Orly R. Shenker.
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Gavagai: What is it like to be an academic, a philosopher, where you come from? How is it similar or different to what you have experienced in Athens or other parts of the world?
Orly Shenker: Interesting question, well, my University is the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I live in Tel Aviv but I teach in Jerusalem, so I will answer about Jerusalem. So, the starting point of my answer would be around the term periphery, what it means to be an academic and in particular in philosophy, in a country which is in the periphery relatively to the centres which are the US the UK, perhaps Germany. The periphery is a place where people do not come unless they are invited. And so I’d say that there is an advantage as well as a disadvantage to being in the periphery and this sheds light to how it is to be a philosopher in Jerusalem. The natural disadvantage is that you have less people to talk with, you travel a lot, and it takes a lot of energy. You look to people who are not in your department, perhaps not even in the next city. So you read more and you talk less in a certain sense. Unless you try to go to conferences and so on. It’s a special effort perhaps not felt by people in those other places. This goes together with doing philosophy in a different language.
To focus a bit on the language issue, which is perhaps shared by people here: Israel is the only place where people speak Hebrew and since it’s a small country, there aren’t many translations. So people speak Hebrew and read English and write papers in English. And it is my feeling, after years of experience, the more years pass and I only read and write in English, the more I like to read and write in Hebrew. Because I find that despite all these years of doing everything professional in English, the mother tongue is very strong, and the thoughts are quicker and sharper in this language, regardless of the quality of the use of English in writing. There is something very deep, and especially in philosophy where you deal with questions that are sometimes not well defined. You define the question, where do you find the terminology? It comes from within. And the mother tongue I think is the way to do it. In recent years more than in the past, I write in Hebrew, and then I translate to English, alright, but the language issue is a major characteristic of what it means to do philosophy in Israel and in other such countries. This is one aspect.
People in the centres, especially in the US and the UK, the so called international language is also their mother tongue, so they don’t have this disadvantage. For them it’s natural that people should speak English, it’s the lingua franca, but it’s not: it’s their language, not our language. It’s more obvious to me recently, that while we feel that we are part of an international community, it’s not an international community, it’s a community with centres in certain places that have, first of all, the money, and as a byproduct it became the lingua franca. As a consequence, the criteria for what it means to do good philosophy are the other people’s criteria: how to speak for example. What it means to do a good job-talk. Well, a good job-talk, is a talk that will give you the job. But the way you present things depends a lot on your culture. So if you are educated in America, you will learn to present things in the American way, which is different from the way people present here, they talk different, the intonation is different, the emphasis is different. I don’t want to be judgmental on either things but I’m sure you know what I mean. These cultural characterisations are not one to one correlated with quality of philosophical work. These are two different things and it’s not always clear that they are distinct and it’s difficult sometimes to get your point through if the way of presentation is not what I would call the ‘American style’. It’s taken to be the criterion for a good presentation. It’s one criterion.
It’s not only about Jerusalem, but about smaller places with their unique language, their own culture in a world which is supposed to be international, a global community. It’s something that should be more emphasised, the non-global nature of what we’re doing. And since philosophy is without a doubt creating new questions, new topics, new ways of thinking about things, this is more visible here than if for example you do Chemistry.
These are the mains points of doing philosophy in the periphery. These characterisations may sound a bit negative in the sense that they bring to the surface difficulties: you’re a small place, people don’t come to you, you have to adjust to other cultures, another language, it’s more difficult. But there is also, to my experience, an advantage. And it is the following: suppose that as a young scholar you come up with a new idea, a fresh idea, which is not mainstream. You are in a creative stage, you wrote a PhD thesis so you are an expert on this topic and you have a new angle. Let’s say a radically new angle. If you are in one of the big centres, my conjecture is that you will be very easily crashed by the mainstream. In the sense that you are surrounded by very clever, knowledgeable people, and they will easily prove to you that you’re mistaken. And you will be convinced, and for good reasons, they will give good arguments, with very good quality. But if you are not there, you don’t hear this criticism. You sit at home. And then this little plant grows and it becomes a tree. And this tree is solid. And then when you go talk to them it’s already a tree it’s not shaken very easily. So you can develop new ideas. The space for growth is much larger in the periphery than in the centres.
