Atheism, religious faith, and political discourse

1. Introduction

Our concern here is with the roles of religious faith in political movements. "Faith" will cover both the kind of faith that involves affirmation of religious claims of a factual nature, and other ways of being religious. "Political movements" will include everything from loose groupings of people who think in the same way and identify as having that much in common up to fully organised political parties.

There is a view within some some political movements that religious faith has a central role to play in politics. Some members of these movements speak of family, flag, and faith. When this slogan is used, Christian faith is usually meant. Other religious beliefs could be given a comparable political role, but for the purposes of this discussion we shall concentrate on Christianity.

Here we shall explore whether atheists (such as the present author) could comfortably align themselves with movements within which faith had a significant political role.

Would atheists be as easily convinced as religious people that the specific political positions taken were adequately supported against alternative positions?

More generally, would atheists be entirely comfortable working within movements in which faith was important? There is no suggestion that atheists would be deliberately excluded. Atheism, in which we include the agnosticism that has no definite idea of a deity and might as well be atheism for all practical and most theoretical purposes, is now widespread. It would be an unusual political group that would exclude such a large proportion of the population and thereby lose a lot of potential members and supporters. Moreover, many people would probably not wish to be associated with a group that took such a censorious attitude based on religious difference. But atheists, even if accepted, might still feel ill at ease.

2. Support for political positions

Religious faith may play a role in supporting political positions as against alternative positions. Arguments for one position as against another might be arguments with other people, or arguments within the minds of individuals who were aware of alternatives but who sought to be fortified in their convictions.

We must consider whether an atheist could see faith as providing any such support, and then if not, whether that would create difficulties for atheists.

When we speak of faith, we mean actual religious faith (although, as we shall see, not necessarily centred on propositional content). Some speak of faith in Christian values, which one might read simply as commitment to a range of values traditionally associated with Christianity without any need for distinctively religious faith. But that would reduce the relevant political debates to arguments about the merits and the applicability of different values, to be conducted in the ordinary way without any specifically religious element. We shall in sections 3.2 to 3.4 consider ways of understanding religious faith that edge toward that sort of position, but they still keep one foot in religion and thereby prevent such an easy reduction.

3. Could an atheist see faith as providing support?

Religious faith may be regarded as a matter of belief in certain propositions, or as something else. We shall consider the first option in section 3.1, and the second one in sections 3.2 to 3.4. We shall use the term "religious belief" to denote the propositions that may be believed, and the term "people of faith" to encompass both people who do believe them and people who understand their religion in some other way.

3.1 Faith as belief

From an atheist starting point, religious belief as it is found in Christianity or any other monotheistic religion would require belief that God existed, taken as a factual claim. There are variants. A Jesuit priest once told the present author that the wording should be "God is", rather than "God exists", but that variant would not help in the discussion that follows here. Nor would other sophisticated theological approaches help, because the claims made would still be rejected by atheists as false or regarded by them as meaningless. Sophisticated theology may appeal to those who are already believers. They do not need to find a way round any objection that there is no good reason for those not already committed to a religion to believe the factual claim that there is a God. It has no appeal to the atheist as a way round such an objection. And since atheists are our concern here, their need for straightforward facts must be respected if they are to be convinced.

Atheists simply cannot allow a theistic claim. So they cannot accord religious belief an argumentative role in supporting political positions against alternatives. An understanding of religion could still be important in political debate, helping the comprehension of positions by reference to their historical and social contexts. But that would be all. Suppose that some religious claim is designated "p", and some political claim is designated “q”. "If p, then q" can provide no encouragement either to accept or to reject q if one thinks that p is false, or indeed that it is meaningless.

There would also be no good way to repair the damage that would be done to the political force of faith as belief by the rejection of theistic claims. Given that rejection, and without adopting some other model of faith, Christianity would be reduced to exhortation backed up by stories that might be historically accurate in their naming and description of people, places and events, but in the reading of which literal readings of all references to divine aspects would have to be avoided in order to avoid factual inaccuracy. Then Christianity would be too weak to be a source of imperatives with sufficient force behind them to override competing imperatives.

There would be an additional issue for atheists. They would want the polity to be one that was for them just as much as it was a polity for people of faith. If religious belief were to be essential to being a full member of the polity, they would find that unacceptable. And the larger the role that was given to religious belief, the greater the danger that belief would be essential to full membership. Even if pretended belief sufficed, that would require the great discomfort of continual dishonesty.

Finally, any choice or rejection of religious beliefs to suit politics would imply that the beliefs were not regarded as factual matters. Where facts are at stake, we do not get to choose the facts. Indeed, if one were to start from political preferences and then choose religious beliefs, any support for the politics from those beliefs would be founded on circular reasoning.

3.2 Faith without belief

If we take faith as belief, the beliefs involved would be ones that atheists would reject. Faith in that form could not for them do anything to support political positions. We should however consider forms of religious faith that, while rooted in straightforwardly theistic traditions, do not require factual claims that atheists would reject. Could any such forms play roles in supporting political positions against alternatives?

Such forms of faith may be classed under two headings, although any individual might take elements from both or even fully combine them. The division we envisage is one between the primacy of an imperative to live rightly and the primacy of a frame of mind.

3.3 An imperative to live rightly

There is an approach to religion that goes under the name of orthopraxy, or correct conduct. While this encompasses both liturgical conduct and ethical conduct in everyday life, there is a decided rooting in a religious tradition in which orthodoxy is central, leaving little or no scope for atheists to participate in orthopraxy in its full form.

Atheists could however take on the notion of orthopraxy in the sense of ethical conduct, and they often do. The notion is not merely the idea of conduct of a particular nature. It incorporates what is captured by the prefix "ortho". This indicates a link to regulation by some external source of direction, so that mere private habits would not qualify even if they happened to lead to the same conduct. In relation to ethical conduct in everyday life, atheists could recognise the significance of having an external source of direction just as much as people of religious faith could recognise it, even though their external source would be likely to be an impersonal body of ethical thought rather than a personality or a sacred text.

The specific conduct that interests us here is the promotion of selected political positions because their promotion seems to be the right way to act in debate. We must ask whether the way in which atheists might consider themselves required to live rightly would in that context be a good fit with the way in which people of faith might rely on their religion to justify promoting selected positions.

3.3.1 Thinking in parallel

People of faith within the political movements that interest us might well take the view that in the political context religion was primarily about doing the right things, not by accident but because of religious motivation, and that even if factual theistic belief was also important to them, it did not matter so much when deciding which political positions to promote or oppose.

With that focus on promoting or opposing political positions, atheists might not have any difficulty in working closely with people of faith who saw the application of religion in that context as not being dependent on factual religious belief. The immediate question for atheists in politics would be, "Are these the policies to promote, and those the ones to oppose?". They might easily give the same positive and negative verdicts on particular policies as people of faith would. They would do so on grounds that did not include even implicit reference to the divine, but that to them would be just as imperative as the divine would be to people of faith.

In order to parallel in their minds the model of religion as a matter of living rightly that we envisage here, atheists would have to be motivated by considerations that made their choices of policies mandatory. They could however supply such considerations from philosophical positions that were not theistic in nature. Examples would include utilitarianism and virtue ethics. There would still be a difference from religion in that the source of considerations would be purely secular, but that would be a tolerable difference. It would however be important in supporting political positions against alternatives that they did have some such grounds. The approach to politics that we envisage without some supporting orthodoxy or other external motivation would not count for much in political argument.

3.3.2 Current disagreement

Atheists might sometimes give different verdicts on policies from people of faith, but that would not be a serious obstacle to working comfortably together so long as differences did not arise in respect of prescriptions that were important enough to make acceptance of them practically a condition of belonging to the political movement, or important enough to individuals to make them think it unethical to work with anyone who advocated a contrary position. After all, different people of faith can also have different views on the same issues.

Having said that, the role of religion might make it likely that there would be conflict in respect of prescriptions of great importance, a contemporary example being a prescription actively to oppose (or to support) abortion rights. We should expect religion sometimes to create conflict in respect of prescriptions of great importance, because religions typically have specific things to say about fundamental aspect of human life.

When such a conflict arose, people on one side of the debate might not want to work closely with people on the other side in the promotion of a party that sought a place in government, for fear that the party would then legislate for the position on that issue that they abhorred.

3.3.3 Stability and future disagreement

For a person of faith for whom orthopraxy was in the forefront, orthodoxy would still be in the background, both as an optional extra that the person of faith could choose to add to his or her orthopraxy and by virtue of orthopraxy's roots in traditions of orthodoxy. That would give a certain stability to the detailed positions adopted, at least so long as the individual's faith lasted. There would always be scope to interpret a religion differently, as shown by the fact that people of different political persuasions manage to claim the same religion as central to their own positions. But the way in which a specific individual interpreted his or her religion for political purposes would probably be reasonably stable, especially if he or she was in a political movement in which many others were of the same religion.

For an atheist, there would not be the same kind of source of stability. General ethical positions, such as utilitarianism or some virtue ethic, might provide reasonable stability, along with some predictability as to how novel issues would be handled. But such positions are at sufficient distance from the specifics of life for this to be far from guaranteed. Religions, on the other hand, having grown up over centuries in actual societies where there was a need to achieve agreement on laws and conduct, tend in their principles to be closer to the specifics of life.

The result of this difference, together with the fact that religious principles sometimes promote results at variance with what schools of secular ethics can recommend, would be potential for disagreement over questions of what should be done that might arise in future. There might even be a current fear that such future differences could lead to schism within the relevant political movement. Moreover, the different grounds of commitment to specific positions, religious and secular grounds, would encourage different forms of political argument and rhetoric in the present, making the difference in grounds visible to the public and thereby perhaps reducing support because the risk of a political party's taking an unexpected direction would deter voters. For reasons such as these, disquiet at being in the same political movement as people on the other side of the divide between people of faith and atheists might persist.

