Intertextuality: Philosophy About Philosophy

When it comes to many students of philosophy, it can be said that much of the process of learning the discipline can — or does — involve the emulation and even outright imitation of philosophers’ (academic) prose styles and even the imitation of their actual philosophical content. Indeed, students — and perhaps some professional academics — find it hard to distinguish between referencing philosophers’ work and actually being entirely parasitical upon it. This often means that such people are effectively caught in intertextual traps.

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” — A.N. Whitehead (see source here)

The first thing to state here is that the title of this essay has little to do with what’s called metaphilosophy (or the philosophy of philosophy). That’s because this discipline involves conscious philosophising about (or the analysis of) the nature of philosophy from what can be deemed to be a higher-order perspective. (Hence the prefix meta.) On the other hand, the intertextual philosophy featured in this essay is largely an unconscious affair.

The neologism intertextuality itself was coined by the literary critic, semiotician and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (see here). However, let the literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes (1915–1980) offer his own take on it (which, admittedly, isn’t strongly tied to my own positions and examples):

“Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc. pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text. Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located; of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks.”

In technical terms, intertextuality can (but need not) involve outright plagiarism, quotation, parody and pastiche. However, all these terms imply a writer’s (or student’s) conscious relations to what it is that he or she is plagiarising, quoting, etc. In terms of the philosophers discussed here, this isn’t the case (at least not in the main). So their kind of intertextuality has nothing to do with, for example, allusion. That’s mainly because allusion is, again, a conscious (usually literary) strategy or device.

The notion of intertextuality hasn’t really been applied (at least not often) to philosophy — especially not to 20th century analytic philosophy. In fact, it’s usually found within the context of literature. (As already seen in terms of the earlier references to Kristeva and Barthes.) However, as we’ll now see, the notion of intertextuality can be applied across the board.

Intertextual Films

My own personal awareness of intertextuality came about when watching mainstream films. (Thus, “intertextuality” is a fancy word for something which many people have noted.) In this case, I noted how derivative (mainly Hollywood) films are. More particularly, one can easily see how so many films are based (or even parasitical) upon other films. (This can be seen in the dialogue, stories, dress, music, characters’ phrases, dialects, overall production, camera angles, etc.) Some good examples of this include the “cockney gangster genre” (satirised in the film ‘Cockneys vs Zombies’), Hollywood films about the New York Mafia and serial killers, “action films” and even news/current affairs programmes (check out the satire The Day Today).

So, in that sense, these examples are films about films.

The director and writer Quentin Tarantino once used that phrase to refer to his own work. Yet Tarantino is simply more honest and explicit about what he’s doing when he writes and directs his intertextual films. (See ‘Let’s Get Into Character: Role-Playing in Quentin Tarantino’s Postmodern Sandbox’.)

However, it must be noted that all this certainly isn’t a reference to “films about films” in the strict sense in which some films have literally been about other films. (See also ‘The Trouble With Films About Films’.)

So, as stated, many films are essentially films about films. That is, many films are intertextual.

Intertextual Philosophy

When it comes to (mainly) students of philosophy and young professional philosophers, it can be said that much of the process of learning the discipline can — or does — involve the emulation and even outright imitation of philosophers’ (academic) prose styles. However, this often even applies to the emulation and imitation of actual philosophical content too. When this is obvious and blatant, it’s sometimes called patchwriting. (This can verge on outright plagiarism.) Indeed, philosophy students up to PhD level, and some young professional philosophers, can find it hard to distinguish between (oblique or direct) references to philosophers’ work and actually being entirely (to put it strongly) parasitical upon it.

All that said, patchworking isn’t really what is featured in this essay. That’s because the kind of intertextuality discussed here comes about because the philosopher is so immersed in certain (philosophical) texts that there’s no deliberate imitation or patchwriting going on at all. However, there may indeed be unintentional imitation or patchwriting involved in his or her written work.

[Many professional — i.e., academic — philosophers patchwork their own previous work. Sometimes they don’t even change the passages they reuse. Indeed, I’ve done this myself — if only in small detail — in this very essay. However, whether or not this self-quoting can be classified as patchworking is debatable. It certainly can’t be classed as plagiarism.]

