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author Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
date Wed, 21 Oct 2026 21:34:02 +0100
parents dfb9d3084275
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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1 [As transcribed by TurboScribe.ai from YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBu2seUFlY0&ab_channel=CASA]
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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3 And the very first talk I think I gave at a Utism was called F'ing the Ineffable, which might have been a possible talk for the conference today. But that's not what I'm going to talk about today. That was back in 2006.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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5 Okay, so I'm absolutely not a religion scholar, unlike our first two speakers this morning. That's not going to prevent me from saying a few things, as people who know me know that I'm not generally stopped. In many pieces I read about religion and science particularly, the religious side is characterized by, especially the people who are against it, in terms of a number of distinctive sorts of things.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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7 First, a set of myths, patterns of myths and stories about fathers and sons, gods and goddesses, spirit worlds, the origin of the world, transubstantiation, and so on and so forth, along with personages who figure large, like Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha, and Vishnu, and who knows else. Secondly, especially in the case of the Abrahamic faiths, the religions are characterized in terms of what I'm going to call factive beliefs. In particular, to be religious is to assent, and not only to believe but to commit yourself to, to pledge allegiance to, various sentential propositions, that God exists, that there's an afterlife, and so on.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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9 And third, of course, paradigmatically in religious traditions, as well as the stories and the myths and the beliefs that you're supposed to subscribe to, there's good and evil, often manifested in various different forms, with different actors playing different roles and so on. In discussions of science and religion, it's often the factive beliefs that come to the fore, probably because science, too, traffics in factive beliefs, that bodies are made of cells and energy is conserved and worlds closed, causally closed, and so on and so forth. And because on the face of it, the factive beliefs of the religious traditions and the factive beliefs of the religious traditions seem at odds.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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11 And in fact, their being at odds is often the topic of some of the science-religion discourses. And my reaction to those discourses is basically, just to be kind of truthful, complete frustration. The myths and stories and personages, in my sense, aren't the point.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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13 They're vehicles, at least in any sense of religious traditions that I have, they're vehicles for religious understanding, not the religious understanding itself. And the conflicts in statements of fact, I don't even find them particularly interesting. They're hardly surprising.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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15 Most of the religious myths with which we're familiar were forged in the 7th century and early thousands of years ago sometimes, well before the development of natural science, and it's not surprising that our sense of the world has changed a lot since then. So it's not a surprise that walking on water or having four or eight arms or a hundred arms or being visited by spirits and so on are viewed with suspicion. But it seems to me these stories and these claims are besides the point.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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17 They're certainly beside the point with respect to anything I'm going to talk about today, so that's it for them. What do I take religions to be? I think I can convey a sense, even if in detail it's harder to say.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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19 Just a note, I'm going to avoid the word religion itself, just the count noun, which I think of as a sort of imperialist category developed by certain imperialist civilizations to name metaphysical worldviews that were alien to them. To the extent I use the R word at all, I'm going to talk about religious traditions or a little bit about what it is to be religious. And what I take the religious traditions to be, actually it ties into things that's said this morning.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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21 I think of them as sociocultural efforts to frame and answer and pass on to future generations ultimate issues, ultimate questions, historically worn strategies that people have developed to formulate their deepest wonders and wondering, to give voice to their most profound understanding of what matters, to reach beyond their daily concerns, to consider issues of sweeping gravity, to found their sense of normativity and ethics, to develop a moral compass with which to chart a navigable course through the trials and tribulations of mortal life, and in general to forge a sustaining intelligible count of what it is to live life significantly. Now that raises an obvious question. Is it possible to frame some of these insights in ways that are hypoallergenic to a contemporary scientifically trained sensibility?
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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23 Sometimes, I mean, to some extent I think it is, so I'm going to give it a shot. Here's one. I grew up in a kind of strange but nevertheless Christian tradition.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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25 And here's my three-word summary, my elevator speech of Christianity, that love trumps justice. There's more to Christianity than that, as I believe the introducer would admit, but when enriched with appropriate understandings of compassion, forgiveness, without watering down justice, understood in a way that doesn't underestimate the importance of other things, those three words don't do a bad job of summing up what at least I took from the Christianity I grew up with. What about God?
