Philosophy – Todd Decker

Nature and Grace

τὰ γὰρ ἀόρατα αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ κτίσεως κόσμου τοῖς ποιήμασιν νοούμενα καθορᾶται, ἥ τε ἀΐδιος αὐτοῦ δύναμις καὶ θειότης (Romans 1:20)

ἐν αὐτῷ γὰρ ζῶμεν καὶ κινούμεθα καὶ ἐσμέν (Acts 17:28)

I enjoy learning how things work. This is often a professional task in my day job as a chemical engineer but this curiosity extends to pretty much everything I encounter. Part of learning how things work is conceptual or physical dissection, dividing a thing into simpler components, but crucially, a comprehensive understanding also requires parallel reassembly, understanding how the components fit and work together. To understand most comprehensively what a thing is requires looking at it in several ways and I marshal a heavy arsenal of varied methods. This includes religious ways of looking at things.

For a secular audience using religious methods of understanding would seem to require some justification. The justification I can give with most confidence is pragmatic, that many aspects of my world of experience, my lebenswelt, are simply more comprehensible with these methods than without them. Not all things of course. Empirical and mathematical methods work just fine for learning about the design of devices and manufacturing processes. But understanding other kinds of things requires other kinds of methods, like literary, artistic, and philosophical methods. What a thing is is often more than its physical makeup, though it is also that. Paintings and photographs are physical objects with no meaning in themselves. But as objects we interpret they are representations, which in a sense transcend their physicality. Similarly a musical composition is more than just a sequence of sounds, though at one level it is that as well. Roger Scruton calls this possibility of looking at things in different ways “cognitive dualism”. He contrasts this with ontological dualism, the view that there are different kinds of things. Cognitive dualism by contrast allows for multiple and similarly acceptable ways of looking at a single type of thing, a difference in perspective rather than in nature.

Objects of religious interest like existence, life, death, and personal identity all have non-religious interpretations that can work just fine in practice but I happen to find that religious interpretations add something to the others. I don’t consider different approaches to an object to be in competition with each other but to have complementary relationships. One criticism I have of scientism and overreaching naturalism is that they presume to exhaust all legitimate perspectives on an object, dispeling all others. Free will is debunked because decisions are physical neurological processes. God is expelled from nature because nature operates according to self-sufficient physical laws. Things are nothing other than what science and naturalism say they are. Mary Midgley called this kind of reductionism “nothing buttery”, the tendency to see a thing as nothing but one particular view of it. My approach is not to deny the empirical, scientific perspective. I view things in that way too. Rather my approach is to see things from additional perspectives, including religious perspectives. Yes, the thing is that, but it is also this.

In many cases this leads me to see God in precisely those places from where he is thought to have been dismissed, particularly in the natural world. I see the natural and supernatural as distinct but not separate. In this I take a side in a significant, if somewhat technical theological debate within the Christian tradition. The direct focus of the debate is between realism and nominalism, which to explain with some simplification is basically a debate over the nature of abstractions (“universals” in medieval terminology), whether they have independent reality or whether they are useful fictions.

In a Platonic or Neo-Platonic conception of reality the physical world is patterned after and governed by a higher order populated by eternally existing universals or forms (εἶδος). Examples could be mathematical and physical laws. In the Christian Platonism these forms subsist in the mind of God. Because this higher order is, at least in principle, comprehensible the mind and nature of God are also comprehensible. Significantly nature, by being patterned after a higher order, is itself ordered and rational. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) understood this connection to be an operation of God’s grace in the created order. Nature is continually driven and directed by God’s power. And so to observe nature is also to see God’s hand in it. Paul of Tarsus, no stranger to Hellenistic thought, expressed this affinity between Gentile and Judaic ideas. For example he said of the Gentiles in his letter to the Romans that “ever since the creation of the world his [God’s] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Romans 1:20). He also taught the people of Athens that God infused nature with life, quoting the Greek poets as saying, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

William of Ockham (1280-1349) dispensed with universals in his metaphysics and in his theology saw God as much further removed from nature, unknowable, and unpredictable. This had important implications for Christian ideas about judgment and salvation that carried into the Protestant Reformation centuries later. In an application of his famous “razor” Ockham dispensed with the forms populating the higher order of reality as entities that had been multiplied beyond necessity. One benefit of this move in Ockham’s view was to make God absolutely free. Nature is not ultimately governed nor ordered by eternal law but by God’s pure will. God can change anything in nature as he sees fit and can make things opposite of what they are. Because of this it is not possible to learn anything essential about God by observing nature. God becomes more inscrutable, known through scripture alone.

