The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation - Chapter 9: A New Epistemic Deal
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Mind and Cosmos is an attempt to blaze a trail towards a coherent, intelligible systematic account of the natural order that includes consciousness. To achieve this, Thomas Nagel believes we will need to identify more than just one unique example of a teleological process (psychegenesis), in the hope of finding teleological laws of nature that operate universally. According to his own definitions, to qualify as natural rather than intentional, these processes must not be driven by the will of a conscious being. I doubt that it is possible to complete Nagel’s project on his terms. I am also skeptical that either that specific process, or any others for which we can assemble any objective evidence, will turn out to be reducible to teleological laws of nature that can be universally applied.
However, I also believe that there will always be people who are instinctively of a naturalistic persuasion, and that those people and their way of thinking must have a legitimate place in a cultural movement towards a Westernised form of ecocivilisation. We certainly cannot expect naturalists to entirely abandon skepticism in the absence of conclusive empirical evidence. We cannot expect people to believe things for which they have no justification apart from other people’s anecdotes. Neither can we expect them to stop looking for a systematic account of reality that is rich enough to include consciousness.
My goal in this book is to define and explore a way of bringing together people holding as diverse worldviews as possible in order to facilitate the creation of an ecocivilisation in the West. This system also needs to be coherent and intelligible. What my project has in common with Nagel’s is a commitment to realism, rationalism, clarity and coherence.
The Psychetelic Principle
In Chapter Seven I introduced my response to Mind and Cosmos, and I’ll describe it more extensively now. My hypothesis is obviously highly speculative. It is the model that makes the most sense to me, given all the information I have to try to assimilate into a coherent account of the reality in which I find myself. As things stand, it is the only coherent and believable comprehensive model I am aware of. I am proposing that both cosmological and biological evolution should be divided into two distinct phases, the first of which ended with the appearance of the first conscious organism, and the second of which continues to this day.
If Henry Stapp’s re-interpretation of von Neumann’s interpretation of quantum theory, or something like it, is correct, then there is an important question in need of an answer: what collapsed the wave function before psychegenesis was complete? If consciousness causes the collapse, what caused the collapse when there were no conscious beings in the cosmos? We can, of course, postulate that other things collapse the wave function now, but if that is the case then the same things would serve this purpose in the absence of conscious observers, and therefore the theory no longer explains the teleology of psychegenesis. However, von Neumann removed the observer from the physical system for a reason – he needed to end an infinite regress of arbitrary physical observers. This is known as the von Neumann chain – a regression of measuring devices, whose stopping point is presumed to be the conscious mind (i.e. not a purely physical measuring device, but a conscious entity who actually reads said measurement, effectively stopping the chain). That reason hasn’t gone anyway; this is no less mysterious now than it was then.
If, instead, we accept Stapp’s proposal that only consciousness can collapse the wave function, then that might seem like a strong objection to this interpretation. If brains are necessary for minds and minds are needed to collapse the wave function, then how are we to make sense of what was going on before evolution had produced the first conscious life? In fact there is a default answer –nothing collapsed the wave function until the completion of psychegenesis. This suggests that the noumenal cosmos was in a state of what could be called “evolving potential” for 12 billion years. This is closely related to the MWI, though there is an important difference: the diverging MWI timelines remain diverged forever and will continue to exist and diverge for as long as the cosmos exists, while in this case all but one of them ceased to exist the moment psychegenesis was complete. The most improbable timeline of them all was chosen – the abiogenesis-psychegenesis timeline.
Rather than causing a show-stopping problem, this hypothesis provides the missing explanation for Nagel’s teleology.There is no reason to posit that an intelligent designer was required for any of this to have happened. Neither was any sort of will required, unless one posits a divine will to be embodied and even in that case no intelligence is required, because all of the complexity in our world can be explained by a combination of naturalistic evolutionary processes: the entire cosmos functioning as if it was the ultimate quantum computer. In effect, psychegenesis was a cosmic quantum computation, the goal of which was the creation of conscious life – the embodiment of the Participating Observer or 0|∞. When psychegenesis was complete – when the first animal became conscious – the von Neumann/Stapp interpretation became true. This hypothesis also offers a new solution to the Fermi Paradox – an uncontrived explanation as to why we have found no signs of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Conscious life evolved within the primordial superposition – every quantum dice roll that mattered was loaded in favour of psychegenesis. But once the cosmological configuration necessary for conscious life had been cracked, the process could not repeat elsewhere – because the wave function was now being continuously collapsed by conscious animals in the Cambrian oceans of Earth.
An important question remains unanswered. What exactly is it about animal brains that enables them to embody the Participating Observer when nothing else does? It must be some sort of physical property, and presumably it is relevant to wave function collapse in quantum mechanics, but that’s about as much as we can say. Nagel’s suggestion that we lack crucial information about the brain certainly applies here (I hold no strong opinion about Penrose and Hameroff’s microtubule theory). However, if panpsychism and materialism are both false then it follows that there must be something very special about brains – there must be some physical reason why animals alone are conscious, and it can’t be anything purely to do with complexity or information processing or any of the other materialistic suggestions. Footnote:Anotherquestion I have left unaddressed is that of Relational Quantum Mechanics(RQM). The ordinary interpretation of RQM would appear to be inconsistent with Stapp’s interpretation, because it claims all sorts of things can collapse the wave function, meaning no Participating Observer is necessary. But a relational version of Stapp’s interpretation might be possible, where “observer” only refers to embodied conscious beings. During the first phase the question doesn’t apply, because of the lack of embodied observers; the “many-worlds phase” as I have described it is just as incompatible with RQM as the MWI itself is. After the phase shift a Stapp/RQM hybrid reality is a possibility, as imagined at the end of Appendix Two. From the perspective of the argument in this book, this question can be left open. Maybe the cosmos became relational during the phase shift, and maybe it didn’t. Maybe there is a single objective version of reality, and maybe there is a system of interdependent objective realities (strikingly like the Hindu concept of Indra’s net). I am aware of no reason why I should take a strong position on RQM either.
