Category: Metaphysics

Way back in 2014 popular astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson did a Nerdist Podcast in which he seemed critical and dismissive of philosophy. There was a response from the defenders of philosophy and some critics went so far as to accuse him of being a philistine. While philosophy’s most ancient enemy is poetry (according to Plato), science is usually up for a good fight.

Tyson presents a not unreasonable view of contemporary philosophy, namely that “asking deep questions” can cause a “pointless delay in your progress” in engaging “this whole big world of unknowns out there.” To avoid such pointless delays, Tyson advised scientists to respond to such questioners by saying, “I’m moving on, I’m leaving you behind, and you can’t even cross the street because you’re distracted by deep questions you’ve asked of yourself. I don’t have time for that.”

While I wrote about this back in 2014, it is wise to revisit my views on the matter.

The idea that a scientist might see philosophy as useless (or worse) is consistent with my own experiences in academics. Since 2014, STEM has risen and the humanities have been under constant attack. As one example, as of Fall 2026 Florida A&M University will no longer have a distinct philosophy (and religion) major. I will still be teaching philosophy, but in a new combined program made up of philosophy, history, religion, and African-American studies.  We are, of course, lucky that we are still permitted to even exist. To be fair and balanced, a case can be made against philosophy. And the concern that the deep questioning of philosophy can cause pointless delays has merit and is well worth considering. After all, if philosophy is useless or even detrimental, then this would be worth knowing.

The main bite of this criticism is that philosophical questioning is detrimental to progress: a scientist who gets caught in these deep questions, it seems, would be like a kayaker caught in a strong eddy: they would be spinning around rather than zipping down the river. This concern also has practical merit. To use an analogy outside of science, consider a committee meeting aimed at determining the curriculum for state schools. This committee has an objective to achieve and asking questions is a reasonable way to begin. But imagine that people start raising deep questions about the meaning of terms such as “humanities” or “science” and become too interested in the semantics. This sidetracking will create a needlessly long meeting and little or no progress. After all, the goal is to determine the curriculum, and deep questions will only slow down progress towards this practical goal. Likewise, if a scientist is endeavoring to sort out the nature of the cosmos, deep questions can be a similar trap: she will be asking ever deeper questions rather than gathering data and doing math to answer her shallower questions.

Philosophy, as Socrates showed with his Socratic method, can endlessly generate deep questions. Questions such as “what is the nature of the universe?”, “what is time?”, “what is space?”, “what is good?”, “what’s for lunch?”, and so on. Also, as Socrates showed, for each answer given, philosophy can generate more questions. It is also often claimed that this shows that philosophy has no answers as every alleged answer can be questioned and only raises more questions. Thus, philosophy seems to be bad for scientists.

A key assumption is that science is different from philosophy in a key way—while it raises questions, proper science focuses on questions that can be answered or, at the very least, it gets down to the business of answering them and (eventually) abandons a question if it turns out to be a distracting deep question. Thus, science provides answers and makes progress. This, obviously enough, ties into another stock attack on philosophy: philosophy makes no progress and is useless.

One obvious reason philosophy is seen as not making progress and as useless is that when enough progress is made on a deep question, it often becomes a matter for science rather than philosophy. For example, ancient Greek philosophers, such as Democritus, speculated about the composition of the universe and its size.  These were considered deep philosophical questions. Even Newton considered himself a natural philosopher. He has, of course, been claimed by the scientists (many of whom conveniently overlook the role of God in his theories). These questions are now claimed by physicists, such as Tyson, who now see them as scientific rather than philosophical questions.

Thus, it is unfair to claim that philosophy does not solve problems or make progress. When philosophy makes progress in an area, that area often becomes a science and is no longer considered philosophy. However, progress is impossible without the deep questions and the work done by philosophers before the field was claimed to be a science.

At this point, some might grudgingly concede that philosophy did make some valuable contributions in the past, but philosophy is now an eddy rather than the current of progress.

Philosophy has been here before—back in the days of Socrates the Sophists contended that philosophical speculation was valueless and that people should focus on getting things done—that is, achieving success. Fortunately for contemporary science, philosophy survived and philosophers kept asking those deep questions that seemed so valueless then.

While some might see philosophy as a curious relic of the past, it is worth considering that some of the deep, distracting philosophical questions are well worth pursuing. Much as how Democritus’ deep philosophical questions led to the astrophysics that a fellow named Neil loves so much.

 

 

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A fundamental question of science, philosophy and theology is why the universe is the way it is. Over the centuries, the answers have fallen into two broad camps. The first is teleology, the view the universe is the way it is because it has a purpose, goal or end for which it aims. The second is t is the denial of the teleological view. Members of this camp often embrace purposeless chance as the “reason” why things are as they are.

