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-second installment contains section 5.1.3.
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
5.1.3 The Metaphysical Ground of Human Dignity: Human Real Personhood
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
5.1.3 The Metaphysical Ground of Human Dignity: Human Real Personhood
The metaphysical ground of the dignity of human real persons is their real personhood. And our real personhood is an essentially embodied, unified set of innate cognitive, emotional, and practical capacities. And this is the metaphysical ground of the absolute, non-denumerably infinite, intrinsic, and objective value of all real persons, including of course all human real persons, as ends-in-themselves, precisely because this essentially embodied set of capacities is the only thing in the universe capable of freely recognizing, freely creating, freely acting according to and for the sake of, and freely sustaining, transcendental value or the highest good, which we already know to exist by the Cantorian argument sketched earlier. So human dignity is, at bottom, all about the essentially embodied complex capacity for free will and practical agency that’s aimed at transcendental value or the highest good, aka free agency. But what, more precisely, is a real person?
Necessarily, every real person is also an individual animal that inherently belongs to some species or another (for example, a human real person),but the converse is not the case: not every individual animal within a species is a real person. For example, human infants born with anencephaly—without a cerebrum or a cerebellum, and lacking the top part of the skull—are really biologically human, but not human real persons. So not every individual human being is a human real person. Moreover, not every particular living organism within a species is even an individual animal within that species, much less a real person in that species. For example, normal human embryos or zygotes prior to 14 days after conception, during the period of “totipotency,” are not even individual human animals, precisely because during that period they can still either split into twins or fuse with several other embryos into a chimera (Kuhse and Singer, 1990).
If, necessarily, all real persons are individual animals within some species or another, then obviously we can make some headway towards explicating the nature of real persons only if we are able to answer a preliminary question: “what is an animal?” The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word “animal” means “a living organism which feeds on organic matter, usually one with specialized sense organs and nervous system, and able to respond rapidly to stimuli” (Hawkins and Allen, 1991: p. 52). In the usage of contemporary biologists, the term “animal” also has a taxonomical sense, in that animals are said to constitute one of the five kingdoms of living things: Monera (bacteria), Protists, Fungi, Plants, and Animals. The class of animals that is jointly specified by these ordinary language and biological-taxonomical senses includes vertebrates and invertebrates, mammals and non-mammals—including birds, reptiles, amphibians, various kinds of fish, insects, and arachnids. My usage of the term “animal” throughout this chapter, however, is a slight precisification of the ordinary language and biological-taxonomical usages, intended also to coincide with its use in cognitive ethology, that is, the scientific study of animal minds and especially non-human animal minds in the context of macrobiology, cognitive psychology, and behavioral psychology (Griffin, 1976, 1984, 2001; Allen and Bekoff, 1997; Bearzi and Stanford, 2008). To signal this precisification, I’ve coined the quasi-technical term minded animal. Minded animals are living organisms with innate capacities for consciousness, intentionality, and emotion—including affective sub-capacities for feeling, desiring, and the passions.
Now minded animals are always creatures within some real species S or another, hence they are always S-type (say, human, or feline, or canine, or equine, etc.) animals. But as I noted above, not every living organism within a species S is an individual S-type animal. For example, a single human embryo or zygote (that is, the sperm-fertilized ovum) is a living organism within the human species, in the strictly phylogenetic sense of sharing our species-specific biological essence, but a single human embryo is not necessarily a human individual. This is because, as I also noted above, early human embryos up to about the 14th day of their existence are totipotent. This means, among other things, that one embryo can split and later become two distinct human individuals (twins), and also that two embryos can fuse and later become a single human individual (chimeras). What, more generally, is an individual belonging to some species S, that is, what is an individual S-type animal? My claim is this:
Something X is an individual S-type (human, feline, etc.) animal if and only if X is a living S-type organism, and X is past the period of totipotency for that species S.
Within the human species—and also within a few non-human animal species—many or even most of the animals within that species can also become real persons within that species. The beginning of a real person’s life for a given S-type animal is what I call the neo-personhood of that animal (Hanna, 2018c: sections 3.1-3.3). In the human species, as far as we currently know, the capacity for consciousness first manifests itself in normal fetuses between 25 and 32 weeks after conception or fertilization, hence roughly at the beginning of the third trimester (Boonin, 2003: ch. 3). My view is that this is when your very own human real personal life started—when you became a human neo-person. Prior to that, and from roughly 14 days after your parents conceived the human organism that eventually became you, there also existed a living human animal that also eventually became you—but, just like the totipotent human organism that became that human animal after 14 days, it was not yet you.
