Souled out of rights? â predicaments in protecting the human spirit in the age of neuromarketing

Philosophy

Modern neurotechnologies are rapidly infringing on conventional notions of human dignity and they are challenging what it means to be human. This article is a survey analysis of the future of the digital age, reflecting primarily on the effects of neurotechnology that violate universal human rights to dignity, self-determination, and privacy. In particular, this article focuses on neuromarketing to critically assess potentially negative social ramifications of under-regulated neurotechnological application. Possible solutions are critically evaluated, including the human rights claim to the âright to mental privacyâ and the suggestion of a new human right based on spiritual jurisdiction, where the human psyche is a legal space in a substantive legal setting.

REVIEW Open Access Souled out of rights? – predicaments in protecting the human spirit in the age of neuromarketing Alexander Sieber Correspondence: AlSieber@hotmail. com Independent researcher, Brookfield, WI, USA Abstract Modern neurotechnologies are rapidly infringing on conventional notions of human dignity and they are challenging what it means to be human. This article is a survey analysis of the future of the digital age, reflecting primarily on the effects of neurotechnology that violate universal human rights to dignity, self-determination, and privacy. In particular, this article focuses on neuromarketing to critically assess potentially negative social ramifications of under-regulated neurotechnological application. Possible solutions are critically evaluated, including the human rights claim to the 'right to mental privacy' and the suggestion of a new human right based on spiritual jurisdiction, where the human psyche is a legal space in a substantive legal setting. Keywords: Human dignity, Human rights, Human spirit, Legal theory, Mental privacy, Neuromarketing, Surveillance Introduction Humanity is on the precipice of a technological age that looks poised to irreversibly intrude on the basic human capability of self-determination as well as bodily and mental integrity. Today, technologies exist that can strip the mind of mental privacy. Privacy is a human right protected for all humans under Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and elaborated on for the benefit of children in Article 16 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and Article 14 of the International Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families for those cited. Yet the unique capacities of these new technologies endanger humans in such a way that new ethical measures must be adopted to protect mental integrity. This article examines the problem, views, and it addresses potential solutions to the challenges posed by digital neurotechnology to human dignity. A closer look into the Mirror Since the industrial revolution, humankind in the West has been on a one-way track towards a distinctly Anglo-Saxon vision of development. In the process, untold trillions of US Dollars were invested in capital goods that create even greater wealth by increasing business efficiency. However, today humanity reaps the enormous, compounded © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40504-019-0095-4 detriments known as opportunity cost. Ronald Coase's proverb of opportunity cost – that every transaction has an inherent cost – has become glaringly apparent to modern society. Images of Pacific sea life trapped in plastic trash do not even begin to capture the enormity of the unsustainable development problem, but still, modern society is now somewhat aware of it. The United Nations has made sustainable development a core ambition in the form of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Confronted with the stark reality of industrialization's unsustainability, the anthropocentric worldview is challenged by a progressive green revolution. Modern society has realized that it shares a biosphere with all living beings. Climate change, displacement, genocide, ethnocide, inequality and lower standards of living have resulted from the pursuit of profit. The conscious effort to reverse the negative consequences of modern development illustrates a paradigm shift: Humankind can ideologically backtrack and innovate with 'humane' purpose by working against ignorance as well as corrupt legal and political institutions. This article argues that the application of modern neurotechnology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalogram (EEG), and big data should be discussed with the same caution as hydraulic fracking or mass deforestation because all are examples of modern technology posing a significant threat to humanity and all other ecological systems today and even more so if they develop unrestrained. Although the comparison may be shocking to many readers, this paper provides a glimpse into the existential threat humanity faces from the virtually unregulated field of neuromarketing. Neuromarketing fMRI and the EEG have opened new possibilities in neuroscience. Tracking blood flow in brains and reading brain-cell activity, respectively, has led to significant advancements in psychology, but psychology is not limited to the biological sciences. The corporate business world has hailed the brain as the "newest business frontier" (Pradeep and Patel, 2010) In the context of neuromarketing, researchers seek to scrape every bit of information they can from consumers not only to deduce buyer preferences but to decide for the consumer what they shall desire. That is, new media marketing is used to hack and manipulate consumers. Neuromarketers make models based on data collected from, for example, fMRI scans and then market targeted groups based on the likeness to their subjects. It may sound innocent, but deep learning from the marriage between fMRI and big data results in some ominous futures. For example, Google, LLC has made neuromarketing part of its marketing strategy. Looking to tie its product to the subconscious of its advertisement viewers, Google's scheme relies on human psychological attachment to its advertisement characters to obtain the attention of the viewer. In such a presentation, neuromarketing is fundamental. Just as fast-food giants use colors that induce hunger in their restaurants for monetary gain, Google uses primal and emotional triggers of the human unconscious to generate business. Today, companies like Google, Samsung, and Facebook engage in extremely invasive and non-transparent neuromarketing strategies and techniques often in the name of efficiency. For example, Facebook, Inc. is engineering neurotechnology that transfers Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 Page 2 of 11 user thought to text. Allegedly, this technology is to save the consumer's time. This invasive methodology marks a new rupture in marketing that could have only been made possible with the advancement of technology. Currently, neuromarketing mines hidden information and even manipulates the consumer's mind by accessing brain information. The mind was once presumed to be a kind of haven from intrusion from the outside world. This is no longer true in modern capitalist society. The mind has been tapped, but what if a line is not drawn at the consumer; what if neuromarketing becomes the method by which a state controls groups? Philosopher Michel Foucault feared this. In his writings on biopolitics, Foucault provided a genealogy of and predictions for the application of power over living bodies and whole populations. Before dying in 1984, Foucault critiqued neoliberalism. Today, Neo-Foucauldians continue his analysis of neoliberalism as a manifestation that has given rise to greater exploitation, inequality, and corruption of individuals and their highest ideals, such as human dignity and democracy (Brown 2015). How we got Here Neoliberalism has created tremendous wealth in the digital age. Austerity measures propel businesses towards greater innovation such as neuromarketing. The financial stakes are so high now that humankind is mining the mind to find out what product is preferred, but that is just the beginning. Neuromarketing now aims to spread and alter specific brain data and brain functions – amounting to consumer manipulation. As Nikolas Rose explains, the "re-shaping of human beings is thus occurring within a new political economy of life in which, in part at least, biopolitics has become bioeconomics (Rose 2007)." The link between contemporary capitalism and efforts to strip the mind is unmistakably evident. Modern capitalism has explicitly brought forth dehumanization and objectification. Reducing a human being to a thing devoid of agency and self-determination degrades the human by othering it. As the person becomes an object, it loses its dignity. Under an fMRI scanner, the human brain is a 'purchaser' and nothing more to the neuromarketer. The genealogy of mind-raiding indicates that the next step is to trigger specific action from the objectified purchaser. As Selena Nemorin writes: In their deliberate efforts to trigger and condition consumers into buying responses, neuromarketing practitioners actively seek to manipulate human processes of understanding, which results in the subversion of core democratic values of freedom of intelligence and self-determination (Nemorin 2018). In effect, neuromarketing could undermine democracy, as the foundation of civil society is to have rational people making decisions on their community's and their own behalf. By definition, rationality is a calm, calculated state. If one takes away the human's communal standing and rationality, one is left not merely with a homo oeconomicus (for even that would require rationality) that acts rationally in its market decisions but with a homo alalus: a machine-like man. It is perfectly acceptable to treat machines as machines and animals as animals, but, as European Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative tells us, humans are to be treated not as a thing, but as an end in itself. Humans are different from other creatures because they are born with the self-determination to be moral Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 Page 3 of 11 and thus to enshrine with dignity. Without autonomy, dignity is lost. Homo sapiens, the moral animals, that have been othered to the point of being treated as a laboratory experiment subject that has not been given free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) – like a regular laboratory animal – lose all dignity. Self-determination, dignity, and FPIC are protected as universal human rights. Rights are designed to protect the dignity of humanity – thought to be the essence of being a human. Without dignity, humans and their societies disintegrate because humans are creatures of profound ethical choice and power over their environment, including over their peers as they all are being-towards-death and therefore, command meaning. In a life of phenomenon, expresses Gail Linsenbard: "ontological freedom, or freedom of choice... is foundational in that it is what all persons are as Being – as human reality, and it makes practical freedom (or unfreedom) possible (Linsenbard 1999)." It is through freedom to love and play that meaning is generated in society. Love is only generated when individuals have a 'world' as described by Hegelian philosophy. Psyches guide each of our worlds, and we can, of course, share – thus further our loving, though without meaning there is nothing for the Homo sapiens. Then there is world destruction. The exhumed psyche is a shattered world. Few things can be conceived that match it. Phenomenologists have long been interested in world destruction. Examples include killing someone and catastrophic loss, but few of us know what experiencing mind mining is really like. Violation of what Nemorin calls "boundary-integrity"1 happens when minds are hacked. Nemorin's use of the word 'boundary' suggests a value in maintaining a profanum – where the sacred and the profane dichotomy is definite – suggesting that law is the answer. Social consequences of Neuromarketing Laissez-faire policies created incentives for modern society's re-enslavement; they also render the society paradoxical, as there is nothing liberal about living in a community that is devoid of choice, even if it is so in the name of 'development'. As consumers have their minds tapped, and corporations hurtle humankind towards a neuromarketing dystopia, one has to ask: How does class fit into the futureless age, and would neuromarketing become a tool of the bourgeoisie to suppress the market consumer who will never hold power over a corporate board? Additional to the horrors of bioeconomics are humankind's trajectorial vestiges of what Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci called 'cultural hegemony'. A world in where neuromarketing runs amok may well lead to the awful realization of a global class society. Giving in to extreme or unencumbered neuromarketing is giving in to the norm of having a ruling class. There is no way around the personal neuromarketing problem other than to rule it. Should humans let neuromarketing strip them bare of their human rights, or is there a different route? It is important to note that neuromarketers "do not actively see the consumer as an animal," but the neuromarketing industry "maintains a conceptual reduction of the consumer to [the] brain as animality is re-inscribed through the discourse, assumptions and operative practices and goals."2 Othering can render policy discourse about consumers faulty on how marketing is helpful, and consumers are rational. For the sake 1Nemorin, Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing, 213. 