Introduction:
Hollow Knight offers one of the most engaging and intriguing experiences in the medium. Its engagement comes in equal measure from its sweeping orchestral music; intricate-yet-open level design; grand-yet-unobtrusive narrative; precise-yet-flexible mechanics; and charmingly illustrated and densely layered art. Its intrigue, on the other hand, derives principally from the fact that Hollow Knight is an interrogative text, meaning that it asks many more questions than it answers.
Some of its deliberate mysteries pertain to the history and plot of its world, but others are open thematic questions. The former group has been combed exhaustively by the game’s community since its release, but the latter have received comparatively paltry attention. The focus here, then, will be Hollow Knight’s oft-overlooked thematic questions, which predominantly revolve around the topics of intelligence and consciousness. To draw out what these questions are, why they are important, and why so many of them remain unanswered (in both the game and reality), in this analysis we will be primarily employing resources from the philosophy of mind.
Philosophy of mind is the field that covers (obviously) the mind—what it is, what it does, and how or if it relates to everything that isn’t the mind. Frameworks and concepts developed by those working in the field will help us to clarify Hollow Knight’s treatment of topics such as intellect, memory, thoughts, dreams, and, well, hollowness.
This article is geared more toward people who are familiar with the characters and plot details of Hollow Knight, and unfamiliar with the relevant philosophy. But for those who don’t match up with that, or whose memory of the game is little buggy, here is an extremely quick, game-jargon-free overview of the full basic story and plot of Hollow Knight:
Below a valley, numerous insect species of varying sentience dwell in a subterranean cave system. Some of the more intelligent species form cultures, which rise and fall over time; most of these cultures are distinctly cultic, worshiping or being led by everything from primal substances to specific deific beings. At some point, a massive worm-like creature finds its way into this diverse region, undergoes a metamorphosis into a much smaller bug, and uses its powers to eventually conquer the majority of the region’s lands and inhabitants—establishing an expansive kingdom and acting as its ruler. Later, one of the deific beings that had been worshiped prior to the worm-like being’s arrival stirs to desperate action, refusing to be forgotten. This prior entity of worship literally moves from mind to mind, slowly infecting and claiming the minds of the kingdom’s citizens.
The king formulates a convoluted plan to address the infection. First, he and his queen bear a huge number of children in eggs which are deposited in a chasm full of a dangerous, mysterious substance. There, the children’s bodies and minds are ostensibly hollowed out and replaced by the substance, yet retain physical functionality. Next, the rulers trap the infectious deity within one of the children, counting on its unusual composition to keep the deity contained. That child is then chained up and sealed away behind a protective barrier.
Although this plan is initially fruitful, the infection eventually begins spreading once again despite the protections, finally causing a total collapse of the kingdom. The king dies while hiding from the infection in a sealed enclosure of his own. The spread of the infection only grows more aggressive over time, even resurrecting the corpses of dead bugs as zombie slaves. The player-character is another of the king’s ostensibly hollowed children; they destroy a trio of beings to break the protective barrier, unchain and confront their sibling trapped within, and then either personally replace them or else directly subdue the infectious deity. Alternatively, the player-character can leave their sibling as-is and fight the infectious deity through another powerful mind to which it can be drawn.
Got all that? Good. Let’s jump in:
The Illumination of Hollow Knight’s Pale King and Radiance:
My last longform application of philosophy to the interpretation of a game, which was focused on analyzing FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls, dealt extensively with the topics of knowledge and belief, and how those concepts lead to action. In other words, it dealt with the contents and capabilities of the mind. But in the course of that work, I never really had an occasion to step back and focus on more fundamental questions: what is a mind? What is consciousness?
Perhaps moreso than any other specific thematic concerns, those questions lie at the core of Hollow Knight.
Much of the game’s emphasis on the nature of the mind is accessible through a consideration of the powers and plans of two creatures: Hallownest’s monarch, the Pale King—and the being responsible for the infection, the Radiance. All of the events of the game and most of the lore of the game pertain in some fashion to the actions of those two figures. And a crucial difference between them, the difference in ability that allowed the Pale King to seize the fealty or at least cooperation of nearly the entire region (leading to the historic neglect of the Radiance which eventually spurs its infectious rampage), begins being introduced immediately at the start of the game.
Before we even drop into King’s Pass and experience the game’s tutorial, we are treated to an elegiac poem credited to the in-game scholar Monomon:
In wilds beyond they speak your name with reverence and regret,
For none could tame our savage souls yet you the challenge met,
Under palest watch, you taught, we changed, base instincts were redeemed,
A world you gave to bug and beast as they had never dreamed.
In ways both subtle and blatant, this verse is introducing us to the eminence and power of the Pale King. On the subtle side, notice that the one and only time that the iambic heptameter rhythm of the poem breaks is at the first direct reference to the King—“Under palest watch,” which is further underscored by that being the only line whose flow is broken up by multiple commas. But more importantly, on the blatant side: the poem informs us that somehow the King’s influence amounted to a form of teaching which suppressed the bestial instinctive savagery of the kingdom’s bugs.
At this point, it would be reasonable to assume that this just refers to some manner of instructive civilizing influence, as though the bugs of Hallownest were simply ill-mannered or uneducated before the King’s arrival. But as the game wears on we learn that something far more dramatic has occurred. Apart from probable outliers like the tribes of mantises and moths, many of the bugs in question were previously instinctive in the sense of being animalistic—beasts rather than people.
The change wrought by the King was to expand the mind, to grow conscious awareness, to grant intelligence. The change brought by the infection of the Radiance, however, was the exact opposite: to condense the mind, to shrink conscious awareness, to remove intelligence.
This is all laid out with relative clarity on a tablet written in an arcane archival language, presumably by the same author as that poem, Monomon. Of the Pale King, it says, “KINGLIGHT-EM-GROWTH-INKIND-FLOW-ALLTHINK-ENFIELD.” And by contrast, of the Radiance it says, “OLDLIGHT-EM-ESSENCE-EM-DREAM-EM-UNGROWTH-O-ENDTHINK.” It does go on, however, to imply the two beings are related in some way: “ABA-KINGLIGHT-CH-OLDLIGHT-THEMKIN.”
As you see in that archive, both beings’ powers are said to find their expression in a kind of light peculiar to each of them. At a surface level, this seems like a subdued zoological joke. After all, the whole plot of Hollow Knight essentially revolves around the fact that bugs are preternaturally enthralled by light—that light sources in reality turn bugs into mindless subservient zombies that must pursue them even unto death. No bug is more famously susceptible to this phenomenon than a moth. It was one or more moths who through the twists and turns of history continued to remember and thus sustain the Radiance, and the Radiance herself is a moth deity whose existence as a glorious light source goes so far as to resemble a sun-like celestial body prior to the fight against her. This would be far from the only ‘lore-ification’ of insect biology in the game; to take just a few examples, notice the warrior culture of the mantis tribe, the Ancestral Mound’s whispering root referring to the snail shamans’ affinity for soul manipulation as a “spiral focus,”and the Hive’s whispering root saying that the bees found the infection familiar (implying they already operated as a hivemind).
Yet the whole situation with the light of those Higher Beings also echoes one of the oldest theories in the philosophy of mind, an epistemological doctrine advanced most famously by the ancient North African philosopher Augustine of Hippo under the name ‘divine illumination.’ This was, as the phrase suggests, an explicitly religious theory of intellect and knowledge—it argued that when we access truths about the world, we do so through direct divine intervention in our minds. Our cognition, according to the theory, requires regular divine assistance to operate: “[. . .] the [reasoning] soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. You will light my lamp, O Lord. My God you will lighten my darknesses (Ps. 17: 29).” (Augustine IV.xv.25, emphasis added to clarify in-text citation). This was not the first historical theory of thinking and knowing, and it was simplistic in its pre-scientific conceptions. But it was nonetheless an important early attempt to grapple with the strange character and power of the rational mind—its ability to access, experience, represent, understand, and remember the world around it.
Now, though the Pale King is extraordinarily powerful and knows a great deal (including being able to see the future to some degree), he is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. In other words, although he positions himself as a God to his subjects, the Pale King is a god with a lowercase ‘g.’ As a result, the Pale King’s divine illumination is not omnipresent; it’s localized and possibly intentionally directed. On a tablet adjacent to the King’s throne room, it’s described as a beacon. And though the Godseeker tells us the beacon can be sensed further afield, its mind-enhancing effects hold sway (or held sway) only within Hallownest—as a lore tablet in the Howling Cliffs tells us that leaving the kingdom means relinquishing the mind it grants (a notion reinforced by a whispering root and the thoughts of a dead bug near the border, and potentially confirmed by Quirrel’s amnesia).
The King’s attempt to imbue this limitation of his power with religious significance, as an aspect of the importance and ‘chosenness’ of this cave system in particular, is visible in the name of his kingdom: Hallownest. Many players mistakenly read or report this as ‘Hollownest’ (for obvious reasons), but the actual spelling pulls in the word ‘hallowed,’ meaning sacred or consecrated.
On the subject of the King as beacon, of the King as powerful-but-not-omnipotent and far-seeing-but-not-omniscient, it’s also important to notice that the Pale King’s motivation is not noble. He does catalyze infrastructure, technology, and civilization; he does engage in diplomacy with groups that reject his leadership; and he does grant mental prowess (as well as protective insight from his prescience) to the citizens of Hallownest—but he does all of that for exactly the same reason that the Radiance infects bugs: to gain their subservience. Why that should be so desirable is important for us to consider in our search for the nature of mind in Hollow Knight because devotion and worship are, in large part, mental.
This telos of the King is revealed on that same tablet that describes him as a beacon, which clarifies: “Minds expanded, to yield, to devote.” The King is willing to go to great lengths to secure this devotion, making many bold claims which are obviously false, such as that Hallownest is the only civilization, that Hallownest is an eternal civilization, and even that he himself created all bugs and the world itself. The exact purpose of gaining that kind of power over multitudes, of being the lone deific ruler with “No Blazing kin” (ibid.) is never confirmed. But it could be that mental devotion has an empowering effect on the recipient. That’s what is implied by the Godseeker in the Pantheon of Hallownest when, on considering Greenpath’s powerful progenitor Unn, they tellingly introspect that they would “give [their] mind” to see Unn “with land and dream and devotion.” And that would explain the apparently growing power of the Radiance and ultimately dwindled power of the King.
We can say with confidence that yielding or devotion sustains the Radiance, but beyond that there’s not enough information to say for sure what specific noteworthy powers all minds have or confer (if any) through their attention and worship.
Something else we know is that certain higher beings like the Pale King and the Radiance stand in opposition to a force worshiped even further back in history, a powerful-yet-volatile substance known as ‘void;’ it’s not clear whether this is mainly because of those higher beings’ association with essence (which is said to be made of light), or because of their association with soul (which has a material incompatibility with void). But whatever the motive, it does seem like the Pale King upset a balance that was present in the kingdom before his arrival; thus—referring to the Pale King by his species, which is ‘wyrm’—Mr. Mushroom thinks to himself, “Wyrms pull bugs into their thrall,/ Till ages pass and kingdoms fall.”
Maybe another way, then, to understand how the Pale King operates, what his power to enthrall entails, is by looking at the kingdom’s fall. This turns out to be a promising approach; Hollow Knight gives us its most specific description of what a mind is . . . when it tells us what it would be not to have one. The King’s plan to avoid the kingdom’s destruction hinged on his ability to use the ancient void substance pooled beneath Hallownest to entirely remove the mind from a bug, to hollow it out: “No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering.”
Assuming these three aspects of hollowness are related, the mind is the seat of thought, will, and expression. It’s the internal willful thinking experience of the being, as well as some related functionality such as language and even perhaps relevant behavioral tasks like speech. Just how all of this works—and what it would mean for a being to be both mindless and competent, both ‘hollow’ and a ‘knight’—is a central strangeness, a central mystery here.