This distinction between animals within a species S on the one hand, and either neo-persons or actualized real persons within a species S on the other hand, is a deeply important difference, both metaphysically and morally. This can be seen in at two ways, with specific application to human animals. First, normal human fetuses after the period of totipotency but still before the emergence of consciousness at 25-32 weeks after conception or fertilization, are human animals but not human real persons, whether human neo-persons or actualized human real persons. Second, anencephalic human infants—a famous example is the real-world case of Baby Theresa (Rachels and Rachels, 2010: pp. 1-5)—are human animals, but neither human neo-persons nor actualized human real persons. Obviously these two claims, if true, will have serious implications for the morality of abortion and infanticide (Hanna, 2018c: ch. 3).
Every real person is also an S-type animal or living organism (but not conversely), and every individual S-type animal is also an S-type animal or living organism (but not conversely). Therefore, being an S-typeanimal or living organism (although not necessarily an individual one, in order to accommodate totipotent organisms in general and chimeras in particular) is a necessary although not a sufficient condition of real personhood. The rest of my metaphysical analysis of real personhood substantively borrows from two different sources: (i) Harry Frankfurt’s hierarchical-desire theory of persons (Frankfurt, 1988c, 1988d, 1988e, 1988f), and (obviously) (ii) Kant’s rationality-based theory of persons, especially as presented in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason.
Frankfurt’s theory of persons is based on the notion of an hierarchically-structured set of desires. The fundamental connection here is that for Frankfurt, a person is essentially identified with the constitution of her will, which in turn is a set of desires immanently structured by the capacities for rationality and free agency, and inherently governed by the norm of “decisive identification with effective first-order desires,” that is, by the norm of authenticity or wholeheartedness. In a nutshell, that is my view of real persons too, although with a more explicitly and robustly Kantian twist, or rather, set of twists. But let me now explore some further specific Frankfurtian details, because they are fundamentally important for my account of real persons.
On my view a desire is a felt need for something, or a conscious going-for something. This is as opposed to an actual need for something—obviously not all felt needs are actual needs—and also as opposed to a mere pro-attitude towards something, a mere preference for something, or a mere wish for something. Frankfurt himself defines the notion of a desire somewhat more broadly, so as to include all pro-attitudes, preferences, and wishes; but in the present context, it is convenient to use my narrower and more conative notion of a desire. Desires in this sense are essentially equivalent with active, committed wants. So to desire X is actively and committedly to want X; and to desire to X is actively and committedly to want to X.
According to Frankfurt, some animals have not only what he calls first-order desires, which are ordinary direct desires for things, events, or real persons (for example, the infant wanting her mother), but also effective first-order desires. Effective first-order desires are desires that move (or will move, or would move) the minded animal all the way to action. An effective first-order desire is the same as a minded animal’s will or first-order volition. First-order desires may or may not be accompanied by second-order desires: to want (not) to want X, or to want (not) to want to X. If so, then some of the second-order desires may be directed to the determination of precisely which first-order desire is to be the effective first-order desire, that is, the minded animal’s will and first-order volition; and such desires are second-order volitions.
According to Frankfurt, whatever the order-level of desires or volitions, they can be either conscious or non-conscious. For the purposes of my discussion, however, I will concentrate exclusively on conscious desires and volitions. This is, in part, because I think that there is no such thing as a mental state, whether dispositional or occurrent, that is strictly non-conscious and not to some non-trivial degree occurrently conscious. In earlier work, Maiese and I have called this (admittedly controversial, but also, we believe, defensible) claim “The Deep Consciousness Thesis” (Hanna and Maiese, 2009: chs. 1-2; Hanna, 2011c). But in any case, and according to Frankfurt, all and only persons have second-order volitions, because all and only persons care about the precise constitution of their wills. By contrast to persons, creatures that are “wantons” have effective first-order desires, but they either lack second-order desires (hence they cannot care about the precise constitution of their wills because they lack self-conscious desires) or if they have second-order desires they nevertheless lack second-order volitions (hence even though they have self-conscious desires, they still cannot care about the precise constitution of their wills). Again, according to Frankfurt, all non-human animals, all human infants, and some human adults are wantons. Finally, for Frankfurt a person has freedom of the will if and only if she can determine, by means of a second-order volition, precisely which among her first-order desires is the effective one. This is also known as identification or decisive identification (Frankfurt, 1988d, 1988f); otherwise persons have unfreedom of the will. Wantons have neither freedom of the will nor unfreedom of the will, simply because they are not persons.
