Colin McGinn is a well-known philosopher of mind who has written a short piece on the “history of knowledge” on his personal website. He takes an evolutionary view of the topic, which is what he means by “history”. But I found the piece, despite McGinn’s reputation and his authorship of nearly 30 books (many of them on consciousness), confusing and probably misleading. You can read it yourself by clicking on the link below
No doubt McGinn will take issue with my criticisms, for I am but a poor evolutionary biologist trying to understand this the best way I can. However, I do know some biology. I will put what I see as McGinn’s two main misconceptions under my own bold headings, with McGinn’s quotes indented and my own comments flush left.
McGinn conflates “knowledge” with “consciousness”. In general, knowledge, which most people define as “justified true belief” is acquired, and does not evolve. Since it involves belief, it does require a mind that is conscious. (I’ll take consciousness as McGinn does. meaning “having subjective awareness” or “being able to experience qualia: sense perceptions like the feeling of pain and pleasure, the apprehension of color and touch, and so on”.)
The problem is that what evolves is consciousness, not “knowledge”. We do not know whether consciousness is a direct, adaptive product of natural selection, or is a byproduct of evolution, but it is certainly a result of our neuronal wiring. I’ll leave aside the problem of which animals are conscious. Based on parallel behavior, I think that many vertebrates and all mammals are conscious, but of course I can’t even say if other people are conscious. (Remember Thomas Nagel’s famous article, “What is it like to be a bat?” We don’t know.) So consciousness has evolved, perhaps via selection, and it’s likely that the consciousness of many vertebrates had a common evolutionary origin based on neuronal wiring, though again it may have evolved independently in different lineages.
But regardless of these unknowns, since “knowledge” is largely acquired rather than inherited (remember its definition), it’s difficult to see how knowledge can evolve genetically, rather than being learned or passed on culturally. Monkeys and apes peel bananas differently from how we do it: starting from the flower (bottom) end rather than the stem end (try it–it’s easier), but surely that knowledge is not evolved. Anything acquired through experience is not knowledge bequeathed by evolution, even though the capacity to acquire certain knowledge (like learning language) can be evolved.
Now in some cases “knowledge” seemingly can be inherited, so the conflation is not total. Male birds of paradise, for example, “know” how to do specific displays to lure females of their species, and that is an instinct (does that count as “knowledge”?) which is inborn, not learned. But different birds of paradise have different displays or songs, and those displays surely evolved independently based on evolved differences in female preferences. We cannot say with any assurance that the genes or neuronal wiring for one species evolved from homologous genes and wiring in another species. Is one songbird’s knowledge of how to find edible berries evolutionarily related to another the ability of another species of songbird to find food? Both may be learned or both may be evolved, but there’s no reason to think that “knowledge” of different species forms an evolutionary tree the way that their genes do.
You can see this conflation in McGinn’s opening paragraph, which assumes that there was a primordial “knowledge” that gave rise to descendant knowledge:
This is a big subject—a long story—but I will keep it short, brevity being the soul of wisdom. We all know those books about the history of this or that area of human knowledge: physics, astronomy, mathematics, psychology (not so much biology). They are quite engaging, partly because they show the progress of knowledge—obstacles overcome, discoveries made. But they only cover the most recent chapters of the whole history of knowledge—human recorded history. Before that, there stretches a vast history of knowledge, human and animal. Knowledge has evolved over eons, from the primitive to the sophisticated. It would be nice to have a story of the origins and phases of knowledge, analogous to the evolutionary history of other animal traits: when it first appeared and to whom, how it evolved over time, what the mechanisms were, what its phenotypes are. It would be good to have an evolutionary epistemic science. This would be like cognitive science—a mixture of psychology, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the various branches of knowledge. It need not focus on human knowledge but could take in the knowledge possessed by other species; there could be an epistemic science of the squirrel, for example. One of the tasks of this nascent science would be the ordering of the various types of knowledge in time—what preceded what. In particular, what was the nature of the very first form of knowledge—the most primitive type of knowledge. For that is likely to shape all later elaborations. We will approach these questions in a Darwinian spirit, regarding animal knowledge as a biological adaptation descended from earlier adaptations. As species and traits of species evolve from earlier species and traits, so knowledge evolves from earlier knowledge, forming a more or less smooth progression (no saltation). Yet we must respect differences—the classic problem of all evolutionary science. We can’t suppose that all knowledge was created simultaneously, or that each type of knowledge arose independently. And we must be prepared to accept that the origins of later knowledge lie in humble beginnings quite far removed from their eventual forms (like bacteria and butterflies). The following question therefore assumes fundamental importance: what was the first type of knowledge to exist on planet Earth?
