Will AI Replace Human Labour? Revisiting a Question I First Asked in 2015

 

In 2015, I wrote an essay entitled, “Will robots replace human labour and reduce real wage levels?” That essay still seems to attract quite a lot of attention even though some of the thoughts in it are now out of date. I did not anticipate the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs).

One of the things I like about my previous essay is the use of down-to-earth examples to illustrate processes. So, I will try to continue in that vein.

Horses, tractors and robots

My previous essay included some paragraphs, quoted from Nick Rowe, illustrating how the replacement of human labour by non-human labour is an ongoing process rather than a new phenomenon:

“Horses were once like robots. Horses could do a lot of the same work that humans could do. Humans and horses can pull things, if you feed them. But then mechanical horses, called tractors, were invented, that could pull heavier things with cheaper food. Tractors pushed horses' wages below subsistence, so the horse population declined.

The robot horse displaced horses, just as horses displaced humans from all the jobs where humans pulled things. But humans, unlike horses, can do lots of other jobs beside pulling things. Humans are very versatile. Horses can't really do anything except pull things. So humans switched to doing other jobs, while horses couldn't. And the marginal product of labour, and hence wages in those other jobs, increased. Horses and tractors were complementary factors to human labour in those other jobs.

But that won't happen if robots are invented that really are just like humans, and can do all the jobs that humans can do. Robots that are just like humans would be just like slaves, rather than like tractors and horses.”

My comment in 2015:

What we are seeing now is robots that are displacing humans from a range of activities and freeing them to do things that robots can’t do - just as horses did. There are adjustment problems for people in the affected industries, but the impact on average real wages is likely to be positive. Over time, superior robots are likely to be invented that will replace the initial series of robots, just as tractors displaced horses. If robots can eventually reproduce like crazy, their capacity to live off “the smell of an oily rag” might mean that wages in many industries in which humans are currently employed will be driven below human subsistence levels.

However, it seems unlikely that robots will ever be viewed by humans as close substitutes for human labour with respect to all attributes relevant to all economic activities. My guess is that many humans will show a strong preference for some goods with a high human labour input e.g. home produced food, restaurant meals and beverages that are served by humans, live music by local musicians, handicrafts and works of art produced by humans, and some manufactured goods that individual humans have designed specifically for themselves or friends and relatives.

My bottom line is that over the next few decades the impact of robots in replacing human labour is likely to be a relatively small part of the total impact of technological change on the quality of life. Rather than worrying about robots replacing human labour perhaps we should be more concerned that the rate of technological progress may be slowing down.

Why do my thoughts of 2015 need revisiting?

In 2015 I was thinking mainly about robots as physical substitutes for human labour, and I posed the choice as one between two models: robots as something close to slave labour (a pure increase in labour supply, competing directly with humans) or robots as something more like horses and tractors (displacing humans from some tasks while freeing them, and raising their marginal productivity, in others). I concluded that robots were unlikely to be close substitutes for humans across all the attributes relevant to production, and that the wage effects of automation would therefore be a comparatively minor part of the overall story over the following few decades.

Large language models (LLMs) were not on my radar in 2015. They change the shape of the question, because they are far closer to general-purpose cognitive substitutes than any robot arm or self-driving vehicle. An LLM does not just replace one narrow task; it can draft, summarise, code, translate, analyse and advise across an enormous range of activities that previously required a trained human. In that sense, the "close substitute" horn of my original dilemma is more relevant to cognitive and creative work than I gave it credit for. I now think the economic impact of LLMs will be massive - considerably larger than the impact of robots in physical production that I was focused on a decade ago.

State plainly, LLMs are closer to general-purpose cognitive substitutes than anything I had in view a decade ago. The AI revolution is very much like an influx of low-cost labour that will replace human labour.

However, it is premature to jump to the conclusion that most of the human population is about to become unemployed and will need to find some source of income other than wages and salaries if they are to survive. In what follows I discuss a range of factors that impinge on the speed and unevenness of dispersion of the new technology before turning my attention to the profound issues associated with checking and validation of AI output.

Human interaction

As argued in my original essay, some activities that depend on human interaction may remain largely immune. People want to be served, taught, cared for, negotiated with and entertained by other people.

Yet, this point should not be overstated. A lot of "human interaction" jobs are information-transfer jobs with a human face on them - for example, customer service, a lot of teaching, first-line medical triage, even therapy. People are apparently willing to accept an AI substitute when it's cheaper, faster, or less judgmental. AI companions, tutoring bots, and mental-health chatbots are already being adopted.

Human advantages

Trades that depend on physical presence and situational judgement - builders, plumbers, electricians, nurses - are unlikely to face serious robotic competition over the next decade or two, whatever progress is made in software.

Diffusion lags

Use of AI in physical production processes is usually a costly and slow process. Diffusion into actual production processes can take many years. Restructuring enterprises – investing capital, redesigning workflows, retraining staff - is likely to take considerably longer than development of the knowhow and systems design which makes automation feasible.

By contrast, however, adoption of AI can occur rapidly in many service sector industries. Individual employees began using AI on their laptops last year, with no capital expenditure and no sign-off from anyone. That is arguably why uptake has already been faster than any prior general-purpose technology. In service sector industries, the labour-market effect may arrive informally and quietly, well ahead of any restructuring.

Costly inputs

The relevance of the "smell of an oily rag" idea in my original piece - the thought that machines might reproduce and operate so cheaply that they would drive human wages toward subsistence – depends on the time period we are considering. During the next few years, electric power and compute will be costly; the marginal cost of running systems at scale is real and substantial.

In the longer term, however, the situation will look different. Computational and financial expense of generating outputs from trained models is falling rapidly. Within a few decades, what looks now like an unusually capable but costly input is likely to look more like a flood of costless labour.

Potential for entrepreneurship

We should take account of the potential for enterprising individuals, rather than large incumbent firms, to exploit these tools quickly - using AI to launch new products and services. That will create new employment opportunities, but not necessarily for the same people who lost the old ones, at anything like the same wage, on anything like the same timescale.

The more important point is that the new technology may have potential to help large numbers of people to find hidden entrepreneurial capabilities. As I noted in a recent essay, entrepreneurs may market new products to satisfy needs that consumers previously didn’t know they had. For the most part, those innovations are likely to be relatively minor and only of local or regional significance, but they could add substantially to the incomes of the new entrepreneurs and, in aggregate, make a substantial contribution to national income.

Complementarity

The "horses and tractors" story is still relevant because humans are using AI as a tool to raise their personal productivity. Adding an LLM app to a personal computer is like adding a hydraulic arm to a tractor – the hydraulic arm enables the driver to become more productive because he can use the tractor to lift things rather than just pull things.

Nevertheless, general-purpose AI has potential to displace humans in a wide range of routine cognitive tasks over the next decade or so. And, over the longer term, the market adjustment mechanism can be expected to have progressively less scope to switch humans to other jobs.

