DS: This DSI is with a philosopher. The last time I interviewed a philosopher, Daniel Dennett, he was remarkably short on ideas, and not really willing to cogitate nor elucidate his readers. Hopefully, this time will be a little bit more interesting. I state this because the philosopher, Mark Rowlands, whose book, The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe, I reviewed, one of a number of books published, shows no penchant for shyness. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. There’s so much good stuff to plumb that much will have to be left out. Nonetheless, I want to delve into your opinions on a plenum of subjects- the philosophic, naturally, but also religious, political and pop cultural. For those readers to whom your book and your name are unfamiliar, could you please give a précis for the uninitiated, on who Mark Rowlands is: what you do, what your aims in your career are, major achievements, and your general philosophy, etc.

MR: I’m Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. I’m also a writer. Or maybe the other way around: the two overlap – a lot. Most of my time is spent writing. I have D.Phil. in philosophy from Oxford U. back in the late ‘80s. (a D.Phil. is what Oxford calls a Ph.D.) And I’ve been putting food on the table teaching and writing philosophy since then, in a variety of countries including the US (twice), Ireland, England, and France.

  I’ve always had what we might call an Eleusinian attitude towards my career, a variant on the message Silenus gave to Midas. The best thing is to be fortunate enough never to have to work. The next best thing is to retire young. So, my aim in my career, almost since its inception, has been to retire. Then, so the fantasy goes, I could spend all my time thinking and writing. Two realizations have prevented my achieving this goal. The first is the realization that I don’t have money to keep myself, and perhaps more significantly my wife, in the style to which we/she have become accustomed. The second is that I probably wouldn’t notice any difference anyway.   

  As for my major achievements, that is for others to judge. I have written a lot of books, probably more than any other philosopher of my age in the world. Some people seem to think they’re quite good. In the ivory tower, I’m a well known name in philosophy of mind and also in ethical issues pertaining to animals. But, I think you’re lost if you agonize about what you’ve achieved and how others regard you. So I don’t. Basically, I like to think about things. When I want to know what it is I’m thinking, I write things down. And when I don’t want to think about those things any more, I make them into a book. 

  General philosophy? It depends what you mean by ‘philosophy’. Here are a few claims culled from my professional writings. These things I believe:

• The mind is not entirely in the head: mental processes go on in the world around us as much as inside our brains.

• Consciousness – what it is like to have or undergo an experience – is real, but nowhere at all.

• Animals have moral rights (at least, they do if humans do).

  Obviously, I believe lots of other things too. But these are the views my professional colleagues tend to associate with me.

  But, perhaps by ‘general philosophy’ you mean the something like my views on ‘the meaning of life’. This is the sort of thing the general public think philosophers do; the sort of thing that, by a strange twist of fate, is precisely what professional philosophers tend not to do (Later on I’ll talk a little about why this might be so). So, if I may be unprofessional for a moment, here it is, my ‘philosophy of life’:

  Time will take everything from us in the end. Everything we have acquired through talent, industry and luck will be taken from us. It will take our strength, our desires, our goals, our projects, our future, our happiness, and even our hope. Anything we can have, anything we can possess: time will take it from us. But what time can never take from us is who we were in our best moments. It’s all luck, all of it, and everyone’s luck is going to run out. What is most important is this: who is it that is left behind when your luck has left you for dead. Here we find our best moments. And in the end it is only our defiance that redeems us.

  This is a paraphrase of one of the principal conclusions of my soon to be published autobiography, The Philosopher and the Wolf, which I shall no doubt shamelessly plug on several occasions during the course of this interview. This is a memoir of a decade or so of my life I spent wandering the earth with a 150 lb. timber wolf. Most of the valuable things I’ve learned in life came, in one way or another, from him. It comes out in November 2008 in the UK and spring 2009 in the US.

DS: What exactly does a philosopher, in the 21^st Century, do? Your job title at the University of Miami is Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, so you are paid to teach. But what ideas have you wrought, and what things do you instill in your students?

MR: The title is from Wiki, and isn’t quite correct. I’m Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. Before that, I was Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire. Some helpful soul must have noticed that the Wiki entry was out of date, and amended it – a little inaccurately. I must do something about my Wiki page.

  What does a philosopher in the twenty-first century do? Depends on where he or she is. It’s not quite accurate that I’m paid to teach. That is one of the things that I’m paid to do. But I’m also paid to write and, more importantly, publish: thus enhancing the glory of whatever institution I happen to be working for – at least, that’s the theory. So, I teach five hours a week, for 30 weeks a year. This sounds ridiculously little. (Actually, to me it sounds a lot. In my previous job I was teaching around an hour and a half a week.) But, old ham that I am, I always thought of teaching as a performance, and I spend quite some time getting myself up for each class. I hope my students notice. Then there’s the preparation, and the grading; and the occasional Department meeting. Also, there’s supervision of Ph.D. students. But apart from that, it’s mostly research and writing. That is what the University of Miami brought me in to do – which suits me fine. But it varies between universities: there are universities that do research, and ones that focus on teaching.

  For the ideas I have wrought, see the answer to the first question. Basically: certain theories about the nature of cognition and consciousness; and a certain theory of the moral status of animals. That’s so far: but I’m just warming up.

  What do I try to instill in my students? Simply this: the ability to work out how to answer, and more importantly ask, questions for themselves. In short: I try to teach them how to think. It doesn’t always work.

DS: What exactly is philosophy? Is seeking deeper or ultimate answers tenable in a cosmos where shallow and partial reasons and answers abound?

MR: Any answer to the question ‘What is philosophy?’ would be a philosophical one. You would have to know a lot of philosophy in order to make sense of the answer. (It’s the Douglas Adams, ‘The meaning of life is 42’ problem). Short of that, I could only give platitudes. One point worth noting is that the idea that all activities can be defined by stating necessary and sufficient conditions is a philosophical assumption that is questionable. What, as Wittgenstein, once asked, is a game? It is extraordinarily difficult to supply criteria necessary and sufficient for something to count as a game (try it). You keep either ruling out some things that are games, or including things that are not games. So, why should philosophy be any different?

  Probably the best way to explain something is not by giving a definition, but by providing some examples. So, here are some examples of philosophical questions:

What is consciousness? And what is its relation to the brain?

What is the nature of right and wrong?

What can I really know (as opposed to merely believe)?

Do I have free will?

What would an ideal society look like?

  These are some of the bigger questions. But there are lots of others too. In answering them, philosophers are supposed to think clearly, rationally, and logically. That is, unless they’re the sort of philosopher who thinks that clarity, rationality and logic are simply expressions of Western Male Phallogocentrism, or some crap like that. I’m not one of those philosophers. They’re bad philosophers.

  With regard to your second question: it depends what you mean by ‘tenable’? Is it worthwhile to seek deeper or ultimate answers when there are so many shallow ones available? I would have thought that the presence of so many shallow and partial answers would up the value of deeper ones.

  Or do you mean, is there any point in seeking deeper answers since no one gives a shit anyway? Even if that’s right – and I’m not saying it is – once you start doing or not doing things on the basis of what you think people do or do not give a shit about, you’re totally screwed.

DS: Did you have any heroes in philosophy as you grew up? Or were you attracted to the discipline of ideas?

MR: No heroes. Not then, not now. Heroes are for pussies. Anyway, I couldn’t really have had any philosophical heroes when I was growing up since I didn’t even discover philosophy until I was 19. Not that I was grown up then (or possibly even now), I suppose.

  I’m in it for the ideas. I love ideas: ideas and relations between ideas. I mean really love them. If there was a lap dancing club for ideas, I would spend all my time and money there. I love the way ideas hang together, supporting each other, undercutting each other.