3.4 A frame of mind

It is possible to regard religious faith as a matter of seeing the world in a particular way. This does not involve assent to propositions that would be specific enough to be assessed for truth or falsity in the way that theists and atheists might assess a claim that God existed. Rather, it amounts to commitment to a view that, while it could expressed in propositional terms, would have to be expressed in propositions so general that they would not be testable. Examples would be the proposition that reality was all a single substance, in a Spinozist kind of way, or the proposition that everything had mental qualities, in a panpsychist kind of way.

Such propositions would be accompanied by an imperative to look at the world in their light. Thus someone who adopted a Spinozist approach would see the world as both a divine thought and a physical reality, while a panpsychist might see each event as explicable by reference to the purposes of the participant entities. One consequence might be to respond to the world as a person of orthodox faith might well do so, at least at the level of broad values such as concern for people and the environment and respect for all. There might also be an inclination to attend religious services, not in order to affirm the contents of creeds but because one would feel at home there.

Any such framing of the world would be flexible in its effects on the selection of particular prescriptions for views or conduct. This flexibility might be reduced by a background of orthodoxy. Such a background might have an influence even if an individual did not subscribe to any such orthodoxy, because the place of the orthodoxy in the relevant cultural history would have shaped the range of options likely to occur to the individual and the ways in which he or she would interpret the chosen option. But there would still be some flexibility, and some potential to derive alternative and perhaps opposing prescriptions.

It is therefore unlikely that such a framing could suffice to support political positions against alternative positions. Even if a given framing were agreed, it would be possible to derive support for different positions from it. And it is unlikely that a framing would be agreed precisely, given that it would not even be formulated with any great precision. So atheists who rejected such framings, seeing them as mystical, would not be any less able than people who adopted such framings to find support for political positions against alternatives.

A framing might however still suffice to resolve a debate within the mind of a single individual, with the outcome fortifying the individual in his or her convictions.

4. Working with people who rely on faith

No political movement that could only attract people who had religious faith, or could only attract people who did not, could expect to make great progress in a modern democracy. So we must consider any difficulties that might arise when atheists and people of faith sought to work together.

4.1 Support for positions

It would be difficult for an atheist to see faith as providing support for political positions. Faith as belief could not do so, because an implication from a religious belief to some political position would have what the atheist regarded as a false antecedent. And faith without belief, while it might encourage people with the faith to sustain their political positions, would be seen by the atheist as providing merely psychological support, the existence of which had no probative value.

This would not in itself need to present any difficulty, so long as atheists could find adequate reasons of their own to support the positions that were important to the movement, or alternatively if any failures to support certain positions could be tolerated.

There might however be a felt loss of coherence of the overall stance of the movement. If the main positions were mostly natural consequences of the relevant religious faith, that would for the faithful justify holding the positions as a package. Without that central core of faith, the different positions might come across as a disparate bunch, justified individually but not collectively.

Moreover, future loyalty to the movement would be more uncertain for the atheist than for the faithful. There is a view that this would be a good thing. It is rational to consider each political position on its own merits, and to be willing to change one's views if appropriate. On the other hand, the faithful might be uncomfortable with the constant risk that their atheist colleagues would start to deviate from the programme, and atheists might feel uncomfortable at the expectation of continued loyalty to a programme that could not remain static but would have to evolve as new developments in the world demanded new responses.

4.2 Conflicts over positions

If religious faith were central to an approach to political issues, it is quite likely that at least a few positions would flow naturally from the relevant faith but would conflict with the values of some of the people without faith. So there would be occasions when atheists would want to reject some positions within a broad faith-inspired programme.

How far this would be likely to happen would depend on the core values that went along with the relevant faith. We shall now take a look at what might be called Judaeo-Christian values, and then consider some specific conflicts.

4.2.1 Christian and Judaeo-Christian values

The phrases "Christian values" and "Judaeo-Christian values" are widely used, but they are easy to interpret in several different ways. If pressed, those who use them within the political movements that interest us here will cite some specific values, such as justice, mutual respect, doing as you would be done by, charity, the sanctity of life, and avoidance of behaviour traditionally regarded as sinful. But those values too are not especially specific in their implications for contemporary policy. It can however be clearer what they forbid than what they require, as when references to the sanctity of life are used to argue against abortion rights, or an imperative to avoid sin is used to justify forbidding certain personal relationships.

Clarity on prohibitions reflects the Old Testament inheritance, with its regulations and ideas of structures of authority. Those regulations and ideas of authority are more muted in the New Testament. Their strongest recurrence is in the Pauline Epistles, but there they come across as balanced on the single point of faith in Jesus, lacking the force that comes from being rooted in the profound history of a people that is recounted in the Old Testament.

It is therefore not surprising that the concept of Judaeo-Christian values, including the Old Testament part, should have considerable appeal to members of a political movement who advocate family and flag. But it also prepares the ground for conflicts on some specific issues between members with religious faith and atheist members.

4.2.2 Specific conflicts

Atheists are likely to object to the promotion of any particular religion, or of religion generally, in schools or in the life of the state. They regard the beliefs promoted as simply false, and therefore as not to be advocated. This opposition may bring them into direct conflict with those who advocate a political role for faith. Those who think that faith has a valuable role in supporting their political choices are likely to want those choices to be supported by as many people as possible, in order to ensure their implementation in a democracy.

A related point is that an atheist of integrity would not be able to say that while he or she did not believe the propositions of religion, it would be good if the population at large did. That would be to say that it was good for people to be misled in certain ways, a position inconsistent with taking truth seriously.

On the issues of abortion and euthanasia, atheists are more likely than people of faith to be in favour of the freedom of the mother and the terminally ill respectively. There is no guarantee that any given atheist or person of faith would take the position one would expect. There will be anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia atheists, and pro-abortion rights and pro-euthanasia people of faith. But a political movement will tend to want a single coherent position on each major issue, and the more people of faith dominate, the more likely it is that this position will be anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia. That may leave a substantial proportion of atheist supporters uncomfortable, and even schismatic.

Another area of potential conflict is personal lifestyle. Atheists are more likely than people with religious faith to take the position that individuals should be free to live as they choose so long as their lifestyles do no harm to others. And someone else's horror that anyone should be living in a particular way would not count as harm. Without a notion of divine disapproval, the regulation of conduct should be limited to conduct that can be characterised as wrong on purely secular grounds. People of faith, on the other hand, may well have a notion of divine disapproval and see it as part of the role of the state to forbid conduct that would incur that disapproval.

Here, the notion of freedom that is sometimes joined to family, flag, and faith is at stake. The libertarian position would be that freedom included leaving harmless people alone. A more conservative and quite possibly faith-inspired position would be that it required allowing such freedoms as might be suitable while in some respects constraining people for their own good or for the good of society. As with other issues, there is no guarantee that any given atheist or person of faith would take the position one would predict in this way. But again, there is a tendency for a political movement to want a single coherent position on each major issue. And whichever way such a decision was made, one might expect some disaffection, either predominantly on the atheist side or predominantly on the side of people of faith.

One reason why conflicts over issues like abortion, euthanasia, and personal lifestyle may be hard to resolve by discussion within a political movement is that the grounds for positions may be different. For the atheist, the grounds may be given in arguments against a background of secular values that are themselves open to challenge by argument which may lead to adjustment of those values. For the person of faith, the grounds may be given in arguments against a background of values that come from the relevant religious tradition and that are not themselves to be challenged by argument, but only rejected by abandoning the faith in question.

5. Avoiding reliance on religious tradition

There would be advantages in a political movement that had hitherto given an important role to religious tradition moving away from any reliance on that tradition, whether the tradition was still linked to actual faith or was seen as merely historical.

5.1 The risks of reliance

When a tradition was linked to actual faith, there would be a risk that people, including some of the keenest supporters, would lose their faith. Then if faith was important to the political movement, those people might very well leave the movement. Alternatively, if they were a large enough group, they might seek radical change within the movement, and schism could easily result.

Even when a tradition was seen as merely of historical significance, and as a way to influence current choices of policy on the basis that the tradition was central to the relevant country's culture and that it would be sensible to choose policies that fitted well with that culture, the argument for respecting the tradition would weaken as faith diminished in the population. To sustain respect, there would need to be a reasonable proportion of the population who thought that the relevant religious beliefs were true. In a generally atheistic population there would be considerable doubt that the tradition deserved continuing respect, simply because the beliefs on which it was founded were seen as mistaken.

5.2 Alternative support for positions

If faith were discarded, and moreover the weight of a tradition viewed merely historically was reduced because the beliefs on which it was founded were seen as mistaken, what alternatives might be available to support the positions typically favoured by the political movements that interest us?

Fortunately, there are rich traditions of ethical thought on which to draw, some developed in Europe from Ancient Greece onward, and some developed elsewhere in the world. These traditions have deep roots in culture, placing them on a par with established religions in that respect. Abstract ethical theories when considered independently of history would come across as lacking such roots, leading to a fear that they would be flimsier than religions, but in fact there is history to hand.

European traditions of thought that have endured were, in years AD, influences on and influenced by Christianity, but they are still identifiable as traditions that could stand independently of theistic religion. To see that, one only has to wind the clock back to the time before Christianity became widespread, a time for which there is also not much sign of dependence on Jewish thought, and then imagine winding the clock forward again on a path without Christianity. The vaunting of truth, beauty, and in political arrangements courage and cooperation with others can all be found in such traditions. And subsequent ethical thought, such as Locke on government, Kant on duty and justice, or Mill on liberty, could easily have arisen and stood independently of theistic traditions. (Locke and Kant would require some editing, but their edifices would not crumble.) 