G: The question of our first issue was ‘what is the ontological status of mind’, referring to the mind-body problem. We know that you have a strong physicalist position…
OS: Let me describe the project that I’m after. It’s to see whether an extremely physicalist view of the mind can be made coherent and complete. This view is under attack, it’s a minority view, it’s an underdog, and very few people really are strong physicalists. Both in philosophy and in science. This was a big surprise for me. So the question is whether this is a feasible project. Can it be done? Is it consistent? Can strong physicalism answer all the questions, the criticisms? So far, I was, I am convinced, that it can. All sorts of criticisms. The way to do it is to understand that physicalism is the reduction to physics. Many people see physicalism as a reduction to biology. Neurons and so on. This is not what I’m thinking. Neurons are made of atoms, with physical interactions and so on. So physicalism is about the fundamental physics: whatever fundamental physics really is, now we have contemporary physics which has many problems people have to solve, maybe future physics will be a bit different, who knows. But this is the idea, and it has many problems. There is Hempel’s dilemma which is about what do you mean by the ‘fundamental physical level’, these terms etc. It’s an ongoing project, but so far every question that I’ve tried to tackle, I was convinced that it can be solved satisfactory in an extremely physicalist way. And I’ll say what I mean briefly.
So first of all what physicalism means is reduction to physics and not to biology. Because if you go to biology then you need to go from biology to physics. So I’m saying all the way down. Maybe it does go to biology, who knows. At the moment people are investigating the brain, the neurones etc, but nobody knows how the mental experience comes out of these neurones. There are all sorts of neurone- correlated consciousness all sorts of projectors but nobody knows, nobody has a clue. So it’s just hand waving, as people in physics like to use the phrase. So the idea is to go all the way down to physics. This is one thing. The other thing is, to reduce the mental to the physical is to say that the mental just is the physical. The phrase ‘just is’ I think is ill understood in the literature. People talk about some sort of correlation between the mental and the physical. When the atoms are arranged in a certain way, then there also there is another a fact, in which we have such and such a mental experience. They talk as if there are two things that are correlated very strongly: physical underpinning gives rise to the mental experience, but I’m saying no. Once you carry out this reduction, if it’s possible, you will say ‘atoms’ and you will mean ‘mental experience’, because there is nothing else, that’s it. There is no correlation, that’s all! So when people for example say ‘what is H2O?’, you don’t say that ‘it gives rise to water’, you say that that’s what it is. H2O molecules that interact in a certain a way, you don’t need to say this gives rise to water, there is nothing more to say. So reductionism is this, as I understand it. And this is a position that, if I am careful, is held by very few people, not even a handful of people.
People talk about the mental being rounded in the physical, or realised by the physical, I’m not sure that I understand all the expressions there are, but all of them seem to be about two things with a relation. So I’m saying there is no relation, there is only one thing. And the only relation there is between two states is causal. Perhaps the mental state, which is the atoms of the brain, causes me to send my hand to the glass of water. This is a causal relation. But I will not say that the atoms cause the mental state. No, they are the mental state. So in this, my view even differs from John Searle. He says everything is biological, but he adds the biological thing causes in some sense the mental, something else. Perhaps if he hears what I have to say, he will agree. Maybe, but I’m not sure. I think that perhaps Galen Strawson in his Panpsychism could accept this. But for him the mental is already at the fundamental level, because each atom has this say, proto-mental property. Ok, we can argue about this, but I think that with Strawson it would be an argument within the family. It’s not something else. He wants everything to be at the fundamental level. The atoms with the proto-mental property, they don’t give rise to the mental, it is already there. So Strawson is perhaps closer to that idea, I have great sympathy for his project. Although I try not to be panpsychist, I try to do without it, but I don’t reject it. Maybe physics will turn out to be like this, who knows. By contrast, I’m not going in Dennett’s direction. Which is more computational and so on. It’s not physicalist. The notion of computation, since it can be realised not only by a brain but by something heterogeneous, then it’s not identical to the physical underpinning.
Having said that, there is something that needs to be said. Suppose that future science understands everything that there is about physics about the brain etc, and suppose that I can make predictions, I take a photo of your brain and I know what you’re thinking about, I can predict what you will think about in five minutes from now, everything is well known. So there are considerations in classical science to support the conclusion that this means that the mental is physical and that I’ve discovered the physical underpinning, or what the physical thing which is mental is. But many people want to adhere to dualism for various psychological reasons, religious reasons, whatever. So these people always have the option of saying there is a correlation, from the brain can derive the mental, ok, but you can’t say that the mental is the physical. This is some sort of parallelism, it goes back to Malebranche, and this is always ok. But then the argument’s not very interesting anymore. If that’s all that there is to say, then ok. That’s the project… in more than 500 words.
G: Why, do you think, there are so few people with this view? You mentioned potential religious reasons, is it the fear of abandoning something we’ve been holding on to for very long?
