Embedded within this essay focused specifically on the question of what could motivate (practically, emotionally, not just logically or intellectually) our generosity or altruism toward distant future generations is a more general idea about the limits of thinking and argumentation, at least in the form that thinking and argumentation typically take in academic analytic philosophy or on the Effective Altruism Forum.
One experience that changed how I think and feel about deep time was watching the documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, directed by Werner Herzog, about the 30,000-year-old cave paintings in the Chauvet Cave in France. That documentary reached into my heart and changed something in it. Before then, the thought about Stone Age people that preoccupied me is how terrible life must have been then and how sorry I feel for them. Instead what I felt when watching Cave of Forgotten Dreams is that people in the Stone Age got to experience the miracle of being alive, and so do I, and I am so grateful.
There is something important that must be said for things that can’t be rationally expressed, or, more truthfully, that can’t be expressed according to the existing social conventions of rationality. In the documentary, there is a powerful interview with a scientist who describes his first experience going into the Chauvet Cave, how his experience of contact with deep time overcame his mind, how he dreamed vividly each night of lions — of paintings of lions, and real lions too. After a few days, he decided to stop going into the cave, to take time to process what the cave was telling him. (To decide to stop going into the cave is a serious decision because, to preserve the rock art in the cave, access is restricted to a small number of scientists for a short period each year.) Somehow, just watching the film, I felt affected on a deep nervous system level, perhaps a little bit like he was. Experiences like these are not about argumentation, as we typically think about it, and they’re not about thinking, as we typically think about thinking, but they are some of the most valuable things we get in life.
Philosophy is so much about intuitions, and where do intuitions come from? They are slippery, and hard to get a handle on. They are not easy to examine. They come from an overall source that mixes cognition, perception, experience, emotion, personal history, and intergenerational history. In philosophy, there is a trade-off between precision and complexity. The more precise we want to be, the more we must shrink the scope of what we talk about. In our most precise forms of argument, those in formal logic, we shrink the subject matter down to nothing at all. Or in the words of the poet Mervyn Peake:
The vastest things are those we may not learn. We are not taught to die, nor to be born, Nor how to burn With love. How pitiful is our enforced return To those small things we are the masters of.
I can say something about non-rational, or, more accurately, non-conventionally rational, explorations of ideas and intuitions as they pertain to longtermism. Things can’t be transactional. You can’t say, okay, I’ll give people opportunities to have spiritual experiences related to deep time and, in exchange, they’ll vote for politicians who allocate funding to longtermist projects. That just turns spirituality into a tool used to the serve the purposes of conventional rationality. Another way of saying this is you can’t be instrumental about this. You have to be sincere. And you certainly can’t be paternalistic or think about it in terms of the most effective way to manipulate people to do what you want or believe what you believe. (Unfortunately, this is a tendency I’ve seen too many times in effective altruism and although I can empathize with where this impulse comes from, ultimately it’s misguided. Instead, you should find that place in you where your convictions really come from and appeal to that place in other people. I think it’s more persuasive when you speak authentically rather than with an intent to manipulate people. Even when it isn’t persuasive, at least it’s honest.)
You have to actually be open to such explorations as a source of truth, or at least a source of guidance about how you will personally act. You can’t treat such explorations as a way to strengthen or reinforce the conclusions you already believe about longtermism. You need to have real openness. You can’t go in with foregone conclusions. If you do, and you aren’t really open to changing your mind, then maybe you are accepting that for others non-conventionally rational sources of philosophical intuition are fine, but you’re not accepting it for yourself. Maybe there’s a way for this to be an internally consistent position — to accept it for others but not yourself — I don’t know. But, internally consistent or not, I don’t think you can hope to motivate others to care about longtermism for reasons you don’t sincerely share.
To put it more plainly, if you explore why you, personally, are practically, emotionally motivated to work on projects related to longtermism, you might find that you don’t feel motivated to work on them at all, and even if you intellectually accept the arguments for longtermism, advancing longtermism is not how you want to live your life. I can anticipate that someone might worry about this — might worry that others will realize that they aren’t motivated or worry that they, themselves will realize aren’t motivated. And so, they might double down on the intellectual arguments and try to put this exploration on a leash. But that won’t work. That’s a half-measure or worse. That’s going through the motions of exploring without really exploring. You might as well not explore at all. I think you should explore (really explore) and see what you find.
Related to this, something I always appreciated about my great philosophical hero Daniel Dennett is that he was sensitive to the emotional dimensions of philosophical debates. For example, he devotes the beginning of his book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting to discussing why people find the idea of causal determinism disturbing or frightening in the context of free will. His discussion of consciousness in other books is similarly empathetic and emotionally aware. I’ve long thought that he was a better philosopher for thinking more deeply than one typically sees in philosophy about the anxieties and hopes at play in philosophical debates and putting them front and centre in the discussion. I wonder if this approach was influenced by his views about the role of emotion in cognition. He emphasized that without emotion, thinking wouldn’t be possible in the human brain. I love Dennett and miss him.
On a final note, I want to say that this essay by Fr. Peter Wyg is beautiful, deeply perceptive, and it’s my favourite essay that I’ve read so far for the longtermism essay competition. I would be happy to see it win one of the prizes.
Embedded within this essay focused specifically on the question of what could motivate (practically, emotionally, not just logically or intellectually) our generosity or altruism toward distant future generations is a more general idea about the limits of thinking and argumentation, at least in the form that thinking and argumentation typically take in academic analytic philosophy or on the Effective Altruism Forum.
