Foolish Brain!

An Open Letter in Support of HH the Dalai Lama's Dialogue With Science Your Holiness, what an uplifting example you set us in your Neurobiology of Compassion address at Stanford University in October of last year! And I'm not talking about the event as an addition to your existing contribution to world peace. No, what I want to pay homage to here is something unique and utterly new to our contemporary culture! I want to celebrate your ground breaking role in laying the foundation stone for dialogue, a two-way exchange of ideas, between scientists and non-scientists, effectively creating a new forum for change in the way we think at precisely the right historical moment when our desperate need for such change has become a public issue affecting all of us, scientists, religionists, philosophers, politicians and ordinary folk alike. It's a vital ray of hope in the current atmosphere of blame and fear aroused by the nightmarish possibility of deep level links between our two most prominent current crises, the twin spectres of impending ecological disaster and ever deepening recession. A key feature of your talk, your belief in the mutual benefits to be gained by religious and secular scientific thinkers getting together on equal terms, presents us with an intriguing prospect, of pooling resources previously often used in disparate and sometimes even opposed pursuits to find answers to questions that have defied our greatest minds since time immemorial, to find, that is, mutually satisfying and actionable solutions to the problems of understanding why we humans behave as we do particularly when we experience such healing and positively empowering states as compassion and altruism. Your unquestionable humility, open-hearted sincerity and good humour in putting forward this proposal is a powerful invitation for all parties concerned to rise to its challenge to develop an equal self-awareness and sensitivity to the difficulties they will inevitably encounter in participating in such a project. You're clearly convinced that the community of scientists contains many who will resonate strongly with your intuitions in this regard. You are of course correct here. We would not, for instance, have been in a position to witness your creative thinking on this matter without the efforts of scientists willing to develop the wider cultural perspective necessary for promoting the notion that empirical science could provide input for, let alone benefit from, consideration of such quintessentially ethical and metaphysical isues as the nature of compassion. Were it not for the work of far thinking scientists like Dr James Doty and Dr William Mobley, the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), which organised the event, wouldn't exist. It's plainly not news to you that the major difficulty facing your mutual project lies in the indisputable resistance all three of you inevitably confront in its reception by many members of the communities you represent. You spoke of the occasional negative reactions of your fellow religionists when you discuss the topic of dialogue with secular thinkers and scientists in particular. On the other side of the equation, notes of the discussions organised by CCARE make it plain that some of the scientific contributers found it distasteful even to begin making an effort to see where such discourse might lead. A subtler version of this problem of negative reception hopefully captured by the title of this open letter lies in the aspirations embedded in your aim of opening a dialogue with neuroscientists such as Dr Doty and Dr Mobley and their colleagues in CCARE. You were quite open about these aspirations in your talk. You admitted that you've been studying western science for around 40 years and provided plenty of evidence that this was a wide ranging and in depth affair which has given rise to much creative thinking on your part. This covered many complex disciplines including anthropology, evolutionary psychology, ethology, immunology and of course, brain science. What particularly caught my attention, however, rooted me to the spot, in fact, and raised the hairs on the back of my neck, was your remark, The brain is very foolish! in the context of a question about the extent to which brain science could end up reducing spiritual states like compassion to the potentially trivialising terms of brain chemistry. I immediately felt I

knew what you meant but was equally sure that Dr Doty who was sitting to your immediate right might not. It seemed a priceless moment. The very idea of someone, anyone, publicly confronting an eminent neurosurgeon whose livelihood depends on the high status of the notion of the very clever brain in our culture with a phrase that implies that our view of neuroscience is topsy-turvy is for me packed with intense dramatic significance, at the very least. However, it seemed evident that Dr Doty was showing no signs of an immediate reaction of concern, perhaps understandably given the fact that the phrase was part of a story which involved other neuroscientists and not himself. It was clear, all the same, that he didn't feel any pressure to acknowledge your use of it as a signal you were willing to begin the dialogue right there. In what follows, I want to unpack the significance that struck me in that moment because I feel it may be critically relevant to any assessment of the chances of success we can hope are attached to your dialogue with scientists and secular thinkers. First, let me just briefly return to my suggestion that what we are dealing with here is a negative reaction to your fresh thinking which is subtler than the one you sometimes get from your fellow religionists. It's subtler because it can happen when you're dealing with someone from another group or culture who is actually well disposed to your own but is not very familiar with it. It thus contains seeds of positivity that a tender and caring hand can aspire to bring to germination. Hopefully, Dr Doty and his colleagues fall into this category, having simply failed to recognise your description of the brain as 'foolish' or 'not clever' as a massively compressed signal of your belief in your ability to make an important contribution to neuroscience because they don't yet have sufficient familiarity with Buddhist modes of discourse. That's certainly the way I prefer to see it. It actually doesn't matter here whether or not this is what you were consciously intending in your talk. What's important is that what you said at that point could, when put together with several of the other components of your talk, be read as an important contribution to neuroscience, one that exposes a key problem in a little known and dangerously confused region of the philosopical underbelly of science. It ought, therefore, to be of considerable interest to all of us to know whether anyone present at the meeting, or who watched it on video as I did, has in the meantime made comments to you which displayed an awareness of the magnitude of what was involved. Be that as it may, I have no option at this point but to assume I personally may never get this information. So, what I'm going to do right now is bypass my feeling that I need it and start forthwith on my attempt at a reconstruction of your potential contribution to neuroscience from components of your talk so that you, the scientists at CCARE and anyone else who might relish the performance, can make up your minds as to the craziness or creativity or both of my receptiveness regarding what you consider to be the message of your talk. The second unpacking step, then, is to look at the contents of your talk for signposts to a good point of entry into what is involved. Here, it's helpful to recall your remarks on the way many people overuse words that refer to the first person singular, like I, me, my, mine as evidence of the strong individualism driving our culture that quickly strikes discerning visitors from more communally minded cultures. This is especially clear when it is considered together with our obvious denial of its negative effects on our health as in the greater proneness to heart disease of people who talk this way. In the next step we add in your remarks about the recentness of scientists' recognition of the two-way connection between mind and health such as can be seen in the emergence of fields like psychoimmunology. Finally, top this with your doubts about our culture's identification of mind with the brain and a clearer picture of the drift of your thinking begins to emerge. You seem to be hinting very gently that the reason our scientists are taking so long to solve the mystery of how the brain works in spite of massive input from our best technology could be that

we have a faulty view of what it's supposed to be doing for us. As you also say, it's only recently that scientists have begun to investigate themselves, from the viewpoint of both their own motives and the reasons for their prominence in our culture. So it's hardly surprising that the influence of our culture's individualism on their scientific thinking has not hitherto been as closely scrutinised as it might have been if objectivity were the prominent criterion we like to think it is. Seen in this light there's an ironic liklihood that it's easier to understand the brain if you're an outsider coming from a more communally minded culture. It's not that difficult to see that the reason we expect our brains to be responsible for everything we're capable of is because we want this part of our anatomy to be concrete and indisputable hard-wired biological evidence of the rightness of our individualism so we can feel justified in believing that our culture, including our current way of doing science, is the best in the world. It's because of this we expect too much from our brains and are thus constantly disappointed in our quest to discover how they work. We don't want to find our brains are simpler than we think more foolish because it would mean we would have to look more closely at our self-image than we feel comfortable with at the moment. Understandably, a baldly stated account of this type is unlikely to persuade neuroscientists they should abandon their current position with respect to the brain without at the very least a deal more dialogue about the many good reasons they feel they have for persisting with it. Their obvious quick first line of defense type of response is for them to ask the foolish brain supporter, OK, you say the brain is simpler than we think so, what's it supposed to be doing then? What's the simple task you say it carries out? And remember we have good evidence for our position! Fortunately, here, you supplied us with a good example in the story you told of how when you were a young child your mother would sometimes put you on her shoulders and take you for a walk. Sometimes, you said, you used to enjoy the unusual perspective you had up there so much you would seek to explore it further by steering your mother where you wanted to go by pulling appropriately on her ears. Pulling her left ear was quickly followed by travel to the left and pulling her right ear similarly followed by travel to the right no need for spoken directions. In other words, even at an early age you had a sound practical understanding of a certain quite simple physiological role the head as a whole fulfils, namely, its acting as the vehicle for our best distance oriented sense organs in the targeting function that lies at the centre of our vertebrate embodiment strategy. An essential part of this role is ensuring that the rest of the body 'follows through' the direction in which the head has moved, either towards or away from target depending on which of these two options the mind has selected. This sinuous 'follow-through' action of the segments of the spine is clearly a basic component of vertebrate movement that vertebrates share with the vast world of non-vertebrate segmental beings like worms and insects and can be seen at work not merely in the muscles that generate the follow-through locomotor movements of the segments that lie 'behind' or 'after' or, for us, 'below' the front or 'head' segment but also in the follow-through action of the similarly segmented array of perceptual organs together with the special muscles that guide them in the local feedback loops of their peripheral action. It's also a phenomenon which appears so far to have had a fairly low priority in terms of research status and is certainly not promoted as a matter the rest of us should meditate upon as crucial to our lives and cultural heritage. It seems to me, however, that a view like this has a lot going for it as a candidate foolish or simple, non-psychological role for the central nervous system as a whole, including the brain, of a type suggested by the details of your talk. This is especially so because it dovetails nicely with a compensatory offloading of what is currently considered a basic function of the brain, to wit, it allows us to dump the brain's supposed responsibility for the generation of the qualitative features of perceptual consciousness back onto the sense organs themselves which have a clearly more appropriately differentiated structure to cope with the task.

In the clever brain picture sense organs are mere passive input stations passing on raw unprocessed data to specialised regions of the centralised brain. The neural operations of these centres process the data in such a way as to generate not only our consciousness of ourselves as being in a multimedia, multidimensional world but also a relevant behavioural strategy and the precise sequence of movements all our sense organs and limbs must make to execute it. The brain, in this picture, is quintessentially the organ of a disembodied yet hyper-talented skill juggling platonic psyche. Somehow, that is, and in a way not as yet understood because it's still, in the clever brain picture, not yet explained, the same types of brain nerves are responsible for generating the diverse range of totally different qualities associated with each of our sense modalities at one and the same time as judging the meaning of what they all detect with enough expertise to select an appropriate behavioural strategy for all the effector units in its domain a job it has to carry out with no other clues than morse code like chains of input pulses in the total senselessness of the bony cavern of our skulls. And it must do all this in real time and at an appropriate speed to ensure survival. In direct contrast, the foolish brain picture has consciousness being generated at the far ends of the nervous system closest to the rewards and dangers of the scene of external action and precisely where it appears to occur, in the various clearly appropriate behaviours of the structurally specialised local internal and external sense organs of the body, thus emphasising the basic 'carrier' form of perceptual behaviour on which all the other more physiologically specific, consciously mediated modes of behaviour ride, piggy-back style. In this picture, follow-through is the essential neural action behind the integration of both consciousness and behaviour wherever it occurs in the body. The significant difference with the clever brain picture of neural action is that follow-through is an automatic function perfectly adapted to the task of operating in real time and with little or no psychological characteristics. If this is the main function of the brain then, in psychological terms, it is, in fact, not merely foolish but literally stupid or incapable of consciousness. Unfortunately, such replies to the defensive questioning of clever brain supporters are unlikely to deter or disarm the more spirited in their ranks. At least one strong second line of cleverist questioning is available to those supporting the current view. It goes something like this, Don't think you can dismiss the clever brain so easily. Your 'foolish' brain is apparently pretty useless at thinking. I take it you would at least allow that you've made several attempts at thinking in expressing the foregoing? If it's not your brain that's responsible for these attempts then which part of the body do you blame for the mess you've made of them so far? Here, too, we must, I think, return to your mother for help or at least to your cogent use of motherhood and its central place in the lives of social animals such as ourselves and all the other mammals whose body architectures so closely resemble our own. I was really impressed by your willingness to contemplate accepting an evolutionary psychology which roots compassion in the common maternal practices which we as mammals revere along with other mammal species even us males who clearly find so many of their features indispensible in our dealings with our fellow males. Putting this view of maternalistic compassion together with your clear vision of the importance of the immune system and its copiously evidenced adaptiveness gives us foolishists some kind of basis for an adequate reply here. It may initially appear to be a rather clumsy ploy with regard to the question it was supposed to answer since what the question required was an alternative discrete location to the cleverists' centralised brain. However, it should be noted that the foolishist picture developed so far has depicted the vertebrate embodiment architecture as being essentially a distributed rather than centrally controlled system. It can therefore be seen as a reasonably consistent move to claim that the body has no central organ of selfhood, while pointing to the adaptivity of the diffuse networks of the immune system as the alternative medium for learning and stimulating thought. Ultimately,