  Rather than doing philosophy, I used to play a lot of pool and snooker when I was a kid. And there are days – increasingly few – in those games when you approach the table, and you just know you can’t be beaten. You feel invincible; almost godlike. You can see all the angles. Really knowing ideas – really knowing an area of philosophy – it’s a feeling like being able to see all the angles on a snooker table. Instead of seeing spatial angles – perceptual angles – you see conceptual angles. You know your way around a philosophical position like you know your way around a snooker table. You start reading a journal article, say, and you stop after the first page or two: because you can already predict what they are going to say. You see all the options, and there is no need to have them presented to you any further. Or, you’re giving a paper, and when you’re fielding questions afterwards, and there are people who are trying to make themselves look good by making you look bad. But you’ve anticipated all their questions. You know your way around better than anyone else. And, because of that, no one can hurt you.

  The feeling, as I said, is almost godlike, or, at least, demi-godlike. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that philosophical interests and preoccupations became thoroughly infected with the imago dei: the idea that we are created in the image of God. I’ll talk more about this later.

DS: All words simply denote things that other words can or cannot, therefore all definitions are dependent; so language is ultimately a circular exercise. Thus, is the penetration into real meaning something more mystical? Is it irresolvable? Is what you consider the color red really what I am seeing as red, etc.?

MR: The second clause of your first sentence doesn’t follow from the first. The first clause describes a view of language associated (rightly or wrongly) with Augustine. The view is associated with Augustine largely through the work of the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein attacked this conception of language with great efficacy. But, for the purposes of your question, if all words simply denote things, then the meaning of the word is the thing, and definitions are redundant. But with regard to your more general question: meaning is, I think, genuinely spooky. In fact, one of the legacies of Wittgenstein was a good understanding of what meaning is not, coupled with an inadequate understanding of what meaning is. Attempts to explain in terms of intentions and other mental states simply push back the problem a stage – now we have to explain the content of these states, and that is the same problem as explaining the meaning of the sentences they cause us to utter. I don’t think anyone really understands what meaning is, and I’m not sure it is the sort of thing that we can understand.

DS: Philosophy is ideas, but art is ideas in motion, put to some purpose. I posit this makes it a higher and more difficult pursuit. Agree or not?

MR: I think this question is a little too vague for me to answer it without further clarification. What does ‘in motion’ mean? And in what sense is it true that art is, while philosophy is not, ideas in motion. Anyway, as I said in my answer to the previous question, philosophy is not primarily ideas. Rather, to do philosophy is to have and exercise the ability to navigate your way around a conceptual space of a certain sort: a space made up of ideas that have certain contents. What sense of ‘motion’ would you have to presuppose in order to say, therefore, that art is but philosophy is not ‘in motion’

  The issue of purpose is an interesting one. What use is philosophy? (or, for that matter, art?) The implicit assumption seems to that something is valuable only if it is done for some purpose. But suppose you do A for the purpose of getting B. Then, it seems B is more valuable to you than A, since the only reason you are doing A is to get B. And if you do B only for the purposes of getting C then it seems C is more valuable to you than B, since the only reason you are doing B is to get C, and so on. So, A is what is known as instrumentally valuable – its value derives from its contribution in getting you B. B is, in turn, instrumentally valuable – its value derives from getting you C, and so on. But suppose there is somewhere that this chain of instrumental value stops – say Z. You don’t pursue Z because of anything it can get you. You pursue it because it is valuable in itself. Then Z has no purpose, and that is precisely why it is more valuable than A, B, C and everything else before it. So, having no purpose is a necessary – but not sufficient – of something being truly, in the sense of ultimately, valuable. If philosophy has no purpose – and note I say ‘if’ – I suspect that might be something in its favor rather than a strike against it.

DS: A nice twist on the meaning ‘invaluable,’ I’d think. Before we delve into The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe, let me start from the beginning, and talk about Mark Rowlands, the man. Are you married? What does your wife do? And how did you meet?

MR: I’m married, and have been for a few years, although we have been together a lot longer than that. Emma and I met when I lived in Ireland. We have a thirteen month old son (not to mention a thirteen week old puppy) – and that, I suppose, is pretty much the answer to what my wife does at the moment.

DS: When and where were you born? You are British, and an immigrant to America. Were you born during the Mod Era or after? What were some of the major, or defining, issues in Great Britain during your youth, insofar as they affected your career path?

MR: I was born in Wales in 1962 in a city called Newport – which has sprung to prominence recently, though not in the US, as being the home of some very good bands – for example, Goldie Lookin’ Chain, and the great Feeder.

   I grew up a few miles away in a town called Cwmbrân – it means ‘Valley of the Crow’ – a so called ‘new town’ and, more significantly, cultureless armpit of a place at the arse end of the eastern valley: the first of the Welsh coal/iron valleys.

   I’m not entirely sure when the Mod Era was. Before my tine, I’m sure. I hit my gusty teens during the first metal era. When I was a kid, the most influential bands were Led Zep, Deep Purple, and Uriah Heep. I’m talking about influential for the cool kids, of course. If you had the misfortune of not being cool, you were probably listening to the Bay City Rollers or, worse, Abba.

  Then when I was fourteen or so, along came the Sex Pistols, followed quickly by The Stranglers, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, and Magazine.

  The social issues that affected my career path mostly seemed to center around Margaret Thatcher, the conservative Prime Minister from 1979 onwards. First, when I was an undergraduate, she devastated the mining communities of my birth. The year I was born there were 250 working coal mines in Wales. By the time Maggie finished with it there was one. My father, by then Chief Superintendent in the Gwent police took early retirement because, in large part, he was disgusted by the increasingly political purposes for which the police were being used.

  Then, by the time I was finishing my Ph.D. and looking for a job, Maggie had turned her attention to the universities in general and philosophy departments in particular – on the grounds that all those liberal, commie, bed-wetting academics had been criticizing her for, among other things, her habit of destroying close knit industrial communities. So, philosophy departments were either being closed hand over fist or had iron clad hiring freezes. So, I had to go to the US for my first job – which was no bad thing, of course.

DS: What were some of the cultural touchstones in your life, the things, events, or people who graced your existence with those ‘I remember exactly where I was’ moments?

MR: It didn’t exactly grace my existence, but 9/11 obviously stands out in my mind. I was in New York on 9/10, ostensibly on a speaking tour of some Eastern US universities. But, Emma and I decided to head down to Orlando for a couple of days to go to Disneyworld (Yes, I’m a big kid). We flew out of Newark. As you drive up the ramp on the approach to Newark airport, there is a great view of lower Manhattan. And I remember pointing out the Twin Towers to Emma. The next morning, I’m in a hotel gym in Orlando, watching the TV while I’m working out, and seeing the first plane crash into the tower.

  Here’s another one, very different. I’m 14, and hanging out with another kid called Mark. His older brother had got us into a barn dance in a farming town called Usk, about fifteen miles away. We are both there for a very specific purpose. Mark’s older brother Tom, 19 and a future career criminal, and all his friends, like fighting. But no one will fight them, because they’re big, scary bastards. So, we two Marks are there to start the fights. So, I get sent up to a guy who’s dancing with a girl. I butt in and start dancing with the girl. The guy, eyeing the snot-nosed kid who had interjected, is supposed to take a swing at me, and then Tom and his friends jump in and all hell breaks loose. That was the theory, and that was indeed the way it usually worked, until one night the bastards decided to hang me out to dry. I do my thing, the guy swings at me. And then … nothing. They’re there at the side of the barn, pissing themselves laughing. Luckily, it all worked out in the end, at least for me. I was a big fourteen – I had grown to what turned out to be my full height by then – and I was a pretty good boxer. So I had no real troubles with the guy. After that I felt strangely ‘grown up’.

  It’s probably worth mentioning that I have an uneasy relationship with my memories at the best of times. That I am in them at all – that they are my memories – often strikes me as a fortuitous bonus: something to be discovered rather than immediately given. This underlies a certain feeling of amazement to which I am sometimes subject, when I think, ‘Wow! Did I do that? Was that me? Is this really my life? That I am the same person in the fight at the barn dance and gazing at the Twin Towers the day before they were destroyed strikes me as faintly surreal.

DS: What did you want to be when you grew up- a soccer player, a scientist, a general? Who were your childhood heroes and why? Where did you go to high school, and to what college?

