Berkeley Talks: Philosopher Mark Johnston asks, ‘Is this our only life?’

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from Strategic Communications at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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Tom Dandelet: Thanks a lot for joining us today. It’s great to see such a large crowd coming here to listen to Dr. Mark Johnston. My name’s Tom Dandelet. I’m a professor in the history department. I think my main connection to the philosophy department is through my daughter who went to Berkeley’s philosophy program, Sophia Dandelet. And when I talked to her casually about the fact that I was on this committee and that we were looking around for someone to lecture on the immortality of the soul, which is not a specialty of mine as an early modern Europeanist, she said, “Well, you should contact Dr. Mark Johnston at Princeton. He knows all about that.” So I’m thanking her for that recommendation and that’s how we got Mark to come here.

I also want to acknowledge the Graduate Council and the Graduate Division who are sponsors of this lecture. We’ve partnered also with the Department of Philosophy to co-sponsor this and we thank them for their help in promoting the lecture and getting posters posted all around campus. Please turn off your cell phones. If you haven’t already, silence those. And I don’t believe recording is allowed either. As a condition of this bequest, we’re obligated to tell you how the endowment supporting the Foerster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul came to UC Berkeley. It’s a story that exemplifies the many ways that this campus is linked to the history of California and the Bay Area.

In 1928, I was actually hoping that I could say this was the hundredth anniversary of the Foerster Lectures, but I’m a little early, but we’re close. In 1928, Ms. Edith Zweybruck established the Foerster lectureship to honor the memory of Agnes A. Foerster and Constantine E.A. Foerster. Edith was a public school teacher in San Francisco for many years and the teaching profession was to her an opportunity to develop a true knowledge and love of the spiritual values of life in the young minds entrusted to her care. Edith’s beloved sister, Agnes A. Foerster, shared her high ideals and hopes as did Agnes’s husband, Constantine E.A. Foerster.

A lawyer by profession, Foerster was a man of high intellectual achievements and of rare personal charm. Although he passed away at the age of 37, he had achieved an esteemed place at the San Francisco Bar and was considered one of its most highly respected members. For several years prior to his death, Foerster was a law partner of Alex F. Morrison, one of the most prominent of San Francisco attorneys at that time for whom our own Morrison Memorial Library is named. Something I did not know before, so you learn something every time you sit on one of these committees.

In her last days, Ms. Edith Zweybruck expressed her deep and abiding interest in the spiritual life by creating this lecture series on the subject, The Immortality of the Soul or other similar spiritual subjects. She believed that through the medium of a great university and the words of scholarly lectures, she might bring new light upon a subject that has interested the world for centuries. Thank you to Edith Zweybruck.

Now about our lecturer, Mark Johnston, Henry Putnam University professor at Princeton University is the author of Saving God, Princeton University Press, and Surviving Death, Princeton University Press 2011.

Known for his many influential and widely reprinted articles in the field of ontology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, epistemology and value theory, Johnston has been in recent years the Gareth Evans Memorial lecturer at Oxford University, the Gifford lecturer at St. Andrews, the Townsend lecturer here at Berkeley, the Stanton lecturer at Cambridge University, and the Romanell lecturer at the American Philosophical Association. It’s my sincere pleasure to welcome Dr. Johnston. Please help me to do that now. Thank you.

(Applause)

Mark Johnston: All right. I’m very happy to be here. This is my sixth visit to Berkeley and it’ll be my 10th lecture. I would’ve thought you’d had enough of me by now, but this is a special topic that I don’t usually talk about, and today, I’m going to do something different, I’m going to refute my former self. In my own view, that’s quite hard to do. So 20 years ago in my Hempel lectures at Princeton, which became Surviving Death, 20 years ago, I argued that the Kantian hope for another life, a life after this in which happiness was somehow made commensurate with displayed virtue was a decent and comprehensible hope. However, I concluded that this hope is dashed by ontological considerations deriving from the nature of our continued existence over time.

I then offered a surrogate, a way of living on in the onward rush of mankind. Today, I want to show why I was wrong. That decent and comprehensible hope is not dashed by such ontological considerations. Even if we are essentially embodied somehow or other, our present embodiments may not be our only embodiments. This will be philosophy, so in addressing the question of the afterlife, I’ll be working with both hands behind my back. There’ll be no appeal to theological considerations and no reliance on religious experience. Even so, I believe that philosophy can teach us something.

So here’s my daughter, Olivia, who’s now 5, at the age of 18 months on the beach with a quizzical philosophical look on her face as if she’s thinking, “Is this my only life?” OK. So here’s something that modernity mostly lost: fear of the afterlife, “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office. When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? To grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, that undiscovered country from whose born no traveler returns puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.”

Now, wait a minute. Haven’t some travelers actually returned from the undiscovered country? Some of you will recall the spontaneously produced reports in roughly 10% of resuscitated cardiac arrest patients, reports of what are now called near-death experiences. These experiences, which seem to the patients to be happening during a period that coincided with the clinical death of their bodies, involve such things as the sense of leaving their bodies and looking down at the medical personnel pumping their chests in attempts at resuscitation.

As the near-death experience develops, a patient seems to be traveling upwards from his body through a tunnel into a bliss-inducing white light. As he moves in the light, dead relatives, perhaps even old pets are encountered. Some are presented with a detailed review of one’s life. You don’t have to be a conventionally religious person to have a near-death experience. The famous atheist, A. J. Ayer, had a near-death experience and his then wife remarked, “Freddy was much nicer after he came back from the dead,” which is saying something if you know him, knew him.

So they’re reported by their survivors, these experiences as lucid disclosures of reality. Unlike many drug or apoxia-introduced hallucinations, hypoxia, low-oxygen state hallucinations, the experiences are not fragmented and they are vividly remembered. They have what William James called a noetic quality. They feel more real than ordinary perceptions. Significantly, many patients who report such experiences no longer fear death. Many make changes in the direction of being more helpful to others.

