Dreams and evidence

1. Introduction

Nicolas Berdyaev has a glorious footnote, "This was once revealed to me in a dream". What was revealed was that "The ego has been a fatality both for the human self and for God" (Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human, page 7). Berdyaev claims to have learnt in a dream something about human and divine reality.

Can we make sense of this mode of revelation, outside the religious context in which there are dreams aplenty (for example in the Bible, and particularly in Genesis)? Can we see how dreams could disclose things about the reality they are ostensibly about, as distinct from disclosing things about the dreamer's character or desires? If Berdyaev's footnote is to stand, it must be possible for dreams to do more than give mere hints as to the nature of reality, hints that could inspire thought on waking, and do more than show us the nature of reality without our having justification for believing that the revelations were correct. Rather, we are interested in the contents of dreams being themselves evidence, perhaps defeasible but evidence nonetheless, as to the nature of reality. The evidence must carry weight in its own right. And it must be such as would be evidence for any human being, not just for the dreamer.

We shall not limit ourselves to dreams. We shall broaden out to include the creative narratives of myths and fiction. (We shall use "fiction" to cover novels, theatre and the like, that is, any imaginary narrative that has not been elevated to the status of a myth that is independent of particular recountings of it.) The narratives of dreams are themselves a form of creative narrative. They are undisciplined and unedited, but then one can imagine publishing fiction of the same nature, even though stream-of-consciousness fiction that is actually published usually has been edited.

A distinguishing feature of dreams, myths and fiction is that their contents are only very loosely disciplined by empirical evidence. The contents may well concern real people, places and events, and they may include factually correct statements. But that is not forced upon the contents. At most, the contents must sufficiently reflect the general nature of the world and people to be intelligible. There need to be objects in physical space and time. Laws of nature must largely be obeyed, but even that constraint can be loosened so long as the violations are superficially intelligible, for example a feather outweighing a stone when they are at opposite ends of a seesaw. And characters must have intelligible psyches, but need not live like actual people. So it is not at all obvious that the contents of dreams, myths and fiction might provide evidence as to the nature of reality.

There are different aspects of reality about which we might aspire to obtain evidence. We shall look first at the physical aspect, the province of the natural sciences, and then at the humanistic aspect, the province of the humanities.

We do not here discuss the social sciences. In the context of our enquiry some parts of them, particularly the more data-driven parts of economics, would have much in common with the natural sciences, while other parts would have much in common with the humanities. In relation to our question about evidence, it is most straightforward to consider the extremes we have chosen. But intermediate cases would also be worth considering.

2. The physical aspect of reality

2.1 What is covered

The physical aspect of reality is the aspect studied in the natural sciences. There is no precise boundary to be drawn, but one good guide is that conclusions and the justifications for believing them would make sense to a Martian just as much as to a human being. That is, human experience of life is not needed. We may draw a contrast with, for example, the study of history beyond mere chronology, or of literature, in which a Martian would not follow what was being said. (For the language in which accounts from the human point of view are given, the human idiom, see Baron, Confidence in Claims, section 2.2.)

Dreams, myths and fiction are not going to supply useful evidence as to the nature of the physical aspect of reality, for two reasons. The first is the nature of the work that is needed to learn about the world. The second is a lack of satisfactory connections from the state of reality to the evidence generated.

2.2 The nature of the work that is needed

We know that what works in the natural sciences is careful formulation of hypotheses and experimental protocols, conduct of the experiments, analysis of the results, and criticism by others. None of this happens in dreams, myths or fiction, although it may be represented.

In dreams, we cannot even expect a decent representation of scientific procedure. Dreams do not have the stability that would be needed. Thoughts come and go, apparent situations change without notice, and single sentences that are being thought can unravel half way through. Moreover, lack of stability is not merely an obstacle to representation of the testing of hypotheses. It is also an obstacle to dreams' having any reliable role in the context of discovery, when hypotheses are first formulated in response to a recognition of gaps in knowledge or difficulties with which data confront us. In principle that task might actually be carried out in dreams, and not merely represented. But even that process needs to be disciplined, with flashes of insight being held precisely and set in a stable intellectual context, if it is to have much hope of yielding useful results. There are examples of useful inspiration coming out of dreams, but even then, what emerges is at the time of emergence far from supporting justified beliefs as to which hypotheses it would be reasonable to work up and investigate.

Things are not quite so bad with myths or fiction, but there is still too much flexibility. Proper experimental procedures can be narrated, but that is optional. Even when they are narrated, details that are critical in real scientific research will be omitted. And supposed results, being driven not by actual experiments but by the preferences of authors, can be changed to fit the narrative. Turning to the context of discovery, readers of myths and fiction may find that ideas come to them, but such reading still does not support justified beliefs as to which hypotheses it would be reasonable to work up and investigate.

2.3 The lack of satisfactory connections

For evidence to be worth anything in support of a given conclusion, it needs to arise out of the reality about which it is supposed to be evidence. More strongly, there needs to be a connection such that if the reality had been different in a way that would have invalidated the conclusion drawn from the evidence, the evidence would very likely also have been different in a way that would have meant the conclusion would not have been drawn. This is an application of Robert Nozick's tracking test (Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, chapter 3, section 1), with the words "very likely" adding an allowance for the fact that evidence can be worth considering even if evidence of its type sometimes misleads. The success of the tracking test in moving us toward an entirely satisfactory definition of knowledge is disputed, but violation of it in relation to evidence that purported to tell us about the nature of the physical world would certainly devalue the evidence.

Moreover, when it comes to the physical aspect of reality, we expect the connection to be causal. We understand how the nature of reality causes instruments to show certain readings.

Once we recognise the need for causal connections, we can easily demote dreams, myths and fiction as evidence. There is no known reliable causal connection from the state of reality in its physical aspect to the contents of dreams, myths or fiction. Dreams are notorious for including events that clearly break the practical constraints of the everyday world, for example when we dream that we are flying (without an aircraft) or that we are in a city a moment after we were in another distant city. Myths and fiction are also at liberty to deviate in their narratives from the limits on what would be likely to happen, or has happened, in the real world. If any of dreams, myths and fiction do appear to supply evidence as to events in the real world, the claims made must be backed up by evidence from other sources that is connected to reality in a way that would pass the tracking test. That evidence will immediately render redundant the dreams, myths or fiction.

3. The humanistic aspect of reality

3.1 What is covered

We shall now consider whether the contents of dreams, myths and fiction could be evidence as to the nature of reality in its humanistic aspect.

We include in the humanistic aspect of reality conclusions about the world that do not have the property characteristic of conclusions in the natural sciences that they and their justifications would be comprehensible without the benefit of a human experience of life. The conclusions that historians reach that make sense of the actions of individuals, that make sense of specific creations in the arts and sciences, or that make sense of large-scale political, social or economic changes, are prime examples of conclusions about the humanistic aspect of reality. And we shall concentrate on these historical conclusions. That focus will not be too narrow, given that history includes history of art, history of thought, history of literature, and so on. We shall also speak of accounts that make sense rather than explanations, recognising the force of the tradition that makes Verstehen the business of the humanities and Erklären the business of the natural sciences.

3.2 Specific events, creations and developments

If the contents of dreams, myths and fiction are to provide evidence as to the humanistic aspect of reality, there must be a connection from how things were, and in the case of history specifically how things were for people at the relevant time, to the contents of the dreams, myths or fiction, such that those contents could be reliable evidence for conclusions as to how things were for people, and those conclusions could in turn generate accounts that would make sense of what happened in a humanistic way. (We focus on seeing how things were for people, rather than how things were in general, because that is what is needed to make sense in a humanistic way.)

It is most unlikely that there would be any reliable connection that would allow dreams, myths or fiction to be dependable guides to how one should make sense of specific events, creations or developments by virtue of contents that directly concerned those things.

There might be successes, but if one were to take the contents of dreams. myths and fiction as evidence, one would often be led astray. We say this because it is a feature of dreams, myths and fiction that they can manipulate the details of actual events, creations or developments, and the attitudes of the people who were there at the time, so as to allow easy ways to make sense that rely on those manipulations in order to succeed. So one would be unlikely to formulate the relevant slice of the past with the accuracy needed to give much prospect of homing in on an account that would make sense of specific events, creations or developments in a way that would stand up to academic criticism.

3.3 The nature of human life

There is something else of which the contents of dreams, myths and fiction might provide evidence. This is the nature of human life as experienced from the inside, a grasp of which permits adoption of the human point of view that is needed in the humanities but not in the natural sciences. An understanding of the nature of human life as experienced from the inside can then be used in the study of history to make sense of actual events, creations and developments.