OS: That’s a very good question. Again Searle already said that if philosophy started today, with the science that we have, maybe we wouldn’t be having these dualistic intuitions. Perhaps. I think that in the recent centuries, human beings have been pushed away from the centre. Starting from Copernicus, Astronomy, Darwin, there is nothing special about us… Freud, we’re not even responsible for what we think and feel and so on, so what is left for us? And some people in the past used to say that the rational, mathematical abilities are it. Well, computers beat us in chess, so it’s not this, what makes us special. So now it is no longer about the human being as a rational animal, computers are more rational. So we’re back to human beings as feeling animals, but we’re arguably not unique in that. So what is left for us? This is one intuition that people want to have something unique.
G: Is that consciousness then?
OS: Yes! Of course many people will concede that animals have consciousness too, depends maybe on which animals etc, dogs definitely do, bacteria I don’t know, where is the line… I don’t think this intuition is shared with people like Dennett. I think for him it’s fine, human beings are on accord with other things in nature. He is pro-science, very much so. It’s not that. But I think that there is an intuition that the mental is abstract. How can it be that that thing, which doesn’t have a place in space… how can it have a space in space? It’s everything! So it seems very very different from this glass, it has a place in space. But my experience of the glass is not in my head or in the glass because it also contains the table etc, so this holistic nature of the mental is very hard to understand. How can it be a state of atoms in the brain? It is indeed very difficult, I don’t have a solution, a scientific proposal. This intuition is expressed in the debate around qualia. But the intuition is around it, how it can possibly be, you must be crazy to think that this is just atoms…
G: So there are qualia or not?
OS: As a fact, of course there are. I see that this is transparent, I feel that this is wet, so I have these feelings. But as a physicalist I am committed to say that this fact, that we call qualia, is nothing but atoms. And by the way, I disagree with Dennett and agree with Searle. And this is subtle. Searle would say, there is a fact that I see this object. The mental experience is a fact, and it’s an objective fact in the sense that it is a fact in the world, I have this experience and science has to explain this fact. Dennett, in a sense, denies this fact, in his multiple draft picture of consciousness. He wouldn’t say that there is a fact in which a moment ago I experienced this glass and I still do and I’m talking about this, and I’m extending my hand to it and so on, these are different states and together they create a chain of events. So he has this more complex notion of what it means to have these experiences. So Searle says that Dennett denies the most fundamental fact about the world, namely that we have experience. In a sense it’s true, in that Dennett goes against the consciousness view. But it doesn’t deny the very fact that I have experiences. So my view takes something that is common to both. There is a fact. I’m not sure if it’s a continuous fact, if it’s always the same fact, how it operates and so on. But there are qualia in this sense, qualia are facts about our experience. Our experiences I add, are nothing but atoms.
G: What’s the relation between science and philosophy? Should science regulate philosophy, or the other way around? And what’s the role of history in philosophy of science?
OS: Starting with the first part of the question, I think science and philosophy are one and the same project. They are inseparable. We actually had a workshop on the relevance of philosophy of science to science, about two months ago in Jerusalem. I think that at a given point in time, if we look at now, it seems that we have two branches in the big intellectual endeavour of finding out what there is in the world or how things are in the world. The difference is in methodology, in the particular questions that we ask, but I think that if you step back, this is the same project. And these departments are inseparable.
In the past, looking back to history, it’s clear that philosophical investigations affected scientific discoveries, in a very straightforward way. Physicists for example told the story of how they were affected by reading philosophy or discussing with philosophers. This is true both about the subject matter of their ontological studies and with respect to the methodology. The very fact that we go to experience in science: why should we? Well, we have good philosophical arguments for doing so, but in the past other people had other opinions. It’s not trivial that we should do what we do in that way, that experiments and the way they are carried out today are relevant for finding out the ontological makeup of the world. It’s not clear. So in the past, philosophy and physics went hand in hand. Science is just a branch of philosophy or they go hand in hand.
Today, since some theories of science are so complex and so successful in prediction and in producing technology, it seems that these branches became independent. They no longer have to look at philosophy. First of all they have the roots to philosophy. It’s not clear that they are saying anything true about the world, if you don’t have philosophical arguments to prove this. But I think the connection even now is stronger. Of course if you go to the so called ‘normal’ science, going to the lab, doing an experiment, writing some small article in a journal etc… alright, but if you go to the parts of science that are the front, that are fundamental problems, or that are trying to discover really new things, that have not been thought before, then they are philosophical works. Not always good philosophical works, some scientists think that they talk about philosophy and that it’s very easy… it’s not good philosophy, just like philosophers can do very bad science. You have to be educated. But seriously I think some scientists, the good ones, are doing philosophical work. Here is one famous example, Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate in physics, he used to talk about philosophers in demeaning terms, not very polite about this, but if you listen to interviews with him, you will see that he is doing philosophy. He is asking about what we can know about the world, and how we can come to know it. This has nothing to do with his laboratory and mathematics, this is philosophy, and it’s part of what he’s doing. So this is in physics. This continues today.
