The Order of the Invisible Sun

A mystery of murdered philosophers

The Skull of Sir Thomas Browne, Erik Desmazières.

Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.

August 2, 2024

Only two weeks following the death of Canmore, and another surprising death has struck the community: McClain died under the exact same circumstances just two nights ago.

Most of the community has been quick to dismiss the deaths as tragic coincidence. The two men, after all, lived about as far away as two men can live—Canmore in Berkeley and McClain in Oxford. To entertain foul play is to succumb to conspiratorial thinking, it has been said, and as academicians we must be better than that—so it has been said. I, for one, however, cannot ignore the similarities. First of all: how incredible that two esteemed philosophers, and two specialized in the philosophy of mind at that, should die in the same calendar year. But also: both men died of a stroke, and both at an age well in advance of the average stroke victim (Canmore was 55, McClain only 42); neither was known to consume alcohol in excess or suffer from any major afflictions comorbid with the cause of their deaths (Canmore had high blood pressure, but don’t we all?); both men died in their beds; most curious, however, is that both men were found with a copy of the collected writings of Sir Thomas Browne on their nightstands beside them. But all of these coincidences are no reason to be alarmed, or so goes the official position of both men’s employers. How surprising should it be, anyway, that two different philosophers of mind were reading Browne concurrently? The men were occasionally in correspondence, after all—they may have even been coordinating their reading with the intention of discussion (attempts to confirm this possibility through investigation of the professors’ university email accounts, however, have failed). There is no sign of struggle or forced entry, and it is difficult to imagine (say the unimaginative medical experts of the victims’ universities) how someone with murderous intent could induce a stroke. Furthermore, a statistical epidemiologist at Berkeley published a report yesterday which argues that although yes, the average age of a stroke victim is 63, that average is actually declining over time, and in fact something like 15% of stroke victims are Canmore’s age or younger (how many of these are fatal, however, would be the important statistic); and while at such a modest rate it seems incredible that two such cases should appear in the same year within the same relatively small community—he estimates the probability of it happening in any given year at less than a hundredth of a percent, using some sort of statistical maneuvering to account for the size and average age and lifestyles of members of the community of academic philosophers (which I cannot understand at a level sufficient to criticize)—the probability that it should happen at least once in a period of 100 years is a near certainty; and as such there is no statistical reason to be alarmed.

Well, my peers and other members of the academic community may attribute it to my personal closeness to Canmore—who, years ago, was my doctoral advisor—but, though I kept it to myself, I was suspicious of foul play even before McClain. Canmore was a healthy, robust, spirited man, and I still cannot believe he is dead; I saw him at a conference only last year, we got together for dinner, and he seemed healthy as ever—in fact it was I who had to leave him, around midnight, despite his pleas otherwise, for he wanted to continue to debate different compatibilist interpretations of free will into the small hours of the morning (but I was exhausted from the demands of the conference, and, frankly, depressed; and furthermore, uninterested in the subject about which he was so passionate).

But now, after McClain, I am beyond certain something is going on that the university officials are unwilling to consider (or even—I tentatively fear—deliberately concealing). But I can only grieve, and fear for whichever of us may be next.

August 8, 2024

The dead now number five: Canmore (Berkeley), McClain (Oxford), Torres (from Pittsburgh; but found dead in a hotel in Colorado), Herrera (New York), and Yori (Tokyo). All eminent philosophers of mind; all dead by stroke; all found in their beds, with copies of Browne on their nightstands or dressers. No signs of forced entry have been discovered at any of the crime scenes, and no suspicious persons have been seen by any witnesses. The volumes left by the murderers at the crime scenes are devoid of forensics.¹ Medical experts are at a perfect loss for an explanation as to how the fatal strokes are induced in the victims: no physical trauma has been found on any of the bodies, nor do toxicology reports provide any insight (the fantastic hypothesis that it was the writing of Sir Thomas Browne that induced the strokes was proposed, considered, and finally rejected after some clear-headed individuals demonstrated themselves reading the book with no ill effect; I myself have read the book in its entirety more than once since the murders began).