Note that he implicitly envisages an evolutionary tree of knowledge. It would be clearer if he used “consciousness” for “knowledge”, and defined both of them, which he doesn’t. But even if you think that, well, McGinn may be onto something here, that “something” comes crashing down when he starts talking about what “knowledge” was the ancestral knowledge. This brings us to the second problem:
McGinn is dead certain that the first “knowledge” that evolved, by which he really means the first quale, or subjective sensation, is the experience of pain. There is no evidence , or even a convincing scenario, for this proposition. Here’s where he proposes this, and not with much doubt, either:
I believe that pain was the first form of consciousness to exist.[1] I won’t repeat my reasons for saying this; I take it that it is prima facie plausible, given the function of pain, namely to warn of damage and danger. Pain is a marvelous aid to survival (the “survival of the painiest”). Then it is a short step to the thesis that the most primitive form of knowledge involves pain, either intrinsically or as a consequence. We can either suppose that pain itself is a type of knowledge (of harm to the body or impending harm) or that the organism will necessarily know it is in pain when it is (how could it not know?). Actually, I think the first claim is quite compelling: pain is a way of knowing relevant facts about the body without looking or otherwise sensing them—to feel pain is to have this kind of primordial knowledge. To experience pain is to apprehend a bodily condition—and in a highly motivating way. In feeling pain your body knows it is in trouble. It is perceiving bodily harm. Somehow the organism then came to have an extra piece of knowledge, namely that it has the first piece, the sensation itself. It knows a mode of knowing. Pain is thus inherently epistemic—though not at this early stage in the way later knowledge came to exist. Call it proto-knowledge if you feel queasy about applying the modern concept. We can leave the niceties aside; the point is that the first knowledge was inextricably bound up with the sensation of pain, which itself no doubt evolved further refinements and types. Assuming this, we have an important clue to the history of knowledge as a biological phenomenon: knowledge in all its forms grew from pain knowledge; it has pain knowledge in its DNA, literally. Pain is the most basic way that organisms know the world—it is known as painful. Later, we may suppose, pleasure came on the scene, perhaps as a modification of pain, so that knowledge now had some pleasure mixed in with it; knowledge came to have a pain-pleasure axis. Both pain and pleasure are associated with knowledge, it having evolved from these primitive sensations. This is long ago, but the evolutionary past has a way of clinging on over time. Bacterial Adam and Eve knew pain and pleasure (in that order), and we still sense the connection. Knowledge can hurt, but it can also produce pleasure.
When you poke an earthworm, it recoils. Does it do so because it feels pain? I doubt it, as it seems to me unlikely that an earthworm is conscious. Perhaps it just has an evolved neuronal network and morphology that retracts the body when it senses (not consciously) that it’s been touched. It could simply be like our kneejerk reaction: a reflex that evolved, but is not perceived consciously (remember, we take our hand off a hot stove before we are even conscious of feeling pain). But even if you think earthworms are conscious, certainly single-celled animals are not, yet they exhibit adaptive behavior as well. One-celled animals can move toward or away from light, are attracted to chemical gradients that denote the proximity of food, move away when disturbed by a touch, seek out other individuals for reproduction, and so on. All animals, whether you think they’re conscious or not, have some kind of evolved instinct to find individuals of the opposite sex when it’s time to have offspring. And surely that “knowledge” (if you will) is the most evolutionarily important of all.
Why, then, is awareness of pain supposed to be the very first “knowledge” to evolve? Why not responses to touch, to chemical gradients, to a drive for reproduction, or all the qualia that involve senses: touch, taste, sight, hearing, hunger and thirst, and so on? All of those can be seen as adaptive as a sense of pain, whether it be conscious or not.
Seeing various behavioral responses as constituting “knowledge”, then, adds nothing to our understanding of either evolution or consciousness. It muddles one’s thinking. The problem is instantiated by sentences like this one:
The organism knows how to get about without banging into things and making a mess. We could call this “substance knowledge”.
Well, simple organisms like rotifers also avoid obstacles. They are almost certainly not conscious, and you can’t have knowledge without consciousness. Do they “know” how to get about without banging into things, or is it an evolved trait based on cues associated with “being touched”. What “knowledge” is being shown here?