Indeed, some who undergo near-death experiences report a sense that this life is a distracting precursor to the real life that was revealed to them after they died.

As yet, I’ve found no robust evidence of distinctive knowledge of the external world that could only be gleaned from the ostensible vantage points of the disembodied or better reembodied subject undergoing an NDE. If one’s left one’s body and is looking down upon it, then one could be expected to take in facts about the emergency room, facts that are not available to the normal viewers standing on the floor.

Experiments have been proposed and even partly performed, but what we do not have is a decisive case that clearly passes the obvious test. And 20 years ago, I commissioned a cartoon that effectively presents the obvious test. We see an emergency room in which a cardiac arrest patient is being resuscitated by doctors. Mounted high up on the back wall of the emergency room is a sign visible only from the ceiling of the room. The messages on the sign change regularly and they are hard to unsee once seen, “Eat at Joe’s,” “Medicare won’t be paying for this,” or, “If you can read this, you’re already dead.”

Now, I note that there’s little scientific interest in this quite precise and possibly momentous empirical question, are there ever viewers looking down from the ceilings of emergency rooms? It’s a quite precise and possibly momentous question. Is the lack of interest in the question due to fear of the very idea of the afterlife as a revival of “unscientific nonsense” or is it because we already know the answer? If we know the answer, how exactly did we come to know the answer? Neuropsychology reveals correlations and patterns of dependence between mental states and brain states. Does neuropsychology then settle the question, “This is your only life”? My claim is only if it supports a form of reductive materialism, in particular the thesis that we are identical to or nothing over and above are familiar quotidian embodiments. We shall see that’s false.

So talking about travelers, here’s some travel advice. If you’re ever in Toledo, Toledo, Toledo, Spain, do make your way to the Church of Santo Tomé. As you enter the vestibule of the church, turn to the right and then you will see in an alcove El Greco’s great masterpiece, perhaps his greatest masterpiece, The Burial of Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz [sic: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz]. Here it is in full. And Gonzalo was a very pious man. As he was buried near the Church of Santo Tomé, the mourners were astonished to see St. Augustine and St. Stephen having the good grace to come down from heaven to officiate and convey Gonzalo’s earthly remains to his tomb while an angel ushered his soul, depicted just above the middle of the painting as a nebulous infant, up through the birth canal of heaven so to enter the next life.

Here’s the relief and I think I have a … Yeah. Here’s the nebulous infant entering the birth canal of heaven and here are the remains of Gonzalo. OK. So what’s the point of that? I’m just noting that, in the near-death experience and in El Greco’s Burial, what has left the old body behind at death is represented as an occupant of space. It has a location and a point of view, be it on the furious operations of the emergency room or on the emerging delights of heaven. The point is, if what survives is called the soul, it’s not clearly immaterial. It may be no more than the original person, be it the dead patient or the pious Gonzalo, differently embodied.

This is not Cartesian Dualism, which has it that the soul is an immaterial substance capable of separately existing from any material embodiment with which it happens to interact. The alternative non-Cartesian thought is just that, though we are essentially material beings, we nonetheless might come to have embodiments other than these familiar quotidian embodiments. Recall John Locke obliquely disparaging Descartes’ defense of the immateriality of the soul by highlighting a doctrine of superaddition, a mind-maker, who Locke thinks of as God, has made matter think and can do it again.

This is from the essay, “All the great ends of morality and religion are well enough secured without the philosophical proofs of the soul’s immateriality. Since it’s evident that he who at first made us to subsist here as sensible intelligent beings, can and will restore us to a like state of sensibility in another world and make us there capable to receive the retribution he has designed according to our doings in this life. And therefore, it is not a mighty necessity to determine one way or other for or against the immateriality of the soul as some overzealous have come forward to make the world believe.” I think he has Descartes in mind.

So here’s the thought. Even if we are not essentially animals, we are essentially material beings. Perhaps we’re capable of surviving somatic death, the death of the rest of our body as still functioning brains. Perhaps we could then undergo that is survive, slow replacement of our neurons by artificial chips which mimic their function, so that we are no longer organic beings. Even so, I claim we need some material embodiment to implement our agency to subserve our perceptual memory and other experiences, to interdependently give embodied expression to our emotional life. That is, we can’t survive without some material embodiment or other. That’s the concession to materialism but not to reductive materialism.

OK. So it raises the question, what exactly is matter? It’s an empirical question and the most basic answer comes from quantum field theory. What appears to us as matter is a highly complex process, namely successive distributed perturbations in interconnected quantum fields. This is a summary of a long story. We’ve discovered that the manner of being of matter is process-like. Particle torque is a useful facon de parler, but the swarming particles do not enter crucially into the calculations of how the quantum fields evolve. About matter, Heraclitus was right. The matter of the gold ring, the matter of the gold atom, that’s always in flux.

So if we are material beings, our embodiments are process-like. They are successions of complex distributed events that collectively appear stable at the meso- and macro-levels. Even if we reject this deflation of particle talk, even if we think in the end the particles can’t be made to go away, we will still be left with embodiments which are ever-changing swarms of particles. These swarms are also processes spread out across time. So what is embodiment? There are certain maneuvers due to my former colleague, David Lewis, which I want to set aside at this point. They could come up in the discussion, but Lewisian maneuvers aside, the reductive materialist projects the very idea of re-embodiment after death. Our familiar quotidian embodiments are our only embodiments. This is your only life.

Now what is this relation of embodiment which holds between a conscious agent and that agent’s material makeup? The reductive materialist has two options. The first one really isn’t any good, but they like it. The conscious agent is either numerically identical with, one and the same as her total embodiment, her total multilayered process-like material embodiment or she is nothing over and above that total embodiment. Nothing over and above is an idiom crucially in need of explication, but for now, think of this example. Chemical events are nothing over and above complex events which are describable in the language of atomic physics.

