This book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE: Uniscience and the Modern World, by Robert Hanna, presents and defends a critical philosophy of science and digital technology, and a new and prescient philosophy of nature and human thinking.
It is being made available here in serial format, but you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text–including the BIBLIOGRAPHY–of THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE HERE.
This fifty-first installment contains section 5.1.2.
We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. (Pascal, 1995: #110, p. 28)
If there is any science humankind really needs, it is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place in [the world] that is assigned to humankind, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be human. (Rem 20: 45)
Natural science will one day incorporate the science of humankind, just as the science of humankind will incorporate natural science; there will be a single science. (Marx, 1964: p. 70, translation modified slightly)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A NOTE ON REFERENCES TO KANT’S WORKS
0. Introduction: Science, The Four Horsemen of The New Apocalypse, and The Uniscience
0.0 How Uncritical and Unreformed Science Is Literally Killing The Modern World
0.2 The Uniscience and Pascal’s Dictum
Chapter 1. Natural Piety: A Kantian Critique of Science
1.0 Kantian Heavy-Duty Enlightenment and The Uniscience
1.1 Kant’s Neo-Aristotelian Natural Power Grid
1.2 Kant, Natural Piety, and The Limits of Science
1.3 From Kant’s Anti-Mechanism to Kantian Anti-Mechanism
1.4 In Defense of Natural Piety
1.5 Scientific Pietism and Scientific Naturalism
1.6 How to Ground Natural Science on Sensibility
1.7 Sensible Science 1: Natural Science Without Natural Mechanism
1.8 Sensible Science 2: Natural Science Without Materialism/Physicalism
1.9 Sensible Science 3: Natural Science Without Scientism
1.10 Frankenscience, the Future of Humanity, and the Future of Science
2.1 Wrestling with Modernity: 1900-1940
2.1.1 Six Sociocultural or Sociopolitical Developments
2.1.2 Two Philosophical Developments: Classical Analytic Philosophy and First Wave Organicism
2.1.3 Architectural and Artistic Trends
2.2 The Historical Black Hole, The Mechanistic Mindset, and The Mechanistic Worldview: 1940-1980
2.2 The Emergence of Post-Classical Analytic Philosophy
2.2.3 The Two Images Problem and its Consequences
2.2.4 Modernism and Countercurrents in the Arts and Design
2.3.1 The Rise of Po-Mo Philosophy
2.3.2 Po-Mo Architecture: Unconstrained Hybridity
2.3.3 Other Apocalyptic Developments: Crises in Physics and Big Science, and The One-Two Punch
2.4 From The Mechanistic Worldview to Neo-Organicism
2.4.0 Against The Mechanistic Worldview
2.4.1 Seven Arguments Against The Mechanistic Worldview
2.4.1.1 Logical and Mathematical Arguments
2.4.1.2 Physical and Metaphysical Arguments
2.4.1.3 Mentalistic and Agential Arguments
2.4.2 Beyond The Mechanistic Worldview: The Neo-Organicist Worldview
2.4.2.1 The Neo-Organist Thesis 1: Solving The Mind-Body Problem
2.4.2.2 Dynamic Systems Theory and The Dynamic World Picture
2.4.2.3 The Neo-Organicist Thesis 2: Solving The Free Will Problem
2.4.2.4 Dynamic Emergence, Life, Consciousness, and Free Agency
2.4.2.5 How The Mechanical Comes To Be From The Organic
3.1 A Dual-Content Nonideal Cognitive Semantics for Thought-Shapers
3.2 The Cognitive Dynamics of Thought-Shapers
3.3 Constrictive Thought-Shapers vs. Generative Thought-Shapers
3.5 Thought-Shapers, Mechanism, and Neo-Organicism
3.6 Adverse Cognitive Effects of Mechanical, Constrictive Thought-Shapers
3.7 How Can We Acknowledge Organic Systems and Organic, Generative Thought-Shapers?
3.8 We Must Cultivate Our Global Garden
Chapter 4. How To Complete Physics
4.2 Frame-by-Frame: How Early 20th Century Physics Was Shaped by Brownie Cameras and Early Cinema
4.3 How to Complete Quantum Mechanics, Or, What It’s Like To Be A Naturally Creative Bohmian Beable
4.4 Can Physics Explain Physics? Anthropic Principles and Transcendental Idealism
4.5 The Incredible Shrinking Thinking Man, Or, Cosmic Dignitarianism
Chapter 5. Digital Technology Only Within The Limits of Human Dignity
5.1 What’s So Special About Human Dignity? The Metaphysics of Human Dignity
