No one has completely solved the question of personhood. What is a person? This question has animated philosophers since time immemorial with some claiming it boiled down at root to our capacity to do art, or our capacity to be moral creatures, or to be “moral agents” or our capacity to do “higher level thinking” like mathematics. All of these circled the actual unifying idea discovered by David Deutsch and linking personhood to our best understandings of computation (and at base physics) - and that is that a person is a universal explainer. Our minds run software on the hardware of human brains and what separates those minds from software running on all other brains in the animal kingdom is that there is a correspondence between the contents of human minds and the rest of physical reality in the form of explanations. And this is only possible because human minds - or the minds of people more broadly - can understand, to some approximation, the nature of the entirety of the rest of physical reality. We “reflect” reality though our explanations and people are unique in their capacity to do this. Other animals may have instincts that drive their behaviour and “see” and “hear” the world around them in some sense (as toy robots do) but they do not form explanations of the rest of physical reality - both seen and unseen.
“The rest of physical reality” is infinitely vast and infinitely complex so our approximate understandings will always remain that - approximate. Which is why fallibilism is true: error is everywhere and our most cherished best theories that explain anything anywhere anytime are, ultimately incomplete. Always. They contain misconception. This unites all people in two profound ways. One I have already mentioned due to David Deutsch: to be a person is to be universal in one’s capacity to explain. This does not mean one will ever necessarily be interested in any given explanation or even problem. But one has a mind such that if one’s personal “problem situation” (their personal circumstance) causes them interest in some problem they can attempt tentative solutions. And nothing, but the laws of physics and their attempt at creating a solution, bounds that universality.
The other profound way in which all people are united is due to Karl Popper: we are all equal in our infinite ignorance. The universe is so stupendously vast - infinite in its size and complexity that no matter how much any of us individually (or even collectively) come to understand about it all, there remains always an infinite amount more left to be uncovered. There is no end to this project. No end to the stream of problems we will encounter whether from deep space or right under our feet (or under our fingernails) and thus there can be no end to the stream of solutions we will need to conjure to improve our circumstance.
In our infinite ignorance we universal explainers are all equal. This is what it is to be a person. But although this is true this is not to say we understand what it takes to be a universal explainer. If we knew that - we would be able to write down the “recipe” (so to speak) for a universal explainer and then encode it into a computer such that some silicon system could “universally explain” and have problems of its own - unprompted. We do not know the recipe - the algorithm or code for a human mind and so we do not yet have artificial intelligence of the kind that is general - as general as possible. Universal, in other words.
The ways in which people are not united is myriad and found in the contents of their memories. The mind of a person comes into this world with “inborn” ideas. Different people have different genes and genes carry with them information which in some cases may cause some initial set of instincts, impulses and various other “mental content” to be present at birth. It will differ between people as genes tend to do. But as with all mental content, all ideas, once it is there in the mind as an idea, it can be changed. We can change our minds. The source of an idea has nothing to do with whether or not we might decide to improve it or discard it when something better comes along. Whether we are born with the impulse or we learn it later - whatever the mechanism - we are all of us born with the capacity to urinate at will. But we soon learn to control this impulse. It does not matter what the idea is: just freely empty your bladder here and now, now that you feel a desire to - that impulse that we had as babies was changed. So we are not born tabula rasa. But nor are we condemned by our genes to engage in any particular behaviour. We can change our minds and it is our mind that dictates our behaviour. As our knowledge grows and we remember more we can diverge increasingly from some people and converge with others. It can be fun to exchange ideas and this can lead to a change in behaviour.
Yes, sometimes we are unaware of the ideas, or memes, causing us to behave a certain way. But that is a call for being a little more reflective and introspective at times especially when unpleasant or unwanted patterns of thought intrude. We may be victims of bad ideas at times - but we are never helpless victims. We can, if we choose, dig down into what drives us and identify where some deep seated misconception or discomfort lay and with something like the skill of a surgeon taking out a tumour, remove and replace ideas that bring us down. We can identify errors and correct them and make progress as much with our own personal psychology as the physicist does with some explanation of the cosmos when a flaw is found. We correct. We improve. We make progress.
But it is true, some ideas can become deeply entrenched. Some may be of the form carried over from some trauma. And some may also be “willingly” signed up to, so to speak, out of some (at times often deeply misguided) attempt to signal virtue. These can become ideologies, and ideologies can contain dogmas and at root dogmas can become a staging ground for a battle of ideas that is waged no longer mainly in the abstract but in the real physical world with rudeness, insults, threats and ultimately violence. And this happens because adherents to the dogma are defending a truth they think is manifest; obvious and unable to be doubted. And anyone who would stand in the way of the truth, on this account, is standing in the way of the good and the righteous. They should therefore be treated as the danger they are: a kind of maelstrom of malevolence undeserving of regular civil courtesies , their freedom or, ultimately, their own lives should they continue to resist the manifest truth in the dogmas of the true ideology. As Sam Harris has observed: if we could imprison tornadoes we would. Some people are the ideological equivalent of tornadoes given the kind of destruction they unleash and so should be regarded in much the same way. A lethal threat undeserving of liberty (and perhaps even life) until they can demonstrate they are safe to move around in civil society freely once more.
