10.1 INTRODUCTION

Many of us are propelled into philosophy by the sense that things are not as they appear to us to be. This is not just a worry about our susceptibility to local error. While doubts may start near to home, philosophical doubt is global. Consequently, it cannot be addressed by scrutinizing more carefully what is before us or by travelling more widely in the world. Uncertainty is directed equally to my perception of the cup next to my word processor as to my knowledge of a volcano on a distant planet, the nature of an entity such as an electron, or the origin of the universe. Doubts as to the true nature of the stuff of the world or, indeed, of our own nature, may expand into profound uneasiness, as when we fear that we may be dreaming or alternately into delight, when we sense that there may be more to the world, something more beautiful, unthreateningly mysterious and wonderful, than what seems to surround us as we go about our seemingly humdrum business in a seemingly humdrum world.

The very process of questioning the reality of what seems to surround us, what we interact with in our waking lives, may seem itself to be questionable. The suggestion that everything revealed to us, everything we engage with on weekdays and weekends, may not be real seems to remove any standard against which unreality may be judged. There cannot be unreality without something – reality – as a benchmark.

4.1 METAPHYSICS UNDER SIEGE FROM SCIENCE

Notwithstanding the failure of neuroscience to account for consciousness, or for the transition from what-is to that-it-is, many thinkers, including quite a few philosophers, believe that the spectacular advance of science has discredited any independent contribution philosophy may make to advancing our understanding of the fundamental nature of what-is. Metaphysical inquiry, we are now told, should be guided by physics. The special sciences, notably biology, may have something to add; indeed, as we shall discuss in Chapter 10, biology can seem to justify radically revisionary views of the nature of the natural world. That said, fundamental physics is the place to which philosophers inclined to scientism usually turn.

If philosophy has any role in guiding our thoughts about the fundamental nature of things, it is merely secondary, that of commenting on science, helping us to understand what scientists are up to, and trying to make sense of the relationship between the world as it is experienced in everyday life and the profoundly counter-intuitive, even unintelligible, accounts of reality as it is described in cutting-edge science. Trying, for example, to make sense of Eddington's Two Tables.

In the Preface to this book, I described its aim in two ways: to make explicitness explicit; or, less ambitiously, to make explicitness more explicit. I am confident that I have not fully succeeded in realizing the first ambition. Whether, or to what extent, I have delivered on the second the reader who has gone this far can now judge.

I began with a direct attempt to capture explicitness, teasing out its many aspects and dimensions. While I hope this was helpful, I fear that it may not have been very illuminating, even less inspiring. Unpacking “explicitness” into its semantic neighbours may have served only to demonstrate how slippery it is and how it forces anyone attempting to dive into its depths to float towards the surface. This may be a question of like forces repelling one another: explicitness resisting making itself explicit. Or, less fancifully, of the impossibility of using words to take us to a place beyond words – and indeed beyond perceptual awareness – whence we can adopt an outside view on explicitness. Hence the indirect approach adopted in the chapters that followed, where I have examined how contemporary approaches to philosophical problems have so often overlooked or sidelined explicitness and have for this reason been seriously point-missing.

Chapter 1 unpacked the seemingly mundane revelation of an individual looking at himself in a mirror. The physical reflections prompted philosophical reflections on what he sees: the unholy trinity of the thing or the Blob, of the organism or the Beast, and of the person or the Bloke who makes the other two, and himself, explicit.

6.1 INTRODUCING THE SELF

Kant's extraordinary claim that “The fact that a human being can have the ‘I’ among his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth”highlights something very special about the awareness that lies at the heart of the “I”, the ego, the person, the conscious subject, or the self. What is special is highly relevant to our exploration, or recovery, of explicitness. “That I am”, the amming of a body to create an embodied subject, is connected with all other modes of explicitness. The conscious “I” transforms the “it” into presences that, thus transformed, potentially have meaning. The explicitness switched on by the self faces two ways: to itself and to that which is other than itself; to the that-I-am – the “who” surrounded by the world, facing it, and engaging with it; and to the that-it-is – to the “what” that adds up to a surrounding world with which the self is inescapably engaged.

Notwithstanding its centrality to our endeavour to make explicitness explicit, the present investigation of the self will not do justice to the richness of the topic. Indeed, it will be consciously incomplete, not the least so that I shall avoid covering too much territory that I have covered elsewhere.

The most hotly contested, and unavoidable, issue in the philosophy of the self is the extent to which it has substance and what that substance amounts to. We might expect that explicitness itself has no substance: that-it-is is not an additional mode of what-is.

1.1 INTRODUCING THE UNHOLY TRINITY

Philosophy has many things going for it. Not the least is that it doesn't require expensive equipment. Even the armchair – that iconic piece of furniture invoked by those who denigrate the discipline – is dispensable. Philosophers worth their salt can philosophize while standing up or walking the dog. This said, the rewards for mobilizing even a modest amount of equipment are disproportionate to the outlay. Consider what can be revealed of our nature when we look into a humble mirror and reflect on what is reflected back to us. And for this purpose, the outlay on equipment can be even more sparing: the mirror can be imaginary.

Indeed, to focus on our thoughts, we need to switch our attention from an actual mirror to the idea of one – not the least so we shall not be distracted by a spot on our nose or a crumb in a beard. The occupant of the mirror who also occupies this page is not a particular individual at a particular moment in space and time; not a bald-headed, grey-bearded individual; rather the idea of an individual looking at himself, realized in the self-directed gaze in a mirror. Up close and (im)personal.

So, there we are: staring at ourselves in an imaginary mirror, endeavouring to make ourselves present to ourselves, to bathe in one of the most literal dimensions of explicitness, being given to ourselves in a paradigm of revelation.