5.1.1 How to Refute the Dignity Skeptic
5.1.2 What is Human Dignity?
00. Conclusion: The Point Is To Shape The World
APPENDICES
Appendix 1. A Neo-Organicist Turn in Formal Science: The Case of Mathematical Logic
Appendix 2. A Neo-Organicist Note on The Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem and “Skolem’s Paradox”
Appendix 3. A Neo-Organicist Approach to The Nature of Motion
Appendix 4. Sensible Set Theory
Appendix 5. Complementarity, Entanglement, and Nonlocality Pervade Natural Reality at All Scales
Appendix 6. Neo-Organicism and The Rubber Sheet Cosmos
BIBLIOGRAPHY
5.1.2 What is Human Dignity?
According to the broadly Kantian theory of human dignity, human dignity is the absolute, non-denumerably infinite, intrinsic, and objective value of human real persons as ends-in-themselves, and human real personhood is grounded in a unified set of innate cognitive, emotional, and practical capacities present in all and only human animals possessing the essentially embodied neurobiological basis of those capacities. Some human animals are born permanently lacking this essentially embodied neurobiological basis or have suffered its permanent destruction by accident, disease, or violent mishap, and therefore some human animals do not have human dignity because they are not human real persons. So not necessarily all human animals are real persons. Conversely, not necessarily all real persons are human: it’s really possible for there to be real persons belonging to other animal species, whether on the Earth or other planets. If so, then they’ll have dignity too.
Nevertheless and in any case, you’re a real person, and so am I. And so is every other living organism that’s capable of fully understanding those words, feeling their normative force, and then choosing and acting under the guidance of that normative force. Neither logically possible or conceivable non-animal persons, disembodied persons, or divine persons, nor actual artificial persons (personae) or actual collective persons, created by human convention, are real persons in this sense. For human real persons, like all real persons, are essentially embodied minds (Hanna and Maiese, 2009; see also section 2.4.2.1 above). In turn, the essential embodiment thesis has two logically distinct parts: (i) the necessary embodiment of conscious minds like ours in a living organism (the necessity thesis), and (ii) the complete neurobiological embodiment of conscious minds like ours in all the vital systems, vital organs, and vital processes of our living bodies (the completeness thesis). The necessity thesis says that necessarily, conscious minds like ours are alive. Negatively formulated, it says that conscious minds like ours cannot be dead, disembodied, or machines. By contrast, the completeness thesis says that conscious minds like ours are fully spread out into our living organismic bodies, necessarily including the brain, but also necessarily not restricted to the brain. In view of the essential embodiment thesis, specifically human real persons are real persons who are necessarily and completely, human animals, hence we’re “human, all-too-human.”
Later in this section, I’ll work out an explicit metaphysical definition of human real persons (see also Hanna, 2018b: chs. 6-7). Right now, I want to concentrate on the metaphysics of the dignity of human real persons as such, or in Kant’s terminology, Würde. To say that human real persons have dignity is to say that they’re absolutely, nondenumerably infinitely, intrinsically, and objectively valuable ends-in-themselves. What, more precisely, do I mean by saying that? Objective values are whatever anyone can care about, that is, whatever anyone can aim her emotions (i.e., desires, feelings, or passions) at. Otherwise put, objective values are what Kant called “ends” (Zwecke). In turn, “absolute” means “unconditionally necessary.” So to say that human real persons are absolutely, nondenumerably infinitely, intrinsically, objectively valuable ends-in-themselves, or that they have dignity, is to say that their value as ends-in-themelves is not only an unconditionally necessary, internal feature of the kind of manifestly real being they are, but also the very highest kind of value.