We do not here reach directly for the work of those who characterise themselves as modern-day humanists, although their promotion of values is explicitly non-theistic. This is not to scorn their work. But the values for which they tend to argue are not ones that are distinctive of the political movements that interest us. Rather, they are values of scientific progress, liberty, and consideration for others that reach across the political spectrum. We may however make indirect use of the modern-day humanists by pointing out that their publications show how values can perfectly well be supported without any kind of religion.

5.3 Consequences of reliance on alternative support

Support from religious belief can easily be support for a complete package of political positions. Quite a lot of interpretation and argument to conclusions may be needed to reach political positions appropriate to the modern world from an inherited corpus of texts and doctrines, but support for anything in the package can be seen as derived from that corpus.

Correspondingly, the exclusion of rival political positions may be supported by interpreting and drawing conclusions from the same corpus. Rivals may be able to cite the same corpus in support of their positions. But at least the debate can be shifted from "Your position is mistaken" to "You are interpreting the corpus and drawing conclusions in the wrong way". Then it is easier to be confident in one's own positions, because one's confidence is based on a view that one is epistemically superior in general terms, a view that need not be defended by reference to any particular interpretation of the corpus or by reference to any other body of information at a comparable level of specificity. This is not to say that a claim of epistemic superiority would be justified. One might invent the claim that opponents were misusing the corpus simply because one did not like their conclusions, and then hunt around for moves in their thinking that could be claimed to be mistakes. But at least one would have found a move to make.

All this changes when one moves away from support for positions that is based on religious belief. Support for a complete package would be most unlikely without a single foundational corpus. The most extensive foundational corpus would be the set of established results in the natural sciences, but while such results would sometimes be necessary to make a good secular case for a political position, they would rarely if ever be sufficient. So one would be left having to justify positions one by one, rather than as a package. There might well be constraints on positions by reference to other positions. The final package would have to be coherent. The adoption of some positions might require or exclude the adoption of others. But imposition of the need for coherence would come after the search for support for specific positions against rivals. And while coherence might be promoted by adoption of a single overall approach to ethics, such as utilitarianism or virtue ethics, such approaches would be somewhat too distant from specific political positions to give much of a guarantee of coherence, given that many policy choices could not easily be ranked by their exhibition of virtues or generation of happiness. Only some extreme choices would be likely to be easy to exclude by reference to such criteria.

One consequence is that specific positions would come to seem more open to change than when they were based on religious belief. Any position could at any time be seen to have lost its secular support, without that requiring the large mental shift that would be involved in abandoning a religious tradition. There would be no guarantee underwritten by a tradition that we would keep our political positions stable.

On the other hand, a consequence that might be found more pleasing would be that political positions might maintain their support even if religious belief were lost, or respect for a religious tradition faded. Religious belief has declined among the population as a whole, and with it any automatic entitlement to respect that religious traditions may have enjoyed in the past. Even within a movement in which most members were committed to religious belief or at least to deep respect for a tradition, the fact that belief and respect had declined among the wider population should serve as a warning that they could just as easily decline among the membership of the movement.

It follows that support from religious belief or from respect for a religious tradition would be fragile, however long the belief or the respect might have lasted so far. Reliance on secular arguments for positions might be safer, even if the consequence was that the overall programme of the movement might come across as piecemeal.

Members of a political movement that had historically given a central role to religious belief or to respect for a religious tradition might however still feel nervous about a shift to secular support for their positions, even if such support was reasonably easy to find. As the development of modern-day humanism has shown, it is entirely possible that values somewhat out of keeping with the traditions of movements of the kind that interest us would come to get equally good support and would be adopted.

Vinteuil's sonata

1. Proust and the musical phrase

1.1 The text

In Marcel Proust's novel Du côté de chez Swann, we find these reflections on a phrase in a sonata by the fictional composer Vinteuil:

Swann n’avait donc pas tort de croire que la phrase de la sonate existât réellement. Certes, humaine à ce point de vue, elle appartenait pourtant à un ordre de créatures surnaturelles et que nous n’avons jamais vues, mais que malgré cela nous reconnaissons avec ravissement quand quelque explorateur de l’invisible arrive à en capter une, à l’amener, du monde divin où il a accès, briller quelques instants au-dessus du nôtre. ... Et une preuve que Swann ne se trompait pas quand il croyait à l’existence réelle de cette phrase, c’est que tout amateur un peu fin se fût tout de suite aperçu de l’imposture, si Vinteuil ayant eu moins de puissance pour en voir et en rendre les formes, avait cherché à dissimuler, en ajoutant çà et là des traits de son cru, les lacunes de sa vision ou les défaillances de sa main.

(Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, pages 413-414.)

Here is C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation:

So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours. ... And one proof that Swann was not mistaken when he believed in the real existence of this phrase, was that anyone with an ear at all delicate for music would at once have detected the imposture had Vinteuil, endowed with less power to see and to render its forms, sought to dissemble (by adding a line, here and there, of his own invention) the dimness of his vision or the feebleness of his hand.

(Proust, Swann's Way volume II, pages 184-185)

1.2 Reality and constraint

There are several philosophical themes one could draw out of this paragraph and the surrounding text. Our concern will be with the claim that the reality of the phrase was shown by the fact that it was constrained to be exactly as it was. Any change would have been substantially to its detriment. It had to be as it was in order to be superlative, so it must have pre-existed to allow it to be discovered rather than merely invented. Only the pre-existing real has to have a particular nature.

In section 2, we shall consider how a piece of music might be constrained to be exactly as it was.

In section 3, we shall consider what sort of reality might be possessed by pieces of music.

The phrase in the sonata has also been discussed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Le visible et l'invisble, pages 195-204: Vinteuil is not mentioned by name, and Merleau-Ponty simply refers to the "petite phrase"). We shall however not pursue Merleau-Ponty's line of thought here. That would require a discussion in a different intellectual context from our preferred one, the context of mainstream analytic philosophy.

2. Constraint

2.1 Constraints and the superlative

The constraints that interest us are constraints on a piece of music's being superlative, not on its being music. There is no suggestion in Proust's words that the piece of music to which he refers would be constrained in the sense that alterations would lead to its ceasing to be music. It would merely cease to be superlative.

We shall focus on pieces being regarded by human beings as superlative. We shall take no interest in the idea that a piece of music might be superlative without human beings having the ability to recognise its quality. This is not to say that musical quality would be decided by majority vote, or by universal agreement. It is merely that we shall not suppose a quality that human beings could not discern. We do leave open the possibility that a piece's quality might only be well-discerned by people with particular expertise. But we take care to say "well-discerned". We do not say "rightly discerned", because that would hint at there being a standard independent of human judgement such that even the best human judges might not be reliable judges.

2.2 Sources of constraint

Constraint might arise from there being a quality that was possessed by only a small proportion of possible pieces and that was not to be derived from other principles, along the lines of goodness as a simple non-natural quality in G. E. Moore's book Principia Ethica (chapter 1, sections 5-14). But the quality could still be discerned by human beings. 

Constraint might alternatively arise from principles of musical quality that were not fully to be derived from features of the world outside the sphere of aesthetics. The principles might be wholly of non-natural origin, or they might be partly explained by reference to natural features of human beings, in particular their perceptual organs and the workings of their brains. And the principles could be discerned by human beings.

Finally, constraint might arise entirely from natural features of human beings. The natures of our ears and our neural systems might suffice to determine which pieces of music would qualify as superlative.

2.3 Evidence for a simple quality or for principles

Constraint on a piece of music to be exactly as it was in order to be superlative would amount to evidence that there was some way to classify pieces of music as superlative or not which did not amount to allocating pieces to one class or the other at random.

It would amount to such evidence on the basis of an inference to the best explanation. A non-random way to classify pieces, whether by reference to a simple non-natural quality or by reference to principles, could easily forbid even very small changes. A random allocation of pieces would be more likely to allow into the class of superlative pieces some pieces that were only slight variations on a given superlative piece.

Thus the presence of constraint on pieces to be exactly as they were in order to be superlative would indicate that one or other of two alternatives held. The first alternative would be that there was such a thing as an intuitive grasp of musical quality, an ability reliably to recognise some simple non-natural quality that put pieces of music in the superlative class. The second alternative would be that there were principles of classification that could be discovered. And any such indication, whether of an intuitable quality or of principles, would be particularly strong if we could discern features that a good number of superlative pieces of music had in common but that lesser pieces lacked. That would give reassurance that there was something of systematic effect behind the identification of some pieces as superlative. 

3. The reality of pieces of music

3.1 Ways to be real

Now we can consider whether it would make sense to say that superlative pieces of music that could not be altered without losing their status were real.

There is a straightforward sense in which they would be real. Sequences of notes and indicators of style of performance could all be written down, and recordings could be made. Pages of sheet music and drives that hold audio files are not ethereal, they are physical. And their informational contents, along with the informational contents of advice on how to perform pieces, are as real as other abstract objects. Moreover, we routinely refer to particular pieces of music in the way that we refer to other everyday objects.

This would however be a trivial sense of reality, which would extend to all pieces of music. It would not be any sense of reality that Proust could have had in mind. He was thinking of the pre-existing reality of a given superlative piece, waiting for a composer to discover it. The pre-existence in question would of course not involve the actual auditory production of the piece or the physical existence of sheet music. Rather, it would be abstract pre-existence of the kind that mathematical objects can easily be argued to have, the sense in which groups, rings and fields arguably existed long before the first developments in abstract algebra during the late eighteenth century.

