Existence, Consciousness & God: Ibn Sina (Avicenna) | 4h Philosophy for Sleep

In the year nine hundred and eighty,

a child was born in Persia who would

fundamentally reshape human thought.

Ibn Sina,

known in the West as Avicenna,

did something extraordinary.

He took the entire edifice of Greek philosophy,

the theology of Islam,

and his own piercing observations about reality,

and forged them into a system so powerful

that it dominated intellectual life for

six centuries.

‎

But here is what makes Ibn Sina truly remarkable,

he was not simply brilliant,

he asked questions that still haunt

philosophy today.

What does it mean for something to exist?

Is your essence,

what you are,

the same as your existence,

that you are?

‎

Can we know anything with absolute certainty?

What is the relationship between God and

everything else that exists?

Most philosophers before him tried to

answer these questions,

Ibn Sina did something different.

He showed that the very way we were

asking these questions was wrong.

‎

He revealed hidden assumptions we did

not know we were making.

He demonstrated that  existence itself was stranger,

more profound,

and more mysterious than anyone had imagined.

Part 1: "The Scandal of Existence: Why

Things Are Is More Mysterious Than What

Things Are": Let me start with the insight

that makes Ibn Sina genuinely revolutionary,

and it begins with a question so simple

it sounds stupid.

Why does anything exist at all?

‎

Every philosopher before Ibn Sina,

from Plato to Aristotle to the early

Islamic theologians,

focused obsessively on what things are.

What is the essence of a horse?

What makes a tree a tree?

What is the definition of justice?

‎

They assumed that if you could define

something's essence perfectly,

you understood it completely.

Ibn Sina said,

you have all missed the most important question.

The question is not what something is,

but that it is.

‎

Here is what he meant,

and this requires careful attention.

Take any object in front of you,

a cup,

a book,

your own hand.

‎

Now ask yourself two different questions.

First,

what is it?

You can answer,

it is a cup,

it is a ceramic vessel designed to hold liquid.

That is its essence,

its definition,

its whatness.

‎

But now ask the second question,

why does this cup exist rather than not exist?

Why is there something here rather than nothing?

And here is where it gets strange.

The definition of a cup,

its essence,

tells you nothing about whether any cup

actually exists.

‎

You could know everything about what a

cup is,

have a perfect understanding of cupness,

and yet the universe might contain zero cups.

The essence does not necessitate the existence.

Ibn Sina called this the distinction

between essence and existence,

and it split philosophy in half.

For most things in the universe,

essence and existence are separate.

‎

A horse's essence,

its horseness,

does not include existence.

Horses could have not existed,

the universe would have been perfectly

coherent without them.

Their existence is added to their essence

from outside,

like a property grafted onto them.

‎

Think about what this means.

It means that for almost everything you encounter,

its existence is borrowed,

contingent,

dependent.

‎

Nothing about the thing itself explains

why it exists.

A tree does not contain within its

treeness the reason for its being here.

Neither do you.

‎

Your essence,

what makes you human,

could have been instantiated or not,

the universe did not have to produce you.

Now here is where Ibn Sina's argument

becomes explosive.

If everything in the universe has this character,

if every single thing we encounter has

existence merely tacked onto its essence,

then we face a problem.

‎

Where does existence come from?

What is doing the tacking?

You cannot say existence comes from other

contingent things,

that just pushes the question back.

If A exists because B gave it existence,

and B exists because C gave it existence,

you have explained nothing,

you have just created an infinite regress.

‎

It is like explaining why a train is

moving by saying the first car is pulled

by the second car,

and the second by the third,

forever.

Nothing is actually doing the pulling.

So Ibn Sina argues,

there must be something in reality that

is different.

There must be at least one thing whose

essence and existence are identical,

fused,

the same thing.

‎

This being does not receive existence

from outside,

it is existence itself.

It cannot not exist,

because non-existence would contradict

its very nature.

He called this the Necessary Being,

wajib al-wujud in Arabic.

Everything else is a contingent being,

mumkin al-wujud,

something that might exist or might not.

‎

Now before you dismiss this as just

another proof for God,

pause and consider how radical this is.

Ibn Sina is not saying we need God to

create things,

like a cosmic craftsman making furniture.

‎

He is saying something far stranger,

that existence itself is a mystery that

requires explanation,

and that explanation must bottom out in

something whose very essence is to exist.

Let me make this concrete with an example

that Ibn Sina himself would not have known,

but which illuminates his point perfectly.

Think about the laws of physics,

the fundamental constants of nature.

‎

Why does the speed of light have the

value it has?

Why is the gravitational constant what it is?

These values could have been different.

Nothing in the essence of a universe

requires these particular numbers.

‎

Their specificity is contingent,

they require explanation beyond themselves.

Modern physicists have struggled with

exactly this question,

proposing multiverse theories and

anthropic principles to explain why our

universe has the parameters it does.

Ibn Sina would say,

of course you are struggling,

because you are encountering the scandal

of existence itself,

the mystery that contingent facts require

grounding in something necessary.

‎

But here is where the debates begin,

and they are fierce.

Al-Ghazali,

writing about seventy years after Ibn

Sina's death,

launched a devastating attack.

‎

He said,

you have made a category error,

Ibn Sina.

Existence is not a property that gets

added to essence like color gets added to

a wall.

‎

To say something exists is not to say

it has an additional feature,

it is to say that the thing is there at all,

that it is instantiated in reality.

This is not just philosophical nitpicking,

it strikes at the heart of Ibn Sina's system.

If existence is not a property,

then the whole distinction between

essence and existence collapses.

‎

You cannot say that God's essence

includes existence as a property,

because existence is not the kind of

thing that can be a property.

It would be like saying the essence of a

triangle includes being thought about,

it makes no sense.

Modern philosophers like Kant would later

make a similar critique,

arguing that existence is not a real predicate.

When you say unicorns do not exist,

you are not saying there are unicorns

that lack the property of existence,

you are saying there are no unicorns at all.

‎

But Ibn Sina has defenders,

and their response is subtle.

They argue that Al-Ghazali and Kant have

misunderstood the claim.

‎

Ibn Sina is not saying existence is a

property like blue or heavy,

he is saying that for most things,

there is a real distinction between what

a thing is conceived to be and whether it

actually is.

The fact that you can coherently conceive

of something without knowing if it exists

proves that essence and existence are

separable in thought,

and separable in reality for contingent beings.

‎

The contemporary philosopher Peter van

Inwagen puts it this way,

if you are trying to make a complete list

of everything that exists,

you need two kinds of information.

First,

descriptions of what kinds of things

there are,

essences.

‎

Second,

which of those descriptions are instantiated,

which ones have existence added to them.

This two-step process reveals that

essence and existence are genuinely distinct.

Here is where Ibn Sina's insight becomes

practically important,

not just theoretically interesting.

If most things in reality are contingent,

if their existence is borrowed and dependent,

then everything we encounter is fragile

in a profound sense.

‎

Not just fragile in the sense that it

might break or die,

but fragile in the sense that it might

simply cease to exist because whatever is

sustaining its existence stops doing so.

This has immediate implications for

ethics and meaning.

If you are a contingent being,

then your existence is a gift,

not a right.

‎

It is sustained moment by moment by

something beyond yourself.

This is not meant to be depressing,

Ibn Sina saw it as the source of humility

and wonder.

Everything that exists is,

in a sense,

miraculous,

because it overcomes the  default state of nothingness.

‎

But it also raises a devastating

question that Ibn Sina spent his life

trying to answer.

If everything flows from the Necessary Being,

if all existence is borrowed from this

single source,

then what about evil?

What about suffering?

What about the sheer arbitrariness and

cruelty we observe in the world?

‎

The Necessary Being,

if it exists,

cannot be indifferent or malevolent,

because it is the source of all existence

and existence itself is good,

it is better to be than not to be.

But then why is the world the way it is?

‎

Why do children suffer?

Why does nature kill with earthquakes and disease?

