything started it or even that it started itself. And
also to say meaningfully that personal qualities played any part in the
process, and equally impossible to argue the toss meaningfully about whether
they did. Nothing could tie itself into unknowability more effectively,
removing even the meaning of the hypothesis that there could ever have been any
entity tying the knot.
28.4.05 . . . Now I want to see what nonsense I wrote
above. Benedict the 16th has got woolly mysticism on his list
of modern evils.
To introduce the things I consider meaningful and in some cases true, I
will tell a story about the conductor Solti. He died only a few days after
Princess Diana and his obituary revealed a possibility that I found enormously
moving. Early in 1946 I had driven with a friend in one of our FAU ambulances
from Oberhausen, where we were stationed, to Wuppertal, where a performance of Fidelio
had been advertised. The first I had ever heard, it was also the best, and
still is, even better than Klemperer’s at Covent Garden. Two things still distinguish
it. The first moved me because it was hardly more than two years since I had
been in Strangeways, exercising in a triangular prison yard and on one occasion
penetrating a women’s yard where mothers in prison uniform with babies at their
breasts were exercising. This Wuppertal production was the only one I have ever
seen where the producer seemed to have any idea what prison exercise is
actually like. The second point is a small one, but no-one else gets it quite
right. In the dungeon scene, the moment a trumpet sounds to announce the
arrival of the minister, Rocco takes over, assumes authority and orders
his men to escort the governor up to the surface. This is implicit in the text
but is somehow never made enough of.
Solti’s obituary
revealed that in the immediate months after the war he had been forced to take
any odd jobs he could, and in particular in the British Zone. It dawned on me
as very probable that he had conducted my Wuppertal Fidelio. This
thought aroused a fantasy in me: perhaps, after my death, my disembodied soul
might encounter Solti’s and ask him whether that had been the case.
Since I can dream of
something like this happening, it must be meaningful to suppose that it
actually might. The question is whether it practically might. In the months
that followed, I began to read or watch or listen to discussions by
neurologists on the mechanism of memory. I came to the conclusion that memory
in the absence of neurological activity could not take place. This would mean that
whatever meaning the concept of a disembodied soul might have it could not be
an entity carrying with it the memory of a previous life, let alone the
possibility of recognising other disembodied souls and checking details with
them.
Granted that, the obvious
question for a sceptic to ask is how memory-without-neurology differs from
consciousness-without-neurology. Surely, both are equally impossible. Common
experience corroborates this. We have most of us encountered circumstances
where consciousness has ceased as a result of brain damage, sometimes
temporarily, sometimes permanently. Why should memory be in a different
category from consciousness?
It is no help to argue
from what we can imagine. I am at this moment listening to some Beethoven. I
can imagine that I died and that my surviving consciousness went on listening
to Beethoven. I can also imagine that it made use of my surviving memory to
play back to itself pieces by Beethoven that I had heard long before I died.
The question is whether I can make any sense, even granted that neurologists
are right in saying that there can be no memory without neurological activity,
and even granted that few neurologists would say anything different about
consciousness, of defying them and insisting that consciousness is
something sui generis that is utterly different from memory. For while
we are of course conscious in remembering, our memory-experience is entirely
different from our present experience in – well, in that we have to call it up,
and even when it calls itself up involuntarily there is still an
incontrovertible difference. On my working table there is a birthday present, a
cube at the bottom of which is a photograph of the friend who gave it to me,
out of sight as it is arranged just now. I can recall that photograph with
extreme vividness, but if I turn the cube to see it directly I see it,
not one whit the more vividly, but seen. Other things that mean less to
me lack this vividness in memory. If I look at my desk and close my eyes and
remember it, what appears in my mind’s eye is a mere shadow of it. The
shadowiness of normal memory is not the essence of the utter difference
between memory and experience. (I hesitate to use the word “absolute” because
there could be complications with drug use or psychosis that I am not competent
to judge.)
Some years ago I said on
a website entry (and have since edited it out) that by exercising our various
kinds of consciousness one can know that this consciousness,
one’s own consciousness, can continue after death. That was a
preposterous claim. Yet there is a residue of it that I maintain. If my
consciousness survives death it will be continuous with my consciousness now,
and not be anyone else’s consciousness, even though in the absence of memory
there can be no continuity of personality, nothing to justify me in saying that
it will be me who has this consciousness. Let alone (and this is why I make
such a song and dance about this point) its being submerged into what I
caricature as consciousness soup, something where there is no continuity
whatever. Thirty-three years ago I encountered a movement with which I am still
connected, and eight years later I began a set of diaries that have survived
among my papers. Recently I rediscovered them and found that some very
intoxicated passages in them seemed to express the idea of conscious soup. I
put them away with a note that if they were ever published they must include a
disavowal of this idea. I am very pessimistic about the abilities of any
inheritors of my papers to edit them according to my wishes (in a word, to
publish them only edited for corrections) and in case this note is not found,
or is ignored, I declare here my horror of all manifestations of consciousness
soup. There is one often-used metaphor which could seem to support it: the drop
that submerges in an ocean of bliss. No: this drop, however blissfully
submerged, retains its absolute individuality throughout all its vicissitudes.