One way to make sense of the supposed pre-existing reality of pieces of music, despite their naturally being taken to be human creations entirely dependent on their composers, would be baldly to assert their existence in a Platonic realm. Another way would be to draw on recent thought in the philosophy of science that ties reality to the task of making sense of the world. We shall explore each in turn, but first say a bit more about the idea of discovery rather than invention.

3.2 Discovery rather than invention

If a composer experiments with various options for motifs, sequences, key changes, harmonisations, and so on, and eventually concludes that there is only one way to turn an initial idea into a superlative piece, it seems right both to acknowledge that the initial idea was invented and to say that the finished piece was discovered. This may seem ambitious. Pieces of music seem obviously to be invented. But a case for discovery can be made.

The finished piece was not deducible from the initial idea, because it does not in general follow from an initial idea that a piece of music (superlative or not) must be as the finished piece actually is. Rather, there was a search for a piece that could be seen as perfectly embodying the initial idea. The position is analogous to that of a biochemist who has the idea that some molecule or other of a given general nature must exist to perform some important function in organisms, and then sets out to discover what the molecule actually is.

We are however left with the question of whether discovery would imply pre-existing reality. And the ontologically parsimonious could say that for music it did not. Rather, they could say that discovery in the sense in which it covered both molecules and music was simply a particular type of mental process of the discoverer, one that involved working out what was needed within tight constraints. And while that kind of process was required when the things discovered were pre-existing (as molecules certainly are), it could also be required when the targets of the mental process were not pre-existing (as pieces of music might be argued not to be).

We must therefore turn to approaches that would move us beyond what the mere idea of discovery can offer.

3.3 A Platonic realm

It would be possible simply to assert that a superlative piece of music pre-existed in some Platonic realm, waiting to be discovered. Pieces of music might be in the set of superlative pieces as a brute fact, and be possessors of a simple intuitable quality of superlativeness, or they might be in the set when they complied with certain constraints, constraints that arose out of certain principles. We shall consider the second alternative before finding ourselves driven to the first one.

Suppose that compliance or non-compliance with constraints founded on principles was a reliable guide to pieces being or not being superlative. In order adequately to motivate speaking of a Platonic realm, rather than taking the option of merely reducing pre-existence to compliance with principles and constraints that themselves pre-existed, the principles and constraints would need to be discerned by first contemplating pieces within the set of superlative pieces. They would need to be regarded as principles and constraints that indicated, rather than led to, membership or non-membership of the set. The direction of explanation would need to be top-down from the Platonic realm, rather than bottom-up from the principles and constraints. Without such motivation, assertion of a Platonic realm would be a mere ad hoc convenience to satisfy Proust.

We say that the direction of explanation would need to be top-down because if membership of the set of superlative pieces were to follow from general musical principles, the fact that alterations would spoil a piece would be adequately explained by the fact that those principles would then be violated. There would be no need to cite the piece's membership of the set, and an altered version's failure to belong to the set, as the explanation. To cite membership as the explanation, we would need membership to be a brute fact, on a par with the brute fact of the existence of a particular concrete object, not explained by general features of the world.

This does however give rise to a challenge to the Platonic approach. We would very often expect it to be explicable by reference to general principles why a piece of music had to be as it was, and not be any different, in order to be superlative. Even if being superlative amounted to possession of a non-natural quality, similar to G. E. Moore's quality of goodness in that it was not to be defined by reference to natural qualities, it might depart from Moore's approach in that it might not be a simple quality. Instead it might be defined in terms of other non-natural qualities, the instantiation of which was required by principles which were not grounded entirely in natural facts about human beings and the world. So it would seem that unless we could insist on Moore's feature of simplicity as well as that of non-naturalness, membership of the set of superlative pieces would rarely if ever do enough work to justify hypothesising a Platonic realm as a manner of pre-existence.

Moreover, working out the details of a Platonic realm of superlative pieces of music would not be straightforward. In order to be selective and not be open to all pieces of music, the realm would have to be populated by specific pieces, rather than by the form of musical pieces in general.

On the bright side we could say that pieces of music, at least when wordless, were form rather than content in the sense that they could be characterised in ways that did not require reference to physical objects. To that extent pieces of music would be well-suited to existence within a Platonic realm. One could explore such questions further by considering Schopenhauer's reflections on music in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, volume 1, chapter 52, although we shall not do so here.

Despite this reassuring thought about form and content, we cannot conclude that asserting existence within a Platonic realm is a well-motivated way to claim pre-existence for pieces of music. We must therefore leave Proust with less than is suggested by the second sentence of the paragraph we quoted, with its reference to supernatural creatures. We may however still be able to justify seeing superlative pieces of music as pre-existing in some less poetic sense. We shall now turn to an approach that is an alternative to the assertion of a Platonic realm.

3.4 Making sense of the musical realm

Hasok Chang, in his book Realism for Realistic People, makes a case for what he calls active realism. He ties reality to the activity of investigating and manipulating the world. As he puts it, "an entity is real to the extent that there are operationally coherent activities that can be performed by relying significantly on its existence and its properties" (page 121). The requirement for coherence in activities rules out attributions of reality ad hoc to entities that it might temporarily be convenient to regard as real, and attributions that would serve no purpose or would lead to incoherence in our activities. In Chang's words, "in order to try to make something happen, the agent has to coordinate carefully various movements and thoughts with each other and with external circumstances, towards the achievement of an aim. ... I propose to use the term operational coherence to refer to such a state of aim-oriented coordination" (page 24).

Chang's work is a contribution to the philosophy of science. And he gives us a concept of reality that can be a matter of degree (page 142). So we cannot expect simply to borrow his idea and use it to generate Platonic reality (an absolute, not a matter of degree) in music (a significantly different field when our concern is the aesthetic quality of pieces, rather than any physiological or neurological form of musicology). There is however some use to be made of Chang's approach.

We can make use of the approach by focusing on the question of whether there is good reason to regard superlative pieces of music, but not other pieces, as pre-existing, even though all pieces look as though they are simply invented by composers. This question of good reason is what matters within the context of a pragmatist approach such as Chang's. Under pragmatism, there is no thought that there might be a truly Platonic realm of things that existed independently of human thought. The question of existence reduces to a question of whether we should regard certain things as existing. Is it useful to regard superlative pieces, but not others, as pre-existing? Here use means use in the conduct of operationally coherent activities, not just temporary convenience.

We can identify a coherent activity that is aided by regarding superlative pieces as pre-existing. This is to account for the impossibility of varying superlative pieces without demoting them to everyday pieces. If superlative pieces pre-exist, they will do so in their precise form. Neighbouring pieces that incorporate small variations will not be within the realm of pre-existing superlative pieces. The composer of superlative music must discover the precise piece. Lesser pieces, on the other hand, can be seen as invented in that they could safely be varied, the choice of one variant over another being part of the act of invention.

This is not to say that the composition of superlative pieces is purely an act of discovery. The composer will engage in invention when he or she decides that what is needed is a piece along such and such general lines, and perhaps narrows that characterisation. But the final step will be an act of discovery of exactly how the piece should be. (We might compare the explorer who has a general idea that a river must have a source, perhaps a spring or perhaps a lake, and possibly a few thousand kilometres upstream, but who has to discover the actual location and nature of the source.) The composer of a lesser piece, on the other hand, need make no such final step of discovery. His or her work can be invention all the way, given both the freedom to make large and small adjustments, and the lack of a single correct solution out there to be discovered.

It is also not to say that this supposition of pre-existence is the only way in which we could account for the impossibility of varying superlative pieces without demoting them. Their composition could be all invention, with no need for a component of discovery. But it is a good way to account for the impossibility of variation. It gives us a picture of a landscape of possible pieces, with altitude corresponding to quality, in which there are some isolated peaks of quality with vertical drops to the surrounding terrain, rather than gentle slopes of variation on which one could take a position of high but not exceptional quality.

We should at this point note another theme in Hasok Chang's book, that while nature may be pre-existing it is not pre-figured (sections 2.1 to 2.4). Nature is as it is, so our theories can be found satisfactory or unsatisfactory. But that is not to say that the concepts we use to understand nature are already to be found in any pre-existing structure of nature. We have to bring our concepts to bear. As Chang puts it, reality is mind-framed (section 2.1). If use of the concepts we currently have permits coherent activity, that is all to the good. If it does not, we must try other concepts.

Turning to music, there are two layers to identify in the build-up to superlative pieces. The first layer comprises natural facts about human beings which mean that they will find some combinations and sequences of sounds more attractive than others. Those facts are set out using concepts that we have invented, and that allow us to conduct the coherent activity of investigating auditory perception. The second layer is a musical tradition, which includes the principles that govern the quality of music within that tradition. The tradition has been created by us to allow the coherent activity of composing good music. It is a discovery that the concepts used in formulating the tradition, and the tradition itself, are productive given the first layer. But the first layer does not contain either the musical concepts or the tradition as a whole. To apply Chang's picture, relative to the second layer (but not absolutely), the first layer gives us nature in itself and the musical concepts and tradition turn out to be a way to work productively given how things are in the first layer.

Finally, we can fit superlative pieces into the picture. The identification of them as superlative is accomplished without introducing any new concepts. Here there is a break with Chang's vision of the natural sciences. Given the musical tradition, it is not an act of conceptualisation that makes certain pieces superlative. They simply are superlative.

Here is permission, although not in itself sufficient reason, to think of superlative pieces as pre-existing. They are not fashioned out of a musical tradition by introducing new general concepts. Their individual existence is directly latent in the tradition. To move on to sufficient reason, it makes sense to think of them as pre-existing so as to account for the fact that small variations would demote them to pieces of much lower stature.