If the Necessary Being's essence is to

exist and to give existence,

why does it give existence to things that

cause such pain?

Ibn Sina's answer to this will shock you,

and it will be the subject of our next part.

But for now,

sit with the strangeness of his core insight,

that existence itself is not something to

take for granted,

that it is the deepest mystery we face,

and that most philosophy has been asking

the wrong questions by focusing on essence

rather than existence.

‎

The scandal is not what things are,

it is that they are at all.

‎

Part 2: "Emanation and the Problem of

Evil: Why God Cannot Help Making a Flawed

Universe": Now we arrive at perhaps the

most controversial and philosophically

dangerous idea Ibn Sina ever proposed.

If there is a Necessary Being that is

pure existence,

pure perfection,

pure unity,

how does it produce everything else?

‎

How do we get from the One to the messy,

multiple,

flawed universe we live in?

Ibn Sina's answer is called emanation,

and it is nothing like creation as most

people understand it.

God does not decide to create,

does not choose what to make,

does not plan and execute like a craftsman.

‎

Instead,

the universe flows from God the way light

flows from the sun,

necessarily,

eternally,

without choice or deliberation.

Here is the argument,

and pay close attention because this is

where Ibn Sina parts ways with mainstream

Islamic theology completely.

The Necessary Being must think,

must have intellection.

‎

What does it think about?

It cannot think about anything outside itself,

because that would make it dependent on

something else,

which contradicts its necessity.

So it thinks about itself,

it contemplates its own perfection.

‎

But here is the strange part,

when the Necessary Being thinks about itself,

something happens.

This act of self-contemplation produces

an effect,

it generates the first created intellect.

‎

Not because God decides to create it,

but because thinking about perfection

necessarily produces something,

like a mirror produces a reflection.

The Necessary Being cannot not produce

the first intellect,

it flows necessarily from the divine nature.

Now this first intellect does three things.

First,

it contemplates the Necessary Being,

which produces a second intellect below it.

‎

Second,

it contemplates itself as necessary

through another,

which produces the soul of the first

celestial sphere.

Third,

it contemplates itself as possible in itself,

which produces the body of the first

celestial sphere.

And then this process repeats.

‎

The second intellect contemplates and

produces the third intellect,

the soul and body of the second sphere,

and so on.

Like a cascade of waterfalls,

each level of reality flows necessarily

from the level above it,

until finally,

at the bottom of this great chain,

you get the material world we inhabit.

‎

Ten intellects in total,

according to Ibn Sina's cosmology,

each one slightly less perfect than the

one above it,

until we reach the Active Intellect,

the one that governs our sublunary realm.

Now before you dismiss this as mystical nonsense,

understand what Ibn Sina is trying to solve.

He is trying to explain how you get multiplicity,

variety,

difference from absolute unity.

‎

If God is absolutely one,

simple,

without parts or complexity,

how does the diverse universe emerge?

His answer is that each level of

emanation introduces a tiny bit more complexity,

more multiplicity,

until you get the rich diversity we observe.

But here is where the problems start mounting,

and they are devastating.

First,

this system makes creation necessary,

not contingent.

‎

If the universe flows from God's nature

the way heat flows from fire,

then God could not have not created the universe.

The universe is as eternal and necessary

as God himself.

This directly contradicts the Quranic

teaching that God chose to create,

that creation is an act of divine will.

‎

Al-Ghazali seized on this and declared

Ibn Sina a heretic,

an unbeliever,

for denying that God freely created the world.

The charge was not exaggerated,

this is a fundamental difference.

‎

If creation is necessary,

then God is not truly free.

God becomes like a machine that must

operate according to its programming,

even if that programming is perfect.

Ibn Sina tried to defend himself by

saying that God's knowledge of his own

perfection is itself a kind of will,

that knowing oneself as perfect

necessarily entails generating the best

possible universe.

But this defense convinced almost no one.

‎

Saying God's nature necessitates

creation is not the same as saying God

wills creation freely.

It is the difference between choosing to

give a gift and being forced to give it

because of who you are.

Second,

and this is even more troubling,

the emanation system cannot explain evil

and suffering.

Here is why.

‎

Each level of reality flows necessarily

from the level above according to perfect

rational principles.

The Necessary Being is perfectly good,

the first intellect is nearly perfectly good,

and so on down the chain.

At no point does anyone choose to

introduce evil,

suffering,

or imperfection.

‎

So where do they come from?

Ibn Sina's answer is that evil is not a thing,

it is an absence.

Evil is privation,

the lack of good,

like darkness is the absence of light or

cold is the absence of heat.

‎

As you descend the chain of emanation,

getting further from the source,

you get progressively more privation,

more absence of perfection.

Matter,

at the bottom,

is almost pure privation,

it has minimal existence and maximal deficiency.

But this answer fails completely when

confronted with actual evil.

A child dying of cancer is not

experiencing an absence,

they are experiencing something terribly

positive and real,

pain,

destruction,

loss.

‎

A genocidal war is not the privation of peace,

it is the active presence of organized cruelty.

Calling these things absences or

privations is not philosophy,

it is evasion.

The contemporary philosopher Marilyn

McCord Adams has devastated this kind of response.

She argues that horrendous evils,

evils so terrible they threaten to ruin

the meaning of a person's entire life,

cannot be explained away as mere absences.

‎

They are concretely,

positively,

overwhelmingly real to those who suffer them.

Any philosophical system that denies

their reality is not worth defending.

Third,

the emanation system makes God radically

distant and unknowing.

If everything flows through  ten levels of intermediaries,

then God does not directly know or care

about individual humans.

‎

The Necessary Being knows only itself,

it does not know that you exist,

it does not hear prayers,

it does not intervene in history.

God becomes an impersonal absolute,

not a personal Lord who loves and judges.

This contradicts the entire spirit of

Islamic devotional life,

which assumes God is intimately aware of

every sparrow that falls,

every thought in every heart.

Ibn Sina tried to argue that God knows

particulars in a universal way,

knowing all events through knowing

universal principles.

‎

But this is clearly inadequate,

knowing humanity in general is not the

same as knowing you specifically,

your struggles,

your grief,

your prayers.

Now here is what makes this fascinating,

Ibn Sina knew all these problems.

He was not stupid,

he was not unaware of the  theological implications.

‎

So why did he insist on emanation

despite these devastating costs?

Because he thought the alternative was worse.

The alternative,

as presented by the Islamic theologians

called the Mutakallimun,

was that God creates through pure will,

with no rational necessity.

God could have made the universe

completely different,

could have made two plus two equal five,

could have made murder virtuous and

kindness evil.

‎

Nothing in God's nature constrains what

he creates,

everything is pure arbitrary choice.

Ibn Sina found this picture horrifying.

It makes the universe fundamentally irrational,

it destroys the possibility of science

and philosophy.

‎

If God's will is completely arbitrary,

then there are no reliable patterns in nature,

no laws we can discover,

no rational structure we can investigate.

Everything could change at any moment

because God decided to will it differently.

More than that,

it makes God himself arbitrary and capricious.

If God's choice to create this universe

over another is not guided by any reasons,

if it is just raw will with no rational basis,

then God is not truly perfect.

‎

Perfection includes rationality,

it includes choosing the best for the

best reasons.

A God of pure arbitrary will is not perfect,

he is the cosmic equivalent of a tyrant

who acts on whim.

So Ibn Sina is caught between two impossibilities.

Either God creates by necessity,

which denies divine freedom and makes

evil unexplainable,

or God creates by arbitrary will,

which makes the universe irrational and

God himself imperfect.

‎

His solution,

emanation,

tries to thread the needle.

It preserves the rationality of the

universe while maintaining that everything

flows from God's nature.

‎

But it does so at an enormous cost,

it makes creation necessary,

God distant,

and evil a mystery that cannot be

satisfactorily explained.

The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides,

deeply influenced by Ibn Sina,

tried to salvage the system by arguing

that God's will and God's wisdom are identical,

so that what God wills necessarily is

also what wisdom demands.