One experience that changed how I think and feel about deep time was watching the documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, directed by Werner Herzog, about the 30,000-year-old cave paintings in the Chauvet Cave in France. That documentary reached into my heart and changed something in it. Before then, the thought about Stone Age people that preoccupied me is how terrible life must have been then and how sorry I feel for them. Instead what I felt when watching Cave of Forgotten Dreams is that people in the Stone Age got to experience the miracle of being alive, and so do I, and I am so grateful.
There is something important that must be said for things that can’t be rationally expressed, or, more truthfully, that can’t be expressed according to the existing social conventions of rationality. In the documentary, there is a powerful interview with a scientist who describes his first experience going into the Chauvet Cave, how his experience of contact with deep time overcame his mind, how he dreamed vividly each night of lions — of paintings of lions, and real lions too. After a few days, he decided to stop going into the cave, to take time to process what the cave was telling him. (To decide to stop going into the cave is a serious decision because, to preserve the rock art in the cave, access is restricted to a small number of scientists for a short period each year.) Somehow, just watching the film, I felt affected on a deep nervous system level, perhaps a little bit like he was. Experiences like these are not about argumentation, as we typically think about it, and they’re not about thinking, as we typically think about thinking, but they are some of the most valuable things we get in life.
Philosophy is so much about intuitions, and where do intuitions come from? They are slippery, and hard to get a handle on. They are not easy to examine. They come from an overall source that mixes cognition, perception, experience, emotion, personal history, and intergenerational history. In philosophy, there is a trade-off between precision and complexity. The more precise we want to be, the more we must shrink the scope of what we talk about. In our most precise forms of argument, those in formal logic, we shrink the subject matter down to nothing at all. Or in the words of the poet Mervyn Peake:
I can say something about non-rational, or, more accurately, non-conventionally rational, explorations of ideas and intuitions as they pertain to longtermism. Things can’t be transactional. You can’t say, okay, I’ll give people opportunities to have spiritual experiences related to deep time and, in exchange, they’ll vote for politicians who allocate funding to longtermist projects. That just turns spirituality into a tool used to the serve the purposes of conventional rationality. Another way of saying this is you can’t be instrumental about this. You have to be sincere. And you certainly can’t be paternalistic or think about it in terms of the most effective way to manipulate people to do what you want or believe what you believe. (Unfortunately, this is a tendency I’ve seen too many times in effective altruism and although I can empathize with where this impulse comes from, ultimately it’s misguided. Instead, you should find that place in you where your convictions really come from and appeal to that place in other people. I think it’s more persuasive when you speak authentically rather than with an intent to manipulate people. Even when it isn’t persuasive, at least it’s honest.)
You have to actually be open to such explorations as a source of truth, or at least a source of guidance about how you will personally act. You can’t treat such explorations as a way to strengthen or reinforce the conclusions you already believe about longtermism. You need to have real openness. You can’t go in with foregone conclusions. If you do, and you aren’t really open to changing your mind, then maybe you are accepting that for others non-conventionally rational sources of philosophical intuition are fine, but you’re not accepting it for yourself. Maybe there’s a way for this to be an internally consistent position — to accept it for others but not yourself — I don’t know. But, internally consistent or not, I don’t think you can hope to motivate others to care about longtermism for reasons you don’t sincerely share.
To put it more plainly, if you explore why you, personally, are practically, emotionally motivated to work on projects related to longtermism, you might find that you don’t feel motivated to work on them at all, and even if you intellectually accept the arguments for longtermism, advancing longtermism is not how you want to live your life. I can anticipate that someone might worry about this — might worry that others will realize that they aren’t motivated or worry that they, themselves will realize aren’t motivated. And so, they might double down on the intellectual arguments and try to put this exploration on a leash. But that won’t work. That’s a half-measure or worse. That’s going through the motions of exploring without really exploring. You might as well not explore at all. I think you should explore (really explore) and see what you find.
The person who has most shaped my thinking about this is the social worker and emotions researcher Brené Brown. She is almost always speaking and writing about epistemic concerns in the context of one’s personal life, but I don’t see why what she says shouldn’t be applied to academic philosophy as well. For example, so much of philosophy and philosophical reasoning is about connecting to your intuition. Many times, you have a feeling that an idea or argument is wrong, but it takes time to work out why. In her book Rising Strong, which I love, Brené Brown describes how to do this process when it comes to your beliefs about yourself and your life story. (She also covers aspects of this in her lecture series The Power of Vulnerability and Rising Strong as a Spiritual Practice, both of which I love.) I have never seen a better discussion of how to do epistemic practice in real life. She’s a social worker writing and speaking about the contexts social workers typically think about, but I don’t see why you wouldn’t apply her ideas to philosophy, science, politics, and so on.
Related to this, something I always appreciated about my great philosophical hero Daniel Dennett is that he was sensitive to the emotional dimensions of philosophical debates. For example, he devotes the beginning of his book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting to discussing why people find the idea of causal determinism disturbing or frightening in the context of free will. His discussion of consciousness in other books is similarly empathetic and emotionally aware. I’ve long thought that he was a better philosopher for thinking more deeply than one typically sees in philosophy about the anxieties and hopes at play in philosophical debates and putting them front and centre in the discussion. I wonder if this approach was influenced by his views about the role of emotion in cognition. He emphasized that without emotion, thinking wouldn’t be possible in the human brain. I love Dennett and miss him.
On a final note, I want to say that this essay by Fr. Peter Wyg is beautiful, deeply perceptive, and it’s my favourite essay that I’ve read so far for the longtermism essay competition. I would be happy to see it win one of the prizes.