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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27 Well, that's not a word I use at all. If pressed, I would lean in the direction of Thierry de Chardin and towards something like God being the ground of being. Now, I've actually never read Thierry de Chardin.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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29 As I say, I'm not actually a religious scholar at all, so I don't really know what I'm talking about. But nevertheless, the point is that I take the conception of God of the people who write against religion in favor of science to be pretty much besides the point. And not only that, my sense is that the most religious people I know also tend to not take seriously the conception of God that is held by those that are arguing vociferously anti-religiously.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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31 I especially like a comment of Fergus Kerr, who is a religious scholar and devout Catholic priest in Edinburgh, who tends to say to people, tell me about this God you don't believe in. I suspect I don't believe in him either. So, what I tend to take God talk as being is something like a profoundly humble orientation to that which transcends human understanding.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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33 For surely that is a common theme throughout the religious traditions, whether theist or not. Not only of orientation to and deference towards, but also originary dependence on the ultimate, which is profoundly, inexorably, and unutterably beyond our grasp, our comprehension, and our words. I know that Allah is greater than I know him to be, says the muezzin.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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35 Or something that surpasses all understandings. The burning bush, right? You can't look God in the face.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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37 This sense that, it's kind of Browning to the max, that the world that constitutes us, the world into which we inhabit, is much bigger than what we normally mean by world. In fact, world might not be the best word to talk about it in terms of, maybe the totality or something. And that what there is in toto transcends us but deserves our attention in more ways than we can imagine.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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39 So that's kind of my sense of what that talk is about. What about the actual beliefs? Now, I can't answer about these beliefs except by telling a story.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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41 And this story, I have to acknowledge my father. I can't basically say anything about this topic without acknowledging my father. He had such a pervasive influence on me that I don't think...
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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43 I had a friend come to visit my parents once, someone I was going out with. And she said on the plane home, you didn't add much, did you? So anyway, so when I was 16, I came home and I said, look, I don't think I can be religious anymore because I don't believe all the things that they're telling me to believe.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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45 Now, my dad wasn't too easy to rebel against. He said, if they require you to say that you believe in things in the sense of assenting to the truth of this or that proposition, then you have to leave. Belief didn't originally mean that.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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47 It had to do with love. Credo meant give your heart. The idea that to be religious is to assent to propositions is a historically new idea, only a couple of hundred years old, which is fatal to what matters most about the religious traditions.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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49 There's just one problem, he said. If you reject the religious traditions, you're going to thereby lose the vocabulary in terms of which to talk to your closest friends about what matters most. So I said, what is it to be religious?
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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51 And he said, to find the world significant. So forget the stories, forget the fact of propositions, even my three-word fact of proposition about Christianity. And discard, too, the pernicious, the xenophobic, the blinkered.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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53 By no means do I think everything distilled in religious traditions is worthy of retention. And discard, too, the tribal. If I could get rid of one thing in the world, I would get rid of tribal sectarian allegiance.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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55 But instead, recognize that these traditions embody humanity's best understanding hewn through many centuries of our deepest insight to ultimacy, and ask the following question. How in the 21st century, in words that mesh without compromise with the very best in science, in words that don't violate our contemporary understanding of the world, in words that are progressive, inclusive, culturally sensitive, how in such words can we express, or at least make room for, wrestle with, coalesce our standings of, derive insights and wisdom from traditions, issues of maximal gravity, the things that matter most?
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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57 How are we going to deal with these issues? And then also, to bring this towards cognitive science, how can we recognize that reaching for such understanding of ultimacy, striving to understand it and to express such understanding, has been as fundamental a fact about the minds that we study as any in the history of the human race? Part two, science.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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59 That's it for religion. Science is shorter. I want to tell a just so story about the foundations of science.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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61 I'm going to run roughshod over Bacon and Locke and God knows who else. But still I think getting at something that matters about the scientific method. Now I said science is shorter, but it's more complicated than Christianity apparently, because the best elevator speech I could come up with was four words, not three.
dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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63 Defer to the world. Because I take it the fundamental project of science since the beginning has been to examine the world and to derive an understanding of the world from the world. An understanding of nature, or whatever you want to call it.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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65 Not from divine revelation, not from logical reflection, not from the authority of sages, but from that which is beyond us, towards which we are in fact directed. Figure the world out, and then try to test or verify or reproduce or validate or communicate or whatever your ideas to see that they're worthy as best you can. Come up with theories, whatever.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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67 But here's the bottom line, I think, about the scientific method. If words and world disagree, the world wins. Adjust your words.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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69 That makes it not like programming, and like some other parts of engineering. The motto of programming is, if worlds and word disagree, debug the world. Science isn't quite art either, it's not just the expression of a creative imagination inside.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
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71 I think it's an attempt to come to grips with that which is beyond us in the best way we can. Not only beyond us in the sense of outside of our own heads and mishigas, but beyond us in the sense of things we don't yet understand. Moreover, since the beginning, this sense of science, of sort of understanding that which is beyond, has been accompanied by a senses of magnitude and mystery and wonder and so on behind scientific discovery, especially in the beginning.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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73 Inspired by the microscope, if you look back, or the telescope. Certainly humility engendered by Copernicus, who de-centered us. Senses of vastness and inscrutability, the fact that even though we start to get a glimpse of what's going on, what it is that we don't understand tends to outstrip what we do understand by more and more and more, the more we look.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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75 Moreover, this sense of deference and mystery about that which is beyond our ken is not just restricted to the empirical. If you read Gödel's incompleteness results, or Turing's proof of the limits on computability, the humility of recognizing what's not accessible to human knowledge is just amazing. A long, long time ago, a hundred years ago, I went up this gravel road in the Yukon called the Camel Road up to the summit of the Mackenzie Mountains, and at the top, even though I had a four-wheel drive vehicle, you couldn't keep going because the road just disintegrated.
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77 But you stand on this ridge, and you look out, and there's the vastness of the Mackenzie Delta and the plains of Northwest Territories, and you're looking northwest, and you have this sense of, oh, goodness gracious, you know, if I started walking, the first person I might meet would be in Moscow. That's trivial compared to the sense of wonder that you get when you actually recognize what these theorems were doing. Now, some of you may be screaming.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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79 Certainly a lot of my graduate students would be screaming. What I've just described, they would say, is a culpable romantic fantasy about science, an imperialist conceit onto which science studies and feminist epistemology and post-colonial studies and critical theory and post-structural thought and a whole bunch of other parts of the university have heaped dollop after dollop of excoriating critique. All that happens in science, they assert, are contingent practices of knowledge production controlled by contestable regimes of power.
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81 All we do is circulate documents, maneuver professionally, position ourselves for funding, and so on. Now, I know all this, and we'll get there in a minute. But I think we have to understand more about this vision, because I think there is something in this founding vision to which these critiques are for a reason we'll come to understand constitutively blind.
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dfb9d3084275 DHA talk 2014, as transcribed by TranscribeMe/TurboScribe
Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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83 So go back to the emergence of this romantic conception of science. There's some evidence, I believe, although I'm not a historian of science either, actually there's nothing much that I actually am, so don't press me on anything. My sense at the end of the 19th century is there was a kind of arrogance that emerged that we would actually get a grasp on reality, that God wrote in mathematics, wrote the world in mathematics, and that a kind of total, if not totalizing, comprehension was actually within sight.
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85 But the 20th century dashed any such vain hopes. Far from being comprehensible, the world turned out to be stupefyingly incomprehensible, far more profoundly than anyone, except possibly religious mystics, could have possibly thought before then. Certainly there's nothing out there like the sort of ordinary furniture of the world that we think of, objects, properties, and relations and stuff.
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Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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87 But think about what else there is that in fact challenge not only our sense that what's out there is what we think in our ordinary mundane ontology, but that we're going to be able to ever figure out how our mundane ontology actually arises, given what's out there. Quantum mechanics not only defied our common sense conception of ontology, but it defied our sense of logic too, how you actually figure out what it is that quantum mechanics is in fact saying. Relativity, I mean quantum mechanics said down at the very small, it's stupefyingly incomprehensible.
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Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
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89 And relativity said things are really weird up top too, when it's big. And Wittgenstein said even if it wasn't weird at the bottom and it wasn't weird at the top, we shouldn't trust what's in the middle either. It's probably just excessive errors of philosophical language.
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91 And then you get the incompleteness of mathematics, which says we can't think about capturing anything. You would think that simple arithmetic would be something you could capture in a formal system, but nope, can't be done. Non-computability.
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92
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93 We write programs for computers, but there are facts about these programs that we want to know the answer to. We write the program. We can't figure those facts out.
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94
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95 And it's in principle that we can't figure them out. Chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics. More nails in the coffin of the enlightenment dream that we're going to actually be able to understand and predict what's going on out there.