But this just restates the problem,

it does not solve it.

‎

If what God wills is identical to what

wisdom demands,

then God still cannot do otherwise,

which means creation is still necessary,

not free.

Thomas Aquinas,

in the thirteenth century,

took Ibn Sina's framework  but modified it crucially.

He agreed that God is the Necessary Being

and that everything else is contingent,

but he insisted that God creates through

free will,

not necessary emanation.

‎

God knows all possible universes and

freely chooses to actualize this one,

not because he must,

but because he wills it.

This preserves divine freedom while

maintaining that creation is rational,

guided by God's perfect wisdom.

But Aquinas's solution has its own problems.

If God freely chooses this universe among

infinite possible universes,

and this universe contains horrendous evil,

then God is choosing evil.

‎

You cannot say God merely permits evil,

because God is actively choosing to

actualize a universe where children get

bone cancer rather than a universe where

they do not.

That is not permission,

that is selection.

Modern philosophers like William Rowe

have pressed this point ruthlessly.

If God can create any universe,

and chooses to create one  with pointless suffering,

suffering that serves no greater good,

then God is either not all-powerful or

not perfectly good.

‎

The existence of gratuitous evil,

evil that could have been prevented

without losing any greater good,

seems incompatible with a perfect creator.

Ibn Sina would respond,

and here we see his genius even in failure,

that there is no gratuitous evil in his system.

Every evil is necessary as a logical

consequence of matter's distance from the

Necessary Being.

‎

The universe could not be better than

it is,

given that it must instantiate all levels

of being from pure intellect down to pure matter.

To remove any evil would be to remove a

necessary link in the chain of emanation,

which would make the universe less,

not more,

perfect.

But this response is monstrous if you

think about it.

It means the suffering of every child,

every torture,

every genocide is metaphysically

necessary for the universe to be complete.

‎

It transforms evil from a problem to be

solved into a feature of cosmic perfection.

This is not just philosophically problematic,

it is morally obscene.

And yet,

Ibn Sina is asking a question that

remains unanswered today.

If you reject his system,

if you insist on divine freedom and the

contingency of creation,

then you must explain why God creates a

universe with this much suffering when he

could have created one with less.

‎

You must explain why the free choice of

a perfect being produces a world that looks,

frankly,

deeply imperfect.

The debate continues,

unresolved,

after a thousand years.

No one has found a way to  preserve divine perfection,

divine freedom,

the rationality of the universe,

and the existence of evil all at once.

‎

Something has to give,

and different philosophers sacrifice

different pieces.

Ibn Sina sacrificed freedom to preserve

rationality and necessity.

Others sacrifice rationality to preserve freedom,

or sacrifice perfection to preserve both.

‎

What Ibn Sina forces us to confront is this,

the problem of evil is not just a problem

for theism,

it is a problem for any metaphysical

system that tries to ground reality in

something perfect.

Whether you call that ground God,

the Necessary Being,

or the universe itself,

you must explain why reality is so far

from perfect.

‎

And no one,

in a thousand years,

has given an explanation that satisfies

both the head and the heart.

‎

Part 3: "The Nature of the Necessary

Being: What God Must Be If Anything Is":

Now we go deeper into the most abstract

and difficult part of Ibn Sina's system,

what is the Necessary Being actually like?

Not what we wish it were like,

not what would be comforting to believe,

but what it must be like if it is truly necessary,

if existence is its very essence.

‎

The first thing Ibn Sina establishes is

that the Necessary Being must be

absolutely simple,

without parts,

without composition,

without any internal complexity whatsoever.

Here is why,

and this argument is relentless.

‎

If something has parts,

then it depends on those parts for its existence.

A chair depends on its legs,

its seat,

its back.

‎

If you remove the parts,

the chair ceases to exist.

But the Necessary Being cannot depend on anything,

because dependence means contingency,

and contingency contradicts necessity.

Therefore,

the Necessary Being cannot have parts.

‎

But Ibn Sina goes further,

and this is where it gets strange.

The Necessary Being cannot even have a

distinction between its  essence and its attributes.

‎

When we say God is powerful and wise

and good,

we might think these are different

properties that God has,

like someone might have brown hair and

blue eyes.

But that would introduce composition into

God's nature.

It would mean God is a compound of power

plus wisdom plus goodness.

‎

Instead,

Ibn Sina argues,

in God,

power and wisdom and goodness are all

identical to each other and identical to

God's essence.

God is not powerful,

wise,

and good,

God is power itself,

wisdom itself,

goodness itself,

and these are all the same thing seen

from different angles.

‎

This is what theologians call divine simplicity,

and it is profoundly counterintuitive.

Think about what this means in practice.

When we say God knows something,

we are not saying God has knowledge the

way you have knowledge,

as an attribute attached to a subject.

‎

God is knowledge,

God's entire being is identical with the

act of knowing.

There is no God who then knows,

there is only knowing that is God.

The same applies to willing,

to creating,

to being,

these are not things God does or has,

these are what God is.

‎

The medieval philosopher and theologian

Moses Maimonides,

deeply influenced by Ibn Sina,

took this to its radical conclusion.

He argued that we cannot say anything

positive about God at all.

‎

Every positive statement,

God is wise,

introduces a distinction between God and wisdom,

between subject and predicate.

The only thing we can say truthfully is

what God is not.

God is not limited,

not composite,

not changeable,

not material.

‎

This is called negative theology,

and it makes God radically unknowable.

But here is the problem  that makes this unbearable,

if God is absolutely simple,

without distinctions or complexity,

then how can God know multiple things?

Knowledge requires distinction.

‎

To know that two plus two equals four

is different from knowing that the sky is blue.

These are different pieces of knowledge

with different content.

But if God is absolutely simple,

without any internal distinctions,

how can God's knowledge contain multiple truths?

‎

Ibn Sina's answer is both  brilliant and unsatisfying.

God knows all things by knowing himself.

‎

Because God is the source of all existence,

knowing his own nature perfectly means

knowing everything that flows from that nature.

God knows the universe the way a geometer

knows all possible triangles by

understanding the definition of triangle.

It is a single,

unified act of knowledge that somehow

contains all particularity within it.

‎

But this creates a devastating problem

for divine providence and prayer.

If God knows things only by knowing

universal principles through knowing himself,

then God does not know you as an individual.

‎

God knows humanity in general,

knows the universal nature of human beings,

but your specific existence,

your particular struggles,

your individual prayers,

these are not known to God in any

meaningful sense.

Al-Ghazali attacked this mercilessly.

He said,

your system makes prayer absurd,

Ibn Sina.

‎

If God does not know me individually,

then praying to God is like praying to

the laws of mathematics.

The laws are real and govern reality,

but they do not hear you,

they do not care,

they cannot respond.

You have turned the personal God of

religion into an impersonal absolute principle.

‎

Ibn Sina tried to defend himself by

distinguishing between God's knowledge of

things through their universal causes and

God's knowledge of things in their particularity.

He argued that God knows the particulars

through knowing the universal principles

that determine them,

like knowing every drop of rain by

knowing the laws of meteorology.

‎

But this defense collapses under scrutiny.

Knowing the universal principles that

produce an event is not the same as

knowing the event itself in  its concrete particularity.

The laws of meteorology do not tell you

that this specific raindrop fell on your

face at exactly three fifteen on Tuesday

afternoon while you were feeling sad.

‎

Universal knowledge and particular

knowledge are different kinds of knowledge,

and if God only has the first,

then he lacks the second.

The contemporary philosopher of religion

Richard Swinburne has pressed this point

in modern terms.

He argues that omniscience requires

knowing all truths,

including irreducibly indexical truths,

truths that cannot be reduced to

universal principles.

‎

The truth that I am here now

experiencing this is not derivable from

any set of general laws.

If God does not know indexical truths,

if God does not know the world from the

inside as we do,

then God is not truly omniscient.

But Ibn Sina has a deeper reason for

resisting the idea that God knows

particulars as particulars,

and it reveals something profound about

his entire system.