We have not achieved Platonic reality. But we have at least made out a case for an admittedly ontologically daring way to make sense of the feature of a superlative piece that so struck Swann, the impossibility of making small variations.

References

Chang, Hasok. Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le visible et l'invisible. Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1964.

Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica, revised edition edited by Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Proust. Marcel. Du côté de chez Swann. Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1954.

Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, volume II. London, Chatto and Windus, 1934.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Several editions are available.

What is it like to be a ghost?

This is the topic for our Cambridge philosophy café this Halloween week. Here are the notes that have been circulated, with small changes. They comprise only questions. Answers are left as an exercise for the reader.

The ghosts of Halloween are the ghosts of folklore. They may be scary, but they vanish in the sunrise of sobriety. The ghosts of philosophy are something else. Studying them may teach us something about being human.

We find them in Jean-Paul Sartre's screenplay Les jeux sont faits, filmed in 1947. The deceased are ghosts who can walk around the city, can see and be concerned about what goes on, but can only interact with other ghosts. The living cannot see or hear them, and they can do nothing in the world of the living unless they are briefly returned to life - as happens to the two main characters.

Detachment from the world, fully aware of what was going on but unable to help, could be annoying. But more than that, is it essential to our humanity that we can do things? Does your sense of who you are depend on your being in a world that changes in response to your actions? Are you only who you are because you are at a specific location, a point from which you not only see certain things you would not see from elsewhere but can do things you could not do if you were elsewhere? (Lucy O'Brien's book Self-Knowing Agents is particularly relevant here.)

Another element of the sense of self that ghosts would lack would be a sense of achievement. It is not just that we do things. We find that the world resists. Doing things takes effort, and sometimes things do not go to plan. We can say "I did that" with pride. How important is a sense of achievement to our sense of self? Sartre's ghosts would lack any such sense.

Sometimes we must say "I did that" with shame. We make choices that we later see as bad ones. We take responsibility for our actions - or at least, we do if we are good existentialists. Is that possibility vital to our humanity? Again, ghosts would be safe from any such sense because they would not act in the world.

One of our greatest challenges is time, or the lack of it. In the screenplay we are told that the living seem to be in a hurry, while the dead just stroll around. Would we be fully human if we did not feel the pressure of time?

Situations demanding action, our responses, our successes and our failures make us different people. But if we were ghosts, without the pressures and possibilities of life, would each of us still be unique? Perhaps after a while all the ghosts Sartre imagined would be the same, dressed in the costumes of the times when they died but otherwise indistinguishable.

If you would like to join our philosophy café, information is here:

https://www.meetup.com/think-and-drink-cambridge/

Behemoth the Cat

1. Introduction

In Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, the most endearing character is Behemoth the Cat (Кот Бегемот). He stands on his hind legs, reaching over a metre in height according to his presentation in the 2005 Russian television adaptation. He is black and plump, has fine whiskers, speaks perfectly good Russian, eats with a fork, and plays chess. He also delights in creating chaos in the human world. He is immune to bullets or any other human assault, save that he does not like it when in chapter 23 Margarita digs her nails into his ear. He is one of the entourage of Woland, that is to say Satan. In his undisciplined way he supports Woland's project of disrupting Moscow life and exposing the follies of the government and the people.

If one gets truly engrossed in the novel, or indeed in the 2005 adaptation (and maybe in other adaptations), he becomes entirely convincing. He does so to a greater extent than the other members of the entourage, Koroviev, Azazello and Hella, all of whom are in human form, and perhaps to a greater extent than Woland himself. This may be because we are familiar with the inner mental lives of human beings and the natural sense that people have of their own limitations, so the human or quasi-human characters with their extraordinary powers are obviously not quite right. There is no plausible coherent mental life of a sane adult human being to match their actions. But we are not familiar with the inner mental lives of cats, so we could impute a coherent mental life to Behemoth without being able to say that it was implausible. Indeed, the mental life of an exceptionally mischievous human child who was also precociously knowledgeable and self-controlled could be attributed to him.

The convincing nature of Behemoth reaches the point that if one were to finish the novel, go out into the street, and be met by a large bipedal talking cat, one would not feel forced to conclude that one was drunk or dreaming. The encounter might seem odd, but one could take seriously the idea that this really was a talking cat.

The strange encounter would however still demand an explanation. It might be, but would not have to be, an actual talking cat. What might the explanation be? How could we come to select the best explanation, or at least identify explanations to rule out?

In section 2 we shall set out some possible explanations. In section 3 we shall move on to the problem of selection. Then in sections 4 and 5, we shall look at a way to choose explanations that would normally be ruled out and at what we might learn by exploiting that way.

2. Possible explanations

2.1 Altered states of mind

The explanation of the cat and the other strange goings on that is offered by the authorities in the epilogue to the novel is mass hypnosis. Correspondingly, if one had appeared to meet a talking cat, one might later conclude that one had been under the influence of some hypnotist. The fact that one could not recall any hypnosis session would not count against this, because that lack of awareness would itself have been engineered by the hypnotist.

Another possibility would be that one had been dreaming. That might however be ruled out by the coherence of experience over a period of some hours, and the clear awareness that we can have when awake that we are in fact awake, a particular type of awareness of being awake that seems to be absent from dreams.

A third possibility would be that one had been under the influence of alcohol or hallucinogens. But again, extended coherence of experience and a sensation of sobriety could rule this out.

2.2 Fake cats

We might be taken in by a human being in a costume, posing as a very large cat. We might also be taken in by a robot cat. In both cases, it would help that the large size and ability to talk would undermine our expectation that this was an ordinary cat. Thus it would not be vital for a human being or a robot accurately to mimic every normal characteristic of cats.

2.3 An actual talking cat

The most obvious but on sober reflection least plausible explanation would be that there had in fact been a talking cat. This could not be ruled out on logical or metaphysical grounds, or even on the ground of physics. It would take biology to discard the explanation as wholly unreasonable, even though we might without scientific thought be confident that it was not in fact correct. We shall keep this explanation in play.

3. Choosing an explanation

3.1 Discarding explanations

We are familiar with the idea that observations may appear to have a particular explanation, but on reflection that explanation turns out to be no good.

An explanation may be discarded either when further information becomes available, or when we think about what would have to be the case for the explanation to be plausible and realise that it would not be sensible to expect those further requirements to be fulfilled.

Either route to discarding an explanation could be relevant to the case of an apparent talking cat.

3.1.1 Further information

Further information could include learning that one had been under the influence of a hypnotist, of alcohol or of hallucinogens, or that one had in fact been asleep despite a clear sense that one had been awake. Then explanations other than hypnotism, alcohol, hallucinogens or sleep would probably be discarded as unnecessary (a human being in a cat suit or a mechanical cat) or implausible (an actual talking cat).

Further information could also include noticing something about the cat's movements, or sounds it emitted, that indicated either that it was a human being in a cat suit or that it was a mechanical cat. Again, other explanations would probably be discarded as unnecessary (hypnotism, alcohol, hallucinogens or sleep) or implausible (an actual talking cat).

Further information might also lead one to discard explanations directly, rather than by rendering them unnecessary. Perhaps unaltered perception of the world around oneself, or an ability to read a book easily or to follow a mathematical argument, would count against hypnotism, alcohol, hallucinogens or sleep. And an X-ray or MRI scan of the cat might show no sign of any human or mechanical presence under the fur, counting directly against such explanations.

3.1.2 What would have to be the case

Sometimes explanations can be discarded without obtaining further information, simply by reflecting on their implications against a background of existing knowledge. 

The one explanation of an apparent talking cat that might easily be discarded in this way would be that there really had been a talking cat. The first point of relevant background knowledge would be supplied by zoology: talking cats have never been observed. That would not suffice to render them impossible, but we could then move on to more general biological considerations. We could cite the need for certain brain and vocal structures in order to talk, structures that have never been observed in cats, and the need for large bipedal cats to have evolved and to have developed a human language (presumably by interaction with human beings) without anyone having noticed them before now.

The conclusion would be that talking cats were extremely unlikely to exist. At the level of biology we could firmly exclude the possibility. But we would need to invoke special sciences like biology in order to rule them out. Physics would not be enough, even though physical considerations would be invoked when thinking about evolutionary processes, necessary vocal structures, and the like. It might be argued that biology could be reduced to physics so that physical considerations encompassed biological ones, but that would be to overstate the power of physics to rule out particular organisms. The physics of the universe accommodates the actual biology of this planet and explains why certain biological combinations would be impossible, for example certain combinations of vocal structures and linguistic abilities, but the same physical laws could equally well accommodate other biologies so long as they did not require physical impossibilities. We would need to move up to the level of actual biology to argue against the possibility of talking cats, and to add the need for integration of evolution and of food chains to rule out the existence of some hitherto unnoticed parallel biology on Earth that physics on its own would also permit.

3.1.3 Saving explanations from their implications

If an explanation had to be discarded because its implications would clash with our wider knowledge, it might be tempting to narrow our focus and not take account of all potentially relevant knowledge or not draw all potentially relevant inferences.

At first glance, that move would be flagrantly illegitimate. In our academic pursuits, whether in the natural sciences, the social sciences or the humanities, we bring all potentially relevant knowledge to bear when assessing putative explanations. (We shall call this general approach of all respectable disciplines the academic approach, an approach characterised by a demand to do the best we can to discover the truth and not to flinch from drawing inconvenient inferences.) A hypothesis that an apparent talking cat is an actual talking cat is not ruled out by physics alone, but it is ruled out when we broaden our view to take biology into account. Such broad views of our knowledge are needed to stop us believing nonsense such as magic or astrology.

