Old-Style Rationalism and Laurence BonJour’s New Rationalism

According to the philosopher Galen Strawson, if you’re a rationalist, then “you can see that something is true just by lying on your couch”. Indeed “you don’t have to do any science” or even “go outside and examine the way things are”.

This is an essay on old-style (usually called “early modern”) rationalism. However, it will still — at least to a small degree — apply to various contemporary rationalists and their positions…

Contemporary rationalists… really?

Wikipedia names the following philosophers as “rationalists”: David Chalmers, Noam Chomsky, Alvin Plantinga, Ernest Sosa, Ayn Rand, etc. I personally believe that not one of the philosophers named by Wikipedia is actually a rationalist — at least not a rationalist in the old style. The same is (more or less) true of the philosophers named as “rationalists” in other places: George Bealer, Henri Bergson, Robert Brandom, Thomas Nagel, etc. However, perhaps all this simply means that there were new 20th-century (in the plural) styles of rationalism. Alternatively, this may also show that it’s unwise to get too bogged down in isms.

In any case, one clear example of a genuine contemporary rationalist is Laurence BonJour (1943-), and he’ll be discussed at the end of this essay.

To get back to the ism under debate.

The adjective “old-style” is used in the title because there have been various (in the plural) rationalisms . For example, what may be called moderate rationalism only has it that (in Daniel Garber’s words) “reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge”. However, (as it were) immoderate rationalism has it that reason is “the unique path to knowledge”.

In terms of immoderate rationalism.

The English philosopher Galen Strawson summed it up by stating that if one is an immoderate rationalist (a term he doesn’t himself use), then this follows:

“[Y]ou can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don’t have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world. You don’t have to do any science.”

Moderate rationalism seems harmless enough and it may even be accepted by non-rationalists. That may be because, at least as it stands, Robert Audi’s earlier words (i.e., “reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge”) can be interpreted in all sorts of different ways. (It also depends on how the word “reason” is defined.) The second position of immoderate rationalism, however, certainly does seem extreme and, indeed, old-style.

Finally, it’s worth stating that the distinction between rationalism and empiricism came about only after the well-known rationalists (at least the ones featured in this essay) had done all their work. So such a distinction isn’t something that would have been recognised by the philosophers now classed under this ism.

Now let’s go into a small amount of detail on René Descartes (1596–1650).

René Descartes

Let A.L. Michael sum up Descartes’ rationalism in the following passage:

“Descartes thought that only knowledge of eternal truths — including the truths of mathematics, and the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the sciences — could be attained by reason alone; other knowledge, the knowledge of physics, required experience of the world, aided by the scientific method []. Descartes developed a method to attain truths according to which nothing that cannot be recognised by the intellect (or reason) can be classified as knowledge. These truths are gained ‘without any sensory experience’, according to Descartes.”

The passage above shows readers how a rationalist like Descartes managed to create a strong distinction between physics and the philosophical disciplines known as epistemology and metaphysics. That’s distinction is worth highlighting because, at least at first, those people who’re new to Descartes’ life and work may wonder how he squared his rationalism with his physics.

In actual fact, it was Descartes’ epistemology which he hoped (or believed) would provide a strong foundation for the sciences of his day — specifically for physics (see here).

However, this neat division between epistemology and metaphysics (which don’t require sensory experiences) and physics (which does) is problematised by the positions of both Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716).

Spinoza and Leibniz believed that, at least in principle, literally all knowledge — and that included knowledge as it’s found in science (well, physics) — could be acquired through reason alone.

Technically, this strong science-philosophy (or at least mathematics-philosophy) link is demonstrated by the fact that Leibniz and Spinoza (especially Spinoza) at various points attempted to start with basic principles which worked like the axioms of geometry (see Spinoza’s Ethics here). And from these axioms, these philosophers believed that they could deductively derive the rest of all possible knowledge. (In terms of the history, these approaches largely occurred as both negative and positive responses to the work of Descartes — see here.)

All that said, both Spinoza and Leibniz sometimes acknowledged (in their various ways) that such (as it were) rational universalism isn’t easy — or even possible - in practice.

Pure Thought?

One may wonder why these 17th-century Rationalists believed all this stuff about “the power of Reason” and the irrelevance of sensory experience. (This was even truer, in many ways, of Plato.)