The two-phase psychegenetic hypothesis also offers a new solution to the fine-tuning problem – an explanation for why we live in a cosmos where the physical constants are just right to sustain a universe where Earth-like planets can exist. It explains why we live on a goldilocks planet in a goldilocks reality where everything is just right. This explanation is closely related to the Anthropic Principle, so perhaps we could call it the Psychetelic Principle (from “psyche” and “telos”). It provides a cause for the Cambrian Explosion, which aligns with our intuition that animals are the only conscious branch of life, and offers new scope for an explanation of the survival value of consciousness. It also implies that our subjective experience of free will is veridical – on this view, the reason we feel like we have free will is because we actually do, at least to some degree. It does all this while avoiding panpsychism, so we don’t have to believe that rocks, stars, trees, fungi or computers (as we know them) are in any way conscious. Panpsychism is inconsistent with the metaphysical situation I’ve described. There would be no explanation for the teleology, no primordial superposition, and no explanation for the Cambrian explosion, the fine-tuned universe or the silence of the cosmos.
The question of how this proposal should be classified ontologically is one that other people seem to find considerably more important than I do. It could be thought of as a sort of dualism between the noumenal cosmos and 0|∞. Some people say it is a kind of objective idealism, because ultimately everything is grounded in the same thing that grounds human minds. It is similar to Hindu idealism, such as that espoused by Erwin Schrödinger. However, I don’t describe myself as an idealist, the reason for which is that the only examples we have of consciousness are things for which brains appear to be necessary. In other words, I am skeptical of the existence of disembodied minds. Even though objective reality is also grounded in 0|∞, the absence of a brain as intermediary makes that a different sort of relationship – a direct connection instead of a brain-mediated one. I therefore see no reason to classify objective reality as mental. The position I have described can certainly be thought of as a neutral monism also. If objective reality is made of structures or information then that is neither mind nor matter, and 0|∞ is explicitly neutral. I think the most appropriate classification is probably neo-Kantianism, because I think the phenomenal/noumenal distinction is more useful than the mind/matter distinction. The bottom line is that if materialism and the hypernatural are rejected, epistemic structural realism is accepted and the physical possibility of the praeternatural is acknowledged, then I don’t care what people want to call it. I call it Reality.
The need for a new epistemological paradigm
Thomas Nagel believes that we must identify teleological processes additional to psychegenesis in order to construct a new systematic theory of the natural order. All praeternatural phenomena are teleological. That is to say – if they exist, then they must be teleological, because they require the quantum dice to be loaded in order to produce a specific outcome. They are processes guided by a goal, such as the evolution of conscious life, the expression of free will, the experience of synchronicity or the unfolding of karma.
Let us consider the epistemic status of four categories of phenomena that should be categorised as praeternatural if real:
1: Psychegenesis is knowable through science and reason. Subjective experience is relevant only to establish that consciousness is real, and therefore in need of an explanation. Having established this, we can justify belief in psychegenesis by applying pure reason to the empirical results of quantum physics. This isn’t science, but it is an inference to the best explanation.
2: Free will can only be known subjectively, but it is the most mundane variety of experience imaginable. We are all familiar with the subjective experience of metaphysical freedom. In the proposed context, I wonder why anybody would choose to believe that humans lack free will. Why believe your choices are entirely the result of the mindless laws of physics and pure objective randomness if there is no good reason to? Why not believe they actually matter? Why not believe your intuition is correct in this specific case? The reasoning here is reminiscent of Pascal’s Wager – if it is true then you’ve gained something, in this case because your choices and your life have some sort of meaning – and if it is false then what have you lost?Footnote: It is worth emphasising that the agent of free will in this model is a human mind, not the Participating Observer (PO). An animal mind is a phenomenon that emerges from the complex system formed by the interaction between the PO and an animal brain. The PO on its own can’t have free will, because it doesn’t have any reasons, and doesn’t have any choices to make. Free will, like consciousness, requires both the PO and a living brain.
3: Synchronicity is knowable only through subjective experiences that by definition seem extremely unusual to those who experience them. According to Jung, synchronistic processes are going on all around us, all the time. They are as integral to reality as normal causality is – they are Yin to the Yang of normal physical causality. Yang is the expansive part of the dynamic process of the unfolding of reality, which intuitively resembles the deterministic evolution of the wave function. Yin is the contractive part, which resembles wave function collapse. Our experience of synchronicity is restricted to individual events, but in theoretical terms it continually loads the quantum dice, at least anywhere in the cosmos that is causally connected to conscious life. The great many people who have never experienced synchronicity must choose between skepticism and faith, and we can’t expect anybody to have faith in anything at all. I personally have no doubt that synchronicity is real, based entirely on subjective experience. That might justify my belief to me, but there is no reason why a skeptic should care what Jung, myself or anybody else claims to have experienced.
4: All other alleged praeternatural phenomena, including karma, ESP, telepathy, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, divinatory systems, Aleister Crowley’s “magick” and the will of God or gods, could only possibly be known through direct subjective experience. They therefore fall into the same category as synchronicity, or perhaps in terms of Jung’s system it might be better to say that all of them are manifestations of synchronicity, or they are all reducible to it. Here “synchronicity” refers to the praeternatural as the entire form of causality we’re talking about (some people will say we shouldn’t call this “causality” at all, but at the very least it is something like causality).
Not much of this sits comfortably with Nagel’s new natural order. Perhaps it is a failure of imagination on my part, but I don’t see why any of these things should be governed by laws. Maybe something along those lines could apply to karma, but even though “every moral action produces an equal and opposite reaction” sounds a bit like a law, there’s no way to reduce moral judgements to mathematics. The rest of it just doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that could be governed by laws at all. I would not rule out the possibility of some kind of non-mathematical praeternatural laws, but I struggle to imagine how they could work. If free will is governed by a law then in what sense is it free? Libertarian free will makes no sense if physical reality is a causally closed system, and if there is a non-physical component of the system that is also entirely governed by laws then presumably the same problems apply. Is will any more free because the applicable law governs how the quantum dice are loaded rather than how the wave function evolves? If any of these phenomena exist, then my expectation is that they aren’t fully governed by, or fully describable with, mathematical laws or other naturalistic principles, and they may not be amenable to scientific enquiry at all.