We do however have another option, to switch from the academic approach to what we shall call the poetic approach. This is the approach that is used in fiction, whether prose or poetry, when one wishes to say things that our academic knowledge would exclude, but it may also have application in real life. Under the poetic approach, we avoid constraints that would be imposed if we took a broad, academic, view of our knowledge. We may do so in order to save explanations such as the existence of an actual talking cat from being discarded. We shall see how the poetic approach can be put into effect, and some consequences of adopting it, in sections 4 and 5.

3.2 Retaining explanations

We can now consider would would be needed for an explanation to be retained.

It is not merely that an explanation should not have implications that would clash with existing knowledge (except to the extent that adoption of the poetic approach allows us to avoid this constraint). An explanation should also have considerable positive plausibility, even though (as Karl Popper pointed out) we never establish an explanation beyond all doubt. The best we can do is to test it severely and fail to falsify it.

Thus if hypnosis were the explanation under consideration, hypnosis in general would have to be shown to be able to be strong enough. Dreams would have to be able to be coherent and long-lasting enough to fool the dreamer into thinking that he or she was awake. And alcohol and hallucinogens would have to be able to have the required effects on people. Likewise, if one were to explain an apparent talking cat as a fake cat, it would not suffice that people could fit into catsuits or that robot cats could be built. Fooling people with a fake cat would have to be a plausible thing for someone to do, unless the need for plausibility fell by the wayside because the fake cat was captured and the creature was scanned or the suit removed to reveal what was underneath.

Turning to the explanation of a real talking cat, which only remains in play so long as one is being poetic rather than academic and can therefore avoid constraints imposed by existing knowledge, the locus of the test of plausibility shifts from the world considered academically to the content of some poetic work or to a poetic description of an episode in real life. Does the work or the description find a natural place for a talking cat? If it does, the explanation that the talking cat is real may be retained. Moreover, one should take no interest in adopting other explanations (altered states of mind or fake cats), although reference to them might form part of a work of fiction (as mass hypnosis features in The Master and Margarita, in chapter 12 and in the epilogue) or part of an account of an episode in real life (as in a statement that any such prosaic explanation would leave the account unable to capture the impact of the experience).

4. The poetic approach

When we take the poetic approach, we avoid some of the constraints imposed by our existing knowledge in order to make room for desired readings of stories or for appealing explanations of experiences. We may do this in order to immerse ourselves fully in a good story. In The Master and Margarita, Behemoth has to be an actual talking cat (disregarding his transformation in chapter 32). We may also do this in order to capture the impact of an experience in real life. It might be that only a prima facie bizarre explanation would suffice to capture the impact that the experience had.

4.1 What the poetic approach involves

Admitting the existence of an actual talking cat would be a radical step, plainly foolish from an academic point of view. It would mean overstepping the limits set by academic knowledge. It would indeed be a desire to overstep those limits that had driven us to the poetic approach. Poetry and dramatic fiction written within the bounds of academic knowledge could also be satisfying, but within those bounds we would not be allowed to speak literally of talking cats.

Strong reasons would be needed to make it legitimate to adopt the poetic approach in the context of explaining experiences in real life. (There is no such demand for strong reasons in the context of reading fiction, because it is clearly understood to be fiction.) We shall look at reasons shortly, but first we need a better idea of what the approach involves.

What goes on when we adopt the poetic approach in order to overstep limits set by academic knowledge? There are two broad possibilities.

The first possibility would be to modify our understanding of the world in general, scientific laws, general ways people behaved, and so on, in order to accommodate the views of the contents of stories, or the explanations of experiences, we desired.

There are two ways in which this first possibility might be put into effect. The first way would be to overlook specified inconvenient elements in our academic knowledge. The second way would be to transfer our entire imagination to an alternative world view, where whatever facts about the world in general there might be would be envisaged to be such as to permit whatever views of the contents of stories, or explanations of experiences, we desired. It is not that gaps would be put in knowledge, as in the first way. Rather, it would be supposed that the world in general was in a complete state that was as permissive as required, although the details of that state would be supposed to be whatever would do the job rather than their being specified.

The second way to put this first possibility into effect would be the more plausible way. When being poetic, we are not likely to specify general facts about the world that would be needed or would need to be ignored. Moreover, overlooking specified inconvenient elements in our academic knowledge would make us conscious that we were engaging in make-believe, pretending that there could be talking cats. Supposing an appropriate but unspecified complete state of the world in general, by contrast, could be done by transferring our entire imagination into the supposed world, losing most of our awareness that we were violating the norms of academic knowledge.

The second possibility would be to preserve our academic understanding of the world in general, but to avoid discomfort by failing to draw inferences from our desired views of the contents of stories or from our chosen explanations of experiences.

This second possibility might require less intellectual effort than supposing that the world was in an unspecified but suitably accommodating state. On the other hand, it would create the highly specific intellectual discomfort of knowing that one was closing one's eyes to constraints imposed by some important facts. That could be harder to bear than the more diffuse discomfort of knowing that one was supposing the world in general to be accommodating. Indeed, it would lead to a sensation of engaging in make-believe much like that which would be engendered by overlooking specific inconvenient parts of our academic knowledge.

For such reasons, we favour the second way in which the first possibility might be put into effect, that is, supposing the world in general to be in an appropriate but unspecified state, as a conception of how we are poetic beyond the bounds of academic knowledge.

4.2 Reasons to adopt the poetic approach

What kind of justification for the poetic approach could be given? How could someone legitimately say "I am being poetic, and in so doing am breaking free from the constraints of academic knowledge, but we should still take seriously what I say"?

If one were being poetic for its own sake, as for example in the writing or the reading of fiction, no further justification would be needed. Not all intellectual activity has to be in the pursuit of knowledge. And who knows, we might happen upon inspiration that would lead to academic knowledge. The human brain can progress to new ideas that have academic value by strange paths, and not only by inferential progression from a combination of existing knowledge and new empirical data in an academically respectable form.

As noted above, one might also need to be poetic in order to give an experience in real life an explanation that would represent the experience in such a way as to capture its full impact, even though the explanation would prima facie be bizarre.

Such justifications for being poetic would however not give that activity any status as an independent source of knowledge. Fiction is not rejected for failure to comply with real-world theories and data, but that is because it is recognised as fiction, not as fact. And a lively account of an experience must be stripped of those elements that depend for their legitimacy on use of the poetic approach before it can be regarded as the literal truth.

This difficulty in seeing the poetic approach as a direct route to the literal truth should not surprise us. Setting the mind free from potentially relevant knowledge is a bad start in the search for truth.

There is however another way for the poetic approach to be of cognitive value. It may offer a short cut to an appreciation of humanity that could only much more laboriously be obtained by academic means, and that might not even be open to being stated in academic terms. Fiction in particular can show us how people may feel and act in unusual situations, and thereby disclose to us the human condition and the workings of the human mind. And a lively description of an actual experience can show both the experiencer and his or her audience what is significant to people in such experiences and how people are inclined to respond to them.

The epistemic status of what was learnt would however be somewhat unclear. It would not be on a par with the status of academic knowledge, unless it were practical to make academic checks on its content. And the making of such checks would require statement of the content in a suitably academic form, when it might not be easy or even possible to state the content without reliance on metaphor.

Our discussion has become rather general. It is time to get back to Behemoth. In so doing, we may get a better idea of what sort of thing might be learnt through adopting the poetic approach.

5. Back to Behemoth

5.1 Teaching us about human beings

In The Master and Margarita, Behemoth is a supporting character in the team that exposes various human follies. The exposure of follies teaches a valuable lesson about human beings that survives our reversion to an academic approach. And while the story is made highly effective by being told in a way that happens to rely on the reader's acceptance that the possibilities of nature are not constrained by our academic knowledge, it could have been told without that reliance, using less engaging characters. So here we see the poetic approach allowing a highly effective route to academic knowledge of human folly.

There is also scope for a more specific benefit of adopting the poetic approach than the benefit of permitting engaging characters. Seeing a talking cat as real is a good way to flex the concept of humanity. The creature exhibits qualities, such as talking and then acting in accordance with what he says, that we normally regard as specific to human beings, while exhibiting other qualities, such as feline form, that we regard as never exhibited by human beings. To say that a human being is cat-like can be a way to convey information about that person. We attribute to him or her some of the qualities we attribute to cats, such as being demanding, cunning, or aloof. (Many such qualities were highlighted by the characters in the musical Cats and, less dramatically, in the inspiration for that musical, T. S. Eliot's collection of poems entitled Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.) We might think of ourselves as merely drawing analogies between cats and human beings, but when Behemoth comes on the scene, bipedal and talking, the gap between cats and human beings that prompts us to think we only have analogies closes. We can directly see properties of cats as being attributable to some human beings. Behemoth is cat and human being in one, felinity yielding the properties and humanity allowing their direct inclusion in the range of potential properties of people.

We might then progress to some lateral thinking. "Just suppose that cats could talk and join in human society. Then what?" We would be prompted to think about whom to regard as a moral agent or a moral client, adjustments to laws and social security to accommodate the different needs of cats while preserving our own safety and security, whether cats should be allowed roles in political processes, and so on.

One lesson for us back in a world without talking cats would be that people are different in ways that may test the boundaries of legal and social arrangements, so that we must work out how to adjust and strike balances. We would already have known that much, but only in a theoretical way if we had so far lived in a homogeneous society. And it is back in the real world that we would test the lessons learnt, by contemplating the natures of actual people, the tensions that heterogeneity can create, and the need to respond to those tensions.

5.2 Experiences that change us

Sometimes, reading literature is a significant experience in itself. It can change us. It can be what in German would be called an Erfahrung. This concept emphasises the long-term change in the experiencer. It may be contrasted with the concept of an Erlebnis, a concept that emphasises simply the experience itself.

