In 2022, a sense of gloom pervades our world. Climate change, the Covid pandemic, economic stagnation and inflation, the Ukraine war, declining trust in democracy – the list of crises goes on and on.
Is this an accidental conjunction, or is there some underlying factor that connects these various crises? I want to suggest a slogan: these are all cases of reality kicking back against human greed and myopia.
For social democrats of my generation, the 1970s can take on a weird retrospective glow as a lost age of optimism and social solidarity (though this is not how things seemed at the time – remember the winter of discontent?). Our current era, beginning in the 1980s, is often identified, for better or worse, with the triumph of market liberalism. But another contemporary development may be equally significant: the take-off of digital media. Should we understand both trends as two sides of a single coin?
Both were globalising projects, aiming to dissolve obsolete and artificial boundaries. Both involved a repudiation of the physical world with its geographic specificities and bounded cultural communities. Material goods should give way to virtual ones. Assets like hard cash and physical stock should be replaced by ever more ephemeral types of credit. Social life should move online. The recent reincarnation of Facebook as Meta is the epitome of this vision.
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These dark ruminations are provoked in part by David J Chalmers' new book
Reality+, a helter-skelter ride through of the outer reaches of science fiction, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, all grounded in hard metaphysical analysis. Chalmers starts at the root of modern philosophy, with a version of Cartesian scepticism: how can we know whether or not we live in a virtual world? Are we being systematically misled by an evil demon? Do we live in a simulation created by a hacker in the next universe up?
Personally, I've never been unduly troubled by this kind of radical doubt, rooted in a lust for certainty. Most of the time I can live happily enough with imperfection, muddling through and balancing probabilities. I have no nightmares about the existence of the external world and the reality of other minds.
But Chalmers' exploration of alternative universes, including man-made simulations, makes this kind of realism look naïve. Reality is neither simple nor single. In assessing reality claims, we can't avoid using different criteria that are not obviously commensurable. In typically epigrammatic fashion, Chalmers writes that 'reality contains many realities, and those realities are real'.
The book is not all games-playing and metaphysical speculation: it also swerves into urgent practicalities. By 2095, Chalmers suggests, Earth's surface might be 'a wreck, a casualty of nuclear warfare and of climate change', where people could live only 'a hard-scrabble existence'. Faced with this, you may prefer to 'lock your body in a well-protected warehouse and enter a virtual world'.
In short, we could, and maybe should, abandon our real (physical) world and relocate to a virtual alternative. Is this position ethically defensible? My gut reaction is no, but I struggle to justify this reaction.
Recently, I enjoyed a nostalgic holiday rediscovering the woods and hills of Deeside. At the same time, I was re-reading Andrew Painting's book,
Regeneration, on the ecological restoration, or rewilding, of Mar Lodge estate. One passage resonates with Chalmers: 'Many conservationists believe in their heart of hearts that the natural world is doomed, and with it will go not only that which sustains us and brings the greatest source of richness of human experience, but also the myriad ways of life that make up the infinitely complex tapestry of life on Earth'.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the natural world is doomed. Why does this matter? If the infinitely complex tapestry of nature is lost, why not replace it with a cultural substitute of equal or greater complexity and splendour? Why value nature above culture? Why value the physical above the digital?
Chalmers, as I read him, points to one answer. He explores various forms of structural realism, which prioritise structure above the substrate in which that structure happens to be realised. From this perspective, the fact that we inhabit a physical universe governed by physical laws (the world of nature) may turn out to be merely contingent. Other types of world, governed by different types of law, are possible, and some may prove superior.
Chalmers also takes seriously the possibility that our physical world may itself turn out to be digital: scientists may ultimately conclude that binary digits are more fundamental than photons and quarks.
The intellectual trip is exhilarating. But late in the book Chalmers concludes that purely mathematical structures are not enough to sustain science. They do not, for example, allow us to discover that we inhabit an Einsteinian universe rather than a Newtonian one. Abstract existence is not enough: 'We need to interpret existence in scientific theories as concrete existence'.