No doubt some believers of various phenomena in this fourth category will be disappointed with my stance. Some people have spent their whole lives and careers in search of empirical evidence of praeternatural phenomena of one sort or another. Some even believe they’ve found it, and that the skeptics are just stubbornly refusing to accept it because their flawed metaphysical assumptions rule it out a priori. My hope is that this is a situation where we can agree to disagree – to let science be science, let mysticism be mysticism, and stop trying to extend the reach of one of them into the territory of the other. It is entirely possible that some of these phenomena are real, but they can’t be scientifically known and tamed by engineers. If so then they will never be fully understood, and there will always be people who never experience them and therefore remain highly skeptical. Our goal is the Westernisation of ecocivilisation, not the establishment of a new mystical metanarrative that everybody is expected to believe in, as we should expect them to believe in science. There needs to be a place for both skeptics and mystics on the path to ecocivilisation. We cannot afford a continuation of an avoidable ideological conflict between science and spirituality. We need both of them.
Where does this leave naturalism? It seems to me that if your goal is to preserve naturalism then instead of looking for a large number of examples of this sort of thing, you might be better off hoping we can restrict it to just the one we have the most objective justification for believing in. Even free will goes beyond naturalism, because it is intentional. Surely the most naturalistic position still available is that psychegenesis is the sole example of a praeternatural process, even though that would be a unique goal-seeking process of exactly the sort Nagel wants to avoid. Perhaps we can think of psychegenesis as marking the boundary between natural and praeternatural, but I doubt naturalism can be stretched much further.
As for the need for a teleological explanation of our capacity for advanced cognition involving values, morality and meaning, that is now satisfied, in a general sense, by the presence of 0|∞ within the mind-brain system (although that is only the vaguest possible description, and it leaves a great many important questions unaddressed). For now, it remains beyond the boundaries of a purely scientific or objective understanding, but I can see no reason to believe that the second phase of biological evolution was teleological. Teleology is involved, but it is involved in the constitutional account of affairs rather than the historical account of how things came to be. It is involved in free will rather than ongoing teleology in evolution.
There is a curious agreement here between Thomas Nagel and Robert Anton Wilson. Nagel believes that the evolution of cognition continued to be teleological after psychegenesis, and presumably continues to be teleological now – which suggests there may be structures in our brain that are not fully formed and are anticipating our future cognitive evolution. Wilson makes exactly this same claim in Prometheus Rising. The first four circuits (Oral Bio-Survival, Anal Emotional-Territorial, Time-Binding Semantic and “Moral” Socio-Sexual) appeared (according to Wilson) at various past stages of evolution. However, circuits five to eight (Holistic Neurosomatic, Collective Neurogenic, Meta-programming and Non-Local Quantum) are “much newer, and each circuit is present only in minorities. Where the antique circuits recapitulate evolution-to-the-present, these futuristic circuits precapitulate future evolution.[”Footnote: Prometheus Rising, Anton Wilson, p41.] Maybe they are both right and I am wrong, but I am skeptical that our biological future is written in this way.
What could not be clearer is that there are some huge questions around here, that we do not have much in the way of reliable answers, and that as things stand we don’t even have any idea now much more objective progress we will ever make. I think that the new paradigm needed to construct an ecocivilisation cannot be the new naturalistic paradigm Nagel is looking for, even if his radical proposal that the evolution of consciousness was teleological is correct. What we actually need is a new epistemological paradigm – one that explicitly takes skepticism very seriously, but that reaches beyond naturalism.
I set myself a goal in this book of circumscribing a new language game, and my conclusion is that its foundation should be an epistemological peace treaty I call the New Epistemic Deal. It begins with a commitment to ecocivilisation as a great societal goal. In order to work – in order for it to be of use in the complex and demanding cultural transition that lies ahead – certain things must be excluded. Along with the hypernatural (which is incompatible with physics) we must systematically exclude all claims to knowledge that can only be derived from epistemological systems that are theoretically incompatible with structural scientific realism. We must begin both our moral and our practical reasoning with the reality of the situations we actually have to deal with. The NED does not provide answers to moral questions. Its purpose is to help us ask the right moral questions instead of the wrong ones – questions that are about real choices rather than questions that purport to be about real choices but where at least one of the possible answers involves an unrealistic escape route from difficult decisions. What other common starting point is available even as a possibility? It can’t be Christianity, Marxism or anything else that has already been tried and failed, and it certainly can’t be a cynical, pessimistic, postmodern denial of reality. Realism is the only starting point that is both up to the job and capable of bringing under a single broad umbrella a sufficiently wide range of political, religious and philosophical viewpoints. We must begin our task with the objective truths we are most certain of, then we should try to determine what possible futures are available to us, and only then should we attempt to agree on which of these we should be aiming for. This presumes nothing at all about the specific reasoning in any situation, or whether the issues are moral, practical or both. Without realism – not just ecological realism but also realism about human nature, geopolitics and everything else of ecological and socio-political importance – we don’t stand a chance. The difficulties we face are immense. If there is such a thing as objective reality, about which we have structural knowledge, then how can we possibly justify starting anywhere else?
There is no reason to exclude beliefs in praeternatural phenomena unless there is some specific clash with the wider goal of creating ecocivilisation. If somebody believes they’re communicating with the god of an indigenous tribal group that they say is helping in the transformation of humanity, then I can see no reason why I cannot co-operate with them. It becomes a problem if they demand that other people believe in their god, or if their god is telling them contraception is evil and they should maximise their production of children, but in that case the problem isn’t that they believe in the praeternatural, but their specific religious beliefs. All religions are not equal. Some are more compatible with ecocivilisation than others. There will be objections to this. Let’s take magick as an example. Crowley described it in the following terms:“Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
(Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons”, pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations” — these sentences — in the “magical language” ie, that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct; I call forth “spirits”, such as printers, publishers, booksellers and so forth and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution of this book is thus an act of Magick by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.)”
