Would conscious AI also cling to its sense of self?

 I began thinking about the question posed above after reading Michael Pollan’s recently published book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.

We do not yet know whether AI will develop a sense of self. We can be confident, however, that if an AI system does develop a sense of self, it will be because it serves a useful purpose for that system. That suggests to me that any intelligent system that has evolved to have a sense of self is likely to have good reasons to cling to it. I refer to AI to invite readers to ponder the motivations that humans have to cling to their individual identity rather than seeking to dissolve it or escape from it.

To set the scene for subsequent discussion I will provide a brief description of the book before focusing on the author’s discussion of scientific research into building AI with conscious feelings and his personal experience of self-transcendence via meditation.

Michael Pollan’s book

Michael Pollan is a science writer with a background in the humanities. He is the author of several books on topics related to science, philosophy and culture. In the introductory chapter, he tells us that his main qualification for writing the book is that he is a conscious human being who has become intensely curious about that fact.

A World Appears explores four different dimensions of consciousness – sentience, feelings, thought, and self. The author’s discussion on sentience focuses on the question of whether plants are sentient, suggesting that the idea should be taken seriously. The chapter on feelings encompasses discussion of research into building AI that might develop feelings. The chapter on thought discusses the contents flowing through consciousness and leans heavily on the work of philosophers and novelists. The chapter on self acknowledges the emergence of a sense of self as “perhaps the apotheosis of consciousness in humans” before entertaining the idea that it is an illusion.

The author tells us the story of his visits to scientists and philosophers who have been thinking about consciousness. That makes the book an interesting and painless way to obtain knowledge of developments in this field.

Feeling machines

One of the most interesting topics covered in the book is the account of the efforts of Mark Solms and Karl Friston to build a machine that has feelings. They focus on feelings, because feelings are necessarily conscious – it is not possible to have a feeling that you cannot feel.

Solms was a protégé of Antonio Damasio, a renowned neurologist, but while Damasio treats homeostasis – the self-regulating process - as a purely biological phenomenon, Solms and Friston believe that it applies to all self-organizing systems. For Friston and Solms, minds are in the business of maintaining homeostasis by reducing uncertainty which jeopardizes their survival. They believe that uncertainty generates conscious feelings in self-organizing systems - consciousness is felt uncertainty. When uncertainty arises, the system relies on feelings to seize our conscious attention and then guide our decision-making.

Solms and his team have constructed an AI model which has homeostatic needs – hunger, thirst and a need to rest. The algorithm samples its simulated environment to construct a model of its world which it relies on to make predictions that help guide its survival choices. The researchers believe that they have forced the “agent” to deal with uncertainty and have thus laid the groundwork for feelings to emerge.

The researchers plan to confront the “agent” with increasingly complex situations which it will learn to navigate. At some stage it will be confronted with misleading hedonic rewards - the opportunity to experience positive feelings which are harmful to its survival. If the “agent” chooses those rewards, Solms will take that as a sign that it has feelings because its actions will be based on feelings rather than reason or self-interest (just like a human taking harmful drugs).

From other sources, I have the impression that the researchers believe that a breakthrough to artificial consciousness may be quite close. At that point, however, they will still have some difficulty in persuading sceptics that their computer model is actually conscious.

 As I was reading about these efforts to build a machine with feelings, I was thinking that the underlying theory has elements in common with Richard Campell’s philosophical contribution in The Metaphysics of Emergence. I have previously written about Campbell’s book here, and here.

I have been unable to find any evidence that Solms had drawn upon Campbell’s philosophy, so I decided to ask Grok:

Can the empirical work of Mark Solms on consciousness be viewed as a test of the systems view of emergence advocated by the philosopher, Richard Campbell?

Here is an abridged version of Grok’s response:

“Yes, Mark Solms’ empirical work on consciousness can reasonably be viewed as a test (or, more precisely, a concrete empirical case study that supports or challenges) the systems/process-oriented view of emergence developed by philosopher Richard Campbell. This interpretation arises from a natural alignment between Campbell’s metaphysical framework and the mechanistic, systems-level account Solms provides, even though the two thinkers do not appear to reference each other directly.  

In The Metaphysics of Emergence (2015), Campbell argues that traditional substance metaphysics (treating reality as fixed entities with intrinsic properties) makes emergence mysterious and irreducible in an inexplicable way. He replaces it with process metaphysics, in which the primary existents are generic processes organised into dynamic systems.  

Solms (neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst) has built an influential body of clinical and theoretical work which locates the “hidden spring” of consciousness not in the cerebral cortex (the usual assumption) but in upper-brainstem structures. Consciousness is fundamentally affective—raw feelings of pleasure/unpleasure that register homeostatic deviations (needs, prediction errors). The cortex adds sophisticated content but is not required for the existence of consciousness itself.

Solms’ account maps almost directly onto Campbell’s criteria for emergence in process-systems:

•  The brain (especially brainstem networks) is treated as an open, far-from-equilibrium process-system engaged in recursive self-maintenance via homeostasis.

•  Consciousness (affective subjectivity) is a novel, system-level property arising from non-linear organisation of lower-level neural processes; it is not reducible to the parts (individual neurons or circuits lack feelings) yet is mechanistically explained by their relational dynamics.

•  The free-energy principle supplies the physics-level grounding Campbell invokes (quantum-field/thermodynamic processes organised into living systems).

•  Empirical predictions are testable and have been tested: brainstem lesions eliminate consciousness (falsifying cortical-centric views), while the model explains clinical phenomena (dreaming, blindsight with preserved affect, etc.) without eliminating the “hard problem” (subjectivity remains real and emergent).

If Solms’ model is empirically robust (and it has gained significant traction in neuropsychology and consciousness studies), it provides positive evidence that emergence of the kind Campbell describes actually occurs in the most complex biological system we know—the human brain. It shows how a higher-level property (felt consciousness) can arise irreducibly yet intelligibly from process organisation, exactly as Campbell’s metaphysics predicts. Failures or inconsistencies in Solms’ data (e.g., if cortical mechanisms proved sufficient after all) would conversely pressure Campbell’s framework.