One way of capturing rationalists’ position on reality is to say that they believed that reality has a logical structure. (Not many rationalists, however, actually used the words “logical structure”.) This essentially means that not only is logic … well, logical: so too is the world or reality! And precisely because the world/reality is deemed to be logical, then that meant that rationalists — and perhaps others too— believed that they could directly grasp the world’s “certain truths” (or “principles”) through — or via — the use of reason. (As we’ll see later, this position squares with Laurence BonJour’s own.)

As a consequence of the above, if the world/reality itself was deemed to be logical by Rationalists, then it won’t be a surprise to find out that many of them also believed that morality, religion, and even politics and history have a logical structure.

Yet the very idea of “reason” or “thought” existing independently of all experience seems odd — at least outside the context of 17th-century rationalist philosophy. It simply doesn’t sound feasible at an intuitive level.

For a start, the words used by any rationalist will have been learned from experience. Indeed that’s the case even when it came to the logical rules and inferences the rationalists will have used. So even if what the logical rules and words express (i.e., their abstract content) it not itself part of experience, then that still doesn’t stop it from being the case that the words for these concepts, propositions and rules were learnt from experience.

So one could metaphorically argue that these Rationalists can no longer preach from the top of their rationalist tower if empirical and experiential means helped them get to the top of that tower in the first place.

Of course not all rationalists have denied these pollutions of their pure rationalism (i.e., as discussed in the introduction).

So what, exactly, did the pure rationalists think about?

Did they always think about some Platonic realm of abstract objects?

Does they only think about propositions, logical laws and “eternal principles”?

When a rationalist thought about reality (or even morality), did he think of such a thing exclusively in (to quote Kant) “the light of pure reason”? (A light that’s untouched by empirical vicissitudes and contingencies.)

Of course thought is more than experience.

Experience is experience and thought is thought.

However, thought relies on experience. Or, in Kant’s philosophy, thought relies on “sensory impressions” (or “phenomena”) in order to (as it were) get going. Yet of course the actual processes which the mind carries out in response to experiences aren’t themselves experiences. A logical inference, for example, isn’t an experience or an observation. (Even this claim depends on definitions.)

In addition, making a generalisation about one’s experiences or observations depends on those experiences or observations. However, the generalisation itself isn’t an experience or an observation. Indeed mental images or other acts of the imagination aren’t themselves experiences either. Nonetheless, they too may (or do) depend on experiences.

Not many (or indeed any) historical empiricists claimed that thought and experience are literally identical. Such empiricists didn’t — and couldn’t possibly — dispense with thought. That is obvious. The empiricist position requires thought that’s not entirely dependent on experience. Indeed the very articulation of an empiricist position requires non-empirical thought.

Yet, on the other hand, the immoderate rationalist claimed that he’d dispensed entirely with experience— even if only philosophically.

Immoderate rationalists have argued that “thought is the only source of knowledge”. Admittedly, some traditional empiricists did argue that experiences (or sense impressions) alone account for all knowledge. That said, other empiricists have argued that all knowledge is only “dependent” on experiences or sense impressions.

So what has given rationalists so much confidence in their rationalism?

Necessary Truths?

Traditionally, it was the status and existence of necessary truths that were vital to rationalism.

Rationalists have argued that empiricists can’t give us — or explain — necessary truths. In fact empiricists have happily admitted that they can’t give us necessary truths because they don’t even accept that such things exist in the first place (at least not outside mathematics and what are now called tautologies).

So why have these necessary truths been so special to rationalists?

They were special because they could be known to be both necessary and true with certainty and without recourse to experience or observations. And that’s precisely what most rationalists have demanded: certainty, truth and necessity. However, even though these necessary truths aren’t reliant on experience, at least some of them are still deemed to be about the world/reality. (See Bonjour later.) That is, they’re things that must be true about the world/reality. Indeed the world/reality can’t be any other way than that which is expressed by the relevant necessary truths (i.e., as they’re expressed in a natural language in the form of statements).

Still, according to the rationalist, when we observe the world/reality, we don’t discover these necessary truths simply by doing so. That is, necessary truths don’t come from the observations alone.

In certain cases (e.g., Kant’s), necessary truths are a “necessary condition” for observing or experiencing the world in the first place (see here). So these necessary truths are applicable to the nature of the world/reality. However, they aren’t entirely derivable from the world/reality. In that sense, then, necessary truths must transcend the world/reality. They transcend the world/reality as it’s observed or experienced.

More clearly and in the rationalist picture, certainties and necessities are never experienced at all.

They’re known exclusively through (or via) thought.