the foolishist reply will attempt to round off its answer in this particular context by presenting it as a potential completion of Schwann and Schleiden's totally distributed cell theory of physiology first mooted in the middle years of the nineteenth century. We will, however, leave the final moves of this project till later and confine ourselves at this point to the details we obtain from the implications of the components you made available in the neurobiology of your talk at Stanford. The essential foolishist strategy here relies on your willingness to upgrade our respect for the role of motherhood in mammal societies and to associate this new respect with your linking of compassion to the adaptive acquisition of immunological wisdom. The resulting composite linkage shines a completely new light from the core of its ensemble and uses the illumination to identify a mother's doctor-like diagnostic skills as its key immunological component. We need to recognise, that is, that doing so develops a new holistic behaviourism which allows that a distributed network like the adaptive immune system is capable of generating specific physiological cycles that can be identified as the motive force of a separate mode of behaviour as distinct as those of food gathering, nest building and reproduction. There is, in other words, such a thing as immunological behaviour and the internal diagnostic dimension of this behaviour constitutes its most characteristic feature, with new developmental forms identifiable as the main factor in the emergence of the basic behavioural institutions of mutual immunological care observable in the evolution of mammal societies. The implication here is that if we want to understand the deep nature of our thinking we need to see it in terms of the overall evolutionary development processes which have made it possible. We can only do this if we're prepared to combine the perspectives of anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology and evolutionary theory to obtain a holistic view of the way it all fits together as a homogenous symphony of massively and at the same time delicately interrelated changes. From this point of view the mammal evolution of a new neural layer of follow-through connectivity in the eruption of the wrinkley spongelike mass we call the cortex from the smell and taste related regions at the front of the older part of our brains we share with reptiles only begins to make sense when we look at it in terms of all the other perspectives. This new smell and taste related follow-through layer of our brain anatomy must, that is, first of all be considered alongside all the other new bits of anatomy it developed with, the new skin and hair, the new jaw and teeth and the unique delicate masticatory action they involve, the new sex organs and internalised reproductive arrangements, the new arrangements of limbs making way for our new ways of moving about and the new reflexive postures we are able to adopt when stationary and so on. Alongside all of these we have to integrate the new physiological changes, the uniquely adaptive mammal immune system which stops our mothers rejecting the growth of another being inside them and maintains and heals us as we pass through the often injurious process of maturation and the new hormones that bond mothers with their offspring and keep them attentive and compassionately concerned about whatever health matters develop over the long course of time the emergent beings take to become self-sufficient. Then finally we have to integrate these factors with the psychology and sociology of the maintenance of these bonds into adult life. Key to these last two perspectives is the centrality of the new relationship between our mouths, distance related sense organs and limbs in the development of new reflexive self-exploring forms of adaptive immunological behavour supporting our ability to attend to the new and closer needs of our own surfaces, the surfaces of our offspring and of those with whom we form our groups and of the surfaces of our ecological niches as we diagnose what they conceal. In other mammals this centrality is expressed as oral grooming in the maintenance of status relationships and territorial boundaries. For us it is non-oral grooming in the maintenance of status and territory with the attention of the newly distanced mouth diverted to the creation and spread of a new layer of this maintenance via the delicate grooming of interpersonal sound in exchanges of language. It's this last which both sets us apart as social mammals and yet also allies us with them through its basis in the

same underlying adaptive immunological processes and objectives. And it's the globally distributed diagnostic dimension of this adaptive immunological behaviour that the foolishist picture identifies as thinking and relies on a Rylean view of the inner representations involved as sensory rehearsals. From this point of view sensory behaviour involves not just current perception but also rehearsals of what it would be like to have a current perception which take place where they appear to in the sensory organs themselves and thus utilise the same anatomical and physiological mechanisms. This updated version of the foolish brain picture has an additional and very significant benefit. It is able to appeal to exactly the same body of empirical evidence that will for some time undoubtedly continue to empower clever brain advocates to persist in defensive dialogue intended to pull the rug from under the foolish brain advocate. According to the foolish brain view, that is, all the clinical and experimental evidence put forward by clever brain advocates to justify their picture could equally well play a key role in presenting the case for the foolish brain. The evidence, in other words, is purely circumstantial for both approaches. Let's have a quick look then at the types of empirical results often cited as evidence in cleverist neuroscience research. The earliest historically involved the personality changing results of surviving accidental damage to the brain such as having a bar of metal blasted through it. Later studies involved the effects on people of stimulating or probing different regions of their brains when part of their skulls has been removed. Others involved the results of making destructive cuts in parts or even through the whole of the wrinkly brain cortex of apes or other non-human mammals. More recent studies focus on the behavioural effects of brain tumours, strokes and agerelated degenerative diseases. Early scanning exercises studied the range of pulse frequencies in neural activity observable in different states of consciousness. More recent scanning technologies such as CAT and MRI have made it possible to create more precise maps of the different areas of neural activity associated with specific behaviours. Another recent avenue of study concentrates on the range of effects of the variety of transmitter chemicals nerve cells emit at their points of contact as a result of developing an action pulse in the long projections which connect them to other nerves. The single most striking feature all these methodologies have in common is that, while they serve to associate a given brain area with a specific behaviour, none of them provide the slightest clue as to the nature of the physiological processes that generate the association. The failure or functionality involved could equally well be read as the failure or functional occurrence of neural follow-through action in the global articulation of particular sinuous behaviours as of the activity of central processing regions for the same behaviours. Their relevance as components of a case being made for how nerves function depends entirely on the untestable assumptions they rest on. This explanatory shortfall is always going to apply to both pictures since their shared topic, the qualities of consciousness and the strategic behavioural decisions they are related to, are purely subjective and thus lie beyond the discriminatory powers of experimental testing. The only things we can say in support of a claim for the superiority of the foolish view is that it appears to involve a much simpler explanation and it alone provides a plausible explanation of the qualitative diversity of consciousness. These, however, are clearly no guarantee of the way reality actually unfolds. Interestingly and quite independently, a new philosophical forum has recently emerged debating a view of mind which appears to support the foolishist view, often dubbed externalism in the philosophy of mind. The externalism being referred to here expresses a contrast to the 'internalism' of any view which claims that anyone looking for conceptual support for explanations of what goes on in our minds need go no further in their search than what they'll find when they consider the details of what goes on inside our brains. Psychological 'internalists' believe, in other words, that brain states are sufficient to explain what they consider to be the two major components of rational thought, the meanings of words and the contents of concepts. They are, as a result, sometimes characterised by externalists as 'individualists' and their approach is labelled as 'Cartesian' because

Rene Descartes was the first to give this kind of internalism a coherent philosophical basis. Externalists in this context, on the other hand, are happy to consider themselves 'anti-individualists' and believe that anyone wanting to understand how words have meanings and concepts have contents needs to look outwards beyond what goes on inside us, to include what goes on between us in our societies and our ecological niches, before all the details of what is involved will begin to fit together in a reasonably complete picture. Brains, in other words, do not have enough fine detail to allow completion of this kind. They are thus lighter and simpler in terms of what we expect of them than has hitherto been allowed. Unfortunately, externalist philosophers of mind aren't much interested in the neuroscience of all this and prefer to confine themselves to discussions about aspects of words and concepts that emerge when we use them in rational discourse. I'm not going to weigh you down with details of these discussions, Your Holiness, because the philosophical non-engagement with neuroscience displayed in them is a minor inconvenience for science compared to the much more significant, many faceted crisis of identity that looms behind it. This is the little known and dangerously confused region of the philosophical underbelly of science I referred to early on in this letter. The more pressing problem that will confront us in any attempt to sort it out is that when scientists finally come to accept that the foolish brain story constitutes yet another example of two incompatible theories both laying claim to the same body of experimental and observational evidence this is going to drive home the painful implications of the message that they don't have the methodological apparatus at their disposal to deal with it. Unless, of course, they continue to turn a blind eye to such phenomena. This is not, of course, a wilful ignorance but simply a consequence of their belief that the boundary between science and philosophy is clear and distinct. The American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine warned about the possibility of problems of this kind in the late sixties of the last century. His warning was based on his acceptance of the need for a holistic approach to the two-way relationship between theory and evidence. Quine saw that observation is seldom raw, is typically theory-laden and new theories arise as a result of our urge to fill the previously unfelt explanatory gaps that have a habit of appearing when we decide to look more closely at the observable objects and processes of our experience. He saw, that is, that our awareness of the limited scope of our senses leaves us with a fatal attraction for stories about aspects of our lives that lie beyond them so that we never have enough evidence to justify the full and unconditional acceptance needed for the reliable versions we like to call theories and that this means there is an intrinsic relativity at the heart of our knowledge. Honing the behavioural strategies of our observation practices or extending it through experimental technical refinements can't root out this condition instead, it just reinforces it. It forces us to stretch the holistic integrity of our network of stories to cover the new phenomena which then has the knock-on effect of exposing further gaps elsewhere in its fabric. There will, that is, always be at least two ways of explaining the combination of the new data and the new holes and, as a result, there is no irrefutable evidence based way of deciding between rival theories. This is especially true of theories that aim to cover 'everything' and are complex enough to tolerate large scale rejigs of what is considered to be their basic 'givens'. Ultimately, on this view, what decides between two incompatible interpretations of the same body of observation is the philosophically disputable issue of which of the two is felt to have the greater explanatory power, simplicity and precision. How you rate the magnitude of the problem that confronts us here depends on how far you agree with the view that both clever and foolish approaches to the brain do appear to be sufficiently flexible to manage to adapt themselves to each new item of evidence that experiment or observation come up with and science, unfortunately, does have no other non-philosophical means of comparing the values of hypotheses that are rivals in this way. The peak intensity of the pain this will inflict on scientists' current identity will only become apparent when we can more reliably gauge the strength

or weakness of the previously unquestioned claim that the methodological use of experiment and observation is exactly and uniquely the way scientists define their community as separate from that of philosophers. Admitting they have a substantial and ineradicable philosophical problem at the very bottom foundation level of their methodology thus threatens scientists' current freedom from interference from philosophers who have for the last century or so maintained a hands-off approach towards them precisely in order to preserve science's methodological independence. Such an admission is effectively a deeply worrying reminder to both communities that, prior to being rebranded as 'science' in the second half of the 19th century, the use of experiment and observation as a means of establishing the reliability of knowledge was known simply as 'natural philosophy'. What scientists were considered to be involved in, under this older rubric, was very much an integral part of the wider range of philosophy and as publicly disputable as the rest of the range. Before we dig deeper into this problem let's first deal with my yet another example claim. I'm not going to go into details on this point right now because I'm going to provide them later in this letter. At this stage I simply want to establish that my other examples aren't the kind of trivia that are plainly irrelevant because they don't have the same scale as the mind/brain controversy. Both of the two theories I'm thinking of are empirically based constructs critical to our view of what it is to be human and to our grasp of what kind of world we live in as such. One, the aquatic ape theory, is an alternative evolutionary psychology and the other, the expanding or growing earth theory, is an alternative picture of the evolution of the universe and our own planet in particular. They have things in common. They are both based on holistic and organic interpretations of the available evidence so neither fits in the current scientific paradigm. That both are consequently ignored by the scientific community as viable options for scientific consideration shocks and horrifies no one. Most of us just wouldn't expect otherwise. It's also not my aim to provoke reactions of this kind. Everyone knows, since the publication of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the 60s of the last century, that this is simply the way things are done in the world of science. We've all grown up a lot since then and realise that science isn't the piling up of individual heroic discoveries as was believed before Kuhn's more finely grained account took hold. It's a communal enterprise that for several centuries now has relied on the combined efforts of many minds simultaneously probing the multiple implications of an original innovative experimental or observational breakthrough to ensure they entail no compelling contradictions indicating that science needs to turn in some newer direction. The core characteristics of the worldview implied by the original innovative work and its results, right down to the way it's presented and talked about, become the umbrella criteria for any new types of investigation that subsequently emerge become the new 'paradigm', in other words. This holds sway for long periods of time, only changing as a result of the agreement of the whole community of investigators that more is to be gained from making methodological changes across the board than by spinning out the flexibility of the old methods to adapt to what would otherwise be seen as increasing evidence of their obsolescence. This, then, is the keynote of the identity crisis I referred to above, effectively the grumbling bowels of a impending 'paradigm shift'. Your announcement of your wish to set up a dialogue with science thus comes at a potentially opportune moment. The way we currently do both science and philosophy in the English speaking world is basically an exclusive and inward looking retentive process in which the input of non-scientists and non-philosophers is neither sought nor expected. They are elite communities with their own criteria and decision making processes that most insiders and outsiders view as the main basis of their authority. This perception of scientists as having an almost priestly role is what establishes the current situation as a status quo 'monkeying' with which invites the perils of cultural chaos and darkness. Against this inward and backward looking view, however, we are now under considerable pressure to acknowledge that we are facing socioeconomic and ecological perils that are increasingly taking on a similar scale. We need, in this situation, to

