You Cannot Escape Metaphysics

UFOs, physics, and the illusion of "just science"

Actual photographic evidence of a metaphysical question.

Dear Living Dark reader,

Last week, in response to Donald Trump’s recent call for the release of all U.S. federal materials related to UFOs, alien life, and unidentified aerial phenomena, Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared on a video interview to reiterate a familiar position: Until someone produces actual photographic or other such evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial spacecraft for general inspection, we’re dealing with speculation and belief systems, not knowledge. In conversation with NBC News’s Tom Costello, he said the laws of physics are universal, and therefore aliens, if they exist, are subject to them, which means visitors to Earth from across the vast distances between stars and galaxies are highly unlikely.

Tyson is always an engaging speaker, and much of what he said in that interview is cogent and sensible. I’m sure it would be interesting to read the deeper exploration that he presents in his forthcoming book, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter. But his remarks also carry an embedded philosophical assumption of materialism or physicalism that goes unnamed, representing a continuation of something he has been doing for a long time. What he says reflects an unexamined view that many others likewise bring to this topic with their notions of mechanical spacecraft and fleshly, physical beings of extraterrestrial origin. More fundamentally, his remarks carry the assumption that the language and thought world of physical science is the first, last, primary, and even the only domain for thinking and talking about such matters.

Twelve years ago—a span of time that makes me dizzy with a kind of temporal vertigo when I consider it—I wrote an essay at my former blog, The Teeming Brain, in which I responded to Tyson’s wholesale dismissal of philosophy itself as a pointless distraction from scientific progress. Last week, watching his new interview on UFOs, I was struck by how directly my earlier critique, which many other people likewise made in their own way at the time, applies to the present moment. This has motivated me to republish that piece here, as a semi-response to present concerns.

You can still find the earlier version of what follows at The Teeming Brain under its original title, “To Reject Philosophy Is to Embrace the Matrix.” For this republished version, I have lightly refreshed the text, and have also integrated a later addendum from 2014 into the body of the piece. I haven’t changed the tone, though, which reflects the somewhat sharper and more polemical approach that I sometimes took back then.

If it’s not already clear from these framing comments, what we’re talking about here is not just UFOs per se (especially since I don’t mention them at all in this republished and refreshed piece). It’s something deeper: the impossibility of escaping philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular, even—perhaps especially—when one believes oneself to be speaking from “pure science.”

You Cannot Escape Metaphysics

or, To Reject Philosophy Is To Embrace the Matrix

In case you haven’t heard, Neil deGrasse Tyson has outed himself as a philistine. Or at least that’s how Damon Linker characterizes it in an op-ed for The Week titled, appropriately enough, “Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Is a Philistine.” In the words of the subheadline, “The popular television host says he has no time for deep, philosophical questions. That’s a horrible message to send to young scientists.”

What Linker is referring to is Tyson’s appearance in March 2014 as a guest on the popular Nerdist podcast.¹ Beginning at about 20 minutes into the hour-long program, the conversation between Tyson and his multiple interviewers turns to the subject of philosophy, and Tyson speaks up to talk down the entire field. In fact, he takes pains to specify and clarify that he personally has no use for philosophy at all, which he views as a worthless distraction from other activities with real value.

Yes, it sounds as if I must be overstating it in the retelling, but in fact I’m not. Here is a portion of the episode’s transcript. The comments from Tyson and his interviewers, especially host Chris Hardwick, come right after they have been discussing the standardization of weights and measures. Note especially how Tyson not only dismisses philosophy but pointedly refuses to allow that there might be even a shred of value or validity to it.

Chris Hardwick: Philosophy was my major.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: That can really mess you up.

Hardwick: It really does mess you up. It’s when it starts crossing over with math and science, and you have to solve an argument using p’s and q’s and whatnot, and the philosophy of science and math says, “Why is a yard a yard?” and “What makes this, this?” I always felt like maybe there was a little too much question-asking in philosophy.

Tyson: I agree.

Hardwick: Because at a certain point it’s just futile, you know, like “Why is a table a table?” and so on.

Tyson: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. My concern here is that the philosophers believe they’re actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, “What are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?”

Another interviewer: I think a healthy balance of both is good.

Tyson: Well, I’m still worried even about a healthy balance. Yeah, if you’re distracted by your questions so that you can’t move forward, you’re not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world. And so the scientist knows when the question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a pointless delay in our progress. . . . How do you define “clapping”? All of a sudden it devolves into a discussion of the definition of words. And I’d rather keep the conversation about ideas. And when you do that, don’t derail yourself on questions that you think are important because philosophy class tells you this. The scientist says, “Look, I got all this world of unknown out there. I’m moving on. I’m leaving you behind. You can’t even cross the street because you’re distracted by what you are sure are deep questions you’ve asked yourself. I don’t have the time for that.”