About physics, you may want to listen on YouTube to a lecture by Carlo Rovelli. He’s a physicist, and he gave a lecture at LSE about this question and he describes the historical connection between science and philosophy and what philosophy is for him in the physics he carries out today. And for example in physics today, physicists have to answer questions like what is space and what is time, they try to say something within and from science, but they have to add some understandings that are not straightforwardly derived from science, they have to ask methodological questions, for example with respect to string theory this is a famous case, there is no direct experimental evidence, it’s a mathematical theory and predictions are the same as alternative theories so why go for it?
This is in physics, but also in brain research and cognitive science. There are two grand, let’s say, research programmes: one is to study the biology, the physiology, the brain and the neurone system, and the other is computational neuroscience. Whereas the biology direction is by and large reductionist, they take their data from the microscope, computational neuroscience is not a reductive project, in my opinion it’s a dualistic project, and it’s not physicalist at all. So they make philosophical decisions about monism versus dualism, reductionism or anti-reductionism in contemporary research. And this is a new branch of science, and it’s still very visible. There are specific examples and experimental results which are interpreted in ways explicitly philosophical, in brain research. So [philosophy and science] are inseparable.
G: Can we talk about a divide between philosophy and science in relation to ethics? Can one act as a watchdog over the other for example? If you want to go in that direction…
OS: I haven’t thought about that very deeply, perhaps there is this interrelation but it’s not symmetrical. In the sense that, when science looks at ethics the result is a naturalisation of ethics: the brain is such and there are these norms and not others, or that evolution is such that we turned out to prefer such norms and not others, and then these are no longer norms these are facts about the brain and about society. So it’s naturalising ethics and perhaps undermining it. Whereas when ethicists look at science they are doing a normative job. The sciences should take into account their impact on society and so on. In the past, or even today, many people say ‘let science do whatever it wants, scientists study whatever they want regardless of the results and let’s hope that the politicians will be clever enough to use it in a peaceful way’, this is too naive in today’s world, where the industry and the state funds research and directs its topics. It’s naive to say that scientists study what they want. The funding is very tempting, and not just tempting since without it you might as well close the lab and send the students home. These are hard decisions. So, here is an example, an anecdote in this respect. I’m doing research funded by an industrial company in America. They are a technological firm, they are building all sorts of things. Some of them are weapons. And in large industrial companies, these companies take whatever technology they can find, whether they fund your research directly or not. People may refuse to take money from such companies, and still work on developing the quantum puter. For academic reasons. It is a very challenging thing, the foundations of physics etc. But of course the first to buy these computers are the armies.
So perhaps doing ethics is the only way really to avoid the output being used in a bad way. So my personal decision was to go on with this research, with that company, knowing that other parts of that company also produce weapons, I know that. The project that I’m doing is connected in improving the use of energy. I cannot ignore the fact that when they have these new devices, with this new use of energy, the first people to buy it will be the armies. I have no doubt, this is everywhere. So if you do anything in science, the big industrial companies and the armies will be the first to buy it. It’s naive to think otherwise. If you do brain research, it’s funded by billions of euros, both in Europe and in America. Why? Are people so interested to find an answer to the question is the mental physical? It’s not that! The first organisations to use any results will be the army and the industry. The more they know about us, the commercials in the television will be more effective and the interrogation of the enemy will be more effective etc. So no science is free form that effect. So in one sense, the hope is, well, vote for the right government, and this is not the direction in which the world is going now. It’s naive to say that the scientists are not responsible for the outcome. On the other hand, since is everything is relevant, if you want to do science you can’t know what to do or what not to do. Every result may be relevant. So quit science and do something else if you don’t want any of these unwanted results. This is a very complex situation, I felt the need to share with you my own experience, there are no saints, and I’m doing philosophy but this company found my philosophy of physics relevant to what its doing. It was a dilemma, I made the decision, I don’t know if it’s the right one, I hope it is. Because the fact that they are so big, and that they get money from governments and so on enables them to carry out this long term research about energy and maybe it will be beneficial for everybody, but who knows…
(Realising we’re running out of time)
OS: Well let me tell you where I’m going now: I’m going to meet Stavros [Ioannidis] and Stathis [Psillos]. We’re working together on a new initiative which we call ‘The Pond’. It’s something that I started in Jerusalem, and ‘pond’ is taken from a quotation from Plato. The Pond is the Mediterranean, and we are like frogs around it. The idea is to have a network of Philosophy of Science around the Mediterranean, to strengthen the connection, the friendship and collaboration between different places around the Mediterranean, exchange students, teachers, read each other’s work, focus our attention on this area, not only the usual suspects in the north. You can post a link to it when we’re ready on the Gavagai. By the way a great name for a journal!