Now, although it has partial reality in the world of Hollow Knight, in reality (with the exception of occasional later outliers) the theory of divine illumination did not survive the medieval period—at which point most philosophers, though retaining the religious instinct, began to prefer the notion that the mind was simply designed so as to be able to access truths about the world, and/or that the world was simply designed so as to be intelligible. To understand everything the game has to offer on the topic, we too will need to move beyond an ancient conception of the mind.
Yet the strange character and power of the rational mind which in part informed Augustine’s epistemology, the mind’s particular ways of accessing and representing reality, would only receive more and more attention as the centuries passed. With regard to that subject, let’s sum up what we’ve gathered so far:
In Hollow Knight, the mind is a personal willful conscious awareness with some possible related behavioral possibilities, just like it is for human beings in reality. In Hallownest, nature sometimes does (but often does not) bestow complex minds on bugs without the need for intervention by the Pale King or another being with relevant powers. Mentality is something that the Pale King can grant or enhance but not directly remove, as he has to turn to the use of void to attempt a removal along those lines. Although some were more impressed by his ability to know certain details about the future, enhancement of the mind was the main benefit he offered in exchange for devotion and cooperation. For her part, the Radiance can reduce the mind to a controlled instinct which supplants or invokes natural instinct, without total removal of the mind, thereby gaining both control and whatever boons are conferred by sentient devotion. Thus the Hunter’s Journal entry for the violent husk says that infected bugs “awoke with broken minds.”
Well, that’s all clear enough, but none of it feels like what we really wanted to know when we asked the question ‘what is consciousness?’ at the start of the section. When I wrote just now that the mind is ‘a personal willful conscious awareness,’ that was more like a definition than an explanation. What we really want to know here is what makes up a mind, what causes a mind to happen, how a mind works. When the Pale King enhances the mind of a bug, which specific aspects of the bug itself are being enhanced to bring about that improvement? Is it or is it not, strictly speaking, a part of the bug’s body? Answering that seems like a better bedrock from which to build. So let’s dig a layer deeper:
Faces, Masks, and Shells in Hollow Knight:
A game is a mechanical world. A consistent world. A world of precise inputs and outputs, of causality, proportionality, and incremental progress. It is, in this regard, a reasonable analogue for a notion of a ‘physical world.’ And we learn about a gameworld in much the same way that we learn about the real world: largely through observation and inductive reasoning. Even the overt instructions we receive in-game are subject to physical verification; this is a fact that is well-understood by anyone who has ever been told to ‘press A’ by a Nintendo game which they are playing with an Xbox controller. Perhaps some events in the game are (or seem) indeterminate or random, but further investigation will usually reveal such events to be at least consistently probabilistic. An involved game is a system whose operations interact like the inner workings of a clock, and each action within it corresponds to defined effects in given circumstances.
Thinking of a game in these terms points the way toward a possible answer to the questions posed by the prior section. After all, in keeping with the way that all of the elements of a gameworld interact mechanically, Hollow Knight’s minds and bodies seem to interact in various ways both mechanically and narratively.
Apart from the Higher Beings covered in the previous section, one of the best sources for insight into the nature of mind in the game is the enigmatic Mask Maker found near the top of Deepnest. Mask Maker is fond of calling our attention to possible truths by posing redolent questions: “Is it mask or face upon the creature? In Hallownest, a difficult thing it can be to decipher. [. . .] A mask! A face! Does it need one? Does it not? To define. To focus. To exist.”
In reality, humans recognize and give special weight to arrays of sensory organs in tight configurations. We have a common term for such an array; we call it a ‘face.’ A high concentration of instruments of sense-perception in varying modalities is what we consider to be the foremost identifying external aspect of a person, the one to which we direct our attention when we address the person. I would contend that this is because of a strong link between our sensations and our minds. Small wonder that eye contact is felt so threatening among a variety of animal species, and given immense social import among people.
According to Mask Maker, in Hollow Knight such arrays have in their organizational structure the potential or possibility to allow a person to define, focus, and exist. And this is true regardless of whether that organizational structure is organic (a face) or artificial (a mask). In fact, while that notion is merely suggested, if themselves unmasked Mask Maker makes a much firmer claim along the same lines: “To change a face; to conceal it fully within another… A powerful protection that is, but one with sad consequence. The original mind is destroyed, though those of striking will may still retain a sliver of that concealed self.”
Granting that certain denizens of Deepnest (including Mask Maker and the one or more predators that ensnare you in the Distant Village) are familiar enough with the working of masks to be able to avoid the “sad consequence” for themselves, Mask Maker is otherwise describing a very strong relationship between mind and matter here—a relationship so strong that even the mere adjoining of an appropriately crafted new outermost layer, in addition to bolstering defense as any additional segment of shell would, fundamentally alters the corresponding mind. And it’s no sheer theory. We see its truth in the game, if we take Brumm up on his offer to banish the Grimm Troupe before the completion of their ritual. Brumm then removes his troupe mask, promptly losing his memory, name, and apparently his serious personality; he appears in Dirtmouth afterward as the more sensitive and emotional Nymm, sharing the shape and musical talent of Brumm but practically nothing else.
This concept of mind following structure recalls for me an essay by the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. Among thinkers who consider the mind to be distinct from the body, Huxley resides at the far opposite end of the spectrum from the divine intervention championed by Augustine. In the essay in question, while displaying familiarity with relevant early modern philosophy by Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, and Hume, Huxley makes an empirical case for the physical causation of mind:
It is experimentally demonstrable—any one who cares to run a pin into [themselves] may perform a sufficient demonstration of the fact—that a mode of motion of the nervous system is the immediate antecedent of a state of consciousness. All but the adherents of “Occasionalism,” or of the doctrine of “Pre-established Harmony” (if any such now exist), must admit that we have as much reason for regarding the mode of motion of the nervous system as the cause of the state of consciousness, as we have for regarding any event as the cause of another. How the one phenomenon causes the other we know, as much or as little, as in any other case of causation; but we have as much right to believe that the sensation is an effect of the molecular change, as we have to believe that motion is an effect of impact; and there is as much propriety in saying that the brain [emits] sensation, as there is in saying that an iron rod, when hammered, [emits] heat. (Huxley 574-575)
In fact, as regards the demonstrations he’s considering, we can do a lot better now than we could in Thomas Huxley’s time. Nowadays, for any given mental event reported while undergoing a scan of brain activity, we have always found neuronal activity that coincides with that event. Moreover, while brain regions for some events do vary between different people, for certain topics across all people and for most topics within a given person there is a consistent relationship between specific patterns or sets of neurological activities and particular thought processes. For a century we’ve been documenting the rhythmic neural oscillations commonly known as brainwaves, which offer a plausible mechanism for the unity of apperception and vary drastically when a person is asleep. We’ve even begun to develop an understanding of emotional experiences which correspond to the prevalence and biological utility of individual neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and glutamate, as well as hormones like oxytocin. Huxley’s contention that if you can get past the problem of induction for anything, you can get past it for this—that it is as tight an empirical relation as any in science—remains true, with added resolution.
For an important point of reference, then, we can contrast the situation Mask Maker is describing with a logical relationship between mind and associated matter which many philosophers have defended over the past century: ‘supervenience.’ Basically, one set of properties or notions is said to supervene on another if the two can not vary independently. When one changes (and only when one changes), the other changes. They are in a conceptual relationship so tight that they always vary together. That’s supervenience.
That this is most likely true of mind and body can be clearly seen through careful consideration of forms of mental impairment. As against its reputation among many historical thinkers, the mind is neither inviolable nor invincible. Naturally, the availability of particular sensations corresponds directly to the operational status of particular sense organs and associated nervous connections. But that’s not all. Each member of the more privileged class of purely mental tasks, such as understanding, imagination, reasoning, and recollection, can be injured by injury to the body—especially by injury or other forms of impairment to the central nervous system. This is readily apparent in the extensive medical literature regarding the reported mental tribulations of victims of traumatic brain injury, but if you are fortunate enough to have never suffered such an injury yourself, the limitations imposed on cognition by inebriation, illness, and tiredness should be more accessible iterations of the same trend.
We see that things are very similar in Hollow Knight when we explore the Soul Sanctum. The scholars there have enhanced their minds beyond what seems possible through masks alone or the King’s beacon alone, by absorbing vast quantities of harvested soul into their bodies—and as a result they describe their minds ‘swelling’ and subsequently ‘aching.’ A more widespread instance of this relationship in the game is the physical manifestation of the bugs’ mental infection as orange veins and pustules on bodies and surrounding landscape. As go the minds, so goes the matter.
To quote a formula invoked repeatedly over the years by the philosopher Jaegwon Kim, “To relieve a headache, you take aspirin: that is, you causally intervene in the brain process on which the headache supervenes. That’s the only way we can do anything about our headaches” (Kim 42-43). Don’t be distracted by the pithy opening there; Kim is not saying aspirin is the only way to relieve a headache. He’s saying that something actually happening in the head is the only way to relieve a headache.
Now, I said a moment ago that we would contrast that with what Mask Maker is describing; that’s because the relationship between matter and essence in the game does not actually rise to the level of supervenience. It is not true in Hollow Knight that there is no mental event without a corresponding physical event. The externally undetected death of the Pale King at some point in the past serves as a reasonable example of this fact.
But there is nonetheless a strong relationship here; mental chains of causation in Hollow Knight still seem to rely on there being relevant physical causes on some preceding occasion. And it does seem that alterations of the thought-bearing essential experiences of particular living beings in the present are dependent in the gameworld on the physical configuration of the relevant bodies. Thus Cornifer’s remark that the player-character lacking an olfactory apparatus must mean that they are without the internal experience of smell: “There’s a potent odour about these caverns and far worse for me I suspect. My trunk is quite sensitive whereas you don’t seem to possess a scent organ of any kind. Is it that you cannot smell at all?” And this isn’t a one-off event; the fact that the player-character has no reaction to noteworthy smells is highlighted again and again, for instance by the unique dialogue offered by various NPCs when you have the Defender’s Crest equipped.
Furthermore, there are no dreams without an origin in dreamers. And I don’t mean the three designated Dreamers sealing the temple; I just mean material beings whose thoughts are made up of dream essence. Even if the mosskin are correct to believe that they originate from the dream of Unn, Unn herself is a physical being. Essence can remain in the land or in objects, apart from that origin. But that’s still the source of particular essence configurations. Hence why the freestanding collections of essence we find always correspond to groups or individuals who live or lived nearby. This is also why it matters for her existence whether the Radiance is remembered. The Radiance is a being of pure essence, so she is reliant on her existence in the minds of others.
This does make the ultimate origin of the Radiance (whether in the collective belief in a progenitor by the moth tribe, or in a long-gone physical Radiance) an intriguing topic; but as I’ve said it’s a game with a great many such unanswered mysteries.
The relevant chains of causation are sometimes mixed or fuzzy, although (when verifiable) they do seem to unilaterally originate in the material world; think of Galien, for example, whose physical death left behind a warrior dream, and then whose warrior dream itself impels his physical scythe to move. Salubra describes some charms as working similarly, with a physical bug having mental wishes or desires and those crystallizing into physical charms when they die. Another example is the Grimm Troupe scout, who seems to have smuggled the anchor lantern into Hallownest via their mind. The significance and value of continuity with a material past is also expressed in the game’s currency system, which places all calculations of worth in terms of the amassment of tokens of geo, which are fossilized shells.
Yet one of the most pronounced ways in which mind and body interact mechanically in Hollow Knight is in its health system. Once we’ve covered health, we can assess whether or not the philosophical framework developed in this section is satisfactory.