As in the formation of a covalent bond, a chemical event, is nothing over and above the juxtaposition of pairs of mutually attractive valenced electrons in the outer electron shells of non-metallic atoms. The coming into being of a covalent bond is nothing over and above the coming to be of this special kind of juxtaposition describable just in the language of atomic physics. This notion will be central to this talk and our understanding of why reductive materialism fails. OK. So here’s a surprise. I don’t want to dwell on this too long because my philosophical colleagues know this argument all too well. Here’s a surprising fact, which I think points to the error that the reductive materialist has made.

Given the process like nature of matter, reductive materialism implies that ethical life is not workable, indeed is simply otiose. Now, a corollary of the argument that follows is that ontologically reductive Buddhist views to the effect that we are either identical with or nothing over and above total mental streams, lifelong streams of subjectless mental events, has the same implication. Given such reductive Buddhist ontological views and that doesn’t exhaust the inventory of Buddhist ontological views. Pudgalavadians would say the reduction doesn’t work, but given such reductive ontological views, we’ll see that Buddhist ethics is a contradiction in terms.

Now, that may seem like a grand claim, but the surprising fact is a consequence of an argument which is not easy to follow, but is easy to follow once we understand the notion of moral worth and the similarity constraints on moral worth. So this is where we’re headed. First, an argument for this thesis, any reductive processive account of the continued existence of humans and other animals when combined with widely accepted claims about bearers of moral worth and so moral status implies that ethical life is unworkable. Then a clarification of what ontological reduction comes to, which allows us to see just why reductive materialism fails.

Finally, a non-reductive account of embodiment, which opens up the possibility of our having embodiments other than these familiar quotidian embodiments. That’s where we’re going. OK. So what’s moral worth? Well, here’s a way into it. What … Obviously, plants, the vegetative kingdom, the earth, the seas, these are all things that can be damaged, but they can’t be wronged. You can damage a plant, but you can’t wrong it. That’s puzzling. What kind of being can be wronged morally by actions and actors which threaten or undermine the securing of those goods required to live a life that’s a good life for the kind of being in question?

Well, I’m just using beings with a moral status as an umbrella term for that. Ethical life is in large part a response to the distinctive moral worth of beings with a moral status. Their worth demands moral respect, including significant sacrifice on the part of reasoning agents when they recognize the prerogatives and protections due to beings with a moral status. Non-conventional that is real ethical life is demanding. There has to be something deeply impressively significant about moral worth if it’s to rationally impose sacrifices on reasoning agents who encounter moral worth in themselves and others. I say we adults have become inured to the impressive thing, which is embodied agency. Contrast toddlers who are fascinated with animals as embodied agents.

So here’s my own view about the ground of moral worth. I say that the ground of moral worth is being a conscious will, a conscious valuer of value that can act to secure the values presented to it. Once conscious valuers of value appear, things happen because of conscious valuing of value. Those animals which are conscious wills have species relative values presented to them by evolved forms of affectivity, which they characteristically act to secure. They characteristically act to secure those species relative values disclosed in these ways, thus the species survives.
When those animals that were the first embodied wills appeared, something unprecedented occurred. Things began to happen because of conscious affective appreciation of value. Though the values appreciated were species relative, the higher order value of valuing those species relative values is not tethered, is not a species relative value. It’s the ground of moral worth. For all the glory of the vegetative world, the higher order value of consciously valuing and consciously acting to secure what’s presented as valuable was absent before the appearance of embodied wills. Then the earth felt its worth. Might remind you of the hymn.

So that is as it might be. The argument that follows doesn’t depend on my own view of moral worth and moral status. It’ll go through on any account of moral status, which respects at least one of the following similarity constraints on moral status. If X and Y are duplicates, just alike, abstracting away from their environment, then if X has a moral status, so does Y. If the only difference between X and Y is in respect of what happens after they each cease to be, then if X has a moral status, so does Y. If X and Y do not differ in morally significant respects, then if X has a moral status, so does Y. These things are on the handouts if you have a look. You really should look at the handout now.

OK. So reductive materialism wedded to the best empirical account of what matter is has it that we’re either identical to or nothing over and above are total, that is lifelong processive material embodiments. Now a subprocess of a process is a perfectly good process, no less real than the larger process which includes it, nor is a subprocess ontologically dependent on the larger process, which includes it. If anything, it’s the other way around. Many, many of the subprocesses of a lifelong person process are very person-like, at least as the reductive materialist understands persons.

Those long-enough lived subprocesses, let’s call them personites, either a duplicate possible lifelong person processes or do not differ from them in morally significant respects or differ only in what happens after the long-enough subprocesses cease to exist. Moral nihilism aside, the reductionists should hold that person processes have a moral status so given reductionism, all of the long-enough lived subprocesses of a given person process that is all the person’s personites also have a moral status. That’s disastrous on any ordinary understanding of ethics because of the entailments of moral status.

But just to illustrate how this argument works, imagine the case of Dum and Dee, two identical twins raised in symmetric environments where they’re monitored, modified and manicured regularly in order to keep their body and brain functions and hence their mental life as similar as possible. Dum dies before Dee. Dum dies at midnight on New Year’s Day 2025, half an hour before Dee dies. And now, the personite that is Dee-minus, those events that make up the last half hour of Dee’s life, call it Dee-minus, could be a duplicate of the person Dum. So since the personite Dum has a moral status, so does Dee-minus.

Remember on the reductive materialist account, the person Dum and the person D-minus are either identical with or nothing over and above long processes. Here’s the picture. So we’ve got two persons, two-person processes, Dum and Dee, with a long enough subprocess of Dee, namely the personite D-minus, which duplicates Dum. And this argument generalizes to all the long-enough lived processes, long enough in the sense that they could match a possible person. OK. So why is that disastrous? It’s disastrous because this explosion of moral status makes ethical life unworkable because of the entailments of having a moral status and A and B capture these entailments, most of them.