Orly Shenker: Interesting question, well, my University is the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I live in Tel Aviv but I teach in Jerusalem, so I will answer about Jerusalem. So, the starting point of my answer would be around the term periphery, what it means to be an academic and in particular in philosophy, in a country which is in the periphery relatively to the centres which are the US the UK, perhaps Germany. The periphery is a place where people do not come unless they are invited. And so I’d say that there is an advantage as well as a disadvantage to being in the periphery and this sheds light to how it is to be a philosopher in Jerusalem. The natural disadvantage is that you have less people to talk with, you travel a lot, and it takes a lot of energy. You look to people who are not in your department, perhaps not even in the next city. So you read more and you talk less in a certain sense. Unless you try to go to conferences and so on. It’s a special effort perhaps not felt by people in those other places. This goes together with doing philosophy in a different language.
To focus a bit on the language issue, which is perhaps shared by people here: Israel is the only place where people speak Hebrew and since it’s a small country, there aren’t many translations. So people speak Hebrew and read English and write papers in English. And it is my feeling, after years of experience, the more years pass and I only read and write in English, the more I like to read and write in Hebrew. Because I find that despite all these years of doing everything professional in English, the mother tongue is very strong, and the thoughts are quicker and sharper in this language, regardless of the quality of the use of English in writing. There is something very deep, and especially in philosophy where you deal with questions that are sometimes not well defined. You define the question, where do you find the terminology? It comes from within. And the mother tongue I think is the way to do it. In recent years more than in the past, I write in Hebrew, and then I translate to English, alright, but the language issue is a major characteristic of what it means to do philosophy in Israel and in other such countries. This is one aspect.
People in the centres, especially in the US and the UK, the so called international language is also their mother tongue, so they don’t have this disadvantage. For them it’s natural that people should speak English, it’s the lingua franca, but it’s not: it’s their language, not our language. It’s more obvious to me recently, that while we feel that we are part of an international community, it’s not an international community, it’s a community with centres in certain places that have, first of all, the money, and as a byproduct it became the lingua franca. As a consequence, the criteria for what it means to do good philosophy are the other people’s criteria: how to speak for example. What it means to do a good job-talk. Well, a good job-talk, is a talk that will give you the job. But the way you present things depends a lot on your culture. So if you are educated in America, you will learn to present things in the American way, which is different from the way people present here, they talk different, the intonation is different, the emphasis is different. I don’t want to be judgmental on either things but I’m sure you know what I mean. These cultural characterisations are not one to one correlated with quality of philosophical work. These are two different things and it’s not always clear that they are distinct and it’s difficult sometimes to get your point through if the way of presentation is not what I would call the ‘American style’. It’s taken to be the criterion for a good presentation. It’s one criterion.
It’s not only about Jerusalem, but about smaller places with their unique language, their own culture in a world which is supposed to be international, a global community. It’s something that should be more emphasised, the non-global nature of what we’re doing. And since philosophy is without a doubt creating new questions, new topics, new ways of thinking about things, this is more visible here than if for example you do Chemistry.
These are the mains points of doing philosophy in the periphery. These characterisations may sound a bit negative in the sense that they bring to the surface difficulties: you’re a small place, people don’t come to you, you have to adjust to other cultures, another language, it’s more difficult. But there is also, to my experience, an advantage. And it is the following: suppose that as a young scholar you come up with a new idea, a fresh idea, which is not mainstream. You are in a creative stage, you wrote a PhD thesis so you are an expert on this topic and you have a new angle. Let’s say a radically new angle. If you are in one of the big centres, my conjecture is that you will be very easily crashed by the mainstream. In the sense that you are surrounded by very clever, knowledgeable people, and they will easily prove to you that you’re mistaken. And you will be convinced, and for good reasons, they will give good arguments, with very good quality. But if you are not there, you don’t hear this criticism. You sit at home. And then this little plant grows and it becomes a tree. And this tree is solid. And then when you go talk to them it’s already a tree it’s not shaken very easily. So you can develop new ideas. The space for growth is much larger in the periphery than in the centres.