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96
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97 The tiniest variation can affect gross properties of a system many years later. So basically the 20th century was in my book, or maybe on my webpage, I don't know if there are books anymore, was in my book a kind of lesson in humility over and over and over again about the adequacy of epistemology with respect to in fact the nature of the reality. So these things basically buttress the sense of humility that I think arose that underlie early science and also increased our sense of the vastness, the majesty, and the ultimate inscrutability of what's out there.
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98
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99 I don't know if any of you heard Pekka Senervo, who is Dean of Arts and Science here, gave a talk recently at Massey College on the Higgs boson. He was actually at CERN, part of this. And he was commenting about how the Higgs boson, his sense of the most important aspect of the Higgs boson is that it opens up a little bit of a glimpse of there being yet lower levels of physics about which we as yet have no clue, revealed in the fact that the strength of the interaction of the Higgs boson with various, with omega particles and God knows what, I don't know any physics either, it interacts at very different strengths. And physicists believe it can't be random, but nobody has a clue why. So Pekka was like at the top of the Mackenzie Mountains too, he'd say, yes, we've got to the Higgs boson, it's like the top of the mountain, look what's beyond.
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100
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101 Oops. I'm not an engineer. Okay so summary of science, the world is surpassingly strange and we are surpassingly small.
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102
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103 Okay part three, epistemology. Let's have another big topic. Let's start to move towards cognitive science.
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104
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105 Now cognitive science to some extent is science gone reflexive. If science is a process of reaching out and trying to understand what's out there, then cognitive science you would think should be a study of how it is that people or minds are able to reach out and try to understand what's out there. So the first thing I want to do is to talk a little bit about how people do that.
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106
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107 How do people understand? How is it that we can pay attention to the world? Reach out beyond our skins, to the stars, to the origin of the universe, to the bottom of a salt mine in Japan, to the insides of a quark, to things outside our light cone with which we are prohibited from ever having any causal interaction.
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108
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109 How is science possible and for that matter, how can I even reach out to you and think that you're there rather than just to the two-dimensional laminar surface off of which light waves are currently bouncing? How do I know you're a solid object, for example? In fact, how do I even know that you're there at all as opposed to being preoccupied by what's causally impinging upon me, which is a huge number of variations of electromagnetic radiations pounding on my retina?
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110
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111 Why am I not consumed with thinking that the world is very lighty because of all of this stuff that's impinging on me? The answer to this has to do with what words, meanings, thoughts, and theories are like, with reference and semantics and interpretation, with what philosophers call intentionality, but because it's a more familiar word today, I'm just going to call our epistemic capacities. This topic, as anyone who has been unfortunate enough to have to sit through my courses knows, is something that I go on endlessly about, about how even the simplest references reach out across the universe to land on and touch people to arbitrary patches and points of the world without having to do so by sending any causal signals.
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112
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113 Reference is amazing. Remember the AT&T ad, Reach Out and Touch Someone? I mean, reference does this.
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114
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115 AT&T never imagined how good reference is at this. I can refer to the flaking paint on the northwest corner of the examination room that Mother Teresa worked in, and boom, I'm referring to it. It's so mundane, our ability to think about the world and refer to the world, that it's almost impossible to understand how astounding an achievement it is, especially if you're a physicalist and you believe in the 1 over r-squared kind of causal limits of causal connection to the world.
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116
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117 And that's because reference isn't causal in any simple sense. The ray of directedness that I direct towards you when I refer to you is, it just bypasses, you know, it's transluminary, it doesn't take the speed of light. I can refer to the sun without it taking eight minutes to be referred to.
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118
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119 Or Andromeda, it doesn't take two and a half million years for the reference to succeed. I just refer to it right now. Moreover, as I also emphasize to students, the fact that reference, ordinarily thinking about things in the world, is not a causal fact, blocks you from being a billionaire.
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120
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121 Because if it were a causal fact, you could build the following iPhone app. You could build an iPhone app that people could have on their iPhones, which would cause the iPhone to beep anytime anybody thought about them. Even though there's a fact of the matter, right this very instant, as to whether your high school sweetheart is thinking about you, for example, not even the NSA can build a detector that could actually tell.
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122
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123 And I don't consider wiring up the universe with brainoscopes and sending everybody's brainwaves out on the Ethernet and so on and so forth, that's not an answer. There's a fact of the matter right this minute about whether your high school sweetheart is thinking about you. You just can't tell.