If God knows particulars in their

constant change,

then God's knowledge must be constantly changing.

‎

God must learn new truths moment by

moment as the universe unfolds.

But change introduces temporality into God,

it makes God exist in time rather than

outside time.

And if God exists in time,

then God is not truly necessary,

because temporal things are contingent,

they come into and pass out of existence.

‎

Here we see the core tension in Ibn

Sina's thought,

the tension between a God who is

religiously adequate,

who knows and loves and responds to prayer,

and a God who is metaphysically necessary,

who is simple,

eternal,

unchanging.

These two conceptions pull in opposite directions.

‎

The more you make God metaphysically perfect,

the less God can be personally engaged

with the world.

The more you make God personally engaged,

the less God can be absolutely necessary.

This tension is not unique to Ibn Sina,

it haunts all of classical theism.

But Ibn Sina felt it more acutely than

most because he was trying to be rigorous,

trying to follow the logic wherever it led,

even when it led to religiously

uncomfortable conclusions.

‎

Now let us turn to another attribute of

the Necessary Being,

immateriality.

The Necessary Being cannot be material,

cannot have a body,

cannot exist in space.

‎

Why?

Because matter is composite,

it has parts,

it has form and matter as its constituents.

And we have already established that the

Necessary Being must be absolutely simple.

‎

Therefore,

the Necessary Being must be pure

immaterial intellect,

pure thought thinking itself.

But this raises a question that has

troubled philosophers for millennia,

how does an immaterial being cause

material effects?

How does pure thought,

something with no physical properties whatsoever,

reach out and affect physical things?

‎

This is the mind-body problem writ large,

applied not to human consciousness but to

divine causation.

Ibn Sina's answer involves the chain of

emanation we discussed earlier.

The Necessary Being does not directly

cause material effects,

instead it produces the  first immaterial intellect,

which produces the second,

and so on down the chain until you reach

the Active Intellect,

which then governs the material world.

‎

At each stage,

the causation becomes more indirect,

more mediated,

until finally material things emerge at

the bottom of the cosmic hierarchy.

But this solution is unsatisfying because

it just multiplies the mystery.

Now you have not one but ten instances of

immaterial beings somehow causing effects

in lower levels of reality.

‎

How does the first intellect cause the second?

How does the Active Intellect govern matter?

The problem has been redistributed,

not solved.

Modern philosophers of mind face a

similar problem when they try to explain

how consciousness,

which seems immaterial,

can cause physical brain states to change.

Some,

like Daniel Dennett,

deny that consciousness is immaterial at all,

it is just a complex physical process

that we misunderstand.

‎

Others,

like David Chalmers,

bite the bullet and accept that

consciousness is genuinely immaterial but

insist it can still causally interact with

matter through psychophysical laws we do

not yet understand.

Ibn Sina,

for his part,

never satisfactorily solved this problem.

‎

One final attribute of the Necessary

Being that Ibn Sina insists on is eternity,

not in the sense of existing at all times,

but in the sense of existing outside of

time altogether.

The Necessary Being does not endure

through time,

does not wait,

does not experience before and after.

‎

Instead,

the Necessary Being exists in what

medieval philosophers called the eternal now,

a single,

timeless present that encompasses all of

time from outside.

This is almost impossible for us to imagine.

Our entire experience is  structured by temporality,

by the flow from past through present to future.

‎

To conceive of existence without that structure,

to imagine a being for whom all moments

are simultaneously present,

is to reach the limits of human understanding.

But Ibn Sina argues this must be the case.

If the Necessary Being existed in time,

then time would be prior to it,

and the Necessary Being would depend on

time for its existence.

‎

But the Necessary Being cannot depend

on anything,

therefore it must be outside of time,

eternal in the absolute sense.

This has bizarre implications for divine action.

If God is outside of time,

then from God's perspective,

there is no sequence of events.

‎

Creation does not happen and then later

other things happen,

instead all of history,

from the Big Bang to the heat death of

the universe,

is simultaneously present to God in one

eternal act.

God does not react to events,

does not decide to intervene at specific moments,

because for God there are no moments,

there is only the eternal now.

The contemporary philosopher Eleonore

Stump has tried to make sense of this by

arguing that God exists in  what she calls eternity,

which is not the same as atemporality.

In eternity,

all of time is present but not as a

static block,

instead God experiences all moments

simultaneously but still in their proper order.

‎

This is supposed to preserve both

divine timelessness and divine awareness

of temporal sequence,

but most philosophers find it incoherent.

You cannot have sequence without time,

the concepts are inseparable.

What emerges from all this is a picture

of the Necessary Being that is

philosophically rigorous  but religiously alienating.

The God of Ibn Sina is perfect,

necessary,

eternal,

simple,

immaterial,

and absolutely transcendent.

‎

But this God does not listen to prayers,

does not intervene in history,

does not know you individually,

and does not change in response to your actions.

This is a God you can contemplate and

philosophically prove,

but not a God you can love or be loved by.

‎

And Ibn Sina knew this,

he was caught in the terrible tension

between what philosophy demands and what

religion needs.

He tried to hold both together,

but the seams show.

‎

The God of the philosophers and the God

of Abraham,

Isaac,

and Muhammad are not easily reconciled,

and Ibn Sina's system reveals the strain

of trying to force them into one coherent picture.

This tension would explode in the

centuries after Ibn Sina,

dividing Islamic philosophy into two camps,

those who prioritized philosophical rigor

even at the cost of religious adequacy,

and those who abandoned philosophical

theology altogether in favor  of faith and mysticism.

But that is a story for later parts.

‎

For now,

recognize what Ibn Sina has shown us,

that if God exists and is truly necessary,

truly the ground of all being,

then God must be radically unlike

anything in our experience.

God must be so different from us that our

ordinary concepts barely apply.

‎

Whether this makes God more sublime or

simply more distant is a question each

person must answer for themselves.

‎

Part 4: "The Flying Man: How Ibn Sina

Proved You Are Not Your Body": We now turn

to Ibn Sina's most famous thought experiment,

one so powerful that it anticipated

modern philosophy of mind by six hundred years.

It is called the Flying Man argument,

and it attempts to prove that you are not

identical to your body,

that consciousness is something distinct

from physical matter.

‎

Here is the thought experiment,

imagine,

Ibn Sina says,

that you are created all at once,

fully formed,

but suspended in the air.

You cannot see or touch anything,

you feel no wind,

no heat,

no cold.

‎

Your limbs are spread apart so you do

not feel them touching each other.

You have no sensory input whatsoever,

no sight,

no sound,

no touch,

no smell,

no taste.

You are in complete sensory deprivation

from the moment of your existence.

‎

Now here is the question,

in this state,

would you still be aware that you exist?

Ibn Sina says yes,

absolutely.

‎

You would still have immediate self-awareness,

you would still know that you are,

even though you know nothing about your body,

nothing about the external world,

nothing about your physical properties.

But here is the crucial next step,

if you can be aware of your own existence

without being aware of your body,

then your self,

your consciousness,

cannot be identical to your body.

If they were identical,

you could not know one without knowing

the other.

‎

Therefore,

you and your body must be distinct things.

You are a soul or self that exists

independently of bodily awareness.

This argument is elegant,

simple,

and has influenced everyone from

Descartes to contemporary philosophers of mind.

Descartes's famous cogito argument,

I think therefore I am,

is essentially a variation of Ibn Sina's

Flying Man.

‎

Both use the indubitability of

self-awareness to establish the existence

of a thinking substance distinct from the body.

But is the argument actually sound?

This is where things get contentious.

‎

The first objection,

raised by materialist philosophers

ancient and modern,

is that Ibn Sina confuses epistemic

distinction with metaphysical distinction.

Just because you can think about X

without thinking about Y does not mean X

and Y are actually different things.

‎

Here is an example,

imagine someone who does not know that

water is H two O.

They can think about water without

thinking about H two O,

they can be certain water exists while

doubting whether H two O exists.

