The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation: Part One

This book is available in print form.

Introduction

We live in an age of deepening fear, anger and confusion. It feels like societies worldwide are falling to pieces, and any remaining hope that we can avoid a more comprehensive collapse is steadily draining away. Many of us react to this escalating chaos by searching for someone to blame, but this approach yields few effective solutions to our problems or meaningful responses to our predicaments. There is no shortage of opposition to the status quo, but it lacks structure and there is nothing resembling an ideology that could bring enough people together to make much difference to the general direction of world events. Most of us aren’t even looking for a unifying ideology – we have collectively given up hope that such a thing is even possible. And all the time we’re accelerating towards social, economic and ecological catastrophe.     

I am not interested in peddling false hope (“hopium” in collapse-aware lingo). The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation (RPE) would have been a lot easier to write if I’d been willing to engage in that sort of business, and it would also have had a much larger potential audience. I believe a significant degree of collapse can no longer be avoided; the process has already begun and is gaining momentum all the time. It is not that it is physically impossible to avoid the catastrophe – even without any implausible technological advances (“techno-hopium”), we could avoid disaster if only we could sort out our political-ideological problems. And it’s not that these problems aren’t theoretically solvable in the long term, either. What makes catastrophe inevitable is that we do not have centuries, or even decades, to figure out solutions. We have run out of time. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we ran out of time at least 30 years ago and we have now reached the point where this should no longer be the subject of serious debate. How long can we go on saying “We must act now or it will be too late”? How late must it be before that message is no longer appropriate? Too late for what, exactly?     

RPE is not so much about collapse itself as it is about how acknowledging collapse could serve as a catalyst for radical transformation. We cannot afford to stop thinking. Giving up all hope for the future might relieve some of the psychological anguish, but it serves no other purpose than ending the conversation. A real future is coming and we must prepare and adapt, and that means we need to think about it and talk about it much more openly, honestly and realistically than we are now. Where do we go from here? Can we justify any sort of hope for a brighter future? Or must we face the conclusion that Homo sapiens is an evolutionary dead end, and that the sooner we go extinct, the better?      

The challenge, then, is how to navigate a world in which the pursuit of holistic understanding has become nearly impossible. Without a coherent framework to guide us, the fragmentation of knowledge mirrors the fragmentation of our society, leaving us grasping at disconnected pieces of truth. If we are to make sense of the complexities facing us – let alone respond to them – we must find a way to think and act beyond the limits imposed by our current cultural systems. This is not about rejecting expertise or dismissing the value of specialised knowledge, but about recognising the urgent need for synthesis: a way of connecting insights from disparate fields and perspectives in search of a bigger picture.      

There are no great polymaths any more. The last person who even pretended towards that sort of status was Hungarian-American mathematician and physicist John von Neumann (1903-1957) – an individual blessed with both superhuman intelligence and the best education money could buy. There are several reasons for the end of traditional polymathy, one being the sheer amount of information available now and the difficulty of deciding what can be relied on and what can’t. Academia is structured in such a way as to avoid that specific difficulty (that is what peer review is for) but this makes the general problem even worse, because it forces academics to specialise in very narrow areas. It is no longer even possible to be regarded as an expert in all parts of one particular subject, let alone combinations of subjects that are only distantly related. Having gained the deep specialist knowledge required to become recognised as expert in their field by their peers, the last thing it makes sense for an academic to do is to zoom all the way out to life, the universe and everything in order to place their specialist knowledge into a coherent view of humanity and reality. Academia does not work like that – in fact it actively works to suppress anything of the sort. The closest we get to a broad, inclusive picture is collections of papers with a connecting theme, or books where each chapter is written by a different person. Such books are rarely a rewarding read, and even if you do make it to the end then you’re left with an inconclusive account of what is still a relatively narrow topic. Interdisciplinary talking shops barely scratch the surface of this problem. The net result is that academia operates like a giant version of the blind men and the elephant.     

In the discourse surrounding collapse and the future of human civilisation, Jem Bendell stands out as one of the most prominent and controversial voices. His 2018 paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy challenged conventional thinking on sustainability and resilience. Bendell’s core argument is that we must move beyond the illusion that current global systems can be sustained through incremental reforms. Instead, he contends that we are already in a state of “inevitable collapse” due to ecological overshoot, primarily driven by climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion. Bendell’s notion of Deep Adaptation offers a radical shift in thinking. It asks us to prepare for societal breakdown and to rethink our relationship with nature, each other, and ourselves, in a world where the basic tenets of industrial civilisation may no longer hold.     

Bendell’s message did not find an easy path. When Deep Adaptation was first submitted for peer review, it was rejected by academic journals for being “too pessimistic” and “unhelpfully alarmist”. This institutional resistance to his work highlights the limitations of academia in confronting existential risks. Like many voices that call for urgent and fundamental change, Bendell found that the dominant paradigms within academic and policy circles were more invested in sustaining the status quo than in acknowledging the profound transformations required. His paper was eventually self-published, and quickly gained traction outside academic gatekeepers, becoming a touchstone for grassroots movements concerned with climate collapse. The attempts to suppress Bendell’s work bear striking similarities to the broader pattern of resistance to challenging dominant worldviews—whether in academia, politics, or media. His story illustrates the precarious position of radical thinkers who poke at the comfortable narratives of progress and control, and reflects the reality that institutions built on the old order – those of economic growth, material consumption and technological optimism – are incapable of hosting the conversations necessary for the transformation required. At the heart of this struggle is a recognition that the future we imagine must be liberated from the intellectual and cultural forces that resist it. Jem Bendell’s experience, like others before him, demonstrates that the path forward will not be carved out through conventional means.     

I am not an academic. I have a lowly BA in philosophy and cognitive science, and my motivation for going to university at the age of 36 was to try to resolve conflicts and inconsistencies in my own belief system. It was more like therapy than a career move. I was a software engineer before, became a professional foraging teacher and author after, and now I run a smallholding in a tranquil corner of West Wales. My only qualification for writing RPE is that I have spent my whole adult life in search of answers to certain questions, the reasons for which I explain in Chapters One and Eight.

The questions are these:

Is there something wrong with civilisation?

Is there something wrong with Western civilisation in particular?

If there is (in either case) then can it be fixed?

Can we know anything about what will happen if we can’t (or don’t) fix it?

What is the best possible outcome for humanity now?

What is the best (or least bad) possible path from here to there?

RPE is an attempt to answer these questions. Should it ever become widely read then I will expect it to draw criticism from academics across the disciplines I have touched upon, which include philosophy, physics, ecology, evolutionary biology, economics, politics, history, anthropology and psychology. I do hope some people who work in these fields will read it, and I wish to emphasise that it is not my intention to start a turf war with them. To do so would fly in the face of the purpose of this book, which is to attempt to construct a whole picture and imagine new ways for people to co-operate in a shared mission to enable and enact desperately needed ideological change. I will have made mistakes. I ask that people try to focus on the overall picture and suggest ways to improve it. If you disagree with details which disrupt the coherence of that picture, then make a suggestion as to what you think a better alternative might look like. We need to be able to understand our world as a whole system, not just countless disconnected component parts.      

The concept of Ecocivilisation – Ecological Civilisation – provides an opportunity for us to start again. It originated in the Soviet Union and has in recent years become an important part of strategic policy-making in China. Ecocivilisation is the final stage or state of the social evolution of human societies – a form of civilisation which has established a stable, long-term balance with the ecosystem in which it is embedded, and is therefore sustainable indefinitely.      

The West has several related concepts already, but none of them unambiguously refers to an end state. “Sustainability” arguably ought to, but it has come to refer to attempts at sustaining our current version of civilisation while trying to minimise ecological harm, rather than aiming at a coherent vision of an ecologically sustainable civilisation. This lack of joined-up thinking is itself unsustainable. “Environmentalism” has been neutered in a similar way.      

The term “degrowth” has proved harder to debase. On first encounter with this term, some people point out that degrowth is inevitable, and probably quite soon, but this is to misunderstand what it means. A process of contraction (of both economic activity and the human operation on Earth) is indeed inevitable, but there are many different ways this could happen. Collapse and degrowth can be thought of as opposing ends of a scale describing the nature of that contraction. Collapse is chaotic, unmanageable and inherently unfair. Degrowth is a conscious attempt to minimise the chaos and manage the process in an attempt to maximise fairness. “Degrowth” is therefore both the name of a movement (in which case I capitalise it) and of a theoretical process (lowercase). This process is the socially ideal form of contraction – a socially and economically fair downsizing of the human operation on Earth.           

Degrowth is not gaining much traction. Its advocates suggest that insufficient people have heard of it yet and we just need to get the word out, but it also has something of a credibility problem. This problem is political in nature, and one only needs to look at the inadequacy of our response to climate change to understand it. The political obstacles to making contraction fair on a global scale dwarf even those of stopping climate change, and that suggests degrowth is an unattainable aspiration. We have already witnessed the extent to which global politics has hindered collective action to control carbon dioxide emissions, so why should anyone believe we are capable of tackling the far greater challenge of mitigating or compensating for the consequences of catastrophic climate change?     

One of the reasons ecocivilisation may prove to be more useful as a concept than degrowth is that its relevance cannot be undermined by people’s views about the political viability of degrowth and the inevitability of collapse. Because it is unambiguously defined as an end state or goal, with nothing implied about how we get from here to there, it is useful almost everywhere on the collapse-degrowth spectrum. The only exceptions are if you are absolutely certain that humans are heading for near-term extinction, or if you believe it is both possible and desirable to abandon civilisation as a form of social organisation and return to tribalism, pre-industrial agriculture or anarchistic hunter-gathering. I explain in Chapter Two why I think extinction is exceptionally unlikely and a return to a “pre-civilised” state of human social organisation is impossible. We have to find a way forwards, and some kind of ecocivilisation is our only possible long-term destination.     

We can expect people to lobby for extensions to the definition of ecocivilisation. For example, they might argue that it must be as socially and economically fair as Degrowthers want the process of contraction to be. However, attempts to widen the baseline definition beyond that which is required for ecological sustainability will lead directly to unresolvable political disagreements before we have even established our opening vocabulary, definitions and starting point. To be clear, I am not implying that we should be aiming for an unfair ecocivilisation. I am merely observing that it is much easier to imagine unfair forms of ecocivilisation than fair ones. A tiny minority could secure a monopoly on power and impose eco-feudalism on everybody else, for example. I hope we can agree that this is not the sort of ecocivilisation we’re aiming for without any need to build it into the definition. We must avoid pointless, unwinnable battles over rival utopian visions of ecocivilisation. We need some idea of what realistic options are available – what sorts of ecocivilisation might actually be possible. Demanding the impossible – making the (allegedly) perfect the enemy of the least bad – helps nobody.     

What might a Western ecocivilisation look like? Is there a believable way to get from here to there? Is it possible to build some sort of new ideology and new movement with this concept as its foundation? How would we go about making this happen? Where could we agree to start?     

When I began to discuss this with people, one particular problem kept cropping up, in various different guises. It concerns the relationship between reality and morality, and can be illustrated by the following claim, which is a real example:

“But I must point out that the question 'What is real?' is as subjective as 'What is important?'”

First we must be clear what “important” means here. This word can be used in a purely scientific-objective manner but in this case it is being used to mean “morally important”. A value judgement is involved. 

I believe this sort of thinking is right at the heart of what is wrong with Western civilisation and must be challenged as a pre-requisite to building a coherent movement towards ecocivilisation. Ecocivilisation must be based on ecology, and that means on the hard sciences, which might as well be defined by their systematic attempt to eliminate the subjective in order to uncover the underlying objective structure of reality. Value judgements do not belong in the hard sciences – those disciplines are concerned with what is real or true, not the moral or aesthetic value of anything.     

My position is that objective reality does indeed exist, and that we do have knowledge of it, albeit limited in various ways. The best of this knowledge is completely independent of human value judgements. When I say “objective reality”, I mean that there is something external to the minds of humans, and that this is the reason why certain things are persistently true in your subjective reality, and mine, and everybody else’s. One example is that humans are descended from apes (and technically are apes). Another is that the Earth’s climate is changing more rapidly than it has done at any time since the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and that the primary cause is human activity. A third example is that our world is divided into around 200 independent sovereign states and nothing can be done to change this situation – at least not until a great many preliminary changes have already taken place. 

If humans have reliable knowledge of an objective reality, then whether we are concerned with practicalities or with morality it is essential that we start by establishing what we can and can’t objectively know and say about it. Any other approach will lead to impractical answers and false morality. We are heading straight towards the most serious humanitarian crisis there is ever going to be, and we have ended up in this mess because previous and current generations have refused to deal with reality. We cannot solve our problems by claiming that the question “what is real?” is as subjective as “what is important?” That is just an open invitation to people whose value judgement is that (for example) the freedom to acquire unlimited personal wealth is more important than ecological facts about reality. How can we ever come to an objective, collective understanding of what is important if we cannot agree to start our enquiries by establishing what we know about what is objectively real? I am going to make a case that attempts to put morality before reality are themselves immoral: that there is such a thing as objective truth, and that its acceptance is more important than any value judgement. That this is itself a value judgement might seem paradoxical, but it is consistent at the level of meta-ethics. Accepting objective reality is a higher-order moral imperative than any other specific value or moral stance – an overarching principle rather than a contradiction.     

This is all highly controversial, and directly related to what have become known as “the culture wars”. Postmodern political ideologies are systemically hostile to realism and claims to objective truth, and deeply skeptical of great societal goals. The anti-realism and cynicism of postmodernism is, at least according to the postmodernists themselves, motivated by morality. Their stated agenda is to make the world a better place by standing up for oppressed and powerless minorities everywhere. They seek to unify the people at the bottom in a celebration of diversity with the intent to overturn oppressive power structures constructed and maintained by the people at the top. However, the effect their ideology has had on society has been the exact opposite: the resistance to existing power structures has been shattered. The “elite” plutocracy/kleptocracy are increasing their wealth and consolidating their power while the opposition quarrels with itself over the politically permissible meanings of words, and over what is or is not a politically acceptable part of reality. And yet many people firmly believe that postmodernism is the end of philosophical history – that there can be no escape from it. I believe this view is wrong. RPE leaves postmodernism behind.     

Some readers may be wondering whether I have identified the wrong enemy. They might say that the problem isn’t postmodern leftism, but the capitalist economic system so beloved of the right. And if that is the problem, shouldn’t we be starting with Marxism as a baseline solution? Do we really need to re-invent the wheel? The concept of ecocivilisation was invented in the USSR and is now being implemented (officially, at least) in China, and their versions of the concept were built on top of the idea of a mature socialist society. In fact I hardly mention capitalism and communism in RPE. I do not wish to be sucked backwards into what I call “pre-collapse politics”. I don’t want to get stuck in the ruts of previous attempts to transform civilisation that have not worked, and that were not designed for an age of global ecological collapse. I want to go back to first principles and start again, in search of the whole elephant.     

No single ideology is going to be enough. What we need is a meta-ideology – a test of ideologies to measure their compatibility with the great societal goal of transforming Western civilisation as we know it into a form of ecocivilisation based on the best achievements of 2,500 years of Western cultural progress. It will need to facilitate agreement about what is worth keeping, what must be reformed, and what isn’t worth saving or can’t or shouldn’t be saved. It will have to embrace both science and spirituality, and it must do so in a way that does justice to them both. In some ways it will resemble today’s political left and in others it will resemble the right, though it will necessarily reject much of today’s political debate as reality-denying nonsense. This meta-ideology will need to be primarily epistemological. It must be concerned with the status and relationships between different sorts of claims on knowledge, and it must start with ecological realism. We cannot construct an ecocivilisation unless we can agree that there is just one global ecosystem, that it is a real thing and not a social construction, and that we must find a way to share it not just with each other but with all of the non-human components of that ecosystem as well. I call this meta-ideology the New Epistemic Deal (the NED), and it is explained in Chapter Nine – the first eight chapters are the groundwork needed to set that foundation stone in its proper place.     

The need to construct a coherent synthesis inevitably means I have to draw heavily on the work of other people. I’m assembling a puzzle largely made of pieces created by others. As a result, some parts of this book read like a who’s who of people who have come up with ecocivilisation-compatible ideas. Of particular importance are two books with remarkably similar titles, although they deal with what might at first appear to be only distantly related subject matter. The titular similarity is no accident though – these two books provide two important pieces of the puzzle, and they fit together in a most unexpected way; neither was designed with any thought of the other. The first is Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007) by physicist Henry Stapp, in which the author provides an adaptation and extension of von Neumann’s “orthodox” interpretation of quantum mechanics (sometimes called “consciousness causes the collapse”), including a new hypothesis about free will. The second is Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature is Almost Certainly False (2012) by philosopher Thomas Nagel. Nagel is the most prominent atheist, skeptic and metaphysical naturalist who is also a prominent critic of metaphysical materialism. His book is a close analysis of the consequences for science and naturalism if you accept that materialism is false, and his core subject matter is the evolutionary explanation of consciousness. If materialism has failed, what could a non-materialistic but still naturalistic alternative look like? Both books are groundbreaking attempts to bring consciousness into a scientific conception of reality from which it has always been missing, but they do it in completely different ways. Nagel says very little about quantum mechanics and Stapp says nothing at all about evolution. The bottom line, for them both, is that materialistic science has not been able to answer fundamental questions about what consciousness is, why it exists, when and how it evolved, or how it is causally related to the physical universe. In fact, it isn’t even clear how to ask these questions from that perspective. What is the scientific definition of consciousness? Not only is there no scientific consensus on the answer to that question – there isn’t even an intelligible explanation of why a consensus has proved so elusive. 

Chapter Five focuses on Nagel’s vision of a post-materialistic naturalism, and he arrives at a very specific conclusion – that causality as it is understood in the context of materialistic science cannot, on its own, account for the evolution of conscious organisms. Instead, he argues, the process must have been teleological. In other words: conscious life was somehow destined to evolve, and not because of divine will but because somehow that is just how nature works.      

Part One of RPE is an exploration of the complex set of problems that humanity in general, and Western civilisation in particular, currently faces. Part Two is my best attempt to imagine a realistic solution. Unrealistic solutions are worse than no solutions at all, for they breed a false sense of security and provide hiding places for the inconvenient truths which grow ever more abundant in our world. 

The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation is a book is about transformation – both the socio-cultural transformation of the current, broken and unsustainable forms of Western and global civilisation into a mature global ecocivilisation, and my own transformation from an evangelical materialistic atheist into a magical realist. Common to both transformations is the traumatic process of breakdown and collapse of existing structures as a necessary pre-requisite for the creation of new and better ones. Cultural Anthropologist Victor Turner called this “liminality” – the “between and betwixt” part of a rite of passage, such as a coming of age or a marriage, when the participants no longer belong to the old state but do not yet belong to the new one.     

Liminality is the disorienting, in-between stage where old structures have collapsed, and new ones are not yet formed – a state of profound possibility. The deep bonds that emerge in such moments exist outside the normal hierarchies of structure and anti-structure, fostering equality and shared purpose. Turner called this “Communitas”. Collapse can be thought of as a perilous journey through liminality on a global scale. Just as in personal transformation, societal collapse brings both loss and opportunity: the loss of what no longer serves us, and the chance to rebuild with intention, imagination, and a deeper sense of what it means to be human.     

The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation is about navigating the threshold: between what is and what could be, between despair and hope, and between an unsustainable present and a sustainable future. To move forward, we must embrace the discomfort of liminality, the insight of communitas, and the radical creativity that collapse demands. Transformation is not optional.

Chapter 1: Metanoia, Part One

When I was growing up in the 1970s, I was offered a choice between two mutually contradictory ways of understanding the world, and two corresponding and equally contradictory accounts of how the world and humanity came into being. The first of these was taught to me in church and Sunday school, where I was taken every week by my mother. God created the world in six days, and the last thing He created was Adam and Eve. They had everything they needed, happily running around naked in the Garden of Eden, but there was also a tree there called The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the fruit of which God instructed them that they must not eat, or they would die. Then a serpent told Eve that God had lied to her – that she wouldn’t die, but rather she would gain knowledge of good and evil, and thereby become like God. Eve ate the forbidden fruit and gave some to Adam as well. Adam and Eve’s eyes were then indeed opened up, and they realised they were naked and were suddenly ashamed. God was furious, kicked them out of the Garden, and has punished the rest of humanity for their disobedience ever since.     

I have never understood what this creation story is really about, which is why I never believed it – taken literally it is about as believable as Father Christmas, although considerably weirder, which made it all the more astonishing to me why some grown-ups think it is literally true. If God’s plan was for Adam and Eve, and their descendents, to stay in the Garden for ever, then why did He create the Tree? And why would He punish all their descendents for a crime they didn’t commit? Are these the actions of a loving and merciful God? This is just one example – I had countless other questions that are just as unanswerable on a literalist interpretation. But if the myth is supposed to be understood metaphorically instead, then what does it mean? Nobody ever volunteered this information, and at the time I didn’t know how, or who, to ask. My Sunday School teachers either didn’t know or wouldn’t say. Even now, with the internet as a research tool, the meaning of this mythology is opaque, because there are competing interpretations, none of which resembles the one I’d suggest if I were asked now what I think it might mean. And yet this is not some minor theological detail – it is the foundation of the Judaeo-Christian explanation for what has gone wrong in the world.      