McGinn then proposes, with near certainty, an evolutionary progression of “knowledge”:
So, let’s declare the age of sense perception the second great phase in the development of knowledge on planet Earth. The two types of knowledge will be connected, because sensed objects are sources of pain and pleasure: it’s good to know about external objects because they are the things that occasion pain or pleasure, and hence aid survival.
I will now speed up the narrative, as promised. Next on the scene we will have knowledge of motion (hence space and time), knowledge of other organisms and their behavior (hence their psychology), followed by knowledge of right and wrong, knowledge of beauty, scientific knowledge of various kinds, social and political knowledge, and philosophical knowledge. Eventually we will have the technology of knowledge: books, libraries, education, computers, artificial intelligence. All this grows from a tiny seed long ago swimming in a vast ocean: the sensation of pain.
The “knowledge” of right and wrong is a learned and cultural phenomenon, completely unlike our “knowledge” of pain, whether it be conscious or a simple reflex reaction to harmful stimuli. What bothers me about all this is not just the mere conflation of “knowledge” with “consciousness”, or the idea that pain was the first “knowledge”; it is the sheer certainty McGinn displays in his essay. Perhaps that comes from his being a philosopher rather than a biologist, as biologists are surely more cautious than philosophers. A quote:
It was pain that got the ball rolling, and maybe nothing else would have (pain really marks a watershed in the evolution of life on Earth).
I could say with just as much evidence that the perception of touch (either conscious or as an evolved reflex) “got the ball rolling”. And a response to touch in simple organisms cannot be construed as “knowledge” in any respect.
There is more in this article, but I find the whole thing confusing. We don’t even know whether consciousness evolved as an adaptive phenomenon. We don’t know whether our consciousness is a post facto construct for perceiving qualia that the body has already detected (remember, you pull your hand off a hot stove before you feel pain). Above all, we don’t know the neuronal basis of consciousness, much less which animals are conscious and which are not. In Matthew Cobb’s biography of Francis Crick, you can see his subject struggling with this issue in the last part of his life, and admitting that we know little about it. Crick laid out a program for sussing out the neuronal basis of consciousness, but, as Matthew noted in these pages, scientists haven’t gotten far with this problem.
I have no idea why McGinn is so certain about evolution and qualia. I don’t know any evolutionist who would agree with his thesis. I even broached it to a neurobiologist who knows evolution, and that person found the whole concept totally misguided.
As I said, McGinn is no slouch; he is a highly respected philosopher whose work I’ve read and respected. But I get the feeling that he’s driven out of his lane here.
I can’t help wondering if “consciousness” is a spandrell.
I mentioned that possibility in my post (a “byproduct”)
As you note, McGinn does not define knowledge. I suspect he is not using ‘justified true belief’ as the working definition but has a kind of pragmatist account, which I think works better in lots of (but not all) contexts. I think it goes better with theory change, for example.
In the excerpts he sometimes uses “consciousness” and “knowledge” as synonyms for “information”. We only started having a solid non-waffly understanding of information itself in the 1940’s, believe it or not. Using poorly understood notions for explaining well understood ones is IMO intellectual malpractice. It is very much like using god(s) for explaining natural phenomena. Today we understand “information” very well, “knowledge” less so¹, and “consciousness” barely at all. He might as well just bite the bullet² and use panpsychism, which tidily explains everything everywhere all at once.
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¹ E.g. the serious difficulties with “justified true belief”.
² A non-scatological version of the metaphor which first came to mind.
I think you’re right. “Information” is the key word when talking about the two realms of reality: consciousness and the physical world.
Superb highlight, thanks.
I popped over to see if McGinn drew any conclusions from his essay, only to find out it is, indeed, brief. I think one could easily, and more appropriately, replace “knowledge” with “sensation” in his essay. That surely is evolutionary. It is clear, though, that, because he talks about the History of Science, he really means “knowledge.” As for what came first, I would think it had something to do with food. I do not see the point of his piece, though.
Well, that does make it easier, doesn’t it?
LOL. I thought exactly the same thing. How convenient! One can do that on one’s own blog but, one would hope, not in a peer-reviewed journal.
Good to see this thoughtful post today, and something to read more deeply as I travel today. My first snarky thought: Pain? What about hunger?
…and I see that Jerry has covered this question quite well.