Arguably, like most of the other points discussed above, the complementarity point seems more relevant to considering the impact of AI over the next few years than to considering what is likely to happen in the decades ahead.

It is now time to introduce a more profound consideration – verification.

Who will be responsible for checking what AI does?

Imagine that vast numbers of aliens suddenly arrive from outer space and are willing and able to do nearly all the cognitive and physical work that humans do at much lower cost than humans. However, even though these alien agents are friendly to humans, they cannot always be trusted to produce outcomes that meet appropriate quality standards and respect individual rights (of humans). Adverse outcomes will sometimes occur because the agents are fallible or because they may be willing to “cut corners” in pursuit of goals. (Those are traits they share with humans.) At other times, adverse outcomes will arise because some humans will instruct the agents to cut corners or infringe the rights of others. The use of agents does not remove the need for principals to check and validate outputs.

That scenario is similar to the one explored in a paper entitled, “Some Simple Economics of AGI” by Christian Catalini, Xiang Hui and Jane Wu, published by SSRN, February 24, 2026. The authors’ core thesis is that artificial general intelligence (AGI) makes output cheap and abundant; human verification becomes the scarce factor; and the economy’s bottleneck shifts from doing to checking.

Catalini et al describe a dynamic process leading to adverse outcomes because the availability of humans with necessary oversight skills doesn’t expand sufficiently as the cost to automate collapses:

“The current "human-in-the-loop" equilibrium is unstable. It is eroded from below as apprenticeship pathways collapse (the Missing Junior Loop), shrinking human expertise precisely when oversight becomes most valuable. It is eroded from within as experts codify their own obsolescence (the Codifier's Curse), converting experience into training data. As capabilities outpace oversight, deploying unverified systems becomes privately rational -introducing a "Trojan Horse" externality of misaligned output. Using AI to verify AI only manufactures false confidence as correlated blind spots propagate. Left unmanaged, these forces pull toward a Hollow Economy of explosive nominal output but decaying human agency.”

The authors also present a more optimistic scenario:

“Yet this outcome is not inevitable. The answer is not a retreat into obsolescence, but a radical elevation of human purpose. By scaling verification infrastructure alongside agentic capabilities, the forces that threaten collapse become the catalyst for unbounded discovery, experimentation, and execution - powering an Augmented Economy.”

Nevertheless, after I had finished reading the article, I was left with the impression that that authors think we are heading rapidly towards a Hollow Economy. In their Conclusion they write:

“Autonomy is fundamentally outpacing oversight. Open-source agent swarms are already operating autonomously at scale—integrated with payments, infrastructure provisioning, and live user data—producing the first visible instances of unverified agentic output in the wild. The same infrastructure that enables accidental harm presents the ultimate attack surface for deliberate abuse, granting malicious actors the leverage to scale catastrophic harm at the marginal cost of compute. Inside major software firms, AI produces a material share of new code, a share executives openly project rising toward a majority in the near future.” (The authors cite references that have been omitted from this quote.)

Catalini et al have provided an important warning about what might happen, but it seems to me that a more nuanced view might be appropriate, taking account of the potential for a diversity of responses by individual firms and the incentives of the legal framework.

Expect diverse responses

I don’t think Catalini et al have suggested explicitly that intense competition will cause firms to engage in “a race to the bottom”. However, that idea surfaces frequently in public discussion of competition and may underlie fears about the emergence of a Hollow Economy. A problem with race to the bottom theory is that it assumes that all firms will make the same assessments about the strategies most likely to enhance their profitability. The theory ignores the possibility that while some firms will see advantages in reducing standards, others will see reputational advantages in maintaining high standards.

It seems likely that while some firms will seek to profit by cutting corners on validation of output, others will focus on enhancing longer term profitability by seeking to build inhouse expertise in checking and validation of output. Interestingly, by drawing attention to the potential for a widespread validation problem to emerge, the paper by Catalini et al may encourage more firms to pursue an inhouse training strategy.

It should also be noted that even though AI is likely to evolve rapidly to become more efficient at verification, the existence of a technically perfect verifier does not solve the accountability problem. As one paper explains, high-stakes domains require a human who understands the content and accepts responsibility for its use, even if the AI's check is flawless.

Having introduced the concept of accountability, we now need to consider how the choices which firms make are likely to be influenced by the incentives provided by the legal and political environment in which they operate.

Legal liability

There is a good reason why I have chosen the Roman legal maxim, “He who acts through another does the act himself” as the epigraph for this essay. That maxim has modern legal application in laws which establish that principals are legally responsible for the authorized acts and contracts performed by their agents.

Existing tort and regulatory frameworks already hold humans responsible when AI-assisted outcomes go wrong. This complicates claims that unverified deployment of AI is likely to be highly profitable. In any context where firms currently adopt rigorous checking practices to reduce potential legal liability for damage to others, they will continue to have an incentive to maintain rigorous checking practices. Insurance companies offering cover for legal liability may refuse cover to firms which cut corners.

Regulation

Government regulation impinges on a wide range of activities in modern economies. Firms using AI will still incur penalties if they fail to meet regulatory requirements. For good or ill, that places an increased burden on firms to have checking mechanisms in place to ensure that compliance occurs.

In respect of some industries, e.g. medicine, law and education, government regulation typically determines who may supply services. For example, if an individual uses AI to diagnose the nature of an illness they suffer from, they are likely to be required to consult a human doctor to check that diagnosis before they can obtain pharmaceuticals to treat the illness.

In recent years, the concept of "meaningful human control" has entered legal-political discussion in response to worries that autonomous systems create a "responsibility gap" where lethal or harmful outcomes occur but no human can properly be held morally responsible for them. In a paper published in 2018, Filippo Santoni de Sio and Jeroen van den Hoven presented a philosophical account of conditions that need to apply for humans to remain ultimately in control of autonomous weapons and other autonomous systems. The authors suggest systems should be able to respond to a “tracking” condition (relating to relevant moral reasons of the humans designing and deploying the system and relevant facts in the environment in which the system operates) and a “tracing” condition (to enable the outcome of its operations to be traced back to at least one human along the chain of design and operation). The authors also suggest that meaningful human control requires training systems to improve users’ understandings of the risks and responsibilities associated with operating them.

For present purposes, the important point is that meaningful human control requires substantial human inputs.

It is unfortunately also necessary to note that advances in AI have added to the capability of predatory individuals and organizations (including authoritarian governments) to purposefully cause financial and physical harm. In that context, humans may need to focus more attention on protecting themselves from predation.

So, will AI replace humans?

After all that I have written above, perhaps the most appropriate conclusion would be that I am not a prophet, so I don’t claim to know whether AI will replace humans. That is certainly the case if we are talking about what might happen in the 22^nd century or beyond.