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124
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125 But the universe knows. That fact is there. So the most fundamental fact about words, thoughts, and other epistemic phenomena, I believe, is that without violating physicalism, so somehow, in virtue of our physical embodiment in the instrumental scaffolding and cultural embeddings and Lord knows what else, somehow our words and thoughts manage to establish these Brentano-esque, if you know about Brentano, arrows of intentional directedness to the outside world. And not only do we refer to the outside world, we try to figure it out. We try to get it right.
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126
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127 Both reference and truth, if you're a philosopher. Whether reference and truth are two things or one thing, I don't know, I'll buy you a pint if you're worried about that. But the point is that reference is deferential and description and understanding are deferential to what you refer to.
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128
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129 This is critical for ethics. You can't give an adequate account of the ethics of hate speech, I believe, unless you understand that what you are referring to, if you say pernicious things, isn't exhausted by your conception. Reference actually travels all the way to the person that you have said this heinous thing about, and it gets them, it actually gets to them.
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130
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131 That's why, in fact, it's heinous. If I think that there's an object somewhere, which is actually a person, and I said, hey you object, and it only got to the object because that was my conception, then I just wouldn't have been talking about anything. But I'm actually talking to a real person, and a real person is more than my words can actually grasp.
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132
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133 So epistemology, to put this into an elevator speech that would take up to the fifth or sixth floor to say, involves reference and truth and understanding of the world beyond your causal envelope. Somehow that's a possible fact about our epistemic capacities, and we are committed to doing justice, truth and right are in fact doing justice to that to which we aren't causally coupled. That's basically, I think, the most interesting fact about epistemology.
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134
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135 Okay, part four, cognitive science. I said a moment ago that you could imagine what cognitive science should be, is an enterprise in which, as intellectuals, we try to reach out and understand how it is that people or minds are able to reach out and try to understand the world. A project of semantic engines understanding semantic engines, if you're a Cog Sci student and ever at Hoagland.
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136
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137 That is, if my characterization holds water, then cognitive science could, with humility and awe, direct its deferential epistemic attention towards how all epistemic creatures defer in order to be able to be normatively and intentionally directed towards a world to which they're beholden but which outstrips their grasp. Now that's a conception of cognitive science that you could fit lots of familiar stuff into. Some mentioned this morning about the relationship between propositional and non-propositional attention and so on and so forth, about how you change propositional attention, about different kinds of knowing and so on and so forth, about the role of emotions.
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138
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139 But the point would be, you would understand them all as strategies for this kind of directedness towards what's, see I'm not directed towards what's causally near me, so I knock it apart. This kind of normative directedness towards that which is beyond what can causally impinge on us. Normative directedness such that you could be in a lead cell with walls ten feet thick and you would still be normatively directed towards what you were thinking about and the lead couldn't stop it.
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140
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141 So is that the cognitive science we have? No. Not at all.
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142
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143 And in fact the definition that Tom read this morning about the information processing one and also the thing he said, which I actually don't, I don't believe myself but I think he attributed me but I'm going to buy him a pint too, about studying the physical and That's a radically narrower conception of cognitive science. So how did cognitive science end up so narrow? I think there are at least three reasons, I'm going to mention three today.
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144
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145 First, natural science started out investigating the physical world, but natural science was never an attempt to study that part of the world in whatever way it was best studied, in whatever way it would get at its constitutive regularities. In the sense that were it to expand its compass it would change its methods so as to take on other parts of the world and understand them like politics or detente or I don't know, fidelity or something. So that it would change its methods to understand those things in the way in which you would do best to get at their constitutive regularities.
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146
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147 Science is not methodologically neutral that is. It was committed to the physical world ontologically but methodologically it was committed to, it wanted to come up with causal explanations of everything that came its way. And of course we discovered a great deal that can be explained in causal terms.
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148
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149 Science was a big success, more than Microsoft. And we're still fitting things into its compass. Most notably recently through evolution all kinds of other things.
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150
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151 But, it never let go of its commitment to causal explanations. And that is having a huge impact on cognitive science. I want to get at the impact that that fact has on cognitive science through computer science.
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152
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153 Because computer science is really interesting. I don't know where I am in my notes anymore but anyway. Here's what happened with computer science.