2Ibid., 216. Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 Page 4 of 11 of ethical argumentation, laissez-faire policymakers should refrain from belittling neuromarketing's nefarious side as many historically have done in debates on the human involvement in climate change. Futures in human rights I have put forth the idea that "[Hu]mankind must declare a normative space to contemplate what it means to be human, for there is a necessity and [a] value to the spiritual as a space in which we can conceptualize the human spirit that is not subject to Empire (Sieber 2017)." This idea of jurisdiction may be a solution to the problems posed by neuromarketing as well as to other attacks on the human spirit, but it raises some interesting issues regarding governmentality. Human rights have always had a metaphysical level to them. Protected in the Preamble to the UDHR is a reference to "inherent dignity (UN General Assembly 1948)." Humanism has a spiritual streak, as features of sacred and profane are fundamental to the human rights regime. Laws of sacredness and profanity are laws observed and enforced today: Freedom is sacred and therefore protected by law, while bodily harm is profane and prevented by law. Humans are owed a level of privacy and space that, again, are protected by universal human rights. Today, our privacy bubbles are being hacked: what was once assumed to be sacred is now profane. Jurisprudential language regarding persons relies heavily on the Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, and Christian understandings of what they considered the real person and the persona. The persona is the mask a real person wears (Burchell 1998). A person may wear his or her dignity and rights as a persona where the mask is something constructed as purely legal. What I called for was a return to the old notion of spiritual jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is a technology that has a toolkit that includes categories. Categorization of the psyche as a legal space would mark a return to substantial law – not to assume, but to assert rights. What potential adversity could this measure produce? Entrenched in today's rights societies is something that Costas Douzinas calls "Foucault's law": The situation in where postmodern societies feel more insecure and unfree the more rights are had (Douzinas 2007). In other words: Rights have diminishing returns – especially nuanced rights – because they frame rights-holders in some way or another. Take for example the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (UN General Assembly 1979). Women's rights are important for ensuring the dignity of women, but they still frame the individual woman by her 'gender'. Now, consider how having a legal space for the psyche in the context of human rights would frame and be received by rights-holders. Not everyone may embrace such an invasive, indeterminate, aspirational human right that possesses a seemingly antiquated premise; they may not want to venture into the governmentality involved in overseeing – of all things – the human soul. A further caveat to my proposition is the law and economics case of diminishing returns and the quest for efficiency. International human rights, which have been subjected to new zealous – albeit deficient – critiques by law and economics scholars(Posner 2014) may continue to use utilitarian arguments to justify challenging human rights in general. Law and economics scholars may make a legitimate case against the Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 Page 5 of 11 jurisdiction of the psyche on the basis of efficiency, but where does that leave humankind? It leaves humankind with a problem that perhaps cannot be solved (the jurisdiction of the human psyche), or – in the name of pragmatism – should not be addressed. Therefore, perhaps the most viable solution to the neuromarketing question remains to police individual applications and technologies – however more jumbled that may prove to be legally. "The flame" There is a significant precedent in maintaining protection for what one might call the flame or the human spirit. Albert Einstein once said, "The human spirit must prevail over technology." In the age of unrestrained neuromarketing, one has reason to believe that technologies can intentionally or unintentionally extinguish the human spirit. Neuromarketing and other technologies can obliterate culture and meaning. The arts, which are greatest when agents are introspective, suffer the most in a neoliberal society where they are cut off from reality by neuromarketing and virtual existence. The arts are avenues for spiritual power that keeps the flame burning. Philosopher Martin Heidegger was notoriously skeptical of technology. He thought that enframing reduces imminence between individuals in society by isolating them. Art, he argued, destroys barriers and brings people closer to truth and authenticity. Heidegger wrote in 1954 that "Enframing means that way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that it is itself not technological (Heidegger 1977)." Furthermore, "the rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth."3 That is, truth escapes humankind unless it tames or turns away from the monstrous apparati it has made. It is Art – the very subject that modern technology suppresses – which acts as a beacon in dark times such as contemporary capitalism. Truth can be difficult or even impossible to grasp when communication is stifled because understanding is subsequently rendered foggy and dumbed-down. Under an unfettered, dystopian neuromarketing regime desire for truth and meaning go down the drain, as society irreversibly become post-truth, post-reason, post-culture, post-meaning, and postfreedom, as the arts are reduced to paradoxically insipid sensationalist tabloids. Psychopolitics Foucault wrote in 1975 that "the soul is the prison of the body (Foucault 2012)." Just as biopolitics is the politics of bodies, psychopolitics are the politics of the psyche or 'soul'. Psychopolitics has been synonymous with torture because the first book published on Soviet torture techniques was titled Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics. Unlike Foucault's biopolitical systems of coercion, modern psychopolitics represses and seduces the human psyche. As sinister as psychopolitics sounds and as futile the existence it renders sounds, they are part of the new status quo. In Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power philosopher ByungChul Han bridges the idea of biopolitics of coercion and violence. Violence is "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high 3Ibid. Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 Page 6 of 11 likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation (Krug et al. 2002)." Big data and modern neurotechnology have the potential to be violent because of their use of psychopolitics on the human psyche. In his book, Han argues that digital psychopolitics can intervene in human psychic processes. One of his worries about psychopolitics' microphysics of power is that it will be even faster than human free will – meaning that, when left unchecked, psychopolitics may very well beckon the end of human freedom. Humans would no longer be able to subdue big data's microphysics because of the microphysical dimension it operates in (Sieber 2019). Freedom is protected by Article 1 of the UDHR, but if the human mind can no longer subdue big data's microphysics because of the dimension it operates in, then how can humanity cope with the dangerously unmanaged marriage between big data and neurotechnology? As promising as digital technology may be, a more in-depth look shows that "when left unaccounted for, it offers no future or reason yet remains commander of humanity's future."4 Therefore, it must become a human sustainability project to address neuromarketing. Mental privacy as a human right Many bioethicists have promoted discussion on neurospecific rights. The advocates of implementing mental privacy as a human right say, "the neurotechnological future we are approaching will require us to guarantee protection not only to the information we record and share, but also to the source of that information since they may be inseparable (Ienca and Andorno 2017)."5 But what would enforcing mental privacy as a human right entail, and in what meaningful way can a duty-bearer protect rights bearers from a pernicious process that they are oblivious to? Researchers Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno propose "the formal recognition of a right to mental privacy, which aims to protect any bit or set of brain information about an individual recorded by a neurodevice and shared across the digital ecosystem."6 They are adamant that humans "need wider privacy and data protection rights" and that "the need to protect information generated below the threshold of voluntary control demands for the recognition of a new right that is specifically tailored on the characteristics of brain information and the new possibilities opened by mind-reading technologies,"7 yet fail to address how that should be done. One can always write rights, but one cannot necessarily protect those rights. Governmentality entails that the people trust the state with the morals of its government. Moreover, governmentality shapes the practices that "try to shape, sculpt, mobilize and work through the choices, desires, aspirations, needs, wants and lifestyles of individuals and groups."8 An intensely moral agreement between the people and its leadership, governmentality has the power for good or evil: benign purpose or invidious 4Sieber. "Does Facebook Violate Its Users' Basic Human Rights?," 143. 5Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno, "Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology." Life Sciences, Society and Policy 13.1 (2017): 14. 6Ienca and Andorno, "Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology," 15. 7Ibid., 14. 8Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Second Edition (Washington: Sage, 2010), 20. Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 Page 7 of 11 purpose. Protecting citizens' rights is often the initial intent, yet rights can fail in the form of re-enslavement. Worse yet, data collection – which is inherent to governmentality – could be used by a regime to abuse groups. A regime of human rights is not guaranteed to be a regime of peace. Regulation of Neuromarketing As Han writes in his book Topology of Violence, "Regulation is always accomplished as spatialization and localization. Sheer violence alone is not capable of forming spaces or creating location. It lacks the space-building force of mediation. Thus it cannot produce a legal space."9 In an example, Han makes note that power always involves consent, as "Power, in contrast, develops along a yes."10 He writes, "The greater the popular approval of the ruler, the greatest is the ruler's power."11 He reiterates, "Even forcible subjugation contains a yes."12 Absolute violence is fundamentally different from power in this sense. Han contends that "An absolute no negates the relationship of power, that is, subjugation."13 Furthermore, "Contemporary violence is based more on the conformity of consensus than the antagonism of dissent. Thus one could invert Habermas's phrase and speak of the violence of consensus."14 Han ends his dismantling of expanding legal spaces to detect violence with a blaring analysis of the new status quo: "Today, politics itself is positivizing itself into work without any possibility of sovereign action."15 This means that not only would it be nearly impossible to identify any evidence of neuromarketing's violent psychopolitical actions, but the conception of a soular jurisdiction (i.e., a jurisdiction of the human psyche) is also rendered futile. Neoliberalism's subtle, stealthy manifestation known as 'neuromarketing' can no longer be traced or brought to justice, so the only conceivable way of curbing its negative effects is through regulation of the devices themselves. Insofar, my proposition of a jurisdiction or legal space for the contemplation on the human spirit may well be necessary, but it will not suffice in actually protecting the human psyche from violence. Alternative futures Heidegger famously said in an interview: "only a god can save us."16 He was referring to the kind of hegemonic predicaments humankind is in now. To put Heidegger in context, we must look to the law. In natural law, any end is justified, yet in positive law, any end is justified by its means of creating order. Philosopher Walter Benjamin made note of divine violence as violence that maintains law and order. With divine violence, there are no ends but a call from within.17 It is called 'divine' because it is outside the flow of history and time; it is a pure manifestation that is both spiritual and apostate. Civil disobedience, on the other hand, is peaceful political protest that may be 9Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), 56. 