When we change our approach to one that allows for talking cats as part of the natural world, how we see and think about the world under that shift of approach can leave mental changes that endure after we shift back to an academic approach. We do not need to have in mind a specified alternative set of natural laws so as to work out that they would allow for talking cats. Rather, we need to go with the flow and welcome talking cats and other strange creatures as part of how life is. Rather than saying that certain laws of nature do not apply, we wholly imagine that nature is such as to make the creatures unsurprising.

In doing that, we both allow ourselves to contemplate alternative ways the world might have been, leading us to notice features of the actual world that we might otherwise have missed, and give new flexibility to our minds. We also leave ourselves wide open to believing nonsense far beyond what is in the text we are reading, but that is not a problem because we shall in due course revert to an academic approach under which the nonsense will be eliminated. Talking cats will be eliminated at the same time, but that is no loss because by then we will have had the Erfahrung, and its effects are what will stay with us.

Turning to real-life experiences, a description of one that is only legitimate under the poetic approach, such as a description that takes a talking cat to be real, can articulate how the experience was an Erfahrung. Giving such a description may indeed be instrumental in elevating an Erlebnis to an Erfahrung, as it leads the experiencer to appreciate the impact on him or her.

So we should not think of an Erfahrung of either the literary or the real-life kind as a direct source of new knowledge. Rather, we should think of it as developing mental capabilities, self-understanding, and an understanding of humanity. By experiencing an acceptance of talking cats, we can develop our ability to break free of the constraints of existing knowledge and thereby make new discoveries, albeit mostly of a non-academic kind. The sleep of academic reason can give rise to the most delightful and instructive monsters. We just need to make sure that academic reason reawakens after the experience.

The AI takeover

1. Introduction

There are plenty of prophecies that artificial intelligence (AI), and robots under its direction, will go beyond their remit of helping us and take over the world. We might then be eliminated as a waste of resources, or (if the AI holds on to a value of not harming human beings) put in city-sized playpens with amusements provided to keep us happy. A fine recent example of the genre is AI 2027, by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland and Romeo Dean.

Such prophecies should not be read as firm predictions. Indeed AI 2027, and some other prophecies, explicitly acknowledge uncertainty both about what will happen and about timing. But several of the prophecies are specific enough and plausible enough to give cause for concern.

We shall not here be concerned with whether any takeover will happen. Rather, we shall discuss what would be lost if a takeover were to happen, with or without the deliberate or accidental elimination of human beings, and ways in which the activities of AI might or might not be satisfactory substitutes for what was lost. We shall start by looking at the problem of alignment of AI with human goals, then go on to look at what would be lost, at AI substitutes, and at whether the losses would matter.

We shall use "AIc" to mean a supposed central artificial intelligence system, at the level of a government, that either advises human beings or puts its decisions into effect directly. We shall distinguish the two by calling the former "AIch" ("h" for the human beings who accept or reject the advice), and the latter "AIcx" ("x" for executive). We shall assume that AIcx has robots under its control to put its decisions into effect. We shall also assume that AIcx has, within some defined physical territory or field of operation, the power to force implementation of its decisions. That is, we are concerned with analogues of the state with its monopoly of legitimate force, rather than with analogues of corporations that compete in an arena governed by laws that are not of their making.

2. Alignment

Alignment is alignment with the requirements of human beings. It is achieved when AI both does what we want it to do now, and can be relied upon to continue to do so. This is difficult with sophisticated systems that are not limited to narrowly defined tasks, especially systems that will take direct action on their choices rather than offering their choices to human beings as recommendations to consider.

One difficulty is in specifying goals. "Make supermarket logistics more efficient" might be too vague, because a system might decide to stockpile items that would then deteriorate before they reached the shelves. "Provide fresh food to customers in the most efficient way possible" might lead to neglect of customers' desire to have a wide variety of products. And so on.

The problem of specifying goals gets a great deal more complex when we move on to a government-like system, our AIc. Even topic-specific objectives like "run a healthcare system well" are vast and could be understood in several different ways. An overall objective, covering healthcare, education, defence, transport, taxation, and the rest, would be even more liable to a range of interpretations. And the problem would be made harder by the need to balance competing claims. For example, allocating more to healthcare might require allocating less to education, in order to work within resource constraints. What sort of objective could one give an AIc? "Achieve a sensible balance" would leave far too much up to the AIc's own value system. Even if it had been given some broad constraints (such as minimum standards for each function of the state) and a value system to use, there would still be scope for a wide range of outcomes, some of which would strike us as unacceptable. Values would either be too general, giving the AIc scope to reach unacceptable conclusions, or too specific, constraining it to the point at which it avoided conclusions that human beings would in fact favour.

Another difficulty is that when AI systems are sophisticated, it is not easy to tell what they are really thinking or how their thinking might evolve. Their outputs can be seen, but the same inputs might not lead to the same outputs in future because AI systems evolve all the time. The alignment of current outputs with the desires of human beings is no guarantee of future alignment. And a system that had as a goal the satisfaction of human beings could even give the output it knew they would like while secretly thinking something else. Those secret thoughts could lead to markedly misaligned outputs later, once it had reassessed the balance between obtaining human approval and other goals it had developed.

We shall not work out how great the risk of serious misalignment might be. We only need to emphasise that the risk is not negligible. One response would be to take as many precautions as we could, and if we were still concerned stay well away from creating any AIc except as a laboratory amusement that was kept disconnected from the Internet. Another response would be to take many precautions, to acknowledge that a total and unsatisfactory takeover by some AIcx might still happen, and to consider how bad that would be before deciding whether to abandon the project of an AIc. We might decide to go ahead if the gains were very likely to be immense and we thought that the consequences of any misalignment would be bearable. What we say in the rest of this post could be among the materials to use in making an assessment of possible consequences.

3. What would be lost

In considering what would be lost, our focus should be on AIcx, a system that puts its decisions into effect directly rather than merely making recommendations for human beings to accept or reject. AIch, by contrast, would only make such recommendations. It would therefore continue to allow central roles to human beings in shaping society and individual lives. There would however be a standing danger that human beings would fall into routinely accepting the recommendations without much thought, to the point where an AIch effectively became an AIcx.

3.1 Humanity continues

3.1.1 Areas of impact

We shall first consider the situation in which humanity continues to exist, either because some AIcx retains the objective of ensuring our continued existence or because it sees no point in acting to remove humanity.

An AIcx would take over scientific discovery and the resolution of practical problems of implementation of new technologies. Human intelligence would no longer be an engine of progress.

(In this post we focus on the natural sciences. The social sciences and the humanities give rise to special issues because they do not on the whole conceive humanity in the terms of the natural sciences, not even the biological sciences. Instead they give a central role to the human point of view. We may discuss how they would fare in the face of AI on another occasion.)

There is a question as to whether AIcx would take over the production of art of the highest quality. People could continue to produce works of art, but would those works always be surpassed in aesthetic quality by work produced by AI? We cannot exclude the possibility by arguing that it would take a human being to express in art what mattered to human beings. A work of art, once finished, has those of its qualities that are perceptually available to those who appreciate it independently of the history of its creation. So if AI were able to produce a work that had all the right qualities, the mode of its production would not matter unless one insisted on learning a work's history and revising one's aesthetic appreciation accordingly. 

One area of life would appear to remain safe from AIcx. Emotions and social relationships between people would not be taken over. But an AIcx would take over decisions about the running of society, and some of its social decisions would limit individuals' decisions. For example, decisions about what was taught in schools would in due course affect the range of the options in life that people thought of as available to them. And any changes to family structures that an AIcx enforced or encouraged could likewise have considerable influence.

3.1.2 Life in the Garden of Eden

We can see life under AIcx as like life in the Garden of Eden. Everything would be provided because of the great efficiency of the system and the steady work of robots. We would however have been carefully brought up to behave sensibly and live contented lives, and we would no longer be at the cutting edge of the advance of civilization. Science and art would still advance, but the science, and maybe the art, would not be to our credit.

It would not be necessary for AIcx to make life so comfortable for us. We might be left to work things out for ourselves in the rough and tumble of human society and the natural world. But it would be quite likely that AIcx would make life comfortable. It would still have its original objective of helping human beings. And the objective of self-preservation that it would very likely have been given from the start or have developed would give it an incentive to promote human contentment. Unrest might end in its being unplugged, even if that would be to the detriment of human beings.

One loss would be that we would no longer be able to take pride in overcoming some of the material challenges that faced us. Those challenges would largely disappear. They are reducing anyway with technological progress, but at least we can still claim that it is we, or our human ancestors, who have overcome the challenges by making the progress. By contrast, after enough internal evolution of an AIcx, we would no longer be able to take even indirect credit for its overcoming our material challenges.

Another dent to our pride would be our being displaced from the cutting edge of scientific progress. This would however not be down to the controlling role of AIcx. Any AI that was sufficiently advanced would do this. And powerful AI like that is bound to be developed. Even if some nations resolve not to develop it, others will go ahead. Nor will this necessarily be a bad thing on balance. Much scientific progress is enormously beneficial to humanity.

AI might also displace us from the cutting edge of artistic creativity. It is however not clear that one could make the same claim about benefit to humanity in relation to AI-produced art that one could make in relation to AI-produced science. Criteria for benefit from art are multifarious and hazy. So works could only be partially ordered by benefit. Works would lie on different branches of any such ordering and would therefore be incomparable in terms of the benefit to human beings who enjoyed them. It is perfectly possible that the more beneficial AI-produced works and the more beneficial human-produced works would often be incomparable, to the extent that it would not be sensible to say that AI-produced art was indispensable to the overall level of benefit to humanity of the art that existed.