avail ourselves of as many informed and concerned neutral advisors as we can find. This urgency is, unfortunately, unlikely to guarantee your dialogue project an easy passage. It is, in fact, more likely to have the opposite effect, simply raising the level of the confusion that envelops anyone forced to get closer to the science/philosophy boundary and, given the human nature of all involved, increasing the intensity of the panic and embarassment any attempt by outsiders to offer help will inevitably encounter. My greatest fear here, Your Holiness, is that in the course of some encounter of this kind some ambiguous exchange of ideas might result in your being discouraged from continuing. This, for me, would be the worst possible outcome and is the reason I am writing this letter. My hope is that foreknowledge of these constraints on the openness of scientists to attempts by non-scientists to influence the direction of their work will minimise the liklihood of this happening and that, forewarned in this way, your well-honed diplomacy will eventually prevail. Delicacy is especially needed if we are ever to be able to assess the extent to which a paradigm shift in the cultural institutions that guide the way we think as a society could open up new avenues of resolution of the problems involved. It could, after all, be argued that the current scientific and philosophical paradigms provide cultural templates for many of the behavioural patterns that are frequently being considered as clearly implicated in the emergence of our problems. The elitism, lack of transparency and the protection of privilege built into the enterprises of science as it is currently conceived play a not insignificant role in our socioeconomic troubles. It could, for example, be argued that science's methodological use of experiment as the most effective way of guaranteeing progress in our quest for reliable knowledge provides the ikonic template for our society's status oriented consumerism with regard to the steady flow of spin-offs from technological progress and industrial growth in general. Somehow we have to establish the need for an overarching and holistic dimension in which global concerns of this kind can be addressed. Your vision of the possibility of sensitive dialogue with the architects of this ikonography holds out the hope of resolving these issue in ways that will satisfy scientist and non-scientist alike. Perhaps the most difficult questions here attach to the possibility of changing the philosophical paradigm, in particular, the passive aquiescence with regard to scientific projects which has hitherto underpinned scientists' sense of their methodological independence. There is a deeply authentic evasiveness about the philosophers who maintain this paradigm, widely known as analytical philosophy, that makes it close to impossible to pin them down on where they stand philosophically. Philosophy is, of course, a notoriously difficult activity, given that its fundamental task is to think about things, particularly thinking itself, and no one has as yet come up with selfevidently clear answers to the questions of what thinking is and how, whatever it is, it can be directed onto itself. Analytical philosophers' problem here is plainly that they are convinced that philosophy isn't fit for its traditionally perceived purpose and they know this sad fact just can't be got across simply to the rest of us who are in denial and reluctant to hear about it. One of the clearest admissions of this otherwise reclusive school is that their field of study should no longer be seen as the location of the keys to reliable knowledge about ourselves and the world we live in. If you're looking for keys of this kind, they say, you must turn to scientists to find them and to learn how they are to be used; the job of philosophy is to function as a mere auxiliary on science's sidelines, tidying up the odd tediously technical, quasi-metaphysical explanatory 'dangler' left unsorted by this arrangement, such as how you can have mind, beauty or morals in a world made of nothing but lifeless matter (that this is the only option is something you can't question because that's questioning science). This resolute philosophical stance of forthright altruism, passing what was once their season ticket to the social limelight to an offspring philosophical community less used to occupying centre stage in the world of learning, guarantees the 'analytical' school a certain anonymity which hides the true story of its origins. Effectively, in terms of public knowledge, it's a hitherto untold story, but it's one you crucially need to know if you want to

understand them philosophically. Retrieving it from history's dustbin where it has lain for some time hasn't been easy and it's a bit of a bumpy narrative ride as a result. But it is worth it particularly if, as you made clear in your Stanford address, you're interested in understanding the deep nature of European secularism. It's a story that takes us back at least two centuries to the chaotic upheaval of the birth of the European modern age and reveals several bizarre twists laced with hints of historical irony that may appeal to your well tuned antenna for uplifting and releasing moments of catharsis that point the way to the birth of willingness to loosen up on fixed attitudes. The untold story is a intensely human drama starting with an initial period of epoch shattering salvation from mental and social breakdown soon followed by stoicism in the face of a steady succession of desperate failures scattered by interludes of the return of shining hope. But you would never know this from looking at the standard prospectus of the school of analytical philosophy. So, let's look at the prospectus first and then go on to compare it to the untold story to gauge the family resemblance. The basic claim of the prospectus is that analytical philosophy began a mere century ago in the early years of the twentieth century when Bertrand Russell followed G. E. Moore in abandoning the then dominant Hegelian idealism of his undergraduate years to return to something more closely akin to the native British empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill. Russell's background in maths and logic, however, soon gave him a more commanding role in the rebellion, supplying the original empirical substrate with the unique analytical tone which has characterised it ever since. Another version of the prospectus has the German mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege working independently and in roughly the same period on similar mathematical and logical ideas which were later perceived to be an important foundational element of the school. The key element of this mix of ideas was, it seems, a mission to prove that maths can be derived from logic, often known as 'logicism' as a result. Its aim was effectively to raise the profile of the whole of western science into a more clearly dominant position among what its exponents saw as its many rivals for control of human thought at the global level of world culture. It was conceived as having three components or stages sliding together smoothly like a telescope in a linked set of rigourously crafted units. First, the claims of logic to a role as the definitive vehicle of rational thought were to be firmly established by formalising it in a symbolic scheme with a consistency and completeness that would defy all attempts to undermine it. This scheme would then be further developed to show that it provided a similarly irreproachable framework for mathematical thinking. In the third and final stage, the resulting structure would be promoted as providing a peerless language for the expression of the key sciences involved in determining the true nature of the universe, physics and cosmology. The resulting provenance of the worldview embodied by the technological projects of Western culture and their claim to priority over all others would then be clearly incontestable. Russell appeared to have the first stage of the project well and truly launched with the publication of his Principles of Mathematics. The inspiration for this treatise came to Russell in 1900 while he was in Paris for the International Congress of Philosophy of that year. There he met Giuseppe Peano an Italian mathematician who read a paper on work he was doing on a symbolic notation for the representation of any attempt at logical treatment of mathematical ideas. Peano gave him a copy of the paper and in a moment of epiphany while reading it Russell saw the possibility of using Peano's notation for a full logicist reduction of maths. Carried away by this vision he left the conference before it finished and returned to England to work out the details for Principles of Mathematics. Once this was completed and still in a state of high intellectual elation he began the collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead which was to result in their monumental work Principia Mathematica at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. But it wasn't long before the uplift of the sublime abstractness of the formal symbolic system they were devising was replaced by waves of

tormenting self-doubt when Russell discovered a critical flaw at the deepest level of its thinking. The inspirational power of the overall cultural vision was, however, enough to get Russell back on track two years later with modifications intended to get the project moving forward again albeit with less naivety attached to his faith in the historic inevitability of its ultimate success. This pattern of an alternating almost bipolar flip-flop of periods of optimism characterised by monumental creativity driving intense labour over complex structural ramifications followed by soul destroying descents into a purgatory of massive salvage operations has been the keynote figure that identifies the ever diminishing social profile of analytical philosophers to this day. It is also the measure of the difficulty that will attach to any move to persuade them to let go their grip on the current paradigm, to abandon their Titanic as its submerging tilt becomes increasingly clear to everyone else outside it. In their eyes they are the ship's increasingly silent orchestra, the last bastion against the powers of darkness, civilisation's last chance saloon, its final karaoke session on the ultimate cosmic frontier and their duty is to keep the music of hope in individualist liberal humanism playing to the bitter end. Something very similar to this is their sincere and tenaciously held belief and they can hardly be faulted on that. The submergence of the logicist project that put analytical philosophers were they are today should be plain to anyone who can read the message of its historic decline since Russell and Whitehead's so transiently auspicious start. Its two initial architects abandoned it around the middle of the last century and went their separate ways, Russell to the writing of popular books on the wider history of philosophy and to capitalising on his high public profile in support of various forms of political activism, Whitehead to the development of a philosophy of holism not merely ignored by analytical philosophers but effectively outlawed by them students professing an interest in it risk being blackballed and having their ambitions to become accredited philosophers dashed as a result. More significantly, all three stages of the project they initiated have turned out to be cultural dead ends. Stage one rated logic as having a fundamental role in our lives even, in the early period of the stage's progress, considering it a fundamental aspect of reality itself. Compare this extremely high profile with its current status and the degree of logic's fall from public grace is strikingly obvious. The notion that it exemplifies a physiologically hard-wired part of our psychology is now only maintained by a painfully diminished and eccentric minority. Few outside university philosophy departments consider it an essential component of a young person's education or a useful adjunct to a career in public service or business. It no longer serves as a paradigm for the folk psychology notion of reason which is thus even more of a mystery as a result. It survives as a relic, a fading exhibit in the museum of ideas. Interest in it is on a par with a devotion to chess, any status attached being due to the clearly mind numbing effort involved in digesting the vast concretion of arcane rules and convoluted bootstrapping operations they can or must be used in, neither of which is ever quite clear to the uninitiated. What sealed logicism's fate, in fact, was Ludwig Wittgenstein's expose of the emptiness of the claim that logic delivers reliable forms of knowledge by showing it reduces the arguments involved to the level of a game based on an unnaturally restricted set of rules whose only difference to the rules on which children's games are based is the degree of their complexity . Wittgenstein's similar verdict on maths had an equally disastrous effect on stage two of the project, making it clear that each of the two pursuits, logic and maths, had its own separate body of rules which were of purely human origin and thus ramshackle in the final analysis. He wasn't alone in the demolition of this phase of logicism, however. The final crushing blow was struck by Kurt Godel who used the formal apparatus of logicism itself to demonstrate that a logically based mathematics can't be at one and the same time both consistent and complete. The cultural effect of these blows is visible today in the virtual disappearance of logicist objectives from the lower and higher educational curricula and in the persistent failure of more philosophically minded mathematicians to complete the task of replacing it with an alternative scheme clearly specifying what precisely unites

