Thinking about *how* to think about demons

(Without getting all magical about it)

This picture isn’t relevant, I just like it

I'm delighted to share a chat with one of my favourite writers here, publisher of Flat Caps and Fatalism.

It results from an essay of theirs that inspired me not to abandon some notions I was struggling to grasp sufficiently to articulate. This was the piece. Probably best to read it first.

Demons

It served to legitimise some intuitions I'd wrestled with about some possible qualities of ideas that can appear to be separate from the thinkers of the ideas. But I wanted to think about it less magically because magical thinking too often seems lazy and childish. FCF unlocked a way of thinking about this that's less fairies at the bottom of the garden and more ah, here's how we can think about concepts that occupy a separate realm to the material without resorting to woo woo.

This exchange does not answer the question 'are there really demons abroad ' (it isn't meant to) but, I think, does answer the question of how to consider that question.¹

MH:

Hello FC&F,

It was your piece arguing that demonology is a 'necessary mode of social explanation' that made a vague notion I'd been pondering (unsuccessfully) begin to gel a bit.

Beginning with a sense that we are kind of captured by ideas - ideas have us rather than vice versa - I was already warm to the concept of ideological embodiment, but struggling with the woo woo side of it.

You're obviously conscious of that because you acknowledge that it can be mistaken for ignorance or superstition. The potential social penalty of thinking outside the box of rules, eh.

Anyway, I had an idea around this that I'd like to explore by getting your perspective.

Here's how I'm conceptualising demons. As emergent properties of memetic interaction. As real as, say, consciousness - and equally hard to pin down.

Long ago the dissertation for my Philosophy degree concluded that some kind of Cartesian dualism seemed inescapable because materialist accounts of consciousness always end up skipping over some essential components. Much as I wished otherwise, as a good rationalist member of the educated western liberal class and a onetime pugnacious atheist to boot.

This isn't to start a conversation about what consciousness is. The point is that consciousness - or the sentient self-referential 'I' - provides a prior example of a 'thing' that exists which you couldn't point at in a laboratory. You can only ever point at signs of it, but not the thing itself. Eg it doesn't matter how much you poke around in my brain with instruments, you still aren't going to surface in a reproducible way what I'm constructing from sense data. As far as I'm aware this is still considered to be the Hard Problem for a reason.

So there's that way of imagining that demons exist in a real way, not just as a symbolic illustrator of something else. 

Then there's the issue of talking about demons using a language model that just isn't designed to accommodate such things. As I replied to a commenter on my piece; these areas of thought are disadvantaged in our current language model, which we think is adequate to express everything - which means that anything that can't be expressed in the same ways as other material concepts must be some kind of new age bollocks.

What do you think? 

FCF:

Hi Mike and thanks for the invitation to chat,

Your question is very much about the philosophy of demons, so I think I should start by saying that I don’t think philosophical analysis is a major reasons why the idea of demons is beyond the pale in the modern West. That has more to do with fashion and scientism than with people actually reflecting on what can be a meaningful agent.

Of course, it is also in the interests of demons that people don’t believe that they exist; so it is natural to suspect that if they do exist, then widespread disbelief in them is due to their own activities.

The philosophical questions are interesting, though! I’ll try to base my answer on relatively low-level principles.

1.       Materialism has not disproven the existence of agents. Materialist lines of investigation, for instance chemistry, exclude agency by fiat at the outset. Doing so has been productive within certain fields, but that tells us nothing more that agency probably isn’t very important at the scale those fields look at. There is a reason why physics gave us the rocket ship and psychology gave us the replication crisis.

2.       Thinking in terms of agents who act for reasons cannot be avoided by human beings. A line from Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion applies here: ‘Whether your scepticism be as absolute and sincere as you pretend, we shall learn by and by, when the company breaks up: We shall then see, whether you go out at the door or the window; and whether you really doubt, if your body has gravity, or can be injured by its fall’. Even if a convincing philosophical proof that all agency is illusory existed, which it doesn’t, humans, in virtue of the kind of creatures that we are, would still largely think in terms of agency. That is to say, even if it were true that there is no such thing as agency, then that truth would have no bite. We would be doomed to error by our biology, and there would be no point in worrying about it.