Both camps agree on many things, such that the universe seems finely tuned. Theorists vary in their views on what a less finely tuned universe would be like. On some views, the universe would be just slightly different while on other views small differences would have significant results, perhaps even a lifeless universe. Because of this apparent fine tuning, a concern for philosophers and physicists is explaining why this is the case.

The dispute over this big question mirrors the dispute over a smaller question, namely why living creatures are the way they are. The division into camps follows the same pattern. On one side is teleology and the other side is its rejection. Interestingly, it might be possible to have different types of answers to these questions. For example, the universe could have been created by a deity (a teleological universe) who decides to let natural selection sort out life forms (non-teleological). That said, the smaller question does provide some ways to answer the larger question.

The teleological camp is very broad, with members including Aristotle and Joel Osteen. In the United States, the best-known form of teleology is Christian creationism. This view answers the large and the small question with God: He created the universe and the inhabitants. There are other religious teleological views—the creation stories of various other cultures and faiths are examples of these. There are also non-religious views. Among these, probably the best known are those of Plato and Aristotle. For Plato, roughly put, the universe is the way it is because of the Forms (and ultimately the Good). Aristotle does not put a personal god in charge of the universe, but he saw reality as eminently teleological. Views that posit laws governing reality also seem, to some, within the teleological camp. As such, the main division in the teleological camp tends to be between religious theories and the non-religious theories.

Obviously enough, teleological accounts have fallen out of favor in the sciences—the big switch took place during the Modern era as philosophy and science transitioned away from Aristotle (and Plato) towards a more mechanistic and materialistic view of reality.

The non-teleological camp is at least as varied as the teleological camp and is as old. The pre-Socratic Greek philosophers considered what would now be called natural selection and the idea of a chance-based, purposeless universe is ancient.

One non-teleological way to answer the question of why the universe is the way it is would be to take an approach like Spinoza, only without God. Which, some might point out, would not be like Spinoza at all. This would be to claim that the universe is what it is as a matter of necessity: it could not be any different from what it is. However, this might be unsatisfactory as one can still why it is necessarily the way it is.

The opposite approach is to reject necessity and embrace a random universe—it was just pure chance that the universe turned out as it did and things could have been different. So, the answer to the question of why the universe is the way it is would be blind chance. The universe plays dice with itself.

Another approach is to take the view that the universe is the way it is and finely tuned because it has “settled” down into what seems to be a fine-tuned state. Crudely put, the universe worked things out without any guidance or purpose. To use an analogy, think of sticks and debris washed by a flood to form a stable “structure.” The universe could be like that—where the flood is the big bang or whatever got it going.

One variant on this would be to claim that the universe contains distinct zones—the zone we are in happened to be “naturally selected” to be stable and hospitable to life. Other zones could be different—perhaps so different that they are beyond our epistemic abilities. Vernor Vinge explores the idea of variable physics in his novel A Fire Upon the Deep.  Or perhaps these zones “died” thus allowing an interesting possibility for fiction about the ghosts of dead zones haunting the cosmic night. Perhaps the fossils of dead universes drift around us, awaiting their discovery.

Another option is to embrace the idea of a multiverse. This allows an analogy to natural selection: in place of a multitude of species, there is a multitude of universes. Some “survive” the selection while others do not. Just as we are supposed to be a species that survived the natural selection of evolution, we live in a universe that survived cosmic selection. If the model of evolution and natural selection is intellectually satisfying in biology, it would seem reasonable to accept cosmic selection as also being intellectually satisfying—although it will be radically different from natural selection in many obvious ways.

 

 

 

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In my previous essays I examined the idea that love is mechanical and its ethical implications. In this essay, I will focus on the eternal truth that love hurts.

While there are exceptions, the end of a romantic relationship involves pain. As noted in my l essay on voles and love, Young found that the loss of a partner depresses a prairie vole. This was tested by dropping voles into beakers of water to determine how much they would struggle. Prairie voles who had just lost a partner struggled less that those who were not bereft. The depressed voles differed chemically from the non-depressed voles. When a depressed vole was “treated” for this depression, the vole struggled as strongly as the non-bereft vole.

Human beings also suffer from the hurt of love. For example, a human who has ended a relationship often falls into a vole-like depression and struggles less against the tests of life (though dropping humans into beakers to test this would presumably be unethical).

While some might derive pleasure from stewing in a state of post-love depression, this feeling is something most would want to end. The usual treatment, other than self-medication, is time: people usually tend to recover and seek out a new opportunity for love. And depression.

Given that voles can be treated for this depression, humans could also be treated as well. After all, if love is essentially a chemical romance grounded in strict materialism, then tweaking the brain just so would fix that depression. Interestingly enough, the philosopher Spinoza offered an account of love (and emotions in general) that match up with the mechanistic model being examined.