I found the New Testament no more believable than the Old – virgin birth, resurrection and the feeding of 5,000 people with two fish and five loaves of bread? If you remove the magical elements then the story doesn’t make any sense, but these stories were presented to me as history – albeit a special sort of history about a time when magic was real. The Christians in my life believed, with no apparent trace of doubt, that the canonical gospels are eye-witness accounts of the miraculous life of a historical person called Jesus. There was no suggestion of this having a metaphorical meaning. That it is unbelievable is not a reason to think that it isn’t true, but further proof that Jesus really was (and still is) the son of God. How else can you explain the miracles? I grew to resent the waste of my Sunday mornings, but my mother compelled me to keep attending. “You may not care about your soul,” she said, “but I do.”       

By the time I was ten I had grown confident enough to resist. I chose Christmas Day to point blank refuse to go to church and that was the end of that. However, the effects of these experiences reached far beyond my relationship with Christianity. I was vaguely aware of Islam, which seemed to me like an angrier, scarier version Christianity. Judaism I thought of as Christianity without Jesus. Of the religions of the east I knew nothing more than names and saw no reason for that to change. For me, Christianity had poisoned the well from which all religions are drawn, and I decided that religion was something I was better off without.     

The other creation story on offer was so much more fascinating and believable than any kind of religion I could imagine, because it actually goes to the bother of explaining and justifying its claims to knowledge. The scientific account of the development of the cosmos and the evolution of life on Earth intuitively made sense to me, is supported and driven by observation of the material world, aims to be clear and coherent, and admits to being a work in progress that changes when change is needed. And there are no fairy stories. Philosophy didn’t register on my radar at all. How is it different to religion? What answers does it provide? How does it justify them? I didn’t know and didn’t care. I just immersed myself in science wherever I could find it, which was mostly television, books and magazines. The three subjects I eventually chose to study at A-level were physics, chemistry and biology. 

I spent my childhood roaming the woodland that spread out in three directions from our house, and began to develop a deep personal connection with the wild natural world. I increasingly felt more at home there than I did anywhere else. I felt a growing bond with all animals...except for humans. These were signs of difficult times to come. My teens were troubled years – nothing unusual about that, except that in my case I was a very early adopter of climate-change-related mental illness. I had already been heading towards the extreme end of the environmental movement before climate change began to emerge as the ecological story of our age. It was not like there was any shortage of other problems – the barbaric cruelty of whaling, the rapidly disappearing rainforests, the chemical assault on the wild world everywhere, etc... I wanted to fight back on behalf of nature, so I decided to get into politics. First I joined the Labour Party, but nobody there was interested in my point of view. They were far too committed to their existing agenda, ecological issues were only ever going to play second fiddle at best, and that just isn’t enough if the world needs saving. So I left Labour and joined the Greens, only to find that even more depressing and hopeless. The Greens were supposed to be the party that put ecology first, but my local party spent most of its time navel-gazing about internal politics (one leader, or two?) and trying to out-left Labour on social issues. And since they had no hope of gaining or even influencing power at a national level because of the UK’s antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system, the whole thing seemed like a pointless waste of time. What were these people actually trying to achieve? 

At this time I was also paying attention to what was going on in the United States, and it was clear to me that the political resistance to climate science there was going to be enormous, and based on the most cynical sort of lies. So I gave up on politics. I didn’t lose interest in following it, but I gave up believing that it was worth any time or effort engaging with the political system myself. I gave up believing that politics offers any real solutions to our most serious problems. I felt that most people either didn’t understand the severity and implications of our ecological predicament, or they were trying to mislead others about it. To make matters worse, even the people who did understand were so committed to the traditional battle between left and right that an agreement about how to share the costs of stopping climate change was clearly going to be impossible. Such an agreement remains as far from reality today as it was then, although many more people are becoming aware of the true nature and scale of the problems. 

There was also something else going on in my life at that time: a growing awareness that casual dishonesty was getting me into trouble. I did not prioritise truth and sometimes I would lie in order to make my life seem more interesting, or to get something that I wanted. Liars need to remember which lie they have told to whom and hope people don’t unexpectedly talk to each other, and so perpetually run the risk of ending up trapped in a web of their own falsehoods. For me it all came to a head late one night when I was on holiday with some friends. I found myself alone on a beach, feeling lost, with no foundation to my life. I wanted to be free from lies and their consequences, and made a connection between the search for scientific truth and the need for personal honesty. So I decided to invent my own personal “religion”, with three commandments:

1. Seek and defend the truth. Try to understand what is really going on in the world, and defend what you believe to be the truth from attempts to hide, distort or deny it.      
2. Speak truthfully. Don’t intentionally mislead people.      
3. Never lie to yourself. Those are the worst sort of lies.

Then I walked naked into the sea and went under the water in a ritual of self-baptism.

By this point in my life I understood the threat that climate change posed, I had been forced to accept that there wasn’t going to be an adequate political response, and lying to myself about the likely consequences wasn’t an option. I therefore arrived at the conclusion that the world as we know it is doomed in the foreseeable future – that we are heading for an almighty collapse, probably in my lifetime. I had nobody to talk to about this. Trying to do so just made things worse, because nobody understood what I was trying to tell them, so everything was misinterpreted as a deepening problem in my mind rather than anything to do with the real world. There was no internet to help me find like-minded people in faraway places, and no books to help me understand or cope – or at least none that I was aware of. I felt isolated and alienated, and fell into deep depression. I fantasised about becoming a genetic engineer and creating a superbug capable of wiping out enough of the human race to stop the ecological destruction and save what was left of the non-human natural world. The only good thing in my life was music, but even that was the agonised output of bands like The Smiths and Nirvana. I did not want any part in the society I had grown up in. I didn’t want what it was offering me, and I didn’t want to share its guilt. 

Then one day in the summer of 1989, when I was 20, my brain seized up. I sat staring into a computer screen at work, no longer able to think anything at all. When I started talking again, my words booked me a place in a psychiatric hospital, deemed to be a suicide risk. During my four week stay at The Netherne I made no progress at all on my own problems, although I learned quite a lot about other people’s. The doctors told me I was psychotic – detached from reality. They told me I was suffering from “endogenous depression” – the sort that comes from inside, rather than being caused by external problems. I repeatedly explained to them exactly what the external causes were, and they told me I had an over-active imagination and had got things out of proportion. They gave me drugs which replaced the psychological pain with meaningless nothingness, and that allowed the rational part of my brain to start working properly again. I eventually arrived at the conclusion that neither the doctors nor the drugs could help me, leaving me with a stark choice: I could either take my own life, or live one day at a time with no care for either my own future or that of the rest of humanity. Nihilism (at least with respect to humans, myself included) or suicide. Since both options required me to get out of the hospital, and the only way to get out of the hospital was to lie to the doctors, I was forced to break my second commandment. Footnote:This I did not do lightly, and it forced me to acknowledge that there are certain circumstances where lying is indeed justified. However, I have found over the years that these circumstances occur very rarely indeed. The overwhelming majority of lies are badly motivated. I told them that I had had time to reflect, and now things didn’t seem so bad, and they let me go home. As you will conclude from the fact that I am still here, I chose nihilism.     

I came out of that hospital a changed person. I was fascinated by the coming collapse, and even though I’d abandoned hope that the most serious of our problems could be solved, I continued to search for a deeper and broader understanding of what is really going on in the world – a process made considerably easier by emotional detachment from the inevitable human suffering. If you find yourself perfectly placed to observe the most spectacular train crash in history, you might as well get the popcorn in. Obviously I knew I am a passenger on the train myself, but nihilism is a pretty good antidote to that. I became a drug-fuelled hedonist, found a sweet and caring girlfriend, wrote some agonised songs and put a band together.     

My acceptance of the inevitability of collapse, and the resulting nihilism, were early steps on a longer journey, though I had no idea of that at the time. Sometimes a comprehensive breakdown is necessary before you can start again. This principle doesn’t just apply to individuals. It can operate at much larger levels. 

Chapter 2: The Metacrisis

The biggest and deepest crisis our species will ever face has begun. Biggest because after the global population peaks and crashes there will never again be anywhere close to eight billion humans living on Earth. Deepest because the changes to the structure of human social organisation required if civilisation of any sort is to survive what is coming aren’t just unprecedented in terms of human history – they represent an evolutionary revolution of a kind that has only occurred a few times in the entire history of life on Earth, and just twice on the line of descent from abiogenesis to anatomically modern humans.

The paths to ecocivilisation

There are many possible paths through this crisis, the vast majority of which ultimately lead to some form of ecologically sustainable civilisation. None of these paths are easy, but some are much longer and harder, and involve far more suffering, than others. The paths that are easiest in the shorter term are the ones which become harder in the more distant future. Taking difficult decisions now is, by definition, hard, but not taking them will ultimately be even harder. But we are human, so of course we prefer to take the easier option now because we will probably be dead when the consequences of our decisions are felt by future generations. It is still possible that these changes tothe structure of human social organisation will be purely the result of cultural evolution, but the probability that biological evolution will also be involved increases proportionally to the inadequacy of our cultural response. Are we the finished article, biologically?      

This book is about the real paths and where they might take us, and how we should, as societies and individuals, be thinking about the future. It is about preparing for a future in which we will be confronted by the increasingly difficult realities of the Metacrisis. I believe the best possible futures are those where we collectively learn to think not just more rationally and realistically but also more coherently and holistically. As things stand, there is almost no public debate at all about the real paths. Instead there is a fragmented smorgasbord of every kind of nonsense that people want to believe, or want other people to believe. Different groups and individuals continually scream past each other. Large numbers of people live their lives in echo chambers guarded by self-appointed ideological gatekeepers whose calling is to “keep their communities safe” from ideas deemed to be too dangerous, frightening or immoral. Meanwhile, the situation in the real world keeps getting worse, steadily reducing the physically possible options remaining for the future of our planet and our species.      

Facing the truth about the severity of our predicament is not easy. In extreme situations we can expect serious conflict between ethical idealism and practical realism, but in normal times, by definition, extreme situations happen very rarely and to few people. These are not normal times. The whole world is heading towards an extreme situation that will take at least centuries and probably millennia to play out, and instead of hitting the brakes we’re accelerating straight into it. There is no way to avoid it now. Even if we could miraculously overcome the political obstacles that stand in the way of meaningful reform of an economic system that is fatally detached from reality, it is already too late. The question now is not whether we can still avoid the biggest and deepest crisis we’ll ever face, but just how bad things are going to get before the situation begins to stabilise, how long it takes until light becomes visible at the other end of the tunnel, and what kind of civilisation – and what kind of human – eventually emerges. Given the extent of the changes required, maybe a better metaphor would be a pupa.     

Perhaps there never was any way to avoid it. The whole thing may already have been inevitable long before our ancestors invented farming. My guess is that the point of no return was no later than 2 million years ago, as Homo erectus established itself as the first apex predator specialised in brainpower. Once evolution had started down that path, and got to work perfecting auxiliary adaptations such as our toolmaker’s hands and complex speech, further increases in brainpower were inevitable. Then, when our intelligence had passed some sort of threshold and climatic conditions were optimal, a rapid acceleration of cultural evolution catapulted us to where we are now (see Appendix One).     

We’re the cleverest animal there has ever been, by an enormous margin. So why are we in so much trouble? Why can’t we think our way out of it?

The biological growth imperative

A fundamental property of all known life forms is a drive to grow and expand – to increase in size, reproduce, occupy more space and/or consume more resources. This process is competitive, and it is the main driving force of both ecological and evolutionary processes. Its flipside is death and extinction – the only way it is possible for new organisms to flourish and new species to evolve is for others – the old, the weak and the losers in the grand competition of life – to die and go extinct. I will call this property “the biological growth imperative”. 

Much more rarely in the story of life, something else happens: a new sort of co-operation is established between individual organisms to create a super-organism (relative to the individuals it is composed of). An early example of this “mutualism” was when the individual micro-organisms that were the ancestors of what we call cell organelles got together to produce the first eukaryotic cell (a cell with a nucleus and a variety of other internal structures, rather than just a biological bag of genetic material). In order to do this, each of the organelles had to find a way to override the growth imperative: they had to “learn” how to stop growing and reproducing, unless instructed to do so by the nucleus when the whole cell is ready to divide. 

It happened again when the first multicellular organisms appeared. Multicellular organisms are a colony of genetically identical cells, even though there are many different types of cell with a huge variety of purposes and physical forms. That this happened at all is an example of the mind-boggling power of evolution by natural selection – an extraordinary feat of biological engineering. Again, the biggest obstacle to assembling a viable super-organism from its component parts was the biological growth imperative. Every cell in a multi-cellular organism is the last in an unbroken series of cells stretching right back to the first single-celled ancestor, every one of which divided, and yet somehow it “knows” that it must specialise and (in most cases) stop dividing. The complexity of this process of overriding the biological growth imperative is revealed by the plethora of ways it can malfunction, whenever the cell “forgets” to stop dividing. We call this cancer. 

The next major layer of complexity occurred in termites about 150 million years ago, and in the hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps) at least eight times since then. Footnote: 'Ancestral Monogamy Shows Kin Selection is Key to the Evolution of Eusociality', William Hughes et al,.Science,2008, Volume 320, Issue5880, pp 1213-1216. Each cell in an insect is a collaboration of organelles. Each insect is a collaboration of genetically identical but morphologically diverse cells. A colony of eusocial insects is a collaboration of individuals which functions as a single super-organism. In order to achieve this, their genetics had to change such that each individual that labours for the colony does so on behalf of its own genes, even though the workers don’t get to reproduce. So again we have an example of an additional layer of co-operation, which was only made possible by most of the individual units that comprise the super-organism finding a way to over-ride the biological growth imperative.     

Something similar has happened in social mammals, such as wolves. Wolf packs are led by a dominant pair, and usually they are the only ones who reproduce. Other members of the pack help to raise the young, who share at least some of their genes. The system would not work if all the adults followed the imperative, so most of them don’t have any right to reproduce. If they want to do that then they must establish a new pack in a new territory.     

Now compare to humans. Civilisation is another example of individual organisms co-operating to form a super-organism, but in terms of evolutionary history it is both new and revolutionary. It appeared only very recently and is unlike anything that has previously happened (to any species, not just humans). Our previous state of social organisation was tribalism – which was more like the wolf pack, though with more complex reproductive arrangements, than it is to what has happened since. There were also loose collaborations between larger groups – a sort of proto-civilisation that had not yet run into the problems that emerge when you stop being nomadic hunter-gatherers. footnote: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow, Allen Lane, 2021. In human tribal systems these internal relationships are regulated by social rules, the whole system having evolved relatively slowly as an integral part of human evolution more generally. Civilisation is on a completely different scale to this, and has developed much more rapidly. The Neolithic revolution took several thousand years, but almost immediately after humans invented the form of social and physical organisation we call “cities”, they became home to tens of thousands of people. Bigger was better, right from the start.Footnote: See Appendix One.    

These new super-organisms started out as temple/city states, then expanded into great empires, and now they are sovereign nations. Unfortunately, this revolutionary evolutionary advance is still in the experimental stage and suffers from a major problem which has brought countless civilisations down in the past and now directly threatens our own: we are yet to find a satisfactory way to over-ride the biological growth imperative. We haven’t done so at the level of global civilisation and sovereign states – the history of human civilisation is the history of war between groups of humans, usually over territory and access to resources, though occasionally over important ideas, especially ideas about human social organisation. And we haven’t done so within sovereign states either – or at least we haven’t done so in the West; China’s one-child policy undeniably succeeded in overriding the imperative in its most direct form. However, that is still only one aspect of a much bigger problem and China is only one country. Elsewhere in the world, including the West, population control is unthinkable, or at least unspeakable.     

In the temple/city state model, individual humans were encouraged to reproduce in order to provide military manpower, and the imperative was either satisfied by expansion at the expense of other humans, or counterbalanced by a death rate kept high by famine, disease and endless warfare. This system was perfected by the Romans, who invented the republic and pushed territorial expansion to its absolute limits. Something similar applied in feudalism too – feudal estates had to supply soldiers to their rulers, and if that didn’t keep the population under control then localised famine did (there was very little international trade, and feudal estates aimed at self-sufficiency). In the modern Western world of science, capitalism and democracy, we do not even attempt to overcome the biological growth imperative. Instead we celebrate it and encourage it. We have constructed social, political and economic systems that depend on it. To question the desirability of growth, whether in terms of population or GDP, is to reject the constraints of present political reality. It’s sufficiently outside the Overton Window

[Footnote: Named after Joseph Overton, this term describes the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. to ensure that you are talking about the philosophical context of contemporary politics rather than actually taking part in it.]      

Our economic and political system requires that each individual human is actively encouraged to consume more, even though many don’t have enough. Control of human numbers is strictly taboo – “progressive” people frequently denounce it as ecofascism. The way to control the population, we are told, is to raise living standards – something that would require very large numbers of people who are currently very poor consuming significantly more than they currently do. Or perhaps the problem will simply solve itself, even though this would be catastrophic for our economic system. We are willing to call for a reduction in the wealth and consumption of the very rich, but it is widely assumed that all humans – at current population levels or higher – should have the right to enough resources not just to survive but to reproduce to our hearts’ content. Not many of us would consent to compulsory restrictions on our own rights to behave in all sorts of unsustainable ways.     

We suffer from a profound psychological, political and cultural unwillingness to admit the reality of this situation. The only way to make civilisation work – to make it ecologically sustainable and therefore a viable example of co-operative evolution rather than an inherently unstable structure which is doomed to collapse – is to find ways to comprehensively and reliably control the biological growth imperative in humans. This has to apply both individually and collectively. Unfortunately there is no way to achieve this that does not conflict with what Westerners consider to be inalienable individual human rights, such as our unrestricted and unqualified right to reproduce, consume whatever resources we can legally acquire, and expand our personal territory (i.e. buy/own property and land). There is no pleasant way to square this circle.

Humanity’s future

What is the long-term fate of Homo sapiens? Are we going to so thoroughly wreck this planet that the entire land surface becomes uninhabitable? Are we heading towards extinction? This is certainly a popular view among some of the more extreme of the collapse-aware. I’ve seen plenty of people declare their certainty that civilisation will disappear by the middle of this century and all complex life will be extinct by the end. This is an understandable reaction to the shock of realising that civilisation as we know it is doomed and that its collapse has already begun. It is also undemanding in the sense that no more thinking is required: if everything is going extinct in the foreseeable future then nothing really matters any more. There is no need to focus on survival – either your own or anybody else’s – or the range of possible futures for humanity and the long-term consequences of our decisions today. Extinction is the ultimate example of levelling down: it’s as bad as things can get, but at least it is equally bad for everyone. In reality, near-term human extinction is extremely improbable, precisely because we are by far the most intelligent species in the history of life on Earth, a talent that has also made us the most adaptable. There is also a limit to how much damage we can do to the global ecosystem before our numbers are reduced to the point where we have effectively removed ourselves from the equation, at least at that level. We couldn’t turn Earth into Venus if we tried – eventually the atmosphere would lose heat into space faster than the greenhouse effect can warm it up. [Footnote: Scoping of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report Cross Cutting Issues, Thirty-first Session of the IPCC Bali,26–29 October 2009.] Even if we collectively choose the worst possible scenario for climate change, there will still be places on this planet that humans can eke out a living. Clearly the global population will be far smaller, but even if it is reduced to six figures then we will still not be threatened with extinction.      

Another popular prediction is that we will return to the Stone Age, or abandon farming entirely and go back to hunter-gathering. This won’t happen because we aren’t going to forget what books are for, or how to make them, and the more valuable or useful a book is, the more reason there will be to look after it, and make copies of it. The paraphernalia of 20^th and 21^st century techno-industrial civilisation is going to be very much in evidence for a long time to come. Certainly we are going to go backwards in some respects (for most people, most of the time, collapse will be experienced as declining living standards) but that doesn’t mean we can return to the Stone Age, or to any other stage of human development. What is coming is very bad, but it is the future, not the past.     

So what is going to happen? Nobody has a crystal ball, but a very broad answer is available, because there are limits to the way evolution and ecology operate. Ecosystems evolve dynamically in response to what is happening to their parts and that isn’t going to change because a new sort of apex predator has destabilised the whole system. No species can remain out of ecological balance with its ecosystem forever. Not even a very clever one.     

It seems probable that humans have got a very long future stretching out ahead of us. Certainly long enough for all sorts of evolutionary changes to take place, to both humans and the Earth’s ecosystems. The broad answer is that at some point a new ecological balance will emerge between the descendants of the survivors of the die-off and an Anthropocene ecosystem very different to the Holocene ecosystem that nurtured civilisations for the last 6,000 years. There can be no return to nomadic tribalism, and no sustained anarchism. Civilisation is too powerful. Civilised humans will always eventually overpower or displace uncivilised and disorganised ones. We cannot uninvent civilisation, so we are doomed to keep trying to make it work until we finally figure out how to control the biological growth imperative.     

If this view is correct, then an ecologically sustainable form of civilisation isn’t just something we should aspire to, but an inevitability. And it will not be merely an inevitable stage, like the scientific and industrial revolutions and the coming collapse, but the completion of the evolutionary revolution which began in Mesopotamia in prehistory. In that sense at least, ecocivilisation is our destiny.

Ecocivilisation, China and the West 

Ecocivilisation (Ecological Civilisation) is any form of human civilisation which has established a stable long-term balance with the ecosystem in which it is embedded and upon which it depends, and is therefore sustainable indefinitely. The final state or stage of the evolution of human social organisation.

The concept of ecocivilisation is currently in only fringe use in Western politics and philosophy. It was first used by academics in the Soviet Union in 1984, then in China from 1987. In 2012 the Chinese government made ecocivilisation one of its five national development goals.     

In China the concept is already closely bound to policy and governance, and rooted in the ancient philosophical-religious tradition of Taoism. The Chinese do, obviously, acknowledge the existence of different forms of society, and they define ecocivilisation as the final state “for a given society”. Of particular relevance here is that China’s political system is authoritarian: it is possible for the leadership to commit the nation to ecocivilisation without having to worry about winning the next election. This difference is crucial, because democracy is one of the hallmarks of Western civilisation, and is very likely to pose multiple show-stopping problems for a Western version of ecocivilisation.       

