A recent post by Scotty Hendricks on Bigthink platform (April 19, 2023) talks about four unsolved problems of philosophy. They are not the only unsolved questions, but they are foundational to how we understand the nexus of our minds and the world; and you don’t need to be a philosopher to think about them. (Spoiler alert: I don’t have all the answers, and some may be unanswerable).
What marks this quartet of philosophical problems is that, while resistant to broad consensus, they are nonetheless of enduring interest. Furthermore, they are accessible for lay reflection, if I may put it that way. What I mean is, thinking about them doesn’t require a background in philosophy or the use of academic terminology. (Both of these have their purposes, but freely wondering about philosophical questions isn’t one of them.) In other words, while essentially philosophical (as foundational questions tend to be) these questions go beyond academic philosophy.
In fact, we are all philosophers of a kind anyway (as I’ve argued extensively elsewhere). And we all – or at least, all but the most pitifully incurious among us – wonder about some of the basic questions of existence. Hence, it seems worth summarizing Hendricks’s ideas and sharing some thoughts of my own.
The first of the four questions is the notorious “hard problem”: What is consciousness, and what material state or states account for it? (Tom Stoppard wrote a play about it, aptly titled “The Hard Problem”). I’m stumped on this one, and I don’t think I’m alone. It would seem that consciousness has something to do with neural networks that function as a single system; but then, octopuses have brains in their arms as well as in their heads.
I’m inclined to agree with philosophers such as Thomas Nagel who believe the nature of consciousness is at least partly a scientific problem and so may ultimately be at least partly solvable. If it is also partly philosophical, then either a) it has no final answer or b) it means that to some extent we get to decide what we mean by “consciousness.” I vote for b), because on metaphysical questions pragmatism must prevail. And pragmatism must prevail because ultimately we have to suit ourselves in our understanding of the universe – not the gods, not the universe, just us chickens.
Alternatively, if the hard problem of consciousness is purely philosophical – i.e., If there are no material brain states that make what we call consciousness possible or necessary – then all bets are off. But that seems doubtful in the extreme. We know we have consciousness, and some other animals have it. We know we sometimes don’t have it (e.g., after fainting or losing a boxing match); and sometimes we have altered forms of it thanks to drugs or sleep, and sometimes we have partial or distorted access to the subconscious, which is a whole other ball of wax.
Does consciousness per se correlate with some particular physical feature or condition? Intuitively the answer would seem to be yes; but who knows? What we do know is that there is something we call consciousness, that it is more or less a single thing – whatever enables us to have thoughts and experiences and be selves; and that it occurs separately in every human and some other animal brains, causing us to have “minds.”
The second big question posed by Hendricks is a stumper: Why is there something rather than nothing? If you don’t think that’s a serious question, you may be right – but you just may be wrong. I take it seriously because, well, it vexes me. I think Question #2 is even more unanswerable than Question #1, because it lies entirely outside of science (as presently defined). We can study consciousness at some level; we can’t study being, but can only think about it, meaning it is almost certainly a philosophical and not a scientific question. Nature alone cannot tell us why nature exists.
Jim Holt, who is one of my favorite thinkers (and like me, an unlicensed philosopher) has written on the subject of why there is something and not nothing. His essay didn’t resolve the question for me, but it further convinced me that it’s one worth pondering. Is being, existence, the universe, or what have you, a “given”? If so, then the question becomes absurd. But on the other hand, if it isn’t a given, in the sense that an alternative can be imagined of non-existence or nothingness, the question “why is there something?” becomes important. What would nothingness be like? (The likely answer: it wouldn’t be “like”anything).
What we can be pretty sure of is that there is something. If I’m wrong about that, all bets are off. But I’m betting on something – and so are you. We have to assume being to go about our business and manage our email, just as we have to assume we have free will and a tiny bit of agency in the world. Even if all existence is a delusion, that delusion is something. Or am I missing something? So yes, there is something; the question is, is being contingent, or does there have to be being? If there’s being without consciousness – as in the early aeons of the universe – does “something” only come about when consciousness emerges? Or am I blurring two questions here?
The third problem that Hendricks explores is tame by comparison to those. It’s known as the “Ship of Theseus” question. I’ve also heard it referred to as “Davey Crockett’s Rifle.” In essence it is this: as parts are removed from some larger entity, some object or whole, when does it cease to be that entity and become something else? And what if those physical parts are reassembled elsewhere as a “new” object?