The objective life-enhancing interests of being with a moral status counts morally, and in any morally acceptable calculation as to what to do, that being’s interests count equally with the same interests of any other being. Secondly, a being with moral status generates moral claims, claims which give others certain non-negotiable ends such as reasonable benevolence directed towards that being and its legitimate interest, along with certain inviolable side constraints on the pursuit of goods, constraints which in the absence of very considerable counter-reasons rule out such things as causing the being to cease to exist and imposing significant harms on such a being absent its being compensated or consenting.

So here’s why ethical life is unworkable, part of the story. If all of a person processes personites have moral status, then ethical life is unworkable in the following sense. We’re ethically required to be feckless when we know somehow that we shouldn’t be feckless. For all forms of prudential self-sacrifice involve imposing costs on a vast multitude of personites who undergo the sacrifice but are no longer around when the possible benefits might accrue. We’re ethically required to be called to the needs of others for all forms of self-sacrifice, period, involve imposing costs on a vast multitude of personites in the absence of their consent or compensation.

Moreover, we’re ethically required to be ruthless for all forms of making demanding commitments to others, most notably promising and keeping promises, impose costs on a vast multitude of latter-day personites who did not exist when the commitment was made but who suffer the costs of keeping the commitment. From the fully informed reductionist point of view, the intimacies of close friendship are now seen to involve sheer impertinence on a massive scale for their imposed on a vast multitude of recently arrived and morally considerable beings, latter-day personites again, who had nothing to do either with the forming and maintenance of the friendship or with the background of established consent, which makes those intimacies ethically acceptable.

From the fully informed reductionist point of view, our practices of reward and punishment are hopelessly scattershot since they unwittingly target a vast multitude of latter-day personites who did not exist at the time that the meritorious or condemnable acts in question were performed and so on and so forth. Now you might think this is a straight out reductio ad absurdum of the reductive materialist’s account of our embodiment and more generally of any attempt to treat human beings and other animal wills as nothing over and above, that classic phrase again, their complex lifelong processes, but not quite.

There is no deductively valid argument of the form if P, a non-normative ontological claim, like our embodiments, our processes and we are nothing over and above them, that’s non-normative ontological claim, there’s no deductively valid argument of the form. If P, then ethical life is unworkable or otiose, so P is false. That’s not a valid argument. I can present various counter-examples to it if you like, but here’s the way I think about it. I think that the best explanation of these ethical absurdities is that the reductive materialist’s account of our embodiment is misguided, a fact which we shall independently establish. Once you independently establish that, you can see these as symptoms of exactly the way in which the reductive materialist goes wrong.

So then after showing that, I’ll close by offering a non-reductive account of embodiment, one on which we need some embodiment or other to survive, implement and be interdependent with our mental life. Necessarily some such embodiment but not any particular one. That’s the view. So what is ontological reduction? That should be clearer than it is. Part of the reason why it’s not clear is that ontological reduction has often been confused with inter-theoretic reduction, which was an important relation for the old positivist ambition to demonstrate the unity of the sciences.

Demonstrating the unity of the sciences is showing us that physics, chemistry, biology are all talking about the same thing in different ways, but we are interested in a relation which as I would put it, holds in rerum natura, that is it holds independently of our patterns of theorizing and the relations among them. And in particular though, identity was an important condition for inter-theoretic reduction. When it comes to ontological reduction, identity is not only not required, it drives ontological reduction out. So here are some marks of ontological reduction.
Reduction is a preservative relation. The reduced is not eliminated. So here’s nothing but claim where what’s described as really eliminated. Unicorn horns are nothing but narwhal tusks, or on some views, demonic possession is nothing but religiously elaborated psychosis. These nothing but views really deny the existence of the thing described and say what is left over. And of course, that’s what the Australian materialists, including Lewis did. They eliminated the mental by ignoring its internal intrinsic character and then concentrated on the functional role of the mental and then delivered the result that that functional role was played by a brain state.
But this combination of elimination and identification of what’s left was not an ontological reduction. It was more like unicorn horns, the mental, nothing but narwhal tusks. So here are the three marks. Reduction is preservative relation. It’s not elimination. The reduced is nothing over and above the reducing. The reduced owes its existence and initial nature wholly to the reducing and not vice versa. It’s an asymmetric relation so that the reducing is ontologically more fundamental than the reduced. So atomic physical events are more fundamental than chemical events.

This has a consequence, namely that the thing that’s reduced that is nothing over and above the reducing, plays no basic explanatory role in accounting either for its own existence or for the fact that its existence is wholly due to the reducing. To include the reduced in the explanatory ground of that fact is redundant because the reduced is nothing over and above the reducing. That’s very important. That is a crucial step. And I owe this idea to Karen Bennett, philosopher at Rutgers. So here are some examples of what I’ve got in mind. So here’s something that you might think is true.

Axe. It lies just in the nature of the particular event of affixing a particular axe head to a particular axe handle that a particular axe comes into being wholly in virtue of the affixing. So there are two things going on here. One is an embedded grounding claim. That is a particular axe comes into being wholly in virtue of the affixing, but what’s important is that that grounding claim derives from just the nature of the particular event of affixing a particular axe head to a particular axe handle. So axe is longhand for the coming into being of the axe is nothing over and above the affixing of the axe head to the axe handle. And that’s ontological reduction.

The reducing event, the affixing itself accounts for both the reduced, the coming into being of the axe and the fact that the axe is coming into being, is wholly grounded in the affixing. Here’s another example, sandwich. Here’s how to make a pathetically minimal tomato sandwich. It lies just in the nature of the particular event of placing a slice of tomato between two comparably sliced pieces of bread, that a pathetically minimal tomato sandwich comes into being wholly in virtue of the placement event. That’s longhand for, the coming into being of the sandwich is nothing over and above the event of placing a slice of tomato between two comparably sliced pieces of bread.