(To requote Strawson: “You can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don’t have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world.”)

Experience can’t tell us (or help us) when it comes to discovering (if discovering is an appropriate word here) these certainties and necessities.

And all the above is precisely why empiricists have rejected the very notions of necessity and certainty.

Both the rationalists and empiricists argued (in their various ways) that we don’t get sensory impressions from things, events, conditions, etc. that (as it it were) tell us that they’re necessary or certain. And that’s because necessity and certainty aren’t things to get experiences from — not even when they belong to things, events or conditions which are themselves empirical and which aren’t themselves necessary or certain.

Furthermore, some empiricists have argued (in their various ways) that a world which (as it were) contains necessities and certainties would be indistinguishable from a world which doesn’t do so. In other words, this is a (rationalists’) difference which doesn’t make a difference. And, because of that, such a (scare-quoted) “distinction” goes against one important aspect of empiricist philosophy.

Since (as it were) Rationalist Reality has just been discussed, let’s now bring this debate up to date.

Laurence BonJour’s New Rationalism

Take the case of Laurence BonJour (1943-).

BonJour belongs to a group of philosophers who’re re-evaluating rationalist philosophy.

Perhaps BonJour goes the furthest towards the kind of rationalism we would recognise from the rationalists of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Nonetheless, there are still obvious differences between BonJour’s work and the Old-Style Rationalists.

As it is, BonJour describes himself as a “rationalist”. And, clearly, he’s also well aware of the criticisms of rationalism.

For example, in reply to the Australian philosopher Michael Devitt, Bonjour talks of Devitt’s

“allegations that rationalism is ‘objectionably mysterious, perhaps even somehow occult’ []”.

BonJour concludes by saying that he find these allegations “very hard to take seriously”.

Rationalist Truths About the World

BonJour believes that we can gain access to the necessary truths of the world via what he calls “rational insight”. He argues that rational insight

“occurs when the mind directly or intuitively sees or grasps or apprehends [] a necessary fact about the nature or structure of reality”.

BonJour also uses the words “necessary truth”. That is, BonJour ties necessity to truth. Again, in BonJour’s own words:

“[Michael] Devitt seems to me to be simply rejecting the idea that merely finding something to be intuitively necessary can ever constitute in itself a reason for thinking it is true [].”

Indeed BonJour goes further by stating the following:

“[A priori] insights at least purport to reveal not just that the claim is or must be true but also, at some level, why this is and indeed must be so. They are thus putative insights into the essential nature of things or situations of the relevant kind, into the way that reality in the respect in question must be.”

According to BonJour, then, necessary truths (or necessities themselves) aren’t a question of language, the synonymy of terms, the “structure of the mind” and all the rest: they’re about the nature (or structure) of the world/reality itself! (BonJour actually uses the words “properties of the world” when talking about such necessities.)

Thus we must immediately ask how the mind can grasp (by rational insight) anything about the world.

In addition to all the above, some contemporary rationalist philosophers are both reassessing the a priori as well as mounting a defence of it.

The A Priori

Commentators may say that it’s an exaggeration to claim that any contemporary philosophers are actually re-evaluating rationalism itself; rather than merely defending their more selective (epistemic) apriorism.

As for BonJour himself. The principle difference, to my mind, between BonJour’s rationalist philosophy and that of the Old-Style Rationalists is his acceptance of the possible experiential (or empirical) defeasibility of a priori claims, “reasons” or beliefs.

So BonJour’s own rationalism is actually encapsulated by his position on the a priori. The following is what he says on that subject:

“[I]f we never have a priori reasons for thinking that if one claim or set of claims is true, some further claim must be true as well, then there is simply nothing that genuinely cogent reasoning could consist in. In this was, I suggest, the rejection of a priori reasons is tantamount to intellectual suicide.”

But what does BonJour’s general rationalism amount to?

Take the following passage:

“[I]n the most basic cases such reasons result from direct or immediate insight into the truth, indeed the necessary truth, of the relevant claim.”

Now perhaps BonJour’s last claim takes us as far away from empiricism as we could possibly go.

Frank Jackson wrote: “Qualia are an excrescence.”

Frank Jackson also wrote that qualia “do nothing, they explain nothing, they serve merely to soothe the intuitions of dualists and it is left a total mystery how they fit into the world view of science”.

excrescence: noun (1) an abnormal outgrowth, usually harmless, on an animal or vegetable body. (2) a normal outgrowth, as hair or horns. (3) any disfiguring addition. (4) abnormal growth or increase.