Hidden Faces, Ancient Masks, and Broken Shells in Hollow Knight:
Speaking generally, the health and respawn system in Hollow Knight rides a line between traditional non-diegetic failure systems in games—like the transparently non-canonical act of losing a life in a Sonic, Mega Man, or Mario game—and integrated, diegetic failure systems—like the vita-chambers of BioShock, the storytelling framework of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, or the way that both player-character and enemy respawning is contextualized in some FromSoft games like Sekiro, Demon’s Souls, and Dark Souls.
Like the older and more common mode of non-canonical death mechanics, Hollow Knight’s system includes details that straightforwardly contradict otherwise consistent aspects of the setting and narrative (such as shades being able to cast spells, infinite new shades spawning or teleporting if one dies repeatedly without first reclaiming old shades, and broken shells teleporting to and awakening at recently visited benches).
Yet like the more interesting and high-effort method of providing a meaningful in-universe account for health and failure mechanics, the presentation of death still provides additional insight into the gameworld (into the composition of a vessel, into the sharing of power between the components of a vessel, and into the resemblance of the player-character’s shade to the Siblings in the Abyss).
Further details of the system, like Confessor Jiji having the power to summon a vessel’s shade and discussing it as if it were a general case of psychological regret, are ambiguous and could be interpreted as either providing or not providing broadly meaningful insight.
This mixed state of affairs has even driven some commentators to say that only Hollow Knight‘s ‘steel soul mode’ (and possibly also ‘godseeker mode’) provide canonical tellings of the gameworld’s events. Yet beyond adjudicating the system’s implications (or lack thereof) for relevant aspects of the lore, from the standpoint of general analysis of the game it is still vital to consider what such fundamental mechanics are thematically and emotionally communicating.
Most straightforwardly, the shell’s broken soul vessel and loss of geo, and the shade’s relatively stationary existence, indicate that the shell and shade are not complete beings when separated. Similarly, the shade is upgraded in health, damage, and abilities in tandem with one’s overall progression, showing that neither half of the being has claim to priority in that regard. Also notable is the fact that the health of the shell is represented (and improved) by a series of masks. These masks stand, literally, for the durability of the shell. But they also stand, figuratively, for the integrity of your personhood.
It’s a structural integrity that marries mind to matter. This endurance is signified by masks, which is to say simulacra of faces, which is to say nexuses of perception which inside the game are said to create and even replace identities and minds (and which outside the game are at least taken to be indicative of identities and minds). Thus this system displays the interactivity of mind and body in Hallownest, through its implication that harming the shell means harming both body and mind.
And using masks as health is especially fitting, as vessels like the player-character are arguably some of the only beings whose faces are also masks. Thus, despite the player-character having a face on an organic shell, Mask Maker thinks of the shade within the vessel as “the face that hides beneath.”
The importance of the face as a physical signifier of a being in Hallownest comes to a fever pitch in the Resting Grounds and Snail Shaman Mounds—the former being a place of funerary and memorial reverence, the latter a place of focus and ancestral knowledge. In both locations, there are walls, floors, and ceilings comprised of masks or facial shells—calling to mind the ornate assemblages of skulls found in many classical church ossuaries and catacombs. Notice also the snail shamans’ adornment of soul totems, necklaces, helmets, and staffs with masks or facial shells.
Masks and faces are clearly aspects of the body—they’re aspects of the gameworld’s material reality. When dreams represent such things, those dream representations are an imprint, projection, or memory. Just as any given dream in reality is underlied by someone dreaming, so in Hollow Knight the material mask or face is causally and logically prior to the dream mask or face. Again, although Seer saying that the Radiance is the origin of the moths does seem to imply it, the notion of a long-gone physical Radiance would be pure speculation. So, we could quibble on the Radiance’s support of this pattern. But the only other pure dream beings we encounter either definitely do follow from past physical entities (like the godseekers, royal retainers, and Pale King) or else have opaque histories and debatable facial features (like the Nightmare’s Heart). And at any rate, if historical correlation fails, substituting in the notion of dreaming-as-imagining for the notion of dreaming-as-remembering should suffice.
In sum, it seems that we’re getting somewhere with this theory of the mental as an effect of the physical.
But there is a remaining issue, and it’s a rather big one. Inside the game, we could express the issue by saying that establishing a relationship between Hallownest’s faces and minds still leaves us with meaningful operative questions. Outside the game, we could say that, unlike the physical story we can tell about the molecular functioning of an iron rod when hammered logically necessitating the presence of heat, the physical story we can tell about the chemical and electrical functioning of the nervous system in relevant situations does not logically necessitate the presence of consciousness. We have equal empirical reason to say bodily states cause (or are instances of) mental states as we do to say hammering iron causes (or is an instance of) heat, but in the latter case we know how.
Thomas Huxley is wrong to say that we are on the same footing in those two cases in that regard. Our theories of kinetic energy and the interaction of forces coincide at every step with the production or instantiation of heat by the hammering; we have as of now no working theories which take us step-by-step through the production or instantiation of mental effects by the neurobiology. What Huxley would have been right to say, following Hume, is that we are equally ignorant in both cases as to why the causation is true—but ultimately we don’t know why anything is true; for understanding in general, we take ‘how’ to be sufficient.
If we’re at least vaguely on the right track here, it would be correct to say that there is a first-person experience of the world from the point-of-view of certain chemical and electrical interactions. But we don’t know how that’s true. We are at present eluded by any mechanism or law of physics whereby it comes to be the case that there is a first-person experience of the world from the point-of-view of certain chemical and electrical interactions.
Even if one were to go a step beyond Huxley, as some have in the intervening century, and say the interactions in question are consciousness, it would not be enough to leave it at that. We’ll discuss that angle more further along, but for now it suffices to point out that an identity relation does not (and a worthwhile explanation would) provide an account of how those interactions in particular are consciousness and others are not.
This is paralleled in the game by the fact that, although many bug corpses found in your travels have dream nail dialogue, some (physically indistinguishable) corpses don’t. As a matter of fact, almost everything I’ve said up until this point could’ve been said of a hypothetical version of Hollow Knight in which you never interact with a dream, read a thought, or visit a mind.
To make progress with this topic, in both the game and reality, we need to dig even deeper. We need to come to grips with what fundamentally exists.
Void, Soul, and Essence in Hollow Knight:
In between positions like Augustine’s and positions like Huxley’s resides the position of René Descartes. If you asked Descartes what a mind is, he would say that it’s a fundamentally distinct substance from the stuff that makes up the material world—it’s an immaterial rational soul. As this is a dual conception of the world, containing two fundamental substances, Descartes is called a ‘dualist.’ Augustine and Huxley were dualists as well, but Descartes’ description of the mind as being rational in itself is a disagreement with both Augustine’s notion that it is always divinely augmented and Huxley’s notion that it is an inefficacious byproduct of bodily functioning.
Yet while it’s not part of the body, nor part of matter at all, a Cartesian mind is efficacious; it’s connected with the body and actively interacts with matter in various ways. And this kind of ‘soul interacting with body’ view, the ‘ghost in the machine’ view as it was derisively called by Gilbert Ryle, is a stance that enjoys broad popularity to this day.
Nevertheless, that position, interactionist substance dualism, rather quickly encounters two related difficulties: (1) every material effect of which we are aware has a sufficient material cause, leaving no obvious role for an immaterial cause to play, and (2) if the material substance and immaterial substance are fundamentally distinct as is alleged, it is by no means clear how an immaterial substance could ever exert a force that controls matter. These issues are by no means new observations. The second of them was discussed with Descartes, for instance, by Elisabeth of Bohemia in the early 1640s:
I [. . .] have never been able to conceive of such an immaterial thing as anything other than a negation of matter which cannot have any communication with it.
[. . .] it would be easier for me to concede matter and extension to the soul than to concede the capacity to move a body and to be moved by it to an immaterial thing. (Elisabeth 68)
Elisabeth remained adamant on this point against deflections by Descartes, leading him to conclude the conversation with the sentiment that ultimately no one should, and so she shouldn’t, spend too much time worrying about philosophy. Yet Descartes’ actual answer was (if you can believe it) even worse than that.
In two of his books (including one whose dedication is to Elisabeth), Descartes explains that although the soul is attached to the entire body, it doesn’t move the whole body directly; rather, the soul interacts with a special spot near the middle of the brain, namely the pineal gland, and that gland in turn moves the body. But while it was already known in Descartes’ own time that his physiological understanding of the brain (which led him to that conclusion) was wrong in various ways, even if he had the biology right it still would’ve been a useless clarification. For obviously neither of the aforementioned difficulties is addressed by such a contention; we would still need to know how the immaterial soul moves the material gland.
As a result of considerations like those of Elisabeth, substance dualism, though still favored by many, is no longer popular among philosophers. And that’s regardless of whether it’s in the Descartes flavor, where causation flows both ways, or the Huxley flavor, where it flows only from the physical to the mental. Instead, for the past century or so, the favored position among professional philosophers has been not dualism but monism: the stance that there is ultimately just one type of fundamental stuff in reality.
Both dualism and monism have difficulties, and both have arguments in their favor. Some difficulties for monism will come up later in this analysis. But between the two of them dualism and monism exhaust the opinions on the nature of reality held by all but a tiny minority of human beings.
It is noteworthy, then, that neither theory seems to be true in Hollow Knight.
Now, someone could try to make a simplistic case for dualism in Hollow Knight. The two fundamental substances would be matter and essence, with the former composing physical reality (encountered in most of the gameworld) and the latter composing mental reality (encountered in dream realms and when interacting with warrior dreams). At the far end of the duality opposite essence would be the subset of matter known as ‘void.’ This is suggested by their respective white and black colorations, their respective associations with light and darkness, the description of void in the White Palace as the “power opposed,” and the Radiance thinking of the player-character as her “ANCIENT ENEMY” (presumably as either a synecdoche for all void or in reference to its unification of all void).
But such a case would be misguided.
There is no firm reason (beyond some behavioral and geographical similarities) to consider void and ordinary matter to be related in the way outlined above; void has enough unique attributes to be considered distinct in its own right, and void-based shade gates seem to repel ordinary matter. Further, even if there was a strong case to be made that void is simply a type of matter, a full understanding of the gameworld would still require acknowledging a third fundamental substance which falls somewhere between matter and essence in properties, namely soul.
Arguably the flame sought by the Grimm Troupe and the lifeblood associated with the large creature trapped to the left of the Abyss should be factored into this picture somehow as well, but it’s unclear—even to the degree that void is conceptually distinct from ordinary matter—whether flame is genuinely distinct in behavior and properties from essence (note the red essence particles associated with Grimm, Grimm referring to the flame as essence, and the general relationship between nightmares and dreams), and whether lifeblood is genuinely distinct in behavior and properties from soul (note that deposits of lifeblood and soul share the same animation for absorption, and that both can be transmuted to health).
All told, we have in Hollow Knight a system of metaphysics involving at least three fundamental substances: matter, essence, and soul. And, depending on your handling of the split between matter and void, as well as your categorization of flame and lifeblood, there are as many as six such substances that we know of. But no matter your exact categorizations, the most important of these are void, essence, and soul.
Hollow Knight, then, is not dualist but pluralist. There are several types of basic stuff that make up its world. And it’s crucial to understand that these are metaphysically distinct substances; they’re not like different chemical elements. Matter in the gameworld includes clay and metal, water and acid, crystals and glass. But essence and soul are obviously not, and void is arguably not, in any way the same type of stuff as any of that conventional matter.