As Spinoza saw it, people are slaves to their affections and chained by who and what  they love. This is an unwise approach to life because, as the voles in the experiment found, the object of one’s love can die (or leave). This view of Spinoza matches this as voles that bond with a partner become depressed when that partner is lost. In contrast, voles that do not form such bonds do not suffer this depression.

While Spinoza was a pantheist, his view of human beings is similar to that of the mechanist: he regarded humans as within the laws of nature and was a determinist. He believed that all that occurs does so from necessity—there is no chance or choice. This view guided him to the notion that human behavior and motivations can be examined as one might examine “lines, planes or bodies.” He held that emotions follow the same necessity as all other things, thus making the effects of the emotions predictable.  In short, Spinoza engaged in what can be regarded as a scientific examination of the emotions—although he did so without the technology available today and from a more metaphysical standpoint. However, the core idea that the emotions can be analyzed in terms of definitive laws is the same idea that is being followed currently in regards to the mechanics of emotion.

Getting back to the matter of the negative impact of lost love, Spinoza offered his own solution. As he saw it, all emotions are responses to what is in the past, present or future. For example, a person might feel regret because she believes she could have done something different in the past. As another example, a person might worry because he thinks that what he is doing now might not bear fruit in the future. These negative feelings rest, as Spinoza sees it, on the false belief that the past and present could be different and  that the future is not set. Once a person realizes that all that happens occurs of necessity (that is, nothing could have been any different and the future cannot be anything other than what it will be), then that person will suffer less from the emotions. Thus, for Spinoza, freedom from the enslaving chains of love would be the recognition and acceptance that what occurs is determined.

Putting this in the mechanistic terms of modern neuroscience, a Spinoza-like approach would be to realize that love is purely mechanical and that the pain and depression that comes from the loss of love are also purely mechanical. That is, the terrible, empty darkness that seems to devour the soul at the end of love is merely chemical and electrical events in the brain. Once a person recognizes and accepts this, if Spinoza is right, the pain should be reduced. With modern technology it is possible to do even more: whereas Spinoza could merely provide advice, modern science can eventually provide us with the means to simply adjust the brain and set things right—just as one would fix a malfunctioning car or PC.

One problem is, of course, that if everything is necessary and determined, then Spinoza’s advice makes no sense: what is, must be and cannot be otherwise. To use an analogy, it would be like shouting advice at someone watching a cut scene in a video game. This is pointless, since the person cannot do anything to change what is occurring. For Spinoza, while we might think life is a like a game, it is like that cut scene: we are spectators and not players. So, if one is determined to wallow like a sad beast in the mud of depression, that is how it will be.

In terms of the mechanistic mind, advice would seem equally absurd because to say what a person should do implies that a person has a choice. However, the mechanistic mind presumably just ticks away doing what it does, creating the illusion of choice. So, one brain might tick away and end up being treated while another brain might tick away in the chemical state of depression. They both eventually die and it matters not which is which. This is another reason why I choose free will; if I am right, then maybe I can do something about my life. If I am wrong, I am determined to be wrong and hence can neither be blamed nor choose to be any different.

In my previous essay I discussed the theory that love is a mechanical matter. That is, love behavior is the workings of chemistry, neurons and genetics. This view, as noted in the essay, was supported by Larry Young’s research involving voles. This mechanistic view of love has some interesting implications, and I will consider one of these in this essay, the virtue of fidelity.

While humans (such as King Solomon and various officials in the current Trump regime) sometimes have polygamous relationships, the idea of romantic fidelity has been praised in song, fiction and in the professed values of modern society. Given Young’s research, it could be that humans are biochemically inclined to fidelity in that w form pair bonds. Sexual fidelity, as with the voles, is another matter.

While fidelity is publicly praised, an important question is whether it is worthy of praise as a virtue. If humans are like voles and the mechanistic theory of human bonding is correct, then fidelity that grounds pair-bonding would be a form of addiction, as discussed in the previous essay. On the face of it, this would seem to show that such fidelity is not worthy of praise. After all, one does not praise crack addicts for their loyalty to crack. Likewise, being addicted to love would not make a person worthy of praise.

An obvious counter is that while crack addiction is seen as bad because of the harms of crack, the addiction that causes pair bonding should be generally regarded as good because of its consequences. These consequences are those that people usually praise about pair bonding, such as the benefits to health.  However, this counter misses the point: the question is not whether pair bonding is good (it generally is in terms of consequences) but whether fidelity should be praised.

If fidelity is a matter of chemistry (in the literal sense), then it would not seem praiseworthy After all, a lasting bond that forms is merely a matter of a mechanical process, analogous to being chained to a person. If I stick close to a person because I am chained to her, that is hardly worthy of praise—be the chain metal or chemical.