[Mary and the knowledge argument won’t be considered in this essay.]

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The following passage (from the paper ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’) is American philosopher Frank Jackson’s very-strong position against qualia:

“All right, there is no knockdown refutation of the existence of epiphenomenal qualia. But the fact remains that they are an excrescence. They do nothing, they explain nothing, they serve merely to soothe the intuitions of dualists, and it is left a total mystery how they fit into the world view of science. In short we do not and cannot understand the how and why of them.’”

… But hang on a minute!

The passage above is actually Frank Jackson expressing what he believed a “qualia sceptic” would say. (The passage above begins with these words: “There is a very understandable response to the three replies I have just made.”)

So some readers may see it as a bad idea to quote a defender of qualia putting the case against qualia.

The words “defender of qualia” have just been used even though Jackson later came to reject his (former) case against physicalism. The following passage shows us why Jackson changed his position on physicalism (if not, strictly speaking, specifically on qualia):

“Most contemporary philosophers given a choice between going with science and going with intuitions, go with science. Although I once dissented from the majority, I have capitulated and now see the interesting issue as being where the arguments from the intuitions against physicalism — the arguments that seem so compelling — go wrong.”

So it’s now worth asking if, after his about-turn, Jackson would have put his new position against qualia in the same — or in a similar — way to the way he expressed it when he put it in the mouth of a fictional qualia sceptic.

In any case, Jackson’s words are suspect in a number of ways. That said, perhaps they are so primarily (or simply) because they’re meant to be purely rhetorical in nature. After all, Jackson was putting his (at the time) opponent’s position in (presumably) as strong terms as possible.

To sum up five (among others) problems with the words of Jackson’s fictional qualia sceptic:

(1) Even if qualia are an “excrescence”, that doesn’t automatically mean that they don’t exist. 
(2) Some philosophers argue that qualia do some things. 
(3) Some philosophers argue that qualia explain some things. 
(4) Not all the people who accept the existence (or reality) of qualia are what Jackson called “dualists”. 
(5) Not “fitting into the world view of science” isn’t the same as clashing with — or contradicting — science.

(1) Do Qualia Exist?

“All right, there is no knockdown refutation of the existence of epiphenomenal qualia. But the fact remains that they are an excrescence.”

The first thing which needs to be said is that even if qualia are an “excrescence”, then that doesn’t automatically mean that they don’t exist (or have any reality). Moreover, even if qualia “do nothing” and “explain nothing”, then they may still exist (or have some kind of reality).

The English philosopher Roger Scruton (1944–2020) hinted at all this in his book On Human Nature (2017). Scruton claimed that the critical philosophical accounts of qualia didn’t actually disprove the existence of qualia altogether — even though he did find qualia problematic.

Yet surely all this hinges on which definitions — or features — of qualia are actually being offered or tackled. That said, Scruton still summed up his own problem by quoting a well-known passage from Wittgenstein:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Indeed Wittgenstein’s words above perfectly express Daniel Dennett’s position, which we’ll come to in a moment.

Of course, if qualia fail in all the respects mentioned by Jackson’s qualia sceptic above (for now, let’s say that they do), then one can immediately ask how it is that they actually exist at all. More strongly, how can qualia be known to exist if they fail in all those respects?…

But, again, it depends on which account of qualia we have in mind.

Take the American philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Dennett does indeed deny the existence of qualia.

So when Dennett states that “qualia do not exist and are incompatible with neuroscience and naturalism”, we must find out what he takes qualia to be. And then it will soon be discovered that he’s actually against a very particular philosophical account of qualia. (All accounts of qualia are — to varying degrees — philosophical. )

The following is a list of the qualities and features which Dennett (questionably) claims qualiaphiles take to be definitive of qualia:

(1) qualia are ineffable
(2) qualia are intrinsic
(3) qualia are private
(4) qualia are directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness.

And it’s precisely because Dennett is against a particular account of qualia, that even his own position — believe it or not (i.e., as a well-known qualia sceptic) — isn’t entirely clear.

For example, American philosopher Owen Flanagan wrote the following:

“Qualia are for real. Dennett himself says what they are before he starts quining. Sanely, he writes, “‘Qualia’ is an unfamiliar terms for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways thing seem to us.’ [].”

That passage again simply raises the question: What does Dennett take qualia to be? Sure, we know what Dennett doesn’t take qualia to be, but what does he take them to be?