We know this because essence, soul, and matter, while they do interact causally with each other, sometimes occupy overlapping or otherwise physically incompatible spatial relationships. Soul ‘fills’ material and essential objects and beings in some manner, in much the way vitalists used to think living things were alive in virtue of having a special kind of vital force within them (in addition to their physical structure). And essence isn’t just massless, as is light in reality; its visible particles in the physical world correspond to thoughts, memories, and even entire dream landscapes—all of which are externally invisible and intangible, and without a dream nail (to most beings) only internally accessible.
Now, even apart from the basic soul-body relation just described, these substances can be mixed or combined in certain ways, as seen in the upgraded spells, the void constructs, and the way that the White Palace we encounter in the game is apparently both the actual White Palace (which Lemm says has seemingly just disappeared from its foundations in physical reality) and a dream representation of the White Palace (complete with blatant non-Euclidean room transitions in some areas, as well as abstract floating defenses—like operational freestanding sawblades—which can only be understood as symbolic, mental, and essence-based). Yet despite these types of interactions, the gameworld’s key substances remain conceptually distinct. Void is never soul and soul is never essence and essence is never void.
Now, let’s take these three concepts in turn, and see what’s notable about them . . . and to what degree each is involved in mentality.
Void is associated with potential, emptiness, and containment as in a vessel. Like I wrote earlier, it could be construed as a particularly powerful type of matter. But it has a distinction that sets it apart from other matter: it doesn’t require soul to move. Void entities on their own do act, and seem to have a natural antipathy toward beings animated by soul—as seen in the pre-void-heart violence directed at a vessel’s shell by the void tendrils, the siblings, and even the vessel’s own shade. But no soul is gained by striking beings of pure void with the nail.
In fact, void can not contain soul; or, though this is not an analysis of Silksong, perhaps based on the events of that game it would be more accurate to say void can not truly integrate with raw soul, in the way matter can. The vessels can only wield soul—and the kingsmoulds and wingmoulds can only yield soul—because of soul being contained by the non-void shells of the former and the non-void armor of the latter. The ancient civilization who worshiped the void had to separately craft solid totems for stowing and interacting with soul. Based on a few bits of circumstantial evidence, some have theorized that void could itself be a corrupted version of soul; that is plausible, but it is a possibility which is never directly discussed or indicated in the game.
And beyond simply acting, a related-but-less-intuitive observation is that unalloyed void is not without will. Until the Void Heart is obtained by the player-character, it may lack (in a strong sense) a unified will. But the King is wrong to think that void offers ‘no will to break.’ Even if void, both broadly speaking and when unprocessed, lacks unity, form, and focus, it can be given all three. The King may believe that he gives the kingsmoulds a will when the command “SERVE” is imprinted on them while shaping them for their armor in his workshop, but it’s more likely that he is offering direction (and hence a modicum of unity) to will already present.
There are many pieces of evidence that void beings have will. Here are several:
One is the player-character’s interaction with Steel Soul Jinn, when they reject the exchange of rancid eggs for geo. Jinn says, “…It refuses to trade…? It has a will… all its own. Can refuse.”
A second is the Hunter’s Journal entry for the Siblings in the Abyss, which explicitly describes each of them as a “fragment of a lingering will.”
A third is the Void Heart itself, whose description says that it is the “bearer’s will,” hence the will of the player-character, under which it unifies the void.
A fourth is Seer, who, on her first interaction with the player-character in a dream realm, can say, “Though you may fall, your will shall carry you forward.”
A fifth is the dream nail dialogue of the lighthouse keeper in the Abyss, which strongly implies they were mentally impelled by the void to disable their station (that previously subdued the nearby sea of void with its light).
And a sixth is that vessels still have essence. We’re already well-acquainted with the ability of the Hollow Knight to contain the Radiance (and a fortiori to contain essence), but there’s more. In acting as wielder of the dream nail (or pursuing one of the first two available endings), the player-character displays the capacity to do the same. Moreover, when the player-character is in a dream realm, they are there as essence; we know this not only because everything in a dream in Hollow Knight is essence, but also because essence particles rush out of them if they die in the dream. That void entities having essence constitutes further evidence of void entities having will is an arguable point, but before we consider essence directly so we can say more on that topic, let’s take a quick look at soul.
Soul in the Hollow Knight universe is a kind of energy that animates bodies and can be channeled into certain effects. As an animating force, soul seems to be naturally passed from parents to children, as evidenced by the text shown when getting the second half of the Kingsoul, which (referring to the Pale King as ‘Wyrm’ and the White Lady as ‘Root’) describes the vessels in the following way: “…Soul of Wyrm. Soul of Root. Heart of Void…” It is cut away from the bodies of other bugs when struck, and powerful beings with the innate capability to do so can absorb soul cut loose from living bugs and focus the harvested power to regenerate damage to their own shells (or bring about certain other effects).
With the exception of a couple specific implementations of a refined product of soul which play a big role in the sequel, it seems to be the case that soul otherwise has no will of its own. It’s a resource; it’s similar to mana, in the gaming sense of the word. Hence the way in which it suffuses hot springs, and the way the Deep Focus charm describes it as being present in the air. Yet as opposed to the similar concept of ‘souls’ in the Dark Souls universe, ‘soul’ in the Hollow Knight universe is not always analogous to physical energy. It overlaps with physical power sources in that it can be used in physical actions and (if extracted) can be kept in physical containers such as jars, but in most situations soul is neutrally acquirable from either physical interaction (as with a nail) or non-physical interaction (as with a dream nail). And entities of both matter and essence wield and yield it. Furthermore, there are multiple ways to draw on practically bottomless sources of soul, namely hot springs, the Kingsoul, and Salubra’s blessing.
By contrast, a more straightforward analogue for a physical power source in the game would be the crystals mined near the peak, which hum softly with power, are finite in utility, and contain both light and heat. Although less powerful than soul, such crystals are said to be less dangerous to manipulate (“less lethal,” as Quirrel says).
Interestingly, using soul in a physical action (such as conjuring a spell) often means shaping it into a form which loosely resembles the form it would have when animating a living being—such as having simplistic facial features, and producing unintelligible whispers.
Soul seems to straddle the line between physical and non-physical power, and (in sharing properties of both) offers a hypothetical medium through which a purely physical and purely non-physical substance could interact. I say ‘hypothetical’ because mediation between matter and essence is not a metaphysical role that is directly suggested to be true of soul in the game. But perhaps if Descartes had argued that the pineal gland is actually a third separate fundamental substance, a bridge substance with properties of both minds and bodies, he might’ve prevented his stance from being incoherent—yet while lots of people subscribe to mind-body dualism, something tells me there wouldn’t have been many takers for ‘mind-body-gland pluralism’ . . .
Granted, the game does occasionally use the word ‘soul,’ typically in the plural, in the colloquial or Cartesian sense (like in the whispering root found in the Spirits’ Glade), but context generally makes it very clear whether the game is merely using it as a synonym for ‘spirit’ and thus for entities strictly made of essence rather than soul (as in the Glade), or is referring instead to what I’m actually talking about here (the important substance studied in the Soul Sanctum).
And mention of the Spirits’ Glade in the Resting Grounds brings us neatly along to the third major substance we need to discuss. Incidentally, the Dark Souls universe also has no conceptual analogue separate from its material souls for the notion of conscious mentality, but the Hollow Knight universe does: essence.
Essence defies a lot of commonsense physical logic. There’s its aforementioned spatial incompatibilities and oddities, both in terms of the positioning and extension of dreams and in terms of their contents and layouts. Similarly, an adept wielder of the dream nail can establish gates into and out of dream realms as something akin to wormholes for convenient fast travel.
But beyond its spatial strangeness, essence defies our intuition in other ways. Some stores of essence, as they diminish, represent with greater strength—like the Grey Prince Zote and White Defender fights. Just before the former’s essence is entirely dissipated and the latter is awoken from their dreaming, their content represents the most formidable variants of the relevant foes. Something similar could be argued about the Radiance, in that her ability to cause the infection seemed to stem from slowly approaching the oblivion of being totally forgotten.
We know that essence comprises not only imagination and dreams, but also thought; this is abundantly clear from the dream nail’s robust ability to allow its wielder to read the thoughts of others. Or, perhaps more helpfully, this could be put by saying that Hollow Knight uses the word ‘dream’ in an unusually broad way, encompassing nearly everything we usually associate with the mind—such as imagination, dreaming, thinking, remembering, and experiencing. Regarding those last two, think of the whispering roots, which Seer tells us are indicative of places where dreams have taken root. When the essence whose presence they signal is gathered together, thoughts of the area can be found unified in the act of dream nailing the root. Such scattered thoughts highlight salient features or events of the surrounding region, showcasing what aspects of the area stood out most prominently in the experiences and/or recollections of those living there.
More than just demonstrating what sort of actions or experiences essence can encode, the whispering roots point to another strange feature of the stuff: that essence can ultimately be separated from its origin in the experiences of particular beings or even collectives of beings. That’s why the Zote shrine can offer representations of Bretta, Bretta’s harem, and the Grey Prince long after Bretta herself has departed the kingdom.
Essence being an exclusively non-physical substance is said outright in the game, when Ogrim recounts the kingdom’s great knights being unable to fight the mental infection represented by the Radiance by saying, “We knights defend against the physical, but a formless enemy. How to defeat such a foe?” Along those lines, the Radiance is an exceedingly pure mental being—said by Seer to be “similar to Essence, [. . .] though much brighter still,” presumably because Seer is not aware of any other being whose essence is at once so concentrated and has such a loose tie to particular entities in the material world.
Essence can be shared across bodies to some degree; it is in this sense that, say, the mushroom clan can be said to share a mind. This seems to be yet another ‘lore-ification’ of biology, here drawing on the underground systems of inter-communicative mycelia which are thought to span entire biomes. But notice that which specific thoughts accompany which bodies within such a collective (in Hollow Knight) is neither random nor standardized. Even though all relevant thoughts are plural, strong fungal bodies think of strength; warrior fungal bodies think of protection; passive fungal bodies think of fear and hunger.
So, dream essence is flexible, non-physical, and not supervenient on matter, but does stand for mind and does seem to follow causally from material facts in every (or nearly every) case.
And speaking of the material world, we can now circle back to the point I was making about void and will earlier. Void entities have (or can have) both will and essence. Now, what I said earlier is that reporting that such entities have will and reporting that such entities have essence may be redundant. After all, while soul is an animating energy, it’s essence that is likely responsible for will in all cases of its presence in the game, given that (1) will is associated with mentality, (2) all mentality in the game is comprised of essence, and (3) only inanimate corpses, bereft of soul to fuel evidence of will, seem to ever have essence without will.
But it’s not vital that will is the exclusive domain of essence. All that really matters is that void beings have both. This is because, now that we understand the basic substances of Hallownest, we are confronted with the fact that together those attributes imply void entities can have mentality. And if they can have minds, do any of them have minds? And if they did, what might that tell us about minds in general?
Zombies, Automata, and Hollow Knights:
Why were the Pale King and the White Lady convinced that their plan could work? Well, because of a concept that has proven to have a surprisingly long and varied history in the philosophy of mind: the conceivability of zombies.
Hollow Knight is a game which contains an unusual concentration and variety of types of zombies. Throughout, you encounter fairly conventional zombies which check most of the expected boxes: there are living beings which are ‘zombified’ in the sense of being mentally enslaved (like many of the infected bosses and regular enemies), as well as dead beings which have been reanimated with simplistic and violent behavior (like the Broken Vessel, the Watcher Knights, and all of the regular enemies with ‘husk’ in their names).
But that’s far from exhaustive. Hollow Knight also contains a class of crystal automata, an entire arena audience of folks sufficiently hypnotized by entertainment to ignore even apocalyptic circumstances, at least two races of hivemind beings which never had truly independent thoughts or wills of their own, parasites physically co-opting corpses, and even beings that behave almost normally but which are ostensibly hollow or mindless.