Now many things are intrinsically objectively valuable, or ends-in-themselves—for example, pleasant bodily or sensory experiences, vivid emotional experiences, beautiful natural objects and environments, fine craftsmanship, skillfully-played sports, good science, good philosophy, good works of art, and any job well done. To say that human real persons are absolutely, nondenumerably infinitely, intrinsically, objectively valuable ends-in-themselves—i.e., that they have dignity—however, is to say that each of us has a moral value that is a transfinite cardinal quantity in relation to all denumerable or countable, economic, or otherwise instrumental kinds of value, for example psychological pleasure or preference-satisfaction. It seems clear that however we measure such things, whether in terms of market value or monetary price, degrees of psychological pleasure, degrees of preference-satisfaction, or comparative rankings of such things, nevertheless every actual or possible economic or otherwise instrumental value is expressible as some rational number quantity or another, including denumerably infinite rational number quantities. Then, by essentially the same method that Georg Cantor used to show the existence of transfinite numbers (Cantor, 1891, 2019) at least in principle, we can create a vertical and denumerably infinite list of every actual or possible economic or otherwise instrumental value, then draw a diagonal across it, and discover another value that’s categorically higher than any economic or otherwise instrumental value. So this value is the prime example of what—following Cantor’s alternative term for transfinite numbers, transcendental numbers— I’ve called transcendental normativity (Hanna, 2015b). Correspondingly, it’s what I’ll call transcendental value, by which I mean either a single transcendental value or else a unified system of several distinct but essentially complementary or interlocking transcendental values. Kant called the unified system of all transcendental values the highest good. The dignity of human real persons has transcendental value in that sense: thus each human real person, by virtue of their dignity, has transcendental value, and their human dignity also inherently belongs to the unified system of all transcendental values, aka the highest good. Correspondingly, the recognition of human dignity, as such, and therefore also the recognition of transcendental value and the highest good, as such, is the mode of creative piety I call “moral piety” (see also section 3.7 above). The essential analogy between the mode of creative piety I call formal piety, as exemplified in Cantor’s proof for the existence of transfinite numbers, and moral piety, should now be self-evident.
Even though each individual human real person has transcendental value—a value that’s categorically higher than any economic or otherwise instrumental value and thereby irreducible to any economic or otherwise instrumental value—nevertheless the value of groups of human real persons can still be calculated from the cardinality of the membership of the group, just as there is an arithmetic of transfinite cardinal numbers. The dignitarian transcendental value of N>1 human real persons is N times greater than the dignitarian transcendental value of one human real person. That’s why it’s twice as good to save the lives of two human real persons as it is to save the life of one human real person, and twice as bad for two human real persons to die as it is for one human real person to die, and so on. This special kind of transfinite/transcendental value-calculability is true of groups of human real persons, and yet the dignity of each individual human real person has a value that’s categorically higher than any economic or instrumental value and thereby irreducible to any economic or otherwise instrumental value, which is to say that it’s a transcendental value, and that it belongs to the highest good. The highest good in this sense is in each and every one of us; and that’s the one and only sense in which we’re all morally and politically equal. But apart from that broadly Kantian dignitarian sense of equality, as Harry Frankfurt has compellingly argued (Frankfurt, 2015), egalitarianism more generally is a misguided and mistaken moral and political ideal. What’s strictly and universally morally and politically obligatory is to treat every human real person with sufficient respect for their human dignity,[i] which will sometimes necessarily involve strict equality of treatment across sets of individual human real persons, but not always or necessarily.
Treating a human real person with sufficient respect for their human dignity, in turn, has three individually necessary, individually insufficient, and jointly sufficient conditions: (i) a human real person is treated with sufficient respect only if they are not treated either as a mere means or as mere thing, for example, in the way that Nazis treated people, like a piece of garbage or offal, (ii) a human real person is treated with sufficient respect only if they are treated in such a way that they can give their explicit and/or implicit rational consent[ii] to that treatment, and (iii) a human real person is treated with sufficient respect only if they are treated with kindness—that is, with benevolent attention to their true human needs (Maiese and Hanna, 2019: ch. 3; see also section 5.4.1 below). These are mutually logically distinct and individually necessary, but still individually insufficient conditions for sufficient respect for human dignity. For, despite what may appear at first glance, they’re not necessarily equivalent, for two reasons.
First, it’s at least minimally really possible for a human real person to give their explicit or implicit rational consent to being treated either as a mere means or as a mere thing. Indeed, it’s at least minimally really possible that a human real person could explicitly or implicitly rationally consent even to becoming someone else’s slave or to being killed by that other person—as an extreme form of self-abasement, self-punishment, self-sacrifice, or sexual self-expression. One real-world example is the notorious “German cannibals” case in 2002 (BBC News, 2002). I do hold, however, that the German cannibals’ explicit rational consent also violates their implicit rational consent. But the more general point I am making here is that in all such cases, someone, of their own free will, disrespects themselves and therefore is choosing and acting impermissibly.
Second, even if a human real person is not being treated as a mere means or as a mere thing, and can also give their explicit or implicit rational consent to some proposed mode of treatment, nevertheless she might still be treated without kindness. For example, someone who is living in extreme poverty might receive just enough food aid not to starve, and just enough health care aid not to die from preventable causes, but also not enough aid to be well-fed, healthy, self-supporting, or able to engage in any creative, meaningful, useful, or productive activities. Then they’re being oppressed (Hanna, 2018d: sections 18-20), by being condemned to a life of constant neediness and suffering.