Thus, while not a direct “falsification test” in the Popperian sense (metaphysics is broader), Solms’ neuroscience functions as a real-world empirical probe of Campbell’s systems view: it demonstrates that treating consciousness as an emergent feature of biological process-systems is not only philosophically coherent but scientifically productive. This alignment makes the interpretation not only possible but illuminating for both fields.”

I am impressed by the ability of this (unconscious) LLM to respond to questions such as the one I asked. It would be understandable, however, if some readers think that I have a favourable view of Grok in this instance because its reasoning supports my own beliefs. If you want to explore these ideas more fully, please consult other sources which may offer differing opinions.  

Why attempt to transcend self?

Of the various theories of self that Michael Pollan discusses, the one by Anil Seth seems most compatible with the approach adopted by Marc Solms. Like Damasio and Solms, Seth grounds his thinking about consciousness firmly in homeostasis. Seth suggests that “the self is not the thing that is perceiving; it is itself a kind of perception” constructed in the brain. Under this theory a feeling is the brain’s interpretation of a change in the state of the body. Consciousness evolved to help keep us alive by monitoring changes in the body.

Pollan comments:

“Afterward, thinking back on all that Seth had told me, I decided that I could travel only so far with ideas of the brain’s “predictions” and “inferences” and “hallucinations.” It all made sense until I tried to translate those abstractions into felt experience. Who is the subject of these mental operations?”

He goes on to note:

“The way I see it, there is an unbridgeable gap between the brain’s operations as a prediction machine and my felt experience of the resulting hallucination. How can you have a hallucination without a hallucinator?”

That is a good question to ask, but one can also ask why one should view consciousness of self as an hallucination or illusion. Indeed, Pollan also mentions that Christof Koch, a neuroscientist, has pointed out that it makes no sense to call consciousness an illusion, for what is an illusion but a conscious experience.

More fundamentally, it seems to me that one of the few things that we can all be certain of is our own existence. Another thing that we can all be certain of is that we are thinking beings. I cannot claim those ideas are original. Indeed, it seems to me that it requires considerable (unnecessary) intellectual effort to contemplate the possibility that one’s awareness of one’s own existence could be an illusion. I have discussed why I am certain of my own existence in the preceding essay entitled, “Who are you?”

Pollan struggles to reconcile how it is possible for humans to be conscious observers of themselves if consciousness is a product of biological processes. Towards the end of the book, he writes:

“I’m abashed to say I know less now than I did when, naively, I set out to unravel the mystery of consciousness. But then, most of what I thought I knew or took for granted, like the assumption that consciousness is a product of our brains and materialism will eventually explain everything, turned out to be unproven or wrong.”

During his journey, the author asks interesting questions. Early in his chapter on the self, he asks:

“Why do we cling to the idea of a self, placing great value on self-confidence and self-esteem, while simultaneously spending so much effort on self-transcendence, whether through meditation or psychedelics or experiences of art, awe, and flow? Some of the most powerful experiences in life hinge on the dissolution of the self and the broad horizons of meaning that open only after it has been chased from the scene.”

That question remains unanswered in his book. The book ends with the author describing his efforts to transcend his sense of self by spending time meditating in a cave. He seems to end up viewing consciousness as an activity:

“My time in the cave had shown me another way to look at consciousness: less as a scientific or philosophical puzzle to be solved and more as a practice, a way to once again be altogether here, present to life and to this vault of stars.”

Personal reflections

 It seems to me that Michael Pollan’s book ends up in a good place, with him being absorbed in conscious awareness of his environment. I have previously recognised the value of that kind of experience in discussing Scott Barry Kaufman’s book, Transcend, 2020. The transcending experiences that Kaufman refers to incorporates a continuum of experiences ranging from becoming engrossed in a book, sports performance, or creative activity (what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as the flow experience), to experiencing meditation, feeling gratitude for an act of kindness, experiencing awe at a beautiful sunset etc., all the way up to the great mystical illumination. He suggests that transcendence “allows for  the highest levels of unity and harmony within oneself and with the world” (See: Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, p. 171).

The experience of unity and harmony within oneself seems to me to be the opposite of attempting to escape from uncomfortable feelings. When people develop a habit of attempting to escape from uncomfortable feelings by using alcohol, drugs, social media etc. they tend to become caught up in a “happiness trap”. I wrote about that here.

It is worth highlighting that the idea of experiencing unity and harmony within oneself still entails the existence of an observer. When I experience transcendence, I forget about the image I present to the world, but I am present as an observer of my own experience.

Pollan asked why we cling to the idea of a self. The obvious answer is that we cling to the idea because it serves useful purposes.

As Richard Campbell explains in The Metaphysics of Emergence, “our consciousness of both ourselves and the world we live in is now irrevocably shaped by cultural and institutional influences, and that influences how our brains function” (pp. 288-9). He suggests: “The first-person standpoint, which is inextricably linked to self-reflection, is an important aspect of human experience, not a theoretical construct” (p. 291). He goes on to note that the human capacity to understand the perceptions of others – to put oneself in their shoes – requires “the exercise of reflective consciousness, and involves more than expressions of our subjective attitudes, desires, and preferences” (p.113). That is what Campbell mean by “transcending subjectivity” in the passage quoted in the epigraph.

Cambell develops an argument along Aristotelian lines that eudaimonia, rather than mere survival, is the ultimate good of a human being. He links personal identity to the exercise of practical wisdom in the process of individual flourishing:

“We are recursively self-maintenant social beings with reflective consciousness, able to create and explore a vast repository of collective knowledge, and with capacities for empathy, practical wisdom, for whom the good life is one of maturity and flourishing” (p. 307).