Magick, as Crowley sees it, operates in a complementary way to normal causality. In our terminology he is saying that he wants his book widely read, and believes that he can influence the quantum dice rolls as an act of will to increase the probability of that actually happening. The response from skeptics might run something like: “Yes, of course belief in stupid nonsense is harmful in principle. If you believe that you can increase the readership your book by an act of will, then surely it should be a bestseller! There’s not even any reason to advertise it or market it. Save your money – use your secret powers instead! Oh wait, your book isn’t a bestseller, so why do you believe your magick is real?” This is exactly how not to think about praeternatural phenomena. If that was how these things worked then scientists would have unambiguously demonstrated their existence a long time ago, and we’d have a set of laws to describe how they operate. In fact, some new-agers did propose something long those lines – that is what “the Law of Attraction” is: “If you believe in something hard enough, you can increase the probability of it happening.” And maybe something like the Law of Attraction really does operate, at least for some people, but if it does then I am highly skeptical that it can be measured by scientists or technologically controlled. I don’t believe in “magick” because I can reliably cause changes to take place in conformity with my will (at least not beyond my body and its immediate surroundings). I believe it, or something close enough, because of things that have happened to me in the past. But what really matters here is thatI don’t expect anybody to take my word for it.
I am making three points. The first is that we should not think about praeternatural phenomena as if they were normal, natural causal phenomena. They are not the sort of thing that can be reduced to laws and investigated scientifically. They are unpredictable. They are mysterious. They are badly behaved.
The second is that unlike the hypernatural, nobody can justify certainty that synchronicity, magick or any of the other praeternatural phenomena in the fourth category aren’t real. Why shouldn’t we allow reality to be re-enchanted? Why can’t we permit ourselves to explore the idea that maybe reality itself was never disenchanted in the first place? Beliefs like this are very important to some people. Note that I am not saying “we should let the simple people believe in nonsense because it gives their empty lives some meaning”. I am saying we don’t objectively know whether or not these things are nonsense, and it is very important to people, and if it is also not hindering the ultimate goal of ecocivilisation, I can see no reason to exclude it. Maybe it could help.
The third is that nobody should be expected to believe in praeternatural phenomena for no good reason. I believe synchronistic processes are going on around us all the time, but I am not expecting this to be established as an objectively known fact, as if it was scientific. I think we can do this the Western way and delegate that decision to the individual instead of demanding a societal-level answer. There is an essential role for skeptics: keeping the whole system honest. Just as believers should not be viewed as fools for believing in things which cannot be proved, skeptics should not be viewed as laggards who haven’t grasped the whole picture. Instead, they should be valued as a balancing force against the excessive tendencies of some of the more enthusiastic believers. And apart from anything else, skepticism isn’t a choice. I cannot force myself to believe that some of the structures in our brain “precapitulate” future cognitive evolution. I just don’t. There is even a role for skepticism for those individuals who are certain that praeternatural phenomena exist based on direct personal experience. It is entirely possible for a person to be utterly convinced that they have experienced something praeternatural, and be correct that this is the case, without any means of discerning what the true cause or purpose was. Maybe what appears to be a message from a god is actually the work of aliens posing as god, or spiritually advanced humans, or unknown praeternatural laws, or maybe the cause is actually, somehow, themselves. Robert Anton Wilson said that his goal was “to try to get people into a state of generalised agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. [”Footnote:'Robert Anton Wilson: Searching For Cosmic Intelligence' – interview with Jeffrey Elliot (1980).] Wilson described himself as an agnostic mystic. Skeptical mysticism may yet turn out to be a thing.
A New Epistemic Deal
In order to start making real progress towards fixing our world’s problems, we need to change the way we think and communicate. The New Epistemic Deal is a proposed agreement to facilitate serious discussions about ecology, politics, economics, morality, spirituality and countless other topics without the discussion being derailed by people who refuse to start with the known facts about reality. We must do this without scientistically ruling out things that aren’t supported by science or reason but aren’t in conflict with them either. This book is firstly an argument that such a thing is needed, and secondly it is my proposal for what it could look like.I have already covered the first four principles of the New Epistemic Deal:
1: Ecocivilisation is our shared destiny and guiding goal.
2: Consciousness is real.
3: Epistemic Structural Realism is true.
4: Both materialism and physicalism should be rejected. Principles five and six are more convoluted, but their justification should now be clear:
5: The existence of praeternatural phenomena is consistent with science and reason, but apart from the unique case of psychegenesis, there is no scientific or rational justification for believing in it/them either. The only possible justification for belief is subjective lived experience.
6: We cannot expect people to believe things (any things) based solely on other people’s subjective lived experiences. There will always be skeptics about any alleged praeternatural phenomena (possibly psychegenesis excepted) and their right to skepticism must be respected. Principles seven and eight are closely related, but sufficiently distinct to warrant the inclusion of both.
7: There can be no morality if we deny reality. If there actually is an objective reality, and we can actually know things about it, then if we start our moral reasoning with anything other than reality we are engaged in fake morality – we will be arguing about what would be morally right and wrong in some ideal reality rather than the real one that we have to figure out how to share. And if the people we are having moral disagreements with are actually dealing with reality, while we are not, then they are engaged with real morality and we are claiming moral high ground we have no right to claim. Attempting to put morality before reality should be rejected as virtue signalling.
8: Science, including ecology, must take epistemic privilege over economics, politics and everything else that purports to be about objective reality. Principle seven is specifically about morality. Principle eight is about everything that matters – it is about practical reasoning as well as moral reasoning. It demands that the whole of science, including the whole of ecology, the limits to growth and the reality of ecological overshoot, must be acknowledged before serious discussion starts about anything at all.It should be considered immoral to come to any negotiating table demanding concessions from others before you are willing to accept reality.