As I said, I take a side in this theological debate on the side of Aquinas and the realists. There are various reasons for this but among them is a Christian sentiment that God is intimately involved in the world. I find this more satisfying both spiritually and intellectually. Admittedly that’s not a solid rational argument but it makes more sense to me. One implication of this is that I see the demystifying, debunking, and secularizing impulses of naturalism and scientism around any natural phenomena rather unthreatening to a religious perspective of the same phenomena. Because God’s grace is observable in the operations of the natural order any greater understanding of the natural order by science in no way displaces God. It is rather a fuller description of God’s activities in nature, one that is more comprehensible to a particular form of human understanding.

I think evolution is a good example of this. Historically no scientific idea has been more threatening to religious people because it provides a way to think about life developing in nature without God. But I think this was only a threat because of a historically contingent intellectual climate in which, centuries after Ockham, it was even possible to think of nature as a whole operating independent of God. David Bentley Hart has argued that the theory of evolution would likely not have bothered ancient and medieval theologians at all had they known about it because in their view any operation in nature is also an operation of God’s grace. They may have simply seen evolution as “the natural unfolding of the rational principles of creation into forms primordially enfolded within the indwelling rational order of things.” In other words, if evolution proceeds by natural selection according to a predictable algorithm, to use Daniel Dennett’s characterization, this is simply the Platonic conception of nature following after the pattern of a higher governing order.

Because I see God and nature so closely related I don’t find certain views of the creationist or intelligent design movements especially compelling or necessary. You could say that I do subscribe to intelligent design in the most general sense of God being active in evolution, since God is active in all of nature and evolution is part of nature. But I don’t see a need to look for gaps in the fossil record or instances of irreducible complexity in molecular biology to carve out a space for God. There’s no need to carve out a space for God because God infuses the whole process from start to finish. Certainly there are gaps in the fossil record and instances of complexity in molecular biology that we can’t explain. But I believe these are simply instances of incomplete knowledge of the process rather than actual gaps in the process itself. For my aesthetic taste I hope that is the case. I would find the divine design of a seamless process that did not require periodic interruptions and fixes much more elegant.

I’m similarly unperturbed by neuroscientific descriptions of mental experiences and find “eliminative” interpretations of them quite unpersuasive. In an eliminative view, physical descriptions of our mental experiences eliminate the need for common-sense notions of mental experiences like fear, belief, anxiety, and desire, dispensing with these concepts as superfluous “folk psychology”. I find it improbable and impractical that one way of interpreting something, even if it is empirical and quantitative, should eliminate the utility and possibility of interpreting in other ways, especially ways that are primary to experience. I don’t know if concepts like fear and desire will be useful in the future of neuroscience but they are certainly useful in many other domains, especially in daily life.

The most inviting target for a naturalistic perspective of the brain is the soul. Do we have souls? Eliminativists and presumably many religious people must have a much more fragile understanding of what a soul is than I do because I cannot imagine what it would even mean for people not to have souls. I understand a soul to be the totality of the organism, its substance and its activities. At first glance this may seem to claim very little. If this is all a soul is then of course we have souls. Souls are what we are. But I maintain that on more thorough reflection the totality of the organism and its activities, particularly the human organism, is an incomprehensibly remarkable entity and that the soul, even understood in so seemingly minimal a way is just as miraculous as whatever maximal conception one might have of it. One need not refer to religious ideas to appreciate this. Two “problems” in the philosophy of mind will suffice. The first, “easy” problem of consciousness is the project to give thorough physical descriptions of the processes in the brain that produce conscious experiences. The easiness of this first problem is only easy relative to the second because it is quite difficult relative to current scientific capabilities. The brain is fantastically complex and the more I study neuroscience the more I come to see how far we are from understanding it as a physical system. Still, I can imagine it being solved eventually. The second, “hard” problem of consciousness is a more fundamental philosophical problem of how the physical material of the brain produces first-person, self-conscious experience, which would seem to be something immaterial. I cannot even imagine how this explanatory problem could be solved, even though the process it concerns obviously takes place.