Conclusion

I asked whether conscious AI would seek to cling to its sense of self to invite readers to ponder the motivations that individual humans have to cling to their sense of self. My answer is that intelligent systems tend to cling to a sense of self because a first-person perspective evolves to serve useful purposes.

The essay was prompted by my reading of Michael Pollan’s recently published book, A World Appears.

My focus has been on chapters in this book discussing research into building AI that might develop feelings and the chapter on the concept of self.

In my discussion of these topics, I have emphasized the relevance of the ideas of the philosopher, Richard Campell, in his book, The Metaphysics of Emergence.

Who are you?

 The following essay is an edited transcript of a podcast episode I released a few years ago. I have decided to publish the transcript in essay form because I want to refer to it in a subsequent essay. It is easier to find particular words and paragraphs in an essay than in a podcast. Besides, when I listened to that podcast episode again, I decided that the sound of my voice distracted from the ideas I was presenting. 

My main qualification for talking about personal identity is that I have been around for long enough to have thought quite a lot about my own identity. I hope that what I have to say will interest other people. In any case, writing this podcast script should also help me to remember what I have learned about myself.

Rather than meander through the circuitous history of my thinking, I will focus here on what I now consider to be a sensible approach to the topic. I will begin by discussing the most superficial aspects of personal identity and will end up considering whether your identity would be retained if your consciousness was uploaded into a machine. Along the way, I will touch upon a range of other issues that might be of interest:

·       Is your identity defined by personal information about you?

·       Does your life-story define who you are?

·       How can aspects of your identity change over time?

·       Is the essence of your identity located in your conscious mind?

·       Where did Descartes go wrong in asserting “I think, therefore I am”?

·       What kind of being are you?

·       How does self-direction fit in to your identity?

Let us begin.

Is your identity defined by personal information about you? 

Your passport has information about your name, nationality, date of birth and sex. It also shows a photo that looks something like you. Other government documents may include additional information such as your place of residence.

If you wanted to tell me who you are, you might provide further information such as your occupation, marital status, whether you have had children and how many, ethnicity, religion, political views, education level, schools attended, employment history, the places you have lived in the past, your hobbies, books you have read, sports you have played or enjoy watching, movies you liked, and other entertainment preferences.

A person with all that information would know a lot about you. They might be well placed to predict how a person like you might spend money or vote, but they would have only a superficial view of who you are as an individual.

Does your life-story define who you are?

Your own understanding of who you are probably includes a narrative covering important events in your life, a view about important things you have learned from life, your personal values, and how you came to hold those values.

So, if you were to write an autobiography covering all those aspects, would that encapsulate a comprehensive understanding of your identity? I doubt it. If you are anything like me, a few days after you finished writing the book you would think of something important that you wanted to add.

What I am suggesting is that even though we know more about ourselves than anyone else can possibly know about us, our self-knowledge is never perfect. As you go through life, you may discover more about who you are, and some aspects of your identity may change.

How can aspects of your identity change over time?

Let us assume for the moment that the concept of identity implies the existence of an unchangeable essence at the core of who you are. I will consider the validity of that assumption later, but I first want to discuss how some aspects of your identity can change.

It is obvious that there are various ways in which the information in your passport and other identity documents can be changed. I will focus on how more fundamental aspects of identity, such as character traits, may change over time.

It may be possible for your character to change as a consequence of changes in the social and economic environment in which you live. People do tend to respond to incentives. For example, if the social and economic environment rewards cooperation for mutual benefit, that provides an incentive for people to develop habits of trustworthy behavior that will enable them to participate more fully in those benefits. The opposite happens if the social and economic environment rewards predatory activity.

However, that does not mean that your identity is “socially constructed”. The social and economic environment affects the incentives you face, but you can still choose how to respond to those incentives. People often think carefully before responding to incentives. And they sometimes choose to respond differently than they have in the past. The behavioralist assumption that people respond automatically to stimuli is a distorted view of human nature.

Individuals can also choose to change their behavior in ways that change their identity. You may discover that you have an aptitude to do something – for example, to assist other people to learn – and some aspects of your identity may change as you acquire skill in doing that.

It is even possible for people to discover that they have potential to change their personality to some extent. Traits such as extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability tend to be fairly stable in adults, but some research suggests that people can even change such traits if they make active efforts to do so. We discover our potential as we actualize it. There is some discussion of that process in Chapter 8 of my book, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing.

If fundamental aspects of your personality can change over time, that raises the question of where we should look if we want to find an unchangeable essence at the core of your being.

Is the essence of your identity located in your conscious mind?

In his book Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, suggests that the system in the mind that makes judgements and choices is “who we think we are” (Kahneman 2011, loc. 7547/9800). He is probably correct that most people tend to identify themselves with that system.

However, I argue in Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, that people are making a cognitive error when they identify themselves in that way (Bates 2021, p.140).

In order to explain why, I need to explain the two systems in the mind that Kahneman employs in his discussion. System 1 engages in intuitive thinking (fast thinking) and tends to produce quick answers to complex questions. It operates with little effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it. Kahneman suggests that System 2 is who we think we are (Kahneman 2011, loc. 7547-7556/9800).

When I first read about Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 several years ago, I saw parallels with the concept of Self 1 and Self 2 developed by Timothy Gallwey, a sports and business coach and author of popular ‘inner game’ books (Gallwey 1986, pp. 18-19). Gallwey observed that when he was playing tennis, he seemed to have two identities: Self 2 was playing tennis and Self 1 was constantly interfering by telling him how to play. It struck me that Gallwey’s Self 1 might correspond to Kahneman’s System 2 and that Gallwey’s Self 2 might correspond to Kahneman’s System 1.

The point I want to make is that it is not possible to judge whether it is more appropriate to identify with System 1 or System 2 without considering the nature of the activity that you are engaged in at a particular time. If you are playing sport, it often pays to identify as a fast thinker, responding intuitively and ignoring the unhelpful advice of the inner coach who is warning you to think carefully to avoid making an error.