While all such entities reinforce the game’s thematic emphasis on possible distinctions between conscious and unconscious beings, it’s that last concept of ‘hollow’ beings which is the most important, both in the game and in the philosophy. In reality, the idea of a being which behaves indistinguishably from other people in every way but which lacks first-person consciousness is called a ‘philosophical zombie,’ or p-zombie for short. In the game, that same concept is given the name ‘pure vessel.’
That pure vessels are considered by the Pale King to be p-zombies is clear when you reflect on the fact that, on the one hand, he sought one with “no mind to think,” and yet, on the other hand, he stationed a world sense monument within the Temple of the Black Egg to report the state of the world for the Hollow Knight to “know.” Clearly the Pale King does not consider ‘knowing,’ in the sense of having cognitive access to information, to require ‘thinking,’ in the sense of having a mind. For all such statements about the Hollow Knight to be consistent with each other, the Pale King would have to believe that the mentality of a void entity is entirely different from the minds of others—that it has what philosopher Ned Block calls ‘access consciousness’ (the ability to take in, retain, access, and use information, including for the control of actions) but not ‘phenomenal consciousness’ (the first-person mental experience of the world).
Anyway, for the plan to be successful, the Pale King’s expectation must have been that the null dream of a void being is internally cut off not just from other dreams (as nightmares are said to be by Seer) but also from the physical world.
Now, we know pure vessels—p-zombies as competent and powerful as any ordinary being—are conceivable in the gameworld. We know this because we encounter one in the imagination of the Godseeker, in their dream. But outside of dreams, are they not merely conceivable but also possible?
In other words, could the plan have ever really, durably worked? Does it actually make any sense to believe the so-called ‘Hollow Knight’ was ever truly hollow in the required sense—that it was just, as the White Lady puts it, “tarnished by an idea instilled?” Or does marrying the untamed willful potential of void to the form and functioning of a material being simply always make something that isn’t really hollow?
Those are tough questions. Kingsmoulds and the Collector have dream nail dialogue, although wingmoulds don’t. Most void beings can’t speak, although the Collector can. Vessels themselves are the most complicated case. Shades of vessels, both the player-character’s own and the Siblings in the Abyss, are instantly defeated by the dream nail. Yet the White Lady confirms that the Radiance’s infection escaping the Temple of the Black Egg means one of the vessels did hold at least one idea in its mind.
The best clue we get to what the White Lady means when she speaks of the “idea instilled” in the Hollow Knight is a closely guarded memory tucked away as deeply and inaccessibly as possible in the White Palace—a brief moment from the past, guarded by a stretch of challenges known as the ‘Path of Pain.’ This moment showcases the Hollow Knight turning toward its father, and the important positioning of the memory implies the importance of that turn: that the champion’s love for one or both of its parents may have been the “idea instilled.”
But as attentive players, we should know not to accept such a simple interpretation of that moment. After all, that is not the only time we see that character make a potentially meaningful turn of its head. As the player-character recalls on hitting its own reflection with the dream nail, turning to take a look at the player-character was the champion’s last act before leaving the Abyss. If the later head turn is evidence of an “idea instilled,” then so is the earlier (which precedes the Hollow Knight’s upbringing in the White Palace).
Notice also the similarly minimal gesture of the Broken Vessel stretching its arm out toward the player-character between being cleared of lightseeds (i.e. defeated) and returning to the inanimation of death. And on succeeding against the Lost Kin variant of the same boss, an essence representation of its former unbroken self treats us to the acknowledgment of a nod or bow. While the Lost Kin was never singled out as pure, the means by which the game communicates its emotion, its ‘impurity,’ is similar in understatement, duration, and form to the two poignant head turns of the Hollow Knight. By the way, it’s worth pointing out that the Lost Kin, despite being a vessel, actually yields the highest essence bounty of any warrior dream or dream boss in the game.
Anyway, on the subject of the Hollow Knight, here’s what the White Lady says specifically: “Its supposed strength was ill-judged. It was tarnished by an idea instilled. But you. You are free of such blemishes. You could contain that thing inside.”
The answer to those earlier questions, then, must be tied together to the answer to just one question: is the player-character a pure vessel? The White Lady was wrong last time; as is implied in the hidden nursery in the White Palace, she was party to the strength of the champion being “ill-judged.” So when she tells us that this time, surely, the lack of relevant blemishes she perceives must be accurate, we have cause to wonder if she might be mistaken again.
We need to take stock, then, of the evidence for whether the player-character is a philosophical zombie.
Hollow Knight’s Abyss Also Gazes Into You:
Is the player-character of Hollow Knight a philosophical zombie? This is a more difficult thing to decide than it may seem. It is the very definition of a p-zombie that they are indistinguishable in behavior from conscious beings. The cognitive limitations of the player-character are fewer than folks conventionally allege, as its assent or dissent to direct questions and its ability to transact business with merchants reveal that it does understand language, even if it can not itself speak. But understanding language is not proof of robust consciousness. Even if the player-character spoke rather than remaining silent, that would not count as certain evidence one way or the other. After all, if we had compelling independent reasons to think someone was a p-zombie, even an impassioned plea from them that they aren’t would be no evidence of anything; it would be them acting exactly as a p-zombie could be expected to act.
On what authority can we decide? I’ve already raised some cause to doubt the White Lady’s take on this subject, but maybe her Pale partner has some insight for us.
Given that (ex hypothesi) the Pale King is responsible for himself and his Palace being sealed into a dream realm, we could ask why the Pale King doesn’t know the Hollow Knight isn’t hollow. Well, this could easily be accounted for if the Pale King, as I’ve argued in several ways already, has false beliefs about the nature of void. If he construes the mind of the Hollow Knight as an inescapable prison, a room with a one-way door, then he would have to believe that entering that mind is trapping oneself there (and depending on the timing, trapping oneself inside with the Radiance). So it’s perfectly straightforward to see why the Pale King would not see any logical way to verify the purity of the vessel. Even sending in a willing royal retainer would do him no good if he believed they could not return.
Now, he could have (somewhat callously) sent one in anyway, as an experiment to learn if such a representative could return; but that would require the Pale King to entertain the possibility of being wrong, and it’s not clear that he was capable of that kind of humility. Or, more sympathetically, it’s not clear that the Pale King was willing to find out that his elaborate planning and work, which he considered his best chance of indefinitely forestalling the fate he foresaw, was not going to work.
In fairness, if he has to tell himself there’s “no cost too great,” then he must see what he did to his children, and to his wife, and to the Dreamers, and to his Palace—as a great cost. Whatever the precise psychology, he failed to practice sufficient investigation or verification.
Obviously, the White Lady and Pale King are both fallible on this point; so we must set aside authority, and conduct our own investigation by looking elsewhere for clues.
How about Nosk?
According to the Hunter, the spider-like shapeshifter Nosk in Deepnest decides what form to take as bait by reading the mind of its prey, possessing innately one of the abilities that the player-character gains through the dream nail. Accordingly, it is sometimes conjectured that Nosk’s mirroring of the player-character’s appearance is evidence that Nosk found nothing in the player-character’s mind. But then by that same token, Nosk appearing to the player-character as Hornet in the Pantheon of Hallownest, rather than any other boss—would have to count as evidence of the player-character having mental content. The Godseeker, after all, has no apparent knowledge of the connection between the vessels and Hornet.
Folks sometimes carry that initial argument about Nosk still further, noting that striking Nosk with the dream nail yields an ellipsis, and surmising that reading the mind of a mind reader reflects back one’s own.
But if that line of thought on why Nosk has no thoughts to read is correct, it is important to highlight that a silent mind is not necessarily an empty mind. Dream nailing an entity and receiving silence, in the form of an ellipsis, is not proof of entirely lacking a mind. This may be a tempting impression when seeing those three dots after dream nailing a stationary bluggsac, but the Hunter’s Journal identifies the bluggsac as a “creature.” And notice that the same result is obtained from dream nailing shrumelings, which partake in the shared mind of the mushroom clan. Their mental quietude is due to their bodily composition, to the shrumeling’s temporarily (and the bluggsac’s permanently) rudimentary cognition. And regardless of whether the identical dream nail text of the Broken Vessel corresponds to the mentality of the vessel itself, of the lightseeds puppeteering the vessel, or both—there the dream rematch showcases that essence and mentality are present despite the ellipsis. Even the Pale King himself deals us an ellipsis when dream nailing his remains a second time, after initially delivering his veritable catchphrase, “…No cost too great…”
Notice also that ellipses are very common in the dream nail text of more active minds, as a space before, after, and between thoughts. Maybe they correspond to connections between thoughts, or to aspects of thought which are nonlinguistic, or to passive moments in active minds. And, as mentioned in other circumstances earlier, while you can dream nail many stationary dead bugs you find along your journey in Hollow Knight, some long-dead corpses whose essence has dissipated don’t respond to dream nailing in any way. In short, that a text box appears at all is significant; something is being accessed there, even if it’s quiet.
But perhaps you were never convinced that Nosk’s ellipsis originated from the player-character anyway, and perhaps you don’t find Nosk appearing as Hornet in Godhome compelling because Hornet is one of the bosses that is aware they’re being attuned, and perhaps you aren’t convinced of the presence of a mind by the mere fact that vessels in general (and the player-character in particular) are depicted repeatedly as possessing both will and essence.
Still, even if all of that were discarded, there is a moment in the game that provides extremely strong evidence of the player-character having a mind: the birthplace sequence. Upon dream nailing one’s own reflection in an egg from which the player-character was most likely born, it enters a dream realm of its own. Although murky and dim around the edges, it is a dream realm of no less specificity and actuality than any other in the game.
I suppose it could be argued that the birthplace sequence is a mental realm whose origin is somehow dependent solely upon the buried egg and entirely independent of the player-character, that the egg being one of the only highly reflective surfaces in the game is a distracting irrelevancy . . . yet the sequence’s depiction of one of the player-character’s own memories makes that highly implausible. This is therefore the one time in Hollow Knight where arguing that an event or detail is not evidence of the player-character having a mind—is far more contrived than the alternative.
The player-character is not restricted to their presumably-memory-accurate pre-campaign moveset within it, but entering a dream or memory is always represented by them moving freely through it with their current abilities. Other than implying their actual ascent in the past took a different route than we see in the memory, it is unremarkable that this is no exception to the trend.
The transformation of the Kingsoul into the Void Heart after this sequence does imply that the player-character gains information that feels new to them, but that could simply indicate that the memory in question was previously repressed—either for an arcane lore reason (such as the ostensibly mind-reducing effect of the player-character’s time in the wastelands outside Hallownest) or for a conventional psychological reason (such as the traumatic nature of the memory).
It is a deep irony that—before we have even seen the Hollow Knight’s momentary hesitation—indeed at the very moment we encounter the Pale King saying that he intends a vessel to be mindless, at the same time the mode of presentation through which we gain access to the information quietly tells us that they aren’t. We have shown previously that the King was totally wrong to believe vessels have ‘no will to break,’ and here we see he was equally wrong to believe they have ‘no mind to think.’ The positioning of the White Palace within a dream realm (plausibly, a mind) of a kingsmould indicates that either the King later became aware of his mistake, or, if he never did, that he sealed himself and his retainers and his Palace and his half of the Kingsoul inside while believing none of them could ever exit.
So, while it does seem to me that the precise nature and extent of the player-character’s mind is one of the many aspects of Hollow Knight that is meant to be ambiguous (hence the hasty removal of the reference to void being ‘given mind’ in the release version of Godhome), the game does not depict the player-character as a zombie, a being entirely without mentality or essence or interiority. And the only character to contradict that, to make not a conjecture or a general statement but a positive claim against it, is the Queen, who reveals at the exact same time she had been mistaken about the exact same topic in the past.