The proposal is that in dreams, myths and fiction we range over emotions, situations and actions in a very free way, exploring some of the scope and limits of the human psyche. Even in dreams, where we find ourselves in bizarre situations and we have to cope with bizarre behaviour from other characters, our choices and reactions still correspond to the choices and reactions we would have expected of ourselves in the waking world if it were as odd an environment as the dream world.

In this way we might get a more explicit grasp than hitherto of the human condition, of what it was like to be a human being. Then we could use such a grasp in giving some historical accounts. Even if we could not make principles explicit, the experience in dreams of free interaction with characters whose conduct was largely not under our conscious control might improve our implicit grasp of the human condition, something that could be just as useful in understanding the course of events.

Something similar could be said of myths and fiction, although what characters do is under the control of authors other than ourselves and our encounters with the characters are not two-way: they do not respond to what we think or do. Myths and fiction explore the space of human possibilities, unconstrained by the details of actuality. They can take us further in exploring the human condition than we would go by looking only at the facts. And they can focus on specific aspects of human life, putting them in high relief, while in a study of the real world it is hard to distentangle specific aspects or justifiably to give them particular emphasis that disregards the messy and complex context.

We may draw a parallel with the work of Daniel Hutto. He has argued that the process of understanding other people is centrally a matter of narrative practice (Hutto, "Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation"). Having learnt this practice by listening to stories in childhood, we enter into the practice ourselves. It is a way of working which tends to generate accounts that we find satisfactory. They satisfy because the practice is one of giving accounts that would if analysed be found to respect the principles of folk psychology. (We explore these and related ideas in Baron, Epistemic Respectability in History, section 2.1.1.)

Another advantage over actuality of all of dreams, myths and fiction is that in them, the inner mentalities of characters, their thoughts and motives, can be made explicit. This may allow us to derive explicit principles to apply in the study of history. Historical records, by contrast, do not often make inner mentalities visible, the exceptions being diaries and private letters. (Public speeches, especially political ones, are highly unreliable guides to inner mentalities.)

The historian should not often conclude that actual people did think in certain ways. Evidence for such conclusions would usually be lacking. But the historian can at least say that the actions of people are intelligible because there are ways, common to more than a small proportion of humanity, in which they might well have thought.

3.4 Counting as evidence

Whether dreams, myths or fiction were involved, and whether the grasp of the human condition were explicit or implicit, the dreams, myths or fiction would count as providing evidence for the nature of the human condition because it would be on the basis of the experience of dreaming or reading that one would come to have an improved grasp, and because to the extent that one were challenged on the reliability of lessons learnt from such sources, one could point to the reasons for thinking them reliable that we shall cover in this section.

3.4.1 Products of the psyche

Dreams, myths and fiction are generated by human psyches. So they are not likely to be fundamentally misleading about the nature of the human psyche, at least not in educating us in the principles that are needed to make sense of human affairs to human beings. 

The words "to human beings" are important here. The goal is a humanistic understanding of human affairs, the sort of thing that would not be intelligible from the detached scientific viewpoint that could be taken up both by us and by Martians. That which was generated by the human psyche could easily be massively misleading if the goal were scientific explanation of the workings of the mind. But even the usefulness of the human psyche in pursuing a humanistic understanding does not imply immunity to error. There is no claim to perfect authority, on the lines of any supposed first-person authority as to one's own beliefs or sensations.

The words "make sense of human affairs to human beings" may raise a suspicion of circularity. The suspicion would be justified if the objective of the humanities were to make sense of human affairs to all rational beings, including our friends the Martians. But that is not the aim. We aim only to give accounts that make sense of human affairs to beings who know the human condition from the inside. Accounts are not unconstrained. They must have epistemic respectability (see Baron, Epistemic Respectability in History). But such a constraint can be imposed by asking whether accounts make sense to us.

Myths and fiction do have an advantage over dreams. Dreams are personal to the dreamer. But myths and fiction must satisfy a wide range of readers. And they will only do so if the characters are ones with whom readers can identify. This means that their states of mind and their choices must be in line with human nature in general, not merely in line with the idiosyncratic nature of a dreamer.

Myths have a good prospect of being the better source of information about the human condition. This is because there has been a process of natural selection. It is the stories that resonate with us, despite our being well aware that there are no gods or dragons, that have survived. They have to resonate very strongly in order to overcome the hurdle set by literal implausibility. And we can say this without having to assume archetypes in a collective unconscious along the lines proposed by Carl Gustav Jung, although we are not debarred from assuming them.

Works of fiction, on the other hand, may survive without having to overcome the hurdle of speaking of the manifestly implausible, but only the hurdle of speaking of people who are known not to have existed but who might well have existed, and events that are known not to have occurred but that might well have occurred. That is a much lower hurdle. A work of fiction does not have to resonate so strongly as a myth when its acceptability can gain additional support from its realism.

3.4.2 Tracking and reliability

We must now ask the question posed by Robert Nozick's tracking test. If the human condition had been different, would dreams. myths and fiction have provided different evidence? We may say probably, because the nature of dreams, myths and fiction is likely to be heavily influenced by the nature of the human brain, and that nature would have had to be different for the human condition as it plays a role in the course of events to have been different. This is speculative, but it is the best we can do.

Even if the tracking test is passed, we must ask about the reliability of any evidence that dreams, myths and fiction may supply about the human condition. Here we can at least say that the inner appreciation of people, the mechanisms of creating stories, and so on, are likely to be the same ones when dreaming, when creating myths and fiction during waking hours, and when making sense of actual human conduct. If we seek to grasp why someone reacted in the way he or she did in given circumstances, we are likely to weave a tale about him or her along the same lines as we would unconsciously in a dream or consciously when creating myths or fiction. It may not be the kind of tale a psychologist would weave, but that would not matter. In humanistic disciplines, we do not seek explanations in scientific terms but accounts that make sense of humanity to other human beings. And that, the need for an account that will speak to human readers, means that much is to be gained from being influenced in the writing of accounts by the structure of human mind and the structure of human experience as viewed from the inside.

3.5 Two issues

Two issues arise.

The first issue is that the people involved in events to be understood may have been substantially different in their human condition from people today. That is so, and we may very well need to pay attention to evidence as to differences, evidence that might for example be found in personal letters. But at least the most likely kind of difference is that certain considerations, such as religion or hierarchy, played greater roles in the past than they do today. That is, externally definable differences would matter most. A change in the ways in which the mind worked in general would be less likely to be significant, simply because such changes would be likely to take a very long time. And it is this way the mind works in general that is explored in dreams, myths and fiction.

The second issue is that the dreamer, or the reader of myths or fiction, will work from within his or her own psyche. There is a risk that the understanding obtained will not be of the human condition generally, but of the condition of the individual concerned who has the dream or who, although reading the words of others, unconsciously finds a way to read myths or fiction in a way that will resonate with his or her own psyche. This is indeed a risk, especially if one relies solely on one's own dreams or on works by a single author. But at least the risk could be reduced by reading works by many authors. Some of the works would then not be amenable to the particular idiosyncratic readings that happened to suit a given psyche. Any work might be amenable to some idiosyncratic reading or other, but for a given reader, some works would not be amenable to his or her quirks.

3.6 Understanding historical figures

Dreams, along with myths and fiction, may help us to grasp humanity's mental space, a space wider than that which we inhabit in our own waking lives, in the sort of way that is likely to be necessary for us to stand in the shoes of historical figures.

There is debate about the value of standing in the shoes of historical figures. R. G. Collingwood was a proponent of mental re-enactment (Collingwood, The Idea of History; Dray, History as Re-Enactment). Max Weber did not think it necessary to be in one's mind a historical character, but did recognise the benefit of being able to empathise with emotions relevant to the lives of people being studied (Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, part 1, chapter 1, section 1, paragraphs 2 and 3). Experiments in one's own mind, carried out involuntarily in dreams and voluntarily when reading myths and fiction, should help to develop such empathy, particularly when the emotions need to be stretched beyond what one experiences in modern, safe and peaceful life. One may for example get inside the heads of people, both virtuous and vicious, caught up in the French Revolution by reading Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities.

4. Conclusion

If dreams (and myths and fiction) can be evidence as to the human condition in the way suggested in this post, we can read in that light this line from the closing passage of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (with Fridolin as the speaker):

"Und kein Traum", seufzte er leise, "ist völlig Traum."

Schnitzler may have had disclosure of the psyche of the dreamer in mind. But we might equally say that no dream is entirely a dream, in the sense that it is also about the human condition generally, a vital if often only tacitly assumed part of human reality.