And again, that’s ontological reduction. The reducing event, the placement, itself accounts for both the reduced, the coming into being of the sandwich and the fact that the sandwich is coming into being is wholly grounded in the event of placing a slice of tomato between two comparably sliced pieces of bread. Now, here’s the sign of a successful reduction. You get something from those silly examples. As exemplified in axe and sandwich, the sign of a successful reduction is that the structure of the reducing event explains the structure of the entity that figures in the reduced event. Why? Because the structure of the entity that figures in the reduced event is what it is, wholly in virtue of the structure of the reducing event, the affixing or the placement.

Accordingly, there’s no puzzle as to why the axe that comes into being originally consists of that axe head affixed to that axe handle. Likewise, there’s no puzzle as to why the sandwich which comes into being originally consists of that slice of tomato and those pieces of bread. Generalizing successful reductions are scrutable in this no-puzzle sense. They show us why the structure of the reduced is what it is given the structure of the reducing. So now, I note that materialist reductions of mental events aren’t scrutable. This is really an argument to the following effect.

The mind-body relation is not scrutable. Once you get very clear about what reduction is, that in itself is an objection to reductive materialism. That’s the argument that I’m now about to deliver. So mental events, a particular mental event M, say my now seeing this audience before me is reducible to a physical event P, say the underlying photo-neural event of the light stream coming from you, stimulating my retina, producing a sequence of neural firings, continuing across the optic chiasm and on through regions V1 through V4 in my occipital lobe.

That’s all true if and only if it lies in the nature of P that M occurs wholly in virtue of P. That’s the form of a reduction of a mental event. It just lies in the nature of the physical event, that electrochemical process and maybe in the case of seeing the photonic electrochemical process, the long process coming from each person that I’m seeing. It just lies in the nature of that event that my seeing you now occurs wholly in virtue of that event. So the difficulty with that is the mental event of my now seeing this audience before me has a fourfold structure. It’s the presentation to me of a plurality of people under a visual mode of presentation, which involves a dynamic mosaic of gestalt grouped expanses of color.

The long photo/electrochemical event extending from the people I’m seeing to V4 in the back of my head has the structure of matter energy propagation. That’s not presentation to a subject. Moreover, the photonic and electrochemical events involved have nothing like the structure of a dynamic mosaic of gestalt-grouped expanses of color, the language of vision as we know it. So likewise, reductionist accounts of persisting persons are not scrutable. Here’s a reduction. The continued existence of a person or animal is reducible to a complex lifelong stream of material processes if and only if it just lies in the nature of the lifelong stream of material processes that a person continues to exist wholly in virtue of the occurrence of the complex lifelong stream of material processes.

But persisting persons and other animals have a moral worth because they’re wills, that is agent causes that can act in ways made intelligible either by reasons or by the evolved affective modes of presentation, which make for harmony between the surviving animal and its habitat. A lifelong stream of material processes exhibits only event causation mediated by matter/energy propagation and exchange. There’s nothing in the structure that is anything like an agent acting intelligibly on a reason or acting intelligibly in the light of its being presented with affectively laden manners of presentation of significant features of its habitat.

Materialist productions are not scrutable and the fact that they’re not scrutable is a reason to doubt them given what ontological reduction is. Think of it like this, just as the assertion of numerical identity does not make for a surprisingly different structure between the things identified, so being nothing over and above, which is very close to identity, does not make for a new structure in the reduced that is surprising given the structure of the reducing. Given that the reduced is nothing over and above the reducing, where did the extra surprising structure in the allegedly reduced come from, if not from the reducing events or processes themselves.
The reductionists cannot account for the new structure, which should not be there given the nature of reduction as a super internal relation of the sort illustrated by axe and sandwich. For the philosophers, once reduction is properly clarified, the so-called explanatory gap is itself an argument against reductionism. I think we’ve just missed that because we weren’t thinking clearly enough about what reductionism is. So we need a non-reductive account of embodiment. Almost there. The reductive account fails when neither reducible to nor identical with our embodiment, and if we were, then ethical life would be unworkable, chaotic.

So our basic manner of being is to be embodied wills. That is a characterization of what it takes for us to exist and continue to exist, not a listing of two essential parts. Our embodiments and our wills become topics of thought and talk. They’re brought before the mind by abstracting away from other particular features of our utterly particular natures, which are natures predicatively and essentially the natures of embodied wills. Embodied wills and not their embodiments are the bearers of moral status. A particular embodied wills embodiment is something we can attend to and thematize, but it’s an abstraction from the full undivided particularity of the embodied will.

Given that a persisting embodied will is not reducible to its embodiment, what exactly is embodiment? What makes it the case that a particular stream of organic processes, including neural processes, is my embodiment. The key idea goes by way of three non-reductive notions of grounding. They have the same structure of the natures of things grounding and other grounding claim. Here, they are, subserving. A physical event subserves a mental event if it lies in the nature of the physical event and the mental event, so not reductive, that the mental event occurs in virtue of the physical event. That last M should be P. So that’s the example of my seeing the people in the room and the underlying photo-neural process.

It lies in the nature of both of those that my seeing all of you in the room is an event that takes place in virtue of this underlying photo-neural process. Then there’s implementation. A physical event P implements a mental event M if it lies in the nature of P and M, both of those events, that P occurs in virtue of M. So if you believed in agent causation, you might think that what happens in the case of agent causation is, take Libet’s view, “I produce a mental veto and that veto makes it the case that a particular physical event doesn’t happen and that would be implementing because it lies in the nature of that physical event, that it implements a mental event, that is it lies in the nature of that physical event and the mental event, that the physical event occurs in virtue of the veto.”