MR: My high school was Croesyceiliog Comprehensive School, in Cwmbrân. After that I went to the University of Manchester to study engineering. Got kicked out after a year, but managed to talk my way into philosophy. This makes no sense to someone from the US. But in the British university system, at least back in those days, you have to pick one subject when you go in, and you study nothing else for the three years that you are there. If you fail any classes, you are out. Nor was it easy getting into university in those days. Only about five percent of the population went, and I was there by the skin of my teeth. The upside was that if you did get in then you generally got all your fees paid, plus a maintenance grant that was enough to survive on. Philosophy went well – I was a natural – and after I graduated from Manchester, I went to Oxford University to do my Ph.D. (or D.Phil. as they call it there). This, if I might add modestly, I did in the record time of eighteen months from start to submission. So, I think I was 24 when I started my first job in academia.

  No heroes – for reasons mentioned earlier. I was, however, very fond of Muhammad Ali. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. Then, when I got to be a teenager, I thought professional boxer might be the career for me but eventually had to abandon that idea on the grounds that, when push came to shove, I was a bit of a pussy really (I didn’t like getting hit). So, as luck would have it, I managed to save a few brain cells for the academic career that eventually followed.

DS: What sort of child were you- a loner or center of attention? Did you get good grades? Were you a mama’s boy, a nerd, or a rebel?

MR: I was a jock through most of my childhood, and through most of that time I was also gregarious and outgoing. In high school, I would have rugby training on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and a game on Saturday morning against some other school. Sometimes, in my later teens, I would also play for the local club team on Saturday afternoons. Monday and Wednesday would be boxing training, with a fight every other Friday night. 

  In the summer, both would be replaced with cricket, for which I probably had the most aptitude but the least enthusiasm.

  When I got to 18, my final year of high school, I gave up all the sport (and where I came from, you just didn’t give up rugby). And after getting very good grades all my school life, they all fell apart too in my final year of high school – which is why I only got into university by the skin of my teeth. I’m not sure why all this happened during my final year of high school. Either I was getting an unusually early start on a mid-life crisis or I was just very, very tired.

DS: Any siblings? What paths in life have they followed?

MR: I have one brother, younger than me by four years. He is a chef.

DS: Any children? What paths have they followed in life? What are their interests and careers? Are any of them writers?

MR: My son is thirteen months old. I have tried to convince him of the wonders of writing. But he just eats the crayons.

DS: What of your parents? What were their professions? Did they encourage your pursuit of philosophy?

MR: My father was a police officer, and my mother a kindergarten teacher. They both strongly ‘encouraged’ me to go to university. I wasn’t the first in my family to have gone; but there weren’t many before me. So, as long as I got in and came away with a degree – which during my final year of high school didn’t look like it was going to happen – they were sufficiently relieved to encourage me to do whatever I liked. Even philosophy.

  I suspect that final year of high school scarred them more than it did me. For years afterwards, they were convinced I couldn’t be any good at philosophy and should get a sensible job. Parenthood f***s you up, apparently. And I have it all to look forward to.

DS: What was your youth like, both at home and in terms of socializing with other children?

MR: During my early years, around 4-10, I just remember a never ending summer of cowboys and Indians, or some or other version of War, down at the Bluebell Woods down the bottom of Chapel Lane. There would be about twenty of us or so. In the summer, the ferns would grow six feet long, and the stalks made great spears. So, the summer months would be devoted to re-enacting Homer’s Illiad; of which we were all great fans. Alternatively, there would be informal soccer matches down at the sports fields on The Highway; or go-kart races down Edlogan way, the steepest and longest hill we could find in my part of Cwmbrân (and that was pretty steep and long).

  I was, as Dylan Thomas put it, as happy as the day was long.

  After I reached 11, formal team sports – especially rugby and cricket – took over. I was good at both, and exceptionally good at cricket (I played for my country at age group level). So, I was a popular jock in high school.

  The days of my mid-teens onwards would see us feral children going down to Newport on Friday and Saturday nights, and getting really drunk, and then a fight around closing time. Unemployment was high (see the Maggie Thatcher response), and busloads of the boys would come down from the valleys looking to blow off steam. But it was all clean stuff. Now it looks positively quaint. Fists only: no feet, no bottles, and no knives. It all started changing around the mid-eighties. But by then I was too old and scared anyway, and had moved on to Oxford, where I didn’t get into any barroom brawls at all.

DS: Do you consider yourself a social or cultural critic, now, having penned The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe, and some other pop cultural works?

MR: I never really think about what I am or what I should consider myself to be. I guess, since I have a book called ‘Fame’ coming out later this year, where I talk about everybody from Paris Hilton to Osama bin Laden, that I could probably be counted as a cultural critic of sorts. But my rule has always been to do what interests me, and let anyone else who can be bothered decide what I am.

DS: On my list of most influential books in my life, I would include Alex Haley’s The Autobiography Of Malcolm X; Walt Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass; Loren Eiseley’s autobiography All The Strange Hours; Leonard Shlain’s Art And Physics, and the Betty Smith novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. Had I read this book earlier in my life, in my teens, perhaps I may have included it on my list, for it is brimming with great examples of philosophic concepts as presented via pop culture. But, what books would you put on such a list as mine above?

MR: Thank you. I’m honored to think that, but for my misfortune in being born too late, I might have been a contender for a list like this.

  If we exclude philosophy (which I hadn’t discovered in my teens anyway), my list is made up largely of novels, and looks something like this:

  Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I love almost all his stuff. He is a brilliant examiner of the tensions and contradictions involved in the modern self(although I didn’t know what when I was first reading him). The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is also among my favorites – if only for the opening page summary of the book’s theme: the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Quite simply the best political novelist who ever lived. I share his suspicion of utopianism. The Secret Agent is also a masterpiece.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night. Don’t ask me why – I guess I like stories about hidden weakness.

  And from my early teens:

  Alexander Cordell, Rape of the Fair Country (largely because it is about the valley where I grew up, but a hundred and forty years before me).

  Also, there’s a poem, not a book: Dylan Thomas, ‘Lament’. All of his truly great poems are about time. But I just live the way the vehicle (i.e. the sound) and the content are interwoven in this one; so much so that the vehicle is part of the content. Philosophers of mind could learn a lot from this.

  Finally, too late to be a formative influence on me – it only came out in 2004 and I antecedently agreed with him anyway – but still a fantastic book: John Gray, Straw Dogs.

DS: What are your views on religion? Do you believe in gods or not? Are you an atheist or agnostic? What links do you see between philosophy and religion? Is myth merely expired religion, and religion myth alive? Do you see religion spawning from the same human wellspring as art?

MR: It would surprise me – it would surprise me a lot – if God existed. Then again, I’ve been surprised before. One thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of thinking about things is that I really don’t know very much at all. In fact, if the history of thought has taught me anything it is that, once we go beyond mundane beliefs that I need to get around in the world, most of what I believe is probably wrong. Therefore, while I find most religious views ridiculous, I am also deeply suspicious of the sort of anti-religious proselytizing certainty you find, in for example, Dawkins or Dennett. I think John Gray is probably right when he describes them as a late Christian movement.

  The links between philosophy and religion are multifarious. There are obvious ones. For example, St Augustine used Plato’s metaphysics to introduce into Christianity the apparatus of souls and a non-physical heaven. Thomas Aquinas got most of his ideas from Aristotle; and so on.

  Fundamentalist versions of religion are, of course, anathema to philosophy. Fundamentalists believe in the sort of objectivity of values first defended by people like Socrates and Plato. But they think they can dispense with all those pesky, and hard-won, arguments you need to find out what those values are. Fundamentalism is philosophy without the arguments – which means it’s basically ‘anti-philosophy’

  There is an idea I want to explore further, since I’ve only recently had it. But it will crop up several times as this interview proceeds: the idea that philosophy, and religion, are basic forms of human conceit. Philosophy is a lot more subtle than religion in this regard. But, nevertheless, it has been thoroughly infected with religious assumptions. And many of the standard problems of philosophy do not make sense without those assumptions. I’ll mention a few of them later.

DS: Since God concepts are obviated by simply asking ‘Who made God?’, because the answer could always be, ‘He always was;’ which is the same answer one can ask re: ‘What made the cosmos?’; thereby making God a superfluity, why does such a belief persist?