G: The question of our first issue was ‘what is the ontological status of mind’, referring to the mind-body problem. We know that you have a strong physicalist position…
OS: Let me describe the project that I’m after. It’s to see whether an extremely physicalist view of the mind can be made coherent and complete. This view is under attack, it’s a minority view, it’s an underdog, and very few people really are strong physicalists. Both in philosophy and in science. This was a big surprise for me. So the question is whether this is a feasible project. Can it be done? Is it consistent? Can strong physicalism answer all the questions, the criticisms? So far, I was, I am convinced, that it can. All sorts of criticisms. The way to do it is to understand that physicalism is the reduction to physics. Many people see physicalism as a reduction to biology. Neurons and so on. This is not what I’m thinking. Neurons are made of atoms, with physical interactions and so on. So physicalism is about the fundamental physics: whatever fundamental physics really is, now we have contemporary physics which has many problems people have to solve, maybe future physics will be a bit different, who knows. But this is the idea, and it has many problems. There is Hempel’s dilemma which is about what do you mean by the ‘fundamental physical level’, these terms etc. It’s an ongoing project, but so far every question that I’ve tried to tackle, I was convinced that it can be solved satisfactory in an extremely physicalist way. And I’ll say what I mean briefly.
So first of all what physicalism means is reduction to physics and not to biology. Because if you go to biology then you need to go from biology to physics. So I’m saying all the way down. Maybe it does go to biology, who knows. At the moment people are investigating the brain, the neurones etc, but nobody knows how the mental experience comes out of these neurones. There are all sorts of neurone- correlated consciousness all sorts of projectors but nobody knows, nobody has a clue. So it’s just hand waving, as people in physics like to use the phrase. So the idea is to go all the way down to physics. This is one thing. The other thing is, to reduce the mental to the physical is to say that the mental just is the physical. The phrase ‘just is’ I think is ill understood in the literature. People talk about some sort of correlation between the mental and the physical. When the atoms are arranged in a certain way, then there also there is another a fact, in which we have such and such a mental experience. They talk as if there are two things that are correlated very strongly: physical underpinning gives rise to the mental experience, but I’m saying no. Once you carry out this reduction, if it’s possible, you will say ‘atoms’ and you will mean ‘mental experience’, because there is nothing else, that’s it. There is no correlation, that’s all! So when people for example say ‘what is H2O?’, you don’t say that ‘it gives rise to water’, you say that that’s what it is. H2O molecules that interact in a certain a way, you don’t need to say this gives rise to water, there is nothing more to say. So reductionism is this, as I understand it. And this is a position that, if I am careful, is held by very few people, not even a handful of people.
People talk about the mental being rounded in the physical, or realised by the physical, I’m not sure that I understand all the expressions there are, but all of them seem to be about two things with a relation. So I’m saying there is no relation, there is only one thing. And the only relation there is between two states is causal. Perhaps the mental state, which is the atoms of the brain, causes me to send my hand to the glass of water. This is a causal relation. But I will not say that the atoms cause the mental state. No, they are the mental state. So in this, my view even differs from John Searle. He says everything is biological, but he adds the biological thing causes in some sense the mental, something else. Perhaps if he hears what I have to say, he will agree. Maybe, but I’m not sure. I think that perhaps Galen Strawson in his Panpsychism could accept this. But for him the mental is already at the fundamental level, because each atom has this say, proto-mental property. Ok, we can argue about this, but I think that with Strawson it would be an argument within the family. It’s not something else. He wants everything to be at the fundamental level. The atoms with the proto-mental property, they don’t give rise to the mental, it is already there. So Strawson is perhaps closer to that idea, I have great sympathy for his project. Although I try not to be panpsychist, I try to do without it, but I don’t reject it. Maybe physics will turn out to be like this, who knows. By contrast, I’m not going in Dennett’s direction. Which is more computational and so on. It’s not physicalist. The notion of computation, since it can be realised not only by a brain but by something heterogeneous, then it’s not identical to the physical underpinning.
Having said that, there is something that needs to be said. Suppose that future science understands everything that there is about physics about the brain etc, and suppose that I can make predictions, I take a photo of your brain and I know what you’re thinking about, I can predict what you will think about in five minutes from now, everything is well known. So there are considerations in classical science to support the conclusion that this means that the mental is physical and that I’ve discovered the physical underpinning, or what the physical thing which is mental is. But many people want to adhere to dualism for various psychological reasons, religious reasons, whatever. So these people always have the option of saying there is a correlation, from the brain can derive the mental, ok, but you can’t say that the mental is the physical. This is some sort of parallelism, it goes back to Malebranche, and this is always ok. But then the argument’s not very interesting anymore. If that’s all that there is to say, then ok. That’s the project… in more than 500 words.
G: Why, do you think, there are so few people with this view? You mentioned potential religious reasons, is it the fear of abandoning something we’ve been holding on to for very long?
OS: That’s a very good question. Again Searle already said that if philosophy started today, with the science that we have, maybe we wouldn’t be having these dualistic intuitions. Perhaps. I think that in the recent centuries, human beings have been pushed away from the centre. Starting from Copernicus, Astronomy, Darwin, there is nothing special about us… Freud, we’re not even responsible for what we think and feel and so on, so what is left for us? And some people in the past used to say that the rational, mathematical abilities are it. Well, computers beat us in chess, so it’s not this, what makes us special. So now it is no longer about the human being as a rational animal, computers are more rational. So we’re back to human beings as feeling animals, but we’re arguably not unique in that. So what is left for us? This is one intuition that people want to have something unique.