and thus identifies the now vast array of mathematical phenomena. This doesn't, of course, mean that maths is left without an identity as a result, just that its identity isn't as solid as it might have been if the logicist project had succeeded. It still retains the more organic but looser identity that Wittgenstein recommended, one of a rough bundle of family resemblances scattered through the array in an as yet undefined manner. And it isn't the case that no form of definition is possible here but simply that it's likely, when it's finally revealed, to lack the abstractness so cherished by mathematicians up to now, tainted as it would be in their eyes by the dimension of empirically dependent meaning it would have to accept in the process. This meaning could easily be derived from the apparent utility of mathematical systems to the solution of the host of arcane empirical problems that continue to intrigue physicists in their investigation of quantum mechanical and cosmological phenomena. This type of empirically based definition would be further enhanced if it were combined with a more behaviouristic approach to the explanation of the modes of thinking that underly mathematical theory and practice. In a simple example of use of this point of view the rhythmic character of numbers is more clearly expressed by taking the ordinal forms, first, second, third and so on, as their basic feature rather than, as currently, the cardinals, one, two, three, etc., which give them the superficial appearance of being virtual objects existing in some abstract virtual world. Similarly, straight lines should give way to curves and their projection of our vertebrate sinusoidal modes of movement as the basis of geometry. From this point of view, the old abstractness morphs through a more practical or empirical rebranding process as forms of approximation demanded by the limitations entailed in the dynamics of the way we form ourselves. The only downside here is the loss of the certainty that was so craved by the logicist approach. Which takes us smoothly into the failure of stage three of the logicist project, the wreck of its cultural imperialism. We don't see the ship this way yet because clearly its cargo has found its way to all corners of the known world. What we're still reluctant to see here is that the reason the cargo is so attractive to outsiders is not the 'obvious' crystalline truth of the worldview which spun it off as trivial side effects of its search for an enduring certainty but simply that it represents a quick and free technological upgrade from a culture which is plainly not that many steps ahead. Irony begins to creep in at this point because what makes it so simple for the receivers of the cargo to make the technological comparison involved is the painful truth that we're so obviously making things up as we go along when we try to explain how we come to be in possession of the cargo in the first place. The stories we produce in so doing are too many and we clearly have considerable difficulty in making them all fit together. Moreover and, more tellingly, we're clearly as impotent as they are in the face of the things they're really afraid of, the hurricane, the vulcano and the tsunami, for example. Our prowess in technology, in these terms, is being put down to our luck in being graced with a more powerful form of fire magic, one that's also perceived by the cargo receivers as being not necessarily suited to their culture because they have no difficulty in spotting many of its downsides which their forms of magic avoid. Who's to say with certainty they aren't right? This then is perhaps an appropriate point, Your Holiness, at which to turn to the ironies of the untold story that underpins the real provenance of analytical philosophy. We uncover one with our very first step in telling it because to take it we must mentally return to a time when English speaking philosophers were more at ease with their fellows on the continent of Europe than they are today. It's a sad fact about contemporary analytical philosophy that a striking feature of the reclusiveness of those who practice it is their refusal to engage with the thinking of non-English speaking philosophers. This is a great pity because continental thought is highly creative and full of socioanthropological detail which is richly relevant to problems of cultural diversity, paradigm variation and so on. It is, in other words, a treasure trove for anyone who is not simply looking at problems from a local point of view but also recognises that solutions must have a globally acceptable

dimension if we are going to have any hope they will be effective. We need a global reach in particular here because what we're involved in is a return to the impact crater of the modern age. We're returning, that is, to the violence and upheaval of the scalding cultural melting pot of European thought which was the French Revolution. And to the link between contemporary analytical philosophy and the turbulent vulcanism of the thinking of this period, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill is a key figure in modern English philosophy and is widely known here as a thinker who made significant developments in utilitarianism, logic and empirical thinking in general. On the continent, however, he is better known as an English positivist. It's on this last term, particularly its noun form, 'positivism', that we must now focus our gaze because Mill's role in its development is what we're going to be considering as the direct route to the more likely crucible of analytical philosophy. The word 'positive' was first used in this way by the original French socialist Henri de Saint-Simon to describe what he felt was the main feature of his ideal society. Saint-Simon was an aristocrat who had been sent to America as part of the French monarchy's assistance to its colonists in their struggle to throw off British rule and took part in the seige of Yorktown under George Washington. While there he had been so impressed by the colonists' freedom from the negative, elitist and antisocial influence of privilege either of church or state that he renounced his aristocratic titles on his return. This and the strikingly radical views he was developing as a result of what he had seen in America were the main reasons he was able not merely to ride out the mental and cultural turmoil of the collapse of French society but actually to come out of it a much richer man. Thanks to the property speculations he made during his imprisonment in the Palais de Luxembourg over the course of the revolution he was able to launch his ideas in a series of salons and promotional events which established a high public profile for his programme of social reform. The pivotal innovative element in this programme was his vision of a new science of society conceived as doing for humankind what physics does for the world. Where previously physics had been the Queen of the sciences, his 'physique sociale' would have the underlying function of providing the new framework of executive knowledge. This was to be based on a view of social history which saw the falling away of feudalism and Catholicism and their replacement by a new Christianity organised by philanthropic industrialists with scientists filling the role of priests as the unfolding of two phases of a necessary, progressive and socially positive developmental process. This, in effect, combined two intuitions, one, a sense of the historical necessity of a more scientific approach to our knowledge of ourselves and two, the recognition of people's need for some kind of religion-like overall framework which would empower their spiritual recovery from the traumas of the revolution. It was, in effect, to be both science and a 'secular religion'. The notes of bizarre historical irony begin to be heard again here, in the origin of our modern notion of secularity as total separation from religion in a word which plainly lacked that interpretation. Saint-Simon's use of the notion of secularity was based on the traditional Catholic distinction between monastic and 'secular clergy' which distinguishes between monks who are devoted to the worship of a god existing outside time and 'secular clergy' from the latin, saecula, for generation or age meaning clergy who live outside the jurisdiction of a monastery and work amongst the masses whose minds are the product of the historical age and culture they live in. The intent behind Saint-Simon's novel usage of the term was to inject a sense of continuity into the proposed demystification of religion which might otherwise have seemed yet another example of the revolution's destructive radicalism. In August 1817, Saint-Simon took on the 19 year old Auguste Comte as his student and secretary. This event is an important milestone in our search for the full provenance of analytical philosophy because it was Comte with whom Mill forged the link with positivism and it was Comte's version of the worldview it entails that Mill passed on to the English speaking world. On this view, Saint-

Simon cleared the ground and dug the trenches for the edifice that Comte went on to build. Where Saint-Simon had added new meaning to the notion of positivity by using it to reference the raising of science to the status of a religion, the more theoretically inclined Comte's baptism of the word began with the historiographically formulaic process of flagging it as an '-ism'. He also coined the words 'sociology', to regularise Saint-Simon's new science of the world of humanity, and 'altruism' to signify the communalistic humanism it embodied a feature that would be considerably downgraded in the handover of its mindset to English patterns of thought. Within seven years what became their partnership would be over, broken by a set of differences that mirrored the strains in their mutual dependency. This had begun with great affection, both acceding to a father/son relationship which Comte particularly valued having suffered a painful break-up with his own father. There was, however, an underlying difference of emphasis in the beliefs they shared. Simon-Simon had lived through the madness of 'The Terror' and its wilful demolition of all traditional cultural support systems and wanted to soften its impact on a society that was struggling to reorganise on the ashes and cinders it left behind by salvaging what he felt was the only saving grace the old regime had possessed, the compassion of the Christ figure and its embodiment of love. Comte, however, had a more affirmative view of the revolution and was anxious not to lose the clean slate he felt it had given them to declare and develop the anti-metaphysical bias of empirical science as an essential component of his campaign to cut off any retreat to what he saw as the three architects of France's breakdown, feudalism, the Roman Catholic church and the metaphysical meanderings of the rationalist philosophers of France's 'Enlightenment'. He too, for the same reason, didn't see the need to do away with religion altogether. He agreed with Saint-Simon that people needed some form of religion-like behaviour to channel the expression of the communal framework of their lives. He wanted, however, to see this framework firmly rooted in the observable world. He believed this could be achieved by reinforcing Saint-Simon's positivism of a priestly role for scientists and at the same time avoiding its otherwordly leanings by changing its target for feelings of reverence to what he conceived as a more empirically objectifiable notion, the human race as a whole. He dubbed his preferred institution the Religion of Humanity eventually, after suffering a nervous breakdown, even putting himself forward as the Pope of Positivism and expending considerable effort in elaborating the rituals and offices over which he hoped to preside. Like Saint-Simon, Comte was frequently in the grip of inner conflict driven by the competing forces expressed in the visionary nature of his belief in the power of empirical science to bring stability to the world around him. The inevitable disapointments caused by the failure of others to leap the gap between promotion of science's self-restriction to the observable world and the plainly messianic vision required to implement its part in the positivist credo meant that Comte was often on the brink of mental collapse. These troubles were not helped by the straightened financial circumstances the two men shared in their later lives. Saint-Simon's profligate promotional projects lead finally to his bankruptcy and Comte's abrasive character frequently got in the way of his attempts to find gainful employment. Indeed, both men ended up trying to take their own lives, both attempts frustrated by the incompetence implicit in their inner confusion. Mill, too, had suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of his troubled relationship with his father, a close friend of Jeremy Bentham, the originator of utilitarianism, and for a brief period, in which he lost his childhood faith in his father's beliefs, he too was the victim of suicidal thoughts. Positivism, however, played a major part in his recovery. Working in the more established climate of religious tolerance and moderation of Protestant England, the task of extolling the social virtues of science was less of an uphill struggle. Perhaps more practically and thanks to his father's influence, Mill had a permanent job that not only provided financial security but allowed him sufficient spare time to develop forms of philosophical and political thinking that were quite different from his father's.

Cushioned by this stable lifestyle, Mill was able to review his deep familiarity with the originators of French positivism (he spent considerable time in France in his youth, was introduced to SaintSimon in the course of it, spoke fluent French and had subsequently carried out a lengthy postal correspondence with Comte) and had no difficulty in separating out the practical promise of Comte's earlier thinking from the metaphysical excesses of his later years. As a result he was able to craft his own positivism and its low-key version of Comte's Religion of Humanity (Mill sometimes preferred the term Cult of Humanity) to provide a locally acceptable promotional vehicle for a new form of utilitarianism which avoided any sense that it represented a threat to public order. Once he had finally managed to throw off the cognitive straightjacket of his father's attempt to educate him as a child prodigy who would grow up to lead the march of Bentham's paternalistic utilitarianism to a dominant position in politics, Mill developed into a deeply compassionate man with a strong fundamental commitment to wider forms of freedom of thought and speech. His utilitarianism stands out in comparison with previous versions in its recognition of the diversity of qualitative criteria for what makes life worth living. Also, his view of the greatest number in the notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number that had underpinned all previous forms of utilitarian thinking went far beyond the politics of the human species they had been restricted to and emphasised the commonness of sentience in the wider organic world. He campaigned for equal rights for women, for legal measures to eradicate cruelty to animals and his economics showed unique early ecological awareness in their recognition of the folly of policies of continuous industrial growth and their inevitable consequence in the despoliation of the ecosphere. A similar scale of creativity animated his efforts to elaborate his scientific positivism. His basic motivation here was a desire to persuade the English speaking world that a scientific approach is essential to any attempt to understand and explain the processes of social, political and economic change. Mill clearly saw that in order to achieve this objective, he would have to avoid appeals to forms of authority other than that of the empirical basis of science as a whole basically, in other words, he would have to appeal only to the lessons of experience. By recommending in this way that 'facts' should be allowed to speak for themselves he knew he would not only gain significant economy of argument but would in addition be more likely to draw his listeners into a frame of mind in which they would be stimulated to look further into the issues from the point of view of their own experience. Following this strategy, Mill ended up with a body of thought which has many similarities with those of Quine and the later Wittgenstein. In his System of Logic of 1843 he laid out a wide ranging treatment of the forms of proof that empirical science offers to seekers of knowledge making it clear that personal experience is the final arbiter of what can be relied on in terms of certainty. He built on Comte's associationist thinking to develop rules of induction appropriate to observation in general and experiments in particular. His approach to both maths and formal logic was similarly empirical, viewing them as ultimately products of experience, and he made no attempt to conceal his conviction that although empirical knowledge based on the combined use of these disciplines is a transparently superior basis for belief compared to the deliverances of metaphysically elaborated systems it will always remain open to future modifications and corrections. It can't, that is, rescue us from our own responsibility for the moral consequences of what we do while pursuing it. So, Your Holiness, there are at least three things I must do next if I am to have any chance of persuading you of the benefits of accepting that this succession of thinkers clearly originating in the French Revolution constitutes a reliable provenance of contemporary analytical philosophy, one hundred years prior to that of this school's standard prospectus. I must first give good reasons for believing it was Mill's legacy Russell and Moore turned to as they abandonned the Hegelianism of their early academic life. Then I must point to a set of family resemblances which is observable at