However, if we are talking about the next few decades, it is possible to make some relevant points:

• ·       The economic impact of LLMs is likely to be massive. This is a major step in the ongoing process of replacement of human labour by non-human labour.
• ·        The impact of LLMs will be uneven. In the services sector, there is likely to be substantial displacement of human labour engaged in routine cognitive activities; trades that depend on the physical presence of humans will be less affected, and some activities involving human interaction will be largely immune. Automation is likely to continue to proceed at a moderate pace in manufacturing and agriculture.
• ·        A major human input will still be required to verify AI output. Firms will need verification to protect their reputations.
• ·        Existing legal and regulatory frameworks hold humans responsible when AI assisted outcomes go wrong –  providing additional incentives for human verification.  

Even after taking account of the human labour required to verify output, we are obviously still talking about substantial displacement of human labour. However, that doesn’t necessarily translate into a situation where there will be growing numbers of intelligent humans either enjoying a life of leisure (or sitting in their homes twiddling their thumbs).

This brings me back to the bottom line of my 2015 essay - that the wage impact of automation would be a relatively small part of the total impact of technological change on the quality of life. For the next decade or two, I think that claim still holds, for the reasons set out above: uneven diffusion, the persistence of human-interaction and physical-presence work, and the ongoing need for human verification. Over a longer horizon, as compute costs continue to fall and verification itself becomes easier to scale, I am considerably less confident the claim will hold - which only means my 2015 self was answering a shorter-run question than he realised.

A massive growth of productivity offers potential for a massive expansion in human leisure, but that outcome isn’t inevitable. It is worth remembering in that amid the Great Depression of the 1930s John Maynard Keynes predicted (in an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”) that by now we would be able to satisfy our needs without having to work more than three hours a day. Average incomes rose more than Keynes predicted and working hours fell much more gradually. Keynes had no way to predict the emergence of new products to satisfy needs that consumers didn’t know they had.

It remains an open question of whether humans will use the growth of productivity resulting from AI for increased leisure, or whether they will continue to work long hours to earn the income required to satisfy needs that they don’t yet know they have.

Why Bother Considering Whether Government is Necessary?

 

Before my most recent trip to India I had to choose which of two recently purchased books I should take with me: Aeon Skoble’s Deleting the State, or Salvatore Babones’ Dharma Democracy. I chose Dharma Democracy (which I have since written about here) because I didn’t like the idea of trying to explain to an airport official that Deleting the State is a philosophical treatise rather than a manual for the violent overthrow of governments.

At that time, I would not have been able to point to pages 107-8 where Skoble argues explicitly against violent action to remove a government in any “nominally liberal democracy”. In the Afterword of the recently published second edition of his book, the author takes the opportunity to emphasize his opposition to violence by giving reasons for eschewing it and reiterating that deleting the state means “deleting the idea of the necessity of the state”.

The subtitle of the book is Requiem for an Illusion. The illusion Skoble refers to is the Hobbesian Fear that in the absence of a government “to keep them all in awe” people would find themselves at each others’ throats - in a war “of every man against every other man”.  I will discuss later the author’s reasons for considering the Hobbesian Fear an illusion.

Skoble regards the neo-Aristotelian conception of human flourishing provided by Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl as providing the best defense of a theory of individual liberty. He notes, however, that in Norms of Liberty the Dougs leave open the question of whether a political/legal order defending individual rights necessitates the existence of a state. Skoble points out that the difference between a state and a political/legal order is not trivial.

What is the point of philosophical anarchism? 

In the Afterword Skoble writes:

“If deleting the state means deleting the generally held notion that we need to have a state, and the only way to do it is to make philosophical arguments, we’re in a lot of trouble. Philosophers have a poor track record of being persuasive to large majorities. So what, one might ask, is the point of philosophical anarchism?”

The author goes on to answer that question cogently. However, before considering his response, I want to present a contrary argument.

Is the existence of government an issue that should occupy the minds of those who believe that liberty supports human flourishing? As far as I know, there is no country in the world in which citizens are currently faced with a choice between having a minimal state or no state at all. In liberal democracies – the countries that currently enjoy the greatest personal and economic freedom – liberty is being threatened by political movements with authoritarian tendencies. Authoritarianism is presented in the wrapping of different varieties of collectivist idealism which offer citizens the opportunity to attribute personal and social problems to immigration, foreign competition, the greed of the wealthy, systemic discrimination, environmental degradation or anything else that appears to justify a larger role for government. Shouldn’t libertarians be focusing their attention on supporting the political/legal order – democracy, or representative government - that has been most successful in promoting personal and economic freedom?

Readers who doubt that the countries with greatest economic and personal freedom are liberal democracies should take a look at the graphs shown in an essay I wrote last year. There may be serious errors in common measures of personal freedom for some countries - as noted in my recent essay on Indian politics – but the weight of evidence suggests that representative government has hitherto been more successful in defending individual rights than any other contemporary form of politico/legal order that currently exists in the real world.

So, how do I justify spending time thinking about utopian concepts such as philosophical anarchism instead of spending all my efforts opposing the advances of authoritarianism?

The first defence that comes to mind is that I find it interesting to think about the question of whether government is necessary. I think that is sufficient justification for a human to spend some time thinking about any topic.

However, I have reasons to be particularly interested in the potential for utopian thinking to play a useful role in considering public policy issues. I have claimed in the past:

“We are more likely to improve opportunities for human flourishing if we approach public policy issues with a view to both (a) upholding ideals that ought to apply and (b) the real-world constraints that should not be overlooked.”

I made that comment in a short essay considering Chris Sciabarra’s discussion of the anti-utopianism in the methodology of Marx and Hayek in Marx, Hayek and Utopia.

Skoble argues that anarchist arguments can help people to think about the limits of state power. He suggests that they can be used to clarify that getting a different group of office-holders into power will not resolve problems that are attributable to institutional structures. He cites mass incarceration and business regulation that stifles innovation as examples. He sums up:

“To make the case against the state is to undermine the idea that coercion is necessary for social order or that it is beneficial to human society. It is to point the way toward the continual need to scale back the scope of state power. It is to affirm the priorities of liberty and its necessary connection to human flourishing, and to keep us mindful of the ways in which the state, and our often-unthinking obedience to it, hinders that flourishing.”

Allaying the Hobbesian Fear

Those who argue that a government is necessary to maintain social cooperation often refer to the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory. Players can obtain a greater payoff if they both cooperate than if they both defect. However, each player has an incentive to defect in the hope of obtaining a greater payoff at the expense of the other player. On that basis, it is claimed that in the absence of a coercive intervention to enforce cooperation both players will end up defecting.