(from above) Why not responses to touch, to chemical gradients, to a drive for reproduction, or all the qualia that involve senses: touch, taste, sight, hearing, hunger and thirst, and so on?
I thought the essay — “A (Really) Brief History of Knowledge” was, um, underwhelming. There such a thing painting with a wide brush, but this goes way beyond that. Pain as the “first knowledge”? So I thought of Discipline and Punish which is of course going too far, but still —
Although Colin McGinn’s work in philosophy of mind is widely known, he has been sharply criticized by Dan Dennett, in the Times Literary Supplement, May 10, 1991. It’s an old piece but is still a useful evaluation of McGinn.
I didn’t read the article, so am only commenting based on your analysis. If I misrepresent something, it’s my fault.
I first wondered if McGinn was perhaps using the word “evolution” in the vernacular sense of “change,” as in: Our understanding of quantum mechanics has evolved over time. This usage would surely cause confusion. But his discussion of pain as “knowledge in its DNA, literally” seems to imply that he really does mean that knowledge is in the genes and evolves in Darwinian fashion.
That’s where I discern a disconnect. Knowledge is conventionally thought to be acquired during life, and not something in the germ plasm. If McGinn really thinks that knowledge—in the form of facts of the world, or in the form of right vs. wrong—has a genetic basis, then I think he’s wrong.
In this case, a good conversation over coffee or wine seems to be in order. What does McGinn actually mean when he refers to “knowledge? What does he mean when he refers to “evolution?” My guess is that a good conversation would dispel some of the confusion.
I prefer to consider knowledge to be understandings that are learned thru experience and observation. Justified beliefs would be a very short definition of knowledge. Elephants know when and where to migrate for water and certain kinds of preferred food that come into season, and they gain that knowledge by experience and by watching other elephants.
But are naturally selected but instinctive behaviors that are encoded in genes also a form of knowledge? McGinn seems to think so, but I too think he is wrong. Else the definition of knowledge is so stretched that single-celled organisms can be claimed to have knowledge. A single celled algae cell will swim toward light. But it’s a great stretch to claim that this is knowledge!
I find myself often surprised at philosophers’ capacity for “advanced” thinking to run away so much that they end up in some befuddled pseudoscientific hinterland. I agree that “knowledge” is a separate concept from raw feeling.
On the other hand not all philosophers belong in the “befuddled” category, I’ve just read Jonathan Birch’s book “The Edge of Sentience” which is a valiant effort to establish which systems, including animal “systems”, we can safely assume have the capacity for sentience, those which he describes as “sentience candidates”, those which are “investigation priorities”, and those that are not. His knowledge of the science of animal behaviour and how this relates to animals in different phyletic groups is impressive.
Pain is a negatively valenced experience, but there is evidence from patients using analgesia who report that the pain is still there but it “doesn’t bother them”, suggesting that the valenced part of the experience can come apart from the pain itself. If this is true pain is not the simple precursor for knowledge McGinn seems to think it is. It seems to me that it might be valenced experience itself – something like the sense of food: good – predator: bad, would have had strong adaptive benefit and might have evolved long before what we think of as pain.
Advanced thinking outside the box risks forgetting where the box is, or even that there ever was a box.
I am having difficulty with accepting much of his assertions. A major problem is that these heavy concepts (knowledge and consciousness and so on) are themselves hard to define. I can read a definition of them and think ‘that seems about right’, but upon further thunking I soon wonder if that is all there is to the concept at its most basic level.
Knowledge is a justified true belief. I well know that definition and it feels right. But you can have a justified true belief (a tested and verified belief in something that is also true), and you can have a justified belief (a tested and verified belief in something — only by honest error it isn’t actually true). We experience these things the same way, and there lies but one problem with defining knowledge. And how do we know we have found any truth? I thought that operationally, we aren’t supposed to say we find truth. We only asymptotically approach it until we can proceed as if a belief is true. So we can keep going down the rabbit hole if we want to.
Was pain the first knowledge? To me it is correct to say we can never know that. Why not recognizing a mate? Or recognizing food versus not-food? When does that particular sensation even start in the ascending ladder of evolutionary complexity? Does a single-celled Paramecium experience pain when it’s injured? I can tell you that its behavior is very suddenly disrupted. But I don’t know if that is because of an evolved reaction to a damaging stimulus, or simply because the electrical potential waves that coordinate its cilia are now short-circuited. The same goes for multicellular Protists, followed by very simple animals like the ciliated larvae of sponges. When does one perceive pain in an ascending ladder of complexity versus just experiencing physiological short-circuiting?