Wannabe Philosophers

At the other extreme, there are some philosophers (especially “wannabe” philosophers) who would like to flatter themselves with the view that their own philosophical positions and ideas have (virtually?) come out of their very own thin air. Such people hold the view that their personal philosophies and worldviews are entirely original… or at least very original. (This has also been the case with a fair number of “classical” composers, rock/pop bands, amateur physicists, etc.)

It can be asked, then, where would the novice (as it were) aprioristic philosopher get his terms, concepts and tools from. Isn’t it the case that he wouldn’t have the vocabulary to philosophise in the first place without intertextual help? And isn’t it also the case that he or she wouldn’t even feel the need to ask philosophical questions at all without the spur of preceding philosophy?

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who’s often seen as being a truly original philosopher, is of help here.

Derrida (in his essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ ) once stated (to paraphrase):

The aprioristic philosopher would still think or speak Greek.

The French philosopher himself admitted to being a (what he called) “Jew-Greek”. That is, Derrida claimed that he lived in a “house” which had been built for him by (religious) Jews and Christians, as well as by (pagan) philosophical Greeks.

What’s more, it isn’t only students of philosophy and young professional philosophers who write philosophy about philosophy or who continually bounce off other philosophers’ texts.

Take the (arbitrarily-chosen) cases of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Some Examples of Intertextuality From Philosophy

Where did Kant’s (as it were) Kantian problems and questions come from? Didn’t they largely come from other philosophers?

More clearly, Kant wouldn’t have been a Kantian without the impasse between rationalism and empiricism, as well as the scepticism of David Hume. Similarly, Schopenhauer wouldn’t have been a Schopenhauerian without Kant and the work of the German Idealists (among other things) who came before him.

Of course, some philosophers (like the wannabes earlier) have seen themselves as being aprioristic philosophers. That is, they didn’t only take a position on the a priori within philosophy; but also an a priori position toward philosophy itself. That is, such philosophers believed that the best way to do philosophy isn’t to read as many philosophical texts as possible — or even read any texts at all. Instead, the best way to do great and original philosophy is simply to think and reason independently of all texts. (Arguably, Ludwig Wittgenstein took this view — at least at times. See this account. As did Martin Heidegger.)

As for intertextuality as it applies to contemporary philosophers.

Take the analytic philosopher William G. Lycan’s medium-length paper ‘The Continuity of Levels of Nature’. This paper includes fifty-two references to other philosophers’ texts. And, in addition, take Jaegwon Kim’s ‘Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept’, which has fifty-one such references. This kind of (as it were) manic referencing is more or less the norm when it comes to papers published in analytic philosophy journals. (One can suppose that this is taken to be a display of the philosophers’ research skills.)

So what about philosophy students, rather than professionals?

It can be said that when a student of analytic philosopher thinks about, say, (what’s often called) the nature of mind, all he primarily does (in crude terms) is read about what, randomly, David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett have said on it. This must mean that he too may well be caught in his own intertextual trap. (Of course, it’s unlikely that any student of mind would rely on only two philosophers.) Indeed, all a student’s responses, reactions and commentaries on the nature of mind may be largely intertextual in nature.

Thus, when students study philosophy at university, it seems that the reading of a multitude of texts (along with research generally) often seems to be far more important than independent thinking and reasoning…

Yet this certainly isn’t entirely a bad thing!

And that’s primarily because (as just noted) aprioristic philosophers aren’t really aprioristic philosophers at all. What’s more, those who see themselves this way often produce very poor philosophy.

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Roger Penrose on Kurt Gödel and Gödelian Truth

Physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose believes that the ascertaining of (what can be called) Gödelian truths is a non-algorithmic process. Indeed, he believes that “genuine intelligence” is non-algorithmic too. Kurt Gödel himself believed that intuition allows us to “grasp” various concepts. Like Descartes’ position on “clear and distinct ideas”, Gödel believed that if we grasp a concept (at least one of a limited, not always mathematical, type) in a clear way, then that will guarantee us knowledge of its truth.

Roger Penrose and Kurt Gödel.

Physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose believes in what can be called Gödelian truth. His belief can be placed in a larger context and it also has a history. That context and history is partly (or even largely) down to Penrose’s stance against mathematical formalism.