From a religious perspective the soul has a spiritual origin and I find that perspective a perfectly adequate account for it. As in the case of many other things for me a religious perspective of the soul, of the totality of the organism, adds something to it, a certain way of seeing our connection to all things. The soul, as a part of nature, is not thereby separate from God or anything spiritual because in my theology God and nature are intimately connected through grace. God’s creative activity in nature coincides with his animating, life-giving activity that produces our souls. The Bible gives a sublime narrative and symbolic illustration of this. God breathed into the nostrils of man the breath of life and he became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). The breath or spirit of God is an important creative force in biblical text. On the first day of creation God’s breath or spirit moved or brooded upon the face of the chaos of primordial waters prior to bringing order to them (Genesis 1:2). Just as God infuses all nature, governing and directing it, God’s spirit inspires and animates all life. I find this a significant perspective to consider as a synthesis of all the information we might gather about the universe and ourselves. It all weaves together into a coherent whole and we are connected to all things in God.

Indirect Methods, Knowing by Their Fruits

ἀπὸ τῶν καρπῶν αὐτῶν ἐπιγνώσεσθε αὐτούς.
– Matthew 7:16

When Jesus warned about false prophets he taught that people could know them by their fruits. Because important features of things and people are not always apparent at an observable surface level appearances can be deceiving. False prophets can come in sheep’s clothing but inwardly be ravening wolves. A tree that appears good may be corrupt. But these inner qualities are not directly accessible for us to evaluate, so we need indirect methods. I believe this practice of using indirect methods is generalizable to many areas of knowledge. It may be frustrating to lack direct access to things we want to understand or disappointing to realize that what we thought we knew directly is actually indirectly mediated. But I don’t think we need to be frustrated or disappointed with having to know things in indirect ways. Instead, it’s helpful to realize and accept that this is just how knowledge works and that understanding these indirect methods can help us to be better knowers.

We might imagine that this kind of indirect access to things, knowing things by their fruits, is some kind of low-grade concession appropriate to dubious things like religion but not necessary in the firmer fields of the sciences. But the sciences are no exception and do not bypass indirect methods. In fact indirect methods are especially important in the sciences. Something I admire about scientists is that they have to be very clever to get at their targets of interest. They cannot simply watch nature passively as casual observers and read off its features but must, as Francis Bacon put it, contrive experiments that compel nature to give up its secrets. Scientists are always trying to dig deeper to understand the hidden structures and laws that govern what we observe. Getting at these hidden structures requires some skillful means because they are not the kinds of things that can be seen in the usual way. We have to see them indirectly.

Often the best way to see something unobserved is to correlate it with something more readily observable. Chemistry uses many such analytical methods. Flame color correlates with the presence of certain metals and organic functional groups. Chemists have an array of methods correlating molecular structure to observable responses like infrared absorption (IR spectroscopy), ion magnetic deflection (mass spectrometry), and radiation absorption at different magnetic field strengths (NMR spectroscopy). We might imagine from the ball-and-stick drawings of molecules we see in textbooks that this is something primary, like what scientists first see when they look at molecules. But these are models, simplified representations that help us to think about and summarize experimental findings, even allowing us to ignore the experimental procedures used to generate these pictures. But a more thorough understanding of the science pays attention to our methods of knowing. For example, the analytic methods mentioned make use of theories of bond energy, electric charge, magnetic force, and magnetic field, all of which are necessary for a thorough understanding of organic chemistry. The lines on a spectrum that a device generates are meaningless without these interpretative concepts. Philosophers of science say these things are theory-laden.