‎

But water and H two O are not actually

two different things,

they are the same thing  under different descriptions.

The epistemic distinction does not prove

a metaphysical distinction.

Similarly,

the materialist argues,

you can be aware of yourself without

being aware of your body,

not because you and your body are

different things,

but because you know yourself  under one description,

immediate self-awareness,

and your body under another description,

external observation.

You are your body,

but you have two different ways of

accessing that fact,

from the inside and from the outside.

‎

The contemporary philosopher Daniel

Dennett makes this argument forcefully.

He says consciousness is a physical

process occurring in the brain,

but we have a special kind of access to it,

introspection,

that does not reveal its physical nature.

‎

When you think about your consciousness,

you are thinking about your brain,

but you are thinking about it

introspectively rather than scientifically,

so it does not seem like a physical thing.

This is an illusion created by the way we

access information about ourselves.

‎

Ibn Sina has a response to this,

and it is clever.

He would say,

the Flying Man is not just unaware of his

body's properties,

he is in a state where he could not

possibly infer that he has a body at all.

‎

Given zero sensory input,

there is no evidence,

no data,

from which to conclude that a body exists.

And yet self-awareness persists.

This suggests that self-awareness does

not depend on having a body,

even in principle.

‎

But the materialist can respond,

just because the Flying Man has no

evidence of his body does not mean he does

not have one.

Introspection gives you access to mental

states but does not give you access to the

physical substrate that produces them.

‎

When you introspect,

you are detecting brain activity,

but introspection is not designed to tell

you that,

it just gives you the subjective

character of experience,

what it is like to be you.

So the Flying Man's inability to detect

his body through introspection proves

nothing about whether he actually has one.

‎

This debate remains unresolved in

contemporary philosophy of mind.

Philosophers who believe in dualism,

the view that mind and body  are distinct substances,

find Ibn Sina's argument compelling.

‎

Philosophers who believe in materialism

or physicalism,

the view that everything is ultimately physical,

think the argument makes an elementary

logical error.

But there is a second,

deeper problem with Ibn Sina's argument,

one that strikes at its very foundation.

The argument assumes that self-awareness

is infallible,

that when you are aware of yourself,

you cannot be mistaken about your own existence.

‎

But is this true?

The philosopher David Hume,

writing in the eighteenth century,

challenged this assumption directly.

He said,

when I introspect,

when I look into my own mind,

I never find a self,

I only find particular perceptions,

thoughts,

feelings,

sensations.

‎

I find anger,

sadness,

hunger,

memories,

but I never find a thing called the self

that has these experiences.

The self,

Hume argued,

is a fiction,

a story we tell ourselves to connect the

bundle of experiences together.

‎

If Hume is right,

then Ibn Sina's Flying Man is confused.

What the Flying Man is aware of is not a self,

not a substantial soul,

but just the bare fact of having experiences.

‎

There is experiencing happening,

but there is no experiencer behind it,

no subject separate from  the experiences themselves.

The self is just the experiences bundled together,

not a separate thing that has them.

‎

This Buddhist view,

which predates both Ibn Sina and Hume,

denies that there is any permanent,

unchanging self at all.

What we call the self is a process,

a constantly changing flow of mental events,

not a substance.

‎

The Flying Man's sense of

self-awareness is real,

but it does not point to a substantial soul,

it points to the ongoing process of

consciousness generating the illusion of a

unified subject.

Ibn Sina would reject this vehemently.

He would argue that you cannot have

experiences without an experiencer,

that the very idea of experience

presupposes a subject who has the experience.

‎

If there are thoughts,

there must be a thinker.

If there are perceptions,

there must be a perceiver.

The subject cannot be reduced to the

bundle of experiences because the bundle

requires something to unify it,

to be the one to whom all these

experiences belong.

‎

But Hume and the Buddhists  have a counter-argument,

the sense of unity is itself just another

experience in the bundle.

When you feel like you are a unified self

persisting through time,

that feeling is itself a mental event,

not a perception of a real underlying substance.

‎

The self-model,

the brain's representation of itself as a

unified agent,

is mistaken for the actual self.

We are not selves who have experiences,

we are processes that generate the

illusion of being selves.

‎

Now here is where Ibn Sina's argument

becomes personally urgent,

not just theoretically interesting.

If Ibn Sina is right,

if you are a soul distinct from your body,

then what you fundamentally are might

survive the death of your body.

‎

Your consciousness,

your self,

might continue even after your brain

ceases to function,

after your body decays.

This opens the door to immortality,

to an afterlife,

to the survival of personal identity

beyond death.

‎

But if the materialists are right,

if you are identical to your body and brain,

then when your brain dies,

you cease to exist.

There is nothing left to survive,

no soul to continue,

just the dissolution of the physical

processes that constituted your consciousness.

‎

Death is annihilation,

not transition.

Ibn Sina was acutely aware of these stakes.

His entire ethical system,

his account of human purpose and happiness,

depends on the soul's immortality.

‎

If the soul is just the body under a

different description,

then everything he says about the afterlife,

about the soul's return to its source,

about eternal happiness in union with the

divine intellect,

collapses.

And this brings us to a final,

devastating problem with the Flying Man argument,

even if it proves that you are distinct

from your body,

it does not prove that you can survive

without your body.

Perhaps the soul is distinct from the

body but still depends on the body to exist,

the way a song is distinct from a CD but

still requires some physical medium to exist.

‎

This is the view of many contemporary

philosophers of mind who accept property

dualism but reject substance dualism.

They argue that mental properties,

like consciousness and thought,

are not reducible to physical properties,

but they are still produced by and

dependent on physical brains.

‎

When the brain dies,

the mental properties cease to exist,

even though they were not identical to

brain states.

Ibn Sina tried to argue that the soul

must be capable of independent existence

because it can perform operations that do

not require the body,

like abstract reasoning and self-reflection.

The body is needed for sensation and imagination,

but pure intellection,

thinking about universals and necessary truths,

is an immaterial operation.

‎

Since the soul can perform immaterial operations,

it must be an immaterial substance

capable of existing without the body.

But this argument assumes that there are

genuinely immaterial operations,

and that is precisely what materialists deny.

They argue that even abstract reasoning

is a physical process,

a computation performed by neurons firing

in specific patterns.

‎

Just because reasoning feels

non-physical to us does not mean it

actually is non-physical,

it just means our introspective access

does not reveal the underlying mechanism.

So where does this leave us?

The Flying Man argument remains one of

the most influential thought experiments

in the history of philosophy,

but it has not settled the debate.

‎

Dualists find it convincing,

materialists find it fallacious,

and property dualists think it proves

something important but  less than Ibn Sina intended.

What Ibn Sina forces us to confront is this,

the nature of consciousness remains

deeply mysterious.

We have immediate,

indubitable awareness of our own existence,

but we do not have clear answers about

what we are.

‎

Are we physical beings with an illusory

sense of non-physical selfhood?

Are we non-physical souls temporarily embodied?

Are we something stranger still,

processes that transcend the

physical-mental distinction altogether?

After a thousand years,

we are still arguing.

And Ibn Sina's Flying Man still hovers in

the air,

still sensing his own existence,

still demanding that we answer the question,

what am I?

‎

Part 5: "The Soul: What You Actually

Are According to Ibn Sina": Having

established that you are not your body,

Ibn Sina now faces the harder question,

what are you exactly?

What is this soul that persists,

that thinks,

that is aware of itself?

‎

And how does it relate to the body it

temporarily inhabits?

Ibn Sina's answer is complex,

nuanced,

and frankly,

contradictory in places.

He wants to avoid two extremes.

‎

On one side is Plato's view that the

soul is a completely separate substance

trapped in the body like a prisoner in a cell,

waiting to escape.

On the other side is Aristotle's view

that the soul is just the form of the body,

the organizational principle that makes a

living thing alive,

inseparable from matter.

Ibn Sina tries to synthesize these views,

taking elements from both while rejecting

their extremes.

He agrees with Aristotle that the soul is

the form of the body,

but he agrees with Plato that the

rational soul can exist independently of matter.