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154
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155 Towards the end of the 19th century, in the beginning of the 20th, the concerns of the rational tradition, not the empirical tradition, not the empiricist tradition, but the rationalist tradition got incorporated into science. Notions like language and data and interpretation and semantics and reference and syntax and identifier and so on and so forth. All these words which were part of logic.
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156
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157 And logic is constituted not as being causally explained. Logic is a system that relates its causal structures to that to which it is semantically oriented. So what did computer science do?
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158
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159 Here it's taken on this epistemological subject matter which can't be captured within causal terms. And tries to incorporate it into science.
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160
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161 What does computer science do? Here, it's taken on this epistemological subject matter, which can't be captured within causal terms, and tries to incorporate it into science. Now, there are two things they could do.
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162
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163 They could have said this. Look, we're taking on a new subject matter. Because of what we said about reference and truth, which are pretty big, important properties of this stuff, we can't understand our subject matter in causal terms.
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164
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165 We have to deal with it in terms of something like a form of relationality, which is non-reducible, non-causally efficacious. And even if they ultimately supervene on the global physical configuration of the world, nevertheless, their regularities can't be constitutively explained physically. So we have to do the following.
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166
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167 We have to change science. We have to change it in the way I suggested. We have to change it so that its methods do justice to the phenomenon that it's taking on.
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168
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169 And we're going to go on strike until the grand universal theory of Academy of Scientific Methods licenses us to let go of pledging allegiance just to causal explanations and gives us some more. And then we'll actually relax and do stuff. Now, of course, they didn't do that.
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170
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171 But they not only didn't do that, they did something perverse. They continued to call all of the things they were studying, language, and reference, and data, and variables, and interpretation, and semantics, and syntax, and identifiers, and information, and so on and so forth. But what they did is they changed the meaning of all the words.
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172
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173 So that now, in computer science, all those words have changed their meaning not to refer to the reach beyond the causal envelope in order to, in fact, be right and stuff. They've changed the words to mean causal, local things. So the net result is I can no longer give a talk in the computer science department, even though I have an appointment there.
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174
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175 Because I don't know anything about that either. I mean, that's what they think. Here's the problem.
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176
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177 If I try to talk about what I think is constitutively important about symbols, like their ability to refer to the world, and their truth, and their semantics, and representation, and all of this kind of stuff, they think the words mean what they think they mean. Because they've taken all those words and given them causal meanings, which means I have no more words. So it's not just my religious vocabulary.
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178
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179 I've lost, in computer science departments, I've lost my epistemological vocabulary too. OK, so that's the first reason that I think cognitive science is not the dream I dreamt a few moments ago, but has been restricted. It's that all of the epistemological vocabulary came into science through computer science and got hobbled down into a causal projection of it.
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180
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181 Kind of like a projection of the world onto the wall of the causal reductionist cave, in a certain sense. There's another reason, though, which is actually quite different. And this one comes not from something going on inside science, but something going on outside science, about science.
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182
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183 In particular, I mentioned that the 20th century was a century of sort of blow after blow of humility on the scientific imagination. But something else happened to science, which is that it grew increasingly clear that scientific take on the world isn't innocent. Language is not transparent, neutral, completely value-free, a pollucedly transparent pair of glasses through which we obtain a conceptual picture of how nature is.
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184
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185 Rather, issues of interest and practicality and funding and other cultural phenomenon, so on and so forth, inevitably intervene. Not only what we know, but how we know what we know, and the framing of the understanding we have of what it is that we've developed the knowledge of, and so on and so forth, is affected. It's culturally bound, and so on and so forth.
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186
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187 Lots of voices contributed to this, science studies and feminist epistemology and various other things I mentioned before. But the bottom line is that in nails we're driven in another coffin, not just the coffin that determinism equals predictability, but the coffin that, in fact, there's any such thing as a pure, objective, neutral, sort of value-free conception of science. Now, I don't think this last one is quite as much of a challenge to science.
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188
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189 I actually think most scientists I know would agree with it now. Nevertheless, though, science, I believe, in spite of recognizing that it's not culturally neutral, and so on and so forth, is still driven by a kind of epistemic deference to the world beyond. It's just a culturally bound, interest-relative kind of deference.
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190
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191 But anyway, I've lost my slides. Here's the problem. The problem is that the critiques of science, which have come out of STS and so on and so forth, don't allow science to continue to have epistemic deference to that which is beyond.