10Han, Topology of Violence, 56. 11Ibid. 12Ibid., 57. 13Ibid. 14Ibid., 62. 15Ibid. 16See Martin Heidegger, "Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten," trans. W. Richardson Der Spiegel 30 (May, 1976): 193–219. 17See Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1921) Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 Page 8 of 11 impossible under "neuroscientific and neurotechnological imperialism."18 Heidegger meant that, if anything, the holy (not God itself) could save humankind from its demise. Philosophy will not solve the problems of modernity, but meditation that leads to a new way of thinking may. Hence, only a god can save us, says Heidegger. Although convexly worded, I think Heidegger would consider human rights as legal technology and the ideal of human dignity a poetic necessity. Insofar, human rights could continue their role as humanity's redemptive scaffolds, or law could prompt the necessary reengineering of technology to comply with our uniquely human needs. Another alternative to positive law that renders a field whereby one can interpret mental privacy is to accept a heretical existence. Society may have to settle for the future it is getting. If so, humankind may learn to redefine the individual body and self. Human agency is manifold. One must then ask: Why would one oppose losing a fraction of agency to neuromarketing? Humans are born unfree; they live their entire lives without total free will; they enslave themselves to laws, yet nevertheless, they live. What is stopping people from voluntarily losing more agency to technology if it is economically prudent? Jurisdiction would open the door to debate on the right to property. Much like selling one's own organs on an open market, may voluntarily selling access to one's mental privacy be made legal? This law and economics course would cut human rights to its groundless core – an angst-reducing and a sanctity-creating mechanism that is altogether disinterested in the unknown and functions primarily in absolutes in a world that may command a retreat therefrom. Then remains the rather profitable, albeit still realistic, future of a commercial good produced that can be worn as a physical persona. Fitted like a mask, humans around the world who choose to opt-out of surveillance (and can afford to) could wear a concealment or use a disorienting mechanism (e.g., surgical masks, digitalcamouflage garb, makeup, laser pens), as we have seen in the recent Hong Kong resistance in the heavily surveyed Chinese metropolis. This would likely pose a mere blip for big data collection, as it will likely amass enough information to compensate. In such a case, the persona would be a cost-bearing item, possibly furthering any economic divide. Lastly, technology is inherently innovative. This is true for efficiency and for correcting economic externalities of production. Take the green revolution for example. Humanity found ways to generate energy while curbing carbon dioxide emissions. There, it innovated to create similar production outputs, if not more and reduced emissions. With nuclear arms, humankind has largely chosen to deescalate and scale down, but one can never uninvent the bomb. Any effort to enforce ignorance about the brain in marketing or data collection would be what economists call a market distortion: insufficient supply for the quantity demanded because of interference. In the past, these have led to criminal activity (e.g., the trade of drugs and people). Furthermore, data collectors may not be retroactively stripped of the information they legally obtain. How data is managed from now on is an issue in itself. 18Andrea Lavazza, "Freedom of thought and mental integrity: The moral requirements for any neural prosthesis." Frontiers in Neuroscience 12 (2018): 84. Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 Page 9 of 11 Conclusions This article examines the implications of new technologies that encroach on a space (the psyche) alleged to be sacred. In such a context, it approached the topic as an ethical issue by evaluating the implications of escalating legal measures and also the absence thereof. If "the modern notion of human dignity involves an upwards equalization of rank, so that we now try to accord to every human being something of the dignity, rank, and expectation of respect that was formerly accorded to nobility,"19 then, there is no way for neurotechnological imperialism to progress in a way that does not increase the gulf between the wealthy class and the working class if it will be an instrument for cultural hegemony. In that respect, the digital revolution's dystopic course is socially damaging to the human value of dignity. Furthermore, the use of neurotechnology can violate citizens' universal human rights to self-determination and privacy that may never be regained given the dystopic trajectory. The number of voices calling for new human rights is growing, and they are seemingly legitimate. That being said, theorists allege that this may be a lost cause since it is unrealistic to govern the psyche in any pertinent sense. The human right to mental privacy remains aspirational and has gained some traction. Ienca and Andorno's paper on what they call a 'right to mental privacy' recommends new regulation that may be the only answer to the dangers of unfettered neurotechnology. If humankind lives in an age where modern technology has pressed it to react to technology for the sake of human dignity, we have reached truly a historic point in history. No longer are we in the state of nature where conflict exists solely between humans, Earth, and animals. Now humankind's creations (technology) have created new points of conflict. The Hegelian master–slave dialectic is perhaps better understood today as, say, the human–computer dialectic. Both fight each other for autonomy – the only difference is that stealthy neurotechnology depends on an apathetic, willing human population. These issues are what make the discourse on neurospecific rights and regulation so remarkable. Neurospecific rights would also contribute to the reduction in the sleek glamour of the still relatively young international human rights law regime. The law and the concept of human dignity have been made messy by technology. This stands to remind scholars that the law itself is technological – an evolving human construct. Lawcraft that pushes back against allowing technology designed to use human faculties as a resource at the expense of individual human dignity should be cautiously embraced. In a neoliberal age, regulation is a necessary yet not so sexy political stance. Civil society should be informed about the dangers posed by neuromarketing before giving in to its soft hegemony. Equal-standing citizens deciding with clear eyes on what is just is part of sufficient democracy. But legal scholars cannot forget that law itself is technological, and insofar, the concept of human dignity and themes surrounding it (e.g., freedom, conditions for valid consent) must be further expounded upon. Neuromarketing and other modern neurotechnologies that harness the power of the human psyche will challenge what it means to be human because it is not clear that there will be a universal response to its harmfulness. A capitalist agenda may triumph – making citizenry bear the economic cost of maintaining a literal persona. Finally, this article questions the efficiency (i.e., payoff) of intrusive neurotechnology. If there is a net benefit, there is – albeit a small – space in legal scholarship for condoning pernicious 19Jeremy Waldron, Dignity, Rank, and Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 33. Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 Page 10 of 11 technology. The time is now for people to debate and set a legal precedent. The applications of big data and neurotechnology deserve the attention of activists, ethicists, lawyers, and policymakers. Neuromarketing, in particular, has enjoyed life on a lawless frontier and should be subjected to delibrative governing before it fully mutates into a digital-aged form of barbarism: when technology (neuromarketing), spirituality (worship of the Market), and the politics of custom (mind-reading) are used to commit acts of extremely cruel conquest (cultural hegemony in the creation of a subjugated class), where the whole are promised salvation (greater efficiency) and the few (dissenting voices) are cast aside for their infamy. Abbreviations CRC: Convention on the Rights of the Child; EEG: Electroencephalogram; fMRI: Functional magnetic resonance imaging; FPIC: Free, prior and informed consent; ICCPR: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; SDGs: Sustainable Development Goals; UDHR: Universal Declaration of Human Rights Acknowledgements Not applicable Author's contributions The author read and approved the final manuscript. Funding Not applicable Availability of data and materials Not applicable Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Received: 26 July 2019 Accepted: 14 October 2019 References Benjamin, Walter. 1921. Zur kritik der gewalt und andere aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution. Brooklyn: Zone Books. Burchell, David. 1998. Civic personae: MacIntyre, cicero and morality. History of Political Thought 19: 101–118. Dean, Mitchell. 2010. Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society, second edition. Washington: Sage. Douzinas, Costas. 2007. Human rights and empire: The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge-Cavendish. Foucault, Michel. 2012. Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. Han, Byung-Chul. 2018. Topology of violence. Cambridge: MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Nur noch ein gott kann uns retten, translated by W. Richardson. Der Spiegel 30: 193–219. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The question concerning technology, basic writings, edited by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row. Ienca, Marcello, and Roberto Andorno. 2017. Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology. Life Sciences, Society and Policy 13: 5. Krug, Etienne G., James A. Mercy, Linda L. Dahlberg, and Anthony B. Zwi. 2002. The world report on violence and health. The Lancet 360: 1083–1088. Lavazza, Andrea. 2018. Freedom of thought and mental integrity: The moral requirements for any neural prosthesis. Frontiers in Neuroscience 12: 82. Linsenbard, Gail E. 1999. Beauvoir, ontology, and women's human rights. Hypatia 14: 145–162. Nemorin, Selena. 2018. Biosurveillance in new media marketing: World, discourse, representation. London: Springer. Posner, Eric A. 2014. The twilight of human rights law. New York: Oxford University Press. Pradeep, A.K., and Harish Patel. 2010. The buying brain: Secrets for selling to the subconscious. mind. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Rose, Nikolas. 2007. Molecular biopolitics, somatic ethics and the spirit of biocapital. Social Theory & Health 5: 3–29. Sieber, Alexander. 2017. Protecting spiritual rights in the era of empire. Paper presented at 6th annual radical democracy conference: What's the matter, New York, NY, may 5-6, 2017. Sieber, Alexander. 2019. Does facebook violate its users' basic human rights? NanoEthics 13: 139–145. UN General Assembly. 1948. Universal declaration of human rights, 217 (III) A (Paris, 1948). UN General Assembly. 1979. Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, 18 December 1979, United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 1249, p. 13. Waldron, Jeremy. 2012. Dignity, rank, and rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Sieber Life Sciences, Society and Policy (2019) 15:6 Page 11 of