I accept much of what Frankfurt has to say about persons and their wills, and correspondingly I want to apply much of what he says to human real persons and their wills. Nevertheless, I also have a substantive disagreement with him on one mid-sized (as opposed to either major or minor) point.
My mid-sized point of substantive disagreement is that I doubt that Frankfurt’s notion of personhood adequately captures the full breadth or depth of my broadly Kantiannotion of human real personhood, according to which some human real persons have what I’ll call higher-level or Kantian rationality. This, in turn, is an innate complex capacity for strict-norm-guided logical or practical reasoning, for reflective self-consciousness, for autonomy or self-legislation, for authenticity or wholeheartedness, and for moral or non-moral responsibility. Any minded animal that also has higher-level/Kantian rationality can recognize necessary truths, judge or believe with a priori certainty, and choose or act wholeheartedly in accordance with desire-overriding non-instrumental, non-selfish, non-egoistic or non-self-interested, non-hedonistic, non-consequentialist, categorically normative reasons and duties, that is, those reasons and duties that inherently express The Categorical Imperative and the “categorical ‘ought’.”
By sharp contrast, what I’ll call lower-level or Humean rationality involves only the possession of innate capacities for conscious, intentional desire-based logical or practical reasoning, for more or less momentary or occasional occurrent self-consciousness, and for self-interested, or in any case instrumental, intentional agency. Any minded animal that has lower-level rationality can recognize contingent truths, judge or believe with a posteriori certainty, and choose or act in accordance with broadly instrumental egoistic, hedonistic, or consequentialist reasons and duties, or those that express at most the “hypothetical ‘ought’.”
All minded animals that possess an innate capacity for higher-level/Kantian rationality also possess an innate capacity for lower-level/Humean rationality, but not the converse. For example, it’s arguable that normal, healthy Great apes and perhaps also dolphins (Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin, 1994; Griffin, 200; Bearzi and Stanford, 2008)[1] possess an innate capacity for lower-level/Humean rationality, but not a capacity for higher-level/Kantian rationality. This is of course not to say that Great apes or dolphins are “irrational” or “non-rational” in any sense. On the contrary, it is only to say that, relative to those animals that do possess an innate capacity for higher-level/Kantian rationality, the rational capacity of Great apes and perhaps also dolphins is somewhat limited in complexity and normative power. Minded animals with an capacity for rationality in the higher-level/Kantian sense are not only constrained in their intentional agency by The Categorical Imperative or at least by some strictly universal, non-instrumental, altruistic, non-hedonistic, and non-consequentialist moral reasons and objective principles, they are also capable of being moved wholeheartedly by the moral emotion of respect for dignity. Or in other words, minded animals with a fully online capacity for rationality in the higher-level/Kantian sense are also capable of autonomy and what I call principled authenticity.
By contrast, minded animals that possess only an innate capacity for rationality in the lower-level/Humean sense are constrained in their intentional agency only by (at least some of) the axioms of rational choice theory, but not by strictly universal, non-instrumental, altruistic, non-hedonistic, and non-consequentialist moral reasons and objective principles. They are therefore not capable of autonomy or principled authenticity. Instead, they are at most capable of being moved non-authentically or non-wholeheartedly by the first-order Humean moral emotion of sympathy (Hume, 1978: books II and III).
Some human animals are “persons” in Frankfurt’s sense, hence are human real persons in my sense, and also rational agents in the lower-level/Humean sense, and not rational agents in the higher-level/Kantian sense, but this is not because they lack the innate capacities for agency in the higher-level sense. Rather they do possess these capacities, but in the mode of real potentiality that is not yet actualized, hence it it is simply because they are not-yet rational agents in the higher-level/Kantian sense. Indeed we—the actual and really possible readers of this book—were all of us, for a time, such creatures.