China has already demonstrated the power of its authoritarian system to make essential ecological choices that would be impossible in any existing Western democracy. From 1979 to 2015 the Chinese government implemented a one-child policy intended to reverse China’s unsustainable population growth. There is no better example of a policy that was both ecologically necessary and unthinkable in the West. If you ask Westerners their opinion about it now, you can expect the answers to focus on the negative consequences for individual human rights (such as forced abortions) or the unintended side-effect of the imbalanced sex ratio that currently exists in China because of a preference for boys over girls. However, if the policy is judged in terms of its raison d’etre, it was a great success: China’s population peaked at just over 1.4 billion in 2021. Had it not been implemented then both China and the whole world would be in a significantly worse ecological position now than they, and we, actually are. As for the undesirable consequences for human rights, there is no point in creating laws if you are not prepared to enforce them, and the more unpopular the law the more important enforcement is. If the law itself is morally defensible, then so is enforcement. And with hindsight the sex-ratio imbalance might have been avoided if the authorities had made clearer just how disadvantageous such an outcome would be to men when it comes to finding a partner – the singles market in China is now very much stacked in favour of women. Neither of these negative consequences are bad enough to have justified not implementing the policy. They were a price worth paying to avoid a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe worse than Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and an irrelevant trifle compared to the price that will have to be paid everywhere for ecocivilisation.     

Ecocivilisation requires that humans are systematically deprived of the right to behave in an ecologically unsustainable manner. How else could it work? What exactly this means must be subject to a great deal of public debate, but as a general claim it must be true. The only conceivable alternative is a world where everybody is free to behave unsustainably, but nobody actually does. While physically possible, this is a game theoretical fantasy of the highest order. In the real world, civilised humans don’t behave like that. None of us are Jesus.     

I find myself heading for familiar trouble. All I want to do is write the truth as I understand it: our problem, both globally and in most if not all individual sovereign states, is ecological overshoot caused by severe overpopulation. We’re not just consuming too much per head. It’s not just that our economic and political systems are broken. The real problems are even more fundamental than that, and until we can talk openly, rationally and realistically about them then we cannot even begin working towards real solutions. That’s what I want to say, but if I continue down this path then my words will be misunderstood, misinterpreted and misrepresented. I will be condemned as an ecofascist, regardless of the fact that I’m talking about modern China as an example, not Nazi Germany. People will try to cancel me on social media. There is no viable path to ecocivilisation here. To find one, we are going to need to start thinking differently, reacting differently, talking differently and voting differently. Only after some carefully considered ground rules have been established will I be able to write more freely. These rules are epistemological – they are concerned with the categorisation and justification of knowledge claims.           

This book is addressed to a Western audience, and it is specifically about the West’s paths to ecocivilisation – both the real ones, and the illusory and fraudulent ones that obscure the most inconvenient realities and the most appalling moral dilemmas. Ultimately, in order to fully satisfy the definition of ecocivilisation, it will have to be global, because all nations are embedded in a singular global ecosystem. However, it is also the case that the creation of a global ecocivilisation directly, without doing much of the work at the national level first, would be considerably more difficult than the creation of ecocivilisation (or as close as possible) at the level of sovereign states. Sovereign states have exactly one national government (or they have a civil war), and even if those governments have to face the electorate every few years, at least sovereign powers can take decisions on behalf of the nation without having to negotiate with anybody else. If the politics of ecocivilisation is impossible in a democratic state, the global politics is impossible squared. Only in a future world where multiple sovereign states are not only committed to ecocivilisation as a national goal, but also well on the way to achieving it, will effective global co-operation start to become plausible.         

How can we Westernise the concept of Ecocivilisation? None of the easy answers are any good. The most closely related concepts are already compromised, and I will take a look at two of them now.

“Sustainability”

The term “sustainability” has become a ubiquitous buzzword, splashed liberally around corporate boardrooms, political campaigns, and marketing materials. Once a term rooted in ecological preservation and long-term planetary health, “sustainability” has come to mean something like “sustaining our way of life while trying to minimise ecological harm”. It has nothing to do with facilitating the transformative changes required to foster a true ecocivilisation. The result is a shallow, surface-level commitment to maintaining the status quo, often under the guise of self-contradictory terms like “sustainable growth”. True sustainability is inherently linked to the notion of balance between human needs and the capacity of the environment to support those needs without degradation. However, as the term has evolved, the goal is no longer the creation of a fundamentally different relationship with the natural world, but about tweaking current systems just enough to give the illusion of ecological responsibility while avoiding any substantial sacrifices or shifts in priorities. This debasement of the concept of “sustainability” serves the interests of those who benefit from the current system. Claiming to be sustainable can enhance brand reputation, attract eco-conscious consumers, and stave off regulatory pressure. Greenwashing, in other words.

“Degrowth”

A new concept was needed to replace “sustainability”, which would not be open to similar dilution and abuse. Enter “Degrowth” to the lexicon – a word designed to be unsettling, to reinforce the message that it refers to something very different to what has gone before. “Degrowth” is a movement calling for a transition to a new sort of economic system that can not only cope with long-term economic contraction, but can do so in a way that improves everybody’s real standards of living. In this case “real” means measuring their wellbeing not in purely economic terms, but also in terms of mental health and all manner of other life-enhancing things that money can’t buy. Buying stuff doesn’t actually make us happy (although financial insecurity certainly makes us unhappy). Degrowth is distinguished from collapse in that it is voluntary, controlled and intended to be as fair as possible, whereas collapse is necessarily involuntary, guaranteed to be chaotic and intrinsically unfair.     

We have known for 50 years that growth-based economics must end, one way or another, but have not made much in the way of progress in response to this knowledge. “Degrowth” is not taken seriously by most economists, and most people have never even heard of it. Why? What makes “degrowth economics” so difficult to achieve in reality? It isn’t the laws of physics, so the problems must be cultural in some way. But if so, why don’t we have a clear idea of exactly what those problems are? I suggest the answer is that the academics involved in this area are themselves either in denial about the nature of the coming transition, or knowingly misleading people about it. This is certainly not hard science. It is very much influenced by politics.     

Post-growth economics is not going to be optional. It is coming whether we like it or not. It is not a case of “growth-based economics must end for the sake of the planet and the people” but “a society premised on growth-based economics cannot be sustained and will eventually collapse”. There is a reluctance to admit this, for political reasons. This paper demonstrates the problem. Footnote: 'Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing', Milena Büchs and Max Koch, Futures, Volume 105, January 2019, pp 155-165.

“[D]egrowth societies would be societies that are organised according to fundamentally different cultural, social, economic, political and technological principles as the ones that are dominant at the moment, organised around the growth ideology.

     [W]e propose that the establishment of regular deliberative forums that discuss universal needs satisfaction could be one (small and first) step to address this. This could be organised according to a “dual strategy” as proposed by needs theorists (Doyal & Gough, 1991), combining input to consensual decision-making by experts and citizens. We argue that it would be important to add other ‘dual’ elements here to make these deliberative forums fit for debating universal needs satisfaction under degrowth (and for considering the underlying cultural principles on which this will be based): these forums would need to establish a dialogue between people from rich and poor countries, as well as between ‘representatives’ of current and future generations. The dialogue between rich and poor people globally is necessary because of their different relations to degrowth – the incomes and material living standards of groups across the world whose basic needs are not currently being met would need to be allowed to rise in the future until their basic needs are satisfied whilst those of the rich will need to decline rapidly. At a country level, degrowth trajectories will need to vary in rich versus poorer countries....”

These authors are saying that representatives of all 8 billion of us, with our different cultures, religions, systems of government, locations on the planet, physical resources, etc... need to get together and agree how to make contraction fair. Within individual countries the rich and poor will need to agree how to do this, and then all the rich countries would need to agree with the poor countries on the fairest way to allow the poor countries to catch up while the rich countries accept a long-term reduction in their relative wealth.     

I am reminded of the New Seekers 1972 hit I’d like to teach the world to sing. [Footnote: The original version of this song is worth a look if you’ve never seen it. The effect today of the original “hilltop” TV advert now is one of idyllic dreaminess which almost immediately morphs into a sinister nightmare. What the world needs today is the real thing. So buy it a coke.] Real human societies have never worked like this, and probably never will. We can safely say that the transition from growth-based economics to post-growth economics will not happen this way. So there is an answer (though not necessarily the only one): the people working in this field are insufficiently engaged with reality. To make this sort of solution work, we would at the very least need the World Economic Forum to start behaving like a Global Communist Party. And why would they do that?

To be clear, “degrowth” is an improvement on “sustainability” – at least it unambiguously rejects the rank insanity of believing infinite economic growth is possible in a finite physical system. But Degrowth is a movement premised on the idea that somehow the process of contraction of both our economic systems and the human operation on Planet Earth can not only be politically managed in democracies, but managed in a way that is deemed to be fair at every level, including the whole world. This condition has about as much to do with realism about human nature and geopolitics as mainstream economics has to do with realism about ecology and the limits to growth. We’re nowhere near grasping the enormity of this problem, let alone being able to talk rationally about the solutions. In this respect, China is way ahead of us.     

The coming transition is not going to be very voluntary. It is going to be chaotic, competitive, and on a global scale there are going to be a lot of losers. No government is going to prioritise the wellbeing of people in other countries over that of people in their own, especially given that this rebalancing between rich and poor is going to have to take place internally in the rich countries too.     

We therefore have a stalemate between a majority who are in denial about the fact that growth has to end at all, and a small minority who accept that fact but are in denial about the nature of the process which will take us from here to there. Two competing visions of the future, both of which are guaranteed to be wrong, and for people who reject both of them, the most widely professed opinion of the future is a simple “we’re doomed” (or something more expletive). Understandable, but it’s not much of a vision of the future. We need to accept that both are wrong – that post-growth economics is unavoidable, and that the process will mostly be chaotic, uncontrollable and manifestly unfair, at least at the beginning and maybe for a very long time. The real transition will not begin with a global debate about wellbeing. It will begin with debates about survival, and they will take place at the sovereign level and below, because at the global level the game is already over. The post-WW2 global order is already falling apart. Civilisation as we know it is approaching its death throes, but that is not going to be the end of the story.     

The rich are not guaranteed to win in this situation. History tells us that even though the rich go through long periods of getting their own way, at times of crisis they can become the biggest losers (the French Revolution being the prime example). What is guaranteed is that in those places where there is a rebalancing of wealth and power away from the rich and towards a fairer society, the winners in that process (which may well require civil war/revolution of some sort) are not then going to voluntarily give up their domestic gains in order to make the international system fairer. People who risk everything to fight for their own survival, and for that of people they care about, do not then selflessly give up what they fought for to help people in other countries whose situation is even worse than their own. They are unlikely to agree to this even if those other countries are themselves heading in the right direction, and they certainly won’t do so if those other countries are still heading in the wrong direction. What history cannot shed much light on is the fate of an “elite” ultra-rich class who see themselves as “above” the system of sovereign states, their immense wealth hidden away in unaccountable tax havens. I seriously doubt whether the existence of those categories of persons and places can be made consistent with an ecocivilisation. The ideology that sustains them is based on the myth of an ever-expanding pie. Without that, there can be no justification for a system that delivers them an ever-expanding slice. If nothing fundamental changes even when that myth has been exploded, then we are revolutionary territory – and this sort of revolution would have to be truly international.

The hallmarks of the West 

I am not advocating that the West tries to emulate the Chinese approach to ecocivilisation. China’s authoritarian system does indeed bypass the intractable problems of democracy, but I am personally very attached to the democracy, liberalism and free speech we actually have. I cannot imagine a situation where I would not defend them as general principles. Right now I am in the process of trying to challenge prevailing orthodoxy in many different ways – not the sort of activity that is tolerated in China if those in power deem it undesirable.     

I am not advocating a Westernised eco-authoritarianism either, although I fear for the survival of democracy and I would obviously prefer eco-authoritarianism to any other sort. The problem is that once you have freed politicians from the fear of non-riggable elections, then there’s no way to guarantee that power remains in the hands of your sort of authoritarian instead of some other sort. I would like to think we can save democracy, in some form. I wish to see it improved, not abolished.     

Two other hallmarks of Western civilisation will not survive in their current form. One of these is capitalism, which must either somehow be adapted for a post-growth world or be replaced by another system entirely. The other is science, or more accurately certain philosophical ideas that are widely but wrongly believed to be part of science or inseparable from it. The West cannot just adopt Taoism; it is too Chinese. We need something of our own, which can play a similar role, and is fit for the 21^st century and beyond.     

There is a pattern here, and that is a need for a transformative reset of Western civilisation. As unrealistic as this might sound, some sort of major transformation is guaranteed, because the existing situation is unsustainable and therefore must eventually come to an end. Growth-based economics doesn’t magically become sustainable because billions of people believe it is so. The question we should be asking is how we can prepare for its demise and what should replace it.The question nearly all of our politicians and economists are actually asking is how to keep it going.

One other concept ranks among democracy, science and capitalism as a hallmark of Western civilisation. The deepest foundations of the modern West were laid down in Athens in the 5^th century BC, during the most extraordinary flowering of human cultural progress there has ever been. The Greeks invented politics, science and philosophy (although all three were mixed together and remained so for a long time afterwards) but if you had to sum up in one word the nature of how that golden age shaped the future of Western civilisation, that word would be individualism – individual thought, individual ethics and individual choices. These ideals became the bedrock of Western civilisation, influencing everything from governance and law to art and education, and they continue to resonate through the fabric of modern Western society. Maybe that too is going to have to change, but if so it is likely to prove the toughest challenge of them all.

Individualism and the limits of language 

The centrality of individualism to Western thought has been both its greatest strength and its potential undoing. It has fuelled extraordinary creativity, scientific innovation, and personal freedom. Yet, in an era of global crises, individualism risks becoming a barrier to the kind of collective action that is urgently needed. The ecological and societal challenges we face demand not only collaboration but also a reimagining of the relationship between the individual and the collective.     

Can we retain the spirit of individual agency while embracing a more integrated, communal mindset? This is no trivial question, as it strikes at the heart of Western identity. Our inherited frameworks of thought, shaped by centuries of individualistic philosophy and practice, may no longer be adequate. Even our language – the medium through which we think, communicate, and shape our reality – reflects and reinforces the assumptions of this worldview.     

This brings us to the limits of language itself. How do we articulate the need for transformation when the tools we use to describe the world are products of the very system we aim to change? Here, philosophy offers a surprising point of entry. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, grappled with the constraints and possibilities of language. His work illuminates not only the traps laid by our linguistic habits but also the potential for transcending them.

In particular, Wittgenstein’s reflections on the mystical and his later concept of “language games” provide a framework for understanding how we might begin to think and speak differently about the necessary shifts. These shifts are not just practical but also deeply philosophical – they concern the nature of reality, meaning, and human interconnectedness.

Wittgenstein and the mystical  

Wittgenstein wrote two major works during his life, though the second, the Philosophical Investigations, was published posthumously. Both are famously difficult to interpret. His first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, was written while Wittgenstein served on the front lines during the First World War. The Tractatus stands as a remarkable artefact of modernist philosophy, a bold attempt to resolve what Wittgenstein believed were the central problems of philosophy.     Wittgenstein’s work arrived at a pivotal moment in intellectual history. The Great War was not only dismantling empires but also shaking the foundations of Western thought. The scientific worldview, which had reigned supreme since the Enlightenment, was undergoing a crisis of its own. The mechanistic, deterministic paradigm that had triumphed with Newton and Darwin was losing ground to the strange new realities of quantum mechanics. Wittgenstein would have been aware of Einstein’s theories of relativity (published in 1905 and 1915), but these still operate largely within the framework of classical physics. Meanwhile, quantum theory was poised to disrupt that framework entirely.     

In 1913, Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford introduced the quantum model of the atom, a revolutionary step toward understanding subatomic particles. This model hinted at the inadequacy of classical physics to describe nature at its most fundamental levels. By the mid-1920s, quantum mechanics had emerged as a fully developed field, challenging long-held assumptions about the determinism and continuity of the physical universe. Against this backdrop, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus can be seen as the philosophical counterpart to the scientific culmination of classical thought – a final, rigorous attempt to delineate the boundaries of what can meaningfully be said.     Central to the Tractatus is Wittgenstein’s “picture theory” of language. According to this view, language serves as a means of representing reality. Propositions (statements) function like pictures, their structure mirroring the structure of the facts they describe. For a proposition to have meaning, it must correspond to a possible state of affairs in the world. This idea, while elegant, imposes strict limitations on what can be expressed. Anything that cannot be “pictured” in this way – such as abstract concepts, ethical values, and metaphysical claims – is excluded from the domain of meaningful language.     

As the Tractatus progresses, Wittgenstein confronts the implications of his own theory. If language can only describe facts about the world, then certain truths – those concerning ethics, aesthetics, and the mystical – lie beyond its reach. These truths are not meaningless; rather, they are unspeakable. They “make themselves manifest,” as Wittgenstein puts it, but defy articulation.     

The book’s concluding propositions encapsulate this tension:     

• 6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make      themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.      
• 6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science – something that has nothing to do with philosophy – and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.      
• 6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me      finally recognises them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)      
• 7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Wittgenstein’s concluding statement is both a summary of his position and a challenge to the reader. The Tractatus itself is revealed as paradoxical. If it is true that the mystical and metaphysical lie outside the limits of language, then Wittgenstein’s own propositions, which aim to delineate these limits, must also be nonsensical. Yet this nonsense serves a purpose. Wittgenstein likens the book to a ladder: once the reader has climbed it and gained clarity about the nature of language and thought, the ladder must be discarded.     

By declaring his own propositions senseless, Wittgenstein does not diminish their importance. Instead, he underscores their role in guiding us to an understanding of what can – and cannot – be said. In this way, the Tractatus transcends its apparent finality. It does not merely close the door on metaphysics; it invites us to confront the ineffable directly, to experience the mystical as something that “makes itself manifest” in silence.     

The Tractatus marks a conclusion of modernist philosophy and the dawning recognition of its limitations. Just as quantum mechanics demanded a new conceptual framework for understanding the physical world, Wittgenstein’s work called for a radical rethinking of the role of philosophy. His later writings would take a very different approach.

The Philosophical Investigations

Wittgenstein’s other book was the Philosophical Investigations (1953), on which he worked over his many years teaching at Cambridge. It consists of a collection of short passages about philosophy, this time with a focus on a different theory of language – that of “language games”. This time his claim was that our usage of language is much like different sorts of games we play – each language game has its own set of assumptions and rules, which under normal circumstances are never questioned from within the game itself. Much of our confusion, especially philosophical confusion, is the result of people using incommensurate (i.e. incompatible) language games without acknowledging that this is what is happening.

I’ll give two examples that are directly relevant to the subject matter of this book.

Example 1: An ecologist talks to an economist about economic growth

In the language game of economics, growth is considered to be both sustainable and desirable, and one of the main goals of policy. Anybody who questions this is not taken seriously by other participants in that language game. In the language game of ecology, economic growth is viewed as intrinsically dependent on the growth of the physical human operation on Planet Earth, and since humans are already well into ecological overshoot this can only be unsustainable and therefore undesirable. The conflict arises because ecology is grounded in hard scientific reality, whereas economics is a quasi-scientific discipline based primarily on politics and psychology. That is not to say that human politics and psychology aren’t part of reality – they surely are – but as academic subjects or language games they are not constrained by physical reality in the way hard sciences like physics and ecology are. Economics starts with conclusions derived from politics and psychology, and then attempts to find a scientific-sounding theory to support those conclusions. There is no other way we could end up with “theories” like Trickle-down Economics and Modern Monetary Theory. We therefore have two incommensurate language games, and that means that if an ecologist is debating an economist about anything concerning growth, they will just end up talking past each other. It’s like trying to have a game where one side is playing football and the other is playing rugby: there’s no point.

Example 2: A physicist talks to a new-age mystic about energy

In the language game of physics, the concept of energy has a clearly defined meaning. It refers to a specific physical concept, and the meaning is understood with zero risk of confusion by anybody who knows how to play that language game. In the language game of new-age mysticism this word means something rather different. A new ager believes they are talking about something real, and they’ve chosen the word “energy” because they have no better one, but what do they actually mean when they say it? Sometimes it seems to have some sort of relationship with the scientific meaning – it’s about “something that makes things happen” – but the meaning is much broader, encompassing things that, in a scientific context, are indistinguishable from magic. Again, we have two incommensurate language games, and when physicists and new-agers try to have a discussion about “energy”, nothing is likely to be achieved unless this situation is recognised for what it is. The way forwards, I believe, is to pay closer attention to the vocabulary and precise usage, and the context in which the discussion is taking place. What exactly does it mean to say that new-age metaphysics is indistinguishable from magic? Could there be magic that doesn’t contradict physics? Could there be magical laws?

The transition from civilisation to ecocivilisation will require ecologists, economists, scientists, mystics and all sorts of other people to be able to understand each other considerably better than they do now. This can only be made possible by some sort of over-arching epistemic system or agreement that provides shared understanding of the appropriate relationships between ecology, physics, economics, politics, ethics, the mystical and anything else that can’t be left out. To misquote Chief Brody – we’re going to need a bigger language game.