The upshot, then, is that a human real person is being treated with sufficient respect for their human dignity respect if and only if (i) they’re not being treated either as a mere means or as a mere thing, (ii) they can give their explicit and/or implicit rational consent to that treatment, and (iii) they’re being treated with kindness. In other words, no meaningful act-intention should ever be chosen or acted upon which entails that human real persons are treated either as mere means or as mere things, without their explicit or implicit rational consent, or with cruelty. To treat a human real person without sufficient respect for their human dignity, and thus either as a mere means or as a mere thing, without their explicit and/or implicit rational consent, or with cruelty, is to harm them by violating their dignity. Therefore, it’s strictly morally impermissible to harm human real persons by violating their dignity; and for the very same reasons, it’s also strictly morally obligatory, to prevent or reduce dignity-violating harms to human real persons. These moral principles are also commonly known as “the negative duty not to harm” and “the positive duty to prevent harm.” Equivalently, a human real person is treated with sufficient respect for their human dignity if and only if they’re provided with freedom from oppression.
One direct consequence of this conception of human dignity, which overlaps significantly with early Karl Marx’s political theory, as formulated, for example, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx, 1961; see also Fromm, 1961), is that human real persons are not commodities of any kind. Therefore, any person or social institution or system that commodifies human real persons, undermines and violates their human dignity.
Another direct consequence of this conception of human dignity, is that human real persons do not have to do anything in order to have dignity, nor can they lose their human dignity by acting badly. Human dignity is neither an achievement nor a reward for good conduct: on the contrary, it’s a constitutive endowment of their human real personhood.
And another direct consequence of this conception of human dignity is that it is not a general requirement of any human real person’s having dignity that they self-consciously recognize that they themselves have dignity, nor is it a general requirement of our acknowledging others as having dignity that we self-consciously recognize that they have dignity. This is for two reasons.
First, the mental act or state of recognizing oneself or another real person as having dignity is not originally or primarily an act or state of self-conscious, or reflective, report, belief, or judgment. On the contrary, it’s originally and primarily an act or state of pre-reflectively conscious emotional perception, or what Michelle Maiese and I have called affective framing (Hanna and Maiese, 2009: section 5.3; Maiese, 2011).More precisely, on this view, emotional perception consists in an essentially embodied, conscious, feeling, desiring, passionate intentional agent’s representing the world via her desire-based readiness to choose or act intentionally, and, in the midst of that readiness, being disposed to have feelings about the world, or others, or herself, in certain specific ways; and the mental content of such acts or states of emotional perception is essentially non-conceptual (Hanna, 2015a: ch. 2; see also section 3.1 above). These same points are also very effectively conveyed by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, without any technical terminology:
“I believe that he is suffering.” –Do I also believe that he isn’t an automaton? It would go against the grain to use the word in both connexions. (Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am certain that he is not an automaton? Nonsense!) Suppose I say of a friend: “He isn’t an automaton.” –What information is conveyed by this, and to whom would it be information? To a human being who meets him in ordinary circumstances? What information could it give him? (At the very most that this man always behaves like a human being, and not occasionally like a machine.) “I believe that he is not an automaton,” just like that, so far makes no sense. My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. (Wittgenstein, 1953: p. 178e)
Second, the concept of human dignity, as I’m spelling it out in this section, is a characteristically moral-metaphysical concept that’s knowable or known only by rational reflection, moral intuition, and philosophical analysis. It would be paradoxical in the extreme if, for example, someone’s falling deeply in love and regarding another real person as inherently lovable required reflectively knowing the moral-metaphysical analysis of the concept of love, either partially or completely. On the contrary, obviously, romantic people normally affectively frame other people as inherently deeply lovable, and thereby fall deeply in love with them, without requiring any reflective or analytical grasp whatsoever of the concepts under which they themselves or the objects of their pre-reflectively conscious emotional perception fall. So too, it would be paradoxical in the extreme if, for example, someone’s either being worthy of respect for their human dignity, or someone’s respecting another human real person, required reflectively knowing the moral-metaphysical analysis of the concept of human dignity, either partially or completely. On the contrary, people normally affectively frame themselves and others as having dignity in a pre-reflective and non-self-consciously conscious way, and without requiring any reflective or analytical grasp whatsoever of the concepts under which they themselves or the objects of their pre-reflectively conscious emotional perception fall.
NOTES
[i] This is a broadly Kantian dignitarian generalization of what Frankfurt calls “the doctrine of sufficiency”: see (Frankfurt, 2015: p. 7).
[ii] I’ll discuss the important distinction between explicit and implicit rational consent in some detail in sub-section 5.4.3 below.
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