2.1 GETTING FROM THE THING TO THE PERSON

When I contemplate what I see when I stand in front of a mirror, I can pay separate attention to the material object or The Thing, to the living Organism, and to the Person. It seems as if they are and yet are not the same entity.

Of course, they are the same entity. To point to one, is to point to all three. None can move without the others moving. They occupy the same space and interact with the same material objects: if the Blob trips over a stone, so do the Beast and the Bloke. The jacket I drape on the Thing encloses the organism and is worn by the Person. It is the same jacket maintaining the temperature of the Blob and delivering warmth to, and protecting the life of, the Organism; and is worn with a (very) modest degree of dash by the Person. When the Thing is destroyed, the Beast and the Person also disappear.

And yet this trinity, this three-in-one, is not entirely one. Its members can part company. A non-fatal but devastating head injury resulting in life-long coma removes the Person, while leaving the Organism intact: living, yes, but no longer me. An even more serious injury may result in a material body that is no longer a (living) Organism: a corpse that may, for a while, occupy roughly the same space and have many of the basic physical properties as the Organism. In short, the Organism can outlive the Person and the material body outlast the Organism.

9.1 THOUGHT AND POSSIBILITY

Thoughts express possibilities that may or may not correspond to anything actual. Articulated possibilities are pure explicitness: that-it-is is detached from what-is, though in the case of a true thought, its intentional object will be an aspect of what-is. The detachment of thoughts from, the independence of, what-is is most obvious in the case of the thought that such-and-such only “might be” the case or the thought that it is not the case. Possibilities, that is to say, carry the second-order possibility that they might not correspond to any past or present actuality or that they envisage a future which, after all, may not come about. This may be concealed in confident expectation until that expectation is confounded. Possibilities that are explicitly entertained as possibilities – “It is possible that …” – are haunted by uncertainty as to whether anything did, does, or will, correspond to them: they are asserted or denied against the background that they only might be the case.

Possibilities may be packaged as thoughts in many different ways.1 These include: as singular factual assertions (“Paris is the capital of France”); as general facts (“Dogs are meat-eaters”); as speculations (“There may be life on Mars”); in the form of questions (“Is Paris the capital of France?”, “Do dogs eat meat?”, “Is there life on Mars?”); or as things to be denied (“Paris is not the capital of France”, “Dogs do not eat meat”, “There is no life on Mars”).

3.1 THE MYTH OF “EASY” PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Before I examine the claim that the transition from what-is to that-it-is, or to that-it-is-the-case, is delivered by the brain – more broadly, the nervous system or, more narrowly, parts of the brain – I want to challenge the distinction, particularly associated with David Chalmers, between the “easy” and the “hard” problems of consciousness. It illustrates the ease with which many manifestations of explicitness are overlooked.

The (supposedly) easy problems are “those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms”, while the paradigmatic hard problem is “the problem of experience”. Another way of capturing the distinction is to contrast “functions and behaviour associated with consciousness” (easy problems) “with the experiential (phenomenal, subjective) dimensions of consciousness” (the hard problem). An organism possesses the latter dimensions of consciousness when we can say, as Thomas Nagel expressed it, that it is like something to be that organism. This is true most incontrovertibly of organisms like you and me. It may be true of some vertebrate animals, but probably not of any plants.

The basic elements of mind, and the source of Chalmers’ so-called “hard” problems, are qualia such as the experience of red, the smell of cheese, or the pain of toothache.

For nearly 60 years, I have been haunted by a thought, an intuition, lying just beyond the edge of anything I am able to think. Notwithstanding the numerous published and yet more numerous unpublished pages where I have circled that thought from different distances, it has eluded me. It relates to something for which I have settled on the unsatisfactory name of “explicitness”. The present volume is my most sustained effort to make landfall.

Explicitness is one of the three fundamental mysteries in which our lives are wrapped, though most of the time they are hidden under what we take for granted. The first is that there is Something rather than Nothing. The second is that that Something has an order which, according to the standard story, ultimately gives rise to and sustains life. The third is that that Something (which I shall call “what-is”) is made explicit, courtesy of entities that also make themselves explicit. For conscious subjects, what-is presents itself as that-it-is or (more ponderously) “that-it-is-the-case”. The most arresting aspect of this mystery is the “I” itself, the blush of “who” awoken amidst the deserts of “what”.

Concerning the first mystery there is nothing to be said for those who, like myself, lack religious belief and who do not share the faith that the authority of science extends to metaphysics. The “creative accounting” of physicists who imagine they can explain the origin of Something out of Nothing by (for example) appealing to instability in the so-called quantum vacuum expressed in a bubbling brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence, allowing Nothing to wobble into Something1 is no more persuasive than the Creation stories offered by sacred texts.

7.1 THE REALITY OF AGENCY

Selves – embodied subjects – are agents. They do things and the things they do, actions – notwithstanding that they are typically physical events – are fundamentally different from the mere happenings occurring throughout the physical world, including their own bodies. “Amming” opens up a territory within being, occupied by doing.

The relevance of actions to the present inquiry is that they are made possible by explicitness – by an explicit self, making the world around itself explicit. Before I develop this point, I shall briefly summarize the case for the distinctive nature of actions in a world of happenings, for their being genuinely free.

Free will seems impossible in theory. Nevertheless, it appears real in practice: there really is a fundamental difference between things that someone does and things that merely happen to or around that person. If there were no such difference, our lives would lose much of their meaning – though this concern should not be taken as evidence in favour of free will. Our lives, after all, may well be meaningless when they are considered sub specie aeternitatis. More to the point, seeing how free will is possible requires a radical rethink of our relationship to the natural world, a critical look at the concepts of causation and of the so-called laws of nature, and reflection on what prompts and guides actions and how those actions are put together.