‎

This sounds like a contradiction,

and in many ways it is,

but Ibn Sina thinks he can make it work.

Here is his picture.

The human soul has multiple levels or faculties,

arranged hierarchically from lowest to highest.

‎

At the bottom is the vegetative soul,

the principle that governs nutrition,

growth,

and reproduction.

This is what plants have,

it is the most basic form of life.

Next is the animal soul,

which adds sensation,

imagination,

memory,

and locomotion.

‎

This is what animals have in addition

to the vegetative functions.

Finally,

at the top,

is the rational soul,

the capacity for abstract thought,

universal concepts,

and self-awareness.

This is uniquely human.

‎

Now here is the crucial distinction.

The vegetative and animal souls are

material forms,

they cannot exist without the body,

they are inseparable from physical organs.

‎

When the body dies,

these souls cease to exist,

they dissolve back into matter.

But the rational soul is different,

it is an immaterial substance that uses

the body but does not depend  on it for its existence.

When the body dies,

the rational soul continues,

it survives and persists.

‎

But this raises an immediate problem,

if the rational soul is immaterial,

how does it interact with the material body?

How does an immaterial mind cause a

material arm to move?

‎

How does a material eye send

information to an immaterial consciousness?

This is the mind-body problem again,

and Ibn Sina never solved it satisfactorily.

His answer involves the internal senses,

a complex system of intermediate

faculties that mediate between body and soul.

There is common sense,

which integrates information from the

five external senses into unified perceptions.

‎

There is imagination,

which stores and manipulates sensory images.

There is the estimative faculty,

which apprehends non-sensory meanings

like danger or affection.

And there is memory,

which stores these meanings over time.

‎

These internal senses are partly material,

located in the brain,

but also partly immaterial because they

process meanings and not just physical stimuli.

They form a bridge between the physical

body and the immaterial rational soul.

‎

But this is more a description of the

problem than a solution,

saying there is a bridge does not explain

how the bridge actually works,

how immaterial and material causally interact.

Now let us talk about how the soul comes

into existence,

and here Ibn Sina says something shocking.

The rational soul is not pre-existent,

it does not exist before the body,

contrary to Plato.

‎

Instead,

the rational soul is created,

brought into existence,

at some point during embryonic

development when the fetus reaches a

certain level of bodily complexity.

But who creates it?

Not the parents,

they only contribute matter and the

vegetative and animal souls.

‎

The rational soul must be created by

something already immaterial and intellectual,

and that is the Active Intellect,

the lowest of the cosmic intellects in

the chain of emanation.

When a human body reaches sufficient complexity,

the Active Intellect emanates a rational

soul into it.

‎

This raises a devastating problem for

personal identity.

If your rational soul was created at some

point during your development,

not at conception but later,

then what were you before that?

‎

Were you not yet a person?

And when exactly does ensoulment happen?

Ibn Sina is vague on this,

and for good reason,

there is no non-arbitrary answer.

Modern embryology makes  this even more problematic.

We now know that there is no clear

threshold of complexity,

development is continuous and gradual.

‎

At what point does the fetus become

complex enough to warrant a rational soul?

Eight weeks?

Twelve weeks?

At birth?

Any answer seems arbitrary,

yet Ibn Sina's system requires a precise

moment when the immaterial soul is

injected into the material body.

‎

Now let us examine what the rational

soul actually does,

what makes it distinctively rational.

Ibn Sina says the rational soul has two

main functions,

theoretical reason and practical reason.

‎

Theoretical reason is the capacity to

grasp universal truths,

necessary propositions,

abstract concepts.

When you understand that two plus two

equals four,

or that all triangles have three sides,

you are using theoretical reason.

‎

These truths are not derived from

sensory experience,

they are grasped by the intellect

directly through its contact with the

Active Intellect.

Here is how it works in Ibn Sina's system.

Your mind does not contain actual

universal concepts innately,

it only has the potential to think them.

‎

When you encounter particulars through sensation,

your mind prepares itself to receive the

universal form.

Then the Active Intellect,

which contains all universal forms actually,

illuminates your mind,

and you suddenly grasp the universal.

Learning is not remembering what you

already knew,

as Plato thought,

and it is not extracting universals from

particulars through abstraction,

as Aristotle thought.

‎

It is receiving illumination from the

Active Intellect.

This is Ibn Sina's famous theory of illumination,

and it was massively influential in

medieval philosophy.

But it has serious problems.

‎

If all knowledge comes from outside,

from the Active Intellect beaming

concepts into your mind,

then in what sense is learning an achievement?

You are not discovering anything,

you are just being a passive receiver of

transmissions from a cosmic intellect.

This seems to eliminate genuine

intellectual agency.

‎

Moreover,

if the Active Intellect is one and the

same for all humans,

then how do we account for individual

differences in understanding?

Why do some people grasp concepts quickly

and others slowly?

Why do some people understand deeply and

others superficially?

‎

Ibn Sina tries to explain this by

saying that different souls have different

levels of receptivity based on their

bodily preparation,

but this makes knowledge dependent on

matter again,

which contradicts the immateriality of

the rational soul.

The alternative view,

held by later philosophers like Thomas Aquinas,

is that the human intellect actively

abstracts universals from particulars

through its own power.

We do not need illumination from outside,

we have an agent intellect within us that

performs abstraction.

‎

This preserves intellectual agency but

raises its own problems,

how can an immaterial intellect abstract

forms from material objects?

What is abstraction as a causal process?

Practical reason,

the second function of the rational soul,

is the capacity to deliberate about action,

to choose,

to govern behavior according  to rational principles.

This is the seat of free will,

of moral responsibility,

of ethical judgment.

‎

But here Ibn Sina faces a problem that

has never been satisfactorily solved,

if the rational soul makes free choices,

then it must not be fully determined by

prior causes.

But if it is not determined,

then its choices are random,

arbitrary,

uncaused.

‎

How can you be responsible for choices

that are not caused by your character,

your reasons,

your values?

But if they are caused by those things,

then they are determined,

not free.

Ibn Sina tries to navigate between

determinism and randomness by saying that

the rational soul is self-determining.

It is the cause of its own choices,

not caused by external factors but also

not uncaused,

caused by itself.

‎

But this is obscure,

what does it mean to be the cause of your

own choices?

If you choose based on reasons,

then the reasons caused the choice,

not you independently of reasons.

If you choose without reasons,

then the choice is arbitrary.

‎

The contemporary philosopher Robert

Kane has tried to develop a sophisticated

version of this libertarian free will,

arguing that free choices involve what he

calls self-forming actions,

moments where multiple options are

genuinely open and the agent resolves the

indeterminacy through an act of will.

But critics argue this still does not

explain how the will resolves

indeterminacy without either being

determined or being random.

‎

Now we come to the fate of the soul

after death,

and here Ibn Sina's view is both

beautiful and terrifying.

When the body dies,

the rational soul separates and continues

to exist.

‎

But what happens to it depends entirely

on what kind of soul it became during

bodily life.

Souls that cultivated theoretical knowledge,

that achieved union with the Active

Intellect through philosophical contemplation,

experience supreme happiness.

They exist in a state of continuous

intellectual joy,

forever contemplating eternal truths in

union with the divine intellect.

‎

This is the highest form of human fulfillment,

the purpose for which we exist.

Souls that remained attached to bodily pleasures,

that never developed their rational capacities,

experience torment.

Not because they are punished by God,

but because they are frustrated,

they still desire bodily pleasures but

have no body with which to satisfy those desires.

‎

They are in a state of perpetual

craving with no possibility of satisfaction,

which is a kind of hell.

And here is the truly disturbing part,

for Ibn Sina,

this state is eternal.

Once the soul is separated from the body,

it cannot change,

cannot develop,

cannot repent or improve.

‎

Its character is fixed permanently.

If you died as a philosophical soul,

you are eternally happy.

If you died as a sensual soul,

you are eternally frustrated.

