How reality escapes our understanding
THE WEIRDNESS OF THE WORLD ERIC SCHWITZGEBEL 376pp. Princeton University Press. £28 (US $32).
ISAIAH BERLIN FAMOUSLY quipped that “Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions”. While some might take that as an insult, Eric Schwitzgebel would surely consider it a compliment. The distinguished American philosopher chose to conclude his latest book by praising “childlike philosophy” that “toys with wild ideas at the boundaries of our understanding”.
In The Weirdness of the World Schwitzgebel follows his own advice to “play and explore” with abandon, revelling in the extraordinary, the uncertain and the unknowable. He’s like a kid eager for the grown-ups to join his frolics, only his “toys” are theories about the nature of the world, mind and causation that shatter certainties and open up possibilities. He argues that in the domain of philosophy there are many “theoretical wildernesses” where “every viable theory is wild”. “Wild” here is a technical term of art, meaning both “bizarre” – contrary to common sense – and “dubious”: we are not compelled by reasons and evidence to believe it or not.
Metaphysics is one such wilderness. The only general theory of the fundamental nature of reality that doesn’t strike most people today as wacky is materialism, which holds that everything is made up solely of the stuff described by physics and that there are no souls, spirits or other non-material substances. But Schwitzgebel argues that materialism is also wild, spelling out its bizarrest implications in a chapter called “If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious”. If you are prepared to accept that consciousness emerges out of purely physical brains, Schwitzgebel argues that you should also accept that it probably also emerges out of nations.
His argument for the possibility of a conscious US is tortuous, but it basically rests on the idea that materialists have to accept that if any physical system has certain characteristics, then it must be conscious, since there is no other special ingredient that can explain how sentience springs into existence. These characteristics are primarily that “there must be some organization of the information in service of coordinated, goal-directed responsiveness; and maybe, too, there needs to be some sort of sophisticated self-monitoring”. That may sound reasonable when it comes to organisms, but Schwitzgebel argues that these properties are also found in nations. For example, “the United States responds, intelligently or semi-intelligently, to opportunities and threats – not less intelligently than a small mammal”.
Schwitzgebel doesn’t want you to believe that the US is conscious, merely to accept its possibility so as to und