However, Skoble observes that defection is only the winning strategy in a one-shot game - social cooperation emerges spontaneously when the prisoner’s dilemma game is repeated over long periods. In support of this argument he refers to Robert Axelrod’s book The Evolution of Cooperation, which found that a tit-for-tat (reciprocation) strategy gave players higher payoffs than constant defection. The author notes that strategies that allow for the possibility that a defecting player may have made a mistake offer higher payoffs than tit-for-tat.

It may be worth adding that the utility maximizing assumptions of game theory tend to be less conducive to social cooperation than are real people engaged in trust games in a laboratory setting. As Vernon Smith and Bart Wilson noted in Humanomics, anonymously paired people are “predominantly caring other-regarding, independent actors in the personal social exchange context of trust games in the laboratory”.

Skoble makes the point that law ought to be construed as a natural consequence of attempts of people to live and work together rather than as something requiring a coercive monopoly power. Among other things, he notes that enforcement of property rights requires “a society that in fact recognizes the practicality of recognizing property rights” rather than a “monopolistic coercive authority”. In that context he discusses the history of spontaneous evolution of civil law conflict resolution drawing upon works by David Friedman and Murray Rothbard.

The author devotes a chapter to providing an extended example of the potential for disaster relief to be provided via voluntary cooperation rather than a centralized political authority.

In his final chapter, Skoble discusses the question of whether disagreements between libertarian anarchists and minimal-state libertarians are radically incommensurable, or capable of being resolved by dialogue. He argues that there are “no fundamental premises or values that separate anarchists from libertarian minimum-statists” that would prevent the differences between them being resolved by dialogue. There is even potential for dialogue between libertarians and welfarist liberals. Political philosophy can explore relevant questions such as the circumstances, if any, under which the will of the majority should override individual liberty.

Additional considerations

One argument that is sometimes advanced in opposition to philosophical anarchism is that a written constitution helps to protect liberty. Perhaps that is true of the United States, but it is not difficult to find examples of countries where constitutional provisions have failed to protect liberty. The former Soviet Union comes to mind. There are also notable examples of countries which have maintained a relatively high degree of liberty without written constitutional protections. Britain comes to mind.  

Roderick Long has suggested that those who believe government is necessary are being misled by a metaphysically illusive picture of what constitutional restraints are and how they work:

“The metaphysical illusion I referred to is the habit of thinking of constitutional restraints (checks and balances, separation of powers, etc.) as though these structures existed in their own right, as external limitations on society as a whole. But in fact those structures exist only insofar as they are continually maintained in existence by human agents acting in certain systematic ways. A constitution is not some impersonal, miraculously self-enforcing robot. It’s an ongoing pattern of behavior, and it persists only so long as human agents continue to conform to that pattern in their actions.” (Long, 2008)

I have previously discussed similar views of the nature of constitutions by Sheldon Richman (here) and Douglass North (here).

A more difficult argument to contend with is that the free rider problem would prevent adequate provision of national defense. I think John Hasnas has advanced an appropriate response to that argument. He suggests that an inability to raise sufficient capital to engage in foreign military adventures or pre-emptive warfare without resort to coercion proves nothing about the potential for defense against outside aggression to be funded voluntarily.

Hasnas acknowledges that he doesn’t know whether sufficient funds could be raised by voluntary means to fund protection against outside aggression. He suggests:

“No one believes that we can transition from a world of states to anarchy instantaneously. No reasonable anarchist advocates the total dissolution of government tomorrow. Once we turn our attention to the question of how to move incrementally from government to anarchy, it becomes apparent that national defense would be one of the last governmental functions to be de-politicized.”

That seems to me to be a sensible position to adopt. It does not preclude the possibility that a society that moves incrementally to reduce coercion of some by others will one day end up not requiring coercion to ensure appropriate provision of any goods currently provided by governments.

Conclusion

This essay has been prompted by my reading of the Second edition of Aeon Skoble’s book, Deleting the State.

Early in the essay, I posed the question of whether the existence of government is an issue that should currently occupy the minds of libertarians in the light of current threats to liberty by political movements with authoritarian tendencies. Skoble provides an appropriate response in his defense of philosophical consideration of the possibility of anarchy. In particular, he suggests that such philosophical endeavours help libertarians to make the point that getting a different group of office holders into power will not resolve problems that are attributable to the existence and scope of state power.

A central concern of the book is to allay the Hobbesian Fear that people will be unable to obtain the benefits of social cooperation in the absence of a government to maintain order. In my view, Skoble provides strong arguments to allay that fear.

I endorse Skoble’s view that law ought to be construed as a natural consequence of attempts of people to live and work together, rather than as something requiring a coercive monopoly power. Constitutional restraints are not self-enforcing. It cannot be assumed that they would continue to offer protection of the rights of citizens if enforcement of them did not have broad community support.

The question of how national defense could be provided without coercive taxation is probably the most challenging obstacle to attempts by philosophical anarchists to persuade minarchists that anarchy is a viable option. In my view, it makes sense to acknowledge the difficulties that would be encountered at present in ensuring adequate voluntary provision of defense resources. That doesn’t mean, however, that it makes sense to assume that coercive taxation will always be required to fund defense. Libertarians who have the objective of reducing coercion “as much as possible in society”, should leave open the possibility that at some stage elimination of the state could become a viable option.  

References

Axelrod, Robert, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1984).

Babones, Salvatore, Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy (Connor Court Publishing, 2025).

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

Hayek, F. A. The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960).

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

Long, R. T. “Market anarchism as constitutionalism”, in R. T. Long & T. R. Machan (Eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a government part of a free country? (Ashgate Publishing, 2008). pp. 133–154.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew, Marx, Hayek and Utopia (State University of New York Press, 1995).

Skoble, Aeon J. Deleting the State: Requiem for an Illusion, Second edition (Independent Institute, 2026).

Smith, Vernon L., and Bart J. Wilson, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Does voting just encourage them?

 

A couple of weeks ago the thought struck me that it was about time I wrote something about the personal ethics of voting. That turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated.

At first, I thought that I should argue that it is unethical to vote because politics is a dirty business. As a person who often espouses principles of libertarianism and decentralism (see the preceding post on this blog) I see voting as akin to online shopping with known fraudsters – you know that the package of goods they deliver will never be the same as the one you thought you were buying. You should avoid shopping with known fraudsters, and you should avoid voting because whoever you vote for a politician will be elected.

Then I thought of some problems with that analogy. What happens if you really need the goods that the politicians are advertising? Who will mend the potholes in your road if you don’t vote for a politician who promises to get it done? Perhaps you might tell me that you and your neighbours could organise a working bee and do it yourself. Good idea!

However, if you don’t vote, who will restrain government spending? I expect that the more cynical among you will respond that no-one will restrain government spending, irrespective of whether you vote, or who you vote for.