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192
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193 They've actually tried to do an epistemological deference altogether. And there's a reason for that. Why didn't they just say, look, we need a situated, local, kind of culturally dependent notion of epistemology?
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194
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195 They didn't. And the reason is actually the third thing I want to bring up as to why it is that this dream of a sort of epistemically open conception of cognitive science is not something we have. So here's the third reason.
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196
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197 It's something I call blanket materialism. And this, I think, is the gravest thing that's happening intellectually at all today. Possibly because of the success of science, the idea that we should restrict our attention to just those things that are causally explicable has taken root throughout the academy.
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198
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199 And it's no longer just ontologically, let's restrict our attention to things that are causally explicable. Nor is it, sorry, it's not a restriction to say, let's restrict our attention to obviously causal phenomena, or even let's restrict our attention to things that aren't obviously causal, but would come to the causal explanation. What's happened in my experience, especially among students, is that people have come to say, let's not just restrict our scientific theory rising, but our complete imagination of what exists, the things that are causal.
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200
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201 In other words, it's gone from being an ontological assumption and a methodological assumption to being a blanket metaphysical assumption. Anything that exists has to be able to be recorded on a video camera. Because if it is not recorded on a video camera, it must not exist.
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202
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203 And what could be recorded on a video camera are things that can in fact generate causal power. If I refer to Anna, if I'm thinking about it, if I refer to you, and you take a video camera down this aisle here, you won't see the reference. You won't see the reference, because reference is not a causal phenomenon in that way.
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204
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205 It just doesn't generate it. And you remember on the tour, and he says, look, I've taken this film of people putting labels into egg baskets on the edge of a desert. In Brazil or something like this.
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206
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207 And what do you see? You see lots of labels. You see people passing these egg crates around and stuff.
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208
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209 I don't see any reference. There's no such thing as semantic, because it's just not there on the video camera, right? It's all there are, patterns of passing egg crates around and so on and so forth.
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210
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211 But see, the problem is this critique has pledged allegiance to this metaphysical idea that if anything exists at all, it must have causal consequences. And I think that's fatal to epistemology and fatal to the mind and fatal to cognitive science. I have some riffs here about, for philosophers, on how blanket materialism is not the same as eliminative materialism or type reductionism or various other kinds of things.
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212
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213 So I'm not gonna worry about those right now. What I wanna say is that this kind of blanket materialism, well, I find it stunning. Now, maybe I'm just an old fogey.
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214
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215 I mean, I am kind of too old, but it's really interesting, because I talk to students about this. Maybe none of the ones who are here, of course, because you CASA students are all fabulous, but like some other students. And I will say, well, look, what's happening if you're the person you wanna go out with and they're high school best friends and stuff, and they're in Hawaii all week, and you're in a kind of complete anxious wreck, and you're wondering if your friend is actually thinking about you or not at all and stuff, and the person comes back and you say, well, look, do you think about me?
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216
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217 And the person says, well, there's no such thing as reference, but lots of things happen in my brain. You know, these symbols got passed around, and my acetylcholine went up, and this wire and I made 26 new neural connections, and so on and so forth. And you say, well, what are they about?
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218
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219 Well, there's no such thing as aboutness. You know, there's just causal bumping and shoving. Like, I mean, Prozac's a better approach.
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220
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221 I don't think you would be relaxed. But when I try to nevertheless convince people that reference isn't, in fact, a causally detectable phenomenon, people sort of think, well, no, that can't be right. It's got to be if it exists, and so therefore it can't be the subject of science, or it can't be the subject of intellectual inquiry at all.
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222
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223 So that's why people scream, I think, with my conception of science, and that's why the attacks on science aren't actually able to say, let's have a situated, culturally sensitive, you know, humanly modest kind of epistemology that is nevertheless recognizes the epistemic deference that, in fact, science and we have to that which is beyond us and that which is ultimate and stuff, because they're victims of blanket materialism, which has wiped anything about epistemology off the electoral map.
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224
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225 So, conclusion. You might be glad. Three morals in particular.
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226
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227 I have to be a little Christological since that's where I came from. First, science in its conduct and cognitive science in its subject matter should recognize two profound humilities, I believe. One, the world transcends us in our comprehension in more profound ways than we ever imagined, even if at the same time we recognize that that which transcendently and magnificently transcends us is what we are of, is what we're in, and is what we're directed towards.