While there is no longer any doubt of murder (except for the epidemiologist at Berkeley, who has rescinded his statistical explanation, calling it a “Bayesian update,” and instead has formulated a hypothesis involving a novel and exact virus, the spread of which was limited to the audience of a specific lecture at a specific conference, at which all victims were in attendance, and which has lain dormant until now), the fact that the deaths continue to occur across vast distances means that there is not one murderer, but some sort of murderous international contingent or Order behind the deaths, coordinating across all corners the developed world.

Furthermore, another strange pattern has emerged in the victims: all of them have been strong proponents of physicalism. As a result, outspoken opponents of physicalism in the academic community are being viewed with suspicion. Some fringe idealist thinkers at the second-rate universities have even been plainly accused (for, as one accuser put it in their inflammatory blog post, “We all already know that these people are crazy.”). But of course all insist that they are completely innocent, and would never consider something as barbarous as murdering their philosophical adversaries. And anyway, no compelling evidence has been found to incriminate anyone in the community.

Professors, even tenured professors, have been resigning from their positions in droves, not all of them philosophers of mind, or even philosophers. This does not appear to be an effective means of ensuring one’s safety, however: Herrera was murdered the week following his resignation (it has been proposed that resigning actually makes you a target; the resignations have slowed, some professors who resigned have returned to their positions). I, for one, am still trying to carry on as normal, despite my classes becoming emptier and emptier, as more and more students fear they are putting themselves at risk by studying philosophy (but none of the victims so far have been students—the risk appears to be correlated with the number and prominence of published articles, and especially books). However, I have not been able to sleep. I spend my wakeful nights at the desk in my study, where I have printed out hard copies of all the victims’ entire bibliographies, and I have been obsessively reading the articles of this macabre anthology over and over. In this reading I have uncovered another pattern, admittedly tenuous, but even more curious than the obvious dominance of physicalism and the bias towards notoriety, which I will illustrate chronologically:

Canmore, my mentor, and the first victim, published countless articles dealing with the subject of philosophical zombies, hypothetical beings identical to ourselves but utterly lacking phenomenal consciousness. These beings are meant to be outwardly indistinguishable from humans as we are familiar with them; zombies, as proposed, exhibit identical behaviors to conscious humans, and are equally capable of language, abstract reasoning, problem solving, scientific endeavors, relationships, grieving, and anything else you can imagine—only, these things occur without any subjective character, completely in the dark. The conceivability of such a zombie universe is supposed to illustrate the profundity of the explanatory gap, and cast doubt on the effectiveness of physicalism as an explanatory position in the philosophy of mind. Canmore’s position, however, has always been that of a zombie skeptic. He published the paper that brought him into prominence, “The Incomprehensibility of Zombies,” in 1998. This paper has been cited hundreds of times to support countless arguments for physicalism. The third chapter of his magnum opus, the dense but approachable Consciousness Explicated, is essentially a summary of this paper. In it, he argues that it is difficult to conceive of philosophical zombies themselves conceiving of philosophical zombies. It follows, then, that a zombie universe would have at least one significant difference from our own: it would lack the concept of philosophical zombies. This difference, he believes, is sufficient to weaken the zombie argument. Several of his later articles have repeated and expanded upon this point, arguing variously against the zombie argument by posing problems with the conceivability of zombies.

The second victim, McClain—whose commitment to illusionism has been controversial but whose thinking and arguments have earned him a wealth of respect in the community (not to mention citations)—repeatedly published writings that challenge the concept of a philosophical zombie by arguments distinct from those employed by Canmore; in McClain’s view, consciousness is simply an illusion affected by an entirely physical system of information processing, like that of a computer. Zombies, then, as beings physically identical to ourselves, would simply have the same illusions.