References

Baron, Richard. Confidence in Claims. CreateSpace, 2015. https://rbphilo.com/confidence.html

Baron, Richard. Epistemic Respectability in History. Amazon, 2019. https://rbphilo.com/history.html

Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Divine and the Human, translated by R M French. London, Geoffrey Bles, 1949.

Collingwood, Robin G. The Idea of History, Revised Edition with Lectures 1926-1928, edited with an introduction by Jan van der Dussen. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. (Many editions are available.)

Dray, Wiliam H. History As Re-Enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995.

Hutto, Daniel D. "Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation". Chapter 7 of Daniel D. Hutto and Matthew Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Re-Assessed. Dordrecht, Springer, 2007.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5558-4_7

Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press, 1981.

Schnitzler, Arthur. Traumnovelle. Berlin, S. Fischer, 1926.

Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1922. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft has been translated as Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1978. The book went through various editions, with text being moved around, but this does not affect the location of the material to which we have referred.

Academic blogging

 

1. The question

A reader of the previous post on this blog wondered about the role of blogging in the writing process. For example, are blog posts a good way to put out drafts?

Here are a few thoughts on the use of blogs in academic writing. In section 2 we shall concentrate on the blog post that is written as a step on the way to some other piece of work, where the post may or may not amount to a draft. In section 3 we shall look at blog posts that are written as parts of a public drafting exercise. In section 4 we shall consider the place in academic practice of blog posts that are themselves intended to be finished pieces of work. In section 5 we shall note some side-effects of the use of blog posts.

2. A blog post that is a step on the way

We shall start by considering a blog post as a step on the way to a longer piece, for example a paper in a journal. Here the main thing will be the envisaged longer piece. The blog post itself might be a draft, or it might be far from being even a preliminary draft. It might for example merely sketch a question to tackle and some lines of enquiry.

While comments on the post are likely to be sought, any resulting dialogue will be used in preparing the longer piece but may not be regarded as a result in its own right. We shall cover dialogues as results in their own right in section 3.3.

This use of a blog post as a step on the way is a natural extension of discussions with others, whether spoken or in writing, about ideas one has for future work. If an author shares an idea with others, feedback on lines of enquiry and on important considerations can be very valuable. If a blog post gets the attention of knowledgeable people, they can provide useful feedback either by commenting publicly or by sending private communications.

What is different from private discussions is that a blog post is public. Anyone can read it, not only those whom the author wishes to consult. And anyone might comment on the post or on other comments that are made publicly.

There are advantages to this degree of publicity.

One advantage is that if an author is going to expose a piece of work to public view, he or she is likely to put effort into making it clear and as intellectually respectable as is feasible. Even if the piece is clearly labelled as only some initial thoughts, the author's reputation will be on the line to some extent. The process of putting thoughts into a presentable form is itself likely to spark fresh thoughts in the author's mind.

Another advantage is that a wider range of comments may be obtained than would be available from consulting people privately.

A third advantage is that public posts facilitate the advancement of knowledge. A post may spark thoughts in a reader who can then start his or her own project.

There is the associated risk that someone else may develop the ideas in a blog post in the same way that the original author would have done, making it pointless for the original author to develop the project in the way envisaged. But at least he or she would have publicly established priority in the ideas. And while it might be nice always to have priority in developing one's ideas, it is not at all clear that there should be any right to do so, or that the existence of any such right would be beneficial to the world of thought.

3. Blogs as writing in public

3.1 The practice

There is a practice of writing in public. The intended sense here is that of making evolving drafts visible, and perhaps inviting comments. We do not mean sitting in a café and publicly tapping on a laptop. A web search for the phrase "writing in public" will turn up plenty of comments on the practice, although some of them will relate to the café sense that we do not intend.

A sequence of blog posts on a given topic would be one way to write in public. It would keep each version distinct from others. 

Another option would be to follow the model of open source software and write in a Git repo that is made available to the world on Github or some similar service. Readers might then be allowed to propose changes directly. Successive versions and the differences between them would be visible, but people would be most likely simply to look at the most recent version on the main branch, especially if there had been frequent commits or there were several branches. To that extent, a sequence of blog posts would make the development of thought more visible.

3.2 Benefits shared with blog posts as steps on the way

Writing in public may have several benefits. We shall start with benefits that are shared with the writing of blog posts as steps on the way to longer pieces, where the posts may or may not amount to drafts of those longer pieces.

There is the benefit of forcing oneself to produce work that is reasonably polished, and the benefit of having fresh thoughts sparked in the effort to achieve an appropriate standard. The pressure to improve the quality of a piece of work may however be less when one is avowedly publishing drafts, because it is clearly understood that they will be improved later. A blog post that is not published as part of an exercise in writing in public must be able to pass for a finished piece of work, because there is no evidence on its face that it is still work in progress.

The benefit of obtaining a wide range of comments carries over from the publication of individual blog posts with a view to producing longer pieces later.

The benefit of facilitating the advancement of knowledge by sparking thoughts in others likewise carries over from the publication of individual blog posts.

3.3 Benefits specific to blog posts as public drafts

We shall now turn to considerations that are specific to blog posts written within a process of writing in public.

One benefit is the motivation to keep going. If readers have been promised a more developed version of a piece of work, the author may feel committed to producing it. Since there is almost always scope for improvement, it is unlikely that the author will look at a version already published and declare some time afterwards that it is the final version. An author may however declare at the time of publication of a version that it will be the final one.

Another benefit lies in the dialogue that is generated by successive drafts and comments on them. Such a dialogue may be seen as a valuable piece of work in its own right, regardless of whether any ideal final form of the work being drafted is reached. The activity of debate can be instructive both to the participants, and to outside readers who merely review successive versions and responses to them. 

Dialogue may be the locus not only of instruction, but also of virtue. On this, there is a paper currently in draft by Frisbee Sheffield, entitled "Socrates and Dialogue as the Greatest Good", which will appear in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for 2024-25 (volume 125).

4. Blog posts as finished pieces of work

It is perfectly possible for a blog post to be a finished piece of work, rather than a step on the way to something else. Essays have long been a respectable literary form. The blog post can be a modern embodiment of this form, with a few differences.

One difference is that there can be a convenient facility for readers to comment.

Another difference is that there is more variation in length than has been traditional, with some posts being very short while others have the more traditional essay length of several thousand words.

Another difference is that the traditional publishing process is bypassed. There are no delays, and no need to go through review or copy-editing. There may of course be a loss here. Such processes can improve work before it is shown to the world. But a blogger who is concerned about such things can always ask a colleague to review work before publication.

A consequence of bypassing the traditional publishing process is that a blog post cannot be regarded as on a par with a peer-reviewed scholarly paper. There is not normally any systematic review under the control of someone other than the author.

This is however not a serious loss for a piece of work in the style of an essay in the humanities. The form is not one dedicated to establishing specific conclusions by reference to evidence, but one dedicated to presenting an illuminating view of a topic.

5. Side-effects

5.1 The erosion of boundaries

5.1.1 Connections between pieces

If blog posts are used as steps on the way to further posts or to work in other forms, boundaries between individual pieces of work may be eroded.

There is nothing new about drafts of pieces of work, but such drafts have traditionally been hidden from view. And while there are books and papers that explicitly develop other pieces of work by the same authors, the majority of published work is not like that. What is new with blog posts that are steps on the way is that they are public drafts or public statements of intent to work on a given topic in a particular way, at the same time as being capable of being viewed as works in their own right so long as they are sufficiently full and polished.

The result when blog posts are steps on the way is that rather than a set of free-standing pieces, bound together only by authorship and some recurring themes, we see an organic body of pieces that can be read separately but an important feature of which is that they are bound together. The binding may be more or less tight, and earlier pieces may point more or less clearly to the contents of later pieces. But one would not get a proper view of the author's achievement if one did not recognise the binding.

5.1.2 Forms of writing

There are some traditional forms of writing - essays, academic papers, monographs, and so on. The blog post is a newcomer, even if it might be thought to have predecessors from earlier centuries in published letters and other short pieces in journals.

Adding a new form of writing tends to erode sharp boundaries between forms, for two reasons. 

The first reason is that a blog post can be a perfectly respectable piece of work in its own right, despite lacking some traditional features such as having gone through a standard process of review and publication. So those features are seen not to be essential, and they no longer appear to demarcate serious writing from casual jottings and journalism.

The second reason is that the more forms of writing one has, forms that share some characteristics but not others, the easier it is to see a spectrum of forms that merge into one another. Large gaps between forms that would encourage clear demarcation are filled in by new occupants.

It is good to erode traditional boundaries between forms of writing. What matters is the content rather than the method of publication. And blog posts certainly make it easier to put content out into the public domain.