Here’s Penrose on such formalism:

“The point of view that one can dispense with the meanings of mathematical statements, regarding them as nothing but strings of symbols in some mathematical system, is the mathematical standpoint of formalism.”

Penrose has a serious problem with this “point of view”. He goes on to say that “[s]ome people like this idea, whereby mathematics becomes a kind of meaningless game”. Penrose concludes:

“It is not an idea that appeals to me, however. It is indeed ‘meaning’ — not blind algorithmic computation — that gives mathematics its substance. Fortunately, Gödel dealt formalism a devastating blow!”

So Penrose has little time for naysayers when it comes to mathematical (or, as we’ll see, essentially Platonic) truth. He makes that clear in the following passage:

“As to the very dogmatic Gödel-immune formalist who claims not even to recognize that there is such a thing as mathematical truth, I shall simply ignore him, since he apparently does not possess the truth-divining quality that the discussion is all about!”

[Note the word “divining”! Perhaps it was just a turn of phrase.]

Roger Penrose on Platonic Truth

The first thing to say is that if there is such a thing as mathematical truth (rather than mathematical correctness, formal consistency, etc.), then it must be very different from other kinds of truth. Take the following examples of the various theories of truth, if not truth itself: truth as correspondence, truth as coherence, truth as “the word of God”, truth as pragmatic utility, etc.

Roger Penrose himself acknowledges all this. Yet he still believes that mathematical truth is Platonic.

So what exactly does Penrose mean by the word “truth” in these contexts?

Penrose seems to assume that truth is part of (all?) mathematical systems when he says such things as “whatever formal system [a mathematician] might adopt”, that will “prov[e] his criterion of truth”. (On the surface, this statement sounds like a kind of formalism.) In other words, not much more is said here — or indeed elsewhere — about what mathematical truth actually is. Then again, Penrose’s Platonic truth may be so brute (or fundamental) that nothing much can be said about it.

So how does all this connect to Kurt Gödel?

Gödel’s Theorem, Algorithms and Consciousness

Roger Penrose explains what he takes to be the chasm which exists between the knowledge (as well as the use) of algorithms and the knowledge of mathematical truth. All this is primarily viewed in terms of Kurt Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem and its (to use Penrose’s words) “devastating blow” to formalism. Penrose’s position is expressed in the following passage:

“[T]he very essence of consciousness. It must be present whenever we directly perceive mathematical truth. When we convince ourselves of the validity of Gödel’s theorem we not only ‘see’ it, but by so doing we reveal the very non-algorithmic nature of the ‘seeing’ process itself.”

The words above state an explicit and essential link between consciousness and the ascertaining of mathematical truth. Basically, then, (human) consciousness is required to (using Penrose’s own word) “see” mathematical truth. This must also mean — to Penrose at least — that mathematical truths can’t be seen by computers or machines. However, that’s not because computerised robots or even rudimentary computers have no (non-biological) eyes, visual systems or intelligence (some would argue that they do) — but because they don’t instantiate consciousness.

Elsewhere, Penrose also wrote:

“[C]oncerning Gödel’s theorem, was that, at least in mathematics, conscious contemplation can sometimes enable one to ascertain the truth of a statement in a way that no algorithm could.”

Basically, the ascertaining of (Gödelian) truths is non-algorithmic. (Or, more particularly, ascertaining the truth of Gödel sentences is non-algorithmic.) Thus, algorithms can’t bring about (or simulate) the type of consciousness which is required to see Gödelian truths.

Indeed, not only is all this the case when it comes to Penrose’s position on consciousness generally, he even takes this position on what he calls “genuine intelligence” too.

Seeing Gödelian Truths

Penrose often uses the words “see”, “seen” and “visualised” when it comes to certain mathematical truths (as well as, so Penrose hints, other things — such as morality, “beauty”, aesthetical taste, etc.). That is, he believes that many mathematical truths are seen to be true without being proved to be true. So, in that simple sense at least, it can be argued that he’s simply putting Gödel’s own position (see the final section).

[Penrose repeatedly puts the word see in scare quotes . That is, he doesn’t mean literal seeing with the eyes.]

Along with “seen”, Penrose also uses the words “insight” and “intuition”.