Private language and the meaning of the word “consciousness”

In another part of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein presents what has come to be known as the “private language argument”. He contends that a truly private language – one intelligible only to the person who creates it – is impossible. More specifically, he argues against the possibility of a private ostensive definition. An ostensive definition is when a word is defined by pointing to its referent – for example, teaching the word “pink” by showing various pink objects that share no commonality other than their colour. A private ostensive definition would involve assigning a word to a personal sensation or experience in one’s own mind. The problem, Wittgenstein points out, is that such a word would be meaningless in any shared context because no one else could verify or understand its usage.     

I will now propose a definition of the word consciousness. This definition will be crucial in the arguments that follow, but defining consciousness without falling into circularity is a challenge. Words like subjectivity, mental, mind, or the technical term qualia – which refers to the subjective aspects of consciousness – all face the same issue: they rely on one another to define themselves. How can we break this loop and pin down what they actually mean?     

The only satisfactory approach is a private ostensive definition, not of any specific experience but of the entire domain of experience. I will use the word consciousness to refer to everything we experience, have experienced, will experience, and all experiences of all conscious beings. To establish this definition, we mentally “point” to our own experiences and associate the word consciousness with what we are pointing to. Crucially, other beings – humans and many animals – behave in ways that suggest they, too, experience things. Because others can make the same private ostensive definition, the term consciousness can acquire a shared, public meaning. This is not a conventional definition, but it aligns with how the word consciousness is actually used. Attempts to define it otherwise, such as equating it with “brain activity”, lead to confusion and meaninglessness. For instance, if consciousness is defined as “a type of brain activity”, the question “How does consciousness arise from brain activity?” would collapse into “How does [a type of] brain activity arise from [presumably some other type of] brain activity?” This is not the question we started with, and similar problems arise with definitions involving specific brain structures or processes.     

Some people extend the meaning of consciousness to encompass external realities unconnected to human minds – phenomena unrelated to brains yet purportedly similar enough to qualify as consciousness. However, without grounding the term in our own experiences, such extended definitions risk diluting the meaning of consciousness into something too vague to be useful.     

While no orthodox definition of consciousness has been provided, I assume readers now understand what that word refers to within the context of this book.

Introduction to the central argument of this book

There is an argument running through this book, which will come together in Chapter Nine, where it forms the formal part of a proposed meta-ideology of Ecocivilisation. The first two stages of the New Epistemic Deal could come in either order, since neither is dependent on the other.

1: Ecocivilisation is our shared destiny and guiding goal.

Ecocivilisation represents a vision of a society that harmonises human activity with ecological principles. This is not a utopian ideal but a necessity dictated by the realities of ecosystems and evolution. The claim that ecocivilisation is our destiny is pre-political, transcending specific ideologies or systems. The social, political, and economic structures of ecocivilisation are not part of this definition, but the core premise is clear: civilisation must work ecologically to endure. This realisation, however, is insufficient on its own to inspire a mass movement. The challenge lies in how we navigate the path forward. Choosing a “least bad” route demands careful thought and collaboration, as well as a willingness to embrace complexity. Yet, despite the uncertainties and debates about how to proceed, we can and must agree on this: ecocivilisation is our ultimate goal – a commitment to creating a world where humanity thrives within the limits and laws of nature.

2: Consciousness is real.

Consciousness – our individual interface with reality – is the one thing each of us can be absolutely certain exists. It is through consciousness that we perceive existence and recognise that anything exists at all. As such, consciousness must serve as the starting point for exploring what exists beyond our subjective experience and for discerning the boundaries of what we know and what we don’t.

Resources relevant to this chapter

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change: William R. Catton, 1982, University of Illinois Press. Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos, Garrett Hardin, 1995, Oxford University Press USA. The Consilience Project: https://consilienceproject.org/

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a prominent thinker and strategist known for his work on complex systems, civilisation design, and the integration of multiple disciplines to address global challenges. Schmachtenberger is a key figure behind The Consilience Project, an initiative focused on addressing the deep systemic issues facing modern society by promoting a more integrative and comprehensive understanding of global problems. The word “consilience” refers to the unity of knowledge across disciplines, and the project embodies this by seeking to integrate insights from various fields—such as science, philosophy, economics and technology—to create a more coherent and actionable understanding of complex societal challenges.     

A central concern of the project is the current crisis in sense-making—wherein misinformation, polarised media, and cognitive biases contribute to a fragmented and often misleading understanding of reality. The Consilience Project aims to address this by developing more reliable and integrative ways of making sense of the world, particularly in the context of rapidly evolving technologies and global risks. Schmachtenberger and his colleagues are deeply concerned with the challenges of modern civilisation, particularly in terms of governance, sustainability, and the potential for catastrophic risks (such as climate change, nuclear war, or uncontrolled AI). The project explores alternative models of governance and social organisation that could better manage these risks and lead to a more resilient and adaptive civilisation.     

One of the key concepts explored by Schmachtenberger and The Consilience Project is the “Metacrisis”, which refers to the interconnected and mutually reinforcing crises facing modern society. The project seeks to understand these crises in a holistic way and to develop strategies for addressing them collectively rather than in isolation.

Chapter 3: Metaphysics

We need to talk about metaphysics, even though Wittgenstein said we shouldn’t. One reason for this is that many of the people who enthusiastically agree with his condemnation of metaphysics are unwittingly deeply embroiled in it themselves. Another is that while physicists are free to “shut up and calculate”, anybody interested in the underlying nature of reality is forced by quantum theory to ask questions that are inherently metaphysical.      

The word “metaphysics” can be used in more than one way, and this can lead to avoidable misunderstanding. In an informal sense it is used to mean something like “the study of spirituality”, but this is the sort of study where people are free to say pretty much whatever they want, for whatever reasons they choose. There is no need for it to be rational or comprehensible. In a formal sense it refers to the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time, and space.“Meta” is a Greek word meaning “beyond” or “after”. As it is normally used in English, the meaning is typically closer to “underneath” than either of the direct translations. Something deeper or more fundamental; metaphysics deals with the context in which we are to understand physics. Footnote:This difference is partly due to the ancient origins of this word, as the name given to some books of Aristotle when his surviving works were systematically ordered in the 1^st century. It literally meant “after” in the sense that those books came after his work known as Physics.The subject matter of Metaphysics was Aristotle’s first philosophy – the place that his philosophy starts, in terms of a structure of ideas.     

Mixing up science and metaphysics was one of the big mistakes of the New Age movement. If scientific terminology such as “energy” and “vibration” are going to be adapted to mean something non-scientific (in this case something metaphysical) then the alternative meaning and context need to be made clear. What is not acceptable is attempting to use scientific vocabulary to do heavy lifting when the meaning is sufficiently ambiguous that nobody is sure exactly what is meant – the scientific thing, the non-scientific thing, or both at the same time. Unintentional ambiguity results in sloppy thinking. Deliberate ambiguity, outside of art, can indicate something more cynical: the intention to mislead and confuse. We need to establish proper places for science, metaphysics and mysticism in a bigger system for categorising knowledge claims – one that encompasses them all, as well as everything else. This will require the careful drawing of boundaries, and that is the job of epistemology. For a century now a big paradigm shift has been brewing. Understanding the nature of this shift is the key to understanding how science and spirituality can co-exist peacefully. Maybe it is even possible that science and mysticism could collaborate to instigate and drive cultural progress in a way that neither has ever managed on its own. This is potentially of great significance for the ideological foundations of ecocivilisation in the West.

Metaphysical terminology (section one)

I must begin by defining some terminology. The exact meaning of many of these terms is contested, so I am providing my own definitions here to minimise the scope for misunderstandings later. I will explain the reason for a division into two sections when we get to section two.    

Reality and truth

Reality is everything that exists, irrespective of whether it is perceived or known. This includes both subjective realities (human and animal consciousness) and objective reality (everything that exists beyond subjective reality). Entities or realms that have no causal connection to our own realities do count as existing, although presumably they are of no relevance to us.     

Truths are statements (including mathematical statements) that correspond to objective reality. This correspondence can be partial – there can be partial truths, as well as complete truths about parts of reality. Statements can also correspond to what we are subjectively aware of or think – subjective truths of which we can be 100% certain ourselves, but to which nobody else has direct access (e.g. what gender I identify as) – and also objective truths, which correspond to the parts of reality of which we are not directly aware, but are nevertheless justified in believing exist. Note that subjective truths are not the same thing as opinions. It is subjectively true that I identify as a man, not an opinion. Opinions are beliefs that aren’t conclusive for some reason or another, whereas gender self-identification is conclusive by definition.     

Truth can be contextual. Contextual truths are statements that correspond to reality, taking account of the current context in which those statements are being made. A statement like “it is raining” can only be true or false depending on where and when it is said. If someone says this in London, it could be true, but if someone says it at the same time in Mumbai, it could be false. The truth of the statement depends on the context of location and time. This is also relevant to Wittgenstein’s language games – whether a particular statement is true or false can depend on which language game is being played. For example the statement “Economic growth is desirable” is true in the language game of contemporary mainstream economics, but false in the language game of ecology. It is important to note that, in epistemology, contextualism is a semantic thesis about how the word “knows” functions in English, rather than a theory of the nature of knowledge, justification, or epistemic strength. [Footnote: Knowledge and Practical Interests, Jason Stanley, 2005, New York: Oxford University Press.]

Skepticism

Skepticism is a decision or policy to not believe in things without good reason. It is a general principle of rejecting faith. Scientific skepticism is a form of skepticism that strongly focuses on science, but stresses open-mindedness and is at least theoretically open to correction. It usually comes packaged with materialism or physicalism, but this is not a requirement.

Materialism and physicalism

The term “(the) material world” refers to a three-dimensional realm full of objects that changes with the apparent passage of time. This world contains our planet Earth, ourselves and other living organisms, and the whole of the rest of our cosmos. Please note that I mean exactly what I have written and nothing more, and also that I bracketed the “the”. That is because while “material world” is itself relatively unproblematic as a concept, we usually say “the material world”, and this “the” implies that there is unproblematically only one thing this could mean. In fact the situation is not so simple, for we could talk about “the material world we directly observe” or “the hypothetical material world as it is in itself, independent of our observations of it”. These are examples of compound conceptual terms consisting of “the material world” and something else – something that makes the compound term explicitly metaphysical. When we talk about “the material world”, we generally mean it in the non-metaphysical, pre-philosophical sort of way – the concept is so familiar to us that we don’t feel any need for a more precise definition. Everybody knows what “the material world” refers to, don’t they?      

Materialism is a metaphysical view that “the material world is the only thing that exists” or that “reality is made entirely of matter and energy.” The reader may already have noticed a problem here; this will be discussed at length in the next chapter. 

Naive materialism is materialism that hasn’t been given sufficient philosophical consideration.      

Physicalism is the claim that reality consists of whatever our best theories of physics suggest or tell us that it consists of. This is more flexible than materialism, but is likely to lead to difficulties if our best theories are inconclusive in this respect. Our best physical theory is quantum mechanics. [Footnote: Some people would say our best theory is now quantum field theory, which I mention briefly in Appendix Two.] – a theory that is notorious for not telling us what reality is made of. It sets up some very interesting questions, but does not provide much in the way of conclusive answers. It is therefore not clear what the general statement “physicalism is true” actually means or implies. It is a placeholder rather than a specific claim or theory, and there are multiple competing and mutually contradictory explanations of what can or should occupy the place in question. This will also be explored in the next chapter.

Science, scientific materialism and scientism

Science is a systematic method of inquiry aimed at generating reliable knowledge about objective reality through observation, experimentation, and theoretical explanation. One of the central topics of this book is the status of scientific knowledge, and my position will develop as the book progresses.     

Scientific materialism is a combination of a metaphysical claim (that materialism is true) and the whole corpus of scientific knowledge. It takes the place of a cosmology, in the anthropological sense (i.e. a worldview or belief system, not a branch of science). Compared to other cosmologies it is rather impoverished, as it has no moral or spiritual content, and offers no meaning, purpose or wisdom. Please note that this is not intended as a value judgement – I am not suggesting that scientific materialism ought to offer any of these things. It just doesn’t, even though it occupies the conceptual and cognitive role of a cosmology.      

Scientism is a purely pejorative term referring to the overextension of scientific principles and methodologies into contexts where they are not appropriate or justified. Nobody self-identifies as scientistic – those described this way see themselves merely as strong advocates for science. They reject the idea that the scope of science can be overextended. To them, any claim to knowledge that necessarily lies outside the reach of science must be false, meaningless, or worthless. Scientism is the conviction that anything unsupported by science and reason fails to qualify as knowledge at all.      Scientism is associated with the view that materialism/physicalism is itself justified by science and reason, or at least more aligned with science and reason than any alternatives. There is frequently a denial that it involves metaphysics at all – a claim that, to those familiar with philosophical terminology, only reinforces the conclusion that the speaker has a scientistic perspective.

Scientific realism

Scientific realism is the claim that our best scientific theories provide knowledge about a mind-external objective world – that science aims to discover truth. Note that scientific theories can be almost true, and that almost true is a great improvement on mostly false. Occasionally scientific theories turn out to be completely false, but this should not lead us to believe that all scientific theories are only tentatively true. Some scientific theories are so well supported that the probability that they will one day be falsified is zero. Note that this is not just “tending towards zero”, but actually zero. An example of this is the basic structure of our solar system – we are never going to discover that the orbit of Jupiter is actually inside the orbit of Earth (unless the orbit of Jupiter or Earth moves, of course). Another is common descent in evolution, both as a general principle and in countless individual cases – we are never going to discover that the principle doesn’t hold.      

Some people find this assertion of certainty uncomfortable – they feel a need to demonstrate their open-mindedness, as well as that of science. They might say “of course we must remain open to the possibility that we’ll find evidence that other apes are in fact descended from humans – otherwise we would invite accusations of dogmatism, which isn’t acceptable in science.” But is this really true? Is there a non-zero probability that theories such as these will one day be falsified and replaced? I can see no way this can happen without jettisoning science entirely.      

I believe scientific knowledge is too important for the future wellbeing of all humanity for its status to be downgraded in this manner (which is a value judgement). Open-mindedness is very important, but not to the extent that our brains fall out. That humans’ closest living relatives are chimpanzees and bonobos is surely a scientific fact – a true statement about objective reality. It is a statement about the relationship between humans and other apes, in the context of the evolutionary history of life on Earth.     

American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-2016) provided a strong argument in support of scientific realism. It is called the “No Miracles Argument”, and is based on the observation that science undeniably works. It has transformed our world. Putnam argued that this unprecedented success cannot be some giant ongoing coincidence, and therefore some other explanation must be provided.Why does science work? What is it that science gets right, which can explain why scientific knowledge has proven so much more powerful than other (alleged) ways of obtaining knowledge? What does science do that non-scientific ways of knowing, such as intuition or revelation, do not? Putnam’s answer is that our best scientific theories tend towards the truth – that they correspond with a mind-external objective reality.     In its basic form, scientific realism simply claims that the entities specified in our best or ideal scientific theories are real. A more nuanced version is structural realism – the view that science provides knowledge about the structure of objective reality. There are two types.      

Epistemic structural realism (ESR) is the view that we can only know the structure of the world, not the intrinsic nature of the objects or entities that populate it. For example, in physics, we might understand the mathematical relationships between particles but not what the particles “are” in themselves. ESR makes no claims about what objective reality is made of, or where or how it exists. For the rest of this book, when I talk about scientific realism I am referring to ESR.      

Ontic structural realism (OSR) is the view that the structure itself is all that exists; the entities or objects we traditionally think of as the building blocks of the world are nothing more than nodes in a network of relations. Reality is constituted by structures, and objects are secondary or derivative from these relations. If scientific knowledge doesn’t tend towards truth about the structure of an objective reality then I can think of no non-miraculous explanation for the success of science. Anti-realists do exist, of course, but they typically provide their own justifications for rejecting scientific realism rather than tackling Putnam’s question head-on. The main anti-realist arguments are:

The problem of underdetermination – for any given set of data, there may be multiple valid scientific theories available.

The theory-ladenness of observation – it is impossible to make observations (in a scientific sense) outside of the context of existing theories. Therefore no observations are truly independent. Instead they are shaped by the underlying assumptions of the observer. 

The “pessimistic meta-induction” –previous theories have turned out to be false, therefore we can’t rely on any existing theories to remain true. 

The problem of reference – scientific terms (such as “electron” or “gene”) have had different meanings at different times. Why should we believe the current definition is “correct”?All of these qualifications are reasonable, but they are just qualifications. By that I mean that they apply in certain scientific situations to a much greater extent than they do in others. I gave the example of the evolutionary relationship between apes and humans precisely because it is beyond reasonable doubt. For the given set of data in this case, could there be a different valid scientific theory available as an explanation for the relationship between apes and humans? Is it possible that our observations of humans and apes are being critically shaped by some sort of unexamined underlying assumption that is leading us into error? It is possible that our understanding of the common descent of species may turn out to be false to the extent that it is no longer true that humans are descended from apes? Could changes in the meaning of the terms “ape” or “human” render this knowledge invalid? I believe the answer to all of these questions is a straightforward “no”.      

The status and relevance of realism is very important in the context of this book. My goal is to establish epistemic conditions appropriate for meaningful public debate about how to create an ecocivilisation – to set some ground rules about what we know and what we don’t know, in preparation for the difficult discussions ahead. Given this context, isn’t it necessary for us to agree that the most well-supported scientific claims, such as “human CO₂ emissions are causing rapid climate change” and “economic growth is ecologically unsustainable” are actually true? Are there any real-world situations where it would be reasonable to consider the possibility that they might be false?     

If these things are accepted as true statements about objective reality then nobody can throw doubt on them for ideological (i.e. political or religious) reasons. The alternative is to create space for people to claim that climate change is just currently popular among some scientists, that scientists are mostly left-leaning politically, that they represent just one perspective among others (all of which are equally valuable), and that therefore skepticism is reasonable. Or that because phlogiston theory turned out to be wrong, there is no justification for believing that economic growth is ecologically unsustainable. Or that we should not be considering redesigning civilisation based on such flimsy claims to knowledge and that we should not submit to the epistemic tyranny of so-called “scientific truth” because the political and economic implications are so thoroughly inconvenient.     

If we cannot agree that ESR is true – that scientific knowledge tends towards truth and sometimes arrives at it – then we can probably forget about ecocivilisation. We cannot redesign Western civilisation on a foundation of ecological realism if the conclusions of our best scientific theories are held to be negotiable cultural creations rather than facts about reality. We must acknowledge that it is our reality – the one reality that we need to figure out how to sustainably share. We must accept that anthropogenic climate change is real and that economic growth is ecologically unsustainable, and that we have arrived at this knowledge objectively and conclusively, rather than merely subjectively and inconclusively. This kind of knowledge has to be collective, not individual. From the perspective of ecocivilisation, those who reject it are on the wrong side of history. There is a critical distinction between theoretical openness to revision and structural knowledge that reflects deeper, unchangeable truths about reality. Certain scientific claims are based on an overwhelming accumulation of evidence and reflect what we might call the structural reality of how we understand the world. These claims, while technically open to revision, are so well-supported that revision is impossible in any meaningful sense, because to do so would lead to a falsification of the whole corpus of scientific knowledge (which would put us in the same territory as flat-Earth theory and Young Earth Creationism (YEC)). This structural knowledge forms a reliable foundation for decision-making, especially in the context of an ecocivilisation, where we must build on truths that guide action. Acknowledging such structural certainty allows us to avoid unjustified skepticism and move forward on issues critical to ecological sustainability. The path that opens up if we accept ecological reality is hard. The path we’ll end up on if we continue to refuse to accept it is easier in the short term, but ultimately much harder.     

There is no reason for conflict between moral and practical reasoning here either. If there actually is an objective reality, and we can actually know things about it, then in practical terms the only justifiable course of action is to frame our problems realistically and restrict our discussion of possible solutions to realistic options. In ethical terms the same applies – if we start our moral reasoning with anything other than reality then we’re engaged in fake morality – we will be arguing about what would be morally right and wrong in some ideal reality, rather than the real one that we have to figure out how to share. And if the people we are having moral disagreements with are actually dealing with reality, while we are not, then they are engaged with real morality and we are claiming moral high ground we have no right to claim. This sort of behaviour is sufficiently damaging to the prospects of creating a real ecocivilisation that it warrants a formal term. I don’t need to invent one, because a suitable term already exists: virtue signalling.

Determinism and free will

Determinism is the view that everything that happens in the cosmos is fully determined (and therefore pre-determined) by physical laws. Before quantum theory, determinism seemed obviously true. Quantum improbability, at least on most interpretations, suggests otherwise.

Hard determinism includes the claim that free will is incompatible with determinism, and therefore doesn’t exist. 

Soft determinism or compatibilism is the claim that free will is compatible with determinism. However, this implies a completely different meaning of “free will” to the one that is shared by hard determinists and believers in libertarian free will, which can lead to confusion (this is why Kant called compatibilism a “wretched subterfuge”). I use the term compatibilist free will to refer to the sort of freedom you have when you aren’t in prison, along with various other concepts of freedom which have nothing to do with metaphysics. 

Libertarian free will is a metaphysical claim that humans have the capacity for a will that is not fully determined by the laws of physics. It is the belief that humans can freely choose to do X in a situation where the laws of physics allow that they could have chosen to do Y, and that this choice is not random but willed. This usually involves some kind of non-physical agent of free will, which is capable of interacting causally with physical reality (in both directions). I am an incompatibilist; when I say “free will” by default I’m referring to the libertarian kind.

Naturalism

Naturalism (or “metaphysical naturalism”)is a metaphysical view that everything happening in reality can be reduced to (or explained in terms of) the laws of nature (including laws we are yet to discover). Naturalism is logically entailed by materialism (all materialists are naturalists) but the reverse is not true (some naturalists aren’t materialists). If the material world is the only thing that exists, then there is no theoretical or conceptual space for anything else that could affect it (an agent of free will, for example, or God) so naturalism is logically entailed. Naturalism differs from determinism in that it can accommodate objective randomness – the future does not have to be fully determined, but anything not determined must be random (really random in every case, not just apparently so or only in some cases).     