3.       Historically, who gets attributed agency has been flexible. In Beowulf, even allowing for the poet’s nostalgia for a pre-Christian past, it is clear that swords were considered to be agents in their own right. It is also clear that listeners were expected to follow the ‘life’ of a notable sword with the same interest and engagement that they would follow the life of a human, something that makes some passages seem weird to moderns. Similarly, whether or not particular animals get counted as agents has varied from time to time and place to place.

4.       The ‘official line’ on agency that restricts it to humans or to us and a few other mammals is weird, wrong, and not genuinely held by anyone. No-one hangs around with dog and doesn’t treat it as acting for reasons. Sit in the sun, as I did recently, and watch grasshoppers courting. It would take a perverse mind to think that they are not acting for reasons. They may or may not be ‘reflecting’ on those reasons; but the idea that only reflective actions count is only so prominent in the literature because that literature is written by philosophers, who reflect lots and do very little. Conscious reflection is irrelevant to the question of agency.

5.       Even with ‘inanimate’ objects, the average modern ascribes agency far more widely than the official line allows. Your computer crashes because it is an awkward bastard, you pat your old car after and mutter ‘well done’ after a long journey, you whisper ‘come on’ to the dice before rolling. These are not ‘metaphorical’ ascriptions of agency. They are instinctive. The ‘metaphor’ excuse is a way of covering up the simple fact that none of us really believes the official line anyway. Not in our bones.

6.       Given that the official line about what counts as an agent is unmoored from any convincing philosophy, historically weird, and doesn’t reflect even modern practices, it can be discarded.

7.       The test for whether something should be considered an agent should be, very roughly, as follows: (1) is it meaningfully distinct from its environment? (2) can it be meaningfully and usefully described as acting for reasons? If the answer to both questions is yes, then there is a prima facie reason to treat it as an agent.

8.       Humans are very social creatures. Moods and ideas spread between us very quickly. Some of these fast-spreading intra-personal factors have structures that distinguish them from the environment and can be usefully described in agential terms. For example, competitive consumption can be a demon in these terms. It spreads between people: Bob’s new Audi inspires Jim to desire the even fancier BMW and so on. It can also be useful to talk about this sort of consumption as a particular demon of greed. Doing so draws attention to the way Bob’s greed and Jim's greed work together for the same purpose that is not Jim’s or Bob’s. The demon of consumption wants to  spread itself further by inspiring fresh consumption at every twist. As an aside, notice that ascribing existence and purpose to the demon allows empirical predictions to be made about the behaviour of those who come into its orbit.

MH:

I'm fully in when it comes to your point that we don't necessarily regard objects that don't go around saying things or emoting as metaphorically agential. I talk to jet airliners when I'm on them, not because I think they're alive and conscious in the conventional sense but because I notice a quality to their being, when they're screaming and clunking and seeming (to me) to be kind of luxuriating in the harder bits of flying before you top out and point toward the place you're going.

I'm unconvinced that it's just good engineering manifesting as the sum of its parts (although it obviously is that, because clever people engineered it to behave that way) but I still feel awkward about expressing an idea that the plane enjoys and wants to do what it's doing. But then, I also feel awkward about saying that there's a particular corner of my meadow where something is that I can't name but only sense. Not something nice, bad, friendly, malevolent or any of the frivolous and anthropomorphic notions we have about 'ghosts' but just something other that isn't me or the various mammals, birds, insects and such that potter around there.

Am I reading you right when I notice that you aren't wrapping sentience in with agency and that you're being quite deliberate about that? It seems to me an important and helpful distinction.

I know I've conflated objects like aircraft with notions like a greed demon here, but I'm still getting my bearings.

One way I'm thinking about it is that human minds 'leak' into the things they create (like swords or Airbuses) and that leakage becomes part of the thing. I can't stop thinking of social media in this way now. A screaming bedlam that exists quite separately from its participants and which may well be not under their control.

FCF

You’re right that I am deliberately refusing to treat sentience and agency as any kind of package deal. I think that bundling them together has caused nothing but confusion in modern philosophy: not just in the more obvious places, but in ethical and political theory too.