If you are making a career choice, it makes sense to identify yourself as a person who thinks carefully about important decisions.

Should we view the system that makes judgements and choices as some kind of inner philosopher who thinks dispassionately? There was a time when I thought that. However, I had to ditch that idea after I read Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes Error. Damasio, a neurologist, pointed out that when people suffer brain damage that causes loss of most of their emotional lives, they are unable to make simple decisions even if their reasoning and logical abilities are intact (Damasio 1994, p.78).

In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt argues that “Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion ... does most of the work”. He presents a useful metaphor - an elephant and its rider - to explain the relationship between the controlled and automatic systems that determine human behavior. Haidt writes:

“The controlled system ... is better seen as an advisor. It’s a rider placed on the elephant’s back to help the elephant make better choices. The rider can see further into the future, and the rider can learn valuable information by talking to other riders or by reading maps, but the rider cannot order the elephant around against its will. ... The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings” (Haidt 2006, p 160).

Haidt is inviting us to identify ourselves as both rider and elephant.

That seems to me to make more sense than to identify myself only with the rider, or the system in my mind that makes effortful judgements and choices. When I exercise my cognitive abilities in non-judgmental observation of bodily sensations and ideas floating past, I identify with a natural self that embodies instinct and emotion as well as reason, and all the inherent potential that individual humans are born with. I invite you to engage in similar meditative practices to see if you come to the same conclusion.

That might be a good point to end on. However, many of you will be reluctant to trust your meditative insights unless you can be persuaded that there is a philosophically respectable basis for them.

We should not even view the meditative insights of prominent philosophers as being beyond question. The philosopher I have in mind is René Descartes, who claimed “I think, therefore I am” in the 17^th century, after he had engaged in a meditative process.

Where did Descartes go wrong?

Descartes reached his conclusion, “I think therefore I am”, after going through a process of considering what sources of knowledge could not be doubted, and discovering that he could not doubt that he was thinking.

I have already mentioned Antonio Damasio’s book, Descartes Error. What does Damasio see as the source of Descartes’ error? Damasio makes the point that beings existed before long before the evolution of humans who are aware that they are thinking (Damasio 1994, pp. 248-9).

In his book, The Metaphysics of Emergence, Richard Campbell suggests that Descartes was on the right track in observing that he was unable to doubt that he was thinking. Campbell suggest that the error arose when Descartes asked himself, “What then am I?” That question “presupposes that he takes himself to be some sort of thing” (Campbell 2015, pp.282-3). Campbell suggests that Descartes question immediately entrapped him in the traditional metaphysics of entities.

At this point I must explain why Cambell considers it to be problematic to consider oneself as an entity rather than as a process.

What kind of being are you?

You observe that you are thinking, and conclude that you are a thinking being. You also observe that you are a being that has a body, and that you experience sensations and emotions.

It appears obvious that you are an entity that has all those qualities. But you are also the observer engaged in self-reflection. You can engage in radical reflexivity as you observe the thoughts passing through your own mind.

However, if you are an entity, how can you be both the observer and the being that you are observing? Could you be two entities? I don’t think so. The observer, who is you, does not exist independently of the being who is observed, who is also you.

Richard Campbell suggests a way out of this dilemma. Drop the assumption that you are a fixed, given entity. The alternative he suggests is to perceive yourself as a complex process system. That enables you to perceive of radical reflexivity as a process. He writes:

“If the assumption that there is a fixed, given entity called ‘the self’ …  is rejected, the way is open to understand consciousness as a flow: a complex, emergent and interactive process which is radically reflexive” (Campbell 2015, p.292).

Our observations of the world tell us that many other animals are also aware of their surroundings. We have no problem in understanding that their awareness emerged or evolved to help them to survive and reproduce. Our human consciousness is just another step in that evolutionary process. Radical reflexivity - awareness of our own awareness - has emerged to help us to flourish as individuals in the cultures in which we live.

Campbell suggests that the flow of consciousness is analogous to a river maintaining its identity as it flows though different places. Your understanding of who you are is informed by the flow of your consciousness through time. In other words, your sense of identity is informed by your autobiographical memories. Campbell explains that this sense of identity also involves an element of projection into the future:

“I am a complex process system continually projecting myself out of my past into my future, my sense of myself necessarily involves my ‘has been’ and my ‘not yet’ (Campbell 2015, p.292).

As you think about your “not yet”, you might imagine a future that is different than your past. Perhaps that is just wishful thinking. Or you might be considering options available to change your life in various ways, or how to achieve a vision that you have for your own future. That brings me to the concept of self-direction.

How does self-direction fit into your identity?

As explained in Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, I subscribe to the view that wise and well-informed self-direction is integral to the process of individual flourishing. The nature of humans is such that as individuals mature, they normally have the potential to exercise the practical wisdom and integrity required to direct their own flourishing in accordance with goals they choose and values they endorse.

However, wise and well-informed self-direction is not an attribute that is manifested by all adult humans. It is to some extent a product of the incentives in the social environment in which people live. When the social environment requires individuals to accept responsibility for the outcomes of the choices they make, they have a strong incentive to become wise and well-informed.

Acquisition of skills in self-direction is also a product of personal attitudes. Unfortunately, some people perceive that nothing they do will make any difference to their lives. Others, who have similar history, perceive the potential to improve their lives and often make inspiring efforts to so by investing in personal development.

In my personal experience, it is easier to avoid behaving like a grumpy old man when I remind myself to be the person that I have potential to become.

That brings me close to the end of what I have to say. However, before I sum up, I will keep my promise to talk about the question I said I would end on.

Would your identity be retained if your mind was uploaded into a machine?

Some neuroscientists think this might be feasible within a few decades. They point to scientific advances that suggest it might be possible, and say they are not aware of any laws of physics that would prevent it.

I am not qualified to have an informed view on the technical feasibility of mind uploading, so I will think of it merely as a thought experiment.