These vagaries must be a great convenience to a philosopher, as one can declare to shed light on this or that aspect of these difficult problems. It is, after all, pretty much their job to declare answers, and to not declare that final answers can never be found.
Thunking? Oh, the sound the head in search of truth makes on the wall? 😉
Sorry for the third comment, but it’s such an inspiring subject. I just fail to see how qualia can be possible in an organism that has no mechanism for experiencing them. I mean, I don’t feel what my cells must be feeling, but by interpreting what my neocortex senses from the brain stem, which itself is only indirectly reacting to what the pain nerve cells tell it. So why are we trying to combine all adverse stimuli at all levels and call them “pain”?
I haven’t read the article so I’m not commenting on it. However consciousness itself is a confusing concept to me. My own mind does things which I am unaware of which I find surprising, for example. But if colour perception is related to consciousness, it’s worth noting that the mantis shrimp has 12 colour receptors, so they have colour vision. I’m dubious, though, whether that qualifies them as “conscious”; but as I already said, I’m confused about the whole subject.
From the website:
The ‘onward march of knowledge’ smacks of progressivism. Maybe a valid philosophical stance or maybe not. But not necessarily a result of evolutionary processes. Tricky to describe cave fish losing their eyes as an onward march of knowledge.
I really don’t want to go off track here, but a very adjacent concept is “intelligence”. The reason why I am venturing into this nearby area is that this too is a heavy concept that has entangled some people, including some academics who should really know better, into stretching the concept so far as to then make the click-bait-y claim that a simple slime mold called Physarum polycephalum has intelligence because it can find the shortest path thru a maze — provided that you put food as an attractant at the entrance and exit of the maze. This slime mold grows as a single multi-nucleated cell, and yes it does reliably settle into concentrating its body along the shortest path thru the maze. So is it … intelligent? I certainly don’t think so!
Here is Jon Perry who pretty well crushes this notion by demonstrating that water also looks to be intelligent bc it too can solve the same maze problem. I don’t agree with Jon here in all details, but it’s still a very interesting trail to follow even if what is likely to be the right conclusion turns out to be non-sexy. No, slime mold is not intelligent. It is, as Jon says, simply “competent”.
This piece illustrates what is wrong with a lot of philosophy, in that it proceeds on what the author (after introspecting) deems plausible and sensible, but doesn’t connect much with reality or evidence (since philosophers disdain those things).
+1 and also there may be motivated reasoning to build up a case for some idea.
We cannot detect consciousness in anyone but ourselves, so it is not something that objective methods of science can directly investigate. But science can study the activities and evolution of nervous systems, which I know are intimately linked to my own consciousness because drugs that alter the activities of nervous systems can alter my consciousness. So research on drug effects can indirectly point to what activity patterns in brains are associated with what levels or states of consciousness. Brain imaging studies suggest that the level of consciousness may be linked to the level of functional connectivity across different brain regions. So under general anesthesia, the level of functional connectivity is abnormally low, whereas on “consciousness-expanding” drugs such as LSD, functional connectivity is abnormally high. This relationship appears to hold across species with brains. That’s my two cents on this.
Why is it easier to swat a bee with a tennis racket than a solid paddle? The answer is that the paddle compresses far more air than the tennis racket, and the increased air pressure galvanizes the bee to move out of the way.
Is pain or knowledge of other organisms required to explain why single-celled animals change direction when approaching an obstacle? No. Any approach in a liquid medium increases pressure, galvanizing the animal to lower it. Neither pain nor knowledge of other organisms are involved. By analogy, consider a man trying to reach a point on the far side of a steep hill. He can climb up and down the hill, or he can walk around it. Climbing requires more effort.
Somebody once said nature is lazy. That statement provides a simpler explanation of the animal’s response than a requirement for pain or knowledge of other organisms. The animal follows the path of least resistance. The intensity of the resistance need not create pain. Pain may warn of damage and danger, but not all warnings are pain. The animal just acts lazy.
🎯
But I do have an unrelated problem with the tennis racket story — who would try to swat a bee in the first place‽ Less kinetic methods are usually less risky for the would-be bee remover.
I think PCC(E) is right: first evolutionary qualia- bumping into something. Directional movement stops, redirect. Pain is obviously very useful, but needs a bigger bundle of “nerves” to communicate the signal. I don’t think there were nerves/neurons during the first few billion of years of evolution. But movement and what affects movement, yes- physical impediment. Even the organelles in the earliest eukaryote cells needed that, right?