‎

There is no redemption,

no second chances,

no divine mercy that intervenes to save

lost souls.

This is in deep tension with Islamic theology,

which emphasizes God's mercy and the

possibility of repentance even at the last moment.

Ibn Sina's system makes the afterlife mechanical,

determined by your level of intellectual

development at death,

with no room for grace or forgiveness.

‎

But there is an even deeper problem

with Ibn Sina's account of the afterlife,

the problem of personal identity.

If the rational soul is all that survives,

stripped of memory,

imagination,

sensory experience,

bodily feelings,

then in what sense is it still you?

‎

The rational soul has no particular memories,

it only retains universal knowledge.

It has no personality,

no individual characteristics,

no sense of itself as having lived a

particular life.

What survives might be a soul,

but it is not clear it is your soul in

any meaningful sense.

‎

This problem has been pressed by many critics,

both medieval and modern.

If what survives death lacks the

psychological continuity that makes you you,

if it does not remember your life,

does not have your personality,

does not recognize itself as the person

who lived,

then the survival of the rational soul

provides no comfort.

‎

It is a kind of impersonal immortality,

not the survival of you as an individual.

Ibn Sina was aware of this problem but

never adequately addressed it.

He insisted that the rational soul

retains a kind of individual identity,

but he could not explain what constitutes

that identity if not memory and personality.

‎

This remains an unresolved tension in

his psychology.

Finally,

we must address the unity of the soul.

Ibn Sina insists that despite having

multiple faculties,

the soul is ultimately one thing,

not a collection of separate parts.

‎

The vegetative,

animal,

and rational functions are all

expressions of a single substance viewed

from different angles.

But this raises the question,

what unifies them?

What makes them all aspects of one soul

rather than three separate souls

accidentally conjoined?

‎

Ibn Sina's answer is that the higher

faculties contain and perfect the lower ones.

The rational soul includes the animal

functions and directs them toward rational ends,

the animal soul includes the vegetative

functions and organizes them for sensation

and movement.

‎

The soul is unified because it is a hierarchy,

not a democracy,

with the rational soul at the apex

governing everything below it.

But this picture of the soul as a

hierarchy breaks down in practice.

Often our rational judgments are

overridden by emotion,

our animal desires defeat our rational plans.

‎

If the rational soul truly governed the

whole person,

how could this happen?

Ibn Sina would say it happens when the

soul is weak,

when it has not fully developed its

rational capacities.

But this seems to undermine the claim

that the rational soul is the form of the

whole person,

if it can be present but impotent,

it is not really governing the organism.

‎

What emerges from Ibn Sina's psychology

is a deeply dualistic picture despite his

attempts to synthesize Plato and Aristotle.

The rational soul is ultimately separate

from the body,

uses the body as an instrument,

and will eventually leave the body behind.

‎

This is much closer to Plato than to Aristotle,

despite Ibn Sina's explicit claims otherwise.

And this matters for how we think about

human nature and ethics.

If you are essentially a rational soul

temporarily embodied,

then the body is not really you,

it is just a tool or a prison depending

on how you view it.

‎

This can lead to a devaluation of

bodily needs,

of physical pleasure,

of embodied relationships,

in favor of pure intellectual contemplation.

Ibn Sina's ideal human is the philosopher

who transcends bodily concerns and lives

in pure thought.

But is this really the fullness of human life?

‎

Or is it a denial of our embodied,

social,

emotional nature in favor of  an abstract intellectualism?

Many critics,

ancient and modern,

have argued that Ibn Sina's psychology is

profoundly anti-human,

that it demands we stop being the

creatures we are in pursuit of an

impossible and undesirable ideal.

‎

Part 6: "How We Know Anything: Ibn

Sina's Theory of Knowledge and Why It

Fails": Now we arrive at perhaps the most

important question in all of philosophy,

how do we know anything?

How can we be certain that our beliefs

correspond to reality and are not just illusions,

errors,

or useful fictions?

‎

Ibn Sina builds an elaborate epistemology,

a theory of knowledge,

that tries to ground certainty in

rational intuition and necessary truths.

But it has fatal flaws that he never

fully addressed.

‎

Ibn Sina begins with a classification

of knowledge types.

At the lowest level is sensory knowledge,

what we learn through the five senses,

seeing colors,

hearing sounds,

feeling textures.

‎

This is particular and concrete,

tied to specific objects at specific times.

Above this is imaginative knowledge,

the ability to form and manipulate mental

images derived from sensation.

Then comes estimative knowledge,

the non-sensory apprehension of meanings

like danger or benefit,

this is what a sheep exercises when it

fears a wolf even on first sight.

‎

Finally,

at the highest level,

is intellectual knowledge,

the grasp of universal concepts and

necessary truths.

The question is,

which of these provides certainty?

Ibn Sina argues that only intellectual

knowledge can give us absolute certainty,

and only in specific cases.

‎

Sensory knowledge is inherently fallible,

the senses can deceive,

can be mistaken,

can present illusions.

The stick looks bent in water but is not,

the distant tower looks round but is square.

We cannot build certainty on sensation alone.

‎

But intellectual knowledge of necessary

truths is different.

When you understand that the whole is

greater than the part,

or that a thing cannot both be and not be

at the same time,

or that two plus two equals four,

you grasp something that cannot be false.

‎

These are not just beliefs that happen

to be true,

they are truths that must be true,

that could not possibly be otherwise.

And when you grasp a necessary truth,

you grasp it with certainty,

you cannot coherently doubt it even if

you try.

‎

Ibn Sina calls these primary principles

or first intelligibles.

They are self-evident truths that do not

need proof and cannot be doubted by anyone

who understands them.

‎

Examples include the law of non-contradiction,

the principle that every event has a cause,

the axioms of mathematics,

and certain logical principles.

These form the foundation of all knowledge,

everything else we know must be derived

from or grounded in these first principles.

But here is where the problems start.

How do we know that these so-called

self-evident truths are actually true?

‎

Just because we cannot help believing

something does not mean it is true,

it might just mean our minds are

structured in a way that forces us to

believe it.

We might be prisoners of  our cognitive architecture,

unable to think differently even though

reality actually is different.

The philosopher Descartes,

writing six hundred years after Ibn Sina,

raised this worry in its most acute form.

He imagined an evil demon who created us

with systematically deceiving minds,

minds that take falsehood for truth,

that cannot help believing what is false.

‎

How do we know we are not in that situation?

How do we know that our sense of

self-evidence tracks truth rather than

just reflecting how our minds happen to work?

Ibn Sina would respond that this kind of

radical skepticism is incoherent.

To doubt everything,

including the principles of logic,

is to make doubt itself impossible.

‎

If you doubt the law of non-contradiction,

then you cannot distinguish between

doubting and not doubting,

between truth and falsehood,

between anything and anything else.

Radical skepticism destroys itself,

it collapses into meaninglessness.

But this response is not fully satisfying.

The skeptic can grant that we must assume

certain principles in order to think at all,

but still ask whether those principles

reflect reality or just the structure of thought.

‎

Perhaps we are trapped inside a

conceptual scheme that does not correspond

to how things really are.

We have to think in certain ways,

but that does not mean reality has to be

those ways.

The contemporary philosopher Hilary

Putnam pressed this issue with his famous

brain-in-a-vat thought experiment.

How do you know you are not a brain in a

vat being fed simulated  experiences by a supercomputer?

‎

Everything would seem the same to you,

all your beliefs would feel just as certain,

but they would all be false.

You cannot appeal to your sense of

certainty to rule this out,

because the brain in the vat would have

exactly the same sense of certainty.

Ibn Sina never confronted this level of

skepticism because it was not a live

option in his intellectual context.

Medieval philosophers assumed that God

would not create minds systematically

deceived about basic truths,

that divine goodness guarantees the

reliability of properly functioning reason.

‎

But once you remove that assumption,

once you allow that our minds might be

unreliable even about what seems self-evident,

Ibn Sina's foundation crumbles.