At this point, my worries about the destruction of nature merge with my worries about the virtual (abstract) quality of so much of contemporary life. On the digital plane, you can evade concrete obstacles and transcend boundaries by a magical shift of perspective. If you're losing one game, you can just switch to a different one. If you're not happy in your real-life identity, just invent a new virtual one.
This brings me back to my doubts about Cartesian doubt. I instinctively believe that I live in a concrete, often contingent, world, which I share with other people. This may be a gut feeling, but I can see philosophical arguments to back it.
To start with, solipsism, the belief that I alone exist, seems simply incoherent. In order to think at all, to conceive of a world in which I live and act, I must have beliefs which I take to be true; and these beliefs must be expressible in a language with stable meanings. And this (as Wittgenstein argued) requires a language embedded in shared social practices and forms of life.
This can be pushed further. In human interactions, truth-telling must be the default setting. People lie, just as they exaggerate, joke and tell fairy stories. But these activities are secondary, even parasitic. They presuppose a bedrock of common beliefs and practices. (You can't understand a joke if you don't know the context.)
Truth-telling and lying may be two sides of the same coin, but their values are asymmetrical. Truth-telling is prior to deception, and similarly reality is prior to simulation. Without this, everything falls apart. Descartes' deceptive demons are themselves an illusion. (Some people might put gods into the same category, but that is another story.)
How does this abstract theorising relate to the all too concrete crises we face? As humans, we are stuck between the concrete and the abstract, the finite and the infinite. In order to describe the concrete here-and-now, we must use abstractions which refer to other, absent things. Our imagination may be infinite but our roots in place and time tie us to a fixed point that is not of our choosing.
Humans have always operated within mixed realities, physical and mental, with the balance varying over time and place. Recently, the pendulum has swung too far towards the virtual: we need to pay more attention to the concrete, with its constraints, boundaries and contingencies.
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The relevance of this to climate change and Covid is obvious, but the links can be extended to our other crises. Chalmers has an interesting chapter on the extended mind hypothesis: the idea that we can expand our minds by accessing digital information that is stored externally. The clearest examples involve donning augmented reality headsets or spectacles, but the same basic principle applies to apps on a mobile phone.
We see this in everyday life: instead of developing an internalised mental map of their environment, many people rely on an app to guide them from street to street. Instead of trying to think through problems and make their own decisions, people allow algorithms to run their lives. As a result, the sense of personal agency becomes atrophied.
This has obvious implications for democracy and collective decision-making in general. As technology encroaches ever deeper into the self, the notion of self-determination withers. Who am I? Who are we? How can I, or we, exercise agency in an ever more alien word?
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There is a real external world out there, which we share with fellow human beings, but we have no direct unmediated access to it. Our understanding is mediated through culturally conditioned words, concepts and practices: it depends on a negotiation between three points: the self, other humans and external (hard) reality. Our world is both socially constructed and physically constrained: our scientific knowledge is the mediated, shifting outcome of these negotiations.
The self, society and 'nature' are all, in their different ways, equally real. This takes me back, in a long loop, to Andrew Painting on rewilding, who asks: 'Is being wild simply the ability to do the unexpected or even the harmful, beyond the control of human interference? Is wildness equal to freedom?'
If so, there is a crucial sense in which nature is – almost by definition – ungraspable and uncontrollable. Within its own sphere, there are no bounds to the progress of science: with luck, our knowledge of the laws of nature will continue to expand indefinitely. But scientific knowledge is always mediated: we cannot jump beyond mediation to grasp reality-in-itself. Mystical experiences may exist but they remain ineffable and unshareable.
In this sense, nature (wildness) comprises whatever lies beyond mental representation. Once we recognise our inescapable entanglement with concrete realities, perhaps we can begin to restrain our lust for infinite abstraction (not least the abstraction that is paperless money).
Dennis Smith is a retired librarian who dabbles in philosophy, watches birds
and does a bit of conservation work in the hope that the planet can still be
saved