There’s also interdependence, a physical event and a mental event or interdependent that lies in the nature of both of those taken together, that the physical event occurs even only if the mental event occurs. And now we can say what our embodiment consists in. My embodiment consists of those physical events that subserve, implement and are interdependent with the mental events of which I am the subject or agent. Remember, we’ve argued against a reductive account of the persisting person and so we can help ourselves to facts about which mental events are have as their subject or agent, that persisting person. My embodiment consists of those physical events that subserve, implement, or are interdependent with the mental events of which I’m the subject or agent, plus the animal body which provides ongoing support for those physical events, just what you would have thought.

So what’s the false premise in the explosion argument? On the handout, that’s the no-difference argument. We can say reductionist cannot say, namely none of the complex extended processes that are Dum, the person Dum, the person Dee, and the personite D-minus are persisting persons. Dum and Dee are no more than the total embodiments of two very similar persisting persons and Dee-minus is a proper temporal segmentation of the embodiment that is Dee, a segmentation that happens to duplicate the embodiment that is Dum. Embodiments are not bearers of moral status. They are particular aspects abstracted out from the full particularity of an embodied will, the real bearer of moral status, nor is a will considered as a particular capacity of an embodied will a mental substance with a moral status.

The embodied will, the person in her full particularity is the agent who wills and is the bearer of moral status. Persons, as the reductive materialist understands them, that is as identical with or nothing over and above their embodiments are not bearers of moral status. Premise four in the explosion argument, the no difference argument fails. So how does the non-reductive account of embodiment bear on the possibility of an afterlife? We’re almost there. Well, you can tell me. Sorry, that was a bit of Glaswegian from my pal, John Campbell, “You can tell me.”
All right. The first thing to notice is that the non-reductive account of embodiment is entirely consonant with the discoveries of neuropsychology, in particular the evident dependence of mental events on brain processes. That’s all in place. That’s the subserving of mentality by neural processes, nor do I think there’s a neuropsychological discovery which shows that implementation never occurs. Remember, Libet did not claim that. The second thing to notice is that our embodiments vary over time. Although the basic manner of being of an embodied will is present at each moment of that embodied will’s existence, its detailed embodiment necessarily changes over time.

The cross-time requirement is that at each time one has some embodiment or other, not that our embodiment at one time is the same as later times. So even if we are essentially embodied beings, that is a determinable essential aspect of our basic manner of being. It’s not like cherry red 115 utterly determined its shade. It’s more like cherry red or red. It’s a determinable though essential aspect of our being. What’s required for us to continue to exist is some determinate embodiment or other that will subserve, implement and work interdependently with our mental events.

Whoops. There’s no way to deduce from the nature of embodiment and the basic manner of being of an embodied will that an embodied will’s determinate and variable embodiment in this life is essential to it. That’s where I went wrong 20 years ago. The decent and comprehensible hope for another life in which one’s happiness is somehow made commensurate with displayed virtue is not dashed by ontological considerations deriving from the nature of our continued existence over time. It’s metaphysically possible, possible in the broadest sense that is consistent with our basic manner of being that there is another life. It’s not ruled out by our natures as essentially embodied wills.

But now some of you came here wanting to know more. You wanted to know whether there will be another life. Qua philosopher, that is without resorting to theology or this worldly religious experience, all I can say is it’s an empirical question, one that admits of experiential verification in the life to come if there is one. Thank you very much for that.

(Applause)

Tom Dandelet: So we’re going to have time for questions. Do you want to come up here? There’ll be a microphone for you.

Mark Johnston: All right. Let me …

Audience 1: Thank you. That was thrilling. I haven’t quite got my head yet around the notion of embodiment that you’re using, which is very interesting and intriguing, but I’m not sure if this is quite the right question to ask to help me get around it. But you used the notion of the nature of a physical event.

Suppose I’m a neuroscientist and I’m also an eliminative materialist. These characters are always saying, “What we really need is higher-resolution imaging equipment.” So suppose I’ve got really great high-resolution imaging equipment and I look at the brain, I see all these brain events going on. I write catalogs of them. I keep cranking up the resolution, but I don’t believe there’s such a thing as the mind or the self. So am I right on your picture, I’m missing something that lies in the nature of those neurochemical events?

Mark Johnston: Yes. I think everyone should agree with that. So the reason everyone should agree with that is that, if you think about what ontological reduction is, the thing that backs the idiom, is nothing over and above, it’s a transitive relation. So I take it that the neurophysiologist thinks the real structure is found in particle theory or quantum field theory.

Audience 1: Sure. I just keep backing up the resolution.

Mark Johnston: Let’s … as a good reductionist about things where reductionism could turn out to be true and it’s very clear that in particle theory and quantum field theory, there’s nothing like the fourfold structure of a mental event. Of course, I’m just echoing Brentano here, the presentation to a subject of an object or a content under a manner of presentation. So the argument I gave didn’t appeal to the transitivity of reduction, but once you get that in mind, everyone should admit that, until you get to particle theory or quantum field theory, you’re missing out on the real structure of physical events.

Audience 2: All right. Thanks. OK, so this relationship of capable of being embodied by different substances, always has to be embodied by some substance not always the same, seems to be very similar to the hardware-software relationship. And there’s also the fact that you have that kind of four level of presentation, I think, in that the software has to have a computer that can read the software and it also has to have a person who’s running the computer and all that, which is really this whole thing is that the mind is really, whether if it is software, it has this relationship of a brain-body world nexus has got to be seen as the embodiment of the soul, not just the brain. And many of the mistakes that the reductives were making was assuming it would be the brain. Does that more or less on track with what you say?

Mark Johnston: Yeah. I like your last remark. So there was a famous philosopher in the Berkeley Philosophy department for a long period of time, Donald Davidson.