Imagine that your mind has been uploaded and you wake up with your memories intact in an environment that looks like the real world as you know it. Is this emulated mind actually you? As I see it, that is something that your emulated mind would have to decide for itself.

However, that does not prevent me from speculating how an emulated mind might perceive its own identity if separated from the body which it remembers as an integral component of the complex processing system from which it was derived. Perhaps the emulated mind might feel as though it is having a dream and is unable to wake up. It might feel more like a ghost than the natural self – the mind-body system – that it remembers as its former self.

It might identify as “the ghost in the machine”.

Summing up

I began by suggesting that personal information about you gives only a superficial view of who you are as an individual. Your life story might encapsulate all the important things that you know about yourself, but self-knowledge is never perfect. As you go through life, you may discover more about who you are.

Aspects of your identity may change over time. Your character might be influenced by changing incentives of the social and economic environment. And you may even change aspects of your personality to some extent, by choosing to develop new habits.

So, where is the essence of your being located? I argue that it is a mistake to think it is located solely in your conscious mind.

Descartes correctly observed that he was thinking, but in concluding “I think, therefore I am” he overlooked the fact that he had already assumed that he was some kind of being.

You are the kind of being that can observe itself. It is difficult to comprehend how you can be both an observer and the object of your observation if you think of yourself as an entity. Thinking of yourself as both observer and object poses no problem if you think of yourself as a complex processing system.

You cannot doubt that you think. You are aware of both the flow of inner experiences – thoughts and feelings – and of your experience of the world in which you live. Thinking about your experience of the world enables you to contemplate the goals you seek, to make choices in pursuit of those goals, and to learn from experience. Your sense of identity is informed both by autobiographical memories and by future projections.

If you accept that wise and well-informed self-direction is integral to your flourishing, you are likely to think of yourself as seeking to become the kind of person who has the practical wisdom and integrity to flourish in accordance with goals you choose and values you endorse.

I have speculated that if your mind was uploaded into a machine, the emulated mind would not perceive itself to be a real person with a body as well as a mind. It might remember you as its former self, but would see itself as being something like a ghost.

You understand who you are from the ongoing experience of your whole self, living in the real world. Walt Whitman captured that well in his poetry. I will leave you to contemplate a fragment from his poem, “A song of myself”:

“My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.”

 
References

Bates, Winton, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing (Hamilton Books, 2021).

Campbell, Richard, The Metaphysics of Emergence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Gallwey, Timothy, The Inner Game of Tennis (Pan Books,1975).

Haidt, Jonathan, The Happiness Hypothesis (Basic Books, 2006).

 Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking Fast and Slow (Penguin, 2011).

 Whitman, Walt, Complete Works of Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Book III ‘Song of Myself’. (The poem, ‘Song of Myself’, was first published in 1855 in the collection Leaves of Grass.)

Are Spontaneous Order and neo-Aristotelian Arguments for a Free Society Compatible?

 This is a guest essay by Dr Edward W. Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business at Wheeling University, and Executive Director of its Institute for the Study of Capitalism and Morality. Ed is author of a trilogy of important books on freedom and flourishing: “Capitalism and Commerce”, “Champions of a Free Society”, and “Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society”. He also has numerous other publications, including several published on this site. (Please see the list after the end of this essay.) 

 

The defense of a free society has emerged from diverse intellectual traditions. One line of argument, associated with thinkers such as Friedrich A. Hayek, Gerald A. Gaus, Jonathan Haidt, and John Hasnas grounds liberty in cultural evolution, spontaneous order, epistemic limits, and moral psychology. From another direction, Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl have developed a neo-Aristotelian justification of natural rights rooted in individualistic perfectionism, virtue ethics, and the metanormative structure of political morality. These two traditions have often been viewed as distinct and divergent: the former emphasizing emergent social complexity, evolved rules, the limits of reason, and epistemological humility; the latter emphasizing teleological ethics, virtue, and the normative structure of human flourishing.

I have been somewhat hard on Hayek’s approach over the years. This is because I have been a strong proponent of the Aristotelian eudaimonist perspective which I believe is foundational and the soul of the idea of a free society. Whereas I saw Austrian economists like Menger and Rothbard taking a realist natural-law-oriented Aristotelian perspective and road toward objective economics, I viewed Hayek’s emphasis on spontaneous order as implying the relative unimportance and inadequacy of individual rationality. Over the years, under the tutelage of Winton Bates, I have gained greater respect for Hayekian ideas. The bridge between my foundational neo-Aristotelian orientation and Hayek’s evolutionary/emergent order/epistemic perspective is the realization that human nature is both fixed and discovery-oriented. We have a fixed need for agency and flourishing but we live in a world of complexity and ignorance.  Whereas one tradition focuses on the teleological requirements of human flourishing, the other tradition focuses on the emergent complexity of social systems. My neo-Aristotelian perspective underpins and complements the cooperation to mutual advantage perspective which incorporates the Hayekian notion that spontaneous order enables individuals to pursue diverse purposes peacefully. Spontaneous order is consistent with individual freedom and human flourishing because it is characterized by voluntary interactions.

This essay argues that these approaches are compatible and complementary. When properly understood, the evolutionary-epistemic arguments of the Hayekian tradition provide the descriptive and explanatory framework for understanding how complex social orders emerge and function, while the neo-Aristotelian perfectionism of Rasmussen and Den Uyl provides the normative foundation for why individual liberty ought to be protected. Together, they offer a comprehensive vision of a free society that is both empirically grounded and ethically justified—a society that emerges spontaneously yet serves the ultimate end of human flourishing.

The Evolutionary and Epistemic Case for a Free Society

At the heart of Hayek's contribution to social theory lies the concept of spontaneous order. Social order, Hayek argues, "is not brought about by human design and concerted agreement; rather, it emerges spontaneously, as the unintended outcome of the actions of many individuals who are separately pursuing their goals”. This insight challenges the constructivist rationalism that has dominated much of Western thought—the presumption that beneficial social institutions must be products of deliberate human design.