all stages of the resulting succession leading up to that of the current school. Finally I must attempt to draw out significant lessons from this view. I will now start on the first of these three steps. The problem is that Mill didn't himself go to school or university, was never an academic and, indeed, wasn't much interested in what went on in academia apart from being concerned about education as an issue. He had been taught by his father, his father's friends, private tutors and by himself. He wrote books, was a regular public speaker and was equally as well known as a politician as he was as a deep thinker. So he didn't create a philosophical school with any standing in academia and the academic high ground was eventually taken by followers of Georg Hegel who clearly had high ranking academic tenure in Germany. And, to top it all, Mill died a year after Russell was born and in the year of Moore's birth. That's the negative side of the argument for his being the link to an earlier provenance for analytical philosophy. On the plus side Mill has a strong connection with Russell. He was a close enough friend of Russell's parents for them to nominate him as Russell's godfather. Unfortunately, Russell's parents died in the early years of his life, his mother two years after his birth and his father two years after that. Russell was subsequently brought up by his puritanical grandmother who filled him in with all the racy details of his parents 'notoriously' free-thinking lifestyle as he grew up so there is good reason to think that this background information would have included a detailed cameo of Mill's inspirational role in their free-thinking. It is also well known that Mill's views on logic and maths provided the foil for the logicism of both Russell and Frege and that his views on the ethics of utilitarianism were the foil for the development of Moore's interest in ethics. And, given that there was a healthy rivalry for the recruitment of uncommitted student thinkers between the followers of Comte and Hegel, who were themselves mutually and cautiously aware of the power of each others' systems of thought, it doesn't need much stretch of the imagination to see that Mill's positivism would have seemed an attractive alternative to anyone thinking of jumping the Hegelian ship. It's well known, for example, that that quintessential early Hegelian, Karl Marx, was influenced by Comte in his turn from pure Hegelianism towards a new physical materialist and politically overhauled upgrade of Hegel's dialectical thinking. All in all, a strong case can be made that Russell and Moore's disaffection with Hegelianism would have left them with an increased openness to the rival attractions of Mill's positivism. The strength of this case, then, is a powerful reason for us to take my second step and now turn to the question of the family resemblances between early French positivism, Mill's thinking and the accepted originators of analytical philosophy, Russell, Moore and Frege, as a possible clinching factor here. Before we actually proceed on this, Your Holiness, please forgive me for anticipating a question you might have here, Why family resemblances? What's the relevance of this element of Wittgenstein's late thinking in this context? What's wrong with just looking at the arguments and explanations they offer? Well, I'm claiming that prominent features of the thinking of these philosophers are shared and I need to be able to say on what basis I make this claim. I need a form of classification that can apply to types of thinking without suffering from the flaws and contradictions of the traditional forms of classification used in this context reasoning, logic, maths and scientific experiments and yet can still deliver results in terms of persuasive power. By relying on judgemental skills that are clearly shared by all mammals, I'm grounding my claim in a natural behaviour which has played a significant role not only in human and mammal evolution but in the evolution of most if not all sentient organisms. Using Wittgenstein's organic approach I'm making a clear admission that I'm not expecting my results to be the watertight and irrefutable 'facts' hoped for in the results of reason, logic, maths and experiment nor the similarities and differences I'm pointing to to be as clear cut. I need an agreed rough form of classification of this kind at this juncture especially because the

point that motivated Wittgenstein in choosing this skill as an organic basis for classification was that it allows members of a family or set to remain in the set even though they don't possess every single feature that is possessed by the members of the set as a whole. Each member may have its own particular subset of the total set of features and some may even straddle its boundary in some disputable way. The method is nevertheless well able to deliver positive results. So, I've gone through the belief systems involved and the contexts in which they were held and extracted what I believe to be a provisional set of family resemblances, one that can, for instance, distinguish Hegelians from positivists. Each feature is expressed as a disposition to support a claim about human activities and the attitudes they entail and is thus consistent with the holistic behaviourism I have been promoting in this letter hitherto. Here's the result, expressed as a numbered list of items. Individually they represent a disposition to see: 1. the human race as the top rank in the hierarchy of beings of which nature is understood to be composed and that this hierarchy does not entail a higher power or divinity ruling over it 2. that the metaphysical mode of thinking has a dangerously speculative and thus negative influence on the products of any conceptual system that employs it and must therefore be avoided at all costs 3. an exclusively empirical mode of thinking as the most reliable basis for any enquiry into the mysteries of nature in general and our minds in particular 4. scientists as occupying the topmost level in the hierarchy of experts to be consulted on the constitution of reality and thus as being the final arbiters of the direction of our lives 5. the experimental method as the most effective tool of empirical thinking 6. reasoning, logic and maths as the most precise and accurate media for the technical expression of the results of experiments 7. atomistic physical materialism as the most appropriate non-technical mode of description of the basic facts underlying the constitution of the universe and the workings of our minds 8. biological and historical evolution as the necessary, inevitable and basically inorganic process by which human positivism has reached its current social and ecological prominence 9. freedom of speech, behavioural self-determination and good health as the natural condition of life for everyone 10. philosophers as the 'in-house' academic 'cognitive maintenance' team dealing with any trivial technical problems that emerge in explanations of why the scientific method can't answer all our questions. Hopefully, Your Holiness, the items numbered above will function as a ready checklist to rate the suitability of a given thinker's inclusion in the pantheon of analytical philosophy's patriarchs and luminaries. It's clear, for instance, from what I've already said about Saint-Simon and Comte, that they can be jointly and affirmatively connected to most of the items on the list. Disentangling which of the two is the rightful owner of the 'intellectual property rights' with respect to each item isn't so easy as is sadly attested by the wrangling over such matters amongst their French followers after their split. Drop this requirement and establishing their role as the source of Mill's system is straightforward. Mill himself scores highly as a result. The crucial thinker then, from the point of view of my argument for a late eigthteenth century and French revolutionary origin of analytical philosophy, has to be Russell, the alleged main founder according to its contemporary prospectus. If he registers as positive with regard to the checklist my case here would appear to be a strong one. Items 4-6 can be immediately rated straightforwardly positive since they are entailed in any account of logicism presented alongside a strong claim to its plausibility if not outright veracity. Items 3 and 7 on either side of this group ought also to be rated positive for the same reason but it's only fair to admit that Russell's position with regard to them could be argued to be questionable. Russell's keen sensitivity to long standing sceptical arguments about the unreliability of perception and the

metaphysical problems confusing the issues surrounding the status of matter mainly concerned with which of the two traditional stances, realism or idealism, are appropriate to any consistent and complete account on these issues is well known. It is, however, clear that, throughout his career, he was extremely anxious to find an irrefutable justificatory basis for both scientific empiricism and materialistic realism, one that would support a strong liklihood of the ultimate completability of experimental science as a top priority cultural objective worthy of any self respecting civilisation. Perhaps the best measure of the intensity of these efforts is the frequency with which he changed his position on these matters. Likewise a fair measure of their value as it's still received by the world of science today is provided by the persistence of his favourite metaphor for reductionist or foundationalist thinking, 'atomism', in spite of recurrent evidence of its unsuitability. Having split the atom and thus shown it to be a contradiction in terms, we persist in burrowing deeper into the 'substance' of solidity in search of what are, by all accounts, effectively sub-atomic atoms, now rebranded as 'particles'. It is, in other words, Russell and his philosphical heirs whom we have to thank for the persistence of what is clearly a form of 'physical internalism', with the word 'internalism' being used here in much the same way as I used it in my earlier reference to 'externalism in the philosophy of mind'. We persist, in other words, in clinging exclusively to the assumption that the answers to all our questions about the nature of matter can be found by investigating the phenomena observable at its infinitesimally minutest or innermost levels. Externalism in this context would be the plea that this flies in the face of increasing cosmological evidence that a good deal of what happens in our universe, including the apparent solidity of most of its mass, may well be attributable to events in unseen and unseeable universes outside or in some other unknowable way external to our own. The problem with accepting an externalism of this kind is, of course, that one of its consequences is that no amount of perception extending experimentation can take us outside our own universe to guarantee the ultimate completability of a science which continues to be organised in the manner Russell conceived it. Whatever else we may infer from this view, items 3 and 7 effectively rate positive with regard to the aspirational dimension of Russell's life. His lifelong commitment to experimental science indicates that he was always, at heart, a physical internalist, nurturing a strong inclination to support some form of quasi-realism with regard to matter without which such a commitment would have been irrational, a condition he never ceased to strive against. Items 1, 8 and 9 all relate to key beliefs in the thinking system we know as 'secular humanism', with its well established roots in the early nineteenth century positivist religions of humanity. Russell's commitment to this worldview is well known and is the main subject of his book Why I Am Not a Christian. The deep honesty that drove Russell's thinking in all matters, such as, for example, his struggle to find a consistent position with regard to physical realism above, also comes out clearly in this work in the way he's forced to admit his inability to declare himself an outright atheist. Thus, it's his inability to find the kind of evidence which would have inclined him towards belief in God which also figures in his admission that he couldn't find enough evidence to warrant the clear disbelief required by atheism either, leaving him with no option but to identify himself simply as agnostic. Russell's unflinching embodiment of this type of refusal to play on people's credulity together with his activism with regard to peace, freedom of speech and human rights in general has made him a patriarch if not a hero of the humanist movement in a way which leaves us with no doubts about putting ticks in boxes 1, 8 and 9. The only difficulty here with giving top marks to Russell as a post-revolutionary positivist, making us thankful for the flexibility Wittgenstein's family resemblance approach provides, comes with the question of how to handle Russell's status with respect to items 2 and 10. Whatever else you may say about him, you can't accuse Russell of being intimidated by the risks attached to metaphysical thinking. It seems reasonable to argue, for example, that Russell retained enough of an appetite for

metaphysical matters from his earlier years as a student of Hegelianism to make him confident of his competence in this direction and that it was this that drove his many attempts at constructing a sound metaphysical basis for his empiricism. Moreover, the strength of this appetite could also be identified as the source of his deep respect for the earlier, non-positivist philosophical greats for whom philosophy could never be reduced to subservience to one alone of its several fields such as, for instance, natural philosophy or 'science' as we now know it. It was, after all, his delight in recounting the achievements of these historical figures that sustained him in so many ways in his later and final years. We can't, I fear, rate items 2 and 10 positive as a result. This, then, your holiness, is the position I promised to sketch for you with regard to the provenance of the shadowy school of philosophers who guard science's vulnerable boundary with their field of expertise. There are enough ticks in the ten boxes above to move anyone with any familiarity with the family of philosophers begun by Saint-Simon and Comte a considerable way along the path to accepting Bertrand Russell and the philosophy he developed as belonging in the main line of descent from them and thus to put the whole school of analytical philosophy in the same camp. You may, however, prefer to agree with many others who will wonder why this matters. What difference, after all, does it make if analytical philosophy is somewhat longer in the tooth than they've been prepared to admit hitherto? I hope you won't mind at least hearing me out a little longer while I offer some suggestions as to why not agreeing with this class of thinkers may be beneficial to anyone considering dialogue with scientists. Well, first off, there's the huge matter of sensitivity and recognising the need for it here. Scientists, like everyone else, have their own sensitivities they are reluctant to go public about if only because they're aware that doing so forces them to confront the problem of language. This has always been a bit of a problem for them ever since they first went public with the experimental method. Early modern scientists were effectively breaking up the old world hoping to put a new one in its place but their native language has never been able to keep up. Inevitably, when talking about their work amongst themselves they began to develop a private language prone to all the semantic problems the later Wittgenstein warns are attached to such endeavours. When faced with the problem of how to explain what they were doing to lay folk, there was always a temptation to let some striking feature of the result of their experiments do the 'talking' instead which was, of course, precisely what made their early demonstrations so popular. Nowadays, it's the spin-offs that play that role. Next there's the question of whose language is going to be used, the private language of the scientist or the language of the non-scientist who wants to dialogue with them. The problem that has emerged in this letter is that analytical philosophers' hands-off policy towards science has left us without the working interface we need here. If we're ever going to get one we'll have to gently tease out the reasons for their reluctance to provide it because they clearly are the ones with the background and skills for the task of developing it to the pitch required. If there's an element of denial involved then foreknowledge of what it hovers round will be essential and this is what the blind spots in scientists' and analytical philosophers' self-knowledge seems to indicate. Then there's the question of the issues the interface is likely to be required to handle. Aspiring dialoguers with science will need to be on the alert with respect to the way the current hidden positivist agenda skews the manner in which many of these issues are handled. We've already covered some of the ground which threatens to be tough going in any attempt to establish the kind of protocols and content the interface is likely to confront when dealing with it. At least two closely related types of issue can be discerned here, one relating to the problem of separating the metaphysical from the empirical and the other that of separating the religious from the secular. Let's take a look at them in that order. Positivists clearly assume that the experimental method makes separating the empirical from the