I think the likely reason that pain is a conscious sensation at all, is that it has to OVERRIDE any conscious decision to get into trouble. An animal such as a worm or a frog that acts purely by instinct, simply has to have a mechanism to override the instinctual behaviour. An animal that acts by pre-programmed sequences of actions that involve no planning, also needs no mechanism other than forcibly switching on the “run away” program. Nothing that could be construed as pain is needed in that case. An animal that learns has to learn to avoid the situation, and here I think is the first need to associate the experience with unpleasantness. In case of mammals, automatism can be overridden by neocortex, so there is an actual need for a pervasive sensation that puts the wrench into the machine, so to speak. With neocortex being (with proper training) dominant in humans, there has to be a way to force change of behaviour no matter how highly motivated. BTW I think painful rites of passage are basically a proof of maturity of a human: one proves that one can, if needed, act despite of pain.
@J. Coyne:
Here’s McGinn’s reply to your comment: https://colinmcginn.net/coyne-on-mcginn/
OMG. The sweating philosopher needs some schooling. Maybe our host is suitably annoyed to be willing to provide it.
(Of course the main purpose of many academic disputes is not to arrive at some “truth” but to amass publications and citations. Quantity not quality. There may be negative value in continuing this one.)
So much to respond to. First of all, I had to go to the McGinn piece just to check for myself that his thinking was as shallow as what comes through in Jerry’s excerpts. It is. It reads like something written in an armchair after the third stiff whiskey of the evening–superficial, incoherent.
As for substantive issues, I agree that the root of the problems is McGinn’s muddy use of the word “knowledge.” He actually shifts among various definitions, with a vague connection to consciousness being a common thread. As for the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief,” I have troubles with this. All three words in this definition beg for definition, but to focus on the word “belief,” I don’t buy that it entails/requires consciousness except in the perhaps in the most minimal sense. I would consider the ability to learn that an aposematic prey organism is nasty (thus to avoid it), as a kind of knowledge, but this and other kinds of associative learning could be explained by the most minimal modification of neural connections, which may often result in automatic responses indistinguishable from reflexes. Indeed, Pavlov called the outcome of classical conditioning “conditioned reflexes.”
And consider further that hand-reared motmots (a tropical bird) are innately phobic about snakes with the color pattern of highly venomous coral snakes. This implies the existence of knowledge NOT acquired during the life time, hence the existence of neural connections not justified by experiences during the lifetime of the animal, and presumably well under the radar of whatever consciousness the birds possess. This knowledge (snakes with the color pattern of coral snakes are dangerous) may not always be “true,” since there exist nonvenomous species with color patterns that mimic that of coral snakes, and these Batesian mimics are also avoided.
An interesting debate that may help to clarify certain aspects.
The distinction between “knowledge” and “consciousness” is misleading, especially if we speak of their evolutionary origin.
Might it help here to use the term “perception”?
According to existential phenomenology, at the origin there was “anonymous perception,” that is, the perception of the environment and of the subject without “explicit consciousness” of it. It was a “repression of immediacy,” or a “creation of the mediated,” or else the “creation of a point–horizon axis.” I think the evolutionary origin of this axis may be the mouth, as McGinn describes in his book.
At this level there is a “pre-personal” consciousness or a “body schema” without attribution to a cognitive subject. The smallest element would be the atomized sensation, understood as an object–subject perception localized in an organism or in a sensory faculty, without integration at a higher level.
If the architecture of these sensations evolves, grows, and becomes integrated, unified perception is born.
[Sigh]
I am going to try¹ to be polite here: Your comment does the polar opposite of clarifying anything, other than some philosophers’ strong preferences for obscurantism.
Please see my reply at (2) regarding the practice of using higher-level waffle to attempt to explain lower-level waffle. IMO your comment contains some defcon 1 level.
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¹ Yes, I do know one philosopher’s view on that [Lucas, 1977].
For me, which is the least important part, and for great intellectuals, what we are talking about is not a trivial matter as you suggest.
If you don’t believe it helps in any way, I respect that. Surely your contribution will be more useful.
And thank you for being polite; I don’t understand why I shouldn’t be. It is probably a big step for you, even if a small one for humanity.
Protip: You might want to level up your passhibuaguresshibu.