Live Options for Live Brains

The distinction between a ‘live’ and ‘dead’ option for our beliefs turns out to be William James’ coinage (all roads, it sometimes feels, lead to American Pragmatism). Here’s his definition of a live versus dead option in his own words from The Will to Believe:

A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be a Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

Leaving aside the fact that whether or not to be a Muslim is a dead option or a Christian a live one is largely a matter of one’s audience, we find here as is so often with James a fertile idea. Although our use in this blog post will largely match James’, it is applicable not only to our personal beliefs but can used, for instance, in distinguishing a classic from an old book¹, to scientific hypotheses (e.g. the ether), and so on.

The way we will put it to use today is in discussing a point Ada Palmer makes in her Inventing the Renaissance on the (non) prevalence of atheism in much of the Renaissance (i.e. a loose time period in European history which definitely includes the 1500s but is otherwise quite hard to define – read the book, it’s worth it). Here we are particularly focussed on the time period in which Machiavelli was alive.

As Palmer explains in her wonderful book, we search for atheists in the past for a range of reasons which reflect our motivations in the present rather than for good historical reasons. We as humans often feel a need to know that our beliefs are not culturally contingent, that our beliefs are capital-T True, derived objectively and not likely to be overturned in the future. She reports having upset more than a few atheists by suggesting to them they would not have been atheists at the time of the renaissance.

Palmer marshalls a range of evidence to explain why a large number of closet Renaissance atheists is highly unlikely. The first piece of evidence is that among the documents surviving from Machiavelli’s time, there is direct evidence for exactly two people which shows them to be atheists in the modern sense of the word². We might wonder if many hid their beliefs due to fear of persecution. The problem here is the next piece of evidence: they often expressed far more dangerous beliefs vis-à-vis the Inquisition.

The important point is that atheism was at the time simply not a live option. It is rather easy to be an atheist today: we have Darwin, we have the big bang theory, we have a range of satisfying scientific explanations that enable many of us to live without the need for religious explanation of ourselves and our origins. To be an atheist before all of this was a very difficult thing: one had to reject the existing (Christian) explanations of mankind’s origins, of the world’s existence, of basically everything, without any satisfying explanation to exist in its place. Consequently, very few people were atheists, and the Inquisition was rather more worried about serious options like Protestantism, or claiming that all religions were one and the same, or some other esoteric religious heresy which is largely dead to us as an option today.

Palmer reports having learned to placate atheists at dinner parties by starting off with this explanation, before explaining that as people who definitely really really really are astoundingly original critical thinkers who don’t just take the received wisdom – to be fair, this sarcasm is probably less fair in the US, which remains a much more religious society – they no doubt would have been radicals. But radicalism in Machiavelli’s day meant Protestantism, or syncretism, or various other heretical beliefs that really did bother the Inquisition a lot more than atheism, which was not taken as a serious option for belief.

All of this leads me to a very Rortyean thought (American Pragmatism, again): which of our beliefs today will go the way of the various heresies of the Renaissance? On what topics will options not taken seriously today, or even imagined, become live options in light of new evidence? Given our beliefs are largely contingent on our context – and no one who has read much in the history of thought and culture can really doubt this – then as the context in which people live changes new beliefs will become viable options.

My money is going on the very safe bet of phenomenal consciousness (I’ll have to think on finding other, less obvious options to bet on, which after all would be better for a post about accepting that one’s beliefs are contingent). In many ways it’s a fairly obvious candidate: the hard problem of consciousness, of explaining how brains give rise to private and inaccessible subjective experiences remains entirely unsolved, with no clear consensus view among philosophers of mind. Some even doubt that the hard problem exists at all and argue that qualia – these subjective experiences – are an illusion produced by the brain for its own consumption.

It seems highly likely to me that one day, albeit who knows when, some fundamental scientific discoveries in neuroscience or elsewhere will change the landscape of which beliefs about consciousness are live and which are dead. This is a little different to philosophers of mind who claim that we need to fundamentally rethink consciousness: my claim is that without new scientific evidence, we will not be able to do so in a satisfactory way. And so until this does occur, confusion will continue to reign about phenomenal consciousness, illusion or otherwise.

Footnotes