We might see this as yet more bad news. Not only are we cut off from direct access to things as they are but our indirect methods require interpretative methods that carry even more baggage. First we couldn’t know the tree directly but needed to know it by its fruit. Now on top of that we can’t just consider of the fruit in isolation but need an entire discipline of husbandry or culinary sense of taste. These are the kinds of constraints that the modern philosophical project strove to avoid. Let’s work out a system that doesn’t depend on any tradition or culture, something that will be universal and independent of those kinds of particular constraints. I’m not convinced that that is possible and that has basically been the conclusion of the postmodern critique, though I don’t see it is as so devastating a critique as it might be thought to be.

That science has a tradition was the theory of Thomas Kuhn in his infamous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. These aren’t traditions bound to particular locations, nationalities, or ethnicities but traditions of thought, collections of accepted practices and theories. Kuhn proposed that scientists usually operated under a consensus of basic theoretical assumptions, like Newtonian mechanics, and tend to explain deviations in ways that preserve the theory. But there are sometimes periods of revolution that upend the theory and transform the tradition, as with relativity and quantum mechanics. Willard Van Orman Quine also challenged the tradition-free aspirations of logical empiricism in his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. The second of the dogmas he challenged was empiricism’s reductionism, the idea that a single statement can be meaningful in isolation. Instead Quine argued that all scientific statements are interconnected, a theory of holism rather than reductionism.

Another interesting attempt to cut free from tradition was in moral philosophy, what Alasdair MacIntyre called the Enlightenment project in his book After Virtue. MacIntyre reviews the moral philosophies of Hume, Diderot, and Kant, charging that each, in their attempt to produce an ethical system from first principles all-too-coincidentally managed to reproduce the norms endemic to their native cultures. MacIntyre argues that this Enlightenment project had to fail because morality depends not only on human nature but on a tradition’s teleological conception of what a human person is to be. Traditions have narratives that define a person’s development in that tradition. These narratives are so engrained that, like Hume, Diderot, and Kant, we might be led to think they would be the natural outcome of any free-thinking, enlightened person. But on closer inspection we find that our moral reasoning depends somewhere either on arbitrary preferences or a traditional narrative.

There have been similar impulses to liberate religious ideas from particular traditions and from scripture. In the sixteenth century this took the form of a rationalistic natural religion, as in deism. In the eighteenth century this took a more experiential, emotional turn in liberal Christianity, notably in the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. These movements had multiple counter-reactions but one of special interest to me is the tradition-embracing postliberal theology of George Lindbeck in his book The Nature of Doctrine. I was introduced to postliberal theology by one of Lindbeck’s students, Phillip Cary. Postliberal theology grants the postmodern critique of modern philosophy, that knowledge and meaning are not possible independent of some kind of tradition. So postliberal theology enthusiastically embraces dependence on Christian tradition and the Bible.

I find indirect methods interesting in all these areas – science, ethics, and religion – but most especially in religion. Maybe that’s because I see religion as most ultimate and extensive in its scope and concerns. Going back to the initial problem of direct versus indirect access it is quite apparent that the big religious questions elude direct access. Mysticism may be a form of direct, personal access but it also seems to be ineffable, so we can’t say too much about it. Communicable religious ideas and practices seem to acknowledge and embrace the hiddenness and mystery. The Hebrew Bible notably forbids images of God. The Bible frequently speaks in myth and parable. Its many rituals seem to indicate that the language of God is the language of symbolism and that if we are to approach God it is to be on these terms.

Why should it be this way? In a sense it is not surprising if God is the ultimate of all things. If the more immediate and tangible matters of science require indirect approaches through scientific models how much more symbolic and parabolic will religious approaches to God need to be? Still it seems that God is to be accessible to everyone, not just through elite religious adepts. This may make symbolism and ritual all the more necessary. Most people don’t approach scientific theories in the most precise and rigorous form of highly mathematical expression but instead through simplified models that nevertheless convey much of the essential intuition of the theories. God may not be comprehensible directly but through indirect religious methods one may encounter God in other ways, as one encounters Christ in a piece of bread or cup of wine.