I’ll try to lay out where I stand on that fairly clearly as I left all this implicit in the original article.

1.       I don’t think that the fact something is conscious necessarily implies that they are an agent,

2.       I don’t think that the fact something is an agent necessarily implies that they are conscious.

3.       I don’t think the fact that something isn’t conscious necessarily implies that they aren’t an agent.

4.       I don’t think that the fact something isn’t an agent necessarily implies that they aren’t conscious.

I can’t claim any great originality here. I got the underlying thought from my understanding of part of Anscombe’s Intention. There’s a bit where she’s talking about Aristotle’s account of practical reasons and she says if it ‘were supposed to describe actual mental processes, it would in general be quite absurd. The interest of the account is that it describes an order which is there whenever actions are done with intentions’ (my emphasis).

That order is the one that emerges through successive applications of the ‘Why?’ question. For example ‘Why did you leave the house?’ – ‘To go to the shop’ – ‘Why?’ – ‘To buy some bread’ – ‘Why?’ – ‘To make toast’ – and so on. At no point while I am actually performing these actions is it necessary for me to be conscious of this formal order. If, for instance, going to the shop to buy bread for toast is my morning routine, then I probably won’t be. In other words, agency is formal property of a certain structured mode of talking. It is not an empirical hypothesis about minds.

I should point out I haven’t read Intention in years, Anscombe was a better thinker on her worst day than I am on my best, and that I am pretty sure she only discusses human and animal intentions in the book, and the latter only in passing. All the same, I think if you accept that agency is a feature of a mode of description and not an empirical psychological hypothesis, then it changes more or less everything.

I don’t think it leads to ‘anything goes’, though. You can see whether the mode of practical reasoning works or not by testing it: by asking a particular form of the ‘why?’ question. For instance, imagine a pebble on the beach – ‘why is that pebble sitting there?’ You can answer in terms of tidal currents and erosion and so on – I know nothing about pebble physics – but that isn’t ascribing agency to the pebble. Although the question uses the word ‘why’, you are answering in a different mode. This is why Anscombe talks about the particular sense of the question: one that asks for reasons, not causes. If you ask the agential ‘why?’ of a pebble, then because there is no further chain of comprehensible reasons, you just get an answer along the lines of ‘well, it just is’. It’s not an agent. A tree is entirely different. ‘Why is it sending its taproot so deep?’ – ‘To find water’ – ‘Why?’ – ‘To hydrate its cells’ – ‘Why?’ – ‘So that it can continue to live’ – ‘Why?’ – ‘So that it can grow’ – and so on. Anscombe’s distinction makes biological teleology less mysterious.

I think your plane example is a good one for a general class of things humans make. Complex reasons and purposes are tied up not just in the plane itself, but in every tiny component, and the complicated reasons of all those components interact in complicated ways. A plane is a lot more like the tree than it is like a pebble. You’re right that this isn’t just good engineering. It’s engineering that allows machinery to transcend mere causation and become something that is also experienced as part of the realm of reasons.

I think the same might be true of some social organisations. A professional football team might be a good example: one midfielder is running forward so that, if the striker has managed to pull an opposing defender into the wrong place, a second midfielder might be able to thread a pass through to them, and so on. All eleven players have a living structure or reasons that moves across and between them without belonging to anyone.

Both machines and teams, and perhaps some demons, are probably examples of what you call human minds leaking into things. I would probably prefer ‘reasons’ to ‘minds’, but I think your diagnosis stands. I suspect, though, that there are other classes of agents: that there are other ways in which interlocking chains of reason have formed something that has, for want of a better word, ‘beinghood’. To return to the biological, probably it makes sense to talk about a forest in these terms. The way material and information is passed between trees through mycelial networks means that they behave in co-ordinated ways like footballers, yet a forest is neither a single organism necessarily human-made.

You talk about sensing something in the corner of the meadow. Possibly your human brain, tuned by nature to the order of reasons, can sense some network of them there, tight enough that it feels like there’s an agent. Now, maybe that’s just a misfire. Brains misfire all the time. But possibly, too, you are spotting a collection of reasons just alien enough that you can see that there is a structure but not really its details or the reasons themselves. That would feel other, as you say.