If my fidelity is determined by this process, then I am not acting from the virtue of fidelity but acting as a physical system in accord with deterministic (or whatever physics says these days) processes.  To steal from Kant, I would not be free in my fidelity—it would be imposed upon me by this process. As such, my fidelity would not be morally right (or wrong) and I would not be worthy of praise for my fidelity. For my fidelity to be morally commendable, it would have to be something that I freely chose as a matter of will. At least for thinkers like Kant.

One concern with this view is that it seems to make fidelity a passionless thing. After all, if I chose to be faithful to a person on the basis of a free and rational choice rather than being locked into fidelity by a chemical brew of passion and emotion, then this seems cold and calculating—like how one might select the next move in chess or determine which stock to buy. After all, love is supposed to be something one falls into rather than something one chooses.

This reply has considerable appeal. After all, a rational choice to be loyal would not be the traditional sort of love praised in song, fiction and romantic daydreams. One wants to hear a person gushing about passion, burning emotions, and the ways of the heart—not rational choice.  Of course, an appeal to the idealized version of romantic love might be a poor response—like any appeal to fiction. That said, there does is a certain appeal in the whole emotional love thing—although the idea that love is merely a chemical romance also seems to rob love of that magic.

A second obvious concern is that it assumes that people are capable of free choice, and a person can decide to be faithful or not. The mechanistic view of humans typically does not stop with the emotional aspects. Although Descartes did see emotions, at least in animals, as having a physical basis—while leaving thinking to the immaterial mind. Rather, they tend to extend to all aspects of the human being and this includes decision making. For example, Thomas Hobbes argued that we do not chose—we simply seem to make decisions, but they are purely deterministic. As such, if the choice to be faithful is merely another mechanistic process, then this would be no more praiseworthy than being faithful through a love addiction. In fact, as has long been argued, this sort of mechanistic view would seem to dispose of morality by eliminating agency.

The humble prairie vole was briefly famous because of research into love and voles. Researchers such as Larry Young found that the prairie vole is one of the few socially monogamous mammals that pair bonds for extended periods of time (even for life). Interestingly, this bonding does not occur naturally in other varieties of voles—they behave like typical mammals, such as many politicians.

Larry Young found that the brains of the voles are such that the pleasure reward of sexual activity becomes linked to a specific partner. This mechanism involves oxytocin and vasopressin, and the voles become, in effect, addicted to each other. This is like how a smoker becomes addicted to cigarettes and associates pleasure with the trappings of smoking.  To confirm this, Young genetically modified meadow voles to be like prairie voles. The results showed that the bonding is probably due to the chemistry: the normally non-bonding meadow voles engaged in bonding behavior.

Humans, unlike most other mammals, also engage in pair bonding (sometimes). While humans are different from voles, the mechanism is presumably similar. That is, we are addicted to love.

Young also found that prairie voles suffer from heart ache: when a prairie voles loses its partner, it becomes depressed. Young tested this by dropping voles into beakers of water to determine the degree of struggle offered by the voles. He found that prairie voles who had just lost a partner struggled to a lesser degree than those who were not so bereft. The depressed voles, not surprisingly, showed a chemical difference from the non-depressed voles. When a depressed vole was treated for this depression, the vole struggled as strongly as the non-bereft vole.

This seems to hold for humans as well. While humans typically become saddened by the loss of a partner (by death or breakup), this research suggests that human depression of this sort has a chemical basis and could be cured. This is what is often attempted with therapy and medication.

While the mechanical model of love (and the mind) might seem new, the idea of philosophical materialism (that everything is physical in nature) dates to Thales. Descartes saw the human body as a purely mechanical system, albeit one controlled by a non-material mind. Thomas Hobbes accepted Descartes view that the body is a machine but rejected Descartes’ dualism. Influenced by the physics of his day, Hobbes held that a human being is a deterministic machine, just like all other machines and living creatures.

Perhaps the most explicit early development of the idea of humans as machines was in Julien de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine.  While La Mettrie is not as famous as Hobbes or Descartes, many of his views are duplicated today by modern scientists. La Mettrie held that humans and animals are essentially the same, although humans are more complex than other  animals. He also held that human beings are material, deterministic, mechanist systems. That is, humans are essentially biological machines. Given these views, the idea that human love and vole love are essentially the same would probably be accepted by La Mettrie and would, in fact, be exactly what his theory would predict.

Contemporary science is continuing the project started by philosophers like Thales, Hobbes and La Mettrie. The main difference is that contemporary scientists have much better equipment to work with and can, unlike La Mettrie and Hobbes, examine the chemical and genes that are supposed to determine human behavior. Probably without realizing it, scientists are proving the theories of long dead philosophers.  The chemical theory of love does have some rather interesting philosophical implications and some of these will be considered in upcoming essays.