Perfect vision

One of the major themes in modern philosophy was concerns about the way that our contact with the world is mediated by our “ideas”. Thus, you are looking at a tree. But are you really seeing the tree, or are you just seeing your sense-impression, which doesn’t have much in common with the tree? Even direct realists like Reid who say you are seeing the cat still think that your conscious experience involves qualia that aren’t like a tree.

Thinking about this gives us the impression that an epistemically better way to relate to the tree would be if the tree itself took the place of our sense-impressions or qualia. Berkeley did that, but at the cost of demoting the tree to a mere figment of our perception. But if we could do that without demoting the tree, then we would be better kinds of perceivers.

However, that on some theory we would be better kinds of perceivers is not a strong reason to think that theory is true! After all, we would be better perceivers if we could see far infrared, but we can’t. It’s not my point to question the orthodoxy about our perceptions of trees.

But now think about beatitude, where the blessed see God. If seeing God is like seeing a tree in the sense that there is something like a mediating supersense-impression in us, then something desirable is lacking in the blessed. And that’s not right. Such a mediated vision of God is not as intimate as we could wish for. Would it not be so much more intimate if it were a direct vision of God in the fullest sense, where God himself takes the place of our qualia? We shouldn’t argue from “it would be better that way” to “it is that way” in our earthly lives, but in beatitude it does not seem such a terrible argument.

But where this kind of argument really comes into its own is when we think of what the epistemic life of a perfect being would be like. The above considerations suggest that when God sees the tree (and it is traditional to compare God’s knowledge of creation to vision), the vision is fully direct and intimate, and the tree itself plays the role of sense-impressions in us. We would expect a perfect being’s vision to be like that.

Now notice, however, that this is an account of God’s vision of the world on which God’s vision is partly extrinsically constituted: the tree partly constitutes God’s conscious experience of the tree. This is the extrinsic constitution model of how a simple God can know. We have thus started with us and with considerations of perfection, and have come to something like this model without any considerations of divine simplicity. Thus the model is not an ad hoc defense of divine simplicity. It is, rather, a model of the perfect way to epistemically relate to the world.

Of Tetris, ends, and the beatific vision

Suppose I am playing Tetris seriously. What am I aiming at?

It’s not victory: one cannot win Tetris.

A good score, yes. But I wouldn’t stop playing after reaching a good score. So a merely good score isn’t all I am aiming at. An excellent score? But, again, even if I achieved an excellent score, I wouldn’t stop, so it’s not all I am aiming for. A world-record score? But I wouldn’t stop as soon as my score exceeded the record. An infinite score? But then I am aiming at an impossibility.

A phrase we might use is: “I am trying to get the best score I can.” But while that is how we speak, it doesn’t actually describe my aim. For consider what “the best score I can get” means. Does the “can” take into account my current skill level or not? If it does take into account my skill level, then I could count as having achieved my end despite getting a really miserable score, as long as that maxed out my skills. And that doesn’t seem right. But if it does not take into account my current skill level, but rather is the most that it could ever be possible for me, then it seems I am aiming at something unrealistic—for my current skill level falls short of what I “can” do.

What is true of Tetris is true of many other games where one’s aims align with a score. In some of these games there is such a thing as victory in addition to score. Thus, while one can time one’s runs and thus have just a score, typical running races include victory and a time, and sometimes both enter into the runner’s aims. This is not true of all games: some, like chess, only have victory (positions can be scored, but the scores are only indicative of their instrumentality for victory).

It’s worth noting that a score can be either absolute, such as time in running, and relative, such as one’s place among the finishers. In the case of place among finishers, one may be aiming for victory—first place—but one need not be. One might, for instance, make a strategic decision that one has no realistic hope for first place, and that aiming at first place will result in a poorer placement than simply aiming to “place as well as one can” (bearing in mind that this phrase is misleading, as already mentioned).