Growth-based economics and politics are dangerous nonsense, and for anybody who understands that, engaging with them while failing to persistently challenge their false assumptions is an immoral act. I would like to think that it could not be clearer why these last two principles are necessary. The purpose of this book is to describe a new epistemological framework to facilitate the construction of a Western ecocivilisation. That process is going to require all of us, at every level of society, to face up to some of the most practically and morally difficult realities that humans have ever faced or will ever face. How can we do that if some of us don’t agree that there even is any such thing as reality and/or demand that either our practical reasoning or our moral reasoning begin from somewhere else? At this point we have established our starting position with respect to objective knowledge of reality. However, so far it has all been at the level of meta-ethics. We have established almost nothing about morality itself.
But before we can start looking at those details, there is another meta-ethical/epistemological issue to address, and that is the question of whether or not science and reason are of any use at all in bridging the gap between what is and what ought to be.
The is-ought problem or fact-value distinction
We are going to need some sort of ethical framework to decide how we should respond, both in terms of personal morality and how our societies will operate in the future. Revealed religion is of little (or no) use, because the majority of individuals in our society don’t grant it much (or any) epistemic legitimacy. Individuals will inevitably seek guidance from religions with respect to their own personal morality, but even that needs to cede moral authority if it clashes with decisions based on ecological realism. Claims based purely on revealed religion must not be allowed to over-rule the new epistemological system.
We now run into what is known as the is-ought problem. This goes back to David Hume, who famously argued that there is no way to get from an is to an ought – that you can’t derive a conclusion about what should be based on statements about what is. It’s a fallacy that occurs when someone assumes that because something is a certain way, it should be that way, or that because something isn’t happening, it shouldn’t. For example, “Humans die if you shoot them in the head. Pete is human. Therefore, you ought not to shoot Pete.” Although this looks like a valid argument, the premises don’t support the conclusion. Perhaps Pete was about to commit mass murder, and shooting him was the only way to stop him.
Hume first identified this problem in 1739. He noticed that moral philosophers would frequently talk about how things are, and then suddenly switch to how things ought to be, without any reason to bridge the two concepts. Hume’s thesis is that reasoning is only correct if the conclusion is interpreted descriptively, not normatively (to do with rules, or standards (“norms”)). For example, if you say “I have a duty to give a lecture on Mondays”, that’s a descriptive premise. The conclusion “I must give a lecture today” is also correct if interpreted descriptively, but if it’s interpreted normatively, it’s reasoning from is to ought, which is fallacious.
According to our cosmological hypothesis, the initial purpose of the cosmos ended with the completion of psychegenesis. After that, for a very long time, there was no purpose beyond survival; the biological growth imperative ruled supreme. Only when human cognition had reached the point where we could start asking questions about morality and meaning did any other sort of purpose start to emerge. This is why the cognitive basis of human morality is of such interest to Thomas Nagel.
Moral realism
Nagel is a moral realist – he believes that moral truths exist independently of individual beliefs, emotions, or cultural practices, and can be known through rational reflection. He rejects the idea that moral judgments are merely subjective expressions of personal preferences or societal conventions. Instead, they reflect objective truths that can be right or wrong regardless of individual perspectives. For example, the claim “torturing innocent people is wrong” is not just a matter of personal opinion but a statement about a moral fact that is true universally.
Nagel contends that moral judgments can be grounded in reason. He believes that moral reasoning involves stepping outside of one’s personal perspective to consider the interests and rights of others, leading to impartial and objective moral conclusions. While acknowledging the existence of moral disagreements, Nagel argues that rather than undermining moral realism, they often arise from differences in the availability of information, reasoning processes, or the application of moral principles. That people disagree does not mean there is no objective truth to be found; rather, it suggests that not everyone has correctly identified that truth.
He is critical of moral subjectivism (the idea that moral judgments are based on personal feelings or opinions) and moral relativism (the idea that moral truths are relative to cultural or societal norms). He argues that these views fail to account for the binding nature of moral obligations and the possibility of moral progress. If morality were purely subjective or relative, it would be difficult to explain why certain moral reforms (e.g., the abolition of slavery) are genuinely improvements rather than mere changes in preference. Ecocivilisation offers us an objective destination point and suggests a framework for judging what is a genuine improvement. Ecocivilisation as an end point is not a preference, although which path we take to get there is, and so is the version of ecocivilisation we ultimately create.
Nagel connects moral realism with the idea that moral considerations can provide reasons for action. If moral judgments were merely subjective, they would not have the authority to motivate or obligate us in the way that they do. For Nagel, the fact that we often feel compelled to act in accordance with moral principles, even when it conflicts with our self-interest, supports the idea that these principles are grounded in objective reality.
He also links moral realism to the concept of human dignity, arguing that treating individuals with respect and recognising their inherent worth requires acknowledging objective moral truths. Without moral realism, the basis for claims about human rights and dignity would be undermined, as they would be reduced to mere social constructs rather than universal principles. Nagel defends moral realism because he believes it provides a robust framework for understanding the nature of moral obligations, the objectivity of moral truths, and the rational basis for ethical decision-making. He sees moral realism as essential for upholding the seriousness and universality of moral judgments.
The reader will make their own judgments. I personally find it very difficult to imagine how we could navigate collapse and build an ecocivilisation if we cannot agree that our morality should be founded on realism and rationalism, at least as far as that is possible.
The opposition
Not everyone will be willing to embrace the New Epistemic Deal. For one group in particular, the very idea of starting any public debate with a shared acknowledgment of objective reality is anathema. Their worldview begins from directly opposed opening premises: that reality is socially constructed and that great societal goals are for oppressors and fools.