5.2 Citation and attribution

A blog post that is not part of a sequence of drafts can be attributed to its author like any other piece of writing, and cited by others so long as the URL is stable.

When there are modifications in later versions of a post or in a finished piece in some other form in response to comments, and the modifications are substantial and incorporate text supplied by commentators, attribution may be more problematic. There may come a point, particularly in an exercise in writing in public, when a mere acknowledgement of assistance provided by commentators is inadequate. A post or other finished piece should then be regarded as having one lead author and several other contributors. There would however be the difficulty of getting the consent of commentators to have their names on the work, given that they might still have substantial disagreements with its content.

When there is a sequence of drafts, there is also a problem of citation. Traditionally, when papers have been circulated in draft, there has eventually been a version of record, and this has been the one to cite. This practice can continue with a sequence of drafts so long as it is clear which is the final one. But if earlier versions remain available, it is perfectly possible that they will contain material worth citing that has been deleted from the final version. So the same post, with variations, may be cited under several URLs. And what is thought to be the final version may get cited under its URL, but then turn out not to be final, with the new final URL not replacing or being added to the earlier one in citations already given.

There is a solution, exemplified by the arXiv ( https://arxiv.org/ ). In that repository, each version of a paper has a page with an abstract and a link to the full text. There is also a short URL which always points to the page for the latest version, and that page includes links to pages for earlier versions. So one can give the short URL and also mention the version cited. Then anyone who uses the short URL can find all versions. 

This degree of organisation could be implemented by individual authors within their own blogs, although it would be more convenient to have a blog post that served as the main page and that simply contained links to all versions, treating the latest version in the same way as earlier versions. Then there would be no need to change the content of the main page beyond adding links to new versions. Others could give the URL for the main page and state which version they were citing.

The use of blog posts in academic work may also have effects on the ease with which academics who are building their reputations and careers can get credit for their work and for getting widely cited. But there are ways in which we could adapt. And any losses would be small compared to the prize of getting out into the hands of the public more work, and work that was better because it had been subject to comment and modification.

The method of contraries

1. The uses of contrary accounts

People may favour various accounts of aspects of the world. These may be straightforwardly factual accounts, as when someone favours an account of the dynamics of galaxies that assumes the existence of dark matter or an account of the American Civil War that emphasis economic causes. Or they may concern concepts rather than concrete reality, as when someone favours a particular account of knowledge or of value. We do however mean to exclude positions that are not accounts of how things are, for example the position that people should live in accordance with Aristotelian virtues or the position that there should be an unlimited right to free expression.

Our topic is a way to clarify the contents of accounts and the intensions of the terms that are used when giving them.

Someone who wishes to argue for an account may well spend time arguing against contrary accounts. This is not surprising. Rivals must be vanquished if the chosen account is to triumph.

There is another reason to explore contrary accounts. Doing so can help to clarify the favoured account. This, and not defence against rival accounts, is the reason we shall explore here. We shall call this use of contrary accounts the method of contraries.

Our focus on clarification means that we are not interested in how one might arrive at an account by a process of dialectic. More generally, our interest is in what to do once one has a favoured account to convey, rather than in any zetetic activity - although in practice we may of course modify an account because difficulties emerge as we try to clarify it.

We deliberately speak of contrary accounts, not contradictory ones. The reason is that clarifying a contradictory account, in the strict sense of an account that was the negation of a favoured account, would be precisely as challenging a task as clarifying the favoured account. It would require colouring in the territory on the other side of the same boundary.

When it comes to concepts, it is usual to speak of definitions that give the intensions of the corresponding terms. But we shall speak of accounts of the intensions of terms, accounts that may be rather more discursive than is normal for definitions. One reason is that in the humanities and sometimes in the social sciences, definitional precision is unavailable for lack of a complete and precise vocabulary to use in giving definitions. We can only say more or less about the intension of a term, not give a precise definition. Another reason is that we want to discuss a single method of contraries that straddles accounts of the intensions of terms and accounts of aspects of the world.

2. Where contrary accounts are used

In mathematics and the natural sciences, we can mostly say what we mean without saying what we do not mean. At the other extreme, there is a tradition of apophatic theology. So little can be said about God, either with confidence or without inappropriately limiting God, that theologians in this tradition resort to saying what God is not. They do so in the hope of somehow conveying something about God. And one could extend the practice to other areas of deep unclarity, outside theology.

Our interest is not in either of these extremes, but in the middle ground where entities discussed and concepts that are applied to them are sufficiently well understood for plenty to be said in a positive way, but there is still not enough clarity or precision to give favoured accounts in a wholly satisfactory way without reference to contrary accounts. It is in the humanities and the social sciences that we can expect to observe this phenomenon.

3. Examples

We shall now consider some examples. They differ from one another markedly. But they do share the use of contrary accounts to clarify as well as defend favoured accounts.

3.1 The Theaetetus

Plato's dialogues are replete with argument and counter-argument. Accounts of the topic under consideration are put up and shot down, and these turn out to be contraries of accounts proposed later. The final result may not be a positive conclusion. Sometimes the aporia remains. But each account still helps to show what is meant by some later account to which it is a contrary.

This kind of content of the dialogues is the result of applying Socratic questioning, a tool of pedagogy and research. Our concern will however be with the results, accounts and the contrasts between them, rather than with the process.

Early in the Theaetetus, the method of contraries is used to clarify what is sought. This is a unified account of knowledge itself, as opposed to a list of types of knowledge (146c-147c).

Then the extended discussion of perception as knowledge which ends at 160e lays the groundwork for bringing out the required distinctions between knowledge and perception (164b), and between knowledge and opinions that may differ from one person to another (169d-171e). These contrasts not only guide the discussion. They also indicate an essential element in knowledge, the truth of what is believed. The discussion also draws attention to the cases where different opinions can happily coexist (as when a wind is hot for one person but cold for another), and to the contrasting cases where there is a matter of fact that is independent of people's opinions so that if two people think different things, at least one of them must lack knowledge (179a-d).

Immediately after that point we are reminded of the use that has been made of the method of contraries, when Socrates notes that the task is to find out what knowledge is, not what it is not. He says we must wipe out everything up to now and start afresh (187a-b). But our view of the problem has already been thoroughly shaped by the dialogue up to this point.

There are also small examples. For example, when Socrates wants to investigate mistakes about the sum of 5 and 7, he emphasises that he means the numbers themselves, not 5 men and 7 men or anything like that (195e-196a). Here the method of contraries is used to show what is meant by abstract numbers. They are not collections of concrete objects. The distinction is obvious to us now, but it may not have been obvious in the early days of science and reflection on science.

3.2 The Renaissance

Our next example comes from historiography. Jacques Le Goff, in his book Must We Divide History Into Periods?, argues against accounts that impose on history a division into periods which would see a significant leap from the medieval period to the Renaissance. He favours an account that would acknowledge significant changes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but would also recognise that there was too much continuity across the supposed leap and not enough radical change to take the traditional view of the Renaissance as a distinct historical period.

In order to make his case, Le Goff makes extensive use of the method of contraries. At the highest level he sets out the traditional conception of the Renaissance, particularly as developed in the work of historians of the last 200 years, so as to be clear about what he is arguing against and therefore about what he is arguing for. At a more detailed level he identifies several allegedly transformational developments and argues against traditional views that they were revolutionary. He measures their significance as somewhat less but not trivial.

His position may be summarised in two quotations from the book. The first is: "However reasonable it may seem to mark it off as a discrete segment of historical time, I do not believe that the Renaissance can truly be said to constitute a separate period. It seems to me instead to constitute the last renaissance of a long Middle Ages" (page 58). The second is: "My own view is that the transition from one period to another, in this case at the end of a long Middle Ages, is to be situated in the mid-eighteenth century" (page 105).

Use of contraries is inevitable when one wants to argue that something did not exist, or was not of the nature commonly supposed. One has to set out what the thing would have been if it had existed, or what its commonly supposed nature was. Nonetheless, we have here perfectly good examples of the method of contraries in our sense. The positive thesis is set out in opposition to the rejected common view. It is then clarified by being set against specific elements in the common view.

3.3 Globalisation

Turning to an example from the social sciences, globalisation may be conceived in different ways by different authors. One example that brings out use of the method of contraries is supplied by Jan Aart Scholte (Globalization: A Critical Introduction, second edition, chapter 2).

Here the favoured account and contrary accounts are accounts of the intension of a term that may be useful, a term that might be thought to be entirely the invention of social scientists in order to help them understand developments in the human world. There is a contrast with knowledge as regarded in the Theaetetus. Plato takes it that there is such a thing as knowledge out there in the (human) world, the nature of which is to be discovered. The term "knowledge" is not one merely invented by philosophers, to have its intension modified as they may find useful.