And by the way, it’s considerations and complications like these that make it seem very petty, partial, and misguided to me when folks get on new players’ cases about calling the protagonist ‘the hollow knight.’ This isn’t a Madeline-Celeste or Link-Zelda situation. Either there are no true hollow knights, or the sense in which there are hollow knights is a sense in which the player-character fits the bill at least as well as the final boss. To put it another way, the player-character may not be the Hollow Knight, but they are a hollow knight. If anyone is, at any rate.
Anyway, in the end, it’s not clear that the Radiance can enter a being in the first place if there are no dreams for her to invade, no thoughts for her to enthrall. That either vessel could even try to contain the Radiance, then, is another piece of evidence that neither of them was ever truly hollow. They may not have the same type of mind as everyone else, nor a mind that others find familiar, but that doesn’t make them mindless.
Note, though, that this misunderstanding of void is not unique to the Pale Royalty. It is a common misconception among the educated caste of Hallownest. Thus Monomon’s tablet explaining the production process of a vessel refers to void as “absence.” In fact, it seems the tablet in the King’s workshop gets closer to the truth when it instead refers to void as “potential.” Void is absence, or (as the Void Heart puts it) emptiness, only in the sense that it is naturally volatile and dangerous, destroying vulnerable organic material it encounters such as the original innards of the vessels. It is the “power opposed” to many materials it can come into contact with. And given that void entities are directly shown again and again to have essence and, in the case of the kingsmoulds and Collector, specific thoughts—it seems very likely to me that shades being destroyed by the dream nail is owed to it attempting to extract soul (which they don’t have) rather than essence (which they do).
The leaders of Hallownest have an organic bias, a belief that a construct of apparently inorganic, ‘primal’ material such as void can not have the kind of rich inner life that purely organic beings have. Possibly this bias was spurred by such beings usually lacking particular abilities that they deem normal, familiar, and important, such as the ability to speak. There are shades of behaviorism there, i.e. of the deeply flawed mid-twentieth-century philosophical theory that a mental state is simply a behavioral state, or at least a behavioral disposition.
This actually allows us to more clearly understand the sentiments we came across a while back in the words of Mask Maker, when they implied that masks and faces are functionally interchangeable and stated that they offer mutually exclusive minds or identities. Mask Maker seems not to share the Pale Beings’ organic bias, lamenting the masking procedure only in cases where it destroys the preceding identity of weak-willed bugs.
This would also explain why the Pale King prefers minds enhanced by his beacon to minds enhanced by the ‘artificial’ act of mask-wearing—as evidenced by him stationing a tablet in King’s Pass instructing readers to “not hide your true form” and “let all bask in your majesty,” which is found right next to a charm that empowers you when you’re low on masks. The King must have been fairly successful at getting bugs to prefer his beacon to their masks, given that broken pieces of ancient masks are found littered across the landscape.
Moreover, we learn from wielding the dream nail that not even the golems of Crystal Peak are truly mindless or dreamless; we could debate as to whether they have their own will, but it’s nonetheless clear that, much like the kingsmoulds, they have thoughts of their work.
All of this finally puts us in a solid position to formulate a theory of mind that is more useful than the smattering of historical options we’ve surveyed up to this point, spanning the 1500 years or so from Augustine to the behaviorists. In particular, the King’s organic bias is strongly reminiscent of philosophers who deny the possibility of some class of non-human (especially machine) consciousness. It may turn out to be the case that there is some aspect of the specific molecules present in carbon-based lifeforms which enable phenomenal consciousness, which would not be present in, say, functionally identical silicon-based lifeforms—but as of now neither an empirical discovery along those lines nor a rational argument to the same effect has succeeded in justifying such anthropocentrism.
If essence (i.e. mind) can inhere in various configurations of matter (in entirely organic beings like face-bearing bugs, in partially organic beings like mask-bearing bugs and vessels, and in entirely artificial beings like kingsmoulds and mining robots), then what that means in philosophical terms is that Hollow Knight depicts mental states as multiply realizable by various physical states. It strikes me as deeply plausible that the same is true in reality. In other words, you can feel pain, and your neighbor can feel pain, and a dog can feel pain, and a sufficiently-advanced far-future artificial intelligence with appropriate sensory systems can feel pain, and aliens who share none of our evolutionary history can feel pain. And for all of them, it counts as pain. If it’s painful, it’s pain. Particular mental states can be realized by multiple distinct material configurations; hence, ‘multiply realizable.’ Like a particular game running on different platforms.
Considerations like the multiple realizability of mental states led a number of philosophers, in moving past both behaviorism and basic mind-brain identity models—to argue that a mental state is a functional state. By that, they mean an organizational or causal state of an organism or other entity. So, not just a human brain, but any system in the relevant functional state is in the relevant mental state; if an alien is in whichever physical state fulfills the functional role of pain for them, the functionalist says they’re in pain. Much like how a mental identity in Hollow Knight can be neutrally associated with a face or a mask.
But as quickly as we move past behaviorism and identity theory to get to functionalism, we must acknowledge that even functionalism falls short of solving consciousness. For despite its considerable additional merits compared to theories that came before it, it fails to account for most of the actually interesting attributes of mind—it sidesteps or dodges the properties that have spurred such extensive investigation into consciousness to begin with: namely, its experiential attributes. The mental states we actually care about here are qualitative, subjective states: what the Hollow Knight can be expected to be experiencing from a first-person perspective when they turn to look at their father.
Functionalism could be true and accurate and we’d still be stuck near square one in terms of providing an explanatory answer to that question from the start of this analysis: what is consciousness? We’ve arrived at a potentially workable and flexible way of creating a dictionary definition of mental states which is neither obviously self-defeating nor plagued with human-centric or organic bias. It avoids the way many other theories deploy dogmatic assumptions to deny the possibility of mentality to unfamiliar entities.
Yet functionalism only accomplishes so much by leaving the definition incomplete: by restricting itself to a discussion of access consciousness, and bracketing (or merely implying) the presence of a first-person experience of the world . . . which is what we set out to understand in the first place. In the absence of any explanation as to how only some functional states in the world are also mental states, to declare that functionalism’s definition does account for phenomenal consciousness would be to slip back into making dogmatic assumptions.
So, what’s going on here? After millennia of work, philosophers and scientists are almost universally on the same page that mental states and physical states are exceptionally tightly connected—that they either follow causally from or are each other. Dualist philosophers and monist philosophers alike overwhelmingly endorse that connection. Yet almost all of the popular theories of mind offered by philosophers and scientists thus far have failed to provide any direct, grounded analysis of the subjective first-person experience of the world (which is the main noteworthy feature of consciousness, an attribute which caught the attention of even ancient thinkers). Now, why is that?
What is it Like to Be a Bug?
While I’ve noted mysteries here and there, I’ve made a lot of Hollow Knight sound like it sums to a consistent logic regarding dreams and shells, or minds and bodies—so consistent that at times I’ve possibly frustrated folks who are well-acquainted with the game. After all, even apart from the ways I’ve favored certain interpretations of events in the game over others, I’ve also left a number of fine details out.
For example:
My discussion of faces ignores the fact that there is a character in the game, namely Divine, plainly wearing half a mask without a problem.
My discussion of the qualities of matter as opposed to the qualities of essence ignores the way that the bodies and masks of the Dreamers vanish after destroying their corresponding dream forms.
My discussion of void’s material incompatibility with soul ignores the fact that using the dream nail on the Collector yields soul and does not instantly destroy it.
These are by no means contradictions of the analysis I’ve pursued. Half a mask might not constitute a mask in the functional sense described by Mask Maker. The bodies of the Dreamers may be tied by their corresponding seals in an unusually tight fashion to their masks and associated identities. The dream nail providing soul after hitting the Collector could be a consequence of operational specifics of how the dream nail gathers or provides soul when it reads an active mind (note the identical situation when striking the armor of the False Knight with the nail versus the dream nail). But these and similar arguable exceptions complicate matters without offering obvious paths for understanding.
And then there are the elements of the gameworld which may or may not fit into this analysis, but which no one presently understands.
Think of the seal-bound shrine in the Distant Village of Deepnest. This horseshoe-crab-shaped structure (often misdescribed as trilobyte-shaped) could be related to lifeblood, given the bright blue blood of horseshoe crabs, the pipes and basin surrounding it, and the fact that many critters in Deepnest and the lore surrounding lifeblood share parasitic implications. But there’s not a drop of lifeblood in the room, nor in the left half of Deepnest for that matter. Lifeblood has a much stronger tie to the area of the Abyss housing the Lifeblood Core charm, and secondarily to Joni’s Repose in the Howling Cliffs. And although horseshoe crabs (appropriately for Deepnest) do share a subphylum with arachnids, they have no noteworthy connection to butterflies or cocoons.
When it comes to that shrine in the Distant Village, or what transpired between Oro and Mato, or the nature or origin of Ze’mer, or why the Broken Vessel and Hollow Knight are both physically larger than all the other vessels, or whether the grubs actually have a significance which merits their being jarred and collected—saying almost anything counts as speculation.
It’s clear that there are numerous things we just don’t comprehend about the precise workings of the game’s universe, and about particular important topics within it (topics like void, essence, and soul). Many of the details of Hallownest’s history which are taken as canonical fact by the community generally remain arguable; quite often they are what matches a slightly incongruous set of evidence best, rather than what we’re sure is true. The game’s lore tablets are as frequently cryptic, poetic, or propagandized as they are reliable; the world’s authority figures are a mostly deceased class of devotion-obsessed liars; and the framing of Hollow Knight’s bestiary positions large swathes of its provided worldbuilding as mere impressions from a hunter.
These trends are among the reasons that I called Hollow Knight ‘interrogative’ at the outset. As prominent Hollow Knight lore enthusiast mossbag says, “It almost feels like we are looking through a keyhole, trying to grasp onto the totality of Team Cherry’s creation. [. . .] Trying to construct a cohesive narrative with the information found in Hollow Knight isn’t exactly straightforward” (mossbag 1:15:01).
It’s easy to get lost in the game, both thematically and in terms of literal navigation. Its labyrinthine world, together with the way both the map itself and your position on it are tied to items and effort, make it almost as hard to understand where you’re going as what’s going on.
Regarding themes, serious interpretation of an artwork is often about mapping the consistency and nature of patterns in a work’s treatment of specific topics. Hollow Knight bristles at exegesis, because its motifs and thematic patterns are unusually prone to holes and exceptions.
But none of this comes across as clumsy or unintentional. These are not flaws in the game, nor even especially noteworthy obstacles to this analysis. Rather, I see this state of affairs as especially appropriate for a work produced in the early twenty-first century which pays such extensive attention to the topic of the mind. The way Hollow Knight draws the player into mysteries, often very compelling mysteries, and offers us just enough consistent material to feel we can meaningfully theorize answers—parallels the study of consciousness.
In the mid-1970s, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published what amounts to an extremely influential intervention in the course of philosophy of mind. The article in question is titled, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” and it begins by establishing what it is that actually interests all of us about consciousness:
[. . .] fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.
We may call this the subjective character of experience. (Nagel 436)
As I mentioned earlier on, this aspect of the mind is specifically called ‘phenomenal consciousness’—the first-person experience of the world via subjective phenomena like the way blue looks, the way pain feels, the way a flower smells, and so on.
Nagel endeavors to account for why it’s so poorly understood, by pointing out how it’s a feature of reality which does not fit into the methodological pattern conventionally used to investigate details of the world.
The basis of all current scientific inquiry involves abstracting away from particular perspectives to observe and describe occurrences from multiple externally positioned angles, to achieve objectivity to the greatest degree possible. Yet it is the nature of any given conscious experiences one might wish to study that they exist only from within singular points-of-view. In this case, then, abstraction away from particular points-of-view moves us further and further off from the target of study. In other words, if first-person experience is essentially subjective, and current physical theory is essentially objective, then that aspect of consciousness is destined to be ignored by current physical theory:
It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?