The market order exemplifies this spontaneous formation. Coordination is achieved not through central direction but through "a constant readjustment of individual plans in the light of new information encoded in the price system". Prices serve as knowledge-surrogates, allowing individuals to coordinate their activities without possessing more than a sliver of the total information dispersed throughout society. This epistemic function of markets represents one of Hayek's most enduring contributions: the demonstration that decentralized decision-making enables a more efficient use of resources than any centrally planned system could achieve, precisely because knowledge is necessarily dispersed and often tacit.

Gerald Gaus extends this Hayekian insight, arguing that the open society is characterized by a complexity that defies comprehensive moral justification in traditional terms. Drawing on formal models and empirical evidence, Gaus shows that "the Open Society is grounded on the moral foundations of human cooperation originating in the distant evolutionary past, but has built upon them a complex and diverse society that requires rethinking both the nature of moral justification and the meaning of democratic self-governance". Gaus's understanding of evolution makes him more optimistic than Hayek about the ability of modern humans to refrain from adopting a tribal moral outlook. Whereas Hayek suggests that tribal morality makes the open society a precarious achievement, Gaus offers the nuanced view that human social life is characterized by an ongoing tension between a tendency to widen moral obligations and a tendency to pull back to emphasize social proximity. 

Hayek's theory of cultural evolution provides the mechanism by which spontaneous orders develop. This evolutionary process operates independently of human reason: "rules are not selected because individuals understand their functions; rather, practices which had first been adopted for other reasons, or even purely accidentally, were preserved because they enabled the group in which they had arisen to prevail over others".

Hayek's distinctive contribution lies in applying an evolutionary framework to the problem of socio-economic-political organization. His theory of spontaneous order delivers the crucial insight that "if we want to generate in society any particular order of a certain degree of complexity, we should look for general rules of conduct which, if followed by individuals, would tend to induce that order to form spontaneously". These rules of just conduct exhibit specific structural characteristics: they are negative, purpose-independent, abstract, universal, and permanent.

The evolution of the common law provides a paradigmatic example. Judges, in deciding particular cases, "are consciously trying to give greater coherence to the law," yet each decision "is unintentionally playing a part in the formation of a spontaneous order". Through this process of systematic mutual adjustment of expectations, the law evolves toward greater coherence without any comprehensive design.

Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory adds a psychological dimension to this evolutionary account. Drawing on cross-cultural research, Haidt and his collaborators identified innate, modular foundations of human moral reasoning that emerged as adaptive responses to challenges in our evolutionary history. The theory proposes six foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. This framework explains both the universality of moral concerns and their cultural variation.  Haidt argues that moral intuitions precede reasoning and that different cultures emphasize different moral foundations. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize these foundations differently. He explains that liberal societies succeed, not because they eliminate diversity, but because they create institutional frameworks that allow diverse moral psychologies to exist.

In addition, John Hasnas has developed a Hayekian concept of empirical natural rights as pre-political rights that have evolved in the state of nature through human interaction and normatively grounded in social peace. He argues that this pre-political, secular, and practical justification for empirical natural rights can be possessed and enforced in the absence of a centralized state.

The neo-Aristotelian Case for Natural Rights

Rasmussen and Den Uyl identify what they term "Liberalism's Problem": a fundamental tension between ethics and politics. Liberal political principles purport to be universal, applying to all individuals without exception, yet liberalism is not supposed to favor one conception of the good life over another. Moral pluralism is essential to the liberal polity. The challenge, then, is to find "the foundation and structure to deal with this tension between each individual's liberty to pursue his own version of flourishing and the universality of liberalism's tenets".

This problem has led many liberal theorists toward either moral skepticism (denying that we can know what constitutes human flourishing) or moral minimalism (reducing morality to the thinnest possible set of requirements). Rasmussen and Den Uyl reject both approaches. They seek instead to provide a robust ethical foundation for liberalism that nevertheless remains compatible with moral pluralism—a perfectionist basis for non-perfectionist politics.

The solution lies in a crucial distinction between normative and metanormative principles. Normative principles concern what one ought to do or how one ought to be—they guide action and character development. Metanormative principles, by contrast, "regulate the conditions under which [normative] conduct could take place". They do not prescribe particular forms of flourishing but instead establish the framework within which individuals can pursue their own conceptions of the good life.

The linchpin of this argument is the concept of self-direction. Self-direction is characterized as "the act of bringing to bear one's reason and judgment on one's surroundings, making plans to act within or upon them, and conducting oneself accordingly". Crucially, Rasmussen and Den Uyl argue that "self-direction is both a necessary condition for, and an operating condition of, the pursuit and achievement of human flourishing".

This claim has profound implications. One cannot flourish unless one has acted, and acting requires reasoning practically and acting on one's best judgment. Flourishing is not something that happens to a passive recipient; it is an achievement of an active agent. Yet at the same time, "self-direction does not imply any particular form of flourishing". One self-directed person may pursue a religiously influenced conception of flourishing, while another equally self-directed individual pursues a secular form. Self-direction is universal and compatible with pluralism. It is required of all moral agents regardless of their normative viewpoint.

Self-direction is thwarted when others can direct an individual without consent—primarily through the initiation of force. Thus, metanormative principles in the form of individual rights protect the conditions for self-direction by prohibiting the initiation of force. This protection does not favor any particular account of flourishing; it simply ensures that each individual has the space to pursue his or her chosen path.

Rasmussen and Den Uyl characterize their position as Individualistic Perfectionism. This formulation captures both elements of their view: it is perfectionist in affirming that human flourishing is the ultimate standard of value, but it is individualistic in recognizing that flourishing is necessarily achieved by particular persons in their own unique circumstances. There is no single template for human excellence; rather, "human flourishing is something each individual must achieve in his or her own way".