Nonetheless, the idea of favouring a particular account of a term's intension remains. It is just that the basis of favouring is usefulness rather than correctness. And the role of the method of contraries in giving the favoured account also remains. So does the aptness of speaking of accounts rather than definitions that we noted in section 1. It may seem more legitimate to give precise definitions if one thinks one is using a term for a concept of one's own invention than if one thinks one is trying to fit a concept to something out in the world. But a desire to come up with something that is truly useful in understanding the world may lead one to hold back from providing a definition that by its rigidity may generate too many inconvenient exceptions to its applicability. There is also the point that in the humanities and to some extent in the social sciences, the available vocabulary often does not provide the words that would be needed to give precise definitions.

Scholte rejects accounts of the intension of "globalisation" in terms of internationalisation, liberalisation, universalisation, and westernisation (pages 54-58).

Scholte then homes in on his preferred account in terms of a spread of connections between people across the planet (pages 59-65). A key contrast with the rejected accounts is set out in these words: "In this fifth usage, globalization refers to a shift in the nature of social space. This conception contrasts with the other four notions of globalization discussed above, all of which presume (usually implicitly rather than explicitly) a continuity in the underlying character of social geography" (page 59). He reinforces the point in the words: "Whereas international relations are inter-territorial relations, global relations are trans- and sometimes supra-territorial relations" (page 65). These quotations highlight the importance of the method of contraries. In order to give his preferred account of the intension of "globalisation" in a way that gives the term sufficient (although still imperfect) precision, and to highlight the importance of a change in the nature of social space, the author has to give rejected accounts.

4. Why is the method of contraries useful?

4.1 The natures of disciplines

It is in the humanities, and to a lesser extent in the social sciences, that we are most likely to see the method of contraries doing work for which it is the only or the best tool. In mathematics and the natural sciences the method is likely only to have pedagogical uses, except perhaps in those natural sciences that are at a considerable distance from physics and chemistry.

The explanation lies in the nature of the humanities and to some extent the social sciences. It can easily be impossible to give a favoured account precisely if one gives it only in a positive way. Recourse must then be had to the method of contraries. The result may still not be fully precise, but it may be markedly more precise.

We shall now consider ways in which the natures of disciplines may give a role to the method of contraries.

4.2 The extensions of terms

Sometimes the difficulty in making precise positive statements will arise from imprecision in the extensions of terms. There may be borderline cases. It may not be possible to spell out necessary and sufficient conditions for entities to fall within the extensions of terms in ways that could in practice be applied to settle every case.

Here the method of contraries may help by picking off some borderline cases as outside the extensions of terms that are used in the positive statement of the favoured account. But the assistance may not be great, and in any case this would be a narrow and relatively uninteresting use of the method of contraries.

4.3 The intensions of terms

A more interesting source of difficulty is that there may be unclarity as to even the broad meaning of the favoured account on account of substantial unclarity as to the intensions of some significant terms. We may expect use of the method of contraries to make a significant contribution to the resolution of difficulties of this type.

Lack of clarity as to an intension may arise because a term is novel and not already well-embedded in the relevant discourse, or because it is being used in a novel sense. This helps to explain why the method of contraries has a much wider role in the humanities than in the natural sciences. In the natural sciences, when new terms are introduced, they are given places in rich networks of inter-definition, with implications between the possession of various sets of properties by entities that can be almost as strong as logical entailment. (Such implications are not verbal artefacts of definition. They need to be discovered by painstaking work. But once the results of research are in, the network of terms will be formulated or modified to fit the results. And the closer we get to physics, the more it is a feature of how the world works that use of terms which fit the world allows strong implications to be identified.) In the humanities and in much of the social sciences, tightly drawn networks of implication are rarely available. New terms must be given their senses in some looser way.

The method of contraries can help in that task. One may display contrary intensions of terms by giving accounts of some rejected intensions of those terms. If the main favoured account is an account of the intension of a term, then the accounts of contrary intensions will simply be contraries to that main account. And if the main favoured account sits above that level, and uses terms with potentially unclear intensions, the accounts of contrary intensions will be contraries to accounts that would convey the intensions of terms as they are used in the main favoured account.

We can see this sort of thing by returning to the examples we gave in sections 3.2 and 3.3.

Jacques Le Goff makes clear what sense of renaissance he will countenance largely by considering the traditional conception and denying its applicability to the relevant period of history. If we analyse his whole argument in our terms, we can see him first making clear what sort of change he has in mind under the term "renaissance", a significant but not necessarily revolutionary change, by presenting the contrary conception of a great transformation. Then he can build an account of the relevant stretch of history, an account that includes several renaissances in his sense but no great transformation of the type that is central to traditional accounts of the Renaissance.

That example is largely one of giving us a sense of the position of the Renaissance on a scale of radicality. And scale is at least in principle a quantitative variable, even if it is hard to measure when it means something other than any kind of physical scale. The example of globalisation is more complex, because the distinctions that Jan Aart Scholte wishes to draw are not in any significant aspect quantitative. Instead he wants to focus on different forms of interaction between entities and barriers to such interactions, before homing in on connections between people.

The way to bring out the form of interaction that is germane to Scholte's approach is to contrast it with other forms of interaction. The points of contrast between the favoured notion of globalisation and notions that are centred on other forms of interaction are not the only points that could be brought out by the method of contraries. But by choosing other notions that have been thought to do the same job of understanding the specific phenomenon of the world's becoming more socially and economically connected, the author can make it likely that he will bring out the points about his favoured notion that will be most significant in doing that job of understanding the phenomenon.

4.4 The favoured account as a whole

There are cases in which the difficulty in giving a favoured account purely positively is not a consequence of imprecision in the extensions or the intensions of terms that are brought together to give the account. Rather, it is a consequence of potential unclarity in the account as a whole when those terms are brought together to give it.

We can see this in the example of the Theaetetus that we introduced in section 3.1.

The goal, a unified account of knowledge itself, is clarified by contrast with a list of types of knowledge. Without this clarification, it would not be clear that a unified account would not even be given by a list of types together with a statement that the list was complete. It would also not be clear that Plato saw a fundamental difference between the intension and the extension of the term "knowledge" which would exist even if there was only one kind of knowledge.

The discussion of perception, about which the perceiver is not mistaken, provides the background for an argument that the intension of "knowledge" must allow for beliefs that do not count as knowledge. That need is then turned back on the proposal to define knowledge as perception, showing its inadequacy.

5. How good a tool is the method of contraries?

We shall now consider whether the method of contraries is a good tool.

On the positive side, the method works. This is indicated by numerous examples of its use. If it did not work, it would have fallen out of use.

It is the negative side that should concern us. Does use of the method of contraries present a high risk of misleading understandings of accounts or terms?

Abstractly, it would seem that it does. If we indicate what is meant partly by saying what is not meant, we are at risk of choosing the contraries that happen to occur to us because they are the ones that we thought of in the context of discovery, when we were still exploring accounts and terms. The contraries chosen in that way may not be the contraries most needed to convey a good understanding. And neglected contraries might have changed our assessment of the adequacy of the favoured account or the appropriateness of the terms used. We could only have full confidence in the results of using the method of contraries if we could be confident that we had identified and made use of all the contraries that would contribute significantly to an understanding and assessment of the account or the terms.

Concretely, there is less reason to worry than might at first appear. This is because of what is achieved in the humanities, and to some extent in the social sciences. The human world is not as amenable to precise characterisation as the physical world, and it is the possibility of precise characterisation that makes the demand that our accounts and terms should match the world an unforgiving demand. Without that possibility, we should not expect a total ordering of accounts by quality. So use of one selection of contraries need not lead us to an inferior result to use of another selection.

Moreover, adding some contraries to a selection may not yield an understanding that is better to any worthwhile extent. It may even muddy the waters. It may be some clear statement that B is neither C nor D that gives insight to the reader. Adding that B is also not E may take the edge off the contrast with C and D. That might seem to be a merely psychological consideration, but such considerations matter when the goal is Verstehen rather than, or at least in addition to, Erklären.

Indeed the tendency we have to cite the contraries that appear most salient, either because they show the reason for homing in on the intended target as distinct from other ones or because they rule out the obvious misunderstandings of the intended target, means that use of the method of contraries should improve accounts in respect of their conferring an understanding of the world. That is a different function from finding out some single and precise way that the world is, a function that is in any case beyond the scope of the humanities.

This is not to say that use of the method of contraries is without risk. We could pick contraries idiosyncratically and thereby mislead ourselves. And citing contraries, while it improves readers' sense of what is meant, does not take us all the way to unambiguous statements or definitions. It may however be the best we can do.