[. . .]
Very little work has been done on the basic question [. . .] whether any sense can be made of experiences’ having an objective character at all. Does it make sense, in other words, to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me? (Nagel 443, 448)
We can match up our attempts and prospects at fitting mental experience into our existing approach with the sources of information on the mind available in Hollow Knight.
Some NPCs share their feelings with us outright. Such conversations, together with Hallownest’s written accounts (both its generic wanderer’s journals and the specific writings of Bretta and Menderbug and the Hunter), are analogous to the only windows into the minds of others that were available for most of human history—their own reports.
Recent developments in neuroscience and imaging have allowed us to begin to scratch the surface of the next step, which would be the basic functionality of the dream nail to read thoughts. Now, we can’t yet read the thoughts of other people plainly rendered in the way the dream nail can, but plausibly that would be a best-case scenario for being on the outside looking in. To learn as much as possible from an objective, external standpoint would be to know what sorts of thoughts, images, and emotions are going through a person’s mind based on an external study or scan of the structure and functioning of their body.
But apart from analogy, even that would be far from knowing what such experiences are like from their perspective.
To get further, to access what it is like to be them, it would be necessary for our minds to be subjected to a direct and sophisticated ‘simulated reality’ from within the mentality of another. We can do something like this in Hollow Knight, when we use the dream nail to enter the minds of others (although naturally it seems to be the case there that it is no simulation, that it is actually the mind of another we are entering). Now, in such a dream realm, we aren’t on the inside looking out—but we are on the inside looking in, where introspection and memory and imagination operate.
Still, to really understand what it would be like to be another, we would need to be able to take that final step, the step even the dream nail can not accomplish: to experience what it’s like to be on the inside looking out. Only then could we know what it is to experience Hallownest as one of the bugs we encounter. Even then, we could quibble (as Nagel does, with regard to the example of a bat) that what we’d be experiencing is what it would be like for us to be them. Not what it is like for them to be them. But it’s the best I can imagine being possible, short of truly being or becoming them—having ourselves the literal cognitive structure and processes that they have (which, if we did, would seem at that time to preclude the claim that we are still ourselves).
Yet even a hypothetical perfect map of such structures, accompanied by hypothetical infallible knowledge that the mind simply is certain chemical and electrical interactions—would not automatically inform us how it comes to be the case that there is something it’s like to be certain chemical and electrical interactions. How those interactions get to be consciousness, and others do not. “If mental processes are indeed physical processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo certain physical processes. What it is for such a thing to be the case remains a mystery” (Nagel 445-446).
Now, an extreme reductionist will say that statement is malformed—that there simply is nothing more to understand beyond the identity of the mind and (if we grant them an agreeable possibility) the functional organization of an intelligent organism. In fact, they’ll tout this as a feature, not a bug, of their stance. So, if first-person experience still seems like an unusual or poorly understood aspect of the world even after accepting the notion that mind is physical, they’d say, ‘Then stop paying attention to first-person experience. What you’re describing is just a weird way of talking about certain material or functional states. If it still seems as mysterious as all that, then what you call ‘conscious experience’ must be an illusion.’
But you have to remember: what scientists and philosophers are trying to do is to understand the phenomena they encounter in reality. One of those observed phenomena is their first-person experience of the world. If it’s an illusion, that must be an explicable fact.
Yet it is deeply unclear, if not simply incoherent, how a person could have an experience of an illusion without having an experience. Mind has a conceptual transparency and priority that other aspects of reality don’t, as a result of it comprising the medium through which we encounter all phenomena. If I write a small program to do nothing but directly output the text string, “I am conscious,” what the program is saying is surely false and yet that is not compelling evidence of a program ‘being deceived.’ Except in metaphors, non-conscious entities are not susceptible to illusory first-person experiences of the world.
Along those lines, some philosophers have tried accepting that a first-person experience of the world is present, while simply denying that it has any properties that make it difficult to understand. But the mere notion of there being an internal experience of the world from a first-person point-of-view in itself contains almost all of the relevant explanatory difficulty.
So if someone wants to close the conversation after saying that the mind simply is that set of chemical and electrical reactions—then either they’ve misunderstood the question being asked, or else they themselves do not have consciousness. Now, with the genuinely alien way that certain eliminative and illusionist philosophers write about, for instance, the experience of pain—it may be charitable to accept that they might be zombies, and not have conscious sensations of the world. But as for me, I do have them, and I’d like to know more about them.
I have no interest whatsoever in pretending not to notice, self-defeatingly labeling as illusion, or otherwise denying the existence of the phenomenon in reality that I have the most direct experience with, the most constant evidence of, simply because it poses significant explanatory problems.
Note, however, that this by no means indicates that monism in general or physicalism in particular is false (where ‘physicalism’ is the flavor of monism that says the only stuff that exists is physical stuff); by comparison, the gaps in our understanding of various topics in Hollow Knight do not falsify particular theories which are consistent with the available evidence. Nagel makes it perfectly clear that he’s not refuting physicalism in his paper; he’s just refuting all attempts at physicalism that have been made in the absence of a direct, comprehensive, workable analysis of first-person experience:
It would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false. Nothing is proved by the inadequacy of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis of mind. It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true.
[. . .]
At the present time the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. (Nagel 446-447)
In parallel, it is not physicalism as a concept with which I have been taking issue here. Every type of monism has the challenging task of plausibly integrating all observable details of reality—and, speaking more broadly, anyone familiar with my analytical work on Half-Life or Demon’s Souls will know I don’t put much stock in most types of universal claims in metaphysics.
Instead, what I’ve been targeting here are specifically eliminativists, illusionists, and all similarly extreme reductionists who deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness as it is generally construed—often by erroneously suggesting that science has already discovered all, or nearly all, that there is to learn about the mind (and accordingly that anything left unexplained should be discarded).
If there’s any lesson to be learned from Gorb, ‘the great mind,’ it’s that there’s more to intellectual ascension than forcefully insisting that it’s happening. Imagine a player of Hollow Knight taking the premises that (1) essence seems to follow from physical facts, and (2) essence in itself has strange properties which make it difficult or impossible to fully understand, then concluding that therefore (3) essence does not exist. The essence particles we see are perhaps metaphorical, they’d say . . .
But denying the existence of an observed phenomenon on the grounds of it being strange and poorly understood is a rash denial of manifest reality. And along the same lines, I don’t think the shape of the essence particles is any coincidence. Their representation of the spider-web-like nets of dreamcatchers is obvious, but they don’t replicate the full structure, optional adornments, or occasional asymmetry of such objects, with the result that the particle shape always also resembles a wheel. A wheel is an important symbol in Buddhism and some forms of Hinduism, where it is associated with wisdom, knowledge, and the path to enlightenment. And the floral or web motifs of the symbols also bring in connections with nature, with what we observe existing in front of us, with our contexts and ourselves.
Now, it may be that—as argued by David Hume, as well as in certain strands of Buddhism, as well as by the experienced advocates of certain hallucinogens—that there are no single solitary unified selves. In the game, that would help to address the various bits of lore which indicate shared or collective consciousnesses. That’s not my stance, but in or out of the game, it would have no particular bearing on the main point being made here regardless. Whether unified into a conventional conception of a person or dispersed across the universe, experiences occur. Even if a self were absent, sensations remain.
So, is the mind physical? In Hollow Knight, it would make the most sense to say, ‘no.’ What about in reality? For most people, it’s ultimately sort of a truism or a non-statement to clarify that some aspect of reality is ‘physical.’ Once we’ve all agreed that something is definitely an aspect of the world, we consider it physically real. If modern science got its hands on proof that dream warriors exist, scientists wouldn’t declare that non-physical things exist. They’d declare that physics is different than they used to think it was. The concept ‘physical’ would expand, not stay the same. It is a linguistic truth that the supernatural can not be proven to exist, because if anything ‘supernatural’ were proven to exist it would be shifted over into the category ‘natural.’ As philosopher Barbara Montero renders it,
[. . .] if physics (correctly) tells us that some things have no mass or no determinate spatial location, well then, physicalists will say, those things will still count as physical. [. . .] without any [taxonomical] restrictions on how the science in question is to progress, or on what entities and properties it is to incorporate, physicalism, that is, the view that everything is physical, becomes not only unfalsifiable, but also trivial. That is, without any restrictions whatsoever [on what can count as physical], the view that everything is physical ends up as the view that everything exists. (Montero 64)
It is my belief that neither the population at large nor scientists in particular will accept and hold to a definition of physicality narrow enough to be falsifiable. Philosophers often do; they can become admirably pedantic when something like this is pointed out to them. But I believe most people will hold to the convention Montero is describing no matter how patiently this is explained, and will just keep using ‘physical’ as a synonym for ‘real.’ So, they’ll describe reality as ‘physical’ no matter what is discovered about reality in the future.
I do not doubt that, as it has several times in the past, science may in the future undergo a radical change to some of its most fundamental concepts. What I doubt is that science will undergo a radical change to some of its most fundamental language. As long as folks seeking better and better models for the functioning of reality are still calling themselves ‘physicists,’ they’re going to hold tight to the word ‘physical.’
So, if someone specifies with sufficient rigor that what they mean by ‘physical’ is falling under the description of reality which follows from a set of nomological mechanical parameters constitutive of current or near-future physics, then mind doesn’t fit in that category. We don’t yet know how it works. Not everything we observe to be true of it is necessitated by the list of fundamental laws, forces, and constituents science has so far compiled, nor logically derivable from any combination thereof. But if, by asking if the mind is not physical, someone is really just asking if the mind is magic: no; it’s real, or ‘physical’ in common parlance . . .
Now, honestly facing the manifest existence of conscious experience should not be construed as an invitation for mysticism or spirituality. Acknowledging that there is a mystery here to be solved by no means demands that it receives a mysterious answer. You may privately attend to any extrinsically harmless belief that you personally prefer as regards ultimate origins or final destinations. Perhaps within the spark of fire Prometheus pilfered from the gods and gave to mortals there was also a spark of consciousness. Perhaps. But the unknowable, inaccessible nature of whether such a hypothesis is true or false should preclude modern scientists and philosophers taking it seriously as they refine questions and pursue answers.
Anyway, even if the extreme notions of the mind as either a magical ghost-like ego or a putative-but-nonexistent concept do not stand up to scrutiny, in between there still exists a wide array of live possibilities as to what the phenomenal mind actually is. It could be a set of structurally innate, definitively nonconceptual representations; and/or a set of cognitive processes in a dependent or recursive relationship with unconscious higher-order cognitive processes; and/or a fundamental intrinsic nature of all or some physical, functional, or computational states; and/or one of two forms or aspects (alongside physicality) of a single underlying or neutral substance; and/or something we’ve yet to theorize.
Maybe in the distant future consciousness will appear as a concept much like gravity: its relationship to contemporary physics, whatever that may be, will be better understood, and as a result people will just take it for granted as a part of scientific reality. That is, the weirdness of the mind may fade from popular consideration due to a strong understanding of related phenomena, including minute comprehension of the relevant processes in the body, and that it is simply one of the features of reality will become a somewhat unremarkable commonplace (akin to the weird way one is grabbed and returned to the planet after jumping). There may even be mathematical formulae that describe the behavior of consciousness in some fashion. But we’re far from that future, and only a hair closer than we were when Nagel pointed out in the 70s how paradigmatically far off we are. And, much like those in the Hollow Knight community who hoped Silksong would settle lore debates, I suspect that in the course of answering current questions we’ll find at least as many new enigmas to examine.
