The Really Hard Problem Quotes

“If you live well, then when you die you lose nothing you care about. Why? Because you are no longer there. You are just gone. That which is gone has nothing to lose. That which was once something, but is now nothing, cannot suffer any loss. But assuming the world and the people in it, including your loved ones remain, then your good karmic effects continue on. This is something to be proud of and happy about while alive. Your goodness, your presence, your worth are why the living feel your loss, and are sad, possibly very sad. But you are not sad, you neither suffer nor experience any loss because you are gone. [...] True, dying could be miserable, but your own death is nothing to worry about.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“The worst question to ask is ‘‘What is the meaning of life?’’ There is no single meaning of life.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“Many people who say that they are 'spiritual’ but not religious are saying that they are seeking to understand and develop a sense of connection to that which is greater than and more comprehensive than their self.
In this manner meaning is sought, possibly found and embodied in one’s life. The spiritual aspirations of such an individual do not, however, involve any theological beliefs. The individual might go to church, but not to worship God.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“We are imperfect information processors, but we can learn about what sorts of false or incorrectly interpreted information lead to incorrect self-assessments (negative or positive) and work to get over the tendency.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“Moral knowledge is not a kind of ‘‘divine wisdom.’’ [...] We are animals. This world is a material one, and there is no justification, none whatsoever, for believing in divinities or an afterlife. Morals matter, but they can’t really be about or for the sake of what the nonnaturalist says they are about or for. Morals are not about what God thinks is good or even what God commands, nor are morals about serving God’s purposes or doing God’s will. These ideas are out there, but they are childish ideas that are epistemically
unwarranted.
If ethics is about anything it must be about flourishing.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“It is constitutive of equanimity that I feel impartially about the well-being of others. If I am in the state of equanimity, interpreted as upekkha, I am in a state that involves, as an essential component, equal care and concern for all sentient beings. We might translate upekkha as ‘‘equanimity in community’’ if it helps us avoid confusion with our understanding of equanimity as a purely self-regarding state of mind.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“When it comes to mental health, or to flourishing, each person is a unique spatio-temporal site, with a particular life history, a certain ‘‘normal weather within,’’ situated inside a certain culture that pulls for display of its own norms, and so on. [...] The ‘‘artful’ or ‘‘craft-like’’ part comes from applying the scientific or empirical knowledge, wisdom, or generalizations in the nuanced way required by the complex particularity of any human life.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“[T]the almost unimaginable complexity of naturalistic explanations or explanation sketches of our kind of being reveal the beautiful depth, texture, and intricacy of our being, even if they remove whatever undeserved enchantment comes from mystifying analyses with numerous slots for the variable ‘‘and then the miracle occurred.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“Most cognitive neuroscientists are looking for a level at which consciousness, conceived as a psycho-biological phenomenon, turns out to be like digestion, where at some level of grain a type neurophysicalist account can be given. Better, across different kinds of consciousness (visual, olfactory, emotional, and so on) such scientists seek unified features that bind that type of consciousness.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“Token neurophysicalism says that all conscious mental states are realized in the brain inside a particular body, but token neurophysicalism allows that they might be realized in a wildly disjunctive way. [...] Type neurophysicalism says that some set of conscious mental events (say, visual perception), in a specific species at least, will have enough physically in common across instances to classify them of the same type, kind, or class.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“[T]here are neural correlates for every mental state. But [...] correlations do not constitute identities. There is a perfect correlation between be a living person and having a beating heart. But a living person isn’t a beating heart, nor vice-versa.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“Linking the phenomenological with the psychological and neural is a promising research strategy for understanding persons. It is, furthermore, the strategy now firmly in place.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“In science, even if experience and reason can’t yield a definitive test for some unsolved problem, the rules require trying to gain some explanatory grip by looking to the best intersubjectively confirmed theory in the vicinity, the theory with the best potential resources for making sense of the puzzling phenomena.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“[W]hen experience and reason lose their grip, one goes to received wisdom.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“If one’s essence is, as it were, immutably fixed, it is hard to see how self-transformation is possible.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“Conventional speech allows us to re-identify each person by her name as if she is exactly the same over time. But in fact identity is not an all-or-none thing. Personhood is a work in progress.