For example he writes:

“[A] specific Gödel proposition — neither provable not disprovable using the axioms and rules of the formal system under consideration — is clearly seen, using our insights into the meanings of the operations in question, to be a true [ditto] proposition!”

Penrose isn’t the only one to use words like “see” in the context of mathematical truths.

For example, in the specific case of number theory and Gödel sentence G, the philosopher of logic Alasdair Urquhart uses the word “perception” (although it too is put in scare quotes) in the following:

“Since we do seem to have a ‘clear and distinct perception’ of the notion of truth in number theory, it has often been argued that this demonstrates a clear superiority of humans over machines.”

And, in the following paragraph, Urquhart continues:

“[We], standing outside the formal system, and using our mathematical insight, can see that the sentence G is true, and so we can surpass the capacity of any fixed machine.”

However, in the above it can be said that Urquhart is (at least in part) putting other people’s positions. And since I’ve just quoted Urquhart, it’s also interesting that he questions Penrose’s claim that he (or others) can see that a Gödel sentence is true. He writes:

“The problem with the Lucas/Penrose argument [] is that the key premise asserting that we can see the Gödel sentence to be true, remains undemonstrated. In fact, there are good reasons for thinking it to be false.”

In addition to the above, it also needs to be said that people may disagree as to exactly what it is they see. For example, one person may see (or intuit) that p is true, yet another person may see that the very same p is false. So even if we accept that there is Platonic seeing in both cases, that seeing alone doesn’t — and can’t — guarantee truth (or “truth without proof”).

Penrose also uses the word “sensing”. In this instance, Penrose goes beyond seeing the truth of a Gödel sentence and starts using much more modal and clearly Platonic ways of speaking. Indeed, he partly explains what he means by “seeing” here:

“[]I believe consciousness to be closely associated with the sensing of necessary truths — and thereby achieving a direct contact with Plato’s world of mathematical concepts.”

There is an important reason (at least within this specific context) as to why Penrose stresses Platonic sight. It’s because he believes that “sensing necessary truths [] is not an algorithmic procedure”. Indeed, this is part of Penrose’s wider stance against the possibility of (genuine) artificial intelligence.

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Part Two: Kurt Gödel Himself

When it comes to seeing the truth of Gödel sentences, intuition is said to enable (or bring about) such seeing.

The problem here is that in order to see the truth of a Gödel sentence (i.e., not simply recognise and understand what a Gödel sentence is), one needs to be proficient not only at mathematics, but also at metamathematics. So, basically, not many people can actually see the truth of any Gödel sentence.

Kurt Gödel himself believed intuition allows us to (to use his word) “grasp” various concepts. Like René Descartes’ position on what he called “clear and distinct ideas”, Gödel believed that if we grasp a concept (at least a concept of a specific type, though not always mathematical) in a clear way (whatever that may mean), then that will guarantee knowledge(?) of truth, as well as knowledge of (some kind of) content.

In detail, Gödel claimed that “we do have something like a perception also of the objects of set theory”. He also mentioned the “intuitive character” and “direct perceptibility” of mathematical objects. Yet, elsewhere, Gödel remarked that terms like “seeing” and “perceiving” (i.e., at least when it comes to sets, numbers, mathematical truths, etc.) mustn’t be taken literally. In his own words, Gödel argued that our “perception” of mathematical objects “must be totally different from [perceiving] sensual objects”.

However, it must also be said that Gödel’s admission (if that’s what it was) doesn’t work against the idea (or reality) of intuition. It’s simply an acknowledgement that the intuition of any given mathematical x isn’t identical to the seeing of, say, a red rose or to the perceiving of something’s being misshapen. In fact, Gödel believed that the kind of intuition he had in mind is actually more reliable that our perception of red roses (or at least judgments about them) or of other “external objects”. In other words, our (as it were) access to, say, basic mathematical truths, and even to the truth of a Gödel sentence, is more direct than our cognitive and perceptual access to a rose and its redness.

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Albert Einstein on Naive Science: Observation, Induction and Cataloguing

Albert Einstein once referred to the traditional view of science as one which posited a “continuous process of induction” and “the compilation of a classified catalogue”. He believed that this view “slurs over the important part played by intuition and deductive thought”.