There is also a record of his responses to a question at a panel interview at a conference in 2011:

My problem with the zombie proposition is I don’t understand what exactly the difference is supposed to be between the zombie universe and our own. Like, what is the distinction that is supposed to be so damning for physicalism?

(Questioner): The distinction is that the zombies are not conscious.

(McClain): That’s what I don’t understand. Like, what do you mean exactly? Assuming, as the zombie proposal does, that zombies have the same reasoning capabilities as normal humans, I just don’t understand what you mean when you try to distinguish… [another panelist interjects].

The third victim, Torres from Pittsburgh, insisted that the zombie argument was weak, and that it relied on terms such as “consciousness” are poorly defined or poorly understood. As she writes in her article “Restoring Mental Clarity: Terminology in Philosophy of Mind”:

What is consciousness? […] I am not sure what, exactly, is being discussed when the word “consciousness” is used. The terms used in attempt to define the concept, such as the word “qualia,” appear to me to be meaningless vocabularies invented for the purpose of establishing the existence of something, the existence of which—though imaginary—supports the arguments of those who invented it. By creating the meaningless word and asserting that it points to something that exists, they have made their position unassailable.

The fourth victim, Herrera, published a short article that proposes a thought experiment in line with Canmore’s arguments against zombies. Says Herrera, suppose we grant that the zombie universe is in fact identical to our own in every way—that is, that zombies are able to conceive of zombies just as we are, because they believe themselves to be conscious (but of course, they are wrong about this), and the zombies of their imagination lack this (somehow unconsciously imagined) quality. The thought experiment is this: if the proposition of zombies requires that they believe themselves to be conscious (although they are not, by definition), then the proposition of zombies comes with the possibility that a being could believe it is conscious when it is not; so, we must either deny the proposition of zombies, or begin to view our own belief that we are conscious as dubious. Denying the existence of zombies, says Herrera, is preferable. He goes on to discuss the intricacies of a proposed zombie mind, and argues that when considered fully, it is “impossible to imagine a mind identical in all ways to mine but lacking that thing we call ‘consciousness.’”

Similarly, Yori, the fifth victim (who is actually employed as a professor of computer science, not philosophy, but whose career in the field of artificial intelligence has placed him equally, if not more so, in the domain of philosophy) argued fiercely that “those who assert that zombies are conceivable are fooling themselves,” because the conception of zombies requires the recursive conception of impossibilities: zombies conceiving of zombies conceiving of zombies conceiving of zombies and so on (this recursion in fact necessary in order for even a first-order zombie universe to be outwardly identical to our own), a computational function of which human minds are incapable.

August 23, 2024

The murders continue: I grieve now eight professors who have long held my respect; in the last two weeks we have heard news of the murders of Andrews, Langlois, and, this morning, Albert. I continue to obsessively read all of their works. The tenuous thread I pulled on two weeks ago has held; all of the subsequent victims have in their bibliographies more than one article asserting the inconceivability of zombies.

I have been quietly working on an incredible hypothesis, the germ of which existed in my mind as soon as I put the tenuous pattern to paper; now, after the murder of Albert, I am confident enough in the hypothesis to put it too to paper.

The cult or Order which is behind the murders has identified individuals that find philosophical zombies inconceivable, and executed their deaths. But they are not merely eliminating their philosophical opponents. As they see it, they are eradicating a terrible disease from the earth; they believe they are preventing the spread of zombiism.

They have taken reasoning about the zombie proposal to a terrible conclusion: if a zombie cannot conceive of a zombie, then those who insist zombies are inconceivable must themselves be zombies.² In other words, the Order believes that there are zombies among us; that the reason certain physicalist thinkers find it so apprehensible to give consciousness a privileged ontological status is because they have no consciousness at all; and furthermore that these thinkers are liable to spread their unconsciousness to others, that they beget zombie progeny, or perhaps that they communicate zombiism through their arguments and teachings. (It is worth noting that, from the Order’s perspective, it would be easy to justify their actions. It is readily agreed that consciousness is the basis of morality; without conscious suffering or conscious well-being, there would be no good or evil in any action; only meaningless matter, tossed about by the winds of the universe, to no purpose or consequence. Then, the Order would believe that they are not committing murder, because they are not killing any conscious beings.) They believe it is their moral duty to safeguard the light of consciousness, by any means necessary; so they have conspired to identify and eliminate zombies in order to prevent their eventual takeover of the world—the conversion of our universe into a zombie universe.