The perspective I want to promote is to see indirect methods not as stumbling blocks but as stepping stones, in all areas where they are applied, including in science but especially in religion. The parables, commandments, and rituals of Christian practice are not smokescreens that obscure the face of God, or worse an unreal delusion. Rather the parables, commandments, and rituals are the means of access; they are our way in. Baptism is a renewal of life. The eucharist is an encounter with and internalization of God. The cross is a sign of God’s self-giving love and saving act for all people.

Atheism in the Service of Theology

I find atheism quite fascinating. It’s not an outlook I’ve ever been able to stick with seriously for various reasons but I like to follow the conversations to see what’s being discussed. It’s theologically interesting to consider what it might mean for atheism to be true, what implications would follow. Such speculations can show in relief the nature of the deity they deny, something of central theological interest. As with religion it’s important to consider that atheism is not one thing but that there are rather many forms of atheism, a variety that makes its study all the more theologically fruitful.

I think I had an unarticulated sense before that there were many forms of atheism but I was pleased to see this idea fleshed out in detail in John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism, published in 2018. Gray is an atheist but rather sectarian, having strong preferences for only a few select forms of atheism over several forms that he finds untenable. I divide up the possible types of atheism into different categories than the ones Gray uses but I nevertheless appreciate his general approach of making these distinctions. I like to organize forms of atheism and theism into complementary pairs, each sharing a similar conception of God that they either deny or affirm.

One form of atheism I find denies a conception of God as master craftsman, what Plato called a demiurge. This is a kind of scientific atheism that sees God as an explanatory hypothesis in competition with modern science, modern science understood here popularly as a kind of canonical set of laws and theories, as opposed to the technical meaning of a general method of empirical enquiry. To prefer the “God hypothesis”, as Victor Stenger called it, is to reject competing scientific hypotheses that have been confirmed by mass experimental evidence. I actually find the claims of this type of atheism rather modest. The world does not look much different today whether this craftsman God exists or not. It just has different origins. There’s no difference in observed reality, just different hypotheses for the origin and cause of its various features. The corresponding theism, belief in God as master craftsman, may be part of many people’s religion. Creationism and intelligent design see God as master craftsman. But most people’s religion is also much more than this and may not even include it or give it much attention. Allegorical interpretations of religious stories have been common for centuries among religious adherents. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden isn’t necessarily a competing hypothesis about human origins. Consistent with the indistinguishable universe that follows from either atheism or theism of this sort, religious believers with alternative or expanded forms of theism may completely accept many or all of the scientific explanations of observable reality without compromising anything. That’s another reason why this type of atheism seems to me quite modest.

Other forms of atheism are kinds of morally-focused atheisms and I see these taking two forms. In one form God is a superfluous law-giver, superfluous because we can derive moral law without God. Moral law and moral progress are real in this view but transcend God and even contradict what God is believed to have decreed. This makes it possible to condemn atrocities committed in the service of religion throughout history. This atheism would take the side of the Euthyphro Dilemma, proposed by Plato, that the gods love what is good because it is good independent of them and not that the gods make things good simply by saying so. There is something transcendent beyond God that grounds morality. This form of atheism makes space for something that would seem supernatural, though naturalized by other names. I still find this form of moral atheism quit modest because the moral world looks very similar to the moral world of theism, though with differences in the specific moral laws.

A more significant form of moral atheism is one that dispenses with moral law altogether, an amoral atheism. Here the moral worlds of atheism and theism look very different. Atheists accepting this form of amoral atheism may still behave in ways that would be considered moral. But there would be no moral fact of the matter, no real right or wrong. There might still be a sense of right and wrong as social convention but it would be of a different ontological category. I don’t find this form of atheism discussed as much though people might take it for granted and acknowledge it when pressed. Richard Rorty is one thinker who has explored this outlook quite thoroughly. Rorty defends liberalism and human rights but without recourse to any ultimate grounds of justification. Promulgating such Western values is a benign form of chauvinism, something other parties in the modern clash of cultures, such as China and Middle Eastern states, would agree with but view less favorably as unwelcome Western imperialism. I find the Rortian outlook quite fascinating and even attractive, especially in some climates of absolutist hyper-moralism that start to get exhausting. But it’s worth stressing some of the jarring implications of this. In an amoral world slavery and mass murder are not morally wrong from any absolute perspective. We can deplore them, declare them immoral in our own adopted morals, and make laws against them. But there’s no fact of the matter beyond that.