This may be the (or an) answer.

In ‘Are we explaining consciousness yet?’ (2001), Dennett argues that qualia are neural responses which are too fine-grained to be captured in any given natural language.

More broadly, then, it’s now widely accepted (at least among philosophers who’re interested in this issue) that the debate about qualia often hinges on the definition of the term “qualia”. More accurately, it strongly depends on what the various qualities and features of qualia are taken to be (e.g., as with Dennett’s own 4-point list).

In any case, most qualiaphiles (probably all) believe that there can never be a (to use Jackson’s words again) “knockdown refutation of the existence of epiphenomenal qualia”. And that’s simply because qualiaphiles (as it were) have (or claim to have) qualia. More accurately, most (or all) qualiaphiles believe that they have immediate and direct access to their own qualia (as in Dennett’s point 4). Indeed Jackson himself put this view in the following:

“As I say in the beginning of ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, we dualists don’t really need an argument to say that consciousness doesn’t fit into the physicalist world view. It’s just intuitively obvious.”

(This is similar to the argument which the English philosopher Philip Goff — along with David Chalmers before him — uses about consciousness generally; which, according to him, is a “datum in its own right”.)

Yet whatever it is qualiaphiles have access to, that doesn’t mean that what they have access to are qualia as they describe them. And neither does it mean that they can’t misdescribe qualia or believe that they have features or qualities which they don’t actually have.

In more abstract terms, even if our cognitive access to any given x is indeed immediate and direct (however we take those terms), the words and concepts we use about that x (alongside the statements we make about it) aren’t themselves immediate and direct. That is, all our words, concepts and even ways of description of x will be contingent and have social and psychological histories and aetiologies.

All that said, surely qualiaphiles — and all of us — do have direct and immediate access to some things they deem to be qualia. In other words, whatever we say about qualia (or however we describe them), then qualia may still be accessed immediately and directly… or will they?

(2) Do Qualia Do Things?

“They do nothing…”

When Frank Jackson claimed that qualia “do nothing”, he was expressing an epiphenomenalist position. But need one take such a position on qualia?

So, firstly, let’s run through four basic positions:

(1) If qualia are physical, then of course they can do things. 
(2) Even if qualia aren’t physical, then they can still do things. 
(3) If qualia don’t exist, then that which doesn’t exist can’t do anything. 
(4) Qualia exist, aren’t physical and they don’t do anything (i.e., the epiphenomenalist position).

Jackson now believes that, say, the experience of blue is entirely instantiated in the brain. (The notion of an experience is surely wider than that of a single quale, such as one of the colour blue — if there even is such a thing.) This also means that such an experience will immediately cause other changes in the brain.

Paul Churchland also provides a physical and neuroscientific account of qualia. So he isn’t actually a qualia sceptic at all (see his ‘Knowing Qualia’). Yet Churchland’s account of qualia is one that most (perhaps all) qualiaphiles will be very unhappy with. So, here again, what Churchland takes qualia to be clashes violently with what qualiaphiles — and perhaps most people — take qualia to be.

(3) Do Qualia Explain Things?

“[T]hey explain nothing…”

Frank Jackson’s statement above depends on what, exactly, needs to be explained. It also depends on the strength (or lack thereof) of the explanations in which qualia feature. Conversely, it depends on why qualia sceptics believe that such explanations (or at least most of them) are effectively non-explanations.

Qualiaphiles argue that their having of qualia explains all sorts of things.

Pain is an obvious example. The having of a toothache will (if loosely) explain that a tooth is rooting away. Hearing the sound of a trumpet is a good explanation as to which instrument my neighbour has now taken up…

But are these really examples of qualia?

Basically these and other examples won’t work as explanations unless the qualiaphile tells us exactly what he takes qualia to be. And qualia sceptics don’t accept what qualia are taken to be. That is, they don’t deny the having of pains or the hearings of musical instruments. What they do deny is that these things are explained by philosophical qualia.

(4) Must All Those Who Accept Qualia Be Dualists?

“[T]hey serve merely to soothe the intuitions of dualists…”

This statement is an obvious ad hominen. Yet, of course, it’s Frank Jackson’s fictional physicalist (or qualia sceptic) who’s talking. That said, Daniel Dennett (again) said more or less the same thing (if about consciousness, not, strictly speaking, about qualia) when he wrote the following:

“To many people consciousness is ‘real magic’. If you’re not talking about something that is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, then you’re not talking about consciousness, the Mystery Beyond All Understanding.”