Conclusion:
There are very fruitful avenues of philosophical analysis in Hollow Knight which are untouched by this article. Those fruitful avenues are, at the time of writing this, also untouched by any other articles or videos. The avenues to which I’m referring are approaches to the content of Hollow Knight through the lenses of political philosophy or socioeconomic theory. From the democracies of the mosskin, moths, and mushrooms to the autocracy of Hallownest under the Pale King to the oligarchy of the mantises, Team Cherry’s title is ripe for political-philosophical analysis. And Hollow Knight’s distinctions among subaltern, faceless, maskless insects; commoners with natural or unnatural intellect; distinguished, privileged, upper-class individuals; and ruling, godly creatures with labels like ‘Higher Beings’ and ‘Pale Beings’—invites an economic and social lens. A lore tablet in the Fungal Wastes reveals that even Deepnest had a distinction between an honored caste and common beasts. I leave those possibilities to hopefully be addressed by other analysts.
Instead, I have focused my analysis on philosophy that I take to be most suited to the main story and primary mechanics of the game, dealing especially with mind and metaphysics. And along those lines, as has become tradition at this point, I close my analysis with an overview of possible takeaways presented in no particular order. As usual, some of these interpretations have been covered here in detail and others only lightly or indirectly. Now it falls to you to decide which of these angles resonate with you as a player of Hollow Knight.
Here they are:
Hollow Knight is a game about nothing being perfect or eternal: not a kingdom, not a Higher Being, not a mind. Change is natural and stasis is not. All references to already-ruined Hallownest as the only and eternal kingdom, all posturing by the already-dead Pale King that he could or would avoid the fate he foresaw, and all those who strove in futility like Tiso and Galien and Markoth toward particular glorious futures for themselves—are like so many desert plinths bearing the name of Ozymandias. Hollow Knight goes so far as to point out (through the vulnerability of essence ghosts to the dream nail, and of the Radiance to being forgotten) that even if some mental aspect of a person survives their bodily death or remains as a residue thereafter—that doesn’t mean the persisting element is eternal. Seer initially reports that dreams, passable between generations, are endless—only to later accept her end with the words, “The Wielder has at last appeared and I’ve held the memories of my tribe for long enough. It is time for us to be forgotten too.” Now, in light of such facts, you can be like Elderbug, and let your fear hold you in the same spot indefinitely; or you can embrace the opportunities afforded by the limited time you have, like Cornifer, Hornet, and even Lemm. Contrast the giddy, spiteful madness of so-called ‘Eternal Emilitia’ with the resolute contentment and handling of circumstances by Quirrel, Sheo, and Brumm. But in accepting that endings lie ahead and avoiding both denial and paralysis in the face of that fact, you also shouldn’t rush prematurely or recklessly to your end; the two possible outcomes for the Nailsmith and the array of possible outcomes for Zote teach us that lesson. Moreover, unless you’re a nail, purity and perfection are unattainable and unnecessary. Outside of dreams, there are no pure vessels, no hollow knights. There’s just a sad being who goes by that name. And it didn’t take one perfect pure vessel to defeat the Radiance; it took a team of three siblings—one of whom was not a vessel at all. (Or it took a large unified void entity attuned by the godseekers . . . which makes a similar point, but is less poetic.)
And/or:
Hollow Knight is a game about the relationship between the mind and the body, and the relationship between the mind and the world. Dreams, imagination, thoughts, emotions, and memories are given foremost positions of importance in Hollow Knight, especially through the significant percentage of its mechanics, levels, bosses, and interactions related to ‘essence.’ Beyond the powers of the dream nail, this angle surfaces in the relationships among faces, masks, and minds; the way the game uses soul to conceptually bridge essence and matter; and the narrative origin dream realms and entities have in relevant physical events. Yet the topic also shines through from a lower level than all of that: in the way Hollow Knight consistently demands and rewards the overlapping capacities of hand-eye coordination, kinesthetic awareness, and proprioception (through its challenging boss fights, protracted Colosseum and Godhome gauntlets, punishing respawn system, and the array of platforming challenges distributed around its gameworld). Difficulty may seem like it has a loose connection to the theme of the mind-body relation, but the game does not leave such features, as many other games do, as bare or unremarkable aspects of ludic structure disconnected from story and themes. The athleticism and mental competence tested by such challenges, being precisely aware of the position of one’s body in space, is taken by the Pale King in the Abyss climb to be proof of bodily and cognitive competence generally. In short, wielding the body effectively is deemed sufficient for fulfilling a high-level social role, such as becoming a knight. Contra the King’s beliefs, however, the game also insists in various ways that wielding the body with such finesse, and so possessing the capacity to fulfill that high-level social role, may at the same time be sufficient for not being hollow. Still, exactly how that works, an explanatory causal chain which accounts for certain physical processes being, becoming, or producing mental processes, remains elusive: “Why couldn’t there be brains functionally or physiologically just like ours [. . .] whose owners’ experience was different from ours or who had no experience at all? (Note that I don’t say that there could be such brains. I just want to know why not.) No one has a clue how to answer these questions” (Block 207). Hollow Knight also refrains from saying such beings are certainly possible or certainly impossible. The fight against the Pure Vessel in Godhome (unless it too bears a misnomer) makes it a matter of canon that they are consistently conceivable and imaginable in the gameworld, which arguably means they are metaphysically possible there. Yet even under the parameters of a pluralist metaphysics, the causal interdependence of the substances in Hallownest means it is still sensical to assert pure vessels may not be physically possible there. At least, that’s what a broad swathe of empirical points in the game imply—with the only direct dissent originating in figures who have been provably wrong in identifying such a being previously.
And/or:
Hollow Knight is a game about reality’s inexhaustible store of strangeness and mystery. With curiosity, motivation, and intuition we can learn an extraordinary amount about the world and about ourselves. That’s true in Hollow Knight, and true outside Hollow Knight. Yet, equally true in both places: we can not learn everything. Folks obsessively insisting the opposite (to the exclusion of all practical and ethical considerations) are the reason the Soul Sanctum is packed with corpses. Potential knowledge about the world is inexhaustible to us not because actual knowledge is necessarily infinite, but rather because our access to such knowledge is limited. In the game, we face practical limitations and ambiguous details. In reality, we face physical limitations and ambiguous concepts. Maybe someday we will be able say truthfully that we understand the intrinsic nature of the mind, or maybe we never will.
Is mentality a fundamental feature of the world? [Or is reality fundamentally nonmental? . . .] To put forth a view, to state a hypothesis is to work hand in hand with science [. . .]
Of course, it may be the case that such hypotheses about the ultimate constituents of the universe might not admit of definitive refutation. For it might be difficult to know with certainty that any particular level [of reality] is the bottom level. (Montero 78)
Ultimately, Hollow Knight instructs us that, despite the limits of understanding always lurking at the edges of our efforts, it’s still beneficial and worthwhile to work toward knowing more. From the several well-hidden gameplay segments like the Hive and Path of Pain to the surprising assortment of charm synergies to the array of actually solvable narrative questions it poses, it’s a game that compensates the curious player—although it denies their total satisfaction.
And/or:
Hollow Knight is a game about the imposition of power, will, and personal agency on the world. The game’s myriad mechanical freedoms—its incredible open-endedness and expansiveness in level design, its near-total lack of cutscenes and similar interruptions to interactivity, the optional nature of the majority of its content, its uncommon abundance of glitchless sequence breaks, its flexible and customizable charm system, its demure attitude toward the imposition of narrative particulars, the variety of viable purchase priorities among its merchants, and even the interchangeability of the keys used for many of its locks—convey that your choices matter, that your will matters, and that your activities and your impact are in your hands. This may seem difficult to accept in a gameworld with a being who could canonically see the future; yet, as A. J. Ayer writes,
But what is meant by saying that the future course is already decided? [. . .] even if this is true, it does not in the least entail that I am a helpless prisoner of fate. It does not even entail that my actions make no difference to the future: for they are causes as well as effects; so that if they were different their consequences would be different also. [. . .] to say that my behaviour can be predicted is not to say that I am acting under constraint. (Ayer 283-284)
We can not choose the circumstances of our birth and we can not choose our ultimate fate, but we can choose (under any worthwhile definition of choice) how we think and act between the first and the second. That we have come into existence at all, that we have minds with which to experience the world in its intricate diversity, is a very great stroke of luck indeed; and it’s a stroke of luck that can be savored, of which we can take full advantage.
And/or:
Hollow Knight is a game about how will, emotion, and experience are found in unlikely places. People might be tempted to think of just about everyone in the game being bugs as a mere aesthetic choice, but it’s a decision that is cashed out in a number of worthwhile ways: in the weight and attention it extends to complex tasks we take for granted among tiny creatures, like the weaving of spiders and the sculpting of dung beetles; in interacting with intelligent beings like Willoh and Midwife for whom you are both interlocutor and potential meal; in the variety of ‘lore-ifications’ of insect and fungal biology mentioned earlier; in the surprising ends of the grub rescue quest and Gruz Mother battle; in characters like the Godseeker who delight in their dramatic bodily metamorphoses; and in the focus on the degree of mentality possessed by beings without a spine and (in some cases) even without a locus of acute sensory perception and expression which we’d call a ‘face.’ This is a very fine example of what literary theorists call ‘defamiliarization,’ in this case of the topics of biology and consciousness. You can see these topics with renewed wonder and humility, as if for the first time, through their presentation by noble and ignoble bugs. And both biology and mind are shown to be far more flexible than their reputations. The thoughts of the lighthouse keeper in the Abyss strongly imply that even unfamiliar, loosely defined, chaotic entities like the void tendrils exert mental influence on their world. Zero in then on the game’s main plot and you’ll find these themes being confronted directly: considering the way that bugs have or gain minds, as well as the consequences of the mistaken belief that a being made of different stuff yet otherwise strongly resembling a person—is not a person. And incidentally, the series continues to have a prominent thematic focus on degrees of will and mind, as Silksong features heavy emphases on the ideas of puppetry and conscious automata.
So:
Is there a common thread among all of these interpretations?
Kind of. They all showcase an insistence on curiosity, fortitude, and (finally) contentment in the face of a mysterious universe. The notion that it is possible to learn much and live well, even though it is not possible to learn all and live forever—is an important lesson for everyone to internalize. Hollow Knight’s intricate mix of solvable and unsolvable mysteries, answerable and unanswerable questions, implicitly and explicitly teaches that lesson.
When we do serious science or philosophy, we take the meat computer and we set it the task of understanding the universe. Now, the meat computer is a rather impressive thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s equal to the task it has been given. There may be a great many aspects of reality fundamentally beyond our capability to understand, to say nothing of aspects of reality fundamentally beyond our capability to conceive.
There’s an indefatigable craving felt by people all along the spectra of beliefs, cultures, and vocations to reach a place of certainty. Folks desire easy answers that fit on the back of a postage stamp: yes or no, this or that. Living with uncertainty, with not knowing things, with not yet understanding some part of the world, seems to be a significant challenge for human beings. One of the primary virtues possessed by the greatest scientists and philosophers is a tolerance for intellectual discomfort.
To learn more about the world than we currently know requires chasing evidence wherever it leads, and not closing off paths of progress because they are messy or mysterious or unintuitive. To assert truths without evidence and to deny truths whose evidence is unconventional are intellectual errors with much in common, as both stem from the human urge for intellectual security. I offered an array of interpretations of the game here to be accepted or rejected à la carte, but there’s one notion I feel one should always see in the stories of the Pale beings and the Hollow Knight, and it’s this: if you can’t live with uncertainty, you will live a lie.
Works Cited:
Montero, Barbara. “Post-Physicalism.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8.2, 2001, pg. 61-80. Print.
mossbag. “The (Mostly) Complete Lore of Hollow Knight.” YouTube, 2020. Web.
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