Learning to Live a Life of Value

Philosophy

Learning to Live a Life of Value Nicholas Maxwell (Published in J. Merchey, ed., Living a Life of Value, Values of the Wise Press, 2006, pp. 383-95.) www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk Much of my working life has been devoted to trying to get across the point that we urgently need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry, so that the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom rather than just acquire knowledge. Early Experiences To begin with, I wanted to understand the nature of the universe. When still a boy I became enthralled, mystified and horrified by theoretical physics space-time curved, particles no more than waves of probability, the real world so utterly different from the way we ordinarily experience it. It was the mystery, the utter strangeness, of the physical universe that caught my imagination. None of this, by the way, should be taken to mean that I was horribly precocious. Not at all. In those far off days in England, 11 year olds had to take an exam which decided whether they would be able to go on to grammar school or not. Failure to pass this exam more or less condemned you to leaving school without qualifications (unless your parents could pay for your education). I failed this crucial exam, not once, but twice! Then, with adolescence, I began to feel it was much more important to understand the hearts and souls of people, the way to do that being via the novel. Instead of reading Jeans, Eddington, and Fred Hoyle, I plunged into the worlds of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Stendhal, Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Flaubert. My real education began. I would become a novelist and dare to reveal dark secrets of the human heart no one before had uttered. I would depict worlds with such imaginative power that they would seem more real than reality itself. But my parents insisted that, first, I must go to University, to secure my future economically (of no significance to me at all at the age of 17). The educational system, fiercely classificatory in those days, had labelled me "science" and not "humanities". (And in any case I knew doing English at University would ruin any chance I might have of becoming a novelist.) I had read Eddington, who informed me that physics is really mathematics, and for a time, earlier, I had been dazzled by this invisible, esoteric world of mathematics. So off I went to University College London to do mathematics, convinced I could write my novels between and after lectures. But I was miserable; I didn't know what to write about; and mathematics seemed both hollow and very difficult. It did not seem to be about anything. I passed all my exams but, abruptly, in my second year, my grant was stopped because I had not attended enough lectures. So I did my National Service. I became a Sergeant in the Educational Corps. And then I went to Manchester University to do Philosophy. I had failed miserably as a physicist, and as a novelist, but I was interested in philosophical problems, so I would do that for three years, and then join the grey shuffle of ordinary, uncreative life (as I then saw it). Visions and Confusion But then, in the summer of 1961, while working in a factory during the day, I began to keep a diary, noting down my thoughts and feelings. And the outcome was a series of psychic explosions which tore me apart and changed the rest of my life. I decided that my earlier desire to be a great theoretical physicist and master the universe, and my desire to be a great novelist and master of human life, were both, when pushed to the limit, aspects of the desire to become God. Not only was this absurd; it was undesirable. Far more desirable was to be something that, up to then, had seemed too insignificant to deserve any consideration at all: myself. This long-neglected, fragile, worthless scrap of almost nothing now seemed to me to be, for me, the most precious thing in existence, something holy and sacrosanct. But what was it? What was I? I had no idea. Having ignored myself, in some sense, for so long, in my striving to become acquainted with, identified with, some profoundly significant otherness (ultimate physical reality, ultimate human reality), my self had become a stranger to me. It felt like a young plant, fragile from neglect and lack of nourishment, needing attention and care to grow and flourish. When we are born, I wrote in the diary, we do not know how to distinguish "me" from "not me": there is just things happening. But then we do discover how to make the distinction, and we discover we are tiny and vulnerable in a vast, strange, and sometimes terrifying world. We falsely half remember the earlier state as a time when we were "everything", and our life project, in one way or another, becomes to return to this earlier, God-like state. One strategy is to try to convert the "not me" into "me", by conquering it, knowing and understanding it, acquiring power over it, or even literally trying to swallow it. Another standard strategy is to do just the opposite: shrink the "me" until it disappears, and there is only "everything". This is the strategy of the mystic who seeks mystical union with God; it is the strategy of the humble, and of those who commit suicide. But both these conventional and absurd strategies rest on a mistaken view about the nature of the "me", the nature of personal identity. Our identity is not what is inside us. What lies within us is just as mysterious as what lies without us. Our identity exists in the interplay between what lies within and without. If the distinction between "me" and "not me" is depicted as a circle on a surface, the "me" is not, as we ordinarily assume, what lies within the circle; it is rather the line of the circle itself. We should not, ludicrously, try to increase the circle until, in the limit, everything is incorporated within it; nor should we, almost equally ludicrously, try to decrease the circle until it becomes a dot and disappears and there is just "everything": instead, we should "relax the muscles of identity" (as I wrote in my diary) so that the line of the circle becomes permeable, and there can be an easy interplay between what lies within and without, and we become our authentic selves, without striving to expand until, in the limit, we become everything, or shrink until we become nothing (and there is only everything). My earlier projects to know and understand the nature of the universe by means of physics, and to know and understand humanity by means of literature, now seemed variants of the strategy to expand and expand the circle of identity. Pushed to the limits of absurdity, it was as if my ultimate aspiration had been to become God. But an infinitely more worthwhile goal lay before me, up till now neglected as worthless: to become myself. "The riddle of the universe" I wrote "is the riddle of our desires". The fundamental question of philosophy is not "How do I acquire knowledge?" but rather "What do I want? How should I live?". These ideas, which now seem to me somewhat absurd, exaggerated and dubious at best, were for me, at the time, the stuff of my life; they were experienced and lived. Before these "revelations", I had half believed in Descartes' picture of the self being the mind, linked to the brain but utterly different from anything physical, the whole experienced world being locked away within the prison of one's skull. This picture was shattered. What was within was just as much a mystery as what lay without: "I" was the region of interplay between these two mysteries. I became whatever I saw or experienced, my self being created and dying many times during the day. In one of his letters, John Keats spoke of becoming the bird he saw pecking on a path. That was how it now was with me. I would be whatever I experienced: seeing a blade of grass, I became that blade of grass; talking with a friend, I became that "talking with the friend". For six weeks it was as if I was high on some hallucinatory drug: visions of exhilarating and terrifying intensity came before breakfast, and throughout the day. I had become a prophet, and my prophecy was: be your own prophet, discover for yourself your own true self, what you really desire in life. In the end I found having a great message for the world such a contradiction that I finally hit upon the idea: there are only stories or myths. One is that of science; another is that of personal experience. Not till I read Karl Popper did I free myself of this nonsense so fashionable in some quarters. I vowed that when I got back to Manchester University in the autumn, I would tell the Philosophy Department about my earth-shaking discoveries of the summer especially, that philosophy should be about how to live, and not about how to acquire knowledge. I found I could not even open my mouth. Ecstasy gave way to persistent black despair. Becoming a Professional Philosopher The visions of the summer of 1961 had gone, but I continued, somehow, to believe I had discovered something of great significance, even though now I no longer knew what it was. I decided to devote my MA thesis to the question: How can the world of physics be reconciled with the world of experience, feeling and art? I was aware that I was grappling with the two worlds of my abandoned childhood megalomaniacal ambitions: to grasp the physical universe by means of science, and to grasp the human world by means of the novel. In those days philosophy in England was dominated by "Oxford" philosophy, conceptual analysis in the manner of Wittgenstein, Ryle and Austin, the sterility of which filled me with horror. However, I discovered the works of two contemporary philosophers which were of great help to me: Karl Popper and J. J. C. Smart. Here were two philosophers who took science seriously, and were concerned to tackle profound problems with intellectual integrity (not being content to dissolve pseudo-problems). I became a visiting graduate student at the London School of Economics and attended Popper's Seminars. I was profoundly impressed. I was especially impressed by the following line of argument running through Popper's early work. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper defends falsificationism, the view that scientific knowledge is irredeemably conjectural in character, scientific theories being falsifiable, but not verifiable. According to this view, scientific knowledge grows by a process of conjecture and refutation. Conjectures are subjected to an onslaught of attempted empirical falsification. When a theory is falsified, we discover the need to develop a better theory, and it is this which drives science forward, and makes scientific progress possible. Falsificationism was then generalized by Popper to become critical rationalism. This holds that, quite generally, we cannot justify or prove our theories or beliefs. The best that we can do is subject them to sustained criticism, in this way giving ourselves the best chance of discovering error, where it exists, this making it possible for us to improve our theories and beliefs. In particular, we need to look critically at the capacity of our ideas to solve the problems they were invented to solve, and we need to consider whether rival ideas do better. Criticism demands that a number of rival ideas are available; criticism does not make sense unless there is the idea that the view being criticized is perhaps false, some other view being correct. Science is just a special case of all this, empirical falsification being just an especially devastating form of criticism. Popper then applied critical rationalism to social and political problems, and problems concerning the nature of the social sciences in The Poverty of Historicism, and in his greatest work The Open Society and Its Enemies. In these books Popper mounts a ferocious criticism of the totalitarian doctrines of Plato and Marx, and sets out to demolish historicism the doctrine that there are laws of historical development. But Popper also transforms the whole idea of what "the rational society" might be. Given prePopperian notions of rationality, the rational society could only be some kind of highly oppressive, rule-bound society dominated by reason, a kind of rational totalitarianism. But given Popper's new notion of critical rationalism, a rational society is one which sustains diversity of beliefs, values, ways of life, and one which values learning through criticism, criticism only being possible if there is a diversity of ideas around. The rational society is, in short, granted critical rationalism, one and the same thing as the open society. At a stroke, reason has ceased to have totalitarian connotations, and has become basic to liberalism. University College London Impressed by Popper's integrity and passion, I decided it might be possible after all to work inside academia with honour. I finished my MA thesis, taught Philosophy of Science for a year at Manchester University, and then joined the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London as a Lecturer (later Reader). I taught and pursued my research at UCL for some 28 years, taking early retirement in 1994, so that I could devote myself to my work. To begin with, I published three papers extracted from my MA thesis: "Physics and Common Sense" (1966), "Can there be Necessary Connections between Successive Events?" (1968), and "Understanding Sensations" (1968). These papers were way ahead of their time and, as a result, failed to have the impact I hoped they would have. Together they tackled the problem of how the experiential world can exist embedded in the physical universe. Physics, I argued, is concerned only with a highly selected aspect of that which exists, namely that aspect which determines (perhaps probabilistically) the way events unfold. For all we know, physical reality may determine necessarily how events unfold: in so far as David Hume denied this, he was wrong. The silence of physics about the experiential is thus no grounds whatsoever for holding that the experiential does not exist. The experiential or mental aspect of a brain process is that aspect we become aware of as a result of having the process occur in our own brain. The experiential cannot, I argued, be reduced to the physical. In order to know what redness is one must oneself have experienced redness, but this is not the case as far as any physical feature is concerned (an argument made famous, some 16 years later, by Frank Jackson in his paper "What Mary didn't Know"). Dismayed by the lack of any response to these papers, I gave up publishing for a time, and concentrated on pursuing my interests. I began to appreciate that Popper had not done what he claimed to do, solve the problem of induction, not because he failed to show how theories can be verified, but because he failed to do justice to the scientific aim of discovering explanations for phenomena. This discovery led me back into the business of publishing papers. I spelled out the point in a paper that appeared in 1972 called "A Critique of Popper's Views on Scientific Method" (Philosophy of Science 39, 131-52). A New Conception of Science But then, with mounting excitement, even before the "Critique" paper was published, I realized that the implication of the argument was that we needed a whole new conception of science. In persistently only accepting unified, explanatory theories, to the extent of rejecting infinitely many theories more empirically successful but grossly disunified, science in effect makes a big, persistent, and highly problematic assumption about the universe: it is comprehensible, in the sense that it is such that explanations for phenomena exist to be found. The fundamental aim of science, in presupposing that the universe is comprehensible, is so profoundly problematic that it has been repressed and replaced with the apparently unproblematic aim of seeking truth, nothing being presupposed about the truth. But this latter view is hopeless; it creates the unsolvable problem of induction. Science is much more rational if big, problematic, implicit metaphysical assumptions concerning comprehensibility are made explicit, so that they can be criticized and, we may hope, improved. Science must be depicted as accepting, as a part of (conjectural) scientific knowledge, that the universe is comprehensible, more or less specific empirically untestable (and thus metaphysical) theses about how the universe is physically comprehensible being criticized and improved as scientific knowledge improves, associated methods being improved as well. There is something like positive feedback between improving scientific knowledge and improving aims and methods improving knowledge-about-how-to-improve-knowledge the methodological key to the ever-accelerating progress of modern science. Problematic Aims Then, walking home one day from UCL, it suddenly struck me: this idea of representing the real problematic aims of science in the form of a hierarchy, aims becoming increasingly unspecific and unproblematic as one goes up the hierarchy, in this way a framework of relatively unproblematic, fixed aims and methods being created within which more specific, problematic aims and methods can be improved as knowledge improves all this has implications for any worthwhile human endeavour with problematic aims. Just as Popper had generalized and applied falsificationism, so too I could generalize and apply my much better conception of scientific method of aimoriented empiricism. I could tread a parallel path to Popper's footsteps, starting from a radically improved initial view, and the outcome would be a radical improvement over what Popper had to say. Even more striking, for me, was my realization that I had rediscovered my great explosive idea of the summer of 1961: philosophy should be about life; the riddle of the universe is the riddle of our desires. But my initial idea had been radically transformed. It was no longer just philosophy which should be concerned with our problems of living, but the whole academic enterprise. "The riddle of our desires" had become "the profoundly problematic character of our fundamental aims in life, both personal and institutional, including even the aims of science". The outcome of generalizing aimoriented empiricism to form a general conception of rationality, aim-oriented rationality, and then applying this to the task of creating a better world, was an entirely new conception, not just of science, but of academic inquiry, with implications for all of life. I have even written a long paper (never published) called "science as the methodological key to the salvation of humanity", the basic idea being that scientific method, when accurately captured as aim-oriented empiricism and properly generalized to become aimoriented rationality, is indeed the methodological key to the salvation of humanity. Initially, I wrote up an account of my new conception of science: this was published as a two part paper called "The Rationality of Scientific Discovery" (Philosophy of Science 41, 1974). In the winter of 1972 I visited Pittsburgh University, and lectured for three hours (my watch had stopped) on my new conception of science. During the visit I had a long debate with Larry Laudan about my new aim-oriented empiricist conception of science; he held onto his problem-solving view (but later published views which showed the influence of my ideas). Back in England I finished a manuscript called "The Aims of Science" setting out my new view. After years being considered for