In 1916, Albert Einstein offered his readers an account of what he believed traditional scientists — and most laypersons — took science to be.

Firstly, he mentioned the stress on induction. He wrote:

“From a systematic theoretical point of view, we may imagine the process of evolution of an empirical science to be a continuous process of induction.”

The basic take on science is that it is essentially inductive. Or at least this is what’s usually believed (i.e., by some scientists and philosophers) to be the contemporary layperson’s view. The problem here is that most laypersons don’t actually philosophise about science at all. More particularly, they rarely — if ever — use the word “induction” or “inductive”. That said, some philosophers tell us that a person may have the concept of a word without ever actually using the word itself. Thus, laypersons may have the concept [induction] without ever using the word “induction”.

What’s more likely is that traditional scientists — and laypersons — stressed observations. So Einstein continued:

“Theories are evolved and are expressed in short compass as statements of a large number of individual observations in the form of empirical laws, from which the general laws can be ascertained by comparison.”

Thus, “individual observations” are (or were) often believed to drive the entire scientific show.

[Once again, only empirical research can establish what most (or any) scientists and laypersons actually believe. Yet, anecdotally, this does seem to be the usual position.]

On this (as it were) naive picture of science, then, scientists simply go outside and … well, observe. Alternatively, scientists carry out experiments and then simply observe what happens.

Thus, according to Einstein’s take on the traditional take, scientists collect all their observations together into a large pot (or at the least they collect their “statements” about their observations together), and then they attempt to make sense of them. Or, in Einstein’s own words, scientists extract “empirical laws” (exclusively?) from their observations.

Clearly, innumerable other factors would be required in order to extract empirical laws from observations alone. And then the situation becomes even more complicated when “general laws” are “ascertained” from those observations and empirical laws.

So Einstein was correct to detect the naivety of this view of science. And that’s why he went on to write the following words:

“Regarded in this way, the development of a science bears some resemblance to the compilation of a classified catalogue. It is, as it were, a purely empirical enterprise.”

Thus, scientists are (or at least were) often seen as merely cataloguing nature (or cataloguing their observations of nature). This is almost like scientific (as it were) “stamp collecting”. (As is the case with some accounts of Francis Bacon and his own philosophy of science. See here.) If this process is followed, then, it was believed that everything could be kept scientifically kosher — or empirical. (The reader might have detected unwritten scare quotes around Einstein’s use of the word empirical.)

Of course, one can immediately ask why scientists were cataloguing the things they were in the first place. Why were they observing those parts of nature and not other parts? Why did they want to “compile[]” the things they compiled and not other things? In other words, there must have been prior factors — above and beyond what it is they observed — that brought about those very same observations.

Einstein himself then explained why this view is both simplistic and naive. He continued:

“But this point of view by no means embraces the whole of the actual process ; for it slurs over the important part played by intuition and deductive thought in the development of an exact science.”

It’s clear, however, that Einstein wasn’t actually entirely ruling out the traditional view of science. This meant (to Einstein) that observations — and even cataloguing — are indeed part of the story of science. That said, these things, according to Einstein, “by no means embrace[] the whole of the actual process”. And it’s here that Einstein adds “intuition and deductive thought [to] the development of an exact science”.

Einstein also wrote the following:

“The theory finds the justification for its existence in the fact that it correlates a large number of single observations [].”

That reference to a “correlat[ion] of a large number of single observations” is a perfect account of a particular kind of inductive process — enumerative induction.

For example, from the observation — and then correlation — of a large number of white swans, a subject may (or will ) conclude that “all swans are white”. Alternatively, a scientist may develop a (to use Einstein’s word) “theory” about swans and why they are all white. (This may even include natural laws of some kind.)

Einstein had also already mentioned “induction” (though in a critical way) when he wrote:

“we may imagine the process of evolution of an empirical science to be a continuous process of induction”.

One may now ask exactly how a scientist “correlates a large number of single observations”. (Alternatively: How does a scientist — or anyone else - connect the dots about all swans being white?) After all, if the theory “finds its justification [in the] fact that it correlates a large number of single observations”, one may suggest that theories were already required in order to enable those correlations. In simple terms, then, old and accepted theories would have been required (or needed) in order to find a new theory. In the white swans case, in order to conclude that all swans are white, the person who concluded that must have already accepted various other things about swans, the colour white, the whiteness of swans, the nature of observations, biology, ornithology, etc.