Insofar as aims align with a score, we can say that we have directed activity, but there seems to be no end, so the activity is not end-directed. We might want to say that the score is the “end”, but that would be misleading, since an end is a state you are aiming at. But typically you are not just aiming at the state of having a score—in Tetris, you get a score no matter what you do, though it might be zero. In timed fixed-distance sports, you need to finish the distance to have a time, and for some endurance races that in itself is a serious challenge, though for “reasonable” distances finishing is not much of an accomplishment.

I think what we should say is that in these activities, we have a direction, specified by increasing score, but not an end. The concept of a direction is more general than that of an end. Wherever there is an end, there is a direction defined by considering a score which is 1 if one achieves the end and 0 if one fails to do so.

So far all my examples were games. But I think the distinction between direction and end applies in much more important cases, and helps make sense of many phenomena. Consider our pursuits of goods such as health and knowledge. Past a certain age, perfect health is unachievable, and hence is not what one is aiming at. But more health is always desirable. And at any age, omniscience is out of our grasp, but more knowledge is worth having. Thus the pursuits of health and knowledge are examples of directed but not always end-directed activities. (Though, often, there are specific ends as well: the amelioration of a specific infirmity or learning the answer to a specific question.)

(Interesting question for future investigation: What happens to the maxim that the one who wills the end wills the means in the case of directed but not end-directed activity? I think it’s more complicated, because one can aim in a direction but not aim there at all costs.)

I think the above puts is in a position to make progress on a very thorny problem in Thomistic theology. The beatific vision of God is supremely good for us. But at the same time, it is a supernatural good, one that exceeds our nature. Our nature does not aim at this end, since for it to aim at this end, it would need to have the end written into itself, but its very possibility is a revealed mystery. Our desire for the beatific vision is itself a gift of God’s grace. But if our nature does not aim at the beatific vision, then it seems that the beatific vision does not fulfill us. For our nature’s aims specify what is good for us.

However, we can say this. Our nature directs us in the direction of greater knowledge and greater love of the knowable and the lovable. It does not limit that directedness to natural knowledge and love, but at the same time it does not direct us to supernatural knowledge and love as such. As far as we naturally know, it might be that natural knowledge and love is all that’s possible, and if so, we need go no further. But in fact God’s grace makes the beatific vision possible. The beatific vision is in the direction of greater knowledge and love from all our natural knowledge and love, and so it fulfills us—even though our nature has no concept of it.

Imagine that unbeknownst to me, a certain sequence of Tetris moves, which one would only be able to perform with the help of Alexey Pajitnov, yields an infinite score. Then if I played Tetris with Pajitnov’s help and I got that infinite score, I would be fulfilled in my score-directed Tetris-playing. However, it would also be correct that if I didn’t know about the possibility of the infinite score, it wasn’t an end I was pursuing. Nonetheless, it is fulfilling because it is objectively true that this score lies in the direction that I was pursuing.

Similarly, our nature, as it were, knows nothing of the beatific vision, but it directs us in a direction where in fact the beatific vision lies, should God’s grace make it possible for us.

This also gives a nice explanation of the following related puzzle about the beatific vision. When one reads what the theologians say about the beatific vision, it appears attractive to us. That attractiveness could be the result of God’s grace, but it is psychologically plausible that it would appear attractive even without grace. The idea of a loving union of understanding with an infinite good just is very attractive to humans. But how can it be naturally attractive to us when it exceeds our nature? The answer seems to me to be that we can naturally know that if the beatific vision is possible, it lies in the direction we are aimed at. But, absent divine revelation, we don’t know if it is possible. And, trivially, it’s only a potential fulfillment of our nature—i.e., a good for us to seek—if it is possible.

Does this mean that we should reject the language of “end” with respect to the beatific vision? Yes and no. It is not an end in the sense of something that our nature aims at as such. But it is an end in the sense that it is a supreme achievement in the direction at which our nature aims us. Thus it seems we can still talk about it as a supernatural end.