publication by Macmillan's it was finally rejected. Then, in three weeks, to meet the publisher's deadline, I wrote my first book What's Wrong With Science? (Brans Head Books, 1976), which takes the form of a debate between a scientist and a philosopher, and is perhaps the most vivid and accessible account of my overall view. At last a more thorough exposition of the whole argument appeared in my second book From Knowledge to Wisdom (Blackwell 1984, pbk. 1987 & 1988). This got some terrific reviews, in Nature for example, and one by Mary Midgley, and a few less terrific reviews, mostly from uncomprehending philosophers. In the book I argue that there is an urgent need to bring about a revolution in the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry so that, instead of just seeking knowledge, the basic aim of inquiry becomes to seek and promote wisdom – wisdom being the capacity, and the active desire, to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom thus including knowledge and technological knowhow, but much else besides. This revolution would affect every branch and aspect of the academic enterprise. The social sciences would become social philosophy, or social methodology (rather than social science), devoted to promoting more cooperatively rational solving of conflicts and problems of living in the world. Social inquiry, so pursued, would be intellectually more fundamental than natural science. The natural sciences would recognize three domains of discussion: evidence, theories, and aims. Problems concerning research aims would be discussed by both scientists and non-scientists alike, involving as they do questions concerning social priorities and values. Philosophy would become the sustained rational exploration of our most fundamental problems of understanding; it would also take up the task of discovering how we may improve our personal, institutional and global aims and methods in life, so that what is of value in life may be realized more successfully. Education would change so that problems of living become more fundamental than problems of knowledge, the basic aim of education being to learn how to acquire wisdom in life. Academic inquiry as a whole would become somewhat like a people's civil service, having just sufficient power to retain its independence and integrity, doing for people, openly, what civil services are supposed to do, in secret, for governments. These and many other changes all result from replacing the aim to acquire knowledge by the aim to promote wisdom by cooperatively rational means. Quantum Theory Having set out the case for a new kind of inquiry, rationally designed to help us learn how to live lives of value, I then plunged into the task of trying to develop a comprehensible version of quantum theory. Quantum theory may seem a far cry from wisdom, but in fact there is a connection. My new conception of science holds that science presupposes that the universe is physically comprehensible; furthermore, it provides us with a rational, if fallible, method for the discovery of new fundamental physical theories. Quantum theory is bafflingly incomprehensible; furthermore, because of the failure to solve the quantum wave/particle problem, the orthodox version of the theory is couched as a theory about the results of performing measurements. Orthodox quantum theory (OQT) is silent about what is going on physically when no measurement is being performed. But this has the disastrous consequence that OQT consists of two mutually incoherent parts: a quantum component, and a component made up of some part of classical physics for a treatment of measurement. OQT is, as a result, ad hoc, disunified, vague, ambiguous, non-explanatory, limited in scope, and resistant to unification with general relativity (as I have pointed out in a series of publications on quantum theory). It struck me that the transition from classical to quantum physics might be, in essence, the transition from determinism to probabilism. If so, what needed to be done to develop a decent, unified, explanatory version of quantum theory was to specify precisely, in quantum mechanical terms, when probabilistic transitions occur. Electrons, atoms and other quantum systems are neither waves nor particles: they are a new kind of probabilistic entity I dubbed the propensiton. Propensitons interact probabilistically, I conjectured, when new so-called "particles" are created, new bound or stationary systems, as a result of inelastic interactions. All measurements that actually detect quantum systems invariably involve interactions of this kind, to leave a record of what has occurred. My new propensity version of quantum theory is free of the above defects of OQT, recovers all the empirical success of OQT, and furthermore is experimentally distinct from OQT, although the relevant crucial experiments, difficult to perform, have not yet been done. This work is recorded in papers in the American Journal of Physics, Foundations of Physics, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, culminating with a paper published in Physics Letters A in 1994. An account of the work is also to be found in chapter 7 of my book The Comprehensibility of the Universe (OUP, 1998, pbk, 2003). My Campaign on Behalf of From Knowledge to Wisdom Over the years I have written countless papers expounding the basic thesis and argument of From Knowledge to Wisdom. I have given endless lectures expounding the idea in different ways, in the UK, in Europe and the USA and Canada. Much has changed since From Knowledge to Wisdom first appeared in the Orwellian year of 1984, but we are as far away as ever from putting wisdom-inquiry into academic practice. As I see it, there is hardly any more important task confronting us, as far as the long-term interests of humanity are concerned, than to bring about the revolution in aims and methods of our institutions of learning, so that the basic aim becomes to promote wisdom. In 1994 I took early retirement from UCL because of horrible things going on in my Department. I retired to be able to get on with my work. For a time I was a visiting Academic at the London School of Economics. I have published three books since retiring: The Comprehensibility of the Universe, The Human World in the Physical Universe, and Is Science Neurotic?. The first develops further aim-oriented empiricism and, most important, shows how the problem explicating what the simplicity or unity of physical theories is can be solved within this framework a problem even Einstein was unable to solve, although he thought a solution should be possible. The second book sets out to solve the problem of how our human world, imbued with colour and other perceptual qualities, consciousness, free will, meaning and value, can exist embedded in the physical universe. In this book I put forward a suggestion as to how it may be possible to explain correlations between sensations and brain processes. The book also reinterprets Darwinism so that evolution gives a better account of how human consciousness, free will, meaning and value have evolved in the physical universe. Is Science Neurotic? argues that science is neurotic because it represses problematic assumptions, associated with the aims of science, having to do with the comprehensibility of the universe, values and politics. It is not just natural science that is neurotic; social inquiry and the humanities are, if anything, even more neurotic (neurosis being interpreted throughout as a methodological condition that arises when aims are repressed or misrepresented). Academic inquiry as a whole is neurotic in that it seeks to acquire knowledge rather than promote wisdom. This book updates and further develops the argument of From Knowledge to Wisdom. Conclusion Has this 45 year effort to develop and communicate the idea that we need institutions of learning devoted to helping us realize what is of value in life been worth it? I am not sure. So far, by and large, I have failed even to get the idea across, let alone get it accepted – let alone help get it implemented in academic practice. Scattered about in the world there are individuals who see things more or less as I do – who believe, as I do, that we need to devote reason to acquiring wisdom. But they, like me, struggle with general indifference and incomprehension. Of course, in comparison with thousands of others in my life-time who have struggled on behalf of humanity, my life has been blessed. I have not been imprisoned, tortured or executed as so many others have been. I have had the incredible good fortune to be able to explore the problems that have preoccupied me, and I have been able to earn my living teaching and writing what has emerged from my passionate concern to understand – to understand, above all, how we can learn to create a better world. There have been times of great joy and exhilaration when problems, long struggled with, are suddenly resolved in an apparent flood of illumination, and new vistas seem to emerge. I am inclined to agree with Einstein when he says "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science." The search for understanding can have its own rewards. Nevertheless, I have failed, so far, to get what I see as my simple, profoundly important idea across, and this induces an immense sense of failure and shame. It is, of course, a mistake to identify the value of a life with the value of some life-project. And who knows, what I have devoted so much of my life working for, may gradually come to pass, and humanity may acquire what it so urgently needs, rational inquiry devoted to promoting wisdom. Perhaps I should feel proud to be associated with the effort to bring this about. In any case, few of us, perhaps, know where what is of most value in our life lies. It remains a mystery.