MR: Presumably: shelter from the storm. Understanding the inevitability of your own death is a deeply unpleasant thing. That is why most of us tend not to think about it too often or too deeply. The essence of religion is hope – though the religious tend to call it faith. This they understand as their primary virtue. But hope is the used car salesman of human existence; so friendly, so plausible, but you can’t rely on him. The most important existential task anyone faces is to realize that there is no hope and to live your life in the face of this realization.

  My autobiography explores this idea in its various facets. This is what I call the religion of the wolf. A life lived in the warm and rosy glow of hope is, obviously, the pleasant option, the one that any remotely sane person would choose if given the option. But we are not given the option, and, consequently, pleasant is not what it’s all about.

DS: Have you ever read Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained? A pal of mine recommended the book to me, but it was not well written and its ideas were dubious. Basically, Boyer’s explanation boils down to the fear and the bush analogy. If there are two people, and there is a mysterious rustling behind the bush, the person who is fearful and immediately runs away is likely to pass on more of his genes to the next generation because, while the brave person may be braver, if there was a saber-toothed tiger behind the bush, the brave person is dead, and bravery is weeded out. Similarly, religious people and beliefs dominate because fear is good for spreading one’s genes, and beliefs in the supernatural are fear-based. While fear is no doubt a part of religion- i.e.- the fear of death, Boyer’s is too simplistic an approach. Thoughts on the idea, and on religion’s provenance?

MR: I’ve not read the book, and from your description I probably won’t. From what you say – although, I repeat, I’ve not read it, and I hate to criticize something secondhand – there seems to be a crucial flaw in the argument. There is no such thing as a genetic advantage per se. There is always only differential selective advantage: that is, advantage relative to some other creature or possibility. Therefore, engaging in a certain sort of behavior – like religious observance – will confer a differential selective on you only if it is a comparatively rare phenomenon. If everyone does it, there is no differential selective advantage. So, if religious observance is widespread, it can confer no differential selective advantage.

DS: Correct, the ‘genetic advantage’ description was mine; I don’t believe it’s in the book; it is just my paraphrase of Boyer’s conceit. Are there any major areas of philosophy that you think have been wrongheaded since the earliest times they were proposed? What are they and why?

MR:  I have a suspicion. It’s a fairly recent suspicion, and so not in any way worked out. But I think others have had related suspicions. The suspicion is that philosophy, in general, is vitiated by an assumption that we can’t quite seem to shake. We could never quite bring ourselves to believe that we are nothing but mammals. On the contrary, we think we are created in the image of God. The assumption is not, at least not today, made explicit – it can’t be because it is laughable. But it is there in tacit form, permeating and prolonging some of the most stubborn and sterile debates in philosophy.

  Take knowledge, both its nature and limits. Since Plato, we have worried about what knowledge is, and how much of it we can have. But where did this idea of knowledge come from? We can believe various things, and some of our beliefs are more reliable than others. I suspect the idea that knowledge is the sort of thing which we can have or to which we can aspire, is the extrapolation of this general observation that some of our beliefs are more reliable than others. And forming the limit of this extrapolation: the idea of God as the embodiment of perfect knowledge.

  I always ask myself: would a philosophical question even make sense when we ask it of my dog? So, if I were to ask things like: What, if anything, can my dog know as opposed to merely believe? In order to know something, does my dog need to know that he knows it? These questions are just silly. For my dog, there are just various beliefs; some true, some false; some having better grounding in available evidence than others. Why suppose it is any different for us? Why don’t we just make do with beliefs? Because God doesn’t believe things – mere belief is compatible with error. And if we are created in the image of God, we must be able to know things too. And so we arrive at the philosophical problem of knowledge.

  I suspect similar stories can be told for a variety of philosophical problems – maybe all of them. Take the problem of free will. What a strange idea that is. There is clearly no such thing as free will. It’s pretty obvious that we cannot act freely. But much of human ingenuity for centuries has been, and still is, devoted to working out how we can be free. The manifest fact that we are not is denied by the vast majority, even today. Very few, armed with what we are continually discovering about the world are prepared to say: so much the worse for human freedom. Even an anti-religious proselytizer like Dennett has written a book showing the sense in which we can be free. We can’t bring ourselves to think: so much the worse for human freedom. That would be to deny that we are the little gods we tacitly take ourselves to be. If you think that’s far fetched, Leibniz actually described humans as ‘little gods’. The idea was prevalent in the 17^th century. And I suspect it still is, tacitly, today.

  So, philosophy, perhaps since its inception, has been complicit in a certain sort of crime, a crime of conceit: we think we are God.

  Of course, to point this out is also philosophy …

DS: Do you belong to any political party, and what are your views on such current politicized matters as euthanasia, abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research? How about the U.S. Presidential election? Are you a citizen, and can you vote?

MR: I belong to no political party and never have. Margaret Thatcher instilled in me a lifelong hatred of politicians. I don’t trust them. And I think the most you can hope for from a politician is that they don’t make things any worse than they already are. That doesn’t happen very often.

  Consequently, I have no distinct party line on the issues you describe. Anyway, morality is not exactly rocket science. Most of the time, all you have to do is ask yourself: how would I like it if that happened to me? So, based on this fairly obvious version of the ‘golden rule’, my views pan out something like this:

  Euthanasia: For it. The least you can do for someone is allow them to die with a little dignity. I have done this for my dogs when it has been required. And I would want someone to do it for me if circumstances warranted. (Note that I am talking about matters of principle here; and not about the often tricky issue of whether the circumstances do, in a particular situation, warrant the euthanasia).

  Abortion: my views have changed. I used to think: it’s just a clump of cells until around 20 weeks. But I was clearly wrong. I’m still cautiously in favor of allowing abortions in the first trimester. By the third trimester, it’s pretty much morally equivalent to infanticide. That’s not to say that infanticide is necessarily wrong: some decent philosophers have defended it. But it is to say that if you have an abortion in the third trimester, you are, in effect, killing an infant. In the second, it’s tricky. I think the most we can say is that the wrongness of the abortion increases as the trimester goes on. Some people like their morality cut and dried: something is either right or wrong. I think life is often too slippery for this.

  Gay marriage? Yes. I think people should be able to do whatever they want as long as they are not hurting anyone else. And, in case there are any religious zealots reading this (an unlikely occurrence, perhaps): offending someone’s sensibilities is not the same as hurting them.

Stem cell research? I have reservations about research involving animals, since they are conscious, can suffer, and have not in any way consented to the experiments. But stem cells are not conscious, can not suffer, and are not the sort of thing which could give or withhold consent. (Some philosophers, and maybe non-philosophers too, are stupid enough to believe that animals can’t give or withhold consent either. They should try giving my puppy a bath some time). So, if the stem cell research does not involve animals I am strongly in favor of it. If it does, I am against, except in exceptional circumstances.

DS: Your abortion answer surprises me. Lemme just follow up: within a decade or two all fertilized human ova will be able to, from conception to birth, be bred outside the human womb. Thus, questions of the fetus’s being part of the mother, etc., will be pointless arguments. I’ve always felt the greater issues were not the autonomy of the fetus, but the ‘genetic sovereignty’ of the parent (till now, solely the mother). If technology eclipses the question of can all fetuses be brought to term?, then is not the right of the individual to say yea or nay the primary right? And, if there is a disagreement between the parents, does not society (an overpopulated one like China, India, or some other) have the right to say, ‘Enough already!’? In short, let’s say I’m single, and a hot chick comes on to me. We take precautions, and I fuck her brains out, with condom. But, a month later she says it didn’t work, and she’s prego. She doesn’t want the kid, but decides to put it in a ‘fetal incubator’ that’s been developed. Now, the choice is solely mine. Since the fetus can be brought to term from any point after conception, the trimester dilemma has no bearing. So, then, don’t I get a say in whether or not I want the kid to be born? After all, I may not want my genes spread this early in my life.