The complementary form of theism that amoral atheism denies grounds morality in God. This could be as a matter of divine fiat, as proposed by William of Ockham and divine command theory, or as something essential to God’s nature: God is good, as a fundamental axiom. Theists can appeal to the natural sense people have that there really are things that just are right and wrong to make the case that this moral reality has a transcendent origin. If the view that mass murder is no more immoral from an absolute perspective than selfless love seems implausible it undermines the plausibility of amoral atheism. Non-theists may object that a person doesn’t have to believe in God to be moral but that isn’t quite the same issue. It’s not a matter of whether belief in God leads to moral or immoral actions but whether God’s existence is necessary to make anything moral or immoral in fact, regardless of people’s beliefs. Again, the difference between atheism and theism here, what the world is actually like, seems significant.

One form of theism that, to its credit, would seem to have no possible complementary atheism is God as being itself, or Being with a capital B. This is the God of classical theism, sometimes called the God of the philosophers. David Bentley Hart gives an excellent overview of this classical theism in The Experience of God in which he sets out “simply to offer a definition of the word ‘God’”. One way I like to wrap my head around this ontological conception of God is to imagine, or try to imagine, what it would mean for this God not to exist. This is a God whose nonexistence would entail the nonexistence of everything else. If this God does not exist, nothing exists. And it’s important to be clear what this means. It’s not entirely clear, to me at least, what else about the nature of God follows from this, or if it overlaps with anything that religions have traditionally said about God. I think it does but it’s not obvious. The only thing immediately apparent here is that there is something underlying all of this, all reality. That could simply be the brute fact of the universe itself, basically pantheism, or something more than that, which I find more plausible. But if this is the most basic definition of God the difference between theists and atheists may amount to a preference of language, theists preferring traditionally and historically loaded terms like God, Brahman, and Dao, and atheists preferring more secular language like Immanuel Kant’s noumena, or just shelving the matter as something indulgently metaphysical and unscientific. For my part I accept the classical understanding of God, with a lot of contingent, scriptural features added on. That the personal God with whom I have an intimate relationship of love and trust is identical to the ground of all being is something that fills me with awe and reverence. I think awe and wonder in the face of the ultimate mystery behind all things is something available to anyone, regardless of their religious beliefs. But combining that with the intimacy and love fitting a personal God comes after the fact of accepting a particular religious narrative and doesn’t seem to be derivable or provable from metaphysical reflection alone.

The last complementary set I consider may be one of convergence in mysticism, where atheistic and theistic complements do not differ all that substantially, particularly in their practice if not in belief. I wouldn’t have considered this convergence until I read Gray’s book but I find it quite interesting. He proposes that “some of the most radical forms of atheism may in the end be not so different from some mystical varieties of religion”. This may be one of those cases where opposite directions on a curved linear spectrum wrap around and meet again. Mysticism isn’t a form of religious practice I adopt yet myself but it feels like something I might save for retirement when I’ve retreated to a tranquil villa somewhere. Mysticism has competing definitions but I think of it as direct, relational encounter. In religious mysticism this is direct and immediate communion with God at a personal level. A relationship with any person who is not me holds unbridgeable mystery but to recognize this and to see another person as another person with their own consciousness and perspective is to see them more profoundly than in any other way. The mystery and the intimate knowledge coexist and reinforce each other. There’s a kind of factual unknowing in this new way of relational knowing that coincides, if not with atheism then with an agnosticism that’s open to the ultimate mystery of reality. That’s one reason it seems particularly fitting for old age, after I’ve have figured out how much I don’t know.