When my reasoning took me to that point, I couldn’t immediately think of an appropriate response. That was when I decided that to bring clarity to my mind I should read again the book, “Don’t Vote – It just encourages the bastards”, by the late, great P J O’Rourke.  My discussion of the book provides only a small sample of the humor and wisdom in it. Despite having been written over 12 years ago, the book contains insightful comments about people who are still on the political stage in America, including Donald Trump. However, that is somewhat tangential to the focus of this article.

You might think that this book would make a strong case against voting, but the old saying about not judging a book by its cover does seems to apply in this instance. O’Rourke suggests that voting does have a purpose: “We vote to throw the bastards out”.  The problem, as I see it, is that when enough voters manage to persuade each other to vote to throw politicians out of office, that doesn’t establish a regime of peaceful human flourishing without any interfering politicians. Voters throw out one lot of politicians by voting another lot into office.

One of the funniest parts of the book is a listing of the personality characteristics of people who are drawn to politics. The first item on the list is “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity”. After listing 9 other characteristics, O’Rourke acknowledges that he has just quoted from the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.

Nevertheless, O’Rourke acknowledges that “individual politicians are, after all, individuals like the rest of us and should be judged individually”:

“It would be wrong—very tempting, but wrong—to think of them all as simply bastards”.

He elaborates:

“I’ve spent some time with politicians. I like politicians. I’m friends with politicians from both sides of the aisle. Politicians are fine until they stick their noses into things they don’t understand, such as most things. Then politicians turn into rachet-jawed purveyors of monkey doodle and baked wind.”

Unfortunately, I must agree. The politicians I have met personally have all been likeable. When you meet them, they seem to be pleasant people (perhaps in the same way that the scammers who seek my friendship on Facebook often seem pleasant). A few politicians I have met even had their hearts and heads in the right places. The one who comes to mind most readily is Bert Kelly, an Australian politician whom I have written about previously.

Sometimes when I see a politician performing on TV, I wonder how a nice person like her, or him, ended up like that – I mean, like a bad actor saying things they don't believe. The fact that their future political careers are at stake is no consolation.

Is there something inherently evil about politics? O’Rourke writes:

“Maybe politics is inherently evil. Maybe politics is so evil that anything we do for it, even attempting to supply it with morality, just feeds the beast. I trust this isn’t true but I can’t say the thought doesn’t trouble me.”

That thought troubles me, too.

In his discussion of morality in politics, O’Rourke introduces (on page 88) the Venn diagram, reproduced at the top of this article. He drew the two circles to intersect, implying that there can be such a thing as moral political behavior.

It seems to me to be appropriate to maintain some optimism about democratic political processes. They don’t do much to protect our liberty and pursuit of happiness, but not many of us would freely choose to live under any of the available alternative forms of government. Many people claimed that democracy could not exist as a permanent form of government because it would not take long for citizens to learn that they could vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. Indeed, that is largely what democratic politics has been about for as long as it has existed. Yet democracy survives! Perhaps democracy’s secret of success has been the existence of sufficient voters and politicians who have been willing to stop playing politics when crises have become imminent.

I often wish that I could be apolitical, but O’Rourke has persuaded me that is not practicable:

“The democratic political process is like the process of our children going through adolescence. There’s not much we can do to improve it and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We cannot, however, just declare ourselves to be apolitical any more than we can declare ourselves to be “aparental.” Here are the car keys, son. Dad’s stash is in the nightstand drawer. Why don’t you take my ATM card while you’re at it? See you when you’re thirty.”

It certainly appears that there is not much that we, as individuals, can do to change the outcomes of the political process. The chance that your vote will be decisive is miniscule. But people do talk about politics and influence one another about how they will cast their votes. Paradoxically, even those of us who would like to be apolitical can make a difference if we decide that we don’t like the direction that politics is taking and choose to vote.

Before concluding, I should offer a personal explanation about the relevance of the personal ethics of voting to me, as a person who lives in a country where voting is compulsory. It is possible to choose not to vote in Australia without displaying a great deal of courage. It is possible to attend a polling place, chat with your neighbours, eat a “democracy sausage”, exchange greetings with people offering “how to vote” literature, have your name ticked off on the voting roll, be handed voting papers, and still not cast a valid vote. In a secret ballot, no-one knows what you write on the voting papers before you put them into the ballot boxes.

Conclusion

When I began writing this article, I was not sure whether I would end up persuading myself to vote, or to have nothing to do with the political process. P J O’Rourke helped me to persuade myself that there is such a thing as moral political behavior.

Democratic politics is certainly a dirty business. It doesn’t do much to protect liberty or the pursuit of happiness, but most of us would choose to put up with democratic immorality rather than to live under any of the currently available alternative forms of governance. Paradoxically, the survival of democracies may be attributable to the willingness of sufficient numbers of voters and politicians to refrain from playing politics – to stop raiding the public treasury - when crises become imminent.

Although the chances of an individual vote being decisive are miniscule, individuals do influence one another in how they cast their votes. Individuals who don’t like the way politics is heading are more likely to improve outcomes if they choose to vote and encourage other like-minded people to do likewise, rather than choosing to refrain from having anything to do with the political process.

How should Lachlan Macquarie be remembered?

 

Lachlan Macquarie was governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. At that time, the colony comprised much of the Australian mainland (known then as New Holland), Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) and other island territories.

Many years ago, when I studied Australian history at school, I came to the view that Macquarie, the fifth governor of New South Wales, was one of the best of the colonial governors. I still feel that Macquarie made a positive contribution to cultural values that are widely held in Australia today. It is unusual for despots to be good people, but I think Macquarie was one.

The above photo is of a sculpture of Lachlan Macquarie, located by Macquarie Street in Sydney. The inscription on the plaque describes Macquarie as “a perfect gentleman”, while that on his tomb in Scotland describes him as “The Father of Australia”.

Macquarie is also remembered in the many places named after him. Some that readily come to mind are the suburb of Canberra, where my family lived for several years; Port Macquarie, on the north coast of New South Wales, where we have enjoyed some holidays; and Lake Macquarie, where we now live.

Proposal to re-name Lake Macquarie

I have been prompted to write this article because there is currently a move for Lake Macquarie to revert to its original name, Awaba. The Indigenous inhabits of the region, Awabakal people, knew the lake by that name for many thousands of years prior to European settlement. I see no reason to oppose the name change if it can be accomplished without a great deal of cost and confusion, and in a spirit of reconciliation.

However, some of the proponents of the name change seem to me to be making it difficult for it to be accomplished in a spirit of reconciliation because they are arguing that Lachlan Macquarie does not deserve to be honoured. It looks to me as though they want him to be cancelled!

Those who seek to denigrate Macquarie refer to the fact that he ordered a military operation that led to a massacre of aboriginal people. They don’t have regard to the circumstances in which that order was given, or consider what alternative courses of action Macquarie could have taken.

What would you have done in his shoes?