Some people use the terms “laws of physics” and “laws of nature” interchangeably, but they have slightly different meanings. The meaning of “laws of physics” is straightforward enough. “Laws of nature” is broader and encompasses all natural phenomena, including not just physical laws, but also biological, chemical, and maybe even some aspects of social or psychological phenomena that are considered “natural” in a broad sense. The laws of nature can include principles like natural selection in biology or chemical reaction rates in chemistry, in addition to the laws of physics.

Metaphysical terminology (section two – opposing terms)

With the exception of libertarian free will (which was easier to explain in section one, even though it actually belongs here) the terms defined above are broadly inter-related – they all tend to fall on one side of a dichotomy. Section two covers the other side.

Woo (or woo-woo) is the word that comes closest to referring to everything on the other side. It is derived from the sound effects that accompanied flying saucers in 1950s science fiction films. The term “woo” does not belong in the new paradigm. Firstly it is too vague, so each skeptic has their own idea of what it means, so it can mean whatever anybody wants it to mean in any particular situation. Secondly it is dismissive and derogatory, which combined with the vagueness amounts to “What I personally think is laughably stupid and/or weird”. We are going to need more precision than that. I only use the word “woo” in reference to the old paradigm. 

Faith is the opposite of skepticism – a decision to believe in things even though there is no rational or scientific reason for doing so, and maybe even if it contradicts science and reason. Note that this is not the same thing as subjectively justified knowledge, because if you have that then faith is not required (e.g. my belief that I am conscious is not based on faith). Directly experiencing something yourself is not the same as believing somebody else’s claim to have experienced it, or that it is possible for people to experience it, or that it exists even though nobody has ever experienced and nobody ever will. The originating source of religions is individual humans who claimed to have direct personal experience which authorised them to make the claims around which those religions revolve. This (allegedly) includes both revelation and the witnessing of miracles to serve as proof of the divinity of specific individuals.

Dualism is the metaphysical view that reality is made of two sorts of stuff – matter and mind or consciousness (or perhaps “spirit”). Most forms of dualism specify an interaction between these two realms – an interaction many opponents of dualism find hard to believe is possible.      Dualism will forever be associated with René Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes was the first Catholic philosopher to completely reject religion as a starting point, although he had to move from catholic France to Protestant Holland in 1629 in order to be free to speculate in this way. His great philosophical achievement was to reject the ancients completely and to establish where to start again. He began by applying universal skepticism and concluded that the statement “I think, therefore I am” (the “cogito”) must be the only legitimate starting point – and something like this has been accepted by the majority of philosophers ever since. For Descartes, the existence of a material universe, however self-evident that appears to be, could in fact be an illusion – he says he cannot even be sure he has a body. He could not, however, doubt the existence of his own mind. He asked why he was so sure of the cogito, concluded it was because it was clear and distinct, and invented a general rule: anything which we conceive very clearly and distinctly must be true. He said God had given him a strong inclination to believe in the existence of his body, and since God would not deceive him his body must exist. This results in Cartesian dualism – parallel realms of mind and matter which interact in the pineal gland (something only Descartes perceived to be clearly and distinctly true, because it was quickly dropped by his followers).  Descartes believed God also gave us the capacity to correct errors, which can be used when deciding what is clear and distinct, and therefore true. Based on this supposed capacity, he proposed a complex cosmological theory that turned out to be entirely false.

Idealism is the metaphysical view that consciousness is the only thing that exists, or that reality is made entirely of mental things or ideas.

Subjective idealism is the claim that only what is consciously experienced exists – to be is to be perceived and there is no reality beyond that. 

Objective idealism is the claim that an objective reality does exist, but that it too is ultimately mental or spiritual in nature.
Panpsychism is the metaphysical view that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. That all things have a mind or a mind-like quality.

Neutral monism makes two basic claims – that reality is unified and that it is made of neither mind nor matter. This is arguably not an opposing term to those in the previous section. It is rejected by materialists, but it has not been traditionally popular with the opposing camp either.      

Neutral monists have been rare in the history of Western philosophy, though one early example deserves a special note. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) came from a Jewish family which moved from Spain or Portugal to Holland to escape the Inquisition. The Jews excommunicated him and the Christians hated him, regardless of the fact that his philosophy revolves around the goodness of God. He accepted Descartes’ rationalism, but rejected his dualism, and instead adopted a very pure sort of pantheism – there is only one substance and that substance is God. He rejected personal immortality – the only sort of immortality he believed in was by becoming closer to God. He was an absolute determinist, totally rejecting both free will and chance in physical laws.      

Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916) theorised that physical entities are nothing more than their perceived mental properties, but made clear this was a form of neutral monism and not idealism. American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) used the term “radical empiricism” to describe his views, but it was close to neutral monism. British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) adopted neutral monism in 1918 and remained a neutral monist for the rest of his life.     

English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) began in mathematics, then moved on to philosophy of science and finally ended up in metaphysics. He defended a metaphysical philosophy known as “process philosophy”. He believed that we should view the world as a web of inter-related processes – a form of neutral monism.When the paradigm shift is over, Whitehead will be remembered as one of its originators.  

What sort of reality do we actually live in?

I offer a thought experiment. For the purposes of the experiment, we are concerned only with what happens while we are alive, and not with questions about any alleged afterlife. Let us also suppose that we know for certain that everything that happens does so in accordance with the laws of physics, and that we know that the randomness inherent in quantum theory reflects an objectively real randomness – the quantum dice rolls are truly and totally random. I will describe all these characteristics together as being definitive of a “type X reality”. Many people believe that we actually do live in such a reality. Among them are people claiming to be materialists, physicalists, dualists, idealists and neutral monists, as well as people who aren’t strongly committed to any of those metaphysical positions. Type X versions of all of them can be constructed. If we know our reality is type X, should we even care which sort of type X it is? Is there any important difference between a dualist type X reality and an idealist one? The answer is surely no, unless you have a liking for purely semantic distinctions. What does matter is whether we really do live in a type X reality and not some other kind – one where there is an afterlife, or where sometimes things happen that defy the laws of physics, or where something non-random is hiding in the apparent randomness of quantum mechanics.

Whether materialism is true or false makes a functional difference because materialism entails naturalism. The same does not apply (at least in a general way) to the other three – there are versions of dualism, idealism and neutral monism that are consistent with naturalism, but there are also versions that aren’t. If something other than the material world exists, and is capable of interacting with the material world, then things can happen that aren’t reducible to the workings of the material world. If the material world is all there is, then that is not possible. This is why people who believe materialism is true find it impossible to take any sort of woo seriously.     I am much more interested in what is actually going on in our reality (about causality, in a general sense) than I am in whether a particular type of reality should be categorised (for example) as neutral monist or objective idealist. Dualists, objective idealists and neutral monists all believe in an objective world external to our minds. Dualists say it is material, objective idealists say it is mental, and neutral monists say it is neither. My view is that I’m not interested in arguing about the label. I’m committed to ESR – that there is indeed an objective reality and that we have knowledge of its structure. I will simply refer to it as “objective reality”, and leave open for now the question of what it is made of, or instantiated upon, or what else it might contain along with the structures that correspond to the material reality we’re experiencing. All that matters for my argument is that it exists, and we can know and say something about its structure.

Why “supernatural” must be carefully defined 

Given the above definition of naturalism, one might think it is straightforward to define supernaturalism as an opposing term: the belief that naturalism is false – the belief in forms of causality (or something resembling causality) that can’t be reduced to laws of nature; the belief that something else is going on. Relatively mild examples include free will, karma and synchronicity. More extreme examples are YEC and most of the miracles in the gospels, such as the Resurrection and the Feeding of the 5,000.     

Not so long ago this definition would have been perfectly adequate. For the whole period between Newton and Einstein (inclusive) physics made absolute predictions about future observations. The laws of classical physics and relativity leave no wiggle room for anything else. In a world where those are our best theories of physics then supernaturalism necessarily involves a breach of laws – it has to involve something that intervenes in the clockwork causality of the material world to produce effects that are inconsistent with the laws of physics. This would be true of everything listed above as supernatural – the mild examples are as incompatible with Newtonian-Einsteinian physics as the extreme ones.      

This situation began to change over a century ago. Modern physics is quantum physics, and quantum physics differs from what went before in several important ways. One of these is that the predictions made by quantum physics are probabilistic rather than absolute. This element of probability provides enough wiggle room to render the straightforward definition of supernaturalism useless.     

There are multiple competing metaphysical interpretations of the scientific core of quantum theory. Strictly speaking, these interpretations aren’t part of science – they are metaphysical because they are attempts to explain what the scientific part of quantum theory actually means. They are theories about what is really going on, underneath the observations themselves, and about what exactly the words observation or measurement should refer to (if anything at all). They are about the context in which we are to understand quantum theory.      

One interpretation in particular will help to demonstrate the implications of the probabilistic nature of quantum theory. In most interpretations there is only one outcome – a set of probabilities (the wave function) becomes just one observed outcome. This is known as “the collapse of the wave function” or just “observation” or “measurement”, and each interpretation involves a different explanation of what that should be taken to mean. The problem they are all attempting to solve is called “the measurement problem”. The Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) proposes a truly radical solution: it gets rid of wave function collapse altogether, by claiming that every possible outcome of quantum events occurs simultaneously in diverging timelines. The entire cosmos is continually splitting along these lines, but we’re only ever aware of one timeline because once they have diverged then there is no further interaction between them. Hence there is no need for any observation or measurement, but there are multiple versions of ourselves, living lives which continually diverge.     

Even though most timelines in an MWI multiverse are “normal”, there will always be a small minority where all manner of strange things happen, including not just occasional improbable events but what appear to be coordinated sequences of them. The point I am making is this:

1. As far as we know, according to science and reason, the MWI might be true. We cannot justify ruling it out on those grounds. It is considered a valid or live interpretation.            
2. If the MWI is true then there are timelines where sequences of exceptionally improbable events actually occur, without breaches of physical laws. Another way to say this is that it is physically possible that such things could happen in any timeline, but extraordinarily improbable.

The reason this matters is that the alleged supernatural phenomena on the “mild” list are consistent with the laws of physics: they require nothing more than events, or sequences of events, which are extraordinarily improbable. Take synchronicity for example. Carl Gustav Jung defined synchronicity as “an acausal connecting principle”. He equated it with the Tao, and connected it to Taoism’s divinatory system of the I Ching. Synchronicity manifests as combinations of events that are both exceptionally improbable and meaningful in some way, particularly but not always associated with personal psychological or spiritual development. Jung’s best known example occurred during a therapy session with a rational and highly educated woman who had been resisting dealing with her emotions. She was telling him about a dream in which she had been given a piece of jewellery in the form of an Egyptian golden scarab beetle – a symbol of rebirth and transformation. Jung heard a tapping on the closed window behind him and saw a flying insect knocking against the window from outside. He opened the window and caught the creature, which turned out to be a beetle virtually identical to the golden scarab, rarely found at that latitude, especially trying to get into dark rooms during the day. The improbability of such an event occurring at precisely that time allowed the woman to stop intellectualising matters and from that moment she began to make progress.     

Science can give us no reason to believe in any such thing, because it gives us no way to distinguish between synchronicity and objectively random chance. But neither does it give us any reason to rule it out as impossible. It can’t do, because the MWI is consistent with science, and if it is true then there are timelines where events that fit the description of synchronicity happen to everybody, all the time.In fact in this case it would not actually be synchronicity, because there would be no need to posit an acausal connecting principle as the explanation. The point is that such events are physically possible even if the MWI is false.      

Now contrast this with the things on the “extreme list”. There are no MWI timelines where YEC happened and none where it is possible to adequately feed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fishes. Even in the unimaginably vast MWI multiverse there are no events which breach the laws of physics.     

Among the other metaphysical interpretations of quantum theory is one that has become known as “consciousness causes collapse”, which removes the observer from the physical system. The earliest version was proposed by John von Neumann in 1932. His motivation was to escape from an infinite series of arbitrary physical observers (what observes the observer?) In Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007), American physicist Henry Stapp extended von Neumann’s theory and explained the implications for a causal mechanism for free will. This is among the most controversial of the interpretations, not least because of certain questions it raises about evolution. If consciousness collapses the wave function then how can it possibly be a product of evolution? What collapsed the wave function before the first appearance of conscious organisms? If something else was collapsing it before that point in evolutionary history, then did it stop doing so afterwards, or does it still do so now? This does have something of a can-of-worms look about it.     

Given the level of uncertainty regarding the interpretations of quantum theory, the definition of supernaturalism given above is not adequate. The phenomena on the extreme list still fit the old definition (they require a suspension of the laws of physics) but the phenomena on the mild list no longer belong in that category. It is not obvious how we should categorise these “mild” supernatural phenomena. On the one hand they do not contradict the laws of physics, but on the other they are not explained by those laws or reducible to them. There is a conceptual space and need here for two categories where currently there is only one. The first we might call contra-scientific supernaturalism. These are forms of causality that require an outright suspension of the laws of nature/physics, belief in which is not reconcilable with ecocivilisation. A person who truly believes that 5,000 people can be adequately fed with two fishes and five loaves cannot be expected to accept the epistemic authority of science, including its applications in ecology. This presents serious challenges when attempting to incorporate mainstream Christianity – or any other worldview that involves belief in contra-scientific supernatural phenomena – into an epistemic framework capable of sustaining an ecocivilisation. If this type of supernaturalism were possible, why wouldn’t God fix our world right now? If you can feed 5,000 people like that, then you can feed eight billion. Why doesn’t He conjure up another planet for us? The second we might call probabilistic supernaturalism: forms of causality involving exceptionally improbable events that are consistent with the laws of physics but that are not explained by them or reducible to them. There is no obvious reason why this should be irreconcilable with ecocivilisation.

Paranormal

The term paranormal is sometimes considered a subset of the supernatural. “Supernatural” is an older term and historically associated with religion, whereas “paranormal” refers to alleged oddities that are beyond current scientific understanding but might not always be. Perhaps we could use it to refer to probabilistic supernaturalism, but I fear that might encourage people to attempt to use scientific methods to investigate, prove or disprove these probabilistic phenomena, which I believe to be a mistake. If the phenomena in question exist at all, and they are fully amenable to scientific investigation, then why didn’t incontrovertible evidence emerge long ago? What has actually happened is an endless dispute about how to interpret borderline results which seem clear enough to people who already believe in such things but not clear enough to convince the skeptics. The believers accuse the skeptics of repeatedly raising the bar to ensure that all positive evidence is rejected as inadequate. The skeptics say the bar needs to be high because if you are making extraordinary claims then you need extraordinary evidence (the “Sagan standard”).  I doubt this situation is going to change any time soon. I think the way forwards is for people to agree to disagree (at least for now), accept that the alleged empirical evidence is too borderline to convince the skeptics, and give up trying to resolve the unresolvable. If probabilistic supernatural phenomena are real then they involve causality (or something that resembles it) which is fundamentally different to anything science has ever successfully demystified. Jung didn't even try to invoke synchronicity under laboratory conditions, and to suggest such a thing is possible is to misunderstand the nature of the alleged phenomena. By definition, these are things that happen to people for a reason, and the reason is never that they are taking part in a scientific experiment designed to prove or disprove the existence of the phenomena themselves. I have no use for the term “paranormal”.

Praeternatural and hypernatural 

There is another term available, which might be more appropriate than “probabilistic supernaturalism”. St Thomas Aquinas (c1225-1274) was the greatest of Catholic philosophers, and from his time onwards he was considered the only philosopher to have got Catholic Christianity “correct” – officially so since the rescript of 1879 by Pope Leo XIII. He was strongly influenced by Aristotle, and disliked Plato.

Aquinas claimed that God sometimes works miracles, but nobody else can – that magic is possible, with the help of demons, but is not properly miraculous. This distinction can strike modern people as odd, but from the time of St Thomas until the 16^th century people had a different set of causal categories to us. We think of magic and miracles as synonymous – both are supernatural as opposed to natural causality. They had three categories instead of two – “supernatural” and “miracle” were terms reserved for acts of God involving a suspension of the natural order. Magic was categorised as praeternatural (or preternatural), which means “beyond nature”. Even though demons were involved, this was a manipulation of the natural order rather than its outright suspension. Praeternatural phenomena could have been entirely the result of natural causality, but aren’t. Magic – aka witchcraft or sorcery – was considered very real and most evil, hence this period is well known for the widespread persecution of alleged witches (of both sexes, but more frequently women). By the mid-18^th century the term “praeternatural” had fallen out of use, and it eventually gained a modern non-metaphysical meaning of “so talented it’s spooky”. I don’t like the term “contra-scientific supernaturalism” – it is too cumbersome. “Probabilistic supernaturalism” isn’t quite right either. “Probabilistic” is fine, but anything “supernatural” sounds like it involves a suspension of the laws of physics. I therefore use “hypernaturalism” rather than “contra-scientific supernaturalism” and “praeternaturalism” for “probabilistic supernaturalism”. The term “supernatural” thereby disappears with the old paradigm, which will make very clear in any context whether we are talking about the old concept of supernatural, or the new concepts I am suggesting should replace it.

From here onwards:

Naturalism is belief in a causal order in which everything that happens can be reduced to (or explained in terms of) the laws of nature.

Hypernaturalism is belief in a causal order in which there are events or processes that require a suspension or breach of the laws of nature.

Praeternaturalism is belief in a causal order in which there are no events that require a suspension or breach of the laws of nature, but there are exceptionally improbable events that aren’t reducible to those laws, and aren’t random either. Praeternatural phenomena could have been entirely the result of natural causality, but aren’t.

The afterlife?

Naturalism, praeternaturalism and hypernaturalism, as I have defined them here, are claims about causality in our reality. The only relevance of the afterlife to these things would be if the spirits of the dead can have a causal effect on reality (such as communicating with the living). This would be inconsistent with naturalism.     

I personally see no reason to believe we have individuated souls that survive the death of the body and get re-incarnated, go to heaven or come back to interfere in the realm of the living. However, in most cases I also do not lose any sleep if other people choose to believe such things. One situation where it does matter is when belief in an afterlife is a contributory factor in suicide attacks, for obvious reasons. Perhaps there are others.     

This is not a topic I wish to dwell on, though I recognise that it is of major importance to many people. My position is that I don’t believe in it, and if I’m wrong then I’ll find out when I am dead. You must choose your battles, and I don’t choose this one.

What we need to know about quantum metaphysics

The story of the development of quantum theory is told in Appendix Two. The reason it does not appear in the main text is because most of it is only of background interest with respect to this book. This brief section explains what the reader actually needs to understand in the present context.     

Before we get further into that, another definition is needed. 

Local realism is the combination of two principles. Locality (physical changes or effects can only be caused by factors in their immediate vicinity, implying that no influence can travel faster than the speed of light) and realism (physical objects and their properties exist independently of observation or measurement).   

Quantum theory differs from classical physics in many ways, the most important of which is that instead of making a single prediction about what we will observe, it provides a range of possible outcomes and assigns them various probabilities. This raises the question of why we only ever observe the particular outcome we actually observe, rather than one or all of the others. This process (if that is what it is) of turning a set of probabilities into a single manifested outcome is known as the collapse of the wave function. The collapse occurs when a quantum system is “observed” or “measured”, but there is no consensus about what an observation or a measurement actually is (i.e. what those words actually mean in the true account of the nature of reality). There is fundamental disagreement about how, when, where or why the collapse occurs, and even about whether it happens at all.     

Four types of solution are available. The correct answer to the measurement problem must fall into these categories:

Category 1 is the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI). In the MWI there is no collapse and no observer, because all possible outcomes occur in a vast array of ever-diverging realities. Once diverged, these realities lose all contact with each other. They are not interdependent.

Category 2 is an objectively random single world. In these cases only one outcome occurs, and the apparent randomness is always objectively random. “Objective” here means it really is random, and doesn’t just appear that way to us because we lack the information that would allow us to see why it isn’t really random.

Category 3 is a deterministic single world. Again only one outcome occurs, but in these cases the apparent randomness is really the result of deterministic laws or naturalistic principles that we are currently unaware of (it is only subjectively random). It might be the case that we will never discover these laws or principles, but regardless of this they are governing what happens.

Category 4 is a praeternaturalistic single world. Again only one outcome occurs, and the collapse is caused by interaction with a non-physical Participating Observer (i.e. something outside of the physical system). The observer can also potentially load the quantum dice. This includes the von Neumann/Stapp interpretation, but it could also involve anything outside the physical system that can load the quantum dice, including all of the things I categorised as praeternatural. To be clear, these things (free will, synchronicity, etc.) aren’t what we normally consider to be observers, but they are taking the place of an observer in quantum theory. By this I mean that they are causing the collapse, and potentially influencing the probability of which of the possible outcomes occurs.     

Various combinations of single world interpretations may be possible. It is possible we live in a reality where the apparent quantum randomness is sometimes objectively random, sometimes the result of hidden determinism, and sometimes the result of praeternatural phenomena.

Relational quantum mechanics

The single world interpretations can also all be modified by another theory known as relational quantum mechanics (RQM). In RQM there is no single, absolute, objective state of the world – all observations are relative to other observers (or other quantum systems). RQM is incompatible with the MWI, because in the MWI there aren’t any observers. In the case of RQM the apparent randomness is at least partly the result of a requirement to keep the various systems consistent with each other. The essential difference between the standard versions of the single world interpretations and the RQM versions is that in the standard version there is a single objective reality and in RQM there is a web of interdependent realities. This interdependence ensures that the whole system has characteristics that are true in all of the interdependent realities. It might look like we have lost objective reality, but it has actually just shifted up to a higher level of abstraction. On this view objective reality is the deep structure that must be true for all observers in order to keep the whole system coherent.