Imagination and Reality in Borges’s “The Circular Ruins”

You are enrolled in a class with the highest of stakes. The payoff for success is your existence. Or so it seems. This is a classroom conjured up, along with you and all its other pupils, in the imagination of the man in the circular ruins. Like many of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories, “The Circular Ruins” explores the boundary between imagination and reality. How much of what we perceive as reality is the product of imagination? And what kind of reality do the objects of our imagination have? What is the nature of the boundary between imagination and reality?

The man in the circular ruins is preoccupied with one great task: “He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality.” What an audacious task! There would seem to be an immense ontological gulf between these two categories. Reality is the realm where things exist independent of our imagination. Objects in the real world actually have mass and extension in space. The tree falls in the forest whether anyone is there to hear it or not. But imagination is a realm fully dependent on the mind. Our dreams don’t actually exist. How can these dreams possibly pass from the imagination into reality?

But maybe the divide isn’t as sharp as it seems. The tree falling in the forest is the classic, overused and parodied example of the dependence of certain phenomena on a perceiving subject. Does it make a sound without anyone there to hear it? There are vibrations in the surrounding air but these noumena would not become the phenomena of sound to any person because sound is an experience, a quale of a conscious subject. What we perceive as the real world is composed of such qualia and that’s our only way of perceiving it. In other words we only experience reality through our imagination.

From the other side, artifacts like tools, art, music, and literature begin as dreams in the imagination. Through a creative process we give these objects physical form in the real world. A sculpture takes form in stone, a musical composition takes form in thermal energy, a painting takes form in the arrangement of pigments on a canvas. Even then these physical objects require the imagination of the perceiving subject to be understood as more than just objects occupying space, to be perceived as art and artifacts. The dreams of imagination and objects of the physical world overlap.

An eccentric but intriguing idea thrown around among the cognoscenti these days is the possibility that our universe is actually a simulation created by intelligent life in some “higher” universe. What would that make us? Does that mean we don’t live in the “real” world? Borges explores a similar concern in “The Circular Ruins” but in a less technological guise. His version of a simulation is the dream. If you are a subject in someone else’s dream what kind of existence do you really have? One way to collapse the problem is to say that to be the kind of being who can even ask such a question, to be anxious about the nature of your own existence, is to exist in the most significant sense already. Once you are a self-aware entity who can worry about your own existence you simply do exist, in the most meaningful sense. What more could be added to that to make your existence real?

This Borgesian idealism is explored in many of his other works, most explicitly in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which Borges refers to the idealist thought of George Berkeley. A classic problem of modern philosophy is what could be called either the hard problem of consciousness or the hard problem of matter, depending on how you approach it. How does our seemingly non-physical consciousness interact with the physical world? The more popular route is to reduce or eliminate consciousness to the material so that there is no more troublesome dualism. The seemingly non-physical aspects of consciousness are illusory, epiphenomena, useful fictions, etc. Another route, taken up be Berkeley is to dispense with the notion of matter instead, to see mind as primary and view matter as the useful fiction. In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” Borges imagines a world in which people take Berkeley’s idea seriously, in a kind of reductio ad absurdum, to the point that they speak in a language lacking nouns.

Among the entities in the dreams of the man in the circular ruins there seems to be a spectrum of autonomy. Some of his dreamed up entities do no more than parrot his instruction while others challenge him and demonstrate capacity for independent thought. He sees this as a key criterion for assessing their worthiness to be instantiated in reality. “He could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him.” Borges makes the intriguing statement that the more autonomous of his dreamed entities “preexistían“; they “pre-existed to a slightly greater degree”. In other words the self-aware ideas in this idealism have some kind of independent existence that the man in the circular ruins apprehends in his imagination. The more autonomous of his dreams are not fully his own creation but existed in some ideal form prior to his dreaming of them.