Einstein on Intuition and Deductive Thought

Earlier, Einstein was quoted stating that the naive view of science (i.e., discussed so far)

“slurs over the important part played by intuition and deductive thought in the development of an exact science”.

Einstein’s stress on what he calls “intuition” and “deductive thought” is a little odd. Many philosophers of science and scientists today would stress theory here — not intuition and deductive thought. Of course, theory may also be intimately tied to both intuition and deductive thought.

So, firstly, what about the word “intuition”?

In philosophy and mathematics, that word often has very specific and technical meanings (see here). So one wonders if Einstein used it in one of those technical ways himself. Perhaps, instead, Einstein simply meant speculation and/or theorising by the word “intuition”. That is, intuition (at least within a scientific context) is all thought which goes above and beyond the observational data. Indeed, intuition may also be required to make sense of the observations, and even lay the groundwork for observations.

So what about Einstein’s words “deductive thought”?

In a general and perhaps vague sense, if we have observations (or statements about them), then we can deduce things from those observations. That is, the observations don’t simply stand on their own. Scientists need to make sense of them. In addition, scientists can also deduce (not always logically) other (what Isaac Newton called) “conclusions” from them.

However, Einstein himself wrote that

“the investigator develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms”.

The quote directly above is Einstein (at least provisionally) treating physics as a kind of (pure) deductive logic. That is, instead of premises from which a conclusion can be derived (or axioms in mathematics which lead to theorems), we have observations and/or “fundamental assumptions” which lead to theories. And, in fact, Einstein himself says that “[w]e call such a system of thought a theory”.

Of course, much of what Einstein wrote about the traditional view of science is too neat and tidy. That is, scientific thinking and scientific practice didn’t really — or didn’t always — adhere to his retrospective formulations. But that’s often what happens in the philosophy of science.

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Max Tegmark Suggests the Term ‘Homo Sentiens’ to Account for Our Extra Specialness

The well-known physicist and AI expert Max Tegmark once wrote the following: “As we prepare to be humbled by ever smarter machines, I suggest that we rebrand ourselves as Homo sentiens!” Is this yet another attempt to place human beings at the top of the universal pile?

I came across a passage written by the Swedish-American cosmologist, physicist and machine learning researcher Max Tegmark in which he seems to be at pains to find abilities (or general characteristics) which truly distinguish human beings from all other… things in the Universe. Alternatively, Tegmark is simply expressing the general mindset of what he calls “we humans”.

This is the passage in full:

“Philosophers like to go Latin on this distinction, by contrasting sapience (the ability to think intelligently) with sentience (the ability to subjectively experience qualia). We humans have built our identity on being Homo sapiens, the smartest entities around. As we prepare to be humbled by ever smarter machines, I suggest that we rebrand ourselves as Homo sentiens!”

Human Beings are Extra Special and Unique?

Max Tegmark

So what’s the passage above all about?

Is it Max Tegmark’s expression of the strong need which so many human beings (or Homo sapiens) have to distinguish themselves from literally everything else?

For centuries, even for millennia, we humans have attempted to distinguish ourselves from other animals — and all else — in the Universe by our sapience. And now that this project has failed (as least according to Tegmark above), now it’s sentience’s turn to be our trump card.

So the same game simply repeats itself.

All sorts of things have been suggested to account for human specialness and uniqueness. That long list includes: language, opposable thumbs, walking upright, big brains, meaning, love, religion, empathy, the ability to play soccer, etc. Thus, the goalposts have kept on shifting. However, arguably some of these traits, abilities or characteristics are still deemed to make us human beings extra special and unique.

Yet, yes, it’s obviously the case that we human beings can do things which no other animal and no computer could ever do. No one would ever deny that.

Thus, human beings can create great — or even insignificant — works of art. No animal can do that. (Some computer programmes — arguably - can do the latter. See ‘Can Computers Create Art?’.) We humans can create religions, fly to the moon, cure diseases, build computers, “see” the truth of Gödel sentences, tell jokes, etc. No animal can do any of these things. And, as yet, no computer (at least without human input) can do any of these things either…

Actually, only a few human beings can do most — or even all — of the things just cited. However, perhaps all human beings have “the potential” to do all of them (see ‘Human potential’)…

But is that true? And what does “human potential” mean in this context?