Conclusion

 For the purpose of my argument in this book, all we need to know about quantum metaphysics is that these are the only options available. Some people will say that we can be more certain than this. They will either argue that we should already be able to agree on which interpretation is true, or that one or more of them shouldn’t be considered as live options. However, most physicists and philosophers will agree that even though they may have their own preferences, we cannot say with any certainty which interpretation (or class of interpretation listed above) is correct.     

It is worth noting that one’s preference in this case is very likely to be influenced by other beliefs that have nothing to do with quantum theory, and maybe not even anything to do with science. Perhaps one of these options fits better with the rest of your worldview than the others, and there can be all sorts of different reasons for this. Perhaps you believe in an interventionist God. Perhaps you are strongly of the opinion that no such thing exists. Perhaps you are attracted to thebrute simplicity and all-conquering determinism of the MWI. Perhaps the subjective experience of free will is enough to convince you to favour the interpretation most compatible with this experience being veridical rather than illusory.      

My conclusion is that we should not rush to firm conclusions when it comes to the interpretations of quantum theory. We are nowhere near a consensus as to what is the correct answer, and we may never arrive at one. Perhaps it is impossible to provide any sort of objective proof – either rational or empirical – of which answer is correct, in which case the question will remain open forever.

We now have the third principle of the New Epistemic Deal:

3: Epistemic structural realism is true.

Scientific knowledge tends towards truth. We acknowledge that there is such a thing as an objective reality, external to human minds, about which science provides structural knowledge that is reliable, albeit with certain qualifications. We reject the idea that all scientific knowledge is merely provisional, or as subjective as non-scientific forms of knowledge. We affirm the epistemic privilege of science.

Chapter 4: The Incoherence of Materialism

For non-materialists it can seem obvious that minds cannot be reduced to matter, equated with brain activity or denied any existence at all. For materialists, clearly, it is not. It is not that they cannot see the problem at all – anybody who is acquainted with this area of philosophy can certainly see a problem. As materialists see it, the problem is that our scientific understanding of consciousness is nowhere near good enough. However, most materialists also believe that the cumulative weight of evidence delivered by the whole of science, rationalism and the last four centuries of human progress – the undeniable and thoroughly deserved dominance of that paradigm – is ample justification for believing that this problem must have a materialistic solution. If it seems impossible then we must be thinking about it wrong, but this does not warrant taking seriously the idea that materialism should be rejected. Materialists believe theirs is the position most closely aligned with science and reason, for it is an expression of allegiance to the worldview which has been associated with those things since the scientific revolution (scientific materialism). It therefore seems thoroughly unreasonable to conclude that the dominant paradigm is itself unscientific or irrational.     

For paradigm shifts to actually happen, rather than just threaten to, at least two things are required. The first is a clear idea of what the old paradigm is and what is wrong with it, and the second is an alternative capable of attracting a consensus and sustaining the shift – a new paradigm waiting to take over. In this specific case the first condition has been satisfied. The old paradigm is metaphysical materialism, and its most prominent defenders include the late Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Paul and Patricia Churchland. There is a growing recognition that materialism is conceptually incoherent: that it does not make sense and cannot be fixed. Many philosophers have explained this incoherence in various different ways, but all these accounts reduce to a single underlying problem. The second condition has not been satisfied – even though the number of people who understand why materialism should be rejected continues to grow, no consensus has emerged in favour of an alternative.

What materialism leaves out

Because arguments against materialism tend to boil down to the same thing, it is not necessary to cover all of them in great detail. I will be focusing primarily on the work of Thomas Nagel, but first I will take a brief look at how some other people have approached this subject, starting with Australian Philosopher Frank Jackson’s“ knowledge argument” (or “Mary’s room” thought experiment).      

Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who knows everything there is to know about the physical processes involved in human colour vision. She understands all the physical facts, including the wavelengths of light, the structure of the eye, and the neural pathways in the brain that process colour. However, Mary has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room, where she has never seen any colour. She learns about the world only through black-and-white media. One day Mary leaves her monochrome room and sees a red rose for the first time. Does Mary learn something new when she experiences the colour red for the first time? Before leaving the room Mary had complete knowledge of all physical facts about colour and human colour vision. Upon seeing red for the first time Mary gains a new understanding – what it feels like to see red – the “qualia” of red. Therefore not all knowledge about human experience can be captured by physical facts, which implies that there are non-physical aspects of consciousness – specifically, subjective experiences or qualia – that cannot be fully explained by physicalism.     

This thought experiment challenges physicalism by arguing that consciousness is not reducible to physical facts; the existence of qualia implies a more comprehensive reality than physicalism allows. It has sparked extensive debates in philosophy of mind, with critics arguing that it might conflate knowing about a phenomenon with experiencing it, or that Mary doesn’t actually gain new propositional knowledge but rather a new ability (e.g. the ability to recognise or imagine red). Nonetheless, it remains a powerful challenge to the idea that physical facts are sufficient to explain consciousness. American philosopher Joseph Levine (1905-1987) made the same point in terms of what he called the “explanatory gap” – a significant gap between physical processes and the subjective experience of consciousness, which materialist explanations will never be able to bridge. 

British physicist Sir Roger Penrose has argued that consciousness cannot be explained by conventional physical theories. He suggests that quantum mechanics might play a crucial role in understanding consciousness, a view he developed in collaboration with Stuart Hameroff. Penrose’s own metaphysical position is not entirely clear, although he is certainly a naturalist. He says he’s a materialist who doesn’t like the word “materialism” because he doesn’t know what material is. Penrose recognises that something is seriously wrong with the old paradigm, but appears to be unsure of exactly what. He is willing to consider unconventional theories, but is also committed to some elements of the old paradigm (he’s confident that the mystical can’t be real, for example). Footnote: For more on this see the 2020 interview between Lex Fridman and Roger Penrose, entitled 'Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe'.

British philosopher Colin McGinn has argued that materialist approaches may be fundamentally unable to explain the nature of subjective experience, and believes that human cognitive limitations will prevent us from ever fully understanding consciousness. McGinn calls this “mysterianism”.     

Australian philosopher David Chalmers is one of the best known opponents of materialism, and frames the debate in terms of what he calls the “Hard Problem”. He contrasts this with the so-called “easy problems” of consciousness. The easy problems involve the challenging work of understanding how brain processes correlate with mental states, and they are considered “easy” only because they are, in principle, solvable. The hard problem is more fundamental: how can consciousness exist at all if materialism is true? Here, “hard” suggests a problem that may be insurmountable, while “easy” means merely difficult.     

Chalmers’ argument involves the conceivability of his now famous “philosophical zombies.” A p-zombie is something that looks and behaves exactly like a normal human at all times, but which isn’t conscious. Chalmers argues the mere fact that we can conceive of such a thing demonstrates that consciousness cannot be brain activity. It must be something over and above it. His conclusion is that physicalism cannot be true.    

I often hear it claimed that the hard problem of consciousness is not specific to materialism/physicalism – that it is a general problem. This claim is made almost exclusively by social media materialists/physicalists, and they follow it up with something like “Since all of the ontological positions struggle to make sense of consciousness, there’s no reason to abandon materialism/physicalism.” In fact, the hard problem is very specific to materialism/physicalism. Dualists and idealists consider consciousness to be a primary constituent of reality, and neutral monism is a conceptual structure deliberately constructed so as not to leave it out, so none of those positions have to deal with the hard problem of consciousness. Just as materialists don’t feel any need to explain the existence of matter, idealists, dualists and neutral monists aren’t required to explain the existence of mind. All explanations have to start (or end) somewhere.     

Though I agree with Chalmers’ conclusion, I have an objection to his argument. I can’t conceive of a p-zombie because by definition they behave like ordinary humans at all times, which means that if you asked one whether it is conscious it would reply “Of course I am! Why are you even asking me that?” I can’t imagine a zombie that believes it is conscious. It might be convincingly human in many ways, but it would not be capable of understanding consciousness or anything that depends upon it, or at least not like a conscious being understands those things. I think it would actually say something like “Consciousness? I have never been able to understand what that word is supposed to mean”, which means it wouldn’t be a p-zombie, because that is not how humans normally talk.     

Similar reasoning lies behind the near-universal rejection of the most extreme version of materialism: eliminativism. Eliminative materialists (such as the Churchlands) evade the hard problem by denying that subjective vocabulary like “consciousness” refers to anything that actually exists. Eliminativists reject the possibility of a private ostensive definition of consciousness: “Consciousness? That kind of talk is folk psychology!” A p-zombie would be a naturally perfect eliminative materialist. Unlike the real ones, it would have no trouble at all in actually abstaining from the use of unscientific subjective vocabulary.     

These arguments all revolve around the same basic problem – that the materialistic model of reality necessarily leaves something out. And the reason why this matters is that the thing it leaves out could scarcely be more important to us, because it is what it is like to be a human.

The view from somewhere

Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher who has worked mostly in the fields of political philosophy and ethics, and philosophy of mind. He is a rare example of a naturalist who is not a materialist, and there is no ambiguity about either of these things: he strongly rejects materialism and is unwaveringly committed to naturalism in general and atheism in particular. 

Nagel’s classic 1986 book The View from Nowhere is a philosophical exploration of the tension between subjective experience and objective understanding. He examines how humans attempt to reconcile the personal, subjective perspective of their inner lives (“the view from somewhere”) with the impersonal, detached stance of objective reasoning (“the view from nowhere”). While objectivity is essential for science, rationality and morality, it cannot fully capture the richness of subjective experience, such as emotions and values. Nagel argues that a purely objective worldview neglects the significance of individual, lived experiences. Consciousness resists full explanation through objective frameworks like physicalism because it necessarily involves subjective qualities (what it’s like to be a conscious being). He examines morality from subjective and objective perspectives, highlighting how ethical principles aim to balance personal interests with universal standards of fairness. He advocates for ethical objectivity but acknowledges the difficulty of fully detaching from subjective bias.The tension between subjectivity and objectivity extends to questions of free will and personal identity. He explores how we view ourselves both as agents acting in the world (subjectively) and as parts of a causal, objective system (objectively), and frames this tension as an inherent part of the human condition. We aspire to transcend our limited perspective but are always anchored to it in some way. He suggests that embracing this duality – without fully resolving it – can lead to a richer understanding of ourselves and the world.

Nagel has not expressed a firm conclusion on the subject of free will, though he thinks it is one of the most important philosophical questions. InThe View from Nowhere (p112) he writes that he changes his mind every time he thinks about it, but he is sympathetic to the idea that we might need to reconsider our understanding of causality when it comes to human agency. Some philosophers advocate for agent-causal theories, which posit that agents themselves can be the originators of their actions in a way that is not fully determined by prior events. Nagel acknowledges the appeal of this idea, but also the difficulties in making it coherent within a naturalistic worldview.

What is it like to be a bat? 

The whole of the next chapter examines Nagel’s later work, but as a preliminary I will outline the argument in his seminal article: What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974). It goes like this:

1: Consciousness exists – and not just human consciousness but completely unimaginable versions of it, such as bat consciousness. Bat consciousness is essentially “alien” to us, and if there really are any aliens out there, perhaps their consciousness could be even more alien than that of the bat.

2: It is impossible to imagine how humans could reduce all of the facts about consciousness to purely physical descriptions. There are facts that are completely impossible to state in any human language, even though we have no problem understanding why they can and must exist. These are facts about the subjective point of view. Only a Martian could understand facts about what it is like to be a Martian. 

3: We need to think about objectivity and subjectivity as directions the understanding can travel. We can understand things like lightning or rainbows from a purely physical point of view – the objective facts that even an alien scientist could understand. Or we can understand them from our own subjective point of view, but not that of a bat or a Martian. But what we absolutely cannot do is travel in both directions at the same time – we cannot reach an understanding of something as essentially subjective as what it is like to be a bat by reducing it to something objective. What would be left of what it is like to be a bat if one removes the viewpoint of the bat? We might as well try to find the top of a mountain by burrowing into the ground.

“[I]f experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes that were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes that were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?”

If we are trying to understand lightning, rainbows or any other obviously physical phenomena, then the scientific method of doing so is to systematically remove the subjective aspects in order to reveal the underlying objective, physical facts. However, in this case the thing we are trying to understand is the subjective aspect itself, so the idea of moving from appearance to reality makes no sense.

“In a sense, the seeds of this objection to the reducibility of experience are already detectable in successful cases of reduction; for in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced....The reduction can succeed only if the species-specific viewpoint is omitted from what is to be reduced.”

Nagel concludes that psycho-physical reduction is therefore impossible, so we must rule out the reductive form of materialism. But there are other forms – identity theory claims something different. Instead of trying to reduce consciousness to brain activity, identity theory claims that consciousness is brain activity. It then runs into major problems trying to explain what the word “is” is supposed to mean in such a statement. What does it mean to say “consciousness is brain activity”? The identity theorist might reply “What could be clearer than the word 'is'? What exactly is the problem?”

“But I believe it is precisely this apparent clarity of the word 'is' that is deceptive. Usually, when we are told that X is r we know how it is supposed to be true, but that depends on a conceptual or theoretical background and is not conveyed by the 'is' alone. We know how both 'X' and 'r' refer, and the kinds of things to which they refer, and we have a rough idea how the two referential paths might converge on a single thing, be it an object, a person, a process, an event, or whatever. But when the two terms of the identification are very disparate it may not be so clear how it could be true. We may not have even a rough idea of how the two referential paths could converge, or what kind of things they might converge on, and a theoretical framework may have to be supplied to enable us to understand this. Without the framework, an air of mysticism surrounds the identification.”

People without the theoretical background can’t understand how matter can “be” energy, but they are justified in believing that people who do have the theoretical background do understand it. This is not the case with the identity theory of consciousness – in this case the people who say “consciousness is brain activity” do not have the faintest idea how the statement could possibly be true. If psycho-physical reductionism is impossible and identity theory depends on a currently incomprehensible usage of the word “is”, then “...[a]t the present time the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it might be true.”

The article ends with a reminder of where it began: our confusion about the relationship between subjective and objective.

“....it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it.”

Materialism vs physicalism

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? describes a logical-conceptual problem that emerges from the essential nature of the attempt to explain consciousness in terms of the material world, although Nagel uses the term “physicalism” rather than “materialism”. Many people use them interchangeably, but their origins and meanings are not the same.     

“Materialism” unambiguously refers to a worldview associated with classical Newtonian physics, and arguably also to Einstein’s theories of relativity. “Physicalism” refers to whatever our best physical theories currently are, and at the present time that means quantum theory. “Physicalism”, in a general sense, should therefore currently refer to whatever quantum theory tells us about what reality is made of, and we have already established that this could be any of several very different things. At least according to one of the available metaphysical interpretations (von Neumann/Stapp), a complete description of what quantum mechanics is telling us about includes “the consciousness of the observer” (von Neumann) or “the Participating Observer” (Stapp). Does this mean that such things have a place in physicalism? Most physicalists would say no. Physicalism, therefore, either suffers from the same conceptual problems as materialism, or it refers to something that the majority of physicalists don’t believe in. British philosopher Galen Strawson takes this reasoning to its natural conclusion: that physicalism entails panpsychism. Footnote: 'Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism', Galen Strawson, Journal of Consciousness Studies, January 2009, 13 (10-11). As things stand, this term functions as an obstacle to a proper understanding of the conceptual problem we are dealing with, because it provides a hiding place for precisely the logical problem that needs to be fully exposed. “I’m not a materialist”, the physicalist can say. “That’s old Newtonian stuff. Physicalism is a much more modern thing.” Unfortunately, it is not clear what this more modern thing actually is.

Why “emergentism” can’t be materialism

There is a metaphysical claim that is sometimes mistaken for materialism which Nagel doesn’t address in What Is It Like to Be a Bat? This is the claim that consciousness “emerges” from material entities.          

Emergentism suggests that consciousness arises from complex systems, such as the brain, but is not reducible to the properties of the system’s individual components. This view is incompatible with materialism for a simple reason: if consciousness emerges from brain activity then something new and distinct has become part of reality. If one argues that whatever emerges is still “material” then we end up with two very different types of materiality. This results in epiphenomenalism – a dualistic view where consciousness “emerges” from brain activity but has no causal influence on it. Epiphenomenalism suffers from two serious problems. Firstly it renders consciousness an extension of the material world which is both inexplicable and meaningless, and secondly it makes it theoretically impossible that the brain could know about consciousness. And if you try to fix these problems by making consciousness causally efficacious then you’ve got full-blown interactive dualism, even though consciousness is claimed to originally have emerged from matter. Something is very wrong here too.

Necessity and sufficiency

There is one particular objection to the conclusion that materialism is false which I encounter so frequently that it is worth mentioning here. This objection is not a serious philosophical objection – it is not made by professional philosophers – but it is ubiquitous among people who discuss these things on social media. The objection is that we have a vast amount of relevant scientific evidence: we know a great deal about the effects on consciousness of a wide variety of mind-altering drugs and different ways that brains can be damaged. This is scientific evidence; why isn’t it relevant? Why isn’t this scientific justification for the belief that minds are nothing but brain processes? 

The answer is that this evidence only establishes that brains are (or appear to be) necessary for consciousness. It does not follow that they are sufficient. The impossibility of psycho-physical reduction suggests that something else is also necessary. An analogy makes this easier to understand. It involves an old-fashioned reel of film and the movie that is projected when the film is played. The correlation between the film and the movie resembles that between brain and mind: if you damage the film, then corresponding damage appears when you play the movie. However, it does not follow that the movie can be reduced to the film, or that the movie is the film. Neither does it follow that the movie “emerges” from the film, although perhaps that is closer to the truth than the other two proposals. The proper description of the situation is that the film is necessary for the movie (without the film there can be no movie) but it is not sufficient (something else is needed, in this case a projector).     

This kind of scientific knowledge does not provide a defence for materialism – it is relevant to the easy problems, but the hard problem remains untouched. It brings us no closer to an explanation of the missing internal viewpoint. If we can account for that internal viewpoint then we can start to imagine how the contents of consciousness might be derived from the brain, or maybe from the brain and other parts of the physical world to which it is connected. But this missing thing cannot “be” anything material. The subjective viewpoint is missing from the materialistic conception of reality and there’s no way to introduce it without the resulting system ceasing to be a coherent version of materialism.

The mind-trap: how assumptions shape the debate on consciousness 

In the decades since Nagel’s famous article was published, a vast amount of literature has been produced regarding the mind-body problem and the status of materialism and physicalism. This might be taken as all the proof anyone needs that the situation is in fact extremely complex, and that you need to have a philosophy PhD to stand any chance of understanding it. An alternative explanation is that there are a lot of materialists, including plenty of influential people, and when they approach this debate they do so having already concluded that materialism must be true. I am intimately familiar with this way of thinking: I have been there, done it and bought the T-shirt (actually, as I explain in Chapter Eight, the T-shirt was free).     

I approached the mind-body problem with my conclusion already decided in favour of materialism. I would not have framed it in those terms, but that is what was actually happening, and it is important to understand why. I felt my justification for believing materialism to be true was overwhelming. That consciousness is brain activity seemed to me the only reasonable option available. The only alternative I was aware of was to believe in souls, or that consciousness was something that had somehow been “hanging around” for over 12 billion years, waiting for the first conscious organisms to evolve. Having conclusively rejected this sort of nonsense when I was ten, there was no way I was going to let some philosophical argument suck me back towards that particular plughole.     

For me, it wasn’t just the lack of a credible alternative that made materialism such a no-brainer. Part of the reason was that so many other people – including pretty much everybody I respected – believed the same thing (or so I assumed). Materialists are well aware of the perils of this sort of groupthink, because they see it all the time in their ideological opponents – believers in religion and other forms of woo: “How could all these people be wrong, especially about something so important?” Materialists assume that their own belief system is immune to this particular pitfall, precisely because it is directly opposed to woo. People don’t turn to scientific materialism because it offers any comforting God to look after them, or because it makes promises about an afterlife. They do it because they believe in the power of reason and in backing claims up with empirical evidence. Where is the evidence for souls, or some non-material consciousness? In fact, what does “non-material” even mean? On top of all that, sensible, intelligent, educated, enlightened people everywhere believe that materialism is true. If there really was some simple conceptual-logical problem with it, then we should reasonably expect that this particular group of people, committed as they are to cold, hard reason, would have spotted it aeons ago. Except, of course, any materialist who discovers a serious problem at the conceptual heart of materialism will swiftly cease to be a materialist, thus eliminating themselves from the group of people who materialists think qualify as sensible, intelligent, educated and enlightened. Ex-materialists are treated with suspicion: they may have recently become weak-minded for some reason, or they may be lying about having ever been materialists in the first place.  

Materialism is a mind-trap. The problem, as alluded to in the previous chapter, lurks in the exact meaning of the word “material” itself. Materialists, and also many of their opponents, rarely even question what that word means, because it seems so obvious. Everybody knows what “the material world” means. In fact it is not so simple. The concept of a material world comes to us via consciousness – the only material world we have any direct knowledge of is the one we directly experience – the one that exists within consciousness. Materialism is the claim that only the material world exists, but in this case the concept of material is subtly but decisively different. The material world of materialism isn’t the one that exists within consciousness, and it isn’t a pre-philosophical and non-metaphysical concept of a material world either. It is specifically the material world that is presumed to exist beyond the veil of perception. No materialist believes that the Big Bang happened in any mind – human or divine. They believe it happened in a self-existing material realm that spent over 12 billion years unconsciously obeying the laws of physics before there was any such thing as a mind (assuming that conscious organisms didn’t evolve somewhere else first).

Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena

There is some relevant terminology that can be traced back to ancient Greece but is now associated with Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787) Kant divided reality into phenomena (things as they appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves, independent of appearances). He claimed that although we can infer the existence of a noumenal world, we can’t know anything about it – indeed we can’t even imagine it, because our cognitive equipment limits our capacity for understanding experience to spatio-temporality. He argued that space and time are the cognitive frame in which the phenomenal world exists. As a result, according to Kant, science is restricted to an investigation of phenomena, while noumena are forever out of its reach. He was not a scientific realist in the modern sense, although for Kant the phenomenal world was real enough. [Footnote: Kant called materialists “transcendental realists”, because they implicitly believe they can transcend the phenomenal world and have knowledge of a noumenal world that they assume to be very much like it. Kant’s position – that this sort of transcendence is impossible – is contrastingly called “transcendental idealism”. Kant was also an “empirical realist”, by which he meant science (i.e. empirical investigation) does indeed provide knowledge of reality – it’s just knowledge of reality as it appears to us rather than of reality as it is in itself. ]    

This terminology can help us to understand why materialism is such a mind-trap. The concept “material world” is pre-philosophical, but we can add some metaphysical concepts to make two new concepts. The material world we directly experience can be called the “phenomenal material world” and the material world that (allegedly) self-existed for 12 billion years before conscious life appeared on Earth can be called the “noumenal material world”. This diverges from Kantian usage, because Kant’s noumena is neither material nor knowable, but the meaning is clear enough. Materialists don’t generally acknowledge this Kant-like distinction, and yet their own word usage suggests they ought to. Consider the rival metaphysical position of idealism. For idealists, the material world is only known to us within consciousness (this is a stage in the reasoning that led them to idealism in the first place). So for idealists the material world is the phenomenal material world. Contrastingly, the material world of materialism can only be the noumenal material world – an objective material world that exists independently of consciousness. Therefore, if materialism is the claim that only the material world exists, then it equates to the claim that only the noumenal material world exists. And if that is what materialism is, then how could it possibly account for the phenomenal world? If things as they are in themselves are all that exists, how do we account for things appearing to us? Who is the us that they appear to? 

If we closely examine what the word “materialism” actually means then it implies that consciousness should not exist. This is the reason why eliminative materialists say that it cannot be real. Why else would people who consider themselves hard rationalists make such a wildly counter-intuitive claim if not compelled by reason? Eliminativism is the only form of materialism that is coherent, precisely because it makes no attempt to accommodate consciousness. However, since we have already established that abolishing subjective vocabulary is not acceptable, we must reject eliminative materialism too.    

After materialism

From the materialistic point of view, consciousness is an awkward afterthought. Science has provided us with the most comprehensive, coherent, self-consistent and rational conception of reality we’ve ever had. Sure, it is impossible to explain how or why the cosmos exists, but theism offers no alternative worthy of serious consideration so that issue can just be kicked into the long grass. That just leaves the pesky little loose end of consciousness, but no matter how intractable that problem seems, there must be some answer that is consistent with science, and that leads materialists to conclude that materialism must be true...somehow.     

The success of science is undeniable, which is why Hilary Putnam based his defence of scientific realism on it, and why I have based my own defence of realism on his. But science, materialism and realism are three different things. It is entirely possible to believe that materialism is incoherent while still basing your worldview on the idea that structural scientific realism is true. All this requires is that there is an objective, mind-external reality, about which we can have knowledge. It does not require that this objective reality is the only thing that exists, so we don’t have to deny consciousness, and neither does it require that this objective reality is material, or local, or exists in space and time. Even though they have been joined at the hip for the last four centuries, science does not need materialism. What changes if you reject materialism is the context in which scientific knowledge is situated, and if materialism is indeed false then a new context – one that actually makes sense – should improve science, rather than in any way degrading it.     

What is far less clear, if you reject materialism, is the status of naturalism. Materialism brings with it (at least) three things: two logical problems and certainty that naturalism is true. Later in this book I will suggest that these two logical problems have a single solution – that in both cases something is missing, and that the something in question is the same in both cases. The question of what that something is, and what it does, is closely related to the question of whether naturalism can survive the death of materialism. Thomas Nagel thinks it can, or at least he hopes so, and in the next chapter I will take a detailed look at his thoughts about how that could happen. My own thoughts must wait until Chapter Seven.

We now have the fourth principle of the New Epistemic Deal:

4: Both materialism and physicalism should be rejected. 

Materialism cannot account for consciousness. Physicalism either suffers from the same problem, or it implies things that most physicalists reject, in which case it is not much use as a piece of terminology. Both materialism and physicalism restrict our models of reality in such a way that they are never going to be able to satisfactorily account for everything we have justification for believing exists.

Chapter 5: Mind and Cosmos: Nagel’s Challenge

Thomas Nagel’s 2012 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False shines a powerful spotlight on a critically important part of the coming paradigm shift. Nagel is forensically searching for the most naturalistic answers available once materialism and physicalism have been rejected on logical-conceptual grounds, which, if you believe he is right, makes him the most important defender of naturalism of our time. Materialism is on its way to the dustbin of failed ideas, but there are always going to be people inclined towards skepticism and naturalism. In Mind and Cosmos Nagel tentatively feels his way towards a philosophical position that those people may hold in a society fit for ecocivilisation. The goal is a new, comprehensive world picture based on the hard sciences, and “the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification”. This world picture must take into account the failure of materialism. Nagel quotes Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) in support of the claim that, as things stand, reductive materialism is widely assumed to be the only serious possibility, and then assures his readers that the everyday operation of the hard sciences is not threatened by what is to come. But if we accept that materialism must be wrong, where do we go from there? Could any other unified theory take its place? Nagel states a preference for neutral monism and sets out in search of a new sort of naturalism.     

This chapter is the most technical part of this book, and it may seem like we’re delving very deeply into arcane, intricate details, considering that we set out in search of a bigger picture. However, these particular details are needed in order to understand how this piece of the puzzle fits together with the piece supplied by Henry Stapp in Mindful Universe, which is covered in Appendix Two.     

The rest of this chapter is a summary of Nagel’s book.

<Chapter 1> (Introduction)

If materialism is false then the physical, chemical and biological processes of evolution must all be reconceived in light of the fact that they have produced conscious organisms. Nagel raises two questions. Firstly, what is the probability of abiogenesis happening solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? Secondly, what is the probability that a viable sequence of genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist? My own view is that these probabilities are currently completely unknowable because we only have a single example upon which to base our estimates. Nagel is similarly skeptical of the current paradigm’s ability to answer either question, though he stresses that within the scientific community it is the first that causes most concern. His skepticism is not based on religious belief, or upon the availability of a better option, but an intuitive feeling that the prevailing scientific account of evolutionary history doesn’t ring true and, given that the only thing supporting it is an assumption he has rejected, he sees no reason why he should believe it. For a materialist, it can be difficult to understand what Nagel is expressing here. If you believe materialism is true then the mainstream scientific account of abiogenesis is something you just have to accept, regardless of the level of improbability it involves. If it is the only serious option, then if it seems incredibly improbable then that must either be because it only seems incredibly improbable, but actually isn’t, or because something incredibly improbable just happened to happen. However, if the assumption of materialism is dropped then other options become available.     

He then makes a bold suggestion: that there are principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. Teleology is going to be an important concept from here onwards. It comes from the Greek word “telos”, meaning “end”, “purpose” or “goal” and refers to a kind of causal process or order. A teleological process is one that is directed by its goal. We can think of mechanistic physical causality as “pushing” the world from its current state to future states, whereas teleology “pulls” it towards a specific end point. Aristotle’s physics, which was a central component of the dominant Western cosmological paradigm for two millennia, is teleological. According to Aristotle, the cosmos is made of four basic elements: Earth, Water, Air and Fire. These elements are continually trying to return to their natural positions – that is why a rock sinks in water, why water runs downhill, and why fire reaches upwards.     

In the Newtonian physics that replaced Aristotle’s, the whole of the future is fully determined by the laws of physics, which leaves no scope for teleology, but the same does not apply in a world governed by the laws of quantum physics. It is physically possible that the quantum dice are loaded in favour of specific outcomes in a way that is scientifically undetectable. Perhaps you were destined to meet your spouse, and the universe conspired to make it happen. This is mysterious to say the least, but if there is no divine intelligence directing the process, then perhaps it could be categorised as naturalistic. Nagel acknowledges that proposing a teleological naturalism will strike many people as outrageous. This, he says, is because “almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.” People who challenge the old paradigm can expect to be condemned as cranks.     

He then outlines the conditions of his project. Firstly it must be antireductionist. Secondly we must reject the idea that an incredibly improbable thing just happened to happen. If we are to “pretend to a real understanding of the world” then we are going to have to do better than that. Thirdly, we should be aiming for a description of a single natural order that unifies everything on the basis of a set of common elements and principles. Though we can’t expect to reach that goal any time soon, we should aspire to it. Cartesian dualism rejects that aspiration by abandoning the attempt at unification, while materialism and idealism are both failed attempts. Interventionist theism also fails to deliver this sort of unification, because it involves something that interferes with the natural order from outside.  

We are looking for a new sort of natural order: one that includes mind. This new paradigm will necessarily include a historical component – we can’t just add mind as an afterthought at the end. The appearance of mind “casts its shadow back over the entire process and the constituents and principles on which the process depends.” If the process was teleological then the teleology must reach all the way back to the beginning, not just of life on Earth but of the whole cosmos.     

How can we integrate this perspective with that of the physical sciences, as they have been developed for a mindless universe? In the old paradigm there is a hierarchy of hard sciences – biology is reduced to chemistry, and chemistry is reduced to physics. To what extent will this reductive system survive in the new paradigm?     

Nagel then pays his respects to intelligent design theorists Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer, who have raised problems with the orthodox scientific consensus that Nagel thinks should have been taken more seriously by the scientific establishment than they were (a claim that did not go down well in some quarters). While their positive arguments in favour of an intelligent designer can be effectively resisted, their negative arguments against the prevailing scientific view should still be regarded as open, because the present paradigm rests strongly on assumptions that govern the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed hypothesis. However, Nagel can’t bring himself to believe that intelligent design is a credible explanation for the origin and evolution of life or that divine purpose is a likely explanation for anything else in the cosmos either.     

The old paradigm is ripe for displacement. However... 

“To argue, as I will, that there is a lot it can’t explain is not to offer an alternative. But the recognition of those limits is a precondition of looking for alternatives, or at least of being open to their possibility. And it may mean that some directions of pursuit of the materialist form of explanation will come to be seen as dead ends. If the appearance of conscious organisms in the world is due to principles of development that are not derived from the timeless laws of physics, that may be a reason for pessimism about purely chemical explanations for the origin of life as well.”

Chapter 2: Antireductionism and the natural order

The second chapter explores the conflict between scientific naturalism and antireductionism. On one side is the hope that the natural sciences can eventually account for everything, and on the other there are serious doubts about whether things like consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought and value can be accommodated in the natural sciences. Nagel refers to the sides as “materialism” and “antireductionism”. 

Not all materialists describe themselves as reductionist. However, from the perspective of people who have concluded that it is untenable, all attempts to accommodate consciousness within materialism suffer from the same problem: they are attempts to reduce the true extent of reality to a common basis that is not rich enough for the purpose. The resistance to the old paradigm can therefore be brought together under the name “antireductionism”, even though it cannot be united under any new one. If reduction fails then a limit to physical science has been revealed, and something will be needed to account for whatever is missing. In fact it may be even worse than this – if consciousness itself can’t be reduced to physics, then it is possible that some of the things associated with it, such as value and meaning, may also require a new sort of explanation. 

If consciousness is not merely physical then it can’t be fully explained by physics. It follows that “aspects of our physical constitution that bring consciousness with them” can’t be explained by physics either. In other words, whatever it is about brains that allows their owners to be conscious, although physical facts themselves, will necessarily defy a complete physical explanation. If evolutionary biology cannot be fully reduced to physics, then it cannot account for the appearance of consciousness or any other phenomena that defy reduction. Therefore if consciousness is a product of biological evolution – if conscious organisms are an integral part of nature rather than miraculous anomalies – then we must be looking for a very different conception of the natural order to the materialistic one. Consciousness must play some sort of central role. 

The antireductionist resistance to the old paradigm can’t remain negative forever. At some point a new paradigm must be assembled. At the very least we need to rethink naturalism, the consequences of which are currently poorly understood but potentially enormous. The reductionist programs are partly driven by the lack of any comprehensive alternative, and Mind and Cosmos is an investigation of the consequences of rejecting it. Materialism must be replaced. If we are to make sense of the natural world then we must start out from a larger conception of what has to be understood than materialism can offer. And we surely must commit to the search for an intelligible underlying order to the universe – a search that predates science by at least 2,000 years. We shouldn’t (and clearly won’t) just give up. However, it is not clear that everything can be made intelligible in terms of natural science. Maybe we need other forms of understanding.     

It can seem that once you accept that reductionism has failed, the only way forward involves “adding peculiar extra ingredients like qualia, meanings, intentions, values, reasons, beliefs and desires to the otherwise magnificently unified mathematical order of the physical universe”, but this does not satisfy the desire for a coherent, generalised new understanding. It’s too ad-hoc. It is the opposite of elegant, and that is partly why it is insufficiently convincing to sustain a paradigm shift. Materialistic reductionism is partly motivated by the unacceptability of denying the reality of consciousness, but if we accept that this strategy has failed then materialistic naturalism is not just “false around the edges”. Perhaps the natural order is not just physical. Or even worse, perhaps there isn’t any comprehensive natural order where everything hangs together. Maybe there are only disconnected forms of understanding.

The intelligibility of the natural order

Assuming that there actually is a comprehensible natural order, what explains it? One answer is that the natural order is itself where explanation ends. Maybe we reach a point where we must say “This is just how things are”. Nagel is not disposed to see the success of science in this way. He thinks science should be seen as “part of the deepest explanation of why things are as they are”. When we prefer one explanation over another, it is not merely an aesthetic judgement. Rather, we believe the preferable explanation is more likely to be true.     

Nagel considers rational intelligibility to be the foundation of the natural order. He thinks that the intelligibility of the world is not accidental, and this makes consciousness doubly related to the natural order. Nature gave rise to conscious beings, and it is (we hope) intelligible to those beings. “Ultimately, therefore, such beings should be comprehensible to themselves.” These are “fundamental features of the universe, not byproducts of contingent developments whose true explanation is given in terms that do not make reference to mind.”     

The question of to what way or ways the world is intelligible looms over the whole of both science and philosophy. How much of the world’s intelligibility consists in its subsumability under naturalism – under “universal, mathematically formulable laws governing the spatio-temporal order”? If science has limits, are there any other forms of understanding that can render intelligible what science cannot? Before tackling this question, he takes a look at the old paradigm’s way of thinking: that science has no limits.     

If there really are no limits, then the sort of intelligibility that makes science possible must be included in the final explanation. The materialist picture must therefore be extended to include an explanation, such that eventually “the physical intelligibility of the world close[s] over itself”. The existence of beings to whom the world is scientifically intelligible must itself be scientifically intelligible.     

The story goes like this, Nagel says: 

“The history of human knowledge justifies the belief that the only way to truly understand the natural order is through physical law. For the universe to be intelligible, everything that happens must be explainable in terms of those laws, at least in principle. We admit that we can’t currently grasp it, but that is because it is too complex, so we are going to need more specialised forms of understanding for practical purposes. But we can still attempt to discover universal principles and laws which govern the things from which everything is composed, and which the observable material world is a manifestation. These we call the laws of physics. We are therefore looking for the most systematic possible description of a material universe extended in space and time.     

Though it is physics and chemistry which have proved most spectacularly successful in this quest for understanding, the greatest single leap forward towards a complete understanding was the theory of evolution, later enriched with the discovery of DNA. Neo-Darwinism offers a general means of subsuming the picture of the existence and developmental history of life as just another consequence of the equations of modern physics. Even if consciousness is proving to be a very stubborn loose end, it is possible to speculate that abiogenesis and evolution are just a very complex manifestation of entirely physical principles. The complex cognitive abilities that allow humans to understand not just science, but morality and art, can be explained by evolutionary psychology ('humans invented religion to bolster group cohesion', 'our appreciation of beauty evolved to allow us to judge health of potential mates', etc...). Surely it is reasonable to expect this sort of an explanation can be extended to cover all of our cognitive capacities.”     

Nagel finds it puzzling how the above view should be so widely viewed as self-evident. There is an enormous amount that we don’t currently know or understand, but scientific naturalists claim they already know what the form of future progress will be. They believe their way of looking at reality is the pinnacle of human thought, and that a future theory of everything is at least potentially within their reach. But, argues Nagel, “so long as the basic laws themselves are not necessary truths, the question remains why those laws hold. But perhaps part of the appeal of this conception is that if the laws are simple enough, we can come to rest with them and be content to say that this is just how things are. After all, what is the alternative? That really is my question.”

The weakness of theistic explanations

Nagel then contrasts theism and materialism as polar opposites in terms of explanation. For theists, all things begin and end with the intention of the divine mind (i.e. God’s will). Theism has often been associated with the ontological position opposed to materialism – idealism. This reverses the materialistic position, by making physical law a consequence of mind and ultimately interprets intelligibility in terms of God’s intention or purpose. This leaves the process of explanation and understanding as incomplete as a purely materialistic account. However, theism is of interest even to atheists, because it at least attempts to explain things that do not seem explainable by physical science. The inadequacies of the old paradigm seem to be real. If mind must be found a central place in our understanding of reality, isn’t idealism the obvious answer? Theistic idealism embraces this idea. Again, Nagel just isn’t convinced. It’s too far for his imagination to stretch and seems to him an unpromising way forward. Idealism is not the same as theism, of course. There have been atheistic idealists, such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860).     

Finding theism no more credible than materialism, Nagel is interested in what lies between them. They do have something important in common: both theism and materialism are attempts to understand ourselves from outside our own point of view (transcendence), even though they use very different resources to do so. What justifies this common ambition of transcendence? Isn’t it enough to understand the world from our own viewpoint? Apparently not, because the ambition is irresistible. We seem to instinctively seek a worldview large enough to encompass itself.In terms of knowledge, both theism and naturalism try to justify our reliance on cognition to understand the world. At one extreme is Descartes, who argued that God would not systematically deceive us and therefore our reason should be infallible, and at the other is naturalistic epistemology, which argues that natural selection wouldn’t provide us with unreliable cognitive faculties. Neither of these schemes provides an effective defence against the skeptical conclusion that we are brains in vats. Neither justifies the ambition of transcendence.     

But perhaps a more modest and realistic ambition is achievable – not an unassailably secure foundation to knowledge, but a way of understanding ourselves that isn’t self-undermining and does not require us to deny the obvious. That is to find a plausible account of the cosmos and our place in it, and neither theism nor naturalistic reductionism can deliver this more modest goal. Theism manages to admit the reality of more of what is so evidently the case, but even filled out with the doctrines of particular religions it only offers a partial explanation of our place in the world. It amounts to the claim that everything hangs together because of intention or purpose, without explaining how that intention operates. This leads us to a well known theological problem.

“An intentional agent must be thought of as having aims it sees as good, so the aims cannot be arbitrary; a theistic explanation will inevitably bring in some idea of value, and a particular religion can make this much more specific, though it poses the famous problem of evil.”

The importance of the problem of evil cannot be overstated. For many atheists the biggest single reason why they don’t believe in an Abrahamic God is the state of the world. If there is a God in charge of this unholy mess then it must be either incompetent or sadistic. Free will provides a partial defence – surely a world where humans have the freedom to commit evil is better than a world where everything is orchestrated by God and bad things never happen. Would you want to live in such a world? I think this argument is a good one, though it has historically caused additional theological problems because it implies that God cannot have perfect knowledge of the future. But the biggest problem, at least in the present context, is the difficulty of explaining why God would have willed into existence things like earthquakes, cancer and parasites.     

Theological explanations do not offer a comprehensive account of the natural order. They do not even attempt to offer comprehensive intelligibility from within the natural order – why should we be able to fully understand God’s intentions? Theists are in part motivated by a belief that there is no possibility that brute facts such as abiogenesis can depend on nothing but the laws of physics, but theism isn’t the only possible response to this belief. Maybe a completely different type of systematic account of nature is possible.

In search of a coherent, comprehensive naturalistic explanation

Naturalistic theories suffer from a different problem. Instead of offering explanations that are insufficient because they come from outside, the explanations they offer from the inside are “not reassuring enough”. Too much rests on evolutionary psychology. “Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a whole.” Nagel then qualifies this – he says that the evolutionary hypothesis for the full range of our cognitive powerscould be reliable, but “we do not have the kind of reason to rely on them that we ordinarily take ourselves to have in using them directly – as we do in science.” This is “even more clearly true of our moral and other normative capacities” (“normative” refers to the rules that define “normal” behaviour). “Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.”     

Nagel promises to defend these claims in later chapters (see Chapters 4 to 6 below), but right now he has a simpler point: even if evolutionary naturalism fails to provide a transcendent self-understanding, we should not abandon the search. There is no reason to believe that our confidence in what we have concluded are objective truths (not just about science, but also about morality) is dependent on the assumption that our cognitive capacities are the product of natural selection. Evolutionary psychology is too weak a ground for that. Our confidence in the truth of certain propositions should not be so easily shaken – and can’t be shaken “without a kind of false consciousness”.       