References

Le Goff, Jacques. Must We Divide History Into Periods?, translated by M. B. DeBevoise. New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2015.

Plato. Theaetetus.

Scholte, Jan Aart. Globalization: A Critical Introduction, second edition. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Techno-optimism

 

1. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

In 2023, Marc Andreessen published The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. There is a link at the end of this post.

The Manifesto makes the following claims.

Technology is the way forward, with the potential to improve our lives.

Resources may be scarce, but technology holds out the promise of unlimited growth. It will let us make more with less.

Free markets impose the best discipline. They encourage producers to make things better and cheaper. And they create the surplus wealth that makes social welfare systems possible.

There are great gains from having human and artificial intelligence working together.

Technology allows increased energy production, which is essential to economic progress, without undue environmental impact.

Technology brings down prices, so that low-income people can enjoy the same goodies as high-income people.

The extension of technology is a heroic and exciting enterprise.

The enemies include visions of a deliberately engineered utopia, and the precautionary principle.

The message of the Manifesto is overwhelmingly optimistic, but conditional on innovators being allowed to get on with their jobs as they see fit. State intervention to tell them how to do their jobs is not welcome, and intervention to stop them would be even worse.

Technology has indeed made a huge difference to our lives. One high point has been the management of large amounts of energy (steam power, internal combustion engines, nuclear power, electricity distribution networks, and so on). Another has been the management of information, from Jacquard cards to computers and the Internet. A third has been the management of chemistry, for example in the extraction of useful elements from the Earth and in the manufacture of plastics. A fourth has been the management of biology, whether in medicine or in the genetic engineering of crops. The aristocrats of past centuries about whom we learn when we tour stately homes may have had fine enough lives, at least until they got seriously ill. But the vast majority of the population had a far worse time of it than they do today.

There are however questions to consider. Here are some of them, and answers that may allow optimism to be sustained.

2. Will the trend continue?

We may start by asking whether the trend of advances improving lives will continue. We do not know what the next innovations will be. So we cannot tell either whether they will be of great benefit to humanity, or whether the right innovations will arrive in time to address pressing challenges we may face.

2.1 Benefit or harm?

We might reasonably suppose, on the basis of past experience, that technology would go well. There are no obvious refutations of a claim that benefits are likely to be considerable. There is only a valid point that considerable benefits are not certain. But there is also reason not to be confident that detrimental effects will be small or manageable. This is because recent innovations have brought ever more energy, information, chemistry and biology under management. There is therefore greater potential than in the past to do serious damage, either by the deliberate direction of energy, information, chemistry or biology to do harm, or by accident.

We should however distinguish between known and unknown unknowns. The known unknowns relate to technology that we can already introduce and technology that, while it is not yet practical, we can already adumbrate. This latter category would broadly cover the technology that we can imagine bringing within reach by the use of existing scientific knowledge or by filling in well-defined gaps in existing knowledge. The unknown unknowns relate to technology that we cannot yet describe in any scientific detail, although we might be able to imagine its capabilities in broad terms. Supersonic flying cars have now moved into the category of known unknowns. Implants to enable human telepathy are still in the category of unknown unknowns. And then there are the totally unknown unknowns, where we cannot imagine the capabilities of technologies even in broad terms but they will nonetheless become feasible eventually.

In fact there is a scale with fine gradations, from the technology we could introduce simply by investing resources to mass produce it, through the technology we can imagine with high scientific precision, then the technology we can only imagine in vaguer terms, up to the wholly unimaginable but in fact feasible in the far future.

The location of a technology on this scale affects the confidence we may have in any judgement as to its potential for harmful effects. The closer to the known end a technology is, the greater our confidence may be. We should however never have complete confidence in such a judgement. The future is never perfectly predictable.

There is a specific reason for optimism in the face of uncertainty about the future. Lack of knowledge about the potential effects of a new technology is likely to reflect a lack of specific detail as to how it would work. We may reasonably hope that the less detail we have, the further away introduction of the technology will be and the longer we will have to work out what precautions might be needed. As introduction of a technology comes closer to being feasible, there should be more detail that we could use to improve our predictions.

We may however wonder how much confidence to repose in this optimistic thought. It is possible for technology, including some potentially highly destructive technology, to develop very fast. In addition, both commercial and government developers may be inclined to keep their work secret in order to prevent others from catching up and taking away their commercial or military advantage. Secrecy would hamper the assessment of risks and the development of precautions.

2.2 Will developments arrive in time?

Humanity always faces challenges. It does not make much sense to complain that technical solutions may not arrive quickly to address existing problems. If they do not, that is not an objection to the message of the Manifesto. And letting technology advance is the best hope of hastening the arrival of solutions.

It it is more of an objection to point out that challenges brought about by new technology can arise, and to be concerned as to whether technology will also address them quickly. Challenges can arise because of the direct side-effects of technology. They can also arise because of more indirect effects, as when technology increases lifespans so that there are new pressures both on total population and on the ratio of active to inactive people.

The fact that technology cannot be relied upon to address reasonably quickly the challenges that it itself creates, although it will sometimes do so, should temper the optimism of the Manifesto. But we should make a broad utilitarian calculation. If technology creates new challenges for which there are no quick solutions, we should weigh in the balance the problems that the new technology does solve. That benefit may substantially outweigh the disadvantage of the new challenges, at least unless those new challenges are severe and will not be addressed fast enough to avoid significant damage.

3. Should governments regulate?

3.1 For and against

3.1.1 Utilitarian arguments

It is easy to make a plausible case for government regulation of new technology. We cannot know in advance what all the consequences of innovation will be, and we may very well not even have the data to estimate either the sizes or the probabilities of undesirable effects. Several such concerns are outlined in Hossenfelder, "Our Enemy is the Ivory Tower" American Tech Billionaire Says. That video also points out that knowledge has to precede technology, so knowledge is the true source of progress.

We should however hesitate to endorse regulation.

One reason to hesitate, which applies in all contexts, is that governments typically show considerable enthusiasm for regulation and downplay its adverse effects. Politicians have an urge to be seen to be doing something, and officials are happy to play along because regulations that must be administered secure their continued employment.

Another reason to hesitate is specific to the regulation of new technology. Technology can bring great benefits. If governments slow its introduction, people who would benefit from it for large parts of their lives may only benefit for smaller parts of their lives. To that extent the total happiness of those who live at any time from the present onward, and their average happiness, will be diminished. The effects over the entire future of humanity might be tiny proportions of total happiness and average happiness, because new technology would only be delayed for a few years. But if one were to concentrate on people now alive, or on them plus those who will be born during the lifetimes of people now alive, the effects would be proportionately much greater. Not only would it be natural to concentrate on that select group, as the people to whom we can relate. It would also be defensible in utilitarian terms, because the far future is so hard to predict that bringing it into utilitarian calculations amounts to mere guesswork.

Moreover, given that each advance enables new advances, the loss to people alive now or to be born during the lifetimes of people now alive could be even greater than would appear from looking at each technology separately. A delay in one technology would delay the development of another. And this would be so even if regulation did not prevent scientific research, but only widespread implementation. Widespread implementation may be needed both to  fund future development, and to identify the gaps in benefit that could usefully be filled by the next round of development.

We must also consider the point that given the unknown consequences of new technology, there is a good chance that governments will regulate in unhelpful ways. They suffer from the same ignorance as everyone else. And in addition, government decision makers often lack both technical expertise and business sense. It is not surprising that they often fall back on the precautionary principle, that things ought to be forbidden whenever there might be adverse consequences. And this principle has been much criticised as a shackle on progress.

This is not to say that there should definitely be no regulation. One of the features of some recent technological developments is that they could easily have very large adverse consequences across the whole planet. The greater the extent of our control over energy, information, chemistry and biology, the more damage we could do at one fell swoop.

3.1.2 An argument of principle

As well as utilitarian arguments for and against regulation, we should consider an argument of principle. This is the argument that government intervention is inherently objectionable and must be thoroughly justified. The starting point of this argument is that we are free human beings who may choose to establish governments because we find them helpful, but who thereby become citizens and not subjects. We surrender some of our liberties because it is worthwhile to do so, but we retain the rest, which were ours to begin with and do not become gifts from the state. So governments should not interfere with our lives beyond their proper remit, and there is at least a rebuttable presumption against regulation.

Applying this argument to the regulation of new technology, we might say that not regulating is in principle preferable to any degree of regulation, and that less regulation is in principle preferable to more regulation. One could fill out the argument by reference to a specific right to use one's talents and labour. In outline, the argument would be that if someone has an idea for a new technology, he or she should be free to make use of the idea. And this could be so whether or not there was any system of intellectual property rights to allow exclusivity of exploitation.