These include the
meaningful supposition that they could involve the reappearance of one person’s
consciousness as another person’s. This idea is commonly expressed as rebirth
or reincarnation, but granted my views on the mortality of memory what it
cannot be called is the reappearance of one person as another person. Identity of
personality must surely require memory, at least in normal circumstances. The
obvious abnormal ones are cases of amnesia, but here there is a fall-back: the
physical person is there for us to examine, and we can hope to find people who
can say “Yes, this really is so-and-so; take him to such-and-such a place and
there is a good chance that his memory will come back”. This could only be
defeated by the improbable case of identical twins suffering simultaneous
amnesia, with none of their friends being able to say which was which. With all
honour to the present Dalai Lama, it is one thing to say that his consciousness
was once the consciousness of his predecessor, but quite another to say that he
was his predecessor.
However, my denial does
not rest simply on my belief in the mortality of memory. Let me put another
point (in the convenient realm of common sense that makes no claim to a QED).
Consider snow flakes and the claim that it is a statistical impossibility that
any one snow flake could exactly resemble another. There is no need to require
this to be an absolute truth: it is merely a starting point for a train of
thought. For how vastly more differences are there between one human
personality and another than between snow flakes? There are subtle differences
between senses of humour, between abilities in friendship, between types of
animosity, abilities in art and music and argument, styles of wit, and the list
can go on for as long as you like. I often think it is the fault of Freud’s
English translators who chose “the ego” for his “das Ich”. Egotism is just one
of the many characteristics that the I can have, while its take-over of the I’s
meaning has been reinforced by the common mispronunciation “eego”. Open your
mind to the multiple aspects of the human personality and you will find it the
most natural assumption in the world that no human being has ever been
identical to any other, nor ever will be.
I owe it to Elizabeth
Anscombe to draw attention to a
paper she read many years ago at Spode House on the soul. It was written from
the viewpoint of someone who had absolute faith (peasant faith, someone said of
her) in the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, and she was grappling with
the doctrine of the resurrection. This entailed that at death something
survived called the soul, termed a disembodied spirit, while at the
resurrection the body of the person concerned would be re-created, the two
would be re-united and the person in the full sense would exist once more, this
time for good.
The question that teased
her was: what existed in the meantime? The person’s soul existed but did the
person? She answered No, the person does not exist. Only his or her soul does,
and that cannot be said to be a person, let alone the person. This
required that she would be forced to tell a grieving widow (for she did not
believe in diplomatic shilly-shallying) “Your husband does not exist. He will
only exist come the resurrection. Of course his soul exists, and is no doubt in
need of your prayers.” Whether the difficulty of explaining this to pious
people was what put her off publication or some fault she found in her argument
I do not know.
This Spode story, like
my Wuppertal story, is to emphasise the point that various things can be meant
by various ideas of a disembodied soul that differ from my minimal concept of
surviving consciousness. That, as the classical philosopher already mentioned
pointed out, is unverifiable. If it does not survive we shall never know. If it
does, then with no component of memory we shall not know that it has any
connection with us. How this minimal concept differs from what I scorn
as consciousness soup is what, while it is ineffably clear to me, is
incomprehensible to anybody to whom I have tried to explain it.
Finally, for if I try to
explain every quasi-religious belief that I find meaningful but wrong I shall
need to go on for ever, there is one such belief that I find too deplorable to
leave out, not so much wrong as wrong-headed and barely meaningful at all. It
goes by the name of humanism, but it has nothing to do with what one means by
saying that Isaiah Berlin, for example, was a humanist. I met it at the
funerals of three of my relatives, who as atheists in their lives were given
what were hoped to be appropriate funerals by their survivors. I have also met
it as a component influencing the Star Trek script writers, so
presumably Roddenbury was this kind of humanist.
The preacher, if that is
the appropriate word, at such a service explains that there is no survival of
death, and that the only thing needed to be considered is how we remember the
person who has died. As an expression of belief, that is fine and honest,
though I noticed that it was delivered with the full conviction that everyone
in the congregation agreed with it. Something more, however, the preacher said,
was needed to supply our needs as grievers. It was this: by remembering the
person who has died we supply a kind of shadow-existence to the departed. If we
do not remember them we fail to provide them with all we could. Without us they
exist in no sense whatever, whereas with our memories to sustain them a shadow
of them sort-of exists. How Star Trek actually gave visual effect to
this non-idea is a triumph of graphics.