But that is one far extreme of the “identifying yourself with an ideology” continuum. Some people become murderous defenders of a faith, others are just obnoxious yellers on public street corners or in parading mobs with megaphones, a rung further down (but not far) are the trolls and threateners wielding threads on social media finding some sense of power in denigrating the “out group”. Of course there is no denying that there does seem to be a rather more benign form of “ideological capture”. Identifying oneself with an ideology can be very comforting for many. It can bring a sense of community and safety because one then has allies in any ideological battle. It makes it easier to recognise who is on my side and who is the enemy. Who I can “trust” and who I should never trust. Who is good. And who is not. Who is pure. And who is “mixed”. And who is evil. This has long been “the game” so to speak in religion and politics. But it is not like the community of self-identified rationalists are immune to this. Philosophy is at root prior to religious, political and other “movements”. Philosophy is what drives both ideology and anti-ideology. It is ideas that cause people to see value in joining a movement and defending an ideology and it is ideas that cause people to be critical of this sort of project.
But a genuine flag of caution should be raised in the minds of any who wish to label themselves with some - indeed any - ideology or other movement - whether religious, political or philosophical (or scientific as some might think). And that is: once you have signed up and identified yourself with some set of ideas: you will be vulnerable to purity tests. Some may enjoy this for a time. Some may be happy to lead movements and be the most pure adherent to a set of doctrines and gain clout and social cache. Some may even create the doctrines themselves and attract a legion of followers. “X” creates a few nice ideas and suddenly people are self identifying as “X-ists” or “X-ians”. Meetings are held. Schisms appear. Infighting begins. Ideas are not explained but defended. “They may call themselves an X-ian but they have not read X carefully enough! We do not support these faux-X-ists.”
It may well be that X contains vast quantities of useful information that explain reality better than all known rivals. And that’s great. More power to X! Go forth and explain X! Improve the world with X! But this should never require one to identify as an X-ian. Because like all great ideas, the real value of X is not in what it says is true now but in what it points to: its own successor. A better idea that is not X, strictly. And it is that we should wish to seek and then explain and spread as far and as wide as possible until errors in it are found and corrected and so it goes forever.
Whether this whole perspective is to be labelled anything or not is beside the point (or would seek to undermine the point by highlighting a supposed paradox). We can spread and explain ideas without giving into the impulses of tribalism - especially in rational discourse. We can simply discuss ideas without being concerned about whether we, or others, pass a purity test. Some may be able to cite actual chapter and verse from scripture in order to explain why it is they are standing at the pulpit calling for an excommunication of a lapsed practitioner. Others might simply be taking the broad brush strokes of what they interpret the central message of that scripture to be and applying it in their own life, in their own way, without concern about exactly what others are saying about it. Out there “doing the Lord’s work” so to speak rather than railing against the evil infidels at the pulpit.
There are necessary limits to an anti-ideology stance. Anti-ideology or anti-dogma does not mean anti-objective or anti-explanation or anti-reality. Anti-ideology is only possible because the best ideas are those that allow for the flourishing of human beings with those universal minds and those minds can only best do what they do in the absence of harassment, threat and violence. The very weapons ideologues wield in order to enforce their dogmas. So those who are against dogma must stand up against insults, harassment, threats and physical harm. Because that is when the battle of ideas leaves the abstract reality conjured by the mind and enters the physical world. Often this is good: the idea for a sparkling new building begins purely in the mind of the architects and engineers. Later it becomes the very physical pylons of concrete and steel. That is all for the good. But when the ideas are about dominating and demeaning - it’s best they do not leak far into the real world. Because that is only ever destructive. And it is people of reason who oppose ideology that must be the bulwark against oppression.