As it is, there’s no strong reason to be against ad hominins when they’re placed (as the cliche has it) within context. That is, if an article, paper or even a single paragraph were made up entirely of ad homs, then that wouldn’t be worth reading — at least not from a philosophical point of view. Yet there’s no reason why every single sentence in a philosophical paper or essay need be an argument or even be particularly philosophical. What’s more, one can sometimes — and in some ways — get a grip of arguments and philosophical positions with the help of ad homs and psychologisations — as historians, biographers, novelists, dramatists, etc. are well aware.

But what of the “intuitions of dualists”?

Even if qualiaphiles’ intuitions are being “soothed” by qualia, then they may still offer good arguments to back up their qualiaphilia. Indeed who’s to say that all qualiaphiles are (psychologically) soothed by qualia in the first place? Perhaps they simply believe that they exist - full stop.

Philosophically, however, Jackson’s (as it were) accusation of dualism is surely correct. That is, if a qualiaphile takes qualia to be non-physical, then he must be a dualist. More accurately, if a qualiaphile believes that qualia do things at the very same time as their being non-physical, then he must be a dualist.

Qualia and Science

“[I]t is left a total mystery how they fit into the world view of science.”

Qualiaphiles — and others! — may ask if science has a single “world view”.

More relevantly, they may ask if science has a single — or indeed any — world view on the subject of qualia at all.

That said, Frank Jackson’s qualia sceptic might have meant that it’s the world view of science-as-a-whole that qualiaphiles need to (as it were) accommodate — i.e., regardless of whether or not Science-with-a-capital-‘S’ has (or doesn’t have) a position on qualia.

Moreover, even if science does have a world view, then that world view may change. Indeed it must have already changed through the centuries. In other words, surely the world view of science (if it exists at all) can’t be determinate and fixed. More relevantly, that world view may come to accept qualia. Alternatively, it may come to completely reject qualia. (Of course this last possibility jars with the earlier question about science having a single world view.)

In any case, all this is complicated by fact that the scientists who do concern themselves with qualia have three (main) mutually-contradictory positions on them:

(1) Qualia exist and can be given a scientific description. 
(2) Qualia exist but can’t be given a scientific description. 
(3) Qualia don’t exist in the first place.

Donald Hoffman’s Case For An Idealist and Spiritual Reality

Donald Hoffman states that when “we peek behind the icons [we’ve] entered the province of philosophy and religion”. So does that mean that his idealism (or “conscious realism”) is religious and philosophical (i.e., not scientific) after all?

Cogntive psychologist Donald Hoffman states that when “we peek behind the icons [we’ve] entered the province of philosophy and religion”. Yet his words make it seem that when he (i.e., not “we”) peeks behind the icons, his doing so is a mere side issue. Hoffman also makes it seem (at least in those words) as if philosophy and religion are largely irrelevant to his writings on what he calls “conscious realism” (with its many mentions of “mathematical models”, evolution, quantum mechanics and whatnot).

Yet one only needs to watch the interviews of Hoffman (or even read his latest book — The Case Against Reality) for a few minutes to realise that the ideas and values of philosophy and religion may well be the main motivation for his own positions. Indeed Hoffman might well have started with such ideas and values and then got to work finding the science to back them up. That reading is put primarily because Hoffman himself claims that the “deeper reality” he often refers to has actually been discovered (or found) by various religions (or “spiritual traditions”) in the past. More accurately, Hoffman states that

“many of the spiritual traditions have been telling us for centuries, even millennia, that spacetime is not fundamental but there’s a deeper reality outside of spacetime”.

That main point of this essay, however, is that Hoffman does indeed believe that there’s a (to use his own word) “reality”. It just so happens that Hoffman’s reality squares with both idealism and with various spiritual traditions.

[It’s almost certainly the case that Hoffman would claim the exact opposite to some of the statements above. That is, he’d no doubt claim that the findings of his scientific research led him to embrace spiritual idealism.]

An Idealist and Spiritual Reality

Hoffman often uses the word “reality” positively. So he does actually believe that there is a reality (i.e., despite the fact that, in 2019, he wrote a book called The Case Against Reality). Nonetheless, Hoffman also argues that we haven’t got direct (or even indirect) access to reality as posited by what he calls “physicalists”. (Hoffman, like Barnardo Kastrup, often means philosophical realism when he uses the word “physicalism”. ) Instead, we’ve only got access to the contents of consciousness. And that’s still the case even if those contents belong to a (as it were) collective of consciousnesses (i.e., a collective of what Hoffman calls “conscious agents”).