If there is no survival,
then no taking thought on our part can provide it. If there is, our thoughts
are not needed to ensure it. In the different beliefs of mankind there are
intercessions that are supposed to ameliorate the state of whatever is supposed
to have survived. Perhaps there are beliefs somewhere that give intercession
the power actually to make a difference between survival and non-survival, but
this presupposes that something exists with which we can intercede. I know of
no belief that gives our mere memory on its own the power to bring about a
shadow of survival, with the exception of this new-fangled ‘humanism’.
The truth of the matter
is that we feel a human hunger to remember the dead. This is equally so of
atheists and believers. A normal, down-to-earth atheist does not feel that
atheism requires forgetting the dead. Perhaps down-to-earth atheists could
usefully get together to promote memory and celebration of the dead. They could
even provide people to speak at the funerals of atheists, proclaiming that
atheists and believers alike are expressing a natural human need in remembering
their dead friends. What they should not do is promote Star Trek superstition
by suggesting that remembering can call into shadow-being some shadow
substitute for survival.
The word “humanism” as
it is otherwise used is a perfectly useful one. It is not a euphemism for
“atheism” or “agnosticism”. It expresses something extra to those, namely that
human life has value in itself without needing belief in a deity or an
afterlife to justify it. You are alive – what more do you want? Well – a
surprising proportion of the human race want immortality as well. That too is a
human hunger, though people who are unaffected by it cannot see why anybody
wants it. I suggest a middle way. Enjoy life with satisfaction and find, as you
approach its end, that you are too fulfilled to attend to an unnecessary
question.
A postscript: since there has been so much talk recently about
intelligent design, I think that having merely mentioned it I should add a note
about it. The question is one of probability, but ideas on this have changed
over the last sixty years. I remember Fred Hoyle, in the early years of the
Third Programme, expressing one extreme of it thus: “Out there, there must
be an eleven capable of defeating the Australians.” Over the decades there was
a pendulum swing, sometimes influenced by discoveries of remarkable attributes
of our own planet that made it seem extremely unlikely that they could be
replicated elsewhere and thus lead to life similar to our own, sometimes by
contrary ideas that (even without Hoyle’s cosmology) suggested life’s being
widespread and intelligent life’s being far from uncommon. Now, however, this
pendulum fluctuation has been replaced by a new idea, not concerning the
general pattern of evolution and its likelihood, but based on micro-biological
details that are said to be of a far higher order of improbability than
anything involved in the evolution of species. I am completely ignorant of
these details, but the posited improbability is so enormous that it has seduced
a well-known and articulate atheist into the intelligent design camp.
I can only, therefore,
deal with the matter in a thought-experiment manner. My Pleiades
response would have been to say, as I have above, that the initial-energy
origin of the universe has no need of intelligent design, it is above that sort
of thing. If this really is so, then the level of posited improbability is
irrelevant. Something that might be expected to happen by chance two or three
times in the course of the universe, once in two or three universes, once in a
hundred universes, once in a million, it is all the same to the Pleiades
enthusiast for neo, non-QED metaphysics. This is a very dangerous slippery
slope. It would mean that I am insulating myself from any kind of discoverable
refutation. When I was enthusing in Pleiades I might have taken a once
in two or three universes chance in my stride. What should I do if this kind of
biological evidence gets stronger than that?
At least as a start I must say that I rely on
my articulate ex-atheist not to have panicked for the sake of anything less
impressive. But what if the truth were more impressive? As a thought
experimentalist I have to be ready to answer anything. I could fall back on
distinguishing between refutations of an hypothesis and challenges to a way of
viewing matters. The honourable atheist sees his hypothesis as refuted. The
normal theist, when the evidence went against him, did not, and retreated into
what sceptics would call a way of viewing matters. That might appear to be the
status of my Pleiades enthusiasm, but if so I had no need to appeal to a
dubious type of metaphysics. A viewpoint is just a viewpoint. In which case I
did not need to worry about precise degrees of improbability. The fact that I
did worry shows that in saying that the universe’s origin had no need of
intelligent design I was anticipating meaningful opposition. So I must come
clean. I am not offering a viewpoint. My only evidence is that the world
exists. My only claim about it is that, that being the case, we are better off
appreciating it than trying to explain how it ultimately came about. How it
developed from its initial moment, of course, is another matter. That will keep
us enthralled until there are none of us left.