What is Derrida Saying to Us?

Philosophy

What is Derrida Saying to Us - Abstract

          Jacques Derrida is difficult and controversial. This article concentrates on the first part of On Grammatology (1967) as the Rosetta Stone to understanding him. It examines concepts such as the metaphysics of presence, the trace, differance, and deconstruction, aiming to interest readers further in pursuing him in more depth.

Article published in Philosophy Now, Issue 127, August/September 2018, pp 9-11. What is Derrida Saying to Us? Mike Sutton gives us his present interpretation of Derrida's traces. Continental Thoughts Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is a philosopher everybody has heard of, but few non-specialists can manage to read; a clear case of 'many are called but few are chosen'. Opinions of him range from those who say he is one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century to those who say he was a charlatan. In the mid-1970s he had a debate of unusual acrimony with the distinguished American philosopher of language, John Searle. In 1992 he was almost refused an honorary degree at Cambridge because of the opposition of several philosophers, some of them eminent. So, a controversial figure. The question of why Derrida's texts are so difficult is interesting in itself. One reason is the unfamiliarity of his concepts. Another is his concern that statements asserting knowledge always assume other knowledge. As Hilary Lawson says in his excellent 1985 book Reflexivity: The PostModern Predicament, "our 'certainties' are expressed through texts, through language, through sign systems, which are no longer seen to be neutral. It appears, therefore, in principle there can be no arena of certainty." Derrida wants to avoid making statements which depend either on fixed linguistic meanings or on assumptions made elsewhere. So what is Derrida trying to say to us? The Problem With Logocentrism I want to try to answer this question by concentrating on the first part of his early book Of Grammatology (1967), which I believe is the Rosetta Stone that gives us the key to all his writings. He takes a lead from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913), who maintained that words derive their meaning from other words, and that meanings work by differences not similarity. For example, we notice that a triangle differs from a square. Neither are related in our minds to some ultimate standard shape; instead we know them by their differences from each other. Similarily, we can't trace meanings of words back to any gold standard. If we want to know the meaning of a word we look in the dictionary, and this defines it in terms of other words. If we want to know what they mean, we have to look them up too, and so on ad infinitum, or at least until we have arrived at words we think we already understand. But there is no natural connection between the word (Saussure called this the signifier, eg the written or spoken word 'dog'), and the idea or concept the word stands for (the signified; the general concept 'dog'). Signs are composed of the relation between the signifiers and the signified. The connection between the signifiers and the signified is a practice or norm which has been built up over time, which continues to evolve, and is of course different in different languages. To learn the links, that is, to learn the meaning of the words, we have to learn the practice. A trace of Jacques Derrida low quality scan of a printed card sent to Philosophy Now by Jacques Derrida himself in about 1993. Writing which argues a case, such as philosophical writing, often attempts to reduce meanings to set definitions; those definitions in turn depend on the signifier and its relationship to the signified. This is motivated by a desire for a focal point for understanding. Derrida calls this sort of desire logocentrism, which means aiming to try to get to the logos, the ultimate definition, which might be called true knowledge by some. Logocentrism initially implies phonocentrism. Originally, Western philosophy relied on speech rather than writing. Socrates never wrote a book; instead he argued with people in the marketplace. Later philosophers, including Aristotle, also championed speech over writing. Speech is somehow considered closer to the thinking of the speaker. Derrida argues against this prioritising at some length in Of Grammatology. I shall not concentrate on this argument but on Derrida's proposals for the interpretation of texts. Philosophy works through language, and constantly makes the logocentric assumption that stable meanings of concepts – set definitions – are available to us. But because a signifier (word) and the signified (its conceptual meaning) have more independence than we would perhaps like to think, there is not always a single, fixed meaning, so texts are capable of more than one interpretation. Take the word 'justice'. The word signifies an abstract concept. Our concept of justice is moreover associated with the concrete institutions of justice – the courts, the police. The complainant wants justice (in the abstract), and looks to the courts for it, and considers the abstract concept and what the courts deal in as the same. But are they? Meaning evolves all the time, and the concept of justice changes: it would have had a different meaning in the minds of most people before there were any courts. On the other hand, one concept of justice – these days the institutional concept – is likely to dominate. This flexibility also means that texts are capable of more than one interpretation. Peter Benson gave a good example of this in this very magazine: "the medieval Christian approach to the Bible declared there to be four ways to read each passage: literal, anagogic, typological and tropological. These interpretative traditions have been challenged by fundamentalists, who seek to pin an immediately-known fixed meaning to every word... Fundamentalism is therefore one manifestation of the metaphysics of presence. From Derrida's perspective, it involves a misunderstanding of the nature of language" (Issue 100, 2014). The Presence of Derrida In Of Grammatology Derrida introduces the important phrase 'the metaphysics of presence'. What does he mean by this? Logocentrism leads immediately to the favouring of present certainties. This is something that's done automatically by Western philosophers, particularly metaphysicians. Indeed, we all seek certainty: we want to know if and what God is, what the good is, what our Being is, why we are here... Moreover, we rely on language to tell us the answers. The Western philosophical tradition as a whole insists on chasing objective truth, demanding certainty in the present; and to achieve this it relies utterly on the connection between the signifier and the signified, between words and their meaning in the text – words which have no gold standard for that meaning but are defined from other words. This is already a problem for the meaning of metaphysical texts, which therefore do not have fixed meanings. Derrida's thesis is further that metaphysics seeks not only to impose an interpretation in the present, but also seeks transcendental signifieds – concepts which overarch past and future, near and far, similar and dissimilar. Such metaphysical concepts are incoherent, a prioritising of presence and similarity at the expense of change and difference. We would like, here and now, to define God, the good, our Being, and many other impossible-to-define things, all with certainty, simply, with as few words as possible. But we can't. So it is words that are the problem in metaphysics, as they need continual reinterpretation. Perhaps philosophers are aware of this. In 'Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida' in New Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn, 1978), the American pragmatist Richard Rorty points out that scientists use few words to describe conclusions from their experiments. It is philosophers, and investigators of things that are impossible to know, who need to write and rewrite, and to re-interpret and re-visit problems. And especially, it is metaphysicians. Rorty says, "it is characteristic of the Kantian tradition that, no matter how much writing it does, it does not think that philosophy should be 'written' any more than science should be. Writing is an unfortunate necessity; what is really wanted is to show, to demonstrate, to point out, to exhibit, to make one's interlocutor stand at gaze before the world... [whereas] In a mature science, the words in which the investigator 'writes up' his results should be as few and as transparent as possible." (p.141). One might be inclined to say "So what?" Everybody knows that scientists write up experiments and philosophers write essays, and that writings can be interpreted in various ways. But it goes further than that. Derrida's critique of metaphysics is not limited to the shaky relationship between signifier and signified. Derrida is famous as the inventor of deconstruction. Interpreting Deconstruction More meaning is available from a text than any immediate intuitive interpretation of the words and concepts. As well as the alternative interpretations beloved of all critics and commentators, there are hidden meanings in texts not necessarily intended by the author. Deconstruction is an attempt to prise out these hidden meanings. As Derrida puts it in Of Grammatology, deconstruction aims to "designate the crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed" (p.14 in G.C. Spivak's translation). It is important to note that deconstruction, at least as conceived by Derrida himself, is not a method – it has no clear modus operandi. Instead, it is a way of reading texts by opening them to question, all the time asking: is that the only essence or meaning of a concept? To understand this better, we need more concepts. Derrida defines (well, given his reluctance to commit himself, sort of defines) what these are in Of Grammatology, Part 1. There he claims that metaphors and metonyms are always present in writing, whether intended or not. The meaning of words, he says, is often only understandable by their metaphoric implication. Since words are only defined by their difference from other words there are also binary hierarchies, pairs of words which are defined by their opposites such as left and right, male and female, presence and absence. Take justice again. Whenever the word is used it implies something about injustice. The path or trace to its definition is accompanied by its opposite in a binary hierarchy. If one says or writes "man", one means "not woman". So a word contains a trace of what it does not mean, and the trace is there but not there, the track of something absent. There is a Freudian element here. All signifiers have a history, they are changed by history, but understanding has to take place in a present. For clarity, I have taken a liberty in being more definite than Derrida, who refuses to define a trace as a concept. It is easier to see why if we regard a language as a flexible system. Words, defined by their differences from other words, not by some gold standard, do not maintain meaning; rather they change in meaning over time and in different contexts. The trace represents that change. It is not even itself a static concept. Derrida sees binaries as a problem for metaphysics because metaphysicians tend to be biased towards the dominant word in the binary hierarchy. It is unjustified and misleading, but pervasive. As he writes: "All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded [by] conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent" (Limited Inc, 1988, p.236.). Writers about feminism have, not surprisingly, taken up this notion of dominance bias. The definition of words by their difference from other words goes further. It can also be deferred, so that no meaning of any word is ever fully present. The deferring of meaning can take place in time or context, or simply because a meaning is subjugated to a related or opposite meaning. The process of differing and deferring is combined into one word by Derrida – differance. This word indicates that words (signifiers), as well as being defined by other words (signifiers) from which they differ, also have their meaning deferred as the meaning constantly changes. This differing and deferring process goes on continually when using a language or understanding texts. Texts may have different meanings to the perceiver on re-reading. Words change as contexts change too. This flexibility in interpretability is easy to see with government legislation and legal rulings, which require expert interpretation. And my conception of this article will be different from your conception, and in any future rereading, our conceptions may also differ, either more or less than they do now. If we were reporting the reading from an instrument such as a galvanometer or a weighing machine dial, our conceptions would not differ nearly as much. But in situations where it is hard to put our finger on what is meant – as in philosophy articles – our conceptions may vary radically, and some discussion between us (using yet more words) might, or might not, enlighten us both. Hilary Lawson illustrates the implication of the concepts of the metaphysics of presence, trace, and differance well in his example of a statement of the form 'the chair is black'. He writes: "we are not able to prove the truth of the statement... by going to look at the chair, for there is no present experience which provides the data against which we can check the statement..." rather, "there is no single meaning of the sentence 'the chair is black', and there is no single meaning to our experience at any point. The meaning of the sentence takes place in the play that is the web of language, and experience is not an independent thing which stands outside of that play" (Reflexivity, p.100). The sentence is therefore devoid of the means of physical verification, and we will each conceive the meaning of the statement differently. These are the rudiments of deconstruction. (No Definite) Conclusions There is, of course, a great deal more to Of Grammatology than I have indicated here. As well as arguing against the prioritisation of speech, Derrida attempts to work out whether grammatology, a science of writing, is even possible. He reaches no definite conclusion. His difficulty seems to be that science seeks present solutions successfully, for the most part, unlike metaphysics. He is doubtful whether such solutions would be available for texts. He also has much to say on other philosophers (particularly Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger) and linguists (particularly Saussure, Peirce, and Jacobson). He criticises the two dominant philosophical movements of his day, phenomenology and structuralism, as both indulging in the metaphysics of presence. And that's only Part 1. The second part of the book is given over to putting deconstruction into practice, particularly for the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Claude Levi-Strauss. Derrida spent much of the rest of his career, particularly the early part, deconstructing the work of philosophers and other writers, often showing that their meaning was unclear, and that their texts often said more than they intended. There is much to read; Derrida was one of the most prolific of writers. The intention of this article has been to give a brief introduction to the way Derrida's thinking works. He would have no doubt hated my attempt to provide such a closed summary of meaning and reference. But to quote him out of context, I have aimed only to "designate the crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed." © Mike Sutton 2018 Mike Sutton lives in Birmingham and writes about philosophy, sociology, science and technology.