Pascal's Wager and the beatific vision

To resolve the many gods and evil god objections to Pascal’s Wager, we need a way of comparing different infinite positive and negative outcomes. Technically, this is easy: we can represent these outcomes as an infinite quantity in some system like the hyperreals or vector-valued utilities, and then multiply these by probabilities, and add. The real difficulty is philosophical: how do we make probability-weighted comparisons of these infinite utilities? How does, say, a 30% chance of a Christian heaven compare to a 20% chance of a Muslim heaven? How does, say, a 30% chance of a Christian heaven compare to avoiding a 5% chance of a hell from an evil god?

I want to make a suggestion that might help get us started. On Christian orthodoxy, heavenly bliss is primarily constituted by the beatific vision—an intimate union with God where God himself comes to be directly present to consciousness, perhaps in something like the way that the qualia of ordinary acts of perception are often thought to be directly present to consciousness. How nice such an intimate union with a divine being is depends on how good the divine being is. For instance, plausibly, such a union with the kind of being who loves us enough to become incarnate and die for our sins is much better than such a union with a deity who wouldn’t or even couldn’t do that.

Gods that have morally objectionable conditions on how to get to heaven are presumably not going to be all that wonderful to spend an infinite time with—even a small chance of a beatific vision of a perfectly good God would beat a large chance of an afterlife with such a god. (Of course, some people think the Christian God’s conditions are morally objectionable.)

There is an important sense in which the beatific vision is intensively infinitely good—i.e., even a day of the beatific vision has infinite value—because the good of the beatific vision is constituted by the presence of an infinite God. Because of this, afterlives that feature something like the beatific vision may completely trump afterlives theories that do not. This may help with evil god worries, in that it is plausible that suffering we can undergo will intensively be only finitely bad. If B is the value of the beatific vision and H is the (negative) value of hell, then pB + qH will be infinitely positive as long as p > 0.

I am not saying that taking the beatific vision into account solves all the difficulties with Pascal’s wager. But it moves us forward.

In defense of a changing beatific vision

It is widely taken in the Thomistic tradition that:

1. Different people in heaven have the beatific vision to different degrees, corresponding to the saints’ different levels of holiness.

2. The beatific vision does not change with time for a given individual.

I think there is a tension between these two claims which is best resolved by dropping the no-change thesis (2). Dropping the difference thesis (1) is not an option for Catholics at least, since it’s a dogma taught by the Council of Florence.

To see the tension, note that the fact that different saints have holiness to different degrees implies that those saints who have a lesser holiness have not maxed out what human nature makes possible. And holiness is attractive to the holy, and infectious. If one saint is less holy than another, it seems likely that given a sufficient amount of time, we would expect the second saint’s greater holiness to inspire the first to even greater holiness. And then we would expect the beatific vision to increase.

We also have one New Testament case where it seems likely that a person’s level of beatific vision has increased. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes of knowing someone who, fourteen years ago, was caught up to the third heaven. It is common to take that to be a modest reference to Paul himself, and the “third heaven” to be a reference to the beatific vision. Now, eventually Paul died and experienced the beatific vision again. It seems very implausible to think that the significant number of years between Paul’s first experience of heaven and his final experience of heaven did not result in Christian maturation and growth in virtue. Thus, it seems quite plausible that Paul had greater holiness when he died than when he was first caught up to heaven, and hence by the correspondence thesis (1), he had a greater degree of beatific vision at death than at the earlier incident.

Note, too, that a Catholic cannot say that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of death, since then purgatory wouldn’t make sense. And, intuitively, we would expect heaven to be inspiring of growth in holiness!

Now, one could insist that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of entry to heaven. But if so, then we couldn’t really say that the death of a saint is always something to rejoice at. Imagine that Paul had died at the time of his first experience of the beatific vision. Then on the no-change view of the beatific vision, he would eternally have had a lesser beatific vision than in actual world where he continued to grow in holiness for over decades more.