MR: The issue of where the fetus is located is irrelevant. Location is not a determinant of whether you have a right to life. So, whether the fetus is in utero or in an incubator doesn’t matter. The possibility of independent existence is a red herring. Nor, I think, does potential matter – not as a determinant of the rights you possess. Potential to be something only gives you potential rights. You have the potential to be President. But that doesn’t give you the actual rights of the President. We all have the potential to be corpses. But that doesn’t mean we should be treated like them. What counts, from the point of view of the moral rights or entitlements you possess is not where you are, or what you can be, but what you now are, and what you can now do. My point about the third trimester – especially the further into that trimester you are – is that the fetus is pretty much the same sort of thing, and can pretty much do the same sorts of things, as the neonate. There is no difference between the two. Therefore if you think killing neonates is a bad thing to do, you logically have to think the same sort of thing about killing third trimester fetuses.

  With regard to your example, I just have a couple of comments. First: way to go! Second, unlucky dude! What is crucial is when you decide to pull the plug. A few days in, and you’ve done nothing wrong. Wait until the 28^th week and you’ve pretty much committed infanticide. And in between, what you do ranges from morally inconsiderable to the morally unconscionable. This assessment has nothing to do with where the fetus is but in what it is and what it can do.

  Finally, sometimes shit happens. And one’s understandable, and indeed justifiable, rage at the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis)fortune does not alter the fact that what one wants sometimes has to play second fiddle to more important considerations.

DS: Ok, but I still think you’re dodging the thing that most Right Wingers want- the ability to save every and all ‘potential’ life- as my example grants. Again, putting the fetus aside (because I simply don’t buy the idea of there being magic points in utero when an abortion beomes infanticide), my concern is more the rights of the individual to further his/her lineage or not, vs. the will of society to say no, or, conversely, say, you must! Anyway, excelsior! How political is philosophy, internally, in Academia? And what role does external politics play in internal politics? I.e.- do Left Wingers get favored treatment?

MR: I don’t know many right wing philosophers. My impression, although it’s not something I’ve really thought about or empirically investigated so I may be way off base, is that the Academy treats those of a right wing persuasion with utter fairness and impartiality – as long as they don’t actually say or do anything right wing (or anything that might conceivably be construed as right wing). If they do, then all bets are off. Larry Summers, anyone?

DS: Do you have a philosophic bete noir? Who is he or she, and what is the source of your dispute?

MR: Not really. Philosophy, as I think I’ve already mentioned, is kind of like snooker. If you worried about who you were playing, because you thought they were better than you, you would get the yips (you would ‘choke’ as I think you say over here). So, you bracket the opponent, and play the balls. I also try to do the same in philosophy. I play the arguments, not the person who came up with them. Half the time, I struggle to remember who came up with the arguments.

  There are a few philosophers – I’ve never met them – who are, in my view, clearly deranged. But, in general, when I meet someone with whom I vehemently disagree, I come to realize that, like me, they are just people trying to do the best they can with what they’ve got.

  And the rest? Well they’re just douche bags.

DS: Can you give the readers a one or two paragraph précis of the content of The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe; its overall argument, and its major conclusions?

MR: First of all, my publishers would be extremely annoyed off with me if I didn’t mention that The Philosopher at the End of the Universe is now out of print. What is in print is the second edition of this magnificent volume, entitled Sci-Phi: Philosophy from Socrates to Schwarzenegger. It’s exactly the same, just with a different title and cover.

  The book was my attempt to talk about various philosophical issues through an atypical medium: recent, blockbuster, but sometimes dire, science fiction movies. Blockbuster and recent were required desiderata, since the publishers wanted the book to sell (as did I, obviously). So, the movies I focused on were: Frankenstein, The Matrix, Terminator, Total Recall, Minority Report, Hollow Man, Alien(s), Independence Day, Star Wars, and Blade Runner. Some of these are great movies, some not so much (you can probably work out which is which).

  I used each movie to introduce and talk about some central area of, or problem in, philosophy.

  I used Frankenstein to talk about the idea of philosophy in general and, in particular, to introduce a distinction between that was going to provide a guiding theme in the chapters to come. The distinction was between two ways of understanding ourselves: from the inside and from the outside. Most philosophical problems derive from our inability to get these two pictures to mesh.

  The Matrix I used to talk about the area of philosophy known as epistemology or theory of knowledge. The guiding question was: how much can we know?

   I used the Terminator films to talk about the mind-body problem: the problem of understanding the relation between consciousness and the brain.

  Total Recall was used as a way of understanding the problem of personal identity: what makes me the person I am, and what makes you the person you are, etc.

  Minority Report was used to talk about the problem of free will: is it ever possible for us to act freely.

  I used Hollow Man to talk about the fundamental question of morality: why bother being moral?

  Alien(s) and Independence Day were used to talk about the scope of morality: to what sorts of things should I be moral?

  Star Wars was used to talk about the relation between good and evil (and as a thinly veiled excuse for talking about one of my favorites: Nietzsche)

  Blade Runner was used to talk about death and to revisit one of the themes of the opening chapter: the meaning of life.

  The book wasn’t really about conclusions, but about questions; and explaining why they were really very good questions. Most importantly, it was about trying to get the reader to think like a philosopher.

DS: Ok, on to some specific and general queries regarding the book and your views. I’ll try to go in a roughly chronological order. The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe basically deals with several sci fi films you like, and you try to explicate their philosophic underpinnings, rather than critique the films- some of which you admit are not too good. In the first chapter, which deals with the Frankenstein mythos, you speak of meaning and absurdity, and use the life cycle of the cicada as an example of meaninglessness. Why?

MR: This is the point where, as an interviewee, I start to become a little awkward. Since I wrote Philosopher, I’ve completely changed my view of the meaning of life, thus undercutting your entirely sensible questions a little. I’ll try to answer them as well I can, but they might not be the answers you were expecting.

  The cicada stuff still works. Let’s suppose you spend almost all your life – 17 years - burrowing your way through shit. Then, you are let out for a day, shag someone, and then drop dead. The person you have shagged produces offspring, who then spend 17 years burrowing through shit; are let out for a day, shag, and drop dead, and so on. Where’s the meaning? What gives this life its significance?

  If you think there isn’t any, then the problem is explaining exactly how we differ from the cicada. We spend much of our lives immersed in various forms of shit. We do this, because we have a family to raise and support; a family that will grow up to spend most of their lives immersed in shit, for pretty much the same sorts of reasons.

  A more familiar, and no doubt respectable way, of making this point appeals to the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus pissed off the gods. So they got him to roll a rock up a hill. When he reached the top, it rolled back down, and he had to begin again. And that was it, for all eternity. Sisyphus is an allegory for human life. Each journey to the top is like your life, and each step on this journey is like a day in that life. But where Sisyphus returns down the hill to start over again, we leave that to our children. Where is the meaning there?

  But we can be happy, you might say. So what? Sisyphus is not happy, but suppose he was. Suppose the gods inculcate in him an irrational but intense desire to roll rocks up hills. Again, so what? You still won’t find meaning in this existence. So meaning can’t be identified with happiness.

  Nor can we find meaning in purpose. But I’ll postpone the reasons for this to my answer to your next question.

DS: But, is not the fault your point of view, not the essential meaninglessness of the life cycle? After all, the larval part of the cicada’s life could very well be the most important or meaningful part? After all, those believers in an afterlife, religiously based or not, often invoke the idea of larvae to describe our current existences vis-à-vis the ‘real’ eternal life they think awaits us after death. And, is meaninglessness the ultimate horror?

MR: Suppose Sisyphus doesn’t roll one rock up a hill; he rolls many. And they don’t roll back down; they stay put. After many years of toil, he succeeds in building a temple. Then, the question is: what now? An afterlife of staring at something he has now completed and is unable to change or augment in any way. The thing about purpose is that if they give your life meaning, you’d better make sure you don’t achieve them. If you do, your life no longer has meaning.

  Appealing to an afterlife doesn’t solve the problem of meaning, but merely pushes it back a step. Now we have the problems of explaining exactly what makes the afterlife meaningful – and this is not a different problem but the same one pushed back a few years in time.