What hard problem?

Philosophy

The philosophical study of consciousness is chock full of thought experiments: John Searleâs Chinese Room, David Chalmersâ Philosophical Zombies, Frank Jacksonâs Maryâs Room, and Thomas Nagelâs âWhat is it like to be a bat?â among others. Many of these experiments and the endless discussions that follow them are predicated on what Chalmers famously referred as the âhardâ problem of consciousness: for him, it is âeasyâ to figure out how the brain is capable of perception, information integration, attention, reporting on mental states, etc, even though this is far from being accomplished at the moment. What is âhardâ, claims the man of the p-zombies, is to account for phenomenal experience, or what philosophers usually call âqualiaâ: the âwhat is it likeâ, first-person quality of consciousness.

/12/13, 17:08 What Hard Problem? | Issue 99 | Philosophy Now Pagina 1 di 2http://philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Hard_Problem Search firstname.lastname@example.com Home My Account Subscribe Shop Log Out Most Read Most Discussed Most Emailed Enlarge cover Back Issues Categories Podcasts Videos Search Forum Events Links Books Free Articles FOLLOW US ON 1. A student's guide to Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism 2. Does God Exist? 3. The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond 4. Morality is a Culturally Conditioned Response 5. Free Will and Determinism Print Email Discuss Share Science What Hard Problem? Our philosophical science correspondent Massimo Pigliucci asks. The philosophical study of consciousness is chock full of thought experiments: John Searle's Chinese Room, David Chalmers' Philosophical Zombies, Frank Jackson's Mary's Room, and Thomas Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat?' among others. Many of these experiments and the endless discussions that follow them are predicated on what Chalmers famously referred as the 'hard' problem of consciousness: for him, it is 'easy' to figure out how the brain is capable of perception, information integration, attention, reporting on mental states, etc, even though this is far from being accomplished at the moment. What is 'hard', claims the man of the p-zombies, is to account for phenomenal experience, or what philosophers usually call 'qualia': the 'what is it like', first-person quality of consciousness. I think that the idea of a hard problem of consciousness arises from a category mistake. I think that in fact there is no real distinction between hard and easy problems of consciousness, and the illusion that there is one is caused by the pseudo-profundity that often accompanies category mistakes. A category mistake occurs when you try to apply a conceptual category to a given problem or object, when in fact that conceptual category simply does not belong to the problem or object at hand. For instance, if I were to ask you about the color of triangles, you could be caught off guard and imagine that I have some brilliant, perhaps mystical, insight into the nature of triangles that somehow makes the category 'color' relevant to their description as geometrical figures. But of course this would be a mistake (on my part as well as on yours): triangles are characterized by angles, dimensions, and the ratios among their sides, but definitely not by colors. The same, I am convinced, goes for Chalmers' hard problem (or Nagel's question, and so on). The hard problem is often formulated as the problem of accounting for how and why we have phenomenal experience. Chalmers and Nagel think that even when all the scientific facts are in (which will take a lot more time, by the way) we will still be missing something fundamental. This led Chalmers to endorse a form of dualism, and Nagel to reject the current scientific understanding (which amounts to pretty much the same thing, really). Let's unpack this. Why phenomenal consciousness exists is a typical question for evolutionary biology. Consciousness is a biological phenomenon, like blood circulation, so its appearance in a certain lineage of hominids seems to be squarely a matter for evolutionary biologists to consider (they also have a very nice story to tell about the evolution of the heart). Not that I expect an answer any time soon, and possibly ever. Historical questions about behavioral traits are notoriously difficult to tackle, particularly when there are so few (any?) other species to adequately compare ourselves with, and when there isn't much that the fossil record can tell us about it, either. Second, how phenomenal consciousness is possible is a question for cognitive science, neurobiology and the like. If you were asking how the heart works, you'd be turning to anatomy and molecular biology, and I see no reason things should be different in the case of consciousness. But once you have answered the how and the why of consciousness, what else is there to say? "Ah!" exclaim Chalmers, Nagel and others, "You still have not told us what it is like to be a bat (or a human being, or a zombie), so there!" But what it is like is an experience – which means that it makes no sense to ask how and why it is possible in any other senses but the ones just discussed. Of course an explanation isn't the same as an experience, but that's because the two are completely independent categories, like colors and triangles. It is obvious that I cannot experience what it is like to be you, but I can potentially have a complete explanation of how and why it is possible to be you. To ask for that explanation to also somehow encompass the experience itself is both incoherent, and an illegitimate use of the word 'explanation'. At this point the gentle reader may smell echos of Daniel Dennett's or Patricia Churchland's 'deflationary' or 'eliminativist' responses to Chalmers & co. That, however, would be a mistake. Unlike Dennett, I don't think for a moment that consciousness is an 'illusion'; and unlike Churchland I reject the idea that we can (or that it would be useful to) do away with concepts such as consciousness, pain, and the like, replacing them with descriptions of neurobiological processes. On this I'm squarely with Searle when he said that "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality" (chew on that for a bit, if you 17/12/13, 17:08 What Hard Problem? | Issue 99 | Philosophy Now Pagina 2 di 2http://philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Hard_Problem ABOUT CONTACT FOR AUTHORS TERMS & CONDITIONS © Philosophy Now 2013. All rights reserved. Advertisement don't mind). Consciousness as we have been discussing it is a biological process, explained by neurobiological and other cognitive mechanisms, and whose raison d'etre can in principle be accounted for on evolutionary grounds. To be sure, it is still largely mysterious, but (contra Dennett and Churchland) it is no mere illusion (it's too metabolically expensive, and it clearly does a lot of important cognitive work), and (contra Chalmers, Nagel, etc.) it does not represent a problem of principle for scientific naturalism. © Prof. Massimo Pigliucci 2013 Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. He is the co-editor, with Maarten Boudry, of Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem (University of Chicago Press). His philosophical musings can be found at www.rationallyspeaking.org.