metaphysical a fairly straightforward matter. They're persuaded it's alright to think this way because, as we've seen, they've already made another and more basic assumption that appears to entail this conclusion. They've decided it's OK to use experiments to investigate their minds and the world they live in because they are convinced by what they see as the greater plausibility of the metaphysics of atomistic materialism and its exclusively internalistic viewpoints, psychological and physical respectively. They believe, in other words, that everything has a structure that can eventually be reduced to irreducible elements, to a demonstrably hard and unchanging bottom layer that resists further analysis because the outcome is clear and self-evidently irrefutable and thus if you keep repeatedly taking things to pieces and then taking the pieces to pieces you'll inevitably reach that layer which will subsequently serve as the reliable foundation for your belief in the existence of what you've discovered up to that point and anything else thereafter that is linked to it. It's clearly arguable that this is acceptable as a starting position for scientific projects even though it means you're running the risk of getting snared at some stage in the problems of circular thinking. If, furthermore, once you're well and truly on your way with the project, you find you're still getting positive results that appear to confirm your internalistic viewpoint, there's no irrefutable reason you shouldn't persist on the same basis. If, however, you begin to find, as scientists currently are doing, that, even after using the best technology your nations can buy, you're regularly running into difficulties interpreting your results, then it's only sensible to accept you should maybe review your situation and consider the possibility that you need a change in your underlying metaphysical assumptions. Both quantum theory and physical cosmology are widely acknowledged to be struggling to find a coherent way out of their multiple alternative interpretations and neuroscience's many advances in mapping brain areas relative to behaviour and perception are still no closer to being balanced by a global theory of how the brain is supposed to achieve all its alleged functions than it was a century ago. Now, surely, is the time to start a review of alternative metaphysical bases. Refusing to do this, as, indeed, the current scientific community and its philosophical support team seem to be doing, is an even clearer indication of denial being at work in the mindset of those involved. Which is, perhaps, understandable, given what is being asked of them at this point. Having to drop your long standing metaphysical base and consider alternatives is not a comfortable position to find yourself in let alone put yourself in. The metaphysical and the empirical are so closely meshed in the sticky web of processes you're confronted with as a result it's very hard to prise them apart far enough to get a steady grip on each of them let alone get them into the kind of alternative balance you would need here. In these circumstances, it's good to have a couple of preprepared samples with their metaphysical bases already clearly in place and thus capable of illustrating how a transition of this kind can be achieved. Any would-be dialoguer with science hoping to be granted a real open door or space for meaningful two-way exchange of ideas, is going to need something of this kind up their sleeves if they're ever to have the chance of bringing their scientific interlocutors around to a condition in which they feel comfortable with handling problems of this nature. One such sample, Your Holiness, is, of course, your appropriately tuned form of Buddhism which, as you pointed out, has already made contributions to physics. Another I briefly mentioned earlier in this letter is the organic holism of the later Alfred North Whitehead. This by-passes many of the problems that the inanimate, ultimately lifeless, starting point of atomistic materialism has with explaining minds and the origins and nature of life by self-consciously starting out from the initial opposite assumption that the universe is and always has been holistically organic; or, in simpler terms, from its outside, wherever that is, it's as alive as ourselves and all the other beings of the ecospheres inside it. Whitehead's organic holism also has the advantage that it provides an ideal metaphysical framework for the three alternative empirical stories I'll be offering to you later in this letter, the expanding or growing earth theory, the aquatic ape theory and my attempt at fleshing out

the foolish brain theory as the completion of Schwann and Schleiden's cell theory of physiology. This links smoothly into another advantage to be drawn from both these two alternative metaphysics. This is that, as Your Holiness has pointed out with regard to the Buddhist alternative, they allow for the construction of much subtler or simpler adaptive physiologies which sustain complex psychologies whose complexities are only perceivable from the viewpoint of external behavioural criteria such as compassion and wisdom. Indeed, the only serious casualty in the scientific transitions they entail would be the experimental method itself which has plainly come to the end limit of its utility. This will be the hardest consequence for them to take on board and the one that provokes the strongest denial. After several centuries of apparently successful use they would be confronting an even more perplexing problem than having to work out what to do next, that of getting themselves to confront the question of why it was ever used it in the first place. Was it because the method promised to provide a litmus test for the truth of rival belief systems or because it opened up the vision of complete knowledge and thus total control of nature or because it gave rise to outcomes which were profitable to their lives in some basic way or some combination of these reasons? Since the profit motive on its own is patently highly questionable philosophically, this leaves them having to work out what, in the absence of evidence for the superiority of the metaphysics of atomistic materialism, could be promoted as having a litmus test-like irrefutability or qualify as complete knowledge or total control. Moreover, if there is no necessary and selfevidently bottom layer to reality and no settled alternative set of metaphysical criteria to act in its place then the experimental method is effectively a machine with no inbuilt stop or halt mode which would allow us to step back from it to consider why or whether we should persist in using it further. Faced with such momentous methodological problems and the knowledge that solutions to them are going to have important consequences for the way we deal with our ecological and economic problems, there are strong reasons for a provisional moratorium on use of the method to allow all sides to get to grips with the issues involved. Ultimately, the would-be dialoguer with science needs to be aware that these problems exist and that they themselves may even, knowing about them, be an important neutral agent in getting the message across. Also, it should be clear that acknowledging and acting on the experimental method's philosophical downsides doesn't mean that scientists and analytical philosophers will be left with nothing to do. An immediate and pressing task for philosophers is, as we have already seen, the construction of a communication interface between scientists' private language of natural philosophy and their own philosophical fields, in tandem, of course, with that of the general culture of ordinary folk. This last requirement would also have the essential function of grounding the interface in the ultimate source of meaning which is the wider language pool of society as a whole what can't be made to make sense in its terms is effectively meaningless. This, after all, is the unavoidable consequence of the Quinean and Wittgensteinian view of the holistic nature of meaning. No better philosophical account of meaning has so far been made available to us. There will also be plenty for scientists to do. Once they have accepted their need to recognise their true calling as natural philosophers, academics and scholars, an immediately obvious empirical task will present itself, that of dealing with the data mountain that centuries of use of the experimental method have left to us. As in the long standing application of technology to agriculture, with its result of creating vast surpluses of grains, butter and other agricultural produce, the application of technology to the gathering of empirical knowledge has filled the libraries of our universities with treasure troves of unused data which doesn't quite fit within the metaphysics of atomistic materialism. Leaving these to rot unsorted would be criminal. An important task for scientists here would be for them to do an audit of this data with, at the very least, the aim of deciding whether, under some other metaphysical basis, we may have already

reached the point at which a satisfactory explanation of mind and the universe could be said to have been achieved. Whether or not this is the case, it will be worth the while of the would-be dialoguer with science to be aware that another of the dangers attached to the problems of not knowing when the machine of experiment has reached the halt position is the risk of overshoot. Perhaps, in other words, we already have enough data to provide a sturdy enough explanatory base for the solution of all the moral, political, economical and ecological problems we are currently facing. Let us now turn to the second of the two types of issue the communication interface is likely to have to handle, the separation of the religious from the secular. This is obviously a highly sensitive issue for the would-be dialoguer with science because being able to look at things from a non-religious viewpoint is one of the clear distinguishing marks the majority of scientists like to pride themselves on; in some cases, desire for the distinction becomes atheism and even outright anti-religiosity. The close similarity of this type of issue with the previous type is due to the relationship the two types share with belief in the ultimate superiority of the metaphysics of atomistic materialism and its underlying assumption that matter has no fundamental organising principle apart from pure chance acting on its basic constituents through a limited number of inanimate forces. The problem with this stance is that it's only one part of a story. 'Chance' by itself is literally meaningless. It's nothing more than an admission of dependence on pure contingency, effectively, dependence on a 'just-so' story. Without the specifics of a just-so story atomistic materialism is an incoherent list. Most scientists prefer to avoid discussion of the basic issues at stake here because they also aspire to an approach to thinking which conforms to the ideal of objectivity. Unfortunately they've so far been unable to pin down what precisely objectivity is because they still don't know enough about how the mind works to define it in practical terms and are thus obliged to be content with the notion that it must, at the very least, entail freedom from the influence of emotion, cultural bias and any other forms of thinking that risk a return to subjectivity,which appears less difficult to pin down, being, if nothing else, the main condition of their lives as non-scientists. However, even discussing what would contribute coherence to the atomistic materialist list of the constituents of matter runs this risk because it's too close to being a riddle and riddles always create contention. Without the hidden academic string-pulling of analytical philosophers to protect them from critics demanding the resolution of the incoherence involved here, such discussions would soon collapse into the kind of emotive factionalism that would be dangerously similar to that of religious sects. Hitherto, the role of philosophical positivism in protecting science from factionalism of this kind has been entirely obscured. Once it's acknowledged, it becomes easier to see that the reason the incoherence that would provoke it has gone so long unnoticed is that thinking about notions like basic elements, forces and chance was first undertaken by outstanding figures of pre-revolutionary, pre-modern science like Newton at a time when their meaning was safely couched in and supported by the religious framework of their day. The aim of such figures was not merely to welcome thinking of this kind but even more to celebrate it as an uplifting embellishment to their religious worldview which was otherwise likely to show increasing signs of obsolescence and decay. The issue that arises most prominently at this point then is the question as to what degree the organisation of science has escaped from the forms of social behaviour typical of thinking couched in this way and whether considering such matters may help to arrive at short cuts to the solution not simply of science's theoretical problems but, surely more significantly, the ecological and economic problems faced by all of us without whom this enterprise couldn't be sustained. Before arriving at any hard and fast judgements on the matter then, it's probably advisable to put it into an even wider and more paradigmatic context first. Clearly, the way we do science today isn't the only way it can be done. It has been done differently before and hopefully spotting appropriate modifications will make us happy to admit that it'll likely be done differently in the future. So, the conclusion that today's science retains many features of its past life as refurbishment of pre-modern