3.2 The pointlessness of control

3.2.1 Difficulties in exercising government control

Governments could not always regulate the spread of new technology, even if it were good that they should do so. We can easily identify some problems they would face.

One problem would arise for governments of separate countries. Technology is transmitted in three forms: ideas for how to do things, software (including both programs and data), and physical objects. The flow of the third can be regulated, but not the flow of the first two. Nor can use of the first two be regulated without the heaviest of surveillance of everyday activity - and even then, some users will mange to hide from the surveillance. So when it comes to ideas and software, individual governments can do very little once technologies become available somewhere in the world. And if they do find ways to block ideas and software at their borders, people will find ways round those blocks. They may for example use encryption or virtual private networks.

Another problem would arise both for governments of separate countries and for any hypothetical world government. Some innovations are easily introduced, without any need for rare resources, once the ideas are available. Software is like this. So the innovations are likely to be used by lots of people in many locations. Stopping a few people might be possible. Stopping many people would not be. And with anything in the software field, there are plenty of methods to hide what one is doing from the authorities.

These two problems would not arise with every new technology. Some things require physical objects, sometimes large ones. Some, such as new ways to generate electricity, require changes to existing infrastructure. And some, such as medical interventions, require both the participation of skilled professionals whom governments could identify reasonably easily, and the use of substantial laboratories or care facilities. But the two problems would arise with quite a lot of new technology. And even when physical objects were involved, it might be difficult to maintain boundaries between countries. Small items can be smuggled, and genetically modified seeds and animals can stray across frontiers.

Finally, there is the concern that blocking use of some new technology in one country while it is introduced in others may be economically detrimental. It may for example lead to other countries destroying the market for important exports from the country that introduces a block, because they have a better product or a more efficient way to make the same product.

3.2.2 International agreements

We have noted that having a world government would remove some but not all of the obstacles to the regulation of innovation. There is no realistic prospect of a world government being introduced in the near future. But international agreements represent a step in that direction. Do they give a route to control?

Alas for those who favour regulation, they cannot be relied upon to do the job. They are often vague in their content. This can be because vagueness is necessary in order for large numbers of countries to agree. And in the specific context of new technology, it can also be because the precise nature of future technology is unknown. So rules cannot be set out with sufficient precision even to come close to regulating all and only the members of a sensible set of targets. Moreover, not all countries will sign any given agreement, and those which do not sign will make up their own regulations or have no regulations at all. Then the difficulties of preventing the spread of technologies from countries that allow them to countries that do not allow them will arise again.

3.2.3 "Ought" and "can"

We may conclude that for some technologies, whatever the case for control may be, control cannot be applied. There are things that people might argue governments should do, but they simply cannot do them. "Ought" may not imply "can".

Having said that, there might be a case for introducing ineffectual controls. They can be a political statement of the kind of society that a government sees as desirable. They can also create an atmosphere of caution or abstention. This would however be a very weak case for ineffectual controls. Such controls could equally have the effect of making the state into a laughing stock.

3.3 Utopia

3.3.1 The danger of an ideal

The Manifesto comes out against Utopias. One might wonder why. Is it not sensible to want to make things as good as possible? There are however reasons why opposition to Utopian visions can make sense.

One reason is that there is no such thing as a perfect world. At least, there is no perfect world that human beings can create. There will always be scope to improve. If we ever thought we had reached perfection, we would rest on our laurels and forgo further improvement. And if we decided in advance what would constitute Utopia, we would be limited by what we could currently imagine. That would be likely to fall far short of what would in fact be possible, because new possibilities would emerge as advances currently beyond us were made.

Another reason to oppose Utopian visions is that if there is a predefined shared goal, someone will have to direct activity so as to achieve it. So central direction of economic activity would be needed. And ample experience shows that this would be disastrous.

What we can laud as an ideal it would be sensible to have would be a world in which the direction was upward, a world of continual improvement. But we should not try to define in advance what improvements there should be, save in the short term when we have well-defined problems to solve such as the security and privacy of information stored online, or a medical condition without an available cure.

3.3.2 Sub-optimal courses of development

We should also be aware that it is possible for us accidentally to follow a path of improvement that would trap us in a sub-optimal corner of the space of possibilities, requiring us to backtrack. But such risks are inherent in any progress into the unknown, and are not to be avoided by any kind of central planning or by an absurd extension of the precautionary principle to not doing things that would be good because they might not be the best.

We may note an interesting way in which sub-optimality might arise. This is a less than ideal order of work. Suppose that two developments, called B and C, are already envisaged in sufficient detail for it to be possible to start work, and that we could work on either of them first. If we worked on development B first and then development C, we might miss out on an opportunity to have done better by starting with C. This could happen because C might have opened up the way to a better form of B, or to an alternative to B that would have been preferable.

While there are unavoidable risks of sub-optimality, we can console ourselves with the thought that losses would probably be for the short term only, with the option to backtrack as necessary. And there would be no reason to let governments regulate in an attempt to avoid sub-optimal paths of development, because they would be as much in the dark as to the best choices as anyone else.

3.4 Accelerationism

3.4.1 The push for progress

There is a trend in modern thought that goes by the name of accelerationism. The broad idea is deliberately to push for progress to happen faster and faster. Various political beliefs have clustered around this idea, some rather strange and some incompatible with others. They include a belief that faster progress is a good way to bring down existing political and social structures, with a view to creating a new and allegedly better world.

The Manifesto explicitly endorses accelerationism as a a general concept, although fortunately there is no commitment to strange political beliefs associated with it. The endorsement gives rise to the question of whether governments should force the pace of progress. The political beliefs give rise to the question of whether progress itself carries a risk of destruction.

3.4.2 Should governments force the pace?

Should governments force the pace of progress, rather than merely not regulate and avoid creating any other barriers to progress?

Forcing the pace of progress would be unwise. It would require applying pressure in particular ways, encouraging some forms of progress more than others. Even if the forms were only defined in very broad terms, there would be an influence of political priorities in an arena in which decisions should be taken by businesses and private individuals. There would also be a degree of selection of likely winners, and politicians are very bad at that.

3.4.3 Political beliefs and the risk of destruction

There are political beliefs sometimes associated with accelerationism which see rapid progress as a way to break down existing institutions. Such beliefs are often rather silly. Deliberately breaking down institutions is not an intelligent thing to do unless one has a well-tested and widely acceptable set of institutions with which to replace them, along with the means to ensure a smooth transition.

However, even if we simply dismiss such political beliefs, we are prompted to ask whether progress itself can be too destructive. If the people with the political beliefs see rapid progress as a way to destroy institutions, maybe institutions and social structures could also be destroyed by accident. And maybe governments should at least intervene to reduce the risk of this.

We can see some ways in which excessive destruction might happen. Developments that quickly eliminated many jobs, at times when the redundant workers had little opportunity to find alternative employment, could lead to a degree of social breakdown. This reflects the fact that work is the leading way we have to distribute income. To take another example, developments that introduced new ways to undertake everyday transactions and to make social connections, which some people adopted quickly and others refrained from using, might create patterns of exclusion. These and similar social strains might in turn lead to a widespread, although probably not universal, loss of confidence in existing political institutions.

These risks are not to be dismissed. We should face them. But it is unlikely that they mean we should put brakes on the introduction of new technology. The losses from doing so could easily be far greater than the gains from avoiding difficulties. It is likely that a better approach would be to assess the risks and see what measures might be held in readiness to counter adverse effects that actually arose. For widespread redundancy, this might be retraining programmes. For social exclusion, it might be steps to preserve old methods of transaction and interaction. And so on.

3.5 Security concerns

3.5.1 National security

There is one specific area in which it may seem that state intervention would be entirely justified, and perhaps essential. This is national security.

There are valid concerns about new technology that would gather and store data on people, on economic activity, or on infrastructure, and that might then transmit the data to potentially hostile foreign powers. New technology might also hand remote control of processes to foreign powers.

In such cases, there would be no point in trying to stop the development of the technology. If a hostile power saw the advantages of using it, that power would develop it. One could only try to limit its deployment.

In the public sector, this would in principle be straightforward. One would simply insist that all technologies be analysed for such risks before buying them. It might however be difficult in practice, because objectionable pathways of data transmission and of remote control might be well hidden.