Hoffman’s position can be summed up in one word: idealism.

Yet, having just used the word “idealism”, it can be seen that Hoffman seems to be a little shy about using (or at least overusing) that term about his own positions. Perhaps that’s primarily because he doesn’t want to be too strongly associated with idealism. Alternatively, Hoffman may simply be keen on stressing the originality — and scientific nature — of his own conscious realism.

To sum up. Hoffman’s philosophical position of conscious realism can be seen as a new take on idealism — idealism with mathematical and scientific knobs on.

Donald Hoffman and Bishop Berkeley

Like Donald Hoffman himself, Bishop Berkeley didn’t only have a problem with materialism as a metaphysical position: he also believed that materialism had profoundly negative repercussions for religion (or “spirituality”) itself, morality and society as whole. (These are things that Hoffman’s fellow idealist Bernardo Kastrup most certainly believes — primarily because he keeps on (stridently) stating that he does so. See here, here and here.)

So take the following subtitle from Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge:

“Wherein the Chief Causes of Error and Difficulty in the Sciences, with the grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquired into.”

And, in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, we find this subtitle:

“In opposition to sceptics and atheists.”

Interestingly, Hoffman often mentions “eastern religions” too (see here, here and here).

Hoffman’s arguments for his conscious realism are very similar to those of Berkeley. Indeed Berkeley’s own words are positively quoted by Hoffman himself.

Berkeley is, of course, well known for denying the existence of matter as a metaphysical substance.

Yet it will (or perhaps simply can) be argued that Hoffman doesn’t — exactly — reject matter. Instead, Hoffman believes that “matter is derivative”. That is, matter is “among the symbols constructed by conscious agents”.

Of course the question now is whether or not this 21st-century way of putting things extracts Hoffman from being an out-and-out idealist. After all, Berkeley himself (at least in a sense) also accepted matter. That is, he too believed that matter is simply a question of our (what he called) “sense-impressions” and “ideas”. (Hoffman sees his “icons”, instead, as stand-ins for what he calls “objective reality”.)

So does Hoffman go all the way and endorse Berkeley’s well-known statement? Namely:

“To be is to be perceived.”

Well, let Hoffman himself discuss Berkeley’s often-quoted one-liner here:

“When Samuel Johnson heard Berkeley’s theory that ‘To be is to be perceived’ he kicked a stone and said, ‘I refute it thus!’ (Boswell, 1986) Johnson observed that one must take the stone seriously or risk injury. From this Johnson concluded that one must take the stone literally. But this inference is fallacious.”

Berkeley himself wrote:

“The ideas imprinted on the sense by the Author of Nature are called real things: and those excited in the imagination being less regular, vivid and constant, are more properly termed [] images of things, which they copy and represent.”

So Berkeley believed that God (as it were) placed reality in our minds via what he called “images” and “ideas”. Hoffman, on the other hand, largely dispenses with references to “God” and simply focuses on the contents of consciousness instead.

That said, Hoffman doesn’t seem to have any deep problems with Berkeley’s positions as expressed above.

It’s of course the case that Berkeley — obviously! — didn’t include lots of data from evolutionary biology, cogntive science, quantum physics, mathematics, etc. (as Hoffman keenly does). But isn’t that a difference which doesn’t make a difference to the strong similarities between Berkeley’s and Hoffman’s philosophical positions?

In any case, the following passage is both Berkeley’s and Hoffman’s argument. In Hoffman’s own words:

“Resemblance between the phenomenal and relational realms: I argue that there need be no resemblance. But Berkeley has an ingenious argument that goes much further, and is probably valid. He argues that there cannot be a resemblance between them. [] The argument, in part, is this: ‘How can that which is sensible be like that which is insensible? Can a real thing, in itself invisible, be like a colour, or a real thing, which is not audible, be like a sound?’ [].”

Hoffman also endorses another of Berkeley’s positions here:

“Idealism proposes that the relational realm is made up of minds. It may be one mind, as in Berkeley’s proposal that it’s the mind of God, or it may be many distinct and finite minds in interaction. In the latter case, the behaviour of these minds has also been described by probabilistic laws.”