  Is meaninglessness the ultimate horror? No.  I can think of a lot worse.

DS: We’ve spoken of meaninglessness, but that is, as you chide in your book, a negative definition. What then is meaning? Do we simply graft it from the ether? Do we all determine it? Is that then not solipsism? Am I entitled to say that Albert Einstein or Abraham Lincoln led lives of more meaning than Nancy Slowowicz, a pole dancer from Newark, New Jersey? And more importantly, am I correct to say it?

MR: As I said, I’ve completely changed my view of the meaning of life. In Philosopher, I was running a fairly standard line on the nature of the meaning of life, and its relation to death. Now I think that line cannot work. It can’t work because it rests on an illicit metaphysical picture – the conception of time as an arrow.

  I deal with these issues at some length in my autobiography The Philosopher and the Wolf, which I seem to find myself plugging yet again.

  First the view I was working with in The Philosopher at the End of the Universe.

We are, as Heidegger once put it, death-bound creatures: we understand ourselves in terms of our relation to time, which we think of as stretching into the future towards our uttermost possibility, death. We fill in the line of our lives by telling stories about ourselves – or, as academics like to call them, narratives. These narratives define us, and provide our life with meaning or significance. No other creature can do this, we tell ourselves, and this is why we think we are better than everything else.

  What I now realize is that there are certain moments in our lives when we can rise above the silly little stories we tell about ourselves, and recognize them for the petty conceits that they are. These moments don’t give our lives meaning, in the way that is usually thought of, but they do have value. If I am in any way worth it – if I am a worthwhile thing for the universe to have produced – it is these moments that make me so.

  These are not happy moments (you won’t find meaning there). Nor do they define us – that isn’t going to happen. But they are the moments when we are at our best. Often they are horrible – because that is what is needed for us to be at our best.

  So, instead of thinking of the meaning or value of life as something towards which we progress – whether in this life or the next – think of it as dotted around your life, grains of barley on a field after the harvest.

  I don’t know Ms Slowowicz. But there could be moments on her life that had real value, and where she could have justified her existence, just as there are, or might be similar moments in the life of Einstein or Lincoln. Because of those moments, the universe would have said, if it were sentient: yes, you were a worthwhile thing for me to have done. And if the universe is not sentient: it doesn’t matter. The value of these moments is not tied to anything bearing witness to them

DS: Except, of course, the doer or the percipient of these actions; who are, part of the cosmos, therefore making it sentient; or so would run a corollary or rebuttal. I ask this question because I have come to the conclusion that 99.99% of people are mere placeholders- i.e.- they are the genetic go-betweens connecting the great people who push human life, society, and culture forward. Think of all the people who claim to want to sacrifice for their children, but for what? So that their children can sacrifice for their children who can repeat the process ad nauseam? No; whether they realize it or not, they are doing it in the hopes of being part of a lineage that will affect something deeper. If there were not this drive, then there would be little to separate us from your cicadas, no?

MR: Maybe. But there’s an alternative explanation: people in general don’t spend much time thinking about why they are doing what they are doing. In particular, the thought that their children are, in Sisyphean fashion, simply going to perpetuate a process that has no meaning: that is not a thought that most people are spend much time thinking. Unless they’ve read Camus, or someone like that. And, after all, most of us most of the time (and all of us some of the time) are bitches of our genes.

  On another note: I would put my wife, son, and for that matter my dog, ahead of any ‘lineage that will affect something deeper’.

DS: I don’t know; even janitors I’ve known have spoken to me of what they hoped to achieve in life- little as it may seem. And, even if not cognizant of it; evolutionarily, we can use an analogy that they are directed toward a semi-self-sacrifice without an awareness of it. As an artist, for example, there are manifest examples of this urge that crop up. Sometimes young wannabe writers email me and ask me why do I write, and I usually say that in ten thousand years, on some starship ten thousand light years away, I want some sentient being, human or not, who may be lonely on some interstellar freighter, to seek to alleviate his tedium by searching the Encyclopedia Galactica, to stumble across my work- read a poem or story or essay, and say to himself, ‘Ah, that ancient earthling- he knew!’ What it was I knew is no matter, but I want that power to awaken another being to something greater, deeper, more lasting. To me, there’s no other reason to write, create art, or pursue any endeavor, save to bring pieces of your life and knowledge to others, so they can benefit intellectually or emotionally. Can there be a deeper or more profound concept of immortality? After all, when we speak of Shakespeare, we do not usually refer to the guy stiff under Avon, but to the ideas and feelings his art ushers forth. Is this why you pursue philosophy?

MR: I strongly disagree. Here’s the way I see it. Am I a worthwhile thing for the universe to have done? Or should it not have bothered? If the universe were sentient, then when, say, Beethoven wrote the final note to the third movement of the Emperor Concerto, then the universe might have said, if it were the sort of thing that could think (which it is not): OK, fair enough, you worked out well. I’m glad I produced you.

  But the value of this is not tied to there being anyone to hear the music, learn from it, or grow from it, or have something deeper in them awakened – or however you want to put it. And the sentient universe is, of course, just a heuristic device: I don’t really think the universe is sentient. Far from there being ‘no other reason’ to create or write, I think the benefit to others – whether intellectual or emotional – your creation might produce is not the primary reason to produce it.

  If both the concerto and Beethoven were destroyed at the moment of completion, it shouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference to our imagined sentient universe’s assessment of Beethoven’s worth. When Beethoven wrote the final note to the third movement, he justified his existence, and everything that happened afterwards doesn’t matter.

  Eventually, everything we do is going to be lost. Even if what we do awakens something in someone else, and in turn in someone else, that too will be eventually all be lost: Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair, etc. Time will take everything. But what it can never take from us is what we were in our best moments – moments like writing the final note to the third movement of the Emperor concerto.

  Just as a matter of interest, I don’t write in the hope of affecting other people. I write so I know what it is I am thinking (until I externalize it, I’m really not sure. And when I want to stop thinking about whatever it is I am thinking – that’s when I turn it into a book.

  I am also skeptical about the extent to which other people can benefit from the work of an artist. I’m willing to allow that it does happen, but not as often as you might think. I suspect the idea that great art inspires is a myth propounded by lovers of art in order to get money. It can inspire, but this is comparatively rare. And it can do so only for people who have already struggled with what the artist is trying to convey.

DS: When I wrote of why I write I was meaning in the larger sense. Of course, all I write gives me pleasure (if good; which most is), and that alone is reason enough to do it (as is masturbation for those with or without artistic talents- pity the spermatozoa!). However, I think that there is a benefit to be gained by thinking long term and beyond the immediate; and I don’t share your Ozymandian pessimism. While our current species is limited, I can conceive of civilizations far greater, to the point of being able to manipulate time and space, even create new habitats- designer universes- to live in. And, even as advanced as they are, I believe they, or a similar sentient crowd, will find good and worthwhile things from a Shakespeare play, a Schneider sonnet, or a Beethoven symphony. To return, I mentioned my placeholder view of life as akin to your cicada posit, but let me see if I can give a proof for it. I feel ‘greatness,’ or the ability to more deeply affect the human condition, is a random thing. When people have tried to make available the sperm or eggs of Nobel Laureates or Mensans, as example, the kids turn out to be rather average. This gibes with the fact that almost all great people, such as Pablo Picasso, Isaac Newton, Einstein, and most famously-Thomas Jefferson, have never had any forebears nor descendents come close to their achievements. And the few famed people who’ve had success run in their families- the Adamses, the Darwins, the Barrymores, have never really had any greats in their clans, or- as in the Darwin case, Erasmus was not in a league with his grandson Charles, a great man by any measure. I call this fact The Infinity Spike, meaning that the idea that a Master Race could be engineered- at least intellectually, is folly. Perhaps physical characteristics, but the chances of two Mensans or Nobel Laureates producing another Michelangelo or Akira Kurosawa are only negligibly greater than such a person coming from a plumber and a teacher. Perhaps a three or four out of fifty million chance versus a one and a half to two chance. In short, greatness spikes toward infinity out of nowhere- there is no predictable bell curve, nor progression toward excellence. What are your thoughts on this posit? And does this increase or decrease the desire for meaning to the individual?