G: Is that consciousness then?
OS: Yes! Of course many people will concede that animals have consciousness too, depends maybe on which animals etc, dogs definitely do, bacteria I don’t know, where is the line… I don’t think this intuition is shared with people like Dennett. I think for him it’s fine, human beings are on accord with other things in nature. He is pro-science, very much so. It’s not that. But I think that there is an intuition that the mental is abstract. How can it be that that thing, which doesn’t have a place in space… how can it have a space in space? It’s everything! So it seems very very different from this glass, it has a place in space. But my experience of the glass is not in my head or in the glass because it also contains the table etc, so this holistic nature of the mental is very hard to understand. How can it be a state of atoms in the brain? It is indeed very difficult, I don’t have a solution, a scientific proposal. This intuition is expressed in the debate around qualia. But the intuition is around it, how it can possibly be, you must be crazy to think that this is just atoms…
G: So there are qualia or not?
OS: As a fact, of course there are. I see that this is transparent, I feel that this is wet, so I have these feelings. But as a physicalist I am committed to say that this fact, that we call qualia, is nothing but atoms. And by the way, I disagree with Dennett and agree with Searle. And this is subtle. Searle would say, there is a fact that I see this object. The mental experience is a fact, and it’s an objective fact in the sense that it is a fact in the world, I have this experience and science has to explain this fact. Dennett, in a sense, denies this fact, in his multiple draft picture of consciousness. He wouldn’t say that there is a fact in which a moment ago I experienced this glass and I still do and I’m talking about this, and I’m extending my hand to it and so on, these are different states and together they create a chain of events. So he has this more complex notion of what it means to have these experiences. So Searle says that Dennett denies the most fundamental fact about the world, namely that we have experience. In a sense it’s true, in that Dennett goes against the consciousness view. But it doesn’t deny the very fact that I have experiences. So my view takes something that is common to both. There is a fact. I’m not sure if it’s a continuous fact, if it’s always the same fact, how it operates and so on. But there are qualia in this sense, qualia are facts about our experience. Our experiences I add, are nothing but atoms.
G: What’s the relation between science and philosophy? Should science regulate philosophy, or the other way around? And what’s the role of history in philosophy of science?
OS: Starting with the first part of the question, I think science and philosophy are one and the same project. They are inseparable. We actually had a workshop on the relevance of philosophy of science to science, about two months ago in Jerusalem. I think that at a given point in time, if we look at now, it seems that we have two branches in the big intellectual endeavour of finding out what there is in the world or how things are in the world. The difference is in methodology, in the particular questions that we ask, but I think that if you step back, this is the same project. And these departments are inseparable.
In the past, looking back to history, it’s clear that philosophical investigations affected scientific discoveries, in a very straightforward way. Physicists for example told the story of how they were affected by reading philosophy or discussing with philosophers. This is true both about the subject matter of their ontological studies and with respect to the methodology. The very fact that we go to experience in science: why should we? Well, we have good philosophical arguments for doing so, but in the past other people had other opinions. It’s not trivial that we should do what we do in that way, that experiments and the way they are carried out today are relevant for finding out the ontological makeup of the world. It’s not clear. So in the past, philosophy and physics went hand in hand. Science is just a branch of philosophy or they go hand in hand.
Today, since some theories of science are so complex and so successful in prediction and in producing technology, it seems that these branches became independent. They no longer have to look at philosophy. First of all they have the roots to philosophy. It’s not clear that they are saying anything true about the world, if you don’t have philosophical arguments to prove this. But I think the connection even now is stronger. Of course if you go to the so called ‘normal’ science, going to the lab, doing an experiment, writing some small article in a journal etc… alright, but if you go to the parts of science that are the front, that are fundamental problems, or that are trying to discover really new things, that have not been thought before, then they are philosophical works. Not always good philosophical works, some scientists think that they talk about philosophy and that it’s very easy… it’s not good philosophy, just like philosophers can do very bad science. You have to be educated. But seriously I think some scientists, the good ones, are doing philosophical work. Here is one famous example, Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate in physics, he used to talk about philosophers in demeaning terms, not very polite about this, but if you listen to interviews with him, you will see that he is doing philosophy. He is asking about what we can know about the world, and how we can come to know it. This has nothing to do with his laboratory and mathematics, this is philosophy, and it’s part of what he’s doing. So this is in physics. This continues today.