Consider, for example, normal toddlers. Normal toddlers and other young children are capable of a great many different sorts of complex affects and complex emotional states, including momentary anticipations of Kantian real personhood, but they are not (yet) higher-level rational human animals. Toddlers and other young children are therefore human real persons in the lower-level/Frankfurtian sense, but not (yet) real human persons in the higher level/Kantian sense. Toddlers and other young children are therefore junior human real persons—as it were, tenure track assistant professors in The Realm of Ends—but not yet senior real human persons, as it were, tenured full professors in The Realm of Ends, even though they are, in terms of dignity, equal moral persons with all the other real persons. By another contrast, adolescents or semi-Kantian human real persons more generally are poised on a razor’s edge somewhere between the higher and the lower levels. They are equal moral persons of the middle rank, but not card-carrying members of the classes above or below themselves—tenured associate professors in The Realm of Ends.
Thus human real personhood in the lower-level/Frankfurtian sense is a necessary and sufficient condition of human real personhood, which includes all the more-or-less online basic capacities of free agents, hence it entails dignity. And as we’ve seen, it is based on the fully online capacity for having second-order volitions, which in turn contains several other distinct constituent fully online psychological capacities. Human real personhood in the higher-level/Kantian sense, i.e., moral agency, on the other hand, both includes and significantly augments human real personhood in the lower-level/Frankfurtian sense, by including the fully online capacity for principled authenticity, at least partially or to some degree. Correspondingly, human real personhood in the higher-level/Kantian sense is based on the fully online capacity for higher-level rational agency, which also contains several other distinct online psychological capacities. In order to display the internal complexity of the relationships between these capacities more fully, here’s an explicit version of the two-level theory of human real personhood that I’ve been developing, together with my conception of human neo-personhood, in the form of a four-part metaphysical definition of human real personhood:
Part I. X is a Frankfurtian human real person (personf) if and only if X is a human animal and X has fully online psychological capacities for
(i) essentially embodied consciousness or essentially embodied subjective experience,
(ii) intentionality or directedness to objects, locations, events (including actions), other minded animals, or oneself, including cognition (that is, sense perception, memory, imagination, and conceptualization), and caring (that is, affect, desire, and emotion), especially including effective first-order desires,
(iii) lower-level/Humean rationality, that is, logical reasoning (including judgment and belief) and instrumental decision-making,
(iv) self-directed or other-directed evaluative emotions (for example, love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, pride, etc),
(v) minimal linguistic understanding, that is, either inner or overt expression and communication in any simple or complex sign system or natural language, including ASL, etc., and
(vi) second-order volitions.
Part II. X is a Kantian human real person (personk), aka a human moral agent, if and only if X is a human real personf and also has fully online psychological capacities for
(vii) higher-level/Kantian rationality, that is, categorically normative logical rationality (Hanna, 2006b: esp. chs. 6-7, 2006c, 2015a: ch. 5) and practical rationality, the latter of which also entails a fully online capacity for free agency, including deep freedom of the will (see also section 2.4.2.3 above), deep (non-)moral responsibility, autonomy (self-legislation), and wholeheartedness, hence a fully online capacity for principled authenticity, at least partially or to some degree (Hanna, 2018b, 2018c).
Part III. X is a human real person if and only if X is either a human real personf or a human real personk; and any other finite, material creature or entity Y is a non-person.
Part IV. If X is an actualized human real person, then the neo-person of X is also a human real person, where the neo-person of X is an individual human animal A that manifests the psychological capacity for consciousness and the following counterfactual is also true of A:
If A were to continue the natural course of its neurobiological and psychological development, then A would become X.
NOTE
[i] Savage-Rumbaugh’s research has been highly controversial. For an alternative view, see (Tomasello and Call, 1997: esp. pp. 375-379). My own view, which I spell out and defend in (Hanna, 2018c: chs. 3-4), says that Great apes and perhaps also dolphins are non-autonomous, non-human real persons who are morally equivalent to normal human toddlers and other young children. This in turn suggests an argument strategy for those who seek to extend real-person-based legal rights to Great apes and dolphins: Since normal human toddlers and other young children clearly have real personhood and dignity, and since Great apes and (perhaps also) dolphins possess the same psychological capacities that ground real personhood and dignity, then it follows that Great apes and (perhaps also) dolphins also have real personhood and dignity, and therefore should also be accorded the same person-based legal rights. See also (Siebert, 2014).
Against Professional Philosophy is a sub-project of the online mega-project Philosophy Without Borders, which is home-based on Patreon here.
Please consider becoming a patron!