Audience 2: Oh, yes, right. Yeah.

Mark Johnston: And Donald Davidson thought the proper form of a theory of meaning was a statement of truth conditions for the language in question in the style of Alfred Tarski. So for Davidson, you had these things like snow is white is true in English if and only if snow is white, and reference to snow and to cities and to people, all of that was supposed to drop out of the truth conditions of the language. One of Davidson’s students, Wallace, pointed out that you can permute the references and the extensions of predicates in ways that gave you really a totally different language.

So here’s an example with a fragment of Australian. In this little fragment, there are two names for cities, Sydney and Melbourne, and there’s one relational predicate is to the north of, and in Australian, Sydney is to the north of Melbourne, but now we can permute the reference of Sydney and Melbourne and the extension of is to the north of and save that truth by having the term Sydney denote Melbourne and the term Melbourne denote Sydney and the relation is to the north of has the same extension as we would intuitively say is to the south of … You preserve truth, but you don’t capture the way Australians use that fragment talk.

That’s because reference is more determinate than what’s settled by truth conditions. So to get back to your question, I was thinking the environment’s very important and your relationship to the environment is very important in securing basic referential connections. That’s why I was talking about the photo-neural event, which subserves seeing. Unless we were in contact with other things by seeing them, we wouldn’t have the rich inventory of topics of thought and talk, which are just given to us by noticing things visually. So this idea of our mental life is locked within our heads is a useful model for certain purposes, but if we wanted to give a basic account of original reference, you’d have to think about this really quite special relationship between the mind and its environment.

And there’s no real way to tell good evolutionary stories about how animals adapted to their habitats. That leaves out the fact that they had to be in touch with the structure of their habitats on the basis of perceptual experience and the affectively loaded presentations which give the animal default pathways in its habitat. So I like this sometimes called the ecological picture of the mind.

Audience 3: Thank you. That was a very interesting presentation and I wish I could say I could wrap my head around a full argument, but I’m brought back to the example you brought up earlier of the ER because I remember reading one of these early reports and I’m sure there’s been more work since then, but basically, it was a zero for N, that is that not a single person who described an out-of-body-experience, “Eat at Joe’s,” or anything like that. Now admittedly, these things don’t happen very often, so the data we’re crawling in, but I’m wondering, doesn’t that give us a sense of the limits of those reports and does it change our understanding of that there’s another life or maybe it suggests that these people were just imagining them floating and they weren’t really and what seemed like a noetic experience was really something else? Does it draw a boundary about what we can think about such experiences?

Mark Johnston: I know a study, and out of a hundred patients, only two reported near-death experience and so there wasn’t a great database. On the other hand, I’m totally agnostic about what’s going on in near-death experiences. I would like to see them. All you’d need is like a few hundred laptops. They could be placed on high cabinets in emergency rooms tilted in such a way that they were only viewable from the ceiling, and if someone said or enough people said, “And as I was going up towards the white light, I saw the most incredible thing, ‘Eat at Joe’s,’” and the timing was right, but didn’t just guess at this, that’d be enough for me. It’s an empirical question, is all I’m saying.

Moderator: We have one question back here and then I’ll move up to the front.

Mark Johnston: Yeah.

Audience 4: Hey, Mark, I guess I just want to hear a little bit more about the alternative embodiment possibility that you’re pointing toward at the end. It does look like it’s going to require some animal body that will give ongoing support to a set of physical events that stand in the right grounding relation to my mental events. One question … I mean, if we’re in the hospital room, it seems like we don’t need to do your thought experiments because there’s no animal body that could be subserving …

Mark Johnston: Yeah, good.

Audience 4: … this alternative embodiment and so there’s that question. And even if we abstract from that possibility, it seems like, what’s going on? We would have to be taking over another biological existence in a way that seems at odds with your ecological conception of what was going on?

Mark Johnston: On the first question, I very quickly said in a line in the PowerPoint, perhaps we could survive somatic death as disembodied brains and perhaps as disembodied brains kept alive and functioning a certain way. We could undergo slow replacement of neurons by chips which played the same information role. So biological embodiment is not required. On the second question, you’re asking something quite important. I said we’re essentially materially embodied. So what is this diaphanous infant or if we believed in near-death experiences as revelations of what awaits us, what is this being that’s up there on the ceiling? They’re not animal bodies.

Now the way to think about this, I’m not endorsing this, but a way to think about this is there’s a kind of emergent matter that can be … Maybe it’s electromagnetic in form. There’s a kind of emergent matter anyway, which can subserve and implement our mental life perhaps for a short period of time before we’re fully embodied. So you might be very skeptical about this kind of matter, but if the deliverances from the ceiling turned out to be the surprising ones, that would be the place to look. All I was saying with John Locke was we don’t need to postulate spiritual substances even if the news from the ceiling is incredibly surprising.

Audience 5: Hi. Thank you very much. One thing I noticed from the beginning of the talk to the end is it’s determinedly individual. It’s all the perspectives you’re describing or as far as I can understand it, the perspectives of an individual’s experience with embodiment, with continuity. The naive notion, which I can represent beautifully because I’m naive, is people are here … If you ask people, “Do we continue to exist?” pretty much the first response you’re likely to get is we continue to exist in the context of a community of people who support each other in some way.

There’s some matter there, to use your term, that is the description of a community that’s also embodied frankly in quantum field mechanics, right? So things don’t exist individually, they exist in relation. So I wonder if you could talk about that kind of tension.

Mark Johnston: See, this is very good. It raises the question of whether the next life would be a life worth wanting and you might think it’s not a life worth wanting unless it’s a life with others. There is in the theology that I was taught as a boy a distinction between the beatific vision, which sounds like you’re entering into the joy of God’s inner life individually and what is called the kingdom, which is a situation in which as Paul says, “We are changed, but we are together.” And I think that the only life to come that’s of interest is a life with others, but of course, I made a vow not to go into theology or religious experience, but if you ask me, I’ll say no, but if you keep asking me, I’ll tell you what I think.