A picture of continual growth in holiness and the beatific vision fits better with our temporality. One may worry, however, that it takes away from the picture of resting in God. However, rest is compatible with change. One of the best ways to rest is to read a good book. But as one reads the book, one grows in knowledge of its content. And if one worries that the thought that one will come to have a greater happiness should induce in one a present sorrow of longing, I think it is plausible that with perfect virtue one would no more find the expectation of greater future happiness to be a source of sorrow than a lesser saint would find the observation of greater saints a source of envy. And, coming back to the book analogy, when one reads a good book, there need be no unhappiness at the fact that there is more of the book yet to come—on the contrary, one can rejoice that there is more to come. (In some cases, there may be a weak negative emotion as one longs for the author to reveal something—say, the solution of a mystery. But not every genre will generate that.)

Furthermore, there is good reason to think that change is not incompatible with rest. Since we will have bodies in heaven, and we will flourish in body and soul, while bodily flourishing involves change, heavenly rest must be compatible with change. And plausibly some of the bodily activities we will engage in will involve a variation in the level of happiness at least in some respects. Thus, eating is an episodic joy, and music, I take it, involves much in the way of anticipation and change.

Beatific vision and scepticism

One way to think of the beatific vision is as a conscious experience whose quale is God himself. Not a representation of God, but the infinite and simple God himself. Such an experience would have have a striking epistemological feature. Ordinary veridical experiences are subject to sceptical worries because the qualia involved in them can occur in non-veridical experiences, or at least can have close facsimiles occurring in non-veridical experiences. But while everything is similar to God, the similarity is always infinitely remote. Moreover, there is a deep qualitative difference between God in the beatific vision and other qualia. No other quale is a person or even a substance.

Thus, someone who has the beatific vision is in the position of having an experience that is infinitely different from all other experiences, veridical or not. This, I think, rules out at least one kind of sceptical worry, and hence the beatific vision is also a fulfillment of the Cartesian quest for certainty—though that is far from being the most important feature of the beatific vision.

Nostalgia: Use Palm infrared keyboard with Android phone

I am probably the only person interested in this sort of thing, but in case anybody has an old PalmOne infrared keyboard and for the sake of nostalgia or convenience or whatever wants to use it with a newer device, I wrote up instructions on how to interface the keyboard via Bluetooth.

Talking of nostalgia, doesn't the phenomenon suggest that there is something not quite ideal about our current relationship to the past? The past is really real. So why feel nostalgia, when our past actions and experiences are really real? In heaven, perhaps, our memory will be so vivid that our past lives--transformed in a hindsight illumined by the beatific vision--will be fully present to us.

Knowledge, community and eternity

When I figure out or learn something, I typically find myself with an urge to share it--with family, friends or blog readers. The new knowledge just pulls me to sharing. Some of the pull is vanity. But I don't think it's all vanity. Even if I had to share the knowledge anonymously, without ever having the satisfaction of knowing if anybody ever appreciated it, I would still feel the urge to share it. This isn't a decisive argument that it's not all vanity, but it is evidence. I think I am not alone in this.

While some goods can be enjoyed alone almost as well as together with others, much of the value of knowledge seems to be the value of communal knowledge--and when I talk of "knowledge", I mean to include here "understanding", "insight" and the like. It is natural to share knowledge--that is in large part why we have language. (Self-concealment correlates with psychological and physical problems, but apparently there is insufficient evidence at present to determine what the causal relationship if any there is here--see The Psychology of Secrets by Anita Kelly. And in any case, when I talk of what is natural, I am talking of a normative naturalness, not a statistical normalcy.)

Even those who want to have an esoteric secret doctrine tend to want to have a community of cognescenti with whom they can share it. Or at the very least, and most annoyingly, they want others to know that they have secret knowledge that no one else has.