On a personal note: this is why I am not a Popperian. I am no “Deutschian” - a neologism many attempt to shoehorn into discussions about the work of David Deutsch in an attempt to short cut any discussion of the substance of the ideas. I am not a critical rationalist or a “crit rat”. I am not a rationalist. Or an empiricist. I am not a capitalist, anarchist, libertarian or Objectivist or “Randian” (a term of insult if one has read the relevant material). People can and do take the perfectly objective discussion of ideas directly into the personal realm of who said what when and where and what you believe and so on as soon as the labels appear. Once one is labelled and answers to the label, the rest of what one says can be swiftly negated. After all: they already know what Popperians (for example) think. We have the shortcut, there’s no need for further explanation. “I’ve got your number, Popperian” (or “Objectivist”, “Christian” and so on). Now we are no longer speaking about the ideas out there like objects (as they are) but rather you as a person with beliefs to defend and what you have said or done or what someone else has said or done or written or whatever else is now the target - rather than the ideas. This is no way to discuss things objectively. It may be fine with friends over tea or wine, or it may be fine on the psychologist’s couch - but that is because those places are the very definition of “the personal”. But if we’re going to talk genetics, we don’t need to talk about Mendel or Watson (or even Darwin for that matter) and what they said and did and wrote. If we are going to talk about how nuclear fusion in the core of stars is able to create the elements on the periodic table, I never need to mention Hoyle. I don’t need to talk about Popper or “critical rationalists” when discussing epistemology. In so far as it’s a shorthand, like all shortcuts, details are omitted and people end up getting lost. The actual path through the forest was created for a reason - and with great effort. It was to avoid the traps and cliffs and uneven ground the shortcuts do not - because they weren’t designed to.
What about atheist? Am I an atheist? Atheism is not a system of ideas. Rather like I am not an astrologer. I just look at the claims of astrology and say: no, I do not believe in that. An atheist is someone who does not believe in those things people who claim to believe in God believe about God (for example). Atheism is just the denial of having certain beliefs. What I am arguing for here is a step further still: not believing in any dogmas or doctrines. Yes, regard some ideas as good or even our best (an indeed only known!) Ideas and say they are indeed good ideas. And be able to explain why they are good. But none of them need ever be believed. Rather they need to be understood. And to understand them is to understand they can be superseded should some better idea come along. And some of our best ideas have indeed come from places like the minds of Karl Popper, David Deutsch, Adam Smith, Plato, Ayn Rand or certain books ancient or newly written. And some of those people came with ideas that improved the ideas of other people on that list. And they too should not expect to be the final word. Nothing ever is. That’s “dogmatic thinking” talking again. The idea that there can be a “final word”. There isn’t. There can not be.
And yet among the above spectrum of ideas and people who have from time to time come to be identified with those “movements” I have just denied being identified with or defined by, I find much that is useful in order to save me the time creating from the ground up a worldview in order to solve any problem at hand. Instead we can solve problems as they arise without going to first principles. Much of the work has already been done earlier and elsewhere by great minds working on similar problems, or deeper problems with vast reach. Perhaps sometimes these problems led to ideas that were universal. Although problems are always parochial, some solutions can indeed be universal. It’s useful to know what they are. But, again, there is no reason to identify oneself with any of them. To identify oneself with an idea is effectively to define oneself. But you cannot be defined for you are a creative, constantly changing person with a mind and memory ever in flux. Such an entity defies definition and so defies any attempt to be labelled with a set of labels that encapsulates ones identity. The present 2020s obsession with identity should be resisted. Everyone is talking about who or what they identify as. This very word “identify” means to “regard as the same” - in other words is very close to “identical” but we are not identical except as people. In that we are united, and not different. But some want to identify as their gender and wear it proudly, or their supposed race or ethnicity, their sexuality or political affiliation or religious background or philosophical or economic stance. It is fine to value each of those things but when they become one’s identity one begins to be defined by those characteristics rather than those characteristics being little more than features of one’s personality - at best. They do not amount to anything like one’s personhood. That comes down to something much deeper with scientific and philosophical significance. What we are at a matter of fact as entities in this cosmos. Explainers, creators and builders.
We are, each of us, identical as people and therefore the same in those two crucial ways Popper and Deutsch have explained: in our ignorance (problems are after all, inevitable) and in our capacity to sometimes eliminate just a little of that ignorance using our universal minds to explain the world (problems are, after all, soluble).
While it may be true that many people are ideologues and sometimes even murderously or genocidally so and we should deal with them as we deal with any disaster man made or natural. We should seek to neutralise the threat, for example. The existence of ideologues and fanatics and people wedded to particular dogmas are no example for us, unless they be an example of what to avoid. We should do the opposite. Resist dogma and subjugation to ideas (with force if they choose to bring violence) but in peacetime, likewise resist the urge to tribally coalesce around dogma. We can instead cooperate for so long as collaboration seems fruitful because we will share, at times, important ideas that we all recognise create a better world around us. But no matter how good the ideas we have are now, we can always understand them more deeply and perhaps come to realise there are errors in those ways and correct them and so our story goes of improvement and progress. And never did we need to label ourselves as part of some movement or ideology in order to simply get things done, defend ourselves and our civilisation when necessary and reach for something better. Because there is always something better to look forward to. Whatever is holding us back is knowable and fixable so that we accelerate - not inevitably - not because we were drawn by some invisible force of nature (or thermodynamics!) or pushed by some invisible hand of God or any other appeal to the supernatural. But rather because we choose to do those things we judge to be better. To make real whatever good ideas we have that spring from the hard won knowledge we create about reality to make real what was only in our imaginations until we understood better what reality is like.
Identity and Ideology