religion shouldn't be too hard to swallow especially as it helps to explain much that would otherwise be mysterious. Once this is swallowed and digested, it's also easier to accept the double bind religion holds science in. On the one hand, contemporary science is still using modes of thought originating in the pre-modern schismatic religious worldview of Europe. On the other, it's as much the product of modern positivist philosophy as it is of the work of the scientists living within the cultural cocoon this philosophy provides and a considerable degree of the comfort this affords is due to the strength of the positivist cocoon itself which we've seen emanates from the secular religion of France's revolution using the word 'secular' with something more like the original Roman Catholic usage of its original positivist baptism. Stretching it this way helps to acknowledge the role of the radical ambiguity of its association with the culturally dissipative force of the French revolution entailed here, given the need to pinpoint generational origins. One further preparatory move, then, illustrating the difficulties we are under in trying to separate the religious from the secular in science goes as follows. We need, that is, to have a stronger grasp of the degree of ambiguity hidden in our current use of the word 'secular' and one tentative and simple way of doing this is by considering the ease with which the list of family features of any enterprise embodying a positivist viewpoint shown a few pages back can be rewritten as a list of features of a religious cult. Each of the ten items is now bathed in a new light revealing: 1. humanity past, present and future as the source of all meaning as the All-meaningful or, effectively, the divine 2. metaphysics as the demonic temptation to sin 3. fundamentalist, self-evident empiricism as the gospel of redemption 4. scientists as priests, and doctors, or medical scientists, as confessors 5. the experimental method as sacrament and the paraphenalia of its products as icons 6. reason, logic and maths as liturgy 7. the material world as the only location for paradise 8. biological and historical evolution as the path to human perfection and salvation 9. freedom of speech, self-determination and health as the only virtues 10. analytical philosophers as publicly mute hermits whose task is to keep the path to redemption free from the accumulation of rubbish and litter left by those who pass along it. Let's now consider the ease with which the above transformation can be carried out and ask ourselves what is the real character of positivist science that enables it to slide so smoothly between the two lists and what drives it as such. Isn't it tempting, Your Holiness, to conclude that what drives today's science, in the absence of either a coherent metaphysical base equipped with a universally accepted just-so story or an effective method of establishing a belief system of this kind, is that it's a powerful cognitive engine for a home grown socially integrative cargo cult. We have, of course, already briefly considered the cargo cult phenomenon in passing but that was purely from the outside in, from the perspective of recipients of scientifically tempered technology living in less technology dependent societies. Let us now consider the phenomenon from the viewpoint of those living within the societies currently reponsible for its generative dimension. In order to do this, we'll first have to take a quick look at the anthropological specifics of cargo cults. Cargo cults were first noticed on a number of islands in the Pacific ocean towards the end of the first half of the last century just before the beginning of the second world war. The phenomenon increased just after the war ended, mainly on those islands which had been the scene of considerable military activities, with large scale troop movements and aircraft landing laden with supplies or parachuting them from the sky. Both sides of the conflict had done this and 'fraternised' with the locals, sharing their cargo, food and goods, with them and then when the conflict was over had suddenly disappeared. Mystified and reeling from withdrawal of the cargo which they had associated with the continuing power of their ancestor worship the locals set about a re-construction

of the technical and behavioural features of what they had seen in the hope of attracting the planes back. They cleared landing strips, constructed control towers, waiting aircraft, electronic equipment such as radio masts, sets, headphones and so on from bamboo and other local materials, dressed up as soldiers and paraded up and down. Most cults eventually evapourated when these strategies repeatedly failed, although some persisted for a considerable period with a single case making it through to the present day on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. According to anthropologists, these cults have three main religious features. The first is that it involves a polarised relationship between a donor culture and a recipient culture with individuals from the recipient viewing those of the donor as in some way supernatural or possessing powers that lie beyond their comprehension. The second feature is that this gap in the understanding of recipient individuals forces them to resort to mimicry of donor behaviour and institutions in the hope of accidentally lighting on the precise formula that causes the arrival of the cargo the donor seems to have such facility in acquiring. The third feature is belief of the recipients that the real source of the cargo is their own ancestors and that it is intended as reward for their persistence in tending their memory. A fourth essential feature which, however, is less clearly religious is that there should exist between donor and recipient a gap of some kind wide enough to make it impossible for recipient individuals to physically follow donor individuals to their home culture to discover how the goods involved were actually generated. The effect of this fourth feature is that recipients never get the opportunity to narrow the gap in understanding in a way that might secularise the process and free the recipients from the sense of inferiority continually being forced on them as a result of the inevitable failure of their necessarily one directional method of learning. Kept at a distance as a result, the cognitive gap is more likely to progressively widen and misunderstanding more likely to increase. The key factor in progressive reinforcement of the religious dimension of cult formation appears to be the residual role of the ancestor related ritual traditions existing prior to the arrival of the donor culture. The strength of this prior reliance increases the liklihood that failure to achieve the desired effect will be identified as being due to failure to carry out the proper rituals and thus lead to the belief that developing new rituals is the only way to go. This attitude may be further strengthened by hostility to outsiders who may be viewed as intent on depriving them of what is theirs by right together with a rejection of the outsiders' missionary projects. One possible effect is that the whole process goes into free-fall. We can now transport this specification over to the internal structure of my hypothetical donor society, namely, the industrial societies of the English speaking world, in order to assess the extent to which it matches the social relationships involved in the home grown cultivation that maintains the institutions of science. Let's try checking out what we find here to see if there's anything that resembles the four features described above. Feature number one, for instance, seems fairly straightforwardly confirmed; we have something very like a donor/recipient relationship between the community of scientists and pretty well everyone else and a strong feature of this relationship is that non-scientists stand in awe of the thinking power of scientists. This may well, in fact, be the chief reason it doesn't occur to people that there may be other ways of understanding the mind and the nature of thinking apart from being the source of this apparent ability of scientists to grapple with the guts of nature and manipulate it as if they were using a constructional plan to guide them. Looked at in terms such as these, solving the mind/body problem by means of the 'clever brain' concept seems to explain everything. Brains, in other words, contain 'intelligence', effectively a mystical third eye into the nature of things, and scientists, on this story, are exceptionally gifted in this way. The thought that they're in all other respects the same as the rest of us seems to emphasise the plausibility of its location in a separate organ specially designed to contain this still mysterious ability and the fact that scientists aren't making much headway in explaining what it is could easily be misconceived by outsiders to the

community of scientists as nothing more than a malign reluctance to share it with them. Feature number two, the conceptual gap keeping the recipient populace at a distance thus imposing a one-way learning process on any amongst them seeking to gain access to what was involved, seems also to hold out. A prominent historical indication of what's going on here lies in the way in which the philosophical nature of the type of thinking which actually drives genuine scientists eventually began to drop out of sight after their rebranding as 'scientists'. A nice irony emerges in this respect; the rebranding was originally motivated by a desire on the part of genuine natural philosophers to distance themselves from the more industrially minded of their readership who were more interested in applying their results for profit while still aspiring to be included in the same conceptual community, adding insult to injury by using the term 'natural philosophers' to promote themselves. By adopting the term 'science' for what they were doing the 'scientists' hoped to emphasise its abstractness and lack of relevance to daily life and concern with such things as potential cargo, by showing, in other words, that it was more akin to such disciplines as 'moral science'. This turned out, in the eyes of the 'scientists' at least, to be an effective strategy right up to the second world war and its aftermath when independent funds to support abstract research dried up and there appeared to be no option but to turn to profit making industrial organisations in search of them. This set the stage for the more recent massive blooming of confusion about the real nature of science and how it should be done. Clearly, the cargo driven researchers weren't drawn to experiment purely because they understood its potential for establishing the kind of knowledge on which a reliable story of the world and our lives in it could be based. Neither were they necessarily bad men because they sought the material fruits of the processes involved in experiment and were drawn more by their exchange value than by the moral implications of the reliable knowledge the real scientists were seeking. As far as they were concerned the nature of morality was already established and benefiting from the goods derived from discovering how God made the world was simply an unexpected divine blessing and cause for celebration, especially as it seemed so easy to copy the inquisitive behaviour of their more abstractly driven brethren, whose eccentricity would otherwise have been deemed a sign of mental weakness. Furthermore, this mimicry of scientific experimentalism wasn't restricted merely to industrialists. It proliferated as a new entrepreneurial spirit and invaded all sphere's of our lives including the arts; even the joy of story telling, with the first English language 'novel', Robinson Crusoe, celebrates the tap root of the new excitement and the ease with which an individual can survive alone on an island if only they have a cargo to live off. It's perhaps precisely because both donor and recipient groups occupy the same geographical territory that distinguishing features two, three and four of the scientific form of the cult is somewhat harder in its generational context than it is in the more geographically distinct locations. Indeed, what makes features two and three so much more perplexing to disentangle as seems to be indicated immediately above is the manner in which the fourth anthropological feature is achieved at such close quarters. It is, in fact, only recently that we have uncovered the historical details of what originally tightened this so mystifying knot that we can now begin to unravel it. It's only in the last decade or so, in other words, that we've come to appreciate the role of the Arabic speaking world in developing the basic religious institution required to create this effect in a single geographical zone, the university. It's these 'higher' academic structures we must thank for the strength of the exclusive and elitist cognitive boundaries essential to the maintenance of the perilous distance between donor and recipient populations that keeps them sufficiently separate for the cult consciousness not merely to survive but to flourish in the way it currently does. We haven't yet, however, fully savoured the irony that, while it was the urge for moral stability that curbed the growth of the original Arab instutions in their native context, it's the masking of morality in the spirit of risk essential to experimentalism which nurtured their flowering in northern lands.

Given the global political rewards this social evolution has conferred on us, it seems only natural for us to want to preserve the high status of academic science and the ethos of cognitive untouchability that goes with it and to feel little in the way of compulsion to question its philosophical basis. Yet the unquestionable consequence of this situation is that we have thereby arrived at an education system which is almost diametrically opposed to the spread of natural modes of learning amongst the population at large. On this view, the prospects of ever freeing cult recipients from the sense of inferiority continually being forced on them as a result of this one directional mode of learning are extremely dim. This is perhaps the single most unfortunate effect of our continuing to deny the persistent religious factor entailed in our current perception that our culture and its civilisation can't survive without being at the centre of cargo generation. It brings us, in other words, Your Holiness, to the core of the confusion complicating the problems that are likely to beset anyone hoping to open a dialogue with science. Ignorance of the revolutionary positivism embedded in the true provenance of analytical philosophy is a massive obstacle obscuring our awareness of its failure hitherto to provide a publicly accessible communicatory interface capable of handling the issues involved in separating the metaphysical from the empirical and the religious from the secular in science. We need this interface because without it there is no way of modifying who, what and how we teach at the upper levels of our academic institutions. As a result, the educational environment which should provide the context for dialogue lacks both the mechanisms essential to facilitating the regular encounters on which it would be based and the channels required to disseminate their results to the wider public. A further complication lies in the consequence that the inequities of the status systems rooted in the obscure cognitive infrastructure described above make it unlikely that dialogue will produce a quick and ready formed solution to rectifying the situation. A paradigm shift encompassing both current scientific and philosophical communities would clearly help to change the situation but this too is unlikely as long as it remains unclear how we are to assess what their current key common commitment, the experimental method, entails. Ultimately, the hidden snare we appear to be caught in here is the way the whole edifice of social relationships making up our science driven society harbours a hidden engine whose throb has an unstoppable momentum of its own due to the fact that awareness of this one particular issue is persistently overridden by the failure of almost all involved to perceive, investigate and assess the true value of its source, the alleged benefits of its unseen residual religious component, the global cargo cult. A serendipitously pertinent illustration of the treacherousness of the ground that will have to be covered if we're ever to release ourselves from this snare can be found in the convoluted complexity of the insights and meditations revealed in the address of the renowned Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist Richard Feynman on the occasion of the inauguration of the research institution known as Caltech in 1974, provocatively titled Cargo Cult Science. The verbatim copy of this talk effectively represents a snap-shot of a man caught and floored in the head-lock of his own thinking processes. Feynman plainly comes to the podium with the intention of throwing a defining light on what distinguishes 'real' science from mere posturing or mimicry of its outward manifestations, of which he admits he sees a good deal around him. He begins light-heartedly but has clearly been troubled by this problem for some time and spent considerable energy on grappling with it to get the measure of what might constitute a solution. The dire off the cuff warning he gives on finishing the talk strikingly signals his sense that he had, on that occasion at least, failed to achieve this aim. He's keenly aware from the start that he has to talk about the issue in a way that is inevitably going to strike not a few members of his audience as a personal attack on themselves. He wants to avoid strong initial negative reactions of this kind so he begins with examples of kooky activities on the fringes of science, UFO's astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. He spends some time humourously playing with such topics