The current manifestation of the opposition can be very difficult to get to grips with. This is intentional: it was designed to be as slippery as possible. I will now briefly take a look at the history and origins of this movement, which is the academic/intellectual driving force behind what has become known as “woke ideology”.
Critical theory
Critical theory originated in the early 20th century, primarily through the work of scholars associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of intellectuals affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany. These scholars aimed to develop a social theory that critically examined the structures of society, capitalism, and culture, integrating insights from various disciplines like philosophy, sociology, and political economy. Key figures in the Frankfurt School include Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and laterJürgen Habermas. They were influenced by a combination of Marxism,German idealism (especially Hegel) and psychoanalysis (especially Freud).
Critical theory built on Marx’s critique of capitalism, but sought to go beyond orthodox Marxism by addressing not only economic structures but also cultural, ideological, and psychological dimensions of power and domination. InDialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Horkheimer and Adorno criticised the Enlightenment’s emphasis on instrumental rationality, arguing that it had become a tool of domination rather than liberation. They believed that reason had been co-opted by capitalism and modern bureaucratic systems, leading to societal repression. They applied Freud’s work to explore how societal repression manifests in individual psychology and culture (how it is internalised) and expanded Marxist analysis to include the critique of cultural industries (media, entertainment, art), focusing on how culture perpetuates social inequality and maintains capitalist domination. Habermas shifted the focus toward communication and the role of the public sphere in democratic societies. He emphasised the importance of rational communication and dialogue in fostering a just and democratic society.
Critical theory has had a significant influence on various fields, including sociology, cultural studies, political science, and education. It has inspired subsequent generations of scholars and movements, such as postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and contemporary critical race theory.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism has roots in the late 19th century, starting with Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche critiqued Enlightenment values such as reason, objective truth and universal morality. InThus Spoke Zarathustra and On The Genealogy of Morals, he attacked the idea of an objective moral order and the notion that there could be any transcendent or universal truths. Instead, he argued that human existence is shaped by perspectives, power, and interpretation. Nietzsche’s perspectivism—the idea that there are no objective truths, only interpretations—heavily influenced later postmodern thinkers, especially in their skepticism toward grand narratives, universal truth, and objective knowledge.
Partly inspired by Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger explored the question of Being and critiqued Western metaphysics. His rejection of traditional categories of thought opened the door for existentialist and postmodern ideas. “Structuralist” thinkers like Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics and Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology focused on structures of language and culture, and implied that meaning is contingent on cultural codes rather than objective realities. Then “poststructuralists” including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard challenged the stability of meaning and critiqued the assumption that human reason could uncover universal truths.
Derrida’s deconstruction focused on the instability of language, aiming to show meaning is always deferred and never fixed. Foucault critiqued modern institutions, claiming that “truth” is constructed through power dynamics and social discourse, resonating with Nietzsche’s concerns about power and knowledge. Postmodernism emerged between the 1960s and 1980s. Lyotard defined postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition (1979) as an “incredulity toward metanarratives”—a rejection of overarching stories or universal explanations (e.g., Enlightenment reason, Marxism and religions). This suspicion of grand narratives comes directly from Nietzsche’s critique of moral and metaphysical systems. Derrida’s idea of deconstruction, inspired by Nietzsche’s rejection of fixed truths, argued that texts (and language in general) contain contradictions that undermine their own apparent meaning. Jean Baudrillard developed ideas of hyperreality, where images and symbols in postmodern culture have lost their connection to reality and now create their own reality. From Nietzsche to postmodernism there is a throughline of skepticism about the possibility of objective knowledge, universal truths, and stable meaning.
When critical theory met postmodernism
The philosophical wellspring of woke ideology is a hybrid of Critical Theory and Postmodernism. An entertaining account of its development can be found in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (2020)by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. Their book is a critical examination of postmodern thought and its evolution into what the authors call “Theory” (with a capital T) – a set of ideas driving contemporary social justice activism. The authors describe how, over time, the relativism of early postmodernism became “applied postmodernism” in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Put very simply, early postmodernism merely claimed that there is no objective reality, whereas applied postmodernism goes on to claim that subjective reality can be objective. This new phase is characterised by a focus on identity politics, where knowledge and truth are seen as constructed by power dynamics related to race, gender, sexuality, and other social categories.
Postcolonial Theory criticises Western societies and their histories of colonialism, often rejecting the achievements of Enlightenment and liberalism as mere tools of oppression. Critical Race Theory views society as a power struggle between races, and often treats racial identity as the most significant factor in human interactions, promoting a worldview that divides people into oppressors and oppressed. Feminism and Gender Studies are built on postmodern assumptions that focus on the social construction of systemic patriarchy and gender, freely disregarding biological realities. Queer Theory destabilises fixed categories of gender and sexuality in ways that can sometimes confuse or contradict basic biological facts.
According to Pluckrose and Lindsay, “Theory” has shifted from an academic pursuit to an activist ideology (especially online) that seeks to transform society by focusing on systemic power structures and identity categories. This activist stance is increasingly intolerant of dissent and hostile to liberal ideas such as free speech, individualism, and universal human rights. The authors argue that this form of Critical Theory and activism has had a divisive and damaging impact on society, creating an “us vs. them” mentality, undermining liberalism, and leading to censorship, self-censorship, and illiberal outcomes in universities, workplaces, and public discourse. One of the book’s central critiques is of what the authors call “Grievance Studies”—academic disciplines built on identity-based grievances that prioritise activism over scholarship. The authors argue that these fields have produced poor-quality research and have fostered a culture of victimhood. They conclude by making a case for classical liberal values, especially free speech and reasoned debate. They advocate for a return to Enlightenment principles, arguing that these offer a better framework for addressing social injustice than the identity-focused, power-centric approach of modern Theory.
A postmodern critique of the NED
Presented with the NED, I anticipate that the postmodern opposition will respond along these lines:
- Reality is a product of social, cultural, and linguistic constructions. All knowledge is situated within specific historical, cultural, and social contexts. What we perceive as “objective” is shaped by the dominant discourses and power structures of our time. What is considered “truth” or “fact” is determined by who holds power and who can impose their version of reality.