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228
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229 Second, the ways we take the world, even if modestly and partially and so on and so forth, and through a glass darkly, are inevitably influenced by our local participation in the world. We don't escape our particularity, our modesty, our locally buffeted circumstances in order to view the world from without. Or to put this into an elevator speech, we're not all that's here, the fundamental truth of realism, but we are here, the fundamental truth of constructivism.
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230
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231 Moreover, we should recognize in our cognitive science that knowing these things, that we're not all that's here, and that we are here, and that our being here affects what we know about what we aren't, that which is beyond us, is constitutive of being a mind. Second, of course, again, both in our conduct and in our subject matter, we should recognize the deferential stance towards the world that undergirds all of epistemology. And we should recognize that epistemology is constitutive of mind.
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232
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233 And therefore, that the mind is a normatively laden, beholden relation, I mean, that mentality, being a mind, is a normatively laden, beholden relationship to the world, not something explicable in totally causal terms. Third, cognitive science, in particular, might take as their, our project something like this. To understand how creatures made of clay can not only be deferentially oriented towards that which transcends them, but also is how it is that such creatures made of clay have and do recognize that that towards which their deferential relation, that towards which they are deferentially related outstrips their own comprehension.
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234
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235 How do we know that there is more than we grasp? That seems to me a real candidate for a mark of mentality. So I just wanna close with one comment about this pesky term world that I've been talking about.
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236
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237 When science started, it may have been thought that it was restricted to the physical world. It wasn't obvious back then what relation that physically conceived or physically conceivable world bore to the totality of all that there is. It still isn't obvious.
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238
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239 Debates continue to rage and opinions to differ about whether mathematics and reason and logics and types and numbers and scientific laws and a parcel of other things are part of this world. And if so, in what sense? But two things seem to me clear for cognitive science.
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240
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241 First, it's hard to argue that our intellectual knowledge and perhaps our scientific knowledge should be restricted to part of the grand totality of everything that is. If for no other reason, we shouldn't think that it's restricted to part of what there is because nobody can any longer divide the world into two parts in any easy way. It was obvious for Descartes, he thought the mind wasn't spatially extended and the body was, and so that was fine.
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242
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243 Body could be understood by science. But suppose we exhumed Descartes and revived him, gave him a cup of coffee and said, look, do you realize that since you were last around, we have actually demonstrated that space and time are inexorably co-constituted. You thought the mind was temporal but not spatial.
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244
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245 That's not actually a logical possibility anymore. What do you think? Will you come talk at Utism 2016?
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246
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247 We should invite him. Moreover, if as cognitive sciences, we're studying minds and minds are epistemic entities, people are epistemic creatures who are in fact, normally beholden to and deferentially epistemically oriented towards anything at all. Then if we're gonna take the epistemic character of mind seriously, we have to be able to think about what it is that the minds we study are thinking about.
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248
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249 Our subject matter can't be narrower than the minds we're considering studying if we're to take on this dream. Because we won't understand what it is that that mind is doing, except with reference to that which it's about. So maybe other scientists can restrict their attention, but I don't think we can.
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250
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251 So by the world, I'm almost done. By the world, I think we have to mean everything that exists. Sometimes I call this in classes, I don't know if any of you have been in such classes, I call this TW, as an ambiguous acronym for the world, or for that which, in the sense of that which we refer to, that which exists, that which surpasses all understanding and so on and so forth.
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252
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253 But words aren't the point any more than the religious myths and stories were the point when we started. The point is that if we're gonna develop an epistemologically sound conception of an epistemologically drenched and oriented mind, which I think we're a long way from, then there's little in my mind that the religious traditions have wrestled with over the course of the centuries that we should not, as cognitive scientists, be wrestling with as well. Not just with minds being religious, though maybe we should study that as well.
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254
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255 But we have to understand what it is to wrestle with questions of ultimacy, because that's what we have to do. That's one of the things that is constitutive of our mentation. And needless to say, though I've been saying it all day, in order to do justice to that which matters most about the epistemic character of mind, we must thereby embody in our own conduct as practitioners of the new science and recognize as constitutive of our subject matter, because we understand the mind.
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256
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257 We must embody and understand deference to and humility in the face of and awe towards that which. All right, thank you.
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258
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259 [Audience Q&A follows, transcription to come]