More clearly and technically, Hoffman takes a very clear Berkeleyan position when he states that “brains and neurons do not exist unperceived”. Of course this is exactly what Berkeley believed (though not, of course, about brains and neurons).

So it’s odd that Hoffman also states (as already quoted) that he “neither needs nor insists on the validity of Berkeley’s argument”. Yet just moments before writing that he’d also claimed that Berkeley’s “ingenious argument” is “probably valid”. Of course it can be argued that even if Hoffman finds Berkeley’s argument “valid” and “ingenious”, then that still doesn’t automatically mean that he “needs” it… Except for the fact that Hoffman does indeed offer an updated version of Berkeley’s argument.

So what about Hoffman’s position on Kant’s transcendental idealism?

Donald Hoffman and Immanuel Kant

Hoffman has a problem with Immanuel Kant’s position on noumena. He believes that it’s not “scientific”. Less strongly, Hoffman believes that Kant’s position doesn’t look promising from a scientific perspective. As Hoffman himself puts it:

“This interpretation of Kant precludes any science of the noumenal, for if we cannot describe the noumenal then we cannot build scientific theories of it.”

So in what way (or sense) does Hoffman himself “describe the noumenal”; or, for that matter, offer us a “scientific theor[y]” of it? In other words, it’s very difficult to see what justification Hoffman has for pitting himself against Kant in this respect.

Perhaps the following words from Hoffman may answer that.

Hoffman then goes on to argue that

“[c]onscious realism, by contrast, offers a scientific theory of the noumenal, viz., a mathematical formulation of conscious agents and their dynamical interactions”.

Well, if conscious agents constitute the noumenal, then this will explain why Hoffman believes he offers us a description of it. But, of course, this isn’t Kant’s noumenal realm because that realm has nothing at all to do with consciousness, let alone with conscious agents and their “dynamical interactions”. (Even a cursory reading of Kant will show that.) Of course it may be the case that Hoffman believes that this is what Kant really meant (or simply should have meant) when he referred to noumena (or “things-in-themselves”).

All that said, Hoffman himself seems to (at least partly) understand these critical points when he writes the following:

“Some Kant scholars interpret him as saying that the relational realm, the thing-in-itself, is unknowable, so that the question of resemblance between the phenomenal and relational is moot.”

So, instead, Hoffman must really be describing (or at least claiming to describe) his very own “relational realm”. Hoffman must believe that conscious agents are (as he puts it) “behind the icons” and that such agents themselves constitute his deeper reality or relational realm. That is, Hoffman’s relational realm (or deeper reality) is actually… us! Or, at the very least, Hoffman’s deeper reality is (or is constituted by) all the conscious agents of the universe (together with their dynamical interactions).

More particularly, if Hoffman’s conscious realism really “offers a scientific theory of the noumenal”, then it’s not actually the noumenal that it’s offering a scientific theory of.

Of course that point may be misplaced in that, to Hoffman, the noumenal isn’t actually noumenal at all! In other words, Hoffman believes that he can offer a scientific theory of the noumenal (i.e., his relational realm) precisely because it is constituted by conscious agents (or at least by the contents of their consciousnesses). Kant, on the other hand, created a theory in which noumena were — by (his) own definition — not only beyond science, but also beyond (to use Hoffman’s term) conscious agents.

In addition, Hoffman’s “mathematical formulation” of his own relational realm is neither particularly mathematical nor about anything particularly scientific or concrete (i.e., empirical, observational or experimental). Instead, it amounts to little more than an idiosyncratic take on what Hoffman calls conscious agents; with the addition of gratuitous (even arbitrary) mathematical symbols, letters and graphs — all seemingly put together to provide a scientific gloss on a very-personal philosophy. (See my ‘Donald Hoffman’s Eye Candy: Conscious Realism’s Mathematical Models’.)

Conclusion

To sum up.

Hoffman’s conscious realism isn’t actually a scientific theory at all.

Of course Hoffman believes that it is a scientific theory — at least in large part.

And that’s primarily because Hoffman is under the impression that employing (often simply citing) lots of scientific data (or technical terms) will make his philosophical theory itself scientific.

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*) See my ‘A Contradiction in Donald Hoffman’s (Idealist) Fitness-Beats-Truth Theorem’, ‘Donald Hoffman’s Philosophy of Consciousness and Reality: Conscious Realism’ and ‘Donald Hoffman’s Long Jump From Evolutionary Biology/Theory to Highly-Speculative Philosophy’.