- Science is not neutral; it is another narrative shaped by power relations. While it can produce useful knowledge, it is not exempt from critique and should be seen as one way of knowing among many. It should be granted no special epistemic privilege, for it has no access to objective truth. Scientific facts are constructed rather than discovered. See Bruno Latour’s “Science Studies” and “Actor-Network Theory”.
- Language is not a neutral medium for describing reality; it actively shapes and constructs it. The meanings of words and concepts are fluid, contested, and tied to power relations. Deconstruction is key to understanding how language shapes our understanding of reality and to uncover the hidden assumptions, contradictions, and power dynamics embedded in texts and discourses.
- There are no universal truths or meta-narratives that can claim to explain all of reality. Metaphysical claims are themselves constructions that reflect specific cultural and philosophical biases. Grand narratives – including the belief in objective reality and moral realism and (presumably) the idea of ecocivilisation as a great societal goal – are tools of domination that suppress diversity and difference. Pluralism and multiplicity should be celebrated, with an emphasis on local, fragmented, and marginalised perspectives.
- Reality and morality are inseparable. What is considered reality is always informed by what those in power have decided ought to be the case.
It looks to me like the NED and postmodernism are radically incompatible, because they start from directly opposed foundational claims. The NED begins with a declaration of a new great societal goal and a commitment to scientific realism. Postmodernism begins with a claim that reality is socially constructed and great societal goals are tools of oppression. Postmodernism has tried to “get behind” everything else, in order to drag all knowledge down to its relativist level, including all scientific knowledge. Once you accept its opening premise there is no way to resist the onward march of relativism, right up to Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.
[Footnote: Physicist Alan Sokal’s famous hoax paper was published in the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996. Sokal submitted the paper, which was intentionally packed with nonsensical jargon and baseless assertions, to test whether the journal would publish something laden with fashionable postmodernist rhetoric, despite its lack of coherence or scientific merit. The fact that the paper was accepted exposed the vulnerability of postmodern critique when it seeks to dismantle science on purely relativist grounds, and it sparked what is now known as the “Sokal Affair” – a powerful critique of postmodernism and its attempts to undermine objective knowledge and realism. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (1997) by Sokal and Jean Bricmont is essential reading for anybody interested in this dispute.]
However, it all rests on this one opening premise, so if the premise itself turns out to be false then the whole edifice comes tumbling down. It cannot be lifted from this non-foundation and sited on firmer ground, because most of its content depends on the wholesale rejection of reason, realism and coherence. Trying to make it objective would cause it to disintegrate.
Postmodernism, and everything it has begotten, is intentionally detached from reality. It is the vanguard of the psychotic breakdown of Western society. Having begun with a declaration that reality is socially constructed, it then feels free to downgrade scientific knowledge to a particularly effective power grab among countless others. This has become a dominant narrative in much of public life and academia, and fuels the “culture wars”. However, the postmodernists cannot win this war, because their foundational premise is false. It boils down to this: either objective reality Footnote:Or its relational equivalent, see Appendix Two. exists, or it doesn’t. And if does, then either we can have knowledge about it, and scientific knowledge tends towards truth, or we can’t, and it doesn’t.
This doesn’t mean truth can’t be contextual. There is no such thing as a statement which can be understood without any context at all. But the context which matters here is that of scientific realism and in this context the Earth’s climate and ecosystems should be thought of as highly complex structures composed of entities which can only be understood in terms of their relationships with other structures. Human societies are also highly complex structures composed of entities which must be understood in terms of their relationships with other structures. Additionally, there is a higher-order relationship between these two structures, and, crucially, this higher-order relationship is asymmetrical: the structure of human societies can and will be forced to adapt to the structure of the Earth’s climate and ecosystems, not the other way around. If this relationship could be deconstructed and reconstructed backwards then it would be possible for the relationship between apes and humans to be the other way around too – the whole of humanity could agree that apes are descended from humans, or that climate change isn’t real, and reality would be reshaped to reflect this new socially constructed truth. But objective reality is not constructed by humans in this way, and cannot be deconstructed and reconstructed differently.
I ask the reader to make their choice. Do we know that humans are descended from apes? Do we know that humans are rapidly changing the Earth’s climate? Are we sure? Can we agree to decisively reject the idea that these facts about reality are power-laden, provisional or otherwise untrue? If your answer is yes then we can move on. We can start talking about things that are actually going to matter in the context of societal and ecological collapse and transformation – the real deconstruction and reconstruction that lies in our real future. If you aren’t sure then please take the rest of this book as hypothetical – it is about what the consequences would be if we rule in reality and the epistemic privilege of science and reason. If your answer is truly no, then I suggest you stop reading.
Gender ideology: an example of this in practice
The NED does not deny that different perspectives exist, or that they matter. The point is that these perspectives need to remain perspectives rather than being surreptitiously warped into claims about objective reality, and there is no better example of this than biological sex and gender. The reason this is such a good example is that it is highly controversial even though the underlying issue could not be much simpler. We are going to face many very difficult situations, and in some cases it will be very hard to know what is true or what we should do. For example, sooner or later there will be another pandemic – something at least as bad as covid. Our economic situation will be much worse. Tough decisions will have to be taken about how to manage it, balancing the benefits and risks. Even if everybody is genuinely trying to start with realism and follow the science, deep controversy maybe unavoidable. The same does not apply to gender ideology.
There is no justification for any confusion at all about the meanings of the words “gender” and “sex” and neither is there any reason to doubt that sex in humans is both binary and immutable. Yes, sometimes the process of sexual development goes wrong, and individuals do not fall straightforwardly into the category of male or female. This condition is called “intersex”, and it is very well understood. The different ways it can happen are well understood. This does not change the fact that biological sex is binary – there are exactly two sexes, and the vast majority of humans are unquestionably one or the other. In a world where realism is respected there would be no confusion about any of this.