Thus, individualistic perfectionism grounds a natural rights doctrine. Because flourishing requires self-direction, and self-direction requires freedom from coercion, individuals possess natural rights to the conditions of their flourishing. These rights are not derived from social convention or utilitarian calculation but from the very nature of human beings as rational agents capable of directing their own lives toward flourishing ends.

 Building a Bridge—Complementarity and Integration

 The first and most fundamental complementarity between these traditions lies in their respective contributions to descriptive explanation and normative justification. The Hayekian tradition excels at explaining how complex social orders emerge, function, and evolve. It demonstrates that market orders, legal systems, and other institutions can coordinate millions of individuals without any central direction, precisely because they operate through abstract rules that allow for local adaptation and knowledge utilization. It shows that cultural evolution selects rules and practices that enable groups to prosper without requiring that individuals understand why these rules work.

What the Hayekian tradition does less well is provide a normative foundation for why these orders ought to be respected and protected. Hayek's own instrumentalism—his emphasis on the prosperity and coordination that spontaneous orders produce—invites the response that if some other arrangement could produce more prosperity, it would be justified. Moreover, evolutionary arguments alone cannot bridge the is-ought gap. The fact that certain rules have evolved does not, without more, establish that they are morally binding.

This is precisely where the neo-Aristotelian framework supplies what is missing. Rasmussen and Den Uyl's individualistic perfectionism provides a normative grounding for individual rights that does not depend on the outcomes of evolutionary processes. The right to self-direction is not justified because it produces good consequences (though it does), but because self-direction is a necessary condition for human flourishing, and human flourishing is the ultimate standard of value. The rights to life, liberty, and property are not merely useful conventions but moral requirements rooted in the nature of human agency.

Yet these normative requirements are not, as some critics of liberalism have charged, impositions of a particular conception of the good on those who do not share it. Because the metanormative framework protects only the conditions for self-direction, it is compatible with a wide range of substantive conceptions of flourishing. It does not tell one individual how to flourish; it only ensures that he has the freedom to pursue his own vision while respecting the equal freedom of another person to pursue his.

The second complementarity concerns the relationship between social orders and individual flourishing. The Hayekian tradition demonstrates that spontaneous orders generate conditions of prosperity, peace, and coordination that no central planner could replicate. The price system, evolved legal rules, and other spontaneous institutions create a framework within which individuals can pursue their diverse ends more effectively than they could in any deliberately constructed alternative. 

The neo-Aristotelian tradition, by contrast, focuses on what individuals do within that framework. Flourishing is not something that society produces for individuals. It is something that individuals must achieve for themselves through their own choices and actions. However, flourishing requires certain enabling conditions—most notably, freedom from coercion and the ability to direct one's own life. These conditions are precisely what spontaneous orders, when properly constrained by metanormative principles, provide. 

Here we see a deep harmony. The spontaneous order of the market does not guarantee that anyone will flourish. It merely creates the space within which flourishing is possible. As Rasmussen and Den Uyl emphasize, rights "do not guarantee success or even provide the conditions of successful action. All they do is provide the conditions that make such action possible". This is exactly what spontaneous orders do. They establish a framework of general rules that allows individuals to pursue their own purposes without promising that those purposes will be achieved. The rules of a free society—property rights, contract enforcement, prohibitions on force and fraud—do not ensure flourishing, they merely make flourishing possible. The actual achievement of flourishing depends on the virtues, judgments, and efforts of individuals themselves.

A third complementarity concerns the nature of knowledge and practical reasoning. Hayek's evolutionary epistemology emphasizes the limits of explicit, articulable knowledge. Much of what we know is tacit, embedded in practices and habits that we cannot fully explain. The rules that have survived cultural evolution embody a wisdom that exceeds the comprehension of any individual—a theme Hayek developed in his critique of constructivist rationalism. 

This epistemological humility resonates with the Aristotelian emphasis on practical wisdom (phronesis). For Aristotle, ethical knowledge is not like mathematical knowledge; it cannot be reduced to general rules that can be applied mechanically. Practical wisdom involves perception, judgment, and the ability to discern what a particular situation requires. The virtuous person does not simply apply pre-existing rules but sees what is called for in concrete circumstances.

The metanormative framework of rights respects this structure of practical knowledge. By protecting the space for individual judgment rather than prescribing substantive outcomes, it allows each person to exercise practical wisdom in directing his or her own life. The general rules of just conduct—negative, abstract, universal—provide a framework within which individuals can exercise judgment without attempting to substitute for that judgment.

This suggests that the spontaneous order of rules and the teleological structure of human action are not opposed, but mutually supporting. The evolved rules of a free society do not replace individual judgment. Rather, they create the conditions under which individual judgment can operate effectively. They protect the sphere within which practical wisdom is exercised while also providing the general expectations that make coordinated action possible.

Haidt's moral foundations theory provides yet another point of connection. The identification of liberty as a distinct moral foundation suggests that concern for freedom from oppression is not merely a preference or a cultural artifact but a deep feature of human moral psychology. This foundation resonates with the emphasis on self-direction in the neo-Aristotelian framework. Both recognize that individuals have a moral stake in being able to direct their own lives without external domination.

The neo-Aristotelian framework, by grounding rights in the nature of human flourishing rather than in any particular configuration of moral sentiments, provides a normative anchor that can withstand shifts in moral psychology. Even if the Liberty foundation is not universally salient, the requirement of self-direction for flourishing remains. The metanormative framework protects the conditions for flourishing regardless of whether individuals are psychologically attuned to the importance of liberty.

Another point of complementarity has been pointed out by Winton Bates. Whereas Hasnas argues that empirical natural rights have instrumental moral value regardless of the moral theory one adopts, Bates explains that it makes more sense to argue that empirical natural rights provide the metanormative conditions that allow moral conduct to occur.  This metanormative perspective concurs with Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s more foundational theory of  Individualistic Perfectionism

A final point of complementarity concerns the relationship between complexity and pluralism. Gaus emphasizes that the open society generates "autocatalytic diversity"—diversity that feeds on itself, producing ever more complex patterns of belief, value, and practice. This complexity defies traditional modes of moral justification and democratic governance. We cannot, from any single vantage point, comprehend the full range of goods that individuals pursue or the full consequences of our institutional arrangements.