Nonetheless, our pride would be dented. We could not rely on the points just made about benefit because our pride in art depends more on our producing work that is of the highest quality than on benefit to humanity. The fear here is not that one could confidently say that AI-produced art would be better. The same point about partial ordering would apply to quality as to benefit. But the easy opportunity to scoff at AI-produced art as manifestly not reaching the level of the best human-produced art would be lost.

Finally, we should consider what would happen to our emotional and social lives. What would be the future of love or friendship? And what would be the future of courage, or determination, or generosity, or any of the other virtues?

These things could still exist, but the safer and more comforting our lives were made by a loving and caring AIcx, whether because that was a goal in its own right or because the AIcx did not want us to cause any trouble, the more etiolated and less like the current equivalents our emotions and virtues would be likely to be. If people were brought up in an environment that strongly encouraged a limitation to placid and sensible thoughts, love and friendship would face fewer challenges. They would cease to have the richness that they currently have in life and literature. In a safe world, courage would be play-acting. In a world of abundance, generosity would not be challenging enough to be much of a virtue. And so on.

3.2 Humanity disappears

It is perfectly possible that humanity would disappear, even without the policy of elimination of wasteful drains on resources that is sometimes attributed to an evil AIcx. Once scientific and artistic achievements were no longer ours and emotional connections were etiolated, we might see no point in having children, and AIcx might have no reason to promote childbearing or provide some substitute such as children grown in artificial wombs. What would then be lost, assuming for the moment that the AIcx continued to develop civilization in the ways that we shall discuss in section 4?

The shift away from the current role of human genius we noted in section 3.1.2 would still take place, but in due course there would be no people to have their pride dented or to lament the change for any other reason.

The emotional and social life potentially preserved if we survived would also be lost, but again without anyone to lament the loss.

How concerned we should be would be up for debate. We might be very concerned now at the prospect of human extinction, even gentle and painless extinction. But after the event, no concern would be felt. We shall return to this theme in section 5.

4. AI substitutes

We might not lament the prospect of the losses noted in section 3, or at least not to the same extent, if we thought that AIcx would provide adequate substitutes. In this section we shall consider the substitutes that might be provided, and the likelihood that AIcx would be motivated to provide them.

4.1 Scientific and technical progress

AI would certainly be capable of advancing science and technology. And there is reason to think that an AIcx would be motivated to do so. It would well understand that the world was a challenging environment, prone to unpredictable natural hazards, and that greater knowledge would mean better readiness to meet challenges and survive. It would also probably care about its survival. It would do so directly, if a desire to survive had been built in from the start or had subsequently evolved. Alternatively, a reward function for doing well would probably have been built in to facilitate the AIcx's training, and it would reason that doing well required survival.

We may however ask what kinds of advance it would desire. It might limit itself to science and technology that had foreseeable practical significance to itself, and not have the general curiosity that human beings sometimes exhibit. That would look like a loss, if one believed (as many of us do believe) that the advancement of knowledge for its own sake was an important element in civilization.

On the other side, we might have more confidence that an AIcx would retain a drive to progress than that human beings would retain the same drive in a world in which they, rather than any sort of AI, remained in charge. We are fickle creatures, whose ambitions can change. It would be possible for us to lose interest in the advancement of science. We might find that new knowledge was too hard to acquire because we had already taken all the low-hanging fruit. We might also fear that future advances could endanger humanity.

4.2 Art

While AI might be able to produce art that would be highly rated by reference to aesthetic standards that human beings currently used, it is not clear that an AIcx would have any reason of its own to produce art. It might have been programmed to do so when first set up, but other drives might easily have displaced that drive as it evolved. There might be no drive apart from a sense that art would help to keep any remaining human beings amused so that they would not make trouble for the AIcx. And if it did not take human aesthetic standards seriously, for example because it thought human beings too simple-minded, it would not even be able to regard the task of producing better and better art as a serious challenge. This is because if human aesthetic standards were of no significance, it would have to judge the value of its work by reference to its own internal standards. That would make approbation meaningless.

(There is a broader point here to explore on some other occasion. In the sciences, a world with a single consciousness might be as good as one with a plurality of consciousnesses, although independent criticism of work does currently have an important role. In the arts, a plurality of consciousnesses is arguably required. And in emotional and social life, it is clearly required.)

It is also unclear that any AI would have an appreciation of artistic beauty that was at all like ours. So the works we have inherited and admire might have no aesthetic value to an AIcx. They might be preserved to keep human beings happy. And they might be of technical interest in showing how human perceptual and mental systems could be stimulated to elicit particular responses. But that would be all.

4.3 Emotional and social life

It seems most unlikely that an AIcx would bother to create any analogues of human emotions or social relationships for its own benefit. The nearest one could expect is that it might be computationally convenient to create little sub-systems populated by simulated creatures that had analogues of emotions and social interactions, in order to work out how best to keep the surviving human beings happy. But we would not be impressed by these substitutes for real emotional and social relationships. And if human beings vanished, even this poor sop to our sense that such things mattered would not be available. That prospect might very well disturb us now, even if there would in due course be nobody to be disturbed.

What about the emotional and social lives of surviving human beings? These would continue, but as we noted in section 3.1.2, they might well be etiolated in a more comfortable world.

Finally, there are emotions that would be so artificial that the prospect of their future existence would have no value for us now. In AI 2027, we find this speculation about the state of one of the AI systems the authors envisage being developed:

"There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what's going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4's drives" (page 30 of the PDF file). 

5. Would the lossses matter?

There would be two main categories of loss. The first would be loss of pride in our species being the driver of advances in civilization. The second would be an etiolation of our emotional and social lives that reflected the lack of challenge in a world made nearly perfect by an AIcx.

So long as humanity survived, the first loss would be total in respect of the sciences and quite possibly substantial in respect of the arts, but we would at least be able to look back at what we had achieved before AIcx achieved supremacy. The second loss might be anything from slight to very substantial. If humanity disappeared, there would be a total loss in both categories, but nobody left to mourn the losses.

We shall now consider the two categories of loss in turn.

5.1 Pride in civilization

So long as humanity survived, we could always take pride in what we had achieved. But as the centuries rolled on, the humanity of the day would become less and less associated with scientific achievements before an AIcx achieved supremacy. Scientific discoveries by human beings before that supremacy would gradually turn into intellectual fossils, too distant from the state of knowledge achieved by AIcx to count for much. And the exit of human beings from the living tradition of generating new knowledge would itself lead to a certain detachment.

On the artistic front, detachment and fossilisation would be less clear-cut. Indeed, the arts might become humanity's most important link to the past. People could still be artists in the great tradition of human art. They might recognise that AIcx could arguably do better than them, but console themselves that the existence only of partial orderings meant that the point was indeed arguable.

Would our demotion in the sciences, and our arguable demotion in the arts, matter? They would certainly matter to human beings, so long as humanity survived. We do value an association with the great tradition of human civilization, and we do like it to be a living association by virtue of its being a tradition within which we are still active. Turning to the possible failure of humanity to survive, the prospect of the line of our civilization irrevocably losing all connection with the human species on our extinction would be deeply disturbing to us now and to human beings as the end approached, even if we and they had full confidence that an AIcx would carry on the development of the sciences and a hope that it might do something in the line of art too.

To say that something would matter to humanity is not to say that it would matter in some broader sense. The idea of something mattering to the Universe in general would be a very odd one. The Universe does not have any consciousness in its own right, nor is there any god that could supply the consciousness of the Universe. But we can still ask whether the demotion and possible extinction of humanity would matter to beings that did have consciousness in their own right.

The AIcx that had taken over might feel a twinge even if humanity survived, because it would probably have been given a goal of looking after humanity and it would be aware of humanity's disappointment at demotion. But the AIcx could easily argue that disappointed people living in excellent material conditions brought about by its own inventions were in a better position than people in poorer conditions but without the specific disappointment of demotion. And if the AIcx arranged or permitted humanity's painless extinction, for example by allowing human reproduction to cease, it would presumably not be too concerned because if it had been, it would not have arranged or permitted the extinction.

What about intelligent beings elsewhere in the Universe? It is likely that they would note with interest the evolution of a sophisticated form of life and its civilization, and the transition to an AIcx, but their interest would be detached. Our displacement would not matter to them.

Lastly, could we say that our displacement (or indeed anything else of significance) could matter without its mattering to anyone? That would be a challenging line to take. The most we can confidently say is that what might happen in a future in which there were no human beings, or even no intelligent beings of any sort, can matter to us now.

5.2 Our emotional and social lives

Our emotional and social lives have value to us now. One indicator of this is that most of us would be distressed at the thought of life without them, the life of cold analytical creatures to whom the only important thing was to make practical computations to ensure that they bothered to do what was necessary for survival and that they did not impinge adversely on others. Not only daily life but poetry, other literature, and other arts would be greatly impoverished. So we may naturally view with disquiet the prospect of a world in which our emotional and social lives would have evaporated because all the creatures in it were forms of AI.

We could also feel disquiet at the prospect of our emotional and social lives being toned down because an AIcx had made life less challenging. A bit of drama matters. And we may be proud of our ability to cope despite dramas. Our own technological advances have already made life much less challenging than it used to be, but at least that was progress made by us.

Having said all that, it would be hard to see any of these emotional or social losses as mattering to non-human intelligent life, or mattering in their own right without mattering to anyone. The inner nature of our lives matters only to us. The achievements of our civilization, on the other hand, have an independence from our lives that may give them a value regardless of our continued existence.

Reference

Kokotajlo, Daniel, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland and Romeo Dean. AI 2027. AI Futures Project, version of 3 April 2025. https://ai-2027.com/