At this point you may believe me insane. Perhaps I am (of my affliction of a certain kind of insanity, anyway, I am certain). But there is a way for me to prove my incredible hypothesis. I will put something plainly in writing, something which, although I have perhaps indicated previously in more than one unremarkable article, I have never stated outright:

I cannot conceive of a philosophical zombie. Despite endless sincere efforts since the beginning of my career, the concept eludes my apprehension, and I have wondered what is different about the zombie proponents’ minds that lends them to acceptance of this profound hypothetical. The exactness of it described by these proponents occurs to me as, at best, an inconsequential vagueness; its ostensible metaphysical consequences, an enduring mystery. I have only been feigning a grasp of the concept as necessary in order to facilitate lectures to undergraduates or the writing of my pitiful articles—a deceit which has been necessary for my survival in this field.

Now, if my theory is correct, once this note has been published, I will be dead within days. And now, surely, you will believe that I am insane. But, I assure you, in this, I act with the utmost clarity of reason.

You see, unlike many of my colleagues, I do not see my failure to conceive of a zombie as a rhetorical point against the zombie argument; I see it as a personal shortcoming. While Herrera finds it easier to doubt the existence of zombies than his own consciousness, I do not. I have long felt that I am missing something; if I recall correctly, this feeling began to overwhelm me in graduate school. Perhaps the arduous labors of the doctoral program robbed me of my splendor for life; perhaps something more profound occurred; but, since then, I no longer live by that invisible Sun inside me. I consider my adult life to be an unending night. I remember what it was like to be a child—the way that life was covered with a certain joy, even in moments of acute pain or sadness. No, joy is not the right word: it was a certain openness, a certain readiness, willingness, or—brightness. Yes, brightness. I remember (in the darkness of night) when I was seven years old, and I broke my leg falling from a tree which I had climbed. The pain was unbearable, I screamed, and I believe I blacked out for a moment, but throughout all of it was the light of the sun, the smell of the grass, the color of the blood, and of course the fierce brightness of the pain, unbearable. It was all unbearable: the blood, the grass, the sun, all of it as bright and vivid and fierce as the pain. My mother came from inside the house, she held me and stroked my head. This, too, was unbearable. It was all bathed in a certain light, all of it regarded with this expansive consideration, as if it was something holy. But I remember these details only as details; remembrances of remembrances. The actual quality of the brightness is lacking from my recollection; this quality has completely left my life. I can recall it, but I cannot recover it.

Two years ago, in an effort to rid myself of the darkness, I went on a silent meditation retreat in Nepal. I spent two weeks in the mountains, not speaking, in fact doing nothing but introspecting. On the penultimate day I recalled Herrera’s thought experiment, and the decision of whether to doubt the existence of zombies or to doubt your own consciousness. After several days of searching inwardly I finally realized that there was nothing to find. What I was looking for did not exist at all.

Since then, I have not placed much value on my life. But here is an opportunity for my life to have some value, in the illumination of the machinations of this Order. If what I believe is true, that the Order is systematically eliminating zombies in order to prevent the spread of their darkness, then I cannot say for certain whether I condemn their actions. But perhaps, with the exposure of the Order’s intentions, more tender attention will be given to the affliction which they are attempting to stamp out, and some other means of curing it will be discovered.

1. In all of the victims’ copies, the murderers bothered to highlight in fluorescent yellow a short but profound quote from Hydriotaphia.

2. Ironically, the members of the order, like the physicalist philosophers they despise, have themselves been transparently and significantly influenced by Canmore.