 Rasmussen and Den Uyl's individualistic perfectionism embraces this pluralism while avoiding relativism. Because flourishing is achieved by individuals in their own unique circumstances, we should expect a diversity of flourishing lives. There is no single template for human excellence. Different temperaments, talents, and circumstances call forth different configurations of virtue and achievement. Yet this pluralism does not entail that anything goes—flourishing remains a normative standard, and some ways of life fail to realize it.

 The metanormative framework of rights accommodates this pluralism by protecting the conditions for self-direction without prescribing substantive outcomes. It does not require that we agree on what flourishing consists in. It only requires that we agree on the framework within which we pursue our diverse conceptions. This is precisely the kind of agreement that Gaus, drawing on social contract theory and public reason liberalism, seeks to articulate: an agreement on the rules of the game rather than on the goals to be pursued within it.

Conclusion 

The evolutionary and neo-Aristotelian defenses of a free society, far from being rivals, emerge as complementary accounts of the same phenomenon from different perspectives. The Hayekian tradition, enriched by Gaus's formal modeling and Haidt's moral psychology, explains how free societies emerge, how they function, and why they are fragile. It demonstrates that complex orders can arise spontaneously, that cultural evolution selects for rules that enable coordination and prosperity, and that human moral psychology provides both resources and obstacles for sustaining such orders.

The neo-Aristotelian tradition, as developed by Rasmussen and Den Uyl, explains why such orders are worth defending. It grounds individual rights in the nature of human flourishing, showing that self-direction is both necessary for and an operating condition of the pursuit of excellence. The metanormative framework of rights protects the conditions under which individuals can exercise practical wisdom and achieve flourishing in their own unique ways.

Together, these traditions offer a comprehensive vision: a free society is an emergent order that creates the conditions for human flourishing, and human flourishing is the ultimate end that justifies and limits the exercise of political power. The rules that evolve spontaneously are not arbitrary conventions but embodiments of practical wisdom. The rights that protect individual liberty are not mere constraints but enabling conditions for the good life.

This synthesis has implications beyond academic philosophy. In an age of political polarization and skepticism about liberal institutions, it offers a defense of freedom that is both empirically grounded and ethically correct. It acknowledges the complexity of modern societies while affirming that this complexity serves human purposes. It embraces pluralism without falling into relativism, and it defends universal principles without imposing a single conception of the good. 

The bridge between evolutionary and neo-Aristotelian arguments reveals that liberty and flourishing are not opposed but interdependent. Liberty is the political condition for flourishing, and flourishing is the moral purpose of liberty. In protecting the former, we enable the latter; in pursuing the latter, we justify the former. The free society, understood in this integrated way, is both our evolutionary inheritance and our highest aspiration—a precarious achievement that deserves our understanding and our defense.

References 

Bates, Winton. 2024. “Did Hayek Acknowledge the Importance of Individual Self-Direction in His Vision of Spontaneous Order?”. Freedom and Flourishing. May, 21.

Bates, Winton, 2024. “Did Robert Nozick Hold a View of the Evolution of Natural Rights that is Similar to that Held by John Hasnas?’ Freedom and Flourishing. Nov. 11

Bates, Winton. 2024.’ Can Empirical Natural Rights be Viewed as Metanormative Principles?’ Freedom and Flourishing.  Dec. 10.

Bates, Winton. 2025. “How Can the Study of Human Nature Help us to Reach Normative Conclusions in Political Philosophy?”. Freedom and Flourishing. October, 31.

Bates, Winton. 2026 (forthcoming). “How do the Concepts of Spontaneous Order and Social Evolution Relate to Individual Flourishing?’. In Edward W. Younkins, (ed.) From Politics to Morality: Implications of Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s Norms of Liberty.  London: Bloomsbury. 

Den Uyl, Douglas J. and Rasmussen, Douglas B. 2016. The Perfectionist Turn. Edinburgh University Press.

Gaus, Gerald. 2011.  The Order of Public Reason. Cambridge university Press.

Gaus, Gerald. 2016. The Tyranny of the Ideal. Princeton University Press.

Gaus, Gerald. 2021. The Open Society and Its Complexities. New York: Oxford University Press.

Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Vintage Books,

Hasnas, John. 2024. Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society. Oxford; Oxford University Press.

Hayek, Friedrich A., 1960. The Constitution of Liberty, University of Cambridge Press.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1967. Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. University of Chicago Press.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1973-79. Law, Legislation and Liberty, 3 volumes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Den Uyl., Douglas J. 2005. Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. 

Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Den Uyl., Douglas J. The Realist Turn: Repositioning Liberalism. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Younkins, Edward W. 2024. “Is a Free Society a Multiple Paradigm Ideal?” The Savvy Street. April 14.

 

Other essays by Ed Younkins on this site:

Younkins, Edward W. (2025) “What Contribution did David L. Norton Make to our Understanding of Ethical Individualism?” Freedom and Flourishing. January 18, 2025.

Younkins, Edward W. (2025) “How can dialectics help us to defend liberty?” Freedom and Flourishing. July 8, 2025.

Younkins, Edward W. (2025) “How can Austrian Economics be reconciled with the Neo-Aristotelian philosophy of Freedom and Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. October 24, 2025.

Younkins, Edward W. (2025) “Can Polarized Moral Politics be Bridged by a Neo-Aristotelian Philosophy of Freedom and Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. December 13, 2025.

Younkins, Edward W. (2026) “Does Humanomics Need a Moral Anchor?” Freedom and Flourishing. January 22, 2026.

Younkins, Edward W. (2026) “Is Character Education Compatible With Individualistic Perfectionism” Freedom and Flourishing. February 27, 2026.