MR: I’m inclined to agree with the idea that there is so much nurture involved in genius that it cannot be genetically engineered. And it’s not always good nurture either. Genius can often be very cruel, both in its genesis and consequences.

DS: You claim, too, that meaning or purpose comes from the quest, not the accomplishment. This is a rephrasing of the old saying that the journey is more important than the destination. However, if the destination- say, Manifest Destiny, or Lebensraum, or a Final Solution, are not worth going, does not even the journey lose meaning? And, as an artist, I also take issue with the idea that fulfillment means that purpose is forever rent. After all, art’s very purpose is its eternal renewal in each percipient, and in each time the percipient engages it. So, I think that claim is wrongheaded. Comments?

MR: I don’t remember saying this. But I’ll take you word for it that I did. I certainly don’t believe it now, for the sorts of reasons outlined in my answers to previous questions. The ideas of meaning and purpose are bound up with our temporality: the fact that we understand our lives a lines stretching from the past into an as yet undetermined future. So, as purpose, meaning is understood as something towards which we aim. Ultimately, I think, we cannot make sense of this notion of meaning.

  I, on the other hand, think that the value of life lies in certain moments when we are at our best – our highest moments, however horrible, terrifying, or hopeless they may be. So, our lives have value when we eschew the narratives we construct to explain ourselves to ourselves, and so manage to step outside the temporal story of our lives for just a moment. It usually takes something extraordinary for us to do this.

DS: The next chapter deals with The Matrix trilogy. You describe Rene Descartes’ view that when dreaming, there is never a way to be certain that the dream is a dream. You then go on to cite the dream within a dream example. Now, I’ve never had that occur, but I have had dreams where time frames from my life were mixed. Say, a woman I dated at 25 is in my high school classroom with classmates from high school and kindergarten. The kindergarteners look like children but act like adults, and they are talking with people I worked with at 35. Thus, I am certain I am dreaming because these folk never met, one or more may be dead, etc. Or, if I dream of flying I know it is a dream. Or, does not lucid dreaming disprove that claim? Or, are you saying that we could be dreamt automata with the delusion of sentience, therefore parts of a dream whose self-consciousness is an illusion? If so, does not Occam’s Razor- the idea that the simplest solution that best fits the known facts is usually the correct solution, however, fall squarely on my side, as your claim would seem far too needlessly complex?

MR: I think the dreaming point is a simple and irrefutable one. Given that there are various sorts of dreams, of various levels of coherence and consistency, then it is not possible to distinguish waking up from switching from one sort of dream to another. So, dreams of the sort you describe – where everything is confused and mixed up – would be one sort of dream. And when you, as you would say, wake up, then you merely switch form this sort of jumbled dream to another sort of dream that hangs together a lot more coherently.

  Note also that you cannot say that you know your high school classroom dream is a dream because ‘these folk never met’ because that they never met could be part of the dream. (Descartes is not refuted so easily). Similarly, the ability to fly might be one that you have in some dreams and not others. So, since it might track the distinction between two sorts of dreams, you can’t use it to distinguish dreaming from waking life.

  Finally, contrary to what you claim, the ‘it’s all a dream’ conjecture is at an advantage on grounds of Occam’s Razor All you need postulate are dreams, not two states, dreams and reality. This sort of point, suitably transformed, was used by George Berkeley in the development of his idealism (the idea that reality is ultimately a collection of ideas).

  Do I believe that everything is a dream? No. Am I justified in this denial? I’m not sure I am.

DS: Let me digress to one of the hallmarks of both modern Political Correctness and Postmodernism, the idea that all is subjective. I argue this is manifest folly, and that anyone even arguing such a point cannot believe it, for if they truly did, there would be no rationale to argue the point. Agree or not?

MR: Yes, the claim that ‘all is subjective’ is a load of crap. But is that what postmodernism is? Postmodernism in the hands of a thinker like, say, Derrida is a far more subtle and nuanced idea: (a) in any text, there are numerous contradictions by way of which the purported principal thesis of the text undermines itself, and just the opposite thesis is asserted, and (b) the world is a collection of signifiers and therefore sufficiently text-like to justify the slogan: there is nothing outside the text.

  This is still, arguably, crap – just not as crap as the position you describe. 

DS: Oftentimes I have argued with other artists who use the ‘art is truth’ canard, or the ‘all art is subjective’ nonsense that, ‘Only bad artists claim all art is subjective.’ Logically, if all is subjective, then there’s no reason doing a damned thing in this life. Yet, just as a single drop of blood would de-purify, say, the Pacific Ocean- were it wholly purely water, so does one objective fact objectify a subjective universe, for anything then can be related or parallaxed to or against it. In writing, as example, clichés are greatly numerically repeated images or groups of words that are placed together in greatly numerically repeated situations. Thus, there is nothing subjective about a manifest cliché like ‘bleeding heart.’ Only if a writer somehow subverts that, out of the context of emotional sorrow, and perhaps uses that phrase in a poem or story about someone literally stabbed or shot in the heart, might that term be annealed or wholly subverted. Do you agree or not?

MR: I agree.

DS: If we realize that objectivity has limits- real, material, or philosophic, is not that as good as no limits because we’ve ‘accepted’ the field of play, so to speak? It’s just that the field has shrunk from infinite to not quite infinite.

MR: I do not understand this question. In particular, I fail to see how ‘limits’ can be as good as ‘no limits’.

  I do, however, think objectivity has its limits. They’re just not the sort of thing we have taken them to be. First of all, how do we understand objectivity? I think the way advocated by Thomas Nagel is entirely representative.

  For Nagel, an ‘objective fact par excellence’ is ‘the kind that can be observed and understood from many points of view’. Objective facts are ones to which there exist many routes of access. It is the existence of such many and varied routes, capable of being adopted by many and varied individuals, that constitutes an item as objective.

  In short, objective items are ones to which access is generalized. Taking the concept of objectivity as primary, we then construct a concept of subjectivity based on the guiding metaphor of a route of access. Subjective phenomena are ones to which our routes of access are reduced to one: they are items to which our access is idiosyncratic.

  To think of subjective phenomena in this way is to think of them as part of a region of reality that in itself is just like any other. It differs from other regions of reality only in that its port of entry – access – is unusually small. Classically objective phenomena are things on a savannah, and can be approached from many different directions. Experiential facts are locked up in a remote canyon whose only mode of access is a narrow tunnel.

  This explanation of subjectivity is, I think, part of the pull of the idea that all reality is objective. The explanation is so ubiquitous that it is sometimes difficult to see the alternative. The alternative is that subjective phenomena are not parts of a region of reality to which our access is idiosyncratic but rather ones that belong only to the access itself. There is no region of reality to which subjective phenomena belong, or in which they find their place. They simply belong to our accessing of regions of reality that are, in themselves, perfectly objective.

  This idea underwrites the view of consciousness I develop in The Nature of Consciousness, and other writings.

DS: Is a thing real only if it is material? Are not desiderata and emotions ‘real’ then?

MR: Why do you think that desiderata and emotions are not material? And what conception of the material must you have presupposed in order to think that?  If you’re a materialist, for example, then you will say that emotions and desiderata (by which I understand you to mean desires, broadly construed?) are structures, states or processes occurring in the brain. So, they’re material because brain processes are material.

  I don’t doubt that emotions are material in at least roughly this sense. I have only one real problem with materialism: no one knows what it is for a thing to be physical. All our knowledge of things is based on tracking their external relations: that is, the relations they bear to other things. These relations will include things like causation, dependence, lawful covariance, and so on. Our problem is that we can never get beyond the relations and identify the natures or essences of things in virtue of they enter into these relations. All we ever find are more relations.

  This was something recognized as long ago as 1927, by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Recent versions of the idea have championed by Noam Chomsky and Galen Strawson, among others. I’m with Chomsky and Strawson on this.