There is no reason to think tight clusters of reasons – agents – will only form where our fairly limited understanding of the world would expect them to. Maybe the forest is an agent; but maybe, too, this meadow and this corner of the forest, and this bird’s nest a mile away (where rooks that land in the meadow every day nest) forms one strange agent in ways we cannot really grasp. We might be unwittingly surrounded by alien agents that we seldom are attentive enough to notice.

---

So that was the chat and thank you to FCF for helping. Anyone with an interest in exploring things that fell out of fashion in the mainstream as we (basically, I think) lost religion and connection with ourselves should sign up to read Flat Caps & Fatalism. You'll find good stuff too among the interactions there, including other writers to follow, so go there.

The reason I think this conversation represents a worthwhile area of exploration, by the way, is the number of intelligent and reasonable people who seem to me not to be entirely in control of the bile, fear, righteous certitude and other passions driving them. What we know about cognitive rigidity doesn’t seem sufficient to explain it, to me. I wonder if social media hasn't just connected users’ minds but has resulted in a kind of distributed consciousness that seems to insert itself agentially beyond the little screens where we feed from or into the zeitgeist. A demon (or egregore) if you will.

---

Loose ends

Covidian Æsthetics has done it again,² with an observation for our times.

love has been commoditised, steered into allyships and tamed into triumphal parades of conformist acceptance. The orgiastic is declawed, and the willingness to “retvrn” amongst our youngest —whom should also be our most transgressive— belies a deep need for certainties and safeties that cannot be had, but which concentrate enormous wellsprings of desire

That’s the money shot for me in a wonderful piece, Tantrism with Brinksmanlike Characteristics. It's one of my favourites from whoever they are.

Why that quote resonates so much is because I'm churning over two ideas it mentions that help to explain almost everything that's ridiculous at this point; everything is mimetic and modernity is built on simulacra.

Rules of belonging seem much more important than acting in relation to the truth or reality of things.

As Bryan Caplan says in this piece "when the truth sounds bad, people lie" and it seems to me that this is at least partly because approval is more important than reality.

It's also from where annoying pat phrases like 'read the room' emerge. Someone makes a 'problematic' observation or questions a popular dogma held by the in-group and this phrase serves as a reminder. To belong, you need to be like us.

I read Carlo Rovelli's 'Helgoland' last year, a supposedly accessible introduction to quantum theory. As well as finding out about superposition and entanglement I also learned that Marx's materialist dialectic is wrong and that postmodern ideas, such as sex not being diamorphic, are right. Even physics turns out to be culturally groupish at the elite level. Still, it's good to know that Carlo's theoretical knowledge of fundamental level energy and matter makes him definitely not a TERF.

The other thought is that 'progress' as a process seems to involve creating simulacra of things that don't really cut it but seem real enough on the surface for us to latch on to them somewhat enthusiastically. 

The Culture Wars are a simulacrum of an actual civil war. The tomatoes I buy in the supermarket are simulacra of the tomatoes everyone around my age remembers from childhood. The love professed by social justice activists is a simulacrum of actual love. Netflix 'parties'. Zoom 'drinks'. I can't wait for that delicious lab-grown steak or living as a bona fide simulacrum in the world of Meta.

No. I wouldn't prefer to be living 300 years ago, or at any previous point. But let's not pretend that every new version of something is any good when so many are self-evidently not.

---

Some pleasing feedback from a reader who took this piece to heart…

So made some changes… in no particular order… quitting LinkedIn… disconnected from some ‘annoying’ connections on Facebook and Twitter…on Twitter in particular disconnected from all political links…setting myself a new mantra for social media, only post for 3 reasons - Motorhead, running or beer… bought a stack of books…removed the Guardian app from my phone…going to do more running…all this thanks to your article.

---

Thanks for reading - and thank you to the surprisingly consistent stream of daily new sign-ups over recent weeks. I'm off to quiz the elves in the meadow about why that’s happening ...

---

1. If you noticed typos on both sides that’s because I left them all in. Eg I say ‘memetic’ when I mean ‘mimetic’.

2. The last time was here