I can understand why some readers might object to the idea of contemplating what it might be like to occupy the shoes of a colonial despot. Some might argue that those shoes did not have to be filled. The British could have chosen not to establish the colony in the first place. They could have found some other way to solve their problem of over-crowded prisons, and thus avoided encroaching upon the lands of Indigenous people.

However, as I see it, if similar choices to those confronting Macquarie were not faced by an alternative British despot, they would have been faced by a despot from France or some other European country. When Britain established the colony, other European powers were seeking to establish colonies throughout the world. So, if the British had not established the colony, it is highly unlikely that the Indigenous people would have been left alone to pursue their traditional lifestyles.

Lachlan Macquarie was a reluctant appointee to the position of governor.  The biographical history by M H Ellis indicates that after having served with the British army in India for 25 years, Macquarie considered it to be unfair that he was being posted to the colony. (Ellis, 166)

In contemplating what you would have done in Macquarie’s shoes, it might be helpful to consider his motives, the circumstances that led to the military operation, and whether alternative approaches might have led to more tranquil relations between Indigenous people and settlers.

Macquarie’s motives

On arrival in the colony, Macquarie expressed the wish that “the natives of the country, when they came in the way in a peaceable manner, might not be molested in their persons and property by anyone, but that they should always be treated with kindness and attention, so as to conciliate them as much as possible to the British Government and manners.”  (Ellis, 179)

How could Macquarie expect the Indigenous people to remain peaceable when their land was being taken away from them? I see some evidence that Macquarie saw potential for mutual benefit from more productive use of the land, and by helping Indigenous people to develop new skills and habits. From his paternalistic perspective, the Indigenous people were wasting their lives “in wandering thro’ their native woods … in quest of the immediate means of subsistence”. He saw them as having qualities that “if properly cultivated and encouraged might render them not only less wretched and destitute” but “progressively useful to the country according to their capabilities”. He expressed the view that they could “advance toward a state of comfort and security”. (Ellis, 352-3).

Macquarie allocated some land for use by Indigenous people on the grounds that they were “a harmless race, who have been without struggle driven by the progress of British industry from their ancient places of habitation”. (Ellis, 358)

Unfortunately, Macquarie received only lukewarm support for this approach from the British government. If the policy had been pursued vigorously by the British government, the Indigenous people would not have suffered such great deprivation and humiliation in subsequent decades.

Circumstances that led to the massacre

A deterioration in relations between Indigenous people and European settlers seems to have occurred in 1814 mainly because the settlers retaliated when Indigenous people helped themselves to unfenced fields of corn planted by the settlers. Macquarie saw fault on both sides. As he saw it, there had been a violation of property rights by the Indigenous people, but it was not a serious violation. He admonished the settlers to behave with patience and forbearance and not to take the law into their own hands. He warned that future aggressiveness by either whites or blacks would be punished in an exemplary manner. (Ellis, 353-4)

Nevertheless, attacks on settlers continued and some abandoned their farms. The governor felt that a severe response was required to prevent the frequent occurrence of trouble. In April 1816 he ordered a military action to drive the mountain tribes a safe distance from the settlement.  (Ellis, 355-6) Those seeking an account of the massacre can find relevant documents on the Australian Museum website. In a subsequent proclamation, Macquarie gave settlers the right to drive away Indigenous people who appeared armed with weapons within a mile of any town, village, or farm.

The military action had the desired effect of restoring order. Members of local tribes attended a friendly meeting which the governor held in December 1816 to, among other things, consult with them “on the best means of improving their present condition”.

Alternative approaches

The limits of my knowledge of the relevant history make it difficult for me to assess the options that faced Macquarie. Perhaps there was potential for him to restore order by adopting a response that was targeted to a greater extent at individual perpetrators of violence rather than on tribes of people, but I have not seen any authoritative discussion of that possibility.

It seems unlikely that Macquarie would have considered the option of attempting to achieve peace by limiting the area of European settlement. That approach would have been likely to lead to rebellion by the settlers and Macquarie’s replacement as governor.

The governor could have continued to pursue a conciliatory approach but there is no reason to believe that would have been successful in discouraging attacks on settlers, or setter retaliation. The most likely outcome, it seems to me, would have been an increase in violence on both sides, with a more extensive military intervention required eventually to end the conflict.

Concluding comments

My view that Lachlan Macquarie made a positive contribution to cultural values that are widely held in Australia today is based mainly on the humane approach he adopted toward the people of the colony. He has been remembered particularly for his humane treatment of convicts and ex-convicts, who made up about 90 percent of the European population of the colony at the time of his appointment. Macquarie saw that some of the most meritorious people in the colony had come there as convicts and sought to treat them justly by giving them the opportunities to hold responsible positions.

Macquarie sought to extend this humane approach to the indigenous people, but was faced with difficult choices. Those who criticize the choices he made should consider what they would have done in his shoes.

What kind of being are you?

 

Self-reflection tells you that you are a conscious being that is aware of its own existence in the real world. You are aware of having a mind and a body. Since you are a thinking being, you have probably worked out that you exist even when you are not conscious. You have probably also noticed that even people who claim to believe that the physical world is an illusion tend to behave as though they believe it is real. For example, you see them walking through doors rather than walking through walls.

Does the existence of your body indicate that you are an entity. If I could see you, I would affirm that you look like a being that has a distinct and independent existence – that is, an entity.

Do you see yourself as an entity? You may think of yourself as an entity, but how do you think of yourself while you are observing your own thoughts?

You could think of yourself as an observer watching your thoughts pass by like leaves on a stream. Some of the thoughts might be about yourself. If the thought “I am a thinking entity”, passes your mind, you might observe, “I am having the thought that I am a thinking entity”. That is an interesting observation. You can’t deny that you are thinking.

However, if you are an entity, how can you be both the observer and the object 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 object who is observed, who is also you.

Richard Campbell suggests a way out of this dilemma in his book, The Metaphysics of Emergence. 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”.

As I discussed in a previous article about Campbell’s book, 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’.”

As you think about your “not yet”, you might imagine a future that is different than your past. That might be just wishful thinking, or you might be considering what options are available to achieve a vision that you have for your own future.

Conclusion

You are a being that is consciously aware of its own existence in the real world. You may think of yourself as an entity – a being that has a distinct and independent existence. However, that perception is at odds with the fact that you can observe yourself thinking. A single entity cannot be both an observer and the object of observation. It makes more sense to view yourself as a complex process system.

Do people have a right to choose where they will live?

 

                                        Vietnamese boat people arriving in Australia in 1976

In the Western liberal democracies there are few people who claim that individuals do not have the right to choose where they live. However, many people set limits on the extent to which they recognize that right. They only recognize that foreigners have the right to live in their neighborhood if they meet stringent immigration requirements.