Hardwick: I also felt that it was a fat load of crap, as one could define what “crap” is and the essential qualities that make up crap: how you grade a philosophy paper?

Tyson: [Laughs.] Of course, I think we all agree you turned out okay.

Hardwick: Philosophy was a good major for comedy, I think, because it does get you to ask a lot of ridiculous questions about things.

Tyson: No, you need people to laugh at your ridiculous questions.

Hardwick: Ultimately, if you ask a lot of questions, it just becomes a bottomless pit.

Another interviewer: It just becomes nihilism.

Tyson: Nihilism is a kind of philosophy.

Linker’s comments express my own thoughts about all of this quite well, so I’ll borrow them:

Yes, he really did say that. . . . [B]ehold the spectacle of an otherwise intelligent man and gifted teacher sounding every bit as anti-intellectual as a corporate middle manager or used-car salesman. . . . With these words, Tyson shows he’s very much a 21st-century American, living in a perpetual state of irritated impatience and anxious agitation. Don’t waste your time with philosophy! (And, one presumes, literature, history, the arts, or religion.) Only science will get you where you want to go! It gets results! Go for it! Hurry up! Don’t be left behind! Progress awaits!

Tyson’s words have also drawn a response from his friend Massimo Pigliucci, who, speaking as someone who is both a biologist and a philosopher, seeks to remind Tyson that science actually arose out of philosophy, and that philosophy deals with real things and makes “progress” of a sort.

There is no such thing as having no philosophy or refusing to philosophize. There is only philosophy that is consciously engaged, or philosophy that is unconsciously and implicitly followed. The former involves careful reflection, deep thought, and the artful interpretation of experience and data. The latter is equivalent to subconscious programming.

But the best response I have seen comes from someone who probably wasn’t thinking about Tyson at all when, a few months after the podcast episode aired, he wrote a beautiful defense of philosophy’s value in just a thousand words. In the essay “In Defense of Armchairs,” published at 3 Quarks Daily, philosopher Charlie Huenemann meditates on the longstanding metaphorical and adjectival use of the word “armchair” as a kind ideological shorthand for denigrating and dismissing someone’s expressed thoughts as stuffy, purely academic, and divorced from the real world. Think, for example, of the disparaging retroactive references to the so-called “armchair anthropology” practiced by the field’s nineteenth-century founders, such as Edward B. Tylor and James George Frazer. “Generally,” Huenemann writes,

in any conflict between long-held, seemingly obvious beliefs and new research challenging those beliefs, defenders of the old beliefs will find themselves charged with sitting in armchairs. . . . An armchair represents both laziness and privilege, a luxurious class of opinion-mongers who simply will not bother themselves with actual empirical research — the original La-Z-Boys, as they might be called.

As Huenemann rightly points out, the people who are most often associated with this type of condemnation are philosophers, since “those who argue from the armchairs are arguing from broad, philosophical perspectives.” I think here, for example, of Andrew Ferguson’s 2013 article for The Weekly Standard titled “The Heretic,” which focused on the ruckus in the intellectual establishment over the publication of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos with its materialism-challenging thesis. At one point Ferguson describes a moment from a 2012 meeting of scientists and philosophers titled “Moving Naturalism Forward” in which the armchair accusation was brought out by Daniel Dennett:

A video of the workshop shows Dennett complaining that a few—but only a few!—contemporary philosophers have stubbornly refused to incorporate the naturalistic conclusions of science into their philosophizing, continuing to play around with outmoded ideas like morality and sometimes even the soul. “I am just appalled to see how, in spite of what I think is the progress we’ve made in the last 25 years, there’s this sort of retrograde gang,” he said, dropping his hands on the table. “They’re going back to old-fashioned armchair philosophy with relish and eagerness. It’s sickening. And they lure in other people. And their work isn’t worth anything—it’s cute and it’s clever and it’s not worth a damn.”