Let us move to a second major problem

with Ibn Sina's epistemology,

the role of the Active Intellect.

Remember that Ibn Sina thinks we learn

universal truths not by abstracting them

from experience,

but by receiving illumination from the

Active Intellect when our minds are

properly prepared.

‎

The Active Intellect contains all

universal forms actually and transmits

them to individual human minds when those

minds are ready.

But this raises a devastating question,

how do you know when you have received

genuine illumination versus when you are

just imagining or inventing ideas?

If knowledge comes from outside,

from a cosmic intellect beaming concepts

into your mind,

then you need some way to distinguish

genuine reception from delusion.

‎

What is the criterion?

Ibn Sina says that genuine knowledge has

a quality of necessity and self-evidence

that mere imagination lacks.

When you truly understand a universal truth,

you see that it must be so,

whereas imagined ideas feel contingent

and uncertain.

‎

But this cannot be the criterion,

because people often feel certain about

things that are false.

History is full of beliefs that felt

self-evident to their believers but turned

out to be wrong.

Aristotelian physics felt self-evident

for two thousand years but was overturned

by Newtonian mechanics,

which felt self-evident for three hundred

years but was overturned by relativity and

quantum mechanics.

‎

The subjective feeling of necessity is

not a reliable guide to truth.

And if that is all Ibn Sina can offer as

a criterion for genuine illumination,

then his epistemology provides no

protection against error.

‎

A third problem concerns empirical knowledge,

knowledge of the physical world derived

from sensory experience.

Ibn Sina acknowledges that we learn about

particular physical facts through sensation,

but he thinks this knowledge is always

uncertain and fallible.

‎

We can never be absolutely certain that

the physical world is as it appears to us,

because the senses can deceive.

But then how can we have science?

How can we have reliable knowledge of

nature if all empirical observation is

inherently uncertain?

‎

Ibn Sina's answer is that science deals

with universals,

not particulars.

Scientific knowledge is knowledge of

necessary connections between essences,

not knowledge of particular contingent facts.

When you know that fire necessarily heats,

you are not knowing a particular instance

of fire heating a particular object,

you are knowing a universal truth about

the nature of fire.

‎

But this picture of science is

completely wrong,

and Ibn Sina should have known this given

his own scientific practice.

Science proceeds by observation,

experimentation,

hypothesis testing,

not by contemplating essences.

‎

You do not learn that fire heats by

thinking about the essence of fire,

you learn it by observing particular

instances of fire heating things.

And the universal claim that all fire

heats is not a necessary truth known

through intellectual intuition,

it is an empirical generalization that

might be false.

We could discover types of fire that do

not heat,

or contexts where fire fails to heat,

and this would not involve  a logical contradiction.

‎

Ibn Sina's epistemology cannot account

for genuine empirical science because it

assumes all real knowledge must be certain,

necessary,

and grasped through intellectual intuition.

But empirical knowledge is not like this,

it is tentative,

probabilistic,

revisable in light of new evidence.

‎

The success of modern science depends

precisely on abandoning Ibn Sina's demand

for absolute certainty and accepting that

empirical knowledge is always provisional.

A fourth problem,

perhaps the most devastating,

is the problem of induction.

Even if we grant that we can know

particular facts through observation,

how do we move from observed instances to

universal generalizations?

‎

You have seen a thousand crows and all

were black,

but how do you know the next crow will be black?

How do you know all crows are black?

The past does not logically necessitate

the future,

no contradiction would arise if the next

crow turned out to be white.

‎

Ibn Sina never addressed this problem seriously.

He assumed that if you observe enough

instances of a pattern,

the universal form behind it becomes

evident to the intellect through

illumination from the Active Intellect.

‎

But this is no solution,

it just relocates the mystery.

How does the Active Intellect know that

the pattern will continue?

And how does it communicate this to your

mind reliably?

‎

The philosopher David Hume,

writing six centuries after Ibn Sina,

showed that induction cannot be

rationally justified.

We believe that the future will resemble

the past,

but this belief itself is based on induction,

on observing that in the past the future

has resembled the past.

‎

This is circular reasoning,

it assumes what it is trying to prove.

We have no rational foundation for

inductive inference,

we just have a psychological habit of

expecting patterns to continue.

‎

If Hume is right,

then most of what we think we know about

the empirical world is not knowledge at all,

it is just firmly held belief without

rational justification.

And Ibn Sina's epistemology,

which demands rational certainty for

genuine knowledge,

would have to admit that we know almost

nothing about the physical world.

‎

Now let us turn to a practical problem

with Ibn Sina's epistemology,

the problem of disagreement.

If certain truths are self-evident to

properly functioning minds,

why do people disagree about so much?

‎

Why do intelligent,

educated,

rational people come to contradictory

conclusions about fundamental questions?

If knowledge comes from the Active

Intellect illuminating prepared minds,

why does it not produce consensus?

Ibn Sina's answer is that most people's

minds are not properly prepared,

they are clouded by passion,

prejudice,

attachment to authority,

or simple lack of intellectual training.

Only philosophers who have purified their

minds through disciplined study can

reliably receive illumination.

‎

Everyone else is getting distorted or

partial transmissions.

But this is elitist and question-begging.

It assumes that anyone who disagrees with

Ibn Sina must be irrational or unprepared,

rather than considering that maybe Ibn

Sina himself is wrong.

‎

It makes the philosopher's views

unassailable by definition,

which is exactly what you would expect

from a system that privileges intellectual

intuition over empirical evidence and

intersubjective verification.

Moreover,

philosophers disagree with each other constantly,

often more than non-philosophers do.

Ibn Sina disagreed with Aristotle,

with Plotinus,

with Al-Farabi,

and his own students disagreed with him.

‎

If philosophical training prepares the

mind to receive true illumination,

why does it not produce agreement among

the trained?

The presence of persistent philosophical

disagreement suggests that intellectual

intuition is not the reliable guide to

truth that Ibn Sina claims.

Contemporary epistemology has largely

moved away from Ibn Sina's  foundationalist approach,

the idea that knowledge must be built on

a foundation of self-evident truths.

Instead,

most epistemologists accept some form of

coherentism or reliabilism.

‎

Coherentism says that beliefs are

justified if they fit together into a

coherent system,

without needing an indubitable foundation.

Reliabilism says that beliefs are

justified if they are produced by reliable

cognitive processes,

even if those processes do not yield certainty.

These approaches give up on Ibn Sina's

demand for absolute certainty,

accepting instead that human knowledge is

fallible and revisable.

But they better account for actual

scientific practice and the reality of

persistent disagreement.

‎

Finally,

we must address the normative dimension

of Ibn Sina's epistemology,

the claim that we have a duty to pursue knowledge,

especially philosophical knowledge.

Ibn Sina thinks that intellectual

perfection is the human good,

that we fulfill our nature by developing

our rational capacities to their maximum extent.

‎

The life of philosophical contemplation

is the best life,

the life most worth living.

But why should we accept this?

Many people find fulfillment in

activities that have nothing to do with

abstract philosophical contemplation,

in relationships,

in creative work,

in physical challenges,

in social engagement.

‎

Is Ibn Sina saying that all these lives

are inferior,

that anyone not pursuing philosophical

wisdom is wasting their life?

This is a form of intellectualism that

many contemporary philosophers reject.

The good life for humans is plural,

there are many different ways to live well,

and philosophical contemplation is just

one option among others,

not the uniquely best way.

‎

Ibn Sina's epistemology smuggles in a

controversial ethical claim about human

flourishing and presents it as if it were

a metaphysical necessity.

In the end,

Ibn Sina's theory of knowledge cannot

deliver what it promises,

absolute certainty grounded in

self-evident rational intuition.

It fails to account for the fallibility

of even our most basic beliefs,

the problem of induction,

the reality of persistent disagreement,

and the nature of empirical science.

‎

What remains valuable is his insistence

that we can know some things with more

certainty than others,

that there is a hierarchy of knowledge

from the sensory to the intellectual.

But the specific mechanism he proposes,