Nagel then re-iterates his opposition to simply giving up on the hope for transcendent understanding, even though such a view has had distinguished adherents. Here he mentions Wittgenstein’s rejection of metaphysics as a proper task of philosophy, and he rejects this attempt to close off the transcendent ambition. 

“To refrain we would have to believe that the quest for a single reality is an illusion, because there are many kinds of truth and many kinds of thought, and they cannot be systematically combined though a conception of a single world in which all truth is grounded. That is as radical a claim as any of the alternatives.”     

The question does not go away, regardless of whether or not we attempt to answer it. Even if we accept that the materialistic account of ourselves is false, it remains the case that we are the products of the long history of the universe since the big bang, descended from bacteria over billions of years of natural selection. That is part of the true understanding we are in search of, so our question is how to combine this with all the other things we know, in a coherent worldview that does not undermine itself. Somehow the world produces conscious beings capable of doing all that we do, including evaluating evidence for competing hypotheses about the natural order. Even if we don’t know how this happens, it is hard not to believe that some sort of systemic explanation is possible.     

Nagel then explains his idea of a satisfactory solution. 

“The inescapable fact that has to be accommodated in any complete conception of the universe is that the appearance of living organisms has eventually given rise to consciousness, perception, desire, action and the formation of both beliefs and intentions on the basis of reasons. If all this has a natural explanation, the possibilities were inherent in the universe long before there was life, and inherent in early life long before the appearance of animals. A satisfying explanation would show that the realization of these possibilities was not vanishingly improbable but a significant likelihood given the laws of nature and the composition of the universe. It would reveal mind and reason as basic aspects of a nonmaterialistic natural order.”    

In this passage Nagel seems to be joining mind and reason – consciousness and intelligence – together in a way that will make them difficult to untangle later. He has explained his motive: he does not like the idea of separating consciousness itself from what appear to be higher-order manifestations of consciousness. He is in search of a unified naturalistic worldview, so he is trying to bring more than just the basic phenomenon of consciousness under an umbrella, where he hopes we might begin to assemble a systematic post-materialistic naturalism. Nagel is not convinced that evolutionary psychology will be enough to explain the full range of our cognitive powers, and is suggesting that the teleology that was necessary for the evolution of conscious organisms is also the most plausible explanation for the ongoing evolution of our cognitive capacities.     

Chapter Two ends with the assessment that all we can do at this stage in the history of science is to argue for recognition of the problem; we’re still a long way from solutions.

Chapter 3: Consciousness

If we take seriously the problem consciousness poses to a comprehensive naturalism then it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, but we aren’t exactly awash with viable alternatives. Modern naturalism began with Galileo and Descartes, both of whom divided reality into the world of matter, which could be precisely described mathematically, and mind, which could not. For them... “it was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind – as well as human intentions and purposes – from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.” That this would eventually be challenged is inevitable, because humans can’t repress the desire for a unified world picture. Our bodies are part of the physical world and our minds are strongly connected with, and probably strictly dependent upon, physical events in our brain, as well as causal connections between our bodies and the rest of the world. It is this connection that has encouraged the hope of including the mind in a single physical conception of the world. This is recent; Descartes thought it was impossible. There has always been resistance to dualism, but for several centuries after Descartes this was mostly expressed through idealism. By the later 20^th century this had been replaced, at least in analytic philosophy, by attempts to unify starting from the physical. Physics is assumed to be philosophically unproblematic, and the Cartesian ghost in the machine is the main target. An alternative is therefore required, and here began a series of failures.     

Several versions of behaviourism failed for the same reason: they were verificationist. They attempted to reduce consciousness to what can be observed from the outside, which cannot be done because consciousness is what is inside. They all left out the most essential character of consciousness, which is subjectivity itself.     Behaviourism was followed by identity theory (as a scientific theory) – mental events “are” physical events in the brain. But what is it about mental events that makes them also physical events? It must be something conceptually distinct from the physical properties that define brain activity, because without that it becomes a conceptual rather than scientific truth (declaring brain activity to be identical to brain activity gets us nowhere). Materialists don’t want to give a dualistic answer – that consciousness is brain activity because it has non-physical properties in addition to its physiological ones. But they have to give some answer, and it has to be consistent with materialism, which necessarily pulls them back into some sort of behaviourism: “What makes the brain process a mental process, they proposed, is not an additional intrinsic property but a relational one – a relation to physical behaviour.” The identity theorists had to explain how “pain” and “brain state” can refer to the same thing even though their meaning is not the same, and do so without appealing to anything non-physical in accounting for the reference of “pain”. This led to the positions known as causal behaviourism and functionalism, as well as more complicated positions down the same path, all of which fail for the same old reason: they clearly leave out something essential, without which there is no mind. And the thing they leave out is exactly the same thing that Galileo and Descartes deliberately excluded at the dawn of modern science.     

An additional problem was noticed by Saul Kripke. Identity theory is based on the idea of other identities such as “H₂0 = water” or “heat = molecular motion”. Kripke argued that these identities are necessary truths, even though they aren’t conceptual or a priori. Water is nothing but H₂0 – you can’t have H₂0 without water, and you need nothing more. These arescientifically discovered identities, and they are true regardless of whether there is anybody around to be conscious of it. What makes this proposed identity necessary? “Experience of taste seems to be something extra, contingently related to the brain state – something produced rather than constituted by the brain state. So it cannot be identical to the brain state in the way water is identical to H₂0.”     

Many materialists involuntarily wobble between saying “consciousness is brain activity” and “consciousness is produced by brain activity”, unaware that they are doing it, and unable to stop. They need the first statement to defend materialism, but it doesn’t make any sense, because consciousness is very obviously not identical to brain activity. The second statement makes sense, but it implies something other than materialism.     

The mind-body problem is sufficiently difficult that we should now expect theoretical progress in this area to require a major conceptual revolution. The broader naturalistic program, at least in its current form, cannot survive the failure of psycho-physical reductionism. Many philosophers of mind are still committed to it – they see the difficulties as problems that can be solved. Nagel asks these people to see the rest of his argument as hypothetical – it is about what the consequences would be if we rule out reductionism. And the consequences run deep: materialistic naturalism is untenable, even as an account of the physical world (because humans are part of it). This goes a long way to explaining how “costly a position antireductionism in the philosophy of mind is”. Much is at stake. This is no regular paradigm shift.

The double mystery in need of explanation

The appearance of consciousness still needs to be explained, as part of the larger project of making sense of the world, and evolution must be part of this explanation. What kind of explanation of the development of conscious animals – even one that includes evolution – could account for the appearance of organisms that are not onlyphysically adapted to the environment but also conscious subjects? It can’t be a purely physical theory. 

“What has to be explained is not just the lacing of organic life with tincture of qualia but the coming into existence of subjective individual points of view – a type of existence logically distinct from anything describable by the physical sciences alone.”

The appearance of consciousness can’t be a separate question to the appearance of conscious organisms. The whole thing has to be explained, and make sense. The materialistic version of evolution cannot be the whole truth – it is not an accident that humans and other animals are conscious, so we need an explanation of their mental character as well as their physical character. Materialism can’t even account for everything in the material world, because it can’t account for humans. On a purely materialist understanding of biology, consciousness must be a tremendous and inexplicable extra brute fact about the world – and since no such inexplicable brute facts belong in a comprehensive vision of the natural order, something fundamental has to give. Antireductionism allows us to pose the question of what it is. 

Conscious animals are the result of biological evolution, but however well-supported is this empirical fact, it is not an explanation: it does not provide understanding, or enable us to see why the result was expected or how it came about. An explanation based on physical reproductive fitness will not be enough. 

“Selection for physical reproductive fitness may have resulted in the appearance of organisms that are in fact conscious, and that have the observable variety of different specific kinds of consciousness, but there is no physical explanation of why this is so – nor any other kind of explanation that we know of..... ….a postmaterialist theory would have to offer a unified explanation of how the physical and the mental characteristics of organisms developed together, and it would have to do so not just by adding a clause to the effect that the mental comes along with the physical as a bonus. The need for an illuminating explanation of the mental outcome pushes back to impose itself on the understanding of the entire process that led to that outcome.”

In other words, we can’t just say “natural selection did it.” For that explanation to illuminate in the way we expect scientific explanations to illuminate – especially evolutionary explanations – we need to explain the role of consciousness in all this. What sort of organisms are conscious? What was the difference between the first conscious organism and its last unconscious ancestor? Did it happen in a single generation? If not, when did it start happening, and why? How did consciousness affect the behaviour of those first conscious organisms? Why didn’t evolution produce zombie animals? As things stand, there is not even the beginning of a scientific answer to any of these questions. Either no answer is available at all, or there are plenty of suggestions for answers but none of them are particularly well supported or offer much hope of a breakthrough. This what an inadequate paradigm looks like. How can we scientifically explain consciousness, given that, from our present scientific perspective we have no idea what purpose it serves or when in evolutionary history it appeared?     

Nagel then rejects “outright dualism”, since this too would abandon a hope for explanation: substance dualism entails that biology has no responsibility for explaining the existence of minds. He is interested in the alternative hypothesis that biological evolution is in some way responsible for the existence of consciousness, but because consciousness defies physical explanation this means we must revise our view of evolution.     

If we accept that evolution is not purely physical, how much do we need to add to produce an explanation of consciousness that makes the appearance of conscious organisms intelligible? This is a crucial question. Nagel says we need to be looking for the following:

(1) At least in later stages, consciousness plays an essential role in survival.

(2) The relevant features of consciousness are genetically transmitted.

(3) Genetic variation supplies the candidates for natural selection, which, at least after a certain point, is simultaneously mental and physical variation.

(4) (And most significantly) these mechanisms should be preceded by others in the earlier stages of evolution that created the conditions for their possibility. 

“This would mean abandoning the standard assumption that evolution is driven by exclusively physical causes. Indeed, it suggests that the explanation may have to be something more than physical all the way down. The rejection of psycho-physical reductionism leaves us with a mystery of the most basic kind about the natural order – a mystery whose avoidance is one of the primary motives of reductionism. It is a double mystery: first, about the relation between the physical and the mental in each individual instance, and second, about how the evolutionary explanation of the development of physical organisms can be transformed into a psycho-physical explanation of how consciousness developed.” 

We are in search of two parts of an explanation, corresponding to the double mystery described above. The historical account (how conscious organisms evolved) presumably depends partly on the constitutive account (the mind-brain relationship). Our goal is to replace these two deep mysteries with a single intelligible explanation. 

The constitutive question

For the mind-brain relationship the possibilities are either reductive or emergent. A reductive account will explain consciousness in terms of the properties of its elementary parts, which means conscious beings must have non-physical constituent parts. There is potential for great confusion here. “Reductionism” usually refers specifically to reduction to the physical, but “reductionist” is also a description of a theory that reduces everything to mind, or to the neutral stuff of neutral monism. When Nagel talks about a reductive constitutive account, he’s talking in this more general sense, that a theory reduces whatever it is trying to explain to the fundamental constituents of reality, whatever they are. And since we are composed of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, it would seem to follow that a reductive constitutive account will involve some sort of panpsychism. 

An emergent account would have to link consciousness with brain processes specifically, and so does not lead to panpsychism. Nagel isn’t interested in the emergent account, and neither am I. Emergence only makes sense if whatever is required to produce the thing that is emerging can be found in the basic constituents of whatever it is emerging from. Without this you’ve just got inexplicable magic, and that is not going to fly if what we’re after is intelligibility. We should therefore eliminate the emergent constitutive option from our enquiries, and that means we must take seriously the reductive alternative: we are searching for an answer that accounts for the relation between mind and brain in terms of something more basic about the natural order. If such an account is possible, it would explain the appearance of consciousness in animals by means of a general monism, according to which the constituents of the universe have properties that explain not only its physical but its mental character. 

He then quotes Tom Sorell: 

“Even if the mechanisms that produced biological life, including consciousness, are, at some level, the same as those that operate in the evolution of the physical universe, it does not follow that those mechanisms are physical just because physical evolution preceded biological evolution. Perhaps some transphysical and transmental concept is required to capture both mechanisms. This conjecture stakes out a territory for something sometimes called 'neutral monism' in addition to dualist, materialist, and idealist positions.”     

In other words, if neutral monism is true then there is nothing intrinsically impossible about explaining how conscious biological life evolved. Consciousness could already have been there, embedded in the fabric of reality, right from the start. In this case, consciousness is not an effect of brain processes – “rather those brain processes are in themselves more than physical, and the incompleteness of the physical description of the world is exemplified by the incompleteness of their purely physical description.”

The historical question

For the explanation of how consciousness evolved there are three options: causal (appealing only to law-governed efficient causation), intentional, and teleological. A causal account is one where the process consists entirely of “pushing” by natural physical causality. A teleological account is one where the process is also “pulled” by a goal. An intentional account involves divine will and intellect.     

For theists, the intentional historical account is the obvious answer. It raises all manner of other questions, especially concerning the problem of evil, but it is an option to answer the question at hand. However, since we are searching for a new naturalistic paradigm, or at least the closest we can get, “God did it” can’t be the answer until such time as all others have conclusively failed. We can therefore rule out the intentional account (at least for now).     

What about the causal historical (and constitutively reductive) account? This leads us back to panpsychism again, and this time Nagel doubts that it can make sense: “The protopsychic properties of all matter, on such a view, are postulated solely because they are needed to explain the appearance of consciousness at high levels of organic complexity. Apart from that, nothing is known about them: they are completely indescribable and have no predictable local effects, in contrast to the physical properties of electrons and protons, which allow them to be detected individually.”
We have no idea how such an explanation might work, and there’s no obvious way to make progress on it. It also still leaves us with the question of how the first conscious organism evolved. How can the same principles apply both before and after that moment? This class of theory doesn’t offer us much in the way of intelligibility either. In this respect, is it even an improvement on emergence or materialism? The reductive teleological explanation is now the only non-theological option still standing. This, Nagel admits, looks like a throwback to Aristotle, but he’s convinced it is coherent, that it is quite different to the theological answer, and that it should not be ruled out. I must admit that I’m not sure how different they really are, at least in the absence of an alternative explanation for the teleology apart from the will of God. The only clear difference is that the theological explanation is that God did it whereas Nagel’s explanation ends with teleology itself: teleology did it.

What sort of teleology?

Of the six initial options (two kinds of constitutive account times three kinds of historical account) the constitutively reductive and historically teleological explanation stands out as the most promising. Emergence is unintelligible, leaving us with the three reductive historical options. We’ve rejected the intentional historical account because it’s theological, which leaves us a choice between the causal and teleological accounts. Of these two, the causal account sets up several different apparently unanswerable questions, whereas the teleological account sets up just one: What explains the teleology? 

What we are really looking for is a solution whereby the constitutive account dovetails with the historical account: an explanation for the relationship between consciousness and brains that somehow naturally leads to a teleological explanation of the origin of conscious life. And perhaps, if we find the right answer, it will shed some light on certain other mysteries that have been lingering around the edges of science like bad smells. 

Nagel then strengthens his claim that the theory we should be searching for must be universal, and not a process that is unique to the appearance of conscious organisms: 

“[I]t is essential, if teleology is to form a part of a revised natural order, that its laws should be genuinely universal and not just the description of a single goal-seeking process. Since we are acquainted with only one instance of the appearance and evolution of life, we lack a basis for bringing it under universal teleological laws, unless teleological principles can be found operating consistently at much lower levels. But there would have to be such laws for teleology to genuinely explain anything.”

This quote is important. Nagel thinks we should be looking for teleological laws – and even says that there can be no genuine teleological explanation without them. He also is saying that in order for a new paradigm to be naturalistic then the process that led to the appearance of the first conscious organisms cannot have been unique. If it was then we are not going to be able to construct a new model of the natural order, because one unique process doesn’t give us enough to work with, even if that process was itself natural. We will need to find other examples of teleological processes that are amenable to scientific investigation, and laws that govern them, universally and consistently.     

Nagel then clarifies something about his proposed teleology. Teleological explanations are typically associated with the idea that outcomes have value, so that it is not arbitrary that those particular teleological principles hold. This leads in turn to the question of whether value can be understood independently of the purposes of some conscious being.      

“Nonpurposive teleology would either have to be value-free or would have to say that the value of certain outcomes can itself explain why the laws hold. In either case, natural teleology would mean the universe is rationally governed in more than one way – not only through universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads towards certain outcomes – notably the existence of living, and ultimately conscious organisms.”     

So we are looking for a sort of teleology where either the goal needs no value, or where the value of that goal can itself explain the teleology. Nagel is not hopeful about approaching such a theory directly. He thinks it will need to be done in stages. Firstly we need to fix the conceptual problems, and then there will presumably be a lot of scientific work to be done. Maybe we lack crucial information about the brain.

Chapters 4 to 6

Nagel now moves to a new topic – that of intentionality. He defines this as “the capacity of the mind to represent the world and its own aims” and notes that it is more controversial to claim that intentionality can’t be explained materialistically than it is to claim that consciousness can’t be explained. However, he’s convinced that intentionality, thought and action will also resist psycho-physical reduction, and this is what the remainder of his book is about. “I believe that the role of consciousness in the survival of organisms is inseparable from intentionality: inseparable from perception, belief, desire, and action, and finally from reason. The generation of the entire mental structure would have to be explained by basic principles, if it is recognized as part of the natural order. ”Philosophy can’t generate such explanations – it can only “point out the gaping lack of them, and the obstacles to constructing them out of presently available materials.”     

Is consciousness separable from reason? Nagel seems to think it is not. I am not so sure. Consciousness and intelligence are certainly linked in humans, but we have no reason to think AIs are conscious and good reason to suspect that even animals as simple as earthworms may well be conscious even though they are incapable of anything but the most basic sort of reason. The capacity for reason implies some sort of complex structure that processes information, but the distinction between a conscious worm and a zombie worm could well be binary – surely either there is an awareness of something, or there isn’t.           

He now asks whether our cognitive capacities could be placed in the framework of an evolutionary theory that is no longer exclusively materialist, but retains the Darwinian structure. There are two aspects. The first is how likely it is that natural selection should have produced creatures of our cognitive capacity, able to extend our knowledge vastly beyond initial appearances (he gives the examples of science, logic and ethics). Is it credible that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time? The second is understanding naturalistically “the faculty of reason that is the essence of these activities.”     

First he points out that the question doesn’t even make sense if there isn’t an objective reality to find out about. On an anti-realist view there is no possibility of finding truths – either scientific or moral – in an external world. He then states that anti-realism about moral truths is a more serious option than for the scientific case. Nagel is a moral realist – he doesn’t just believe there is an objective reality out there, but that there are true/false answers to at least some moral questions that are theoretically accessible to any rational being. The opposite to moral realism is moral anti-realism, including moral subjectivism and relativism. This is a book about realism, and also about morality, and questions about the status of moral realism are indeed going to matter. Whether or not they matter in the current context is a different question. Nagel thinks they do.     

He then provides an uncontroversial account of evolutionary psychology, which he skeptically describes as a “just so story”. At the end he acknowledges that “it is not easy to say how one might decide whether [our advanced cognitive capacities] could be a manifestation of abilities that have a survival value in prehistoric everyday life. In view of the mathematical sophistication of modern physical theories, it seems highly unlikely, but perhaps the claim could be defended.”This was the first part of Mind and Cosmos that surprised me; I think that claim is quite easy to defend. The human brain is extraordinarily adaptable. We are capable of learning all sorts of specific things which were unthinkable to early anatomically modern humans, from the invention of writing onwards.     

This discussion would presumably be easier if we had some details – any idea at all – of how this proposed teleology worked in the primary example of the evolution of conscious life. Without that information it is almost as mysterious as other possibilities that we have already rejected as unpromising or unintelligible. As things stand, how can we even guess how likely it is that a general theory will be found, or what other sorts of processes might be relevant, or what teleological laws might look like?     Nagel’s argument here concerns advanced cognition – especially the ability to escape from our subjective viewpoint and understand objective reality and abstract theories such as quantum mechanics. He then applies similar reasoning to our ability to make value judgements, such as our capacity for morality. He believes this should be considered as a third candidate for a teleological evolutionary explanation, suggesting that there is ongoing teleological evolution of our cognitive powers, at least with respect to value judgements. If true, this may have implications for our future capacity to build an ecocivilisation. Maybe we really aren’t the biologically finished article, and our path to ecocivilisation will be guided not just by the brutal mechanics of natural selection through a die-off and population bottleneck but by teleological upgrades to our ability to make value judgements.     

The arguments about advanced cognition and value judgements lack the logical force of the argument with respect to consciousness – they rank among the easy problems of consciousness rather than the hard problem. However, Nagel thinks the universality they imply and their potential to contribute to a general theory justifies his belief that these things also have a teleological explanation.      

Mind and Cosmos concludes with the following comments:

“I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in the light of how little we really understand about the world. It would be an advance if the secular theoretical establishment, and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates could wean itself of [sic] the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps – to adapt one of its own pejorative tags. I have tried to show that this approach is incapable of providing an adequate account, either constitutive or historical, of our universe.     

However, I am certain that my own attempt to explore alternatives is far too unimaginative. An understanding of the universe as basically prone to generate life and mind will probably require a much more radical departure from the familiar forms of naturalistic explanation than I am at present able to conceive. Specifically, in attempting to understand consciousness as a biological phenomenon, it is easy to forget how radical is the difference between the subjective and the objective, and fall into the error of thinking about the mental in terms taken from our ideas of physical events and processes. Wittgenstein was sensitive to this error, though his way of avoiding it through an exploration of the grammar of mental language seems to me plainly insufficient.”

“I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two – though of course it may be replaced by a new consensus that is just as invalid. The human will to believe is inexhaustible.”

Part Two of this book is my contribution to the exploration of what lies beyond the current boundaries of the thinkable.