Audience 5: I won’t do anymore.

Audience 6: OK. Hi, thank you. I’m just trying to understand a little bit better, and I wonder if I’m on the right track, when you talk about rejecting reductive materialism. What comes to my mind is like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts or you talk about just emergent qualities and I wonder if that’s relevant to what you were talking about.

Mark Johnston: It’s highly relevant. So philosophers make a distinction between weak emergence and strong emergence, really interesting terms, right? Weak and strong. Often the weak isn’t strong enough and the strong isn’t weak enough, but weak emergence is really a point about our limitations. So when you’re doing chemistry, it would be inept and unworkable to use just the language of atomic physics. That’s the sense in which chemistry is weakly emergent. Strong emergence is something not reducible to the base, comes into being as a result of the base taking a certain form.

Audience 6: Like life.

Mark Johnston: You might think the beginning of life is like that. Tom Nagel, my friend and former colleague, got booed for saying that life was like that. The union card was taken away from him. Some of these things which you hear physicists say, what they’re required not to go to continue to do physics, they turn that into, “This is the nature of reality, so there’s no downward causation,” is a famous example of that. I myself think strong emergence is problematic on philosophical grounds. It’s usually modeled by thinking that as well as the basic laws, say of particle theory, there are other laws. So these laws are generalizations which have an antecedent and a consequence, something like whenever you throw a piece of potassium into water, it explodes, something like that, antecedent consequence.

That’s not a basic law, that’s derivable from fundamental laws in particle theory, but the idea of emergence by law is the idea of fundamental non-derivable laws whose antecedents glom on to some complex material or neural thing. Most of these complex material or neural things that are ontological trash, as I put it, that is in their nearest vicinity, there are a host of things just like them that differ from them in trivial ways, but have different conditions of persistence. And one thing about fundamental laws of nature is they have no truck with ontological trash. That’s on problem.

It’s as if you thought, for example, that when the periodic table was complete and there’s an extremely rare element, let’s call it extremelyrarium, there’s a fundamental law of nature that tells you once you’ve got extremelyrarium, all sorts of things happen that can’t be explained by the atomic structure of that atom. Also, there’s a technical problem with these emergentist proposals if they’re popping individual embodied wills. These laws are not Markovian in the technical sense that the consequence is not like a Thursday spell made on Monday.

Thursday spell made on Mondays is like this, I cast a spell on somebody that will operate on Thursday, but there’s no intervening causal connection that makes it the case that it happens on Thursday. It just happens on Thursday because that’s the way spells go. There’s a spell-like character to emergentist laws which pop a self because the underlying neural condition in the law looks like a condition that you could get into once and then twice and then you’re stuck with thinking, “Well, either it pops another self or once the self comes to have a body, it defends the body against another self-popping.” These laws are very strange, right? A view that doesn’t have any of those problems is a view like law. There’s a mind-maker with the capacity to make matter think on individual occasions.

Moderator: One more question or two.

Audience 7: Thank you so much for your presentation. It’s really an honor for me to hear such a lucid explanation of your point of view about it. Wonderful. And my question is it seems that the line of argument views ontological reduction as quite basic. Is this true? So my question is I feel your argument is extremely interesting and probably decisive in some sense against a strong form of materialism, but I’m wondering would a view of taking phenomenology or the phenomenological reduction as primary, I’m having trouble seeing, would this translate into an argument for or against it or it’s like off the chart? Any thoughts here?

Mark Johnston: Are you thinking of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction?

Audience 7: Yeah, Husserl, right, exactly. Because embedded in the argument throughout is like subjects that have certain properties such as they have a moral status and things like this. However, if you take noesis and noema, it’s not a subject, it’s a process and the object of it. So like you cited Brentano earlier, but more of a naturalistic Brentano where there is some kind of subject, whereas my understanding phenomenology is that there isn’t a subject per se.

Mark Johnston: Yeah. So here’s the way in which I think of the subject. It’s the person. It’s the embodied will or it’s the animal, it’s the embodied will. Nothing special about the self. There’s a lot of carryon about the self and a lot of forms of denial of the self, but here’s a little fact. It’s like a semantic triviality that the function of I in English is to pick out the author of the utterance or thought in which that token of I occurred. Now here’s a question. For that to be a useful semantic rule in the language, how do, say, embodied wills like us have to be in order to use I in accordance with that rule?

And the answer is, well, at least we have to be aware of ourselves as the authors or agents of the thoughts or tokens, so of the thoughts or utterances in which token occurrences of I occur. But that awareness of yourself is just the awareness of the agency of a particular embodied will that is you. No superlative self. Now, I would ask about Husserl whether he really is at odds with the superlative self or whether he wants to make the extraordinary claim on the basis of the phenomenological reduction that there aren’t all of these animal wills around us that are embodied. It just seems to me to be an empirical matter of fact easily ascertained. Yeah.

Audience 8: Very quick personal question. Thank you. My personal question is I’ve become, as I get old, very extremely curious about the answer to this question and I wonder if you are, you will either get the answer when you die or you won’t. Are you at all looking forward to dying and finding out after spending your life?

Mark Johnston: I am.

Audience 8: I am.

Mark Johnston: I am. I’m quite interested. More than that, I have argued that a lot of extent religions are idolatrous and spiritually materialistic. We need not name them, but I think we know what they’re like, but not all of religion is a crock. There are genuine religious communities where people show each other an extraordinary kind of love, which shows that they’ve escaped to some extent from the centripetal force of selfishness. One of the reasons I hope for another life is I’ve made a little movement in that direction, very small. I’d like to have more chance to get better at that, overcoming, focusing on my own good and trying to velarize what is simply good.

(Applause)

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(Music fades out)