Is that a reasonable view? If people readily accept that individuals should be free to choose where they will live within national borders, why are they reluctant to accept that individuals have a right to choose which country to live in?

If you view national borders as arbitrary lines on maps, it will seem absurd to you that immigration requirements should make it more difficult to re-locate across national borders than within a nation. International migration could normally be expected to be as beneficial as migration within national borders. For example, the potential benefits to both the employees and employers concerned when workers relocate to take up employment opportunities are not necessarily reduced when national borders are crossed. Similarly, the potential benefits to both the grandparents and grandchildren of living in the same locality are not necessarily reduced when national borders are crossed to enable that to happen.

I have been pondering such questions while reading Ilya Somin’s recent book, Free to Move: Foot voting, migration, and political freedom. Somin presents a powerful argument in favour of foot voting – choosing to move to a different country, city, condo etc. because you prefer its rules to the ones you currently live under. Foot voting enables individuals to make a choice that actually matters to them, whereas voting in an election offers individuals only a miniscule chance of affecting the outcome.

I didn’t need to read Somin’s book to be persuaded of the potential value of foot voting. It would be difficult for an economist engaged in public policy not to be aware of those benefits. I also had the benefit of considering the issues involved many years ago when I read Robert Nozick’s famous book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

However, it is one thing to accept the potential benefits of foot voting as an ideal, and quite another to advocate removal of current obstacles to foot voting posed by migration regulations.

Somin suggest that the sovereignty argument – the view that the right to bar migrants is intrinsic to the existence of an independent nation state – has little support among political theorists, although it often arises in public discourse. Somin mentions Donald Trump and his southern border wall proposal in this context, but John Howard, a former Australian prime minister, advanced the argument just as strongly in 2001:

 “National Security … is also about having an uncompromising view about the fundamental right of this country to protect its borders. It's about this nation saying to the world we are a generous open-hearted people, taking more refugees on a per capita basis than any nation except Canada, we have a proud record of welcoming people from 140 different nations. But we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

While national governments continue to exist, it would not be realistic to expect them to refrain from accepting responsibility for migration policy. However, that does not mean that it is beyond the realms of possibility for governments to adopt something more closely approaching an open borders policy. As Somin points out, sovereign nations existed for centuries without exercising a general power to bar peaceful migrants. Most governments made significant efforts to restrict entry only in the late 19^th century.

The reason why the sovereignty argument seems persuasive to many people must be related to their perception that illegal or unauthorized migration has adverse consequences. They want immigration regulation enforced because they believe it serves a useful purpose.

Somin discusses in some detail various reasons that have been advanced for immigration restrictions. These include fear of terrorism and crime, possible reduction of wage levels, burdening of the welfare state, destruction of the environment, and the spread of harmful cultural values. He recognizes the validity of some objections to freedom of international migration, but suggests that “keyhole solutions” are available to meet negative side-effects of expanded migration. These keyhole solutions aim to target real problems, minimizing risks of adverse outcomes without imposing unnecessary restrictions on foot voting.

As in many other policy areas, carefully targeted regulation which minimizes adverse side-effects is clearly preferable to blanket bans and restrictions that are directed toward meeting political demands of anti-migrant nationalist groups. Somin recognizes that such groups are the main obstacle to international foot voting.

This brings me back to the sovereignty argument. It seems to me that anti-migrant nationalist groups had greater sway in Australian politics 20 years ago when significant numbers of people seeking refugee status were arriving by boat without prior approval. Under those circumstances it was relatively easy for the opponents of immigration to claim that “people smuggling” and “queue jumping” by refugees was likely to lead to huge social problems.

The government’s action to enforce regulation and discourage unauthorized arrivals seems to have enabled the public debate about immigration levels in Australia to become somewhat more civilized in recent years. It may also have reduced public disquiet about the relatively high migrant intake in recent years (prior to the Covid 19 pandemic).

The sovereignty argument is clearly opposed to recognition that people have a right to choose which country they will live in. Nevertheless, Australians seem generally to have become more relaxed in their attitudes toward high levels of immigration since the government stridently asserted sovereignty by taking effective action to discourage unauthorized arrivals.

Postscript

The last couple of paragraphs have attracted some comment in response to a Facebook post by Boris Karpa: https://www.facebook.com/548209107/posts/10159829476419108/

The issue is whether there is any evidence to back up my assertion that Australians seem generally to have become more relaxed in their attitudes toward high levels of immigration since more effective action was taken to discourage unauthorized arrivals.

Survey evidence certainly suggests that immigration has gone off the radar as a major political issue in Australia over the last decade (Scanlan Foundation, Mapping Social Cohesion, 2020, p24). 

The total number of migrants has increased, but there has been substantial opposition associated with the "somewhat more civilized debate" that I referred to. It now seems possible for people to argue for a lower migrant intake on grounds of pressure on infrastructure, impacts on unskilled wage, and house prices etc. without being accused of racism, or lack of sympathy for refugees.

The refugee intake has not risen much over the last decade. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be survey data on perceptions of whether the current refugee intake is too high or too low for long enough to assess whether attitudes have changed over the last decade. The Scanlan Foundation's report for 2019 suggests that in recent years opinion has been evenly balanced between those who say the intake is too small and those who say it is too large.

I think the Australian public would now be receptive to a larger refugee intake, provided people don’t arrive uninvited. However, that is just my personal view. I guess we will see whether or not I am right over the next year or so. 

Further comments are welcome.

 

How can we comprehend the emergence of consciousness?

 

It seems common for consciousness to be viewed either as an inexplicable mystery or as something we will only be able to comprehend if advances in science can explain how thoughts – a rich inner life - can somehow be created from matter. However, the problems we have in comprehending the emergence of consciousness may stem from our habit of thinking in terms of a separation between mind and body.

The idea of mind as separate from body has been part of Western philosophy for a long time, but is commonly referred to as Cartesian dualism after René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes who famously said, “I think, therefore I am”, concluded “I knew that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is to think … [that] does not depend on any material thing”. These days, not many people believe consciousness to be a substance, but dualism still seems to linger on in much discussion about consciousness.  

Descartes reached his conclusion 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. 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:

“If I seriously think that I am not thinking, what I am thinking is pragmatically self-refuting.” (283)

Descartes error arose when he asked himself, “What then am I?” after observing that he could not doubt he was thinking. As Campbell points out, that question “presupposes that he takes himself to be some sort of thing”.

(Campbell’s discussion reminds me of the part of the long speech Ayn Rand had John Galt make in Atlas Shrugged in which Galt proclaims the axiom that “existence exists”, and that consciousness is “the faculty of perceiving that which exists”. Galt adds “a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms” (1015). Readers who are allergic to Ayn Rand will be pleased to note that Campbell’s book contains no references to her, or to Objectivism.)

Before going further I should note that Richard Campbell is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the ANU. The Metaphysics of Emergence was published in 2015.