In private sector businesses, it would be harder to control deployment. One can try to regulate private sector procurement, but there might not be the resources to analyse all potentially objectionable technology. And if a supplier was condemned, some other supplier might replace it, repackaging a product with the same objectionable qualities. Moreover, the heavy hand of the state regulating the use of all technology that fell within a broad range when only a small proportion of examples of use might in fact be objectionable would be economically counter-productive. One might therefore have to take the risk, recognising that it could be a considerable risk. The risk could be considerable if tools on which businesses relied included ways for hostile powers to turn them off remotely. A hostile power could cause considerable disruption by turning off banking services, supermarket logistics, or water and sewage services.

Among the general public, control over deployment would be harder still. If people like a product, and it can be obtained without bringing physical goods across a boundary where there are controls (typically a national boundary), they will get it. Blocks to the sharing of software can generally be circumvented. So technology that will result in the sharing of data on individuals or in remote interference with their devices can easily be deployed, and there is not much that governments can do about it. Fortunately, the scope to harm national security in this way is limited.

There are two general points to draw out of what we have just said. The first is that controls might reasonably be desired, but they may be hard to impose. The second is that if one were to take a strictly utilitarian approach, one would proportion attempts to control deployment to the risks involved. The risks are bound to be high in some parts of the public sector, most obviously the military, security services, and some parts of the police. They can be substantial in some other parts of the public sector and in parts of the private sector that are critical to the smooth running of society. Risks at the societal level are much lower in the generality of businesses and among individuals.

Fortunately, ease of controlling deployment of technologies is positively correlated with level of risk at the societal level, although the correlation is far from perfect.

We should also note that none of the concerns here would make much of an argument against development of the technologies in question. Those technologies may bring considerable benefits. If they would also bring risks, the point at which the risks arose would be deployment. And while control at that point may be difficult, it would in any case be the only option given that development can happen anywhere in the world.

3.5.2 Personal data and the state

A specific concern with much new technology is that it allows the collection and analysis of large amounts of personal data. Sometimes this will be done by private enterprise, and sometimes by the state. 

The obstruction of technology that allowed the collection of data would be a bad move. If a service provider, whether a business or for example a state health service, has information on the people with which it interacts, it can provide a better service. The sensible response is therefore likely to be laws that give people rights over the use of their data.

Here the state is a particular concern. It is unlikely to make laws against itself. It may even make laws to frustrate attempts to keep data private, for example when the UK government issues secret orders to technology companies to undermine the encryption that they offer to their customers.

State monitoring may help to fight crime, but it has adverse effects too. If people think they are being constantly watched, they will self-censor. Even if current governments are not at all likely to intervene against opinions they do not like, so that there is no immediate reason to be concerned, data will be saved up for an indefinite period and future governments might not be so benign. Moreover, state surveillance would make it very difficult for a whistle-blowing civil servant, aware of wrongdoing, safely to pass information to journalists, so the level of corruption would be very likely to rise.

Given that government regulation of technology is useless in the area of state data collection, our best hope to control the adverse effects of state monitoring that relies on new technology is more new technology. Examples are encryption systems that are developed by companies or communities immune to orders from particular governments to build in backdoors, and software such as virtual private networks to hide web browsing.

3.5.3 Misinformation

The world wide web in general, and content generated by artificial intelligence in particular, have been seen as threats to the social and political environment by virtue of their scope to distribute false information in ways that make it easy for people to think it is true. Fiction and guesses, masquerading as established fact, can be disseminated very quickly. And deepfakes can be used to make it look as though respected authorities have made certain assertions when in fact they have not.

There are two reasons why this might be regarded as a security issue. The first is that people may be led to act in ways that are foolish and disruptive. The second is that the normal functioning of democracy may be undermined, because that functioning requires voters to have accurate information on issues facing the state and on political parties so that they can choose accordingly.

As already noted, there would be no prospect of controlling the development and the widespread use of such technologies. And there would be a strong case against attempts to control either development or deployment. On utilitarian grounds, such controls would limit the considerable benefits available from technologies like the web and artificial intelligence. On grounds of principle it is a basic liberty to be able to exchange ideas. The controls that would be necessary to, for example, prevent the generation of messages by using artificial intelligence, would greatly limit the exchange of ideas more widely.

One might make a case for control downstream, targeting particular messages or categories of message. But that would be outright censorship, to which there are ample objections. One could add that established political parties themselves happily mislead people and misrepresent issues as part of the routine political process.

4. Control by corporate interests

It is a common concern that new technologies which play a significant part in people's lives are controlled by corporations that are in turn under the control of their founders. These are seen as immensely wealthy people who may try both to frustrate government attempts at control and, more broadly, to foist their own political agendas on society.

It is not surprising that control by a few very wealthy people should be reasonably common in relation to new technologies. Specific people had to have the new ideas, then drive them forward to commercial reality. And there has not been time to diffuse control through the sale of equity in the relevant businesses to a broad range of shareholders.

We shall not spend time on moral objections to striking disparities of wealth. There is however one point about disparities that is particularly relevant to technological progress. This is that innovations which generate vast wealth for a few are also ones that confer great benefits on the many. Those benefits are why there are many customers, and hence vast wealth to be made. In consequence, the rewards to the innovators are a tiny fraction of the benefits to people generally. Looked at that way, large rewards to innovators may look entirely proportionate.

Should we be concerned that innovators may try to frustrate attempts at government control? Perhaps not, if we think that governments are too keen to control and too unaware of the damage that excessive control can do. It may well be that innovators who resist control provide a useful counterweight to the urges of governments. And to the extent that attempts to control are ineffective anyway, for the reasons we set out in section 3.2, there will be little loss from effective resistance to what governments may attempt.

There is however a way in which innovators may positively encourage government control. They may want measures to shut out competitors. They may for example seek to strengthen existing intellectual property protections, or they may seek new regulations that impose safety conditions which they happen to satisfy without any difficulty but which new competitors would find hard to satisfy. This is something that governments should of course resist.

Turning to rich people seeking to impose wide political agendas, this is not a problem specific to innovators. It just so happens that many of the most publicly recognised rich people have made their money in that way. So if controls are needed, they are not specifically for innovators, nor does innovation create a new need. Any controls would be a matter for the wider political system, and would raise general political questions such as those that have come up in relation to super-PACs in the United States. 

It might still be thought that there should be a special concern because innovation can so easily give rise to many rich people. But the loss from attempts to hold back innovation would be so great that it would be folly to tackle the supposed political problem in that way. There is also the point that the more billionaires there are who seek to influence the political process, the greater is the likelihood that they will have a range of political views and will to some extent work against one another, thereby lessening their overall impact.

5. Value and fulfilment

The Manifesto portrays technological advance as an inherently noble pursuit. It is valuable and a source of human fulfilment. There is an implicit nod to some of Ayn Rand's characters, particularly Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged and Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, and a mention of John Galt from Atlas Shrugged.

5.1 Value

We could agree with the value of technological advance by reference to long-standing approaches to ethics.

Most obviously, utilitarians would endorse actions that increased overall human happiness, and technology can certainly do that - although utilitarians would also want to avoid innovations that were on balance harmful.

Virtue ethicists could also endorse innovation because it is mostly a way to benefit humanity. And they could endorse work to advance technology, because it requires the exercise both of intellectual virtues such as sound reasoning, creativity and skill, and of other virtues such as determination.

So the view that technological advance is ethically valuable could enjoy widespread support.

One might hesitate here. People who drive our technology forward are easily viewed as selfish, out to make as much money as they can, and selfishness tends to attract ethical opprobrium. On the other hand, there are those (such as Ayn Rand) who argue that selfishness is a virtue, so long as one relies on the consent of others to make deals and does not coerce people into handing over their resources. If you set out to improve your own position by non-coercive means, the only ways to succeed are first to use resources that are lying around unused and unowned, and second to offer to fulfil the needs of others so that they are willing to do business with you. Thus the pursuit of your own ends leads to the fulfilment of other people's ends.

5.2 Fulfilment

Whether work on technology is fulfilling depends on the individual.  But it can very easily be fulfilling. It demands the exercise of intellect, and sometimes physical skill. And the benefits to humanity mean that what is done can be seen as worthwhile. The career of an engineer can be as fulfilling as the career of a poet.

This may however sometimes be hard to see. An engineer will typically work in a big team, and there may be many other people who would have done the same work. A poet, on the other hand, will typically work alone. And the poems written will be such as would not have been written by anyone else, even if plenty of other people would have written poems of equal merit. So if uniqueness of contribution matters to fulfilment, the poet will have the edge over the engineer. On the other hand, if consistent acknowledgement of merit that does not vary much with individual taste matters to fulfilment, the engineer will have the edge over the poet.

References

Andreessen, Marc. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Online publication, 2023.

https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

Hossenfelder, Sabine. "Our Enemy is the Ivory Tower" American Tech Billionaire Says. Video, 2024.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kibFAk8HwS4