We could call Question #3 the “What’s What Problem.” I consider it less challenging than the previous two, by an order of magnitude in fact, but nontrivial; it’s basically a question that forces us to complicate our understanding of the concept of identity, which is foundational to all experience: to consciousness, to being, and so forth.
We need stable entities in the universe. But such complication is a good thing; positing complex identities – overlapping, evolving, family-resembling, or relating in other ways – expands our capacity to understand and describe reality. We need complex as well as simple identities; without them, we can be led to absurdities, or at least gross simplifications. And that is one of the things that philosophy can do: it can prevent or correct gross simplifications.
Take the statement “I am the same person I was when I was five years old.” This is not precisely the Ship of Theseus problem of parts being removed from wholes; but it’s clearly an identity problem of a related kind. The cells in my body have changed: they die, and new ones are born. But in a useful sense I have the same body I started with. So am I the same person? I’m compelled to say by way of an answer: In an important sense, yes; and in a more limited sense, both materially and in terms of my behavior, thinking, maturity, experiential memories, etc., no. I’m someone else.
You can take it from there. I am one person, but one who has changed over my lifetime; and Theseus’s ship is a certain identity formed by the bundle of “objects,” mostly pieces of wood, metal, rope or cloth, that comprise the original ship. That bundle also changes over time, and those constitutive objects have distinct identities of their own, which (at least in this example) do not change over time. That’s why we can individuate them as “objects.”
I don’t see this as a great metaphysical problem, because it can be resolved by carefully parsing our meanings. But that is something we need to do more often than not; and it is one way in which we are all philosophers. We’re philosophers because we have minds.
The fourth question Hendricks addresses is called “the demarcation problem” and it relates to the bounds of science. My inclination is to say: science is the pursuit of knowledge about nature: its parts, systems, relationships, and causation in the natural world (including humans of course). Science is about what we can in principle agree on, factually speaking, because we share the same physical world, even if we perceive it differently, and even if scientists disagree on how to interpret it. There’s only one nature, and when we study it, we are studying the same thing. It’s about what can be measured, counted, observed, compared, tested.
Whether or not this is an adequate definition, Question #4, like Question #3, is a problem of communication and understanding – of language and shared thought – not a problem about the essential nature of the universe per se. It’s not about something we may discover in the future, or something we may never discover because of our limited minds. It’s about how we parse reality. We can resolve it by being analytically rigorous, i.e., by being clear, explicit, making useful connections and distinction, and using consistent and plausible definitions.
There are other great and unresolved questions besides these four. A big one (see Chapter Twelve of Inside the Liberal Arts) concerns the nature of causation and causality, and why these are distinct but related problems. No real education, in STEM or the liberal arts, can leave out serious consideration of the metaphysical question of free will and determinism: which one predominates, or how they interrelate.
Another big question is about time: what it is, if anything; and if (as some physicists suggest) it isn’t anything, why do we need to imagine it? If time is a necessary illusion, what does the need for it say about human consciousness? Can something be both necessary and illusory? Maybe it’s just that our brains aren’t big enough to experience everything at once, so we need to celebrate our birthdays once a year.
Another big question is about the foundation of human morality Why do we have values relating to our conduct and that of others, and why do we have significant zones of both agreement and conflict on those moral principles? I will be reprising this question in future posts; and I discussed it in Chapter Fourteen of Inside the Liberal Arts. I also wrote about morality in a “ghost chapter” that was published as a separate essay titled “Critical Moral Thinking.”
How do we think? How do we act? What does it all mean? I’ve never been one to consider “the meaning of life” one of the core questions of philosophy. To me, philosophy is mainly about how to think deeply, broadly, and flexibly: mental yoga, you might say. But how to live rightly has been a core human question since the Greeks and earlier; and for all its proper focus on intellectual techniques, philosophy invariably raises these universal human questions.
Here’s one final metaphysical teaser. Ask yourself: Why me? Why am I a locus of consciousness, and not part of the vast nothingness of the universe? Is it a miracle, a logical necessity, a pointless question, a profound but unanswerable one, or an invitation to abandon philosophy for mysticism?
It doesn’t hurt to ask such questions if we aim to live fully. We are privileged that we can think about them, no matter where they lead; privileged that our natural curiosity, along with our need for clarity and flexibility of meaning, makes us philosophers. These paths of inquiry take us to the edge of what we can think, and most of us return from that abyss unscathed, or even exhilarated.