  Some would say: that’s because relations are all there are. Reality is simply relations between things. But what drives this idea is the slide from what we can know or discover – relations – to what there really is. This is a move from what is known as epistemological claim – a claim about what we can know – to an ontological claim – a claim about what is. Scientists make this claim all the time, particularly in the more theoretical branches of science. But I am deeply suspicious of it. Actually, I think it’s manifestly false. Underlying it is something I’ll talk about later on in the interview: the idea that we are created in the image of God.

DS: What is the mind/body problem? Does it suggest that consciousness may be a process forever beyond explication, such as people like your colleague, Colin McGinn, suggest with their New Mysterianism? And what is New Mysterianism, and Old Mysterianism? Or could consciousness merely be an illusion, as philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests with his Multiple Drafts Theory of the mind?

MR: The mind-body problem has meant different things at different times. In the last couple of decades it has typically been taken to mean the problem of consciousness: the problem of understanding how consciousness is produced or constituted by the brain. We know, or strongly suspect, that the brain does it, but we can’t understand how. Those who think there is a problem here – I am one of them – emphasize that it doesn’t stem simply from technical shortcomings: that is, it’s not the sort of thing that could be rectified by upping our knowledge of the brain. Rather, the problem is that the brain simply seems to be the wrong sort of thing to do the explaining. This is reflected in your earlier assumption that emotions are not material – how could the feeling of love be explained as simply electro-chemical activity. Maybe that is what it is, but what we can’t see is how it could be this sort of thing. Seeing how is the mind-body problem (at least in its current incarnation).

  There is no Old Mysterianism. The Mysterians were apparently a band from the 1960s. Before my time – but not before Owen Flanagan’s time: the guy who used their name to describe the view that consciousness is a mystery – a view that Colin McGinn and I both share, although we do so for different reasons. Colin thinks that it is the idiosyncratic nature of our access to consciousness – quite different from our access to the brain and other obviously physical things – that makes the production of consciousness by the brain a mystery. I, on the other hand think that the problem stems from the fact that consciousness is not an object of access at all, but belongs only to the accessing of regions of reality – regions that are, in themselves, perfectly objective.

  Anyway, the label ‘new’ was apparently a way of making sure we were not confused with the 60s band, or something like that. Speaking as a mysterian, I hate the name. But it caught on – apparently philosophers like lame names.

    I disagree strongly with Dennett’s multiple drafts model, and I don’t think he achieved what his major work on this subject, Consciousness Explained, set out to do. I think it was Ned Block who quipped that the book should really have been called Consciousness Ignored. I’m with Block on this.

  As for the more general view that consciousness is an illusion, if you think this then you should follow John Searle’s advice: pinch yourself.

DS: To what do you attribute the lack of introspection in modern society? Is American or Western culture simply as shallow as many of its detractors claim? In the arts, PC and Postmodernism have certainly aided in the ‘dumbing down’ of culture.

MR: Is there a lack of introspection in modern society? I would have thought that, on the contrary, there is far too much. There is a lack of effective introspection, maybe.

  What I mean by suggesting that there is too much introspection is the modern tendency to think of what is important in life as happiness, and then to think of happiness as a feeling. So, if you want to know if your life is going well or badly, you have to turn your attention inwards and work out how you feel about certain things. So the quality of your life is judged on the basis of the feelings you encounter when you introspect.

  Happiness, I suspect, is not a way of feeling, but a way of being: the most important thing in life is not to feel a certain way but to be a certain sort of person. And the idea that happiness is a feeling is a symptom of a peculiar sort of cultural degeneration that we in the West have undergone. This, I think, connects up with your questions on postmodernism in a variety of ways. Another, related, symptom of this degeneration is the confusion of individualism – the idea that a person’s life typically goes best when he or she is allowed to choose how to live it – with subjectivism or relativism: the idea that all ways of life are equally valid. These are very different things, and neither entails the other. This confusion is, I think, almost certainly willful and lies at the core of PC.

DS: Well, I think the term introspection implies a deeper level of inquiry. I think what you seem to term as too much introspection is just gossip and neural static. Let me digress for a moment, since I mentioned Dennett. When I interviewed him, he released a good deal of bile against the late naturalist Stephen Jay Gould, a man who invoked a good deal of antipathy in the evolutionary crowd, some echoed by other interviewees in this series. Yet, Dennett himself is, generally speaking, quite a reviled figure amongst many evolutionists, brain researchers, atheists, and philosophers- people in his own fields. You, yourself, have reflected this antipathy. Is Dennett, like Gould, simply a polarizing figure, a disreputable cad, is the philosophic breach so great, or are there professional reasons (jealousies, grant preferences. etc.) such men are personally reviled by people who would seem to be natural allies?

MR: I think ‘reviled’ is a little strong. We academics get ‘het up’ about things, our little disputes that seem so important to us. But we sometimes forget that the sorts of arguments we are having are ones you can have only with people with whom you agree on so much. Often, these are the nastiest little spats, precisely because the amount of common ground makes it possible for them to run and run.

  We’ll talk about this some more when we move on to the subject of evil. I think that, to a considerable extent, the sharing of common ground opens up new vistas for nastiness. I’m not sure why this is so: perhaps because when someone shares a lot of common ground with you, when you can see how similar they are to you, then any disagreement becomes more ‘personal.’ 

DS: I mentioned a certain lack of introspection on the part of the masses, yet in interviewing Dennett he seemed almost a blank slate himself, unwilling to take on philosophic subjects beyond that he’s written of. As example, he had appeared on a tv talk show at the end of the century, as a panelist regarding the most influential folk of the last millennium. You recall how many such lists were made, no doubt. Anyway, I thought it a great way to dovetail with my interest in mass murderers and despots, since I believe Genghis Khan was overlooked on most lists, with the issue of causality and determinism. Thus, I asked this query:

  That puts me in mind of another Charlie Rose show you did, with Steven Pinker and others, at the turn of the century, on the most influential people of last century. What I found a bit galling was some of the sheer stupidity on that panel- most notably by the President of the Carnegie Institute, Maxine Singer. She equated influence with good morality- an asinine position, yet one which no one, not even you, challenged. I similarly recalled Time magazine having a most important people of the last millennium issue, and leaving off, to my mind, easily the most influential person of the last thousand years, Genghis Khan. My reasoning is that influence comes with time, so the most influential person simply could not be in the last couple of hundred years. Then, there would have to be reach over several spheres. Then, there would be the mind experiment of removing that person and seeing if he or she was merely a part of historic forces, or one of the Great Men of History. Khan fits all of these- even if he was the worst mass killer in human history, up until the 20^th Century. He was born early on- the 12^th Century, and he took a nomadic Gobi people, with a six thousand year history of no territorial expansion, united the Mongol tribes with the Turkic tribes, and built a nation larger in area than the old Soviet Union- all within two decades- and sans guns or any advanced war materiel. His effect on politics, the arts, religion (his was a secular state), and life was profound. Remove him and the Mongols likely go on as nomads. Then there is no check on Chinese expansionism. Khan forced the Chinese to abandon their junk explorations across the Pacific and likely to the Americas. They hibernated xenophobically as a world power for centuries. The Khanates carved out of his empire, by his descendants, helped establish the Ottoman Empire, which acted as a bulwark against Muslim expansionism into Europe. Without the Ottomans, Islam may have displaced the Papacy, forcing its withdrawal to Scandinavia and a reduced status as a regional Arctic cult. China may have expanded across the Subcontinent, Oceania, and into the Andes and the western half of the Americas, while Europe was Islamized. Moorish Spain and Imam Britain may have then settled the Americas from the east. The Cold War of the last century may not have been between Communism and Capitalism, but between Islam and Sino aggression. Yet, none of that happened because one Mongol named Temujin preferred horseback riding and conquest to life as a scavenger. To me, this omission shows the profound lack of vision many so-called leaders and experts have in their respective fields.

  First, would you agree with my ranking of Genghis Khan as numero uno in influence last eon, for despite his genocidal ruthlessness, he was an organizational genius with a mind that wanted to know seemingly everything? He was arguably also the most amazing figure in human history. If you disagree, why? And why do you think he was so ignored on such lists? Was it simple