The good of knowledge is, then, incomplete when the knowledge is solitary. Likewise, the good of knowledge is incomplete when the knowledge is evanescent. While eating a chocolate can be satisfactory even though the chocolate disappears in a few seconds, and the memory fades in minutes to hours, to know something for a short bit of time and then forget it completely is to miss out something important about knowledge. Knowledge is supposed to be a stable and lasting good. We see this in Plato (though he drew from this the wrong conclusions about what can be the object of knowledge, in large part because he was an A-theorist). Suppose we were to learn the answer to some difficult scientific problem, and if we were to about to die and live never again (of course, I believe that death is not the end of life, but this is a hypothetical question), and we could pass the answer to no one. This could be quite tormenting, and it might almost have been better not to know the answer. And, no, this is not just about bragging rights.

One of the things I have wondered about is how much of the meaning of our lives would remain if death were the end of life, and all humanity were to return "again to the nebula" (to use Russell's phrase). Perhaps some valuable things might not lose that much of their savor under that hypothesis. But knowledge, I think, would be much impoverished if it were all coming to an end. One reason for that is the structure of human knowledge. Finding things out always opens more new questions, and so knowledge points to more questions which in turn point to more knowledge--Nicholas Rescher talks about this really nicely. But I think there may also be something about knowledge itself, about the connection between knowledge and eternity.

The good of knowledge, thus, seems to point to community and eternity, being incomplete without either.

For the Christian, this reflection might point to the Trinity (God's self-knowledge is essentially shared between three Persons who have one intellect), the Incarnation and beatific vision (this self-knowledge is graciously shared with us), and eschatology (our knowledge will, indeed, last--and even our bodies will rise again, so even the kind of knowledge we have as embodied beings will return). Love is greater than knowledge (in its fullness it includes knowledge but goes beyond it), but knowledge (or at least understanding, and justified true belief) is theologically significant as well. After all, Christ is Logos and Sophia.

The scholarly life: Two views

The pessimist:

I HAVE, alas! Philosophy,
Medicine, Jurisprudence too,
And to my cost Theology,
With ardent labour, studied through.
And here I stand, with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before.
Magister, doctor styled, indeed,
Already these ten years I lead,
Up, down, across, and to and fro,
My pupils by the nose,--and learn,
That we in truth can nothing know!
That in my heart like fire doth burn.
'Tis true I've more cunning than all your dull tribe,
Magister and doctor, priest, parson, and scribe;
Scruple or doubt comes not to enthrall me,
Neither can devil nor hell now appal me--
Hence also my heart must all pleasure forego! (Goethe, Faust, Part I)

The optimist:

The ennui of the accustomed explains not only why elderly people like to travel, but also why they incline to live vicariously in the doing of the young. However, this is far less of a problem with someone whose life is dedicated to learning, for there lies before one an endless horizon of more things to learn about. To be sure, it might seem that, very abstractly considered, learning and thinking themselves are "more of the same." But that is altogether false because, concretely considered, the idea at issue is always something new, something fresh." (Nicholas Rescher at age 73, Enlightening Journey, p. 266)

One should also, I think, supplement the quote with Rescher's idea that as one learns more, the knowledge makes possible new questions, and so the quest for knowledge is, in principle, without end for finite knowers.

I think Rescher gets right what Faust gets wrong. It may be true that the more one knows, the more one realizes what a small fraction of the questions there are one knows the answer to. But that is not reason for despair--for one can, after all, know more and more, both more facts and more questions.

I sometimes have suffered from a fear of the ennui of eternity in heaven. I realize that this is an irrational fear--the vision of God, our infinite lover and beloved, can unchangingly satisfy us forever. But it does seem plausible that growth, progress and change are important aspects of human nature (that's one reason I don't like the account of heavenly life as timeless--another reason is the apparent nonsensicality of saying "after this temporal life, there will be a timeless existence"). I was thinking about these ideas from Rescher yesterday, and I think they did much to take away the fear of the ennui of eternity. Here's the argument: I can see the life of ever increasing inquiry, truth leading to questions leading to truth, synoptic view leading to new questions leading to a wider synthesis, as a life worth engaging in for eternity. But what God has prepared for us, which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, either includes that or--quite likely--includes something even more satisfying. So the idea that eternity would produce ennui is mistaken--at least if one loves truth.