Where did these ideas come from before he imagined them? One answer available in Borges’s universe is that they existed in “The Library of Babel”, another of Borges’s short stories and probably his most famous. One way to think of the Library of Babel is as a reified, physical instantiation of platonic forms as texts in a library. The library is filled with books of every possible combination of characters. In Borges’s library the books are limited to a certain set and number of characters. But it’s possible to throw out that constraint and imagine a library of infinite possibility where every possible combination of characters is produced in some book somewhere in the library. This would mean that anything you could possibly dream would simply be a reflection of some book somewhere in the Library of Babel. Everything pre-exists there. But crucially, most of the books are absolute nonsense. Hidden among the nonsense there are books with intelligible, meaningful text. But the share of meaningful text in the Library of Babel is infinitesimal.

The autonomous entities dreamed up by the man in the circular ruins, who are able to oppose him, would seem to have a special kind of character that enables them to act independently. They are among the infinite number though infinitesimal portion of books in the Library of Babel with sufficient complexity and coherent structure to endow them with consciousness and self-awareness. What then does it take to impose these entities onto reality? If they pre-existed and already have some kind of independent capacity for thought and anxiety over their own existence what more could be added to make them real? What is it that breathes fire into them to make them living souls?

Steven Hawking asked a similar question of the mathematical structure of the universe. “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a Universe for them to describe?” Max Tegmark posits something analogous to the Library of Babel in abstract space, an infinite library of “mathematical structures” of every possible form, one of which is our own universe. What breathes fire into a mathematical structure and endows it with physical existence are “self-aware substructures” inside the mathematical structure that perceive elements of the structure as physical reality. In other words, the presence of self-aware entities creates what they perceive as physical reality. Nothing more is required than this condition of self-awareness.

The man in the circular ruins labors countless hours to dream a man in the most minute detail. To endow this man with physical existence he must make special supplication to the deities of the ruins. But what is it that the deities can do to make the man more real than he already is? There seems to be one crucial step. Before supplicating the deities “He dreamed an entire man – a young man, but who did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after night, the man dreamt him asleep.” After he makes his request to the deities “In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.” This awakening is the crucial step. There’s no clothing in earth or matter. It’s simply the awakening of self-awareness. At that point the dreamed one is imposed on reality.

The deities eventually require that the dreamed one be sent off to another temple to repeat the same task as the man in the circular ruins, to create a man of his own. But the man worries that the dreamed one will discover that he is a dream. To all other men the dreamed one appears as a man like any other. Only fire knows his true nature and only fire can reveal it: fire will not consume him. The story concludes when fires approach the circular ruins and the man, having completed his life’s work, submits himself to the flames but then discovers that they do not consume him and that he is himself someone else’s dream. What does this mean for his existence? Is he any less real because someone else is dreaming him? What if the one who is dreaming him is also someone else’s dream and so on, as Borges implies?

What seems crucial in this story is that the capacity for imagination is its own reality. To be the kind of thing that can imagine and be self-aware is already to exist and nothing more is required to breathe life into it. Speculations about our universe as a simulation include the idea that we are several layers below “base reality”. That our simulators are part of a simulation whose simulators are also part of a simulation and so on up to base reality. But what would distinguish this base reality from any other simulated reality? In what sense would entities in that base reality exist that we do not? What is it that makes their physical reality more real than ours? Certainly there would be a difference of some kind but it wouldn’t seem to be a difference in the nature of our self-awareness. That would seem to be the same in all levels of reality.

It may just be that we are the dreamers, dreaming ourselves into existence. If the idea of the conscious self is a useful fiction it is certainly quite useful indeed. Perceptions are undoubtedly occurring and it’s much easier for these perceptions to have some single, stable reference point to give them continuous and coherent structure.

The problem of course is that this is viciously circular. How can an entity dream itself into existence as unified prior to its unification? Some form of pre-existence seems to be necessary, on some kind of stable substrate from the outside. If the universe is a simulation the information content of our self-aware substructures subsists in this simulation. In traditional Christianity, supplemented by Neoplatonic thought, we subsist as ideas in the mind of God. And in Borges’s universe these same ideas subsist as books on the shelves of the Library of Babel. In the end the differences between these metaphors are perhaps less significant than their similarities. Among the books stacked in the shelves of the Library of Babel some infinitesimal but infinite number will have the complexity and coherence to dream and dream of themselves as living souls.