to build up a relaxed atmosphere of group accord before turning to his keynote theme and a description of the anthropological details of the cults and the imitative behaviour they involve. Then, after introducing a first note of the seriousness and momentous scale of the problem it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system he gets down to business and begins his treatment of the one feature I notice that is missing in Cargo Cult Science. He pulls things together at this point by bringing out the key insight of his previous lengthy meditations on the problem, its having to do with something outside science's 'event horizon', stuck deep somewhere in its hidden philosophical foundation layer. It doesn't help that he's aware he has also to show how it's ingrained in the whole education system from bottom up that no one is clear precisely what's involved. It's the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science at school we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. As he says later, We just hope you've caught on by osmosis. Even at this point of high clarity, however, he has already put his foot on the crucial banana skin, his own grasp of what he has to do here, It's interesting, therefore he begins dithering, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty a kind of leaning over backwards. He's on the skids here heading back through the morass of his immediate predicament, as a speaker addressing an expert audience, to the unmarked exit leading to the ethical division of the philosophy department where such moral principles belong. Far from speaking explicitly, in other words, he has been thrust back into dependency on metaphor and allusion. He quickly recovers his poise, however, and is immediately back on track he knows the core problem is the background of theory and motivating intentions behind the decision to experiment and the interpretations that can be drawn from them and from its results. His mind is now back in its element and doing what it likes to do best. He's duly empowered again because he's sure he has within easy reach what will make the defined and explicit impact on those listening to imprint on them precisely what he wants to say, something he has worked on from his earliest years as a convinced scientist, the procedural obligations that will confer the mantle of professional integrity on the creative, moral and aesthetic output of the aspiring experimenter. Even here, however, he is still plagued by the ambiguities infesting the relationship between interpretation, inspiration or theory and experiment, experience or community reception and is obliged to make several passes over the same ground under the pressure of his urge to get it right. What these passes add up to, basically, is that aspiring experimenters must have the mental clarity to maintain a degree of oversight of their projects which ensures they don't entail anything that might confuse, cause doubt about, reveal ambiguity in or otherwise invalidate the definite novelty, or novel definition, they contribute to our best current perceptions of the world we live in, including any form of circular thinking or the possibility of alternative explanations. In the course of drawing out these requirements it clearly dawns on Feynman that he has strayed into the unwelcoming zones of the philosophy of science or worse, pure epistemology. He starts to add a series of footnotes he hopes will reconnect what he's saying to the less hostile world of the laboratory itself, finally resorting to home spun philosophical nostrums about the nature of the particupar type of honesty he wants to spotlight, We've learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. Here, finally, he has found himself in the thick of Quinean relativity and he has nowhere else to go. Apart, that is, from falling back on further wanderings in the realm of folk wisdom. He knows he's got to dig deeper and finger examples many of his audience will credit as having been or seemed like real science. He gives examples of instances where scientists have been lead astray by the

mistaken belief that results that have already passed muster in the science community can be safely left with no necessity for further review. He has, however, already shot his bolt on the specifics of good and bad science and can only point to the role of denial and self-deception in allowing such things to happen but adds reassuringly that now we don't have that kind of a disease. He knows he shouldn't let this pass with so little in the way of analysis so he pastes on a Wittgensteinian postscript that could apply to any discipline that has lumbered itself with a private language, This long history of learning not to fool ourselves or having utter scientific integrity is, I'm sorry to say something we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. From this point on he is basically giving more examples of the type of poor science that other scientists have failed to reject but that he feels deserve to be labelled as cargo cult science. Many of these are products of mind related sciences but he admits wrily that Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. He then gives examples of the way that non-scientific objectives like lack of funds, tight program schedules or the need for new results for public relations purposes can affect experimenters' use of expensive particle accelerators. Then it's back to the field of psychology for a couple of meandering tales till he suddenly realises he has run out of time and should end with some valedictory remarks wishing his listeners will find somewhere you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organisation, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. Then finally comes the admission of failure, May I also give you one last bit of advice: Never say that you'll give a talk unless you know clearly what you're going to talk about and more or less what you're going to say. So, Your Holiness, it also behoves me now to take my sense of empathy with Feynman, in his still point of humility as he stood effectively facing the community of all those driven by the desire to find a channel through to the pulsing heart of what drives us to seek irrefutable knowledge, and to similarly bring my own meanderings to some kind of conclusion. I too have been crazy enough to think I could make, somewhere along the path they would take, a clear and distinct contribution to your quest to open up diaologue with science. I too am now not so sure I've succeeded. If I were forced to pick out a candidate for this role amongst the array of topics I have covered, it would have to be the way the alternative brain theory I 'saw' in your Stanford address spotlights a haziness that could turn out to be a worrying problem in the philosophical justification of the methodological use of experiment as the single most clearly identifying feature of science. It already worries me because if this problem turns out to be in some way intractable then we are in a moral morass with all systems on 'automatic pilot' and we have a desparate need to get our hands back on the manual controls, wherever they are. If the experimental method is incapable of doing what it's claimed it can do, that is, to lead us to some one of Nature's phenomena that finally agrees with one particular view of the world we live in and no other, then it's out of control and what's guiding it is something else, something mysterious in the same way religion is ultimately mysterious. If we can't confront the mystery it seems unlikely we'll ever escape the morass. Chosing a global cargo cult as the underlying mystery has maybe muddied the waters somewhat in this regard. It certainly has a strong consequence of leading us away from any definiteness the worry about the validity of the methodological use of experiment may possess into a much more conjectural zone of thought. It's clearly highly arguable as a thesis. This, however, seems OK. So long as it figures as a relevant topic capable of opening discussion on where the experimental method problem leaves us it will have performed a useful service. It seems to have a lot going for it in that respect. One could follow it up, for instance, by considering how the phenomenon could provide a historical link back to the series of cargo cults that take us from pre-modern Europe all the way through to those of the ancient Mediterranean or outwards in the contemporary scene to the

great nations of the Far East and elsewhere who have managed to cross-fertilise it with their own which never required the kind of philosophical engine like the one I claim drives ours. It also has a kind of folksy allure that resonates nicely with tales of magic such as we regale our kids with today like the story of The Magic Porridge Pot. This goes back to around the end of the medieval period when Europe was struck by a series of desperate famines. People were driven to eating things they wouldn't normally have considered edible like delirium producing mouldy bread or a diet of nothing but porridge oats. In the story a mother leaves her only daughter home alone while she goes off in search of food. Her daughter goes out into the road outside their house and finds an old woman there for whom she does some act of kindness which the old woman repays by handing her a battered and not very proper looking cooking pot which she accepts with some grace being an exceptionally good-hearted type of girl. The old woman then explains this is a magic pot and all she has to do is say the magic words, something like, Cook, little pot, cook!, and it will get to work and produce as much porridge as she wants. When she's had enough all she has to do is utter the words that bring it to a halt, I don't unfortunately recall what they were. When her mother gets back empty handed, the girl is able to quickly restore her spirits with bowlfuls of delicious fresh porridge. Cutting the longer version of the story short, the upshot is that one day the girl goes off to play with her friends leaving her mother alone with the pot. She remembers the words her daughter used to get the pot cooking so when she feels a little peckish she decides to try them herself but when she's had her fill she too can't remember what you have to say to stop it. The porridge starts pouring out onto the floor, then out of the doors and into the garden. The pot keeps on spilling out porridge until it's running down the hillside on which they live threatening to drown the whole village in hot oats. Eventually, the glutinous tide reaches where the daughter is playing and, realising what has happened, she manages to get back to their hovel and utter the words needed to stop the disaster from engulfing the whole world. The Cargo Cult of Science is strangely similar a magic pot no one can switch off. I now need to show this isn't also true of this letter and so must hurry on to my finalising words. I must also, however, fulfill the promise I made to you earlier on in this letter that my story would throw up a couple of bizarre ironies or so. I think I've already paved the way in pointing out several lesser ones. I could give you others such as the unfortunate wrong turn modern positivism took at the start of the story in its current prospectus. Instead of picking up the more naturalistic version developed by Mill, they preferred to base their thinking on the residue of Hegelianism they had unwittingly preserved in their grand historical view of the powerful destiny of human thought implicit in the inspiration behind the logicist project. The irony in this, however, is nowhere near as bizarre as the upshot we're left with here, namely, that experimental science, far from being the paradigm of secularity that scientists and their analytical philosophy support team think it is, is itself in desperate need of a large dose of secularisation if it is ever to get to grips with the problem of overshoot. Science needs, in other words, to be much more awake to the ecological spirit of the age. Only a remedy such as this can, it seems, bring our society back from its grandiose visions of human nature and its paramount destiny to strike out beyond our birth place in this world and spread us and our cargo into the far reaches of the universe and even, maybe, beyond via some as yet undiscovered capillary into the endless potential of the multiverse, thus achieving something as close to immortality as it's possible to get. There's some kind of atavistic denial involved here that makes us ignore what is effectively a highly significant explanation of our current predicament, one that could if acted on end up resolving many of the problems our overblown self-image has got us into. This is, Your Holiness, the kind of message you seemed to be getting across in your Stanford address, that we are essentially mammals and all our powers are constrained by this fact. Somewhere along the line in our evolutionary past we were pushed out of the shrinking world of

forest apes and became lost and confused about our place in nature, perhaps as a result of an interlude as marine mammals which saved us from extinction but also deprived us of the terrestrial mammal's coat of hair and its traditional oral mode of immunological care and socialising, details of which will be included when we go further into the aquatic ape theory. Since then we have become somewhat unclear about how to stay healthy and maintain harmonious relationships in our social lives. There's still time, in other words, to sort out the mess we have got ourselves into as a result. We need, it seems, to make less demands on our minds in order to see this. One other thing before I finish. There's a simple question I so far haven't asked why are analytical philosophers so desperate to evade their true provenance and keep both it and themselves out of sight as if they're afraid that losing their concealed role as pupeteers of the current ideal self-image will inevitably plunge us into chaos and darkness? What is so reprehensible about acknowledging an origin in the French Revolution? Isn't it really a worthy origin to profess, at one and the same time both intensely human and heroic to pull so much that is positive from so great a disaster? Can it really be their aversion to the post-modernism and its subsequent avatars that have ruled the cultural roost in Europe for so long? Why can't they cancel out this xenophobia with recognition of the growing ecological sensitivity to the benefits of diversity? Or is it simply that their idealised vision of what it is to be human makes them shudder at the thought that we are no more than the animals we so closely resemble because they persist in reading into the story of what it is to be an animal so many of the dysfunctional characteristics displayed by the secular mass of folk that are actually purely the result of the inequities under which so many of them are obliged to live? One thing is certain here and that is that they will always have difficulty finding credible answers to such questions as long as they fail to see their own need to develop their powers of communicating in the vulgate. We desperately need that interface and they are the only ones who can build it. Now more than ever we need them to throw off their self-inflicted seclusion and take responsibility for experimental science's vulnerable philosophical underbelly. It needs air. Without the oxygen of public debate it will continue to fester and nurture monstrosities. We all need to come back down to earth in some such way and recognise the need to simplify the terms in which we speak. We need to pull away the magic carpet our fractured private languages provide for all kinds of extremism and fundamentalism including fundamentalist empiricism. We need to find the words that will draw out and emphasise the consequences of refusing to see that empiricism only works, as it can work, when it resolutely straddles the divide between metaphysics and the theory of knowledge, epistemology, psychology or whatever name you choose for the study of the way our minds work. Empiricism will only begin to generate solutions to our problems when it balances both these fields of investigation and inquiry into our as yet publicly undefined nature. It can only do this when we are ready to recognise the two main limits on science, the everchanging complexity of the world we live in and the situatedness of our understanding of it in the mammal nature of our place in the ecosphere. At the very least, they should begin to refurbish the reputations of thinkers like Quine and Wittgenstein for whom such concerns were paramount. These should be freed from their current minor status as lone outriders or mavericks so they can take their place in the pantheon of philosophical greats alongside Mill, Russell and Moore, where they belong. Finally, Your Holiness, I would like to stress the importance of your own contribution here. Without the efforts of unbiased, inspired and insightful minds such as yours, the legions of others like myself who would dearly love to see dialogue opened between scientists and non-scientists so that credible advances can be made in dealing with the host of problems and impending crises that currently beset our species will be forever caught in the maze of social and academic restrictive practices which currently frustrate and elude us. Please persist and don't let up. We all need what you are doing.