Campbell asks what conclusion we can draw from the observation that we cannot doubt we are thinking. His answer:

“Thinking that one is thinking, being aware that one is aware, has to be at least a meta-level operation, interacting with the processes of more basic awareness.”

To understand what Campbell is getting at here, it may be helpful to have some knowledge of the general line of argument he develops in his book.

• In the preface, the author explains that he has come to the view that any satisfactory account of the emergence of complex phenomena has to begin with recognition that “processes underly what seem like stable enduring entities, and therefore should be accorded priority over them”.
• Campbell argues that everything is fundamentally in process. That line of argument is opposed to the dominant tradition of Western intellectual history (began by Parmenides) which views entities as the norm. The view that everything is a process presents us with the challenge of explaining the emergence and apparent stability of enduring things, whereas under the dominant tradition change requires explanation.
•  Campbell suggests that Plato may have misrepresented Heraclitus in claiming he said, “You cannot step into the same river twice”. Heraclites may have been trying to convey the insight that the river stays the same even though it consists of changing waters. Campbell suggests that rivers exemplify “that the continued existence of things depends on their continually changing”.
• The view of stability as the norm led to a focus on particular entities and the “matter” of which they were comprised. Since matter itself seemed to be comprised of entities (atoms and sub-atomic particles) it seemed to follow that everything was composed of entities (countable things). However, advances in physics make that view no longer tenable.  Although sub-atomic particles are often still talked about as though they are well-defined micro-entities, they behave more like processes than entities. Entities can no longer be accorded the role of the primary way of being.
• Entities, including living things, can be best understood as special cases of generic processes constrained in certain explicable ways. Entities are minimally homomerous – they exist in fixed portions or units. If you cut a cow in two the result is not two smaller cows.
• Many types of dynamic system retain their distinctive properties even though their constituents are replaced over time. That points to the importance of the constituent processes in maintaining the system.
• Living creatures perform actions. Interactions between internal and external processes binds them together as cohesive entities and enables them to behave as integral wholes. Their actions are an emergent phenomenon – resulting from the interaction of many processes.
• As Aristotle recognized, talk of actions carries implications of teleology – actions are directed towards some goal or end. In the case of simple multi-cellular organisms, goal-directedness is directed toward survival, but does not carry any implication of conscious choices or purposes. “The recursive self-maintenance of an organism is what requires the category of action to be predicated of it as an integrated action system and provides the necessary condition for other kinds of action which are directed at ends other than survival.” (176)    
• As evolution proceeds, living creatures become capable of performing selective actions in response to differences in their environments. In relatively simple organisms, those actions are instinctual rather than choices involving deliberation or calculation. Selection becomes more significant in more complex creatures which need to choose between fighting and fleeing, or whether to search for food or find a mate. Complex organisms can learn by detecting that some action they have performed is in error.
• The appropriate question regarding motivation is what makes an organism perform one action rather than another, rather than what makes it do something rather than nothing. Living organisms cannot do nothing, or they cease to exist as living beings.
• When an organism has the ability to learn which kinds of action yields rewards and to select actions on the basis of that learning it seems reasonable to say that it can evaluate the projected outcomes. As organisms become more highly developed, goal-seeking activity becomes increasingly self-directed, more flexible, and more generic (not confined to specific task routines). The behaviors of many species of non-human animals indicates that they have some awareness of their surroundings.
• The consciousness of humans evolved from the awareness displayed by other animals. Primate awareness includes elaborate event representations in which experience across many sources including bodily feelings are integrated and can be remembered. However, primates seem to lack the “fundamental defining capacities” to develop language skills (unless raised by humans) and do not express any kind of self-description.
• Human evolution went through several stages: a mimetic culture employing the whole body as an expressive device; the mythic stage in which spoken language evolved (arguably to meet specific cognitive and cultural needs); and the theoretic stage beginning around 5,500 years ago with invention of the first writing systems. The theoretic stage is characterized by “institutionalized paradigmatic thought” – using external symbolic devices to store and retrieve cultural knowledge.
• One’s sense of oneself is an aspect of consciousness that seems to be distinctively human, although some species of apes and elephants can recognize an image in a mirror as their own. “Our individual self-understandings are informed by our autobiographical memories, whose meaning depends on a shared oral tradition.” (290) Our consciousness of ourselves has been shaped by cultural and institutional factors that influence how our brains develop and function. While we talk metaphorically of the evolution of modern humans, this is not evolution in the Darwinian sense. A child born today differs little genetically from one born 60,000 years ago.
• The development of human brains is strongly influenced by personal experience. Cultural interactions play an important role in determining the way the brains of children develop. They do not reach their mature architecture until adulthood. 

Some further explanation can now be given of what Campbell meant by writing that being aware that one is aware has to be at least a meta-level operation, interacting with the processes of more basic awareness. He is suggesting that when he detects something with one of his five senses there is more than one operation going on:

“I am actively eliciting and processing those sensory inputs, and at the same time reflectively experiencing the qualities of that awareness. If that is right, then the way many philosophers today pose the issue of experience – how is it that certain complex physical systems are also mental – is misconceived. The situation is not that there is one phenomenon which has two aspects: one physical; one mental. Rather, experiencing is an on-going self-organizing activity which involves two distinct types of process: exploratory sensory activity (which is both bodily and neural); and another higher-level process operating upon the former. Being self-organizing, these interactions essentially involve feedback. That is why humans’ consciousness is reflective, reflexive, and thereby self-aware.” (283-4)

Before concluding, I should make clear that I prepared the above summary to improve my own understanding of the line of argument in Richard Campbell’s book. I hope it is a reasonable summary, but it not a substitute for reading the book. I am publishing this article in the hope of encouraging others to read the book.

I would also like to mention that I was prompted to read The Metaphysics of Emergence by a comment made by Robert L Campbell, a psychologist, in his review (published in JARS) of Harry Binswanger’s book, How We Know. I am pleased that I was given that prompt to read the book because I have a long-standing interest in explanations of consciousness - for example, see my comments on Alva Noё’s book, Out of Our Heads, published on this blog over a decade ago.

Conclusion

We cannot doubt that we think. That seems to me to be a profound observation. We may have reasons to doubt that what we are thinking at any moment is related to reality, but we cannot doubt that we are thinking. We are aware of both the flow of inner experiences – thoughts and feelings – and of our experience of the world in which we live. Thinking about our experience of the world enables us to contemplate the goals we seek, to make choices in pursuit of those goals, and to learn from experience. Our observations of the world tell us that many other animals also engage in similar processes - which imply an awareness of their surroundings. We have no problem in understanding that their awareness emerged/evolved to help them to survive and reproduce. Our human consciousness is just another step in that evolutionary process. Awareness of our own awareness has emerged to help us to flourish as individuals in the cultures in which we live.