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“[S]cience offers powerful tools for deepening human understanding of the interconnectedness of all life, although not all scientists see or avow this goal. Despite the actual heterogeneous motivations among scientists, it is not an idle hope that in good hands scientific knowledge can enhance wholesome, ethical goals and can lead to action that benefits all sentient beings and the environment.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“But modern science and theism—especially the sort that claims to be in possession of texts written by God—don’t, as it turns out, sit together comfortably. Buddhism, being intellectually deep, morally and spiritually serious, but non-theistic and non-doctrinal, sits well poised to be an attractor for the spiritually inclined.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“Meaningful human lives, we can now say, involve being moral, having true friends, and having opportunities to express our talents, to find meaningful work, to create and live among beautiful things, and to live cooperatively in social environments where we trust each other. If we have all these things, then we live meaningfully by any reasonable standard.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“[L]iving in a world in which many people are prevented from actualizing their potentials places powerful moral demands on those who have the resources to do so.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“[B]eing fit involves staying fit. Fitness is not something one achieves on a certain day at a certain time and is then done with. This means that while working to be and stay biological fit, one can begin the project of aiming to flourish.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“[M]orality is not ‘‘something altogether new on the face of the Earth.’’ It is not an invention de novo. Homo sapiens, presumably like their extinct social ancestors, as well as certain closely related species, such as chimps and bonobos, possess instincts and emotions that are ‘‘protomoral,’’ by which I simply mean that we possess the germs, at least, of the virtues of sympathy, compassion, fidelity, and courage. There is no ‘‘skyhook" being imputed here. We didn’t create the relevant instincts and emotions. Natural selection did. We are endowed with these instincts and feelings thanks to a craning operation that began with unicellular organisms.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“And for all the talk about how Darwin’s theory is one of ‘‘red in tooth and claw,’’ it simply isn’t. Humans are designed to care about more than individual fitness.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“We humans naturally care a lot about personal satisfaction. Hedonic well-being is firmly on our radar, and selfish, communally disruptive motives are abundant. It would make sense to be completely selfish—with self-serving strategic exceptions—if we were designed solely to achieve individual ‘‘fitness.’’ But we were not designed that way. We were designed to be fit as social animals.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“What we are motivated to be or to do has a biologically based species history, as well as whatever the histories of our people and our families add to our aspirations, goals, and ideals.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“[I]n order to flourish each person must interpenetrate the spaces of the good, the true, and the beautiful to some degree.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“Humans across otherwise very different social, economic, and political worlds show a motivation to locate what is ‘‘good,’’ ‘‘true,’’ and ‘‘beautiful’’ in order to live by and in their lights. Living in a genuinely meaningful way has two components. First-personally one judges one’s life to have been well lived and it is so judged by third parties in a position to evaluate legitimately the quality of the life lived.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“Conscious mental events are essentially Janus-faced and uniquely so. They have first-person subjective feel and they are realized in objective states of affairs.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“The simple and obvious point is that not everything worth expressing can or should be expressed scientifically. Scientism is descriptively false and normatively false.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World

“One surprisingly common idea is that science, in explaining some phenomenon, makes it something it isn’t or wasn’t. It tries to disclose that every thing is a ‘‘mere thing.’’ It takes the world as we know it and turns it into a mere collection of scientific objects. ‘Reductionism’ is the disparaging name for this phenomenon. Something like this view—that reduction always entails that things are not as they seem, and that such phenomena as consciousness are revealed as illusory—is common. But it rests on a mistake. To say that some phenomenon can be understood scientifically, even that it can be reduced, is not to say that the phenomenon is itself ‘‘scientific,’’ nor does it entail that the phenomenon we began with disappears or evaporates—whatever exactly that might mean—when we get at its deep structure. Consider a simple case: Water is H2O. Water is not explained away; its nature is understood more deeply. Water is a natural element. It is the explanandum. H2O is the explanans. Is either water or H2O itself ‘‘scientific’’? The question makes no sense. Water is a natural phenomenon, and science helps us to understand its microstructure, which explains why it in fact possesses such higher-level properties as fluidity. That’s all there is to it.”
― Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World