Gender is very different. It is a socio-cultural concept that refers to people’s subjectively experienced “identity”. There’s nothing wrong with gender as a concept,provided everybody is very clear that it is essentially subjective. Whether or not somebody identifies as a woman has no bearing on whether or not they are biologically a woman, and vice versa. If you are saying something that you expect other people to acknowledge as meaningful, then when you use the word “woman” you must either be talking about biological sex, in which case a man cannot be, or become, a woman, or you are talking about gender, in which case a biological man can be anything they like, from a transgender woman to a walrus. [Footnote: Johnny the Walrus, Matt Walsh, 2022, DW Books.]
What is the sentence “trans women are women” supposed to mean? It can’t mean “transgender women are transgender women”, because that communicates nothing at all. Therefore the implied meaning can only be “transgender women are biological women”, but the word “biological” has intentionally been omitted. The reason it has been omitted is because if it was made explicit then the sentence would be revealed as obviously false, and wouldn’t serve its true purpose, which is to generate confusion about what is actually being said in order to protect vulnerable transgender people from oppression. [Footnote:For more information, seeThe End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society, Debra Soh, 2020.]
This is postmodernism in action. It’s a feature, not a bug, and the justification for this systemic dishonesty is the overturning of oppressive power structures. The lived experience of oppression is itself real – if somebody feels oppressed then there is no point in arguing with them about their feelings. But the true source of what they experience as oppression, at least in this case, is biological reality itself. Postmodernism denies this, either by claiming that biological reality allows for the existence of female men, or denying that there’s any such thing as objective biological reality in the first place. One result of this is biological men competing as women in elite sports, being held in women’s prisons and accepted in women’s refuges. Another is cultural warfare, the most intense part of which is being fought between transgender activists and “trans-exclusionary” radical feminists. The only way to resolve this societal fracture is to accept that reality should take priority, and this must apply not just in this specific case but in all cases where there is no justification for confusion or disagreement about what the reality actually is. Some groups of people really will be disadvantaged if and when reality is admitted. In this example, the necessary admission is that transgender women are biological men, and this does indeed have the potential to cause psychological distress. Transgender people are vulnerable. However, the point I am making here is that regardless ofany level of distress caused to any individual or any group of people, nobody has a right to demand that the rest of society accept their subjective experiences as part of objective reality. It is enshrined in principles six and seven of the NED. We cannot expect people to believe things based solely on other people’s subjective lived experiences. Nobody has a right to demand that their personal morality can take epistemic priority over objective reality, and that must apply universally. For a moral claim to be defended as objective and universal then it must be supportable in a moral realist sense – you need to be able to step outside of your personal perspective and support it from an objective viewpoint. It is very difficult to see how this could ever apply to the claim that transgender women are biological women.
Postmodernism, reality and morality
Postmodernism is not just about epistemology but about ethics. It is the self-appointed guardian angel of the oppressed, whose mission is to vanquish oppressors by deconstructing their power-laden socially constructed realities. From that perspective, it follows that anybody who rejects postmodernism must either be an oppressor or an unwitting accomplice of oppressors. Responding to this with arguments based on science and reason is pointless, because postmodernism asserts that those things have no epistemic privilege.
We need to be clear that reality is partly socially constructed. For example, our economic system is largely a social construction, even though it revolves around the biological growth imperative (which most certainly isn’t). Nothing in the laws of nature restricts economics to growth-based theories. Our democratic systems are another obvious example. Real limits apply to attempts to change them, but given enough time, there is nothing preventing us from inventing a completely different sort of democracy, including one founded on ecological literacy. But these are second-order properties of reality – they are built on top of an objective reality that is impervious to human attempts to change it. Scientists might be social animals themselves, but that doesn’t justify the relegation of scientific knowledge to a mere social construction. Thomas Nagel doesn’t prefer neutral monism to the more popular metaphysical positions because it has anything to do with power structures, but because he thinks it is the most likely to be true. There is nothing power-laden about quantum theory, biology, ecology or climatology. There could indeed be universal truths that can explain all of reality, even if we are currently not in possession of them. Given that there actually is an objective reality, then why can’t there be such things as truths about it, including both truths about the whole thing and things which are true for all observers?
Postmodernism’s claim that reality is entirely socially constructed is wrong, unethical and dangerous, and it cannot be rejected piecemeal. You either accept its anti-realist opening gambit, or you must question the validity of the whole thing. Such is the fate of worldviews that are balanced on a point. Science is not balanced on a point. Parts of it will certainly look different after it has been uprooted from the materialistic foundation upon which it was originally constructed and guaranteed its rightful epistemic privilege under the NED or something like it, but not only will most of it be intact, some of it will be greatly improved. Science still has a glorious future ahead of it, whereas postmodernism has run out of ideas and has nothing positive to offer humanity going forwards. I don’t have a strong opinion about whether a post-postmodern form of Critical Theory is possible, but it seems unlikely given that Critical Theory’s agenda has always been primarily negative. Criticising the existing systems is not going to be enough. We need to create something new.
My argument is that there can be no true morality in the absence of realism, and that this needs to be applied as a universal, general principle. A commitment to realism as the ideological glue to hold a meta-movement toward ecocivilisation together can only work if it is respected by all parties and nobody demands the right to an exception when it is their turn to accept reality. It is like democracy in this respect – democracy only works if the losers consistently accept that they have lost and respect that the winners have won. It is in the interests of the losers to do so only because they expect that in the future, when they are on the winning side, the future losers will also accept their defeat. If one group of people is granted an exception then the whole thing falls to pieces, and in the case of realism the result of this is epistemic anarchy. Unfortunately, there is nothing theoretical about such a situation, for it is the postmodern post-truth world in which we all currently live.
The new paradigm needs to be epistemological rather than ontological. Materialism belongs to the old paradigm, but it is not the whole thing. Postmodernism, though it is opposed to materialism itself, also belongs to the old paradigm.