About physics, you may want to listen on YouTube to a lecture by Carlo Rovelli. He’s a physicist, and he gave a lecture at LSE about this question and he describes the historical connection between science and philosophy and what philosophy is for him in the physics he carries out today. And for example in physics today, physicists have to answer questions like what is space and what is time, they try to say something within and from science, but they have to add some understandings that are not straightforwardly derived from science, they have to ask methodological questions, for example with respect to string theory this is a famous case, there is no direct experimental evidence, it’s a mathematical theory and predictions are the same as alternative theories so why go for it?
This is in physics, but also in brain research and cognitive science. There are two grand, let’s say, research programmes: one is to study the biology, the physiology, the brain and the neurone system, and the other is computational neuroscience. Whereas the biology direction is by and large reductionist, they take their data from the microscope, computational neuroscience is not a reductive project, in my opinion it’s a dualistic project, and it’s not physicalist at all. So they make philosophical decisions about monism versus dualism, reductionism or anti-reductionism in contemporary research. And this is a new branch of science, and it’s still very visible. There are specific examples and experimental results which are interpreted in ways explicitly philosophical, in brain research. So [philosophy and science] are inseparable.
G: Can we talk about a divide between philosophy and science in relation to ethics? Can one act as a watchdog over the other for example? If you want to go in that direction…
OS: I haven’t thought about that very deeply, perhaps there is this interrelation but it’s not symmetrical. In the sense that, when science looks at ethics the result is a naturalisation of ethics: the brain is such and there are these norms and not others, or that evolution is such that we turned out to prefer such norms and not others, and then these are no longer norms these are facts about the brain and about society. So it’s naturalising ethics and perhaps undermining it. Whereas when ethicists look at science they are doing a normative job. The sciences should take into account their impact on society and so on. In the past, or even today, many people say ‘let science do whatever it wants, scientists study whatever they want regardless of the results and let’s hope that the politicians will be clever enough to use it in a peaceful way’, this is too naive in today’s world, where the industry and the state funds research and directs its topics. It’s naive to say that scientists study what they want. The funding is very tempting, and not just tempting since without it you might as well close the lab and send the students home. These are hard decisions. So, here is an example, an anecdote in this respect. I’m doing research funded by an industrial company in America. They are a technological firm, they are building all sorts of things. Some of them are weapons. And in large industrial companies, these companies take whatever technology they can find, whether they fund your research directly or not. People may refuse to take money from such companies, and still work on developing the quantum puter. For academic reasons. It is a very challenging thing, the foundations of physics etc. But of course the first to buy these computers are the armies.
So perhaps doing ethics is the only way really to avoid the output being used in a bad way. So my personal decision was to go on with this research, with that company, knowing that other parts of that company also produce weapons, I know that. The project that I’m doing is connected in improving the use of energy. I cannot ignore the fact that when they have these new devices, with this new use of energy, the first people to buy it will be the armies. I have no doubt, this is everywhere. So if you do anything in science, the big industrial companies and the armies will be the first to buy it. It’s naive to think otherwise. If you do brain research, it’s funded by billions of euros, both in Europe and in America. Why? Are people so interested to find an answer to the question is the mental physical? It’s not that! The first organisations to use any results will be the army and the industry. The more they know about us, the commercials in the television will be more effective and the interrogation of the enemy will be more effective etc. So no science is free form that effect. So in one sense, the hope is, well, vote for the right government, and this is not the direction in which the world is going now. It’s naive to say that the scientists are not responsible for the outcome. On the other hand, since is everything is relevant, if you want to do science you can’t know what to do or what not to do. Every result may be relevant. So quit science and do something else if you don’t want any of these unwanted results. This is a very complex situation, I felt the need to share with you my own experience, there are no saints, and I’m doing philosophy but this company found my philosophy of physics relevant to what its doing. It was a dilemma, I made the decision, I don’t know if it’s the right one, I hope it is. Because the fact that they are so big, and that they get money from governments and so on enables them to carry out this long term research about energy and maybe it will be beneficial for everybody, but who knows…
(Realising we’re running out of time)
OS: Well let me tell you where I’m going now: I’m going to meet Stavros [Ioannidis] and Stathis [Psillos]. We’re working together on a new initiative which we call ‘The Pond’. It’s something that I started in Jerusalem, and ‘pond’ is taken from a quotation from Plato. The Pond is the Mediterranean, and we are like frogs around it. The idea is to have a network of Philosophy of Science around the Mediterranean, to strengthen the connection, the friendship and collaboration between different places around the Mediterranean, exchange students, teachers, read each other’s work, focus our attention on this area, not only the usual suspects in the north. You can post a link to it when we’re ready on the Gavagai. By the way a great name for a journal!