So can we draw any general conclusions from these (seemingly) unique human abilities? And is there a single unique… something which characterises all of them and which is “purely human”?

As already stated, human beings are indeed unique. However, so too are cockroaches, ants, satellites, stars, bacteria, electrons, etc.

In addition, human beings can do things which animals can’t do. However, every animal can also do things which human beings can’t do.

So are there abilities or characteristics that we humans have, but which other animals and computers don’t have? And are these abilities more important and more unique than all the abilities which animals and computers have, but which we humans don’t have?

Or is it simply that we humans are unique in some extra-special way (or ways)?

Perhaps we are. However, how could that ever be established?

[Much of the above can be placed under the classification anthropocentrism. In addition, some responders have said that I’m really referring to Western culture — and its attitudes — in the above. Indeed, there may be an element of truth to that. That said, it depends on the non-Western cultures which do and don’t differ. And, in parallel, no blanket statement can be made about Western culture either when it comes to this specific subject.]

Sapience and Sentience

Max Tegmark himself believes that the meaning of the word sapience is “the ability to think intelligently”. Of course, the word “intelligence” is one of the slipperiest words around.

For a start, on many readings, an ant or even a cockroach is intelligent — or at least it acts or behaves intelligently. Indeed, the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose writes:

“[T]he behaviour pattern of an ant is enormously complex and subtle. Need we believe that their wonderfully effective control systems are unaided by whatever principle it is that give us our own qualities of understanding?”

And similar things can be said of most — or even all — computers (or computer programmes).

So we can’t decide if it’s (what Penrose — again — would call) “genuine intelligence” until we define “intelligence”. And that’s the problem! Thus, we’ve just moved from sapience to “the ability to think intelligently” to the word “intelligence” on its own.

Now what about Tegmark’s personal choice: sentience?

Sentience doesn’t really help us distinguish ourselves from a whole host of other animal species either. So, in that limited sense, surely sentience can’t play the role previously played by sapience (i.e., when it came to arguing for human specialness and uniqueness). Surely most animals must instantiate varying degrees of sentience too. And, as we’ve seen, perhaps that’s also true of sapience.

In neither the case of sapience nor sentience, then, do we have (as it were) ultra-uniqueness when it comes to human beings.

Finally, it can be noted that human(?) consciousness itself (i.e., not Homo sapiens generally) is said to fall into this category of extra specialness and uniqueness. (In a recent essay, I wrote on this subject.)

Consciousness or Human Consciousness?

In detail. It is argued that consciousness isn’t like other natural phenomena (such as photosynthesis, combustion, cognition and even life itself). Indeed, even many physicalists, naturalists, evolutionary theorists, neuroscientists, etc. freely admit that consciousness isn’t really like other natural phenomena. However, and in many respects, no given natural phenomenon is like any other natural phenomenon. (Think here of an electron’s charge, and then compare that to the mating habits of a baboon.)

Yet consciousness most certainly does have distinct features…

Yet so too does every other natural phenomenon. (Now think of how high a flea can jump relative to its size, or consider superfluidity.)

So are the unique characteristics of consciousness more unique than all these other examples of (as it were) natural uniqueness?

How on earth could a question like that be answered?

And isn’t it actually the case that we adult human beings take consciousness to be unique and extra special simply because consciousness is very important to us? In addition, isn’t all this at least partly down to the fact that we have (at least on most accounts) first-person access to our own consciousness?

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Note: Qualia

It’s interesting that Max Tegmark has used the technical term “qualia” in his definition of sentience. (The term is largely found in analytic philosophy, though it dates back to 1866.)

Even if we accept the existence of qualia (which will depend on what qualia are taken to be), do we actually “experience qualia” or is experience actually constituted by qualia? That is, is each experience (as it were) made up of qualia? Thus, surely we can’t firstly have an experience, and only then do we experience qualia. If that were the case, then an experience and qualia would be two separate things and/or two separate events (which would be separated in time).

My flickr account.