But back to Huenemann: Having noted the particular susceptibility of philosophy and philosophers to this charge, he goes on to offer an eloquent and pithy defense of pure speculation of the armchair variety. And I, for one, think his words lucidly call out the fundamental flaw in positions like Dennett’s and Tyson’s:

An armchair is a place of frictionless speculation. In an armchair we can ask What would I see if I rode upon a beam of light? and What if species aren’t fixed? We can also ask Why do people follow laws even when the cops aren’t around? and What is it about opera that makes it seem so much more meaningful than barbershop quartets? We can ask what it is that makes mathematics true, and whether there are any cases when providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number turns out not to be the right thing to do. Empirical information is required in all these cases, but what is even more important is our ability to speculate and conjecture, to imagine and project. If we don’t discover any new answers, we at least begin to see our old presuppositions for what they are.

Armchair speculation can also help us see what our theories entail. Is our mental life purely a matter of what the brain does? If so, then could I read your mind if I studied your brain? Are human actions as fully determined as any nonhuman event? If so, then on what basis would we call any of our actions “free”? If we list the physical causes leading up to an event, do we thereby explain the event? Or in some cases—think now of historical or cultural developments—does explanation require something more than a listing of causes? Again, it would be silly to think that all the information relevant to these questions can be reached from an armchair, but it is impossible to try to tackle them without some good old-fashioned armchair speculation. Answering questions is sometimes just as much about how we think about things as it is about those things themselves.

To further illuminate the rhetorical and ideological use of the word “armchair” as a tool of critique, consider the wonderful passage in the conclusion of Jeffrey Kripal’s necessary book, Authors of the Impossible, where, in an ironic act of inversion, he invokes the word while significantly repurposing its application. This comes in the midst of his discussion of why it’s important to reclaim and reacknowledge the reality of anomalous and paranormal experiences in the context of religious studies. He writes:

Why continue to tolerate a kind of armchair skepticism that has everything to do with scientistic propaganda and nothing at all to do with honest, rigorously open-minded collection, classification, and theory building, that is, with real science and real humanistic inquiry? True enough, anomalies may be just anomalies—meaningless glitches to the statistical field of possibility. But anomalies may also be the signals of the impossible, that is, signs of the end of one paradigm and the beginning of another.

Armchair skepticism—take that, Daniel Dennett. Genuine and important philosophical thinking that actually applies to reality, and that even questions what we mean by the word “reality” itself—take that, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

To draw the point from all this, and to hit at the primary aspect of Tyson’s obtuse dismissal of philosophy that strikes me as most glaring and short-sighted: There is simply no such thing as having no philosophy or refusing to philosophize. There is only philosophy that is consciously engaged, or philosophy that is unconsciously and implicitly followed. The former involves careful reflection, deep thought, and the artful interpretation of experience and data. The latter is equivalent to subconscious programming. Real philosophy, the consciously engaged kind, involves careful consideration of and reflection upon the very principles and assumptions by which we do all this considering, reflecting, thinking, and interpreting. If we don’t practice it, then we automatically fall into the second type, the unconscious, unacknowledged, implicit kind that makes us puppets of our own unacknowledged biases and predilections. And that leads nowhere but to business as usual and the unconsidered propagation of unrecognized assumptions.

Tyson can talk all he wants about being “a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world,” but if he refuses to pause, and if he discourages others from pausing, to inquire into what he means by terms like “the natural world,” “productive,” and “understanding,” and if he refuses to dig under the surface of language, thought, and culture to uncover the multitude of assumptions that precede and are embedded in these terms and their linkage to the assertions he’s making about who we are, what the world is, and what, if anything, we ought to be doing and not doing in and with this experience of life and consciousness—if he refuses to do this, and if he convinces others not to do it, and if this stands for something like mainstream educated opinion and public intellectual discourse, then something is terribly amiss and we’ve reached a singular type of cultural dead end.

In The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas wrote, “The fund of data available to the human mind is of such intrinsic complexity and diversity that it provides plausible support for many different conceptions of the ultimate nature of reality. . . . Evidence can be adduced and interpreted to corroborate a virtually limitless array of worldviews. . . . Because the human understanding is not unequivocally compelled by the evidence to adopt one metaphysical position over another, an irreducible element of human choice supervenes.” The worst thing we can do is refuse to recognize and acknowledge that we are always involved in this inescapable act of philosophical choosing. An entire way of seeing and being in the world hangs in the balance. To reject philosophy is to ignore this choice, to opt for the unexamined life, and to embrace our enslavement to a matrix of our own unrecognized creation.

Warm regards,

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1. Apparently this podcast episode has been retired and made unavailable, as the link is now dead. I searched for an updated version at the Nerdist site but couldn’t find it, nor could I locate the 2014 podcast episode at all. Even the Wayback Machine comes up empty. I have left the link in this republished version of my Teeming Brain post so that you can do your own digging if you want to search for the episode. Please let me know if you find it!