The Unreasonableness of Naturalism
| November 15, 2012 | Posted by Steve Fuller under Darwinism, Evolution, Philosophy, Science, Society |
Some of you may have already seen that Thomas Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, has been subject to a blistering review in the liberal US weekly, The Nation. On the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s excellent Religion & Ethics website, I have commented on this review, Nagel’s thesis, and the attempt by naturalists to present a politically correct face that avoids Nagel’s critique.
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In a nutshell, Leiter critism is that naturalism as an argument from utility, makes it superior so who care about details.
For, my iphone’s ghost radar beats your ouija board. My satellite TV beats your visions. My….
Well, you get the picture…..right?
Even I give Leiter more credit for intelligence than you seem to!
Ed Feser has some comments on Leiter’s review here and here, as well.
As to the enigma of consciousness:
The preceding interactive graph points out that the smallest scale visible to the human eye (as well as a human egg) is at 10^-4 meters, which ‘just so happens’ to be directly in the exponential center of all possible sizes of our physical reality (not just ‘nearly’ in the exponential center!). i.e. 10^-4 is, ex
ponentially, right in the middle of 10^-35 meters, which is the smallest possible unit of length, which is Planck length, and 10^27 meters, which is the largest possible unit of ‘observable’ length since space-time was created in the Big Bang, which is the diameter of the universe. This is very interesting for, as far as I can tell, the limits to human vision (as well as the size of the human egg) could have, theoretically, been at very different positions than directly in the exponential middle of all possible sizes; Finding conscious observation to be directly in the exponential center is interesting since,,,
Preceding quote taken from this following video;
as well,
Moreover, besides the smallest scale visible to the human eye, finding that the human egg is also in the exponential center of all possible sizes in the universe argues very strongly for the pro-life position and clearly indicates that humans are intended for a purpose and are not random accidents of nature as the atheistic neo-Darwinists would hold.
Supplemental note:
Verse and music:
Of related note: ENV ‘serendipitously’ posted this podcast last night:
I think the problem with Nagel’s book is simple: it’s just not very good. It doesn’t have the conceptual sophistication of the work that made him famous (not just “What is it like to be a bat?” but other essays and articles as well, mostly in ethics and politics). He throws terms around (like “reductive” and “materialism”) without engaging in the various debates about how these terms are to be cashed out.
It’s also not well-done from a scholarly point of view. Consider: Nagel first started writing about these issues in 1974 — that’s when the “bat” essay was first published. There’s been a lot of hard work done since then, by some heavy-hitters in the field. But Nagel takes pretty much no notice of them. His argument against reductionism is the same now as it was in 1974, and even that argument depends largely on whether one’s “intuitions” have been decisively shaped by Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
(In the bat essay, Nagel is clear that what he’s really talking about is the ontological gulf between the pour soi and the en soi. So I’m not surprised to learn that he wrote his dissertation on Sartre.)
For example, there’s been a lot of work done on different notions of irreducibility. (Fuller mentions John Dupre, in particular.)
Now, it could be that the irreducibility of subjective consciousness to objective materiality is (1) ontologically real, and not just a feature of our “vocabularies”, as Davidson and Rorty argued, and it could also be that (2) the ontological irreducibility of subjective consciousness to objective materiality is different in kind from the irreducibility of population genetics to molecular genetics, or the irreducibility of geology to particle physics. So perhaps there’s more than kind of irreducibility. (As indeed I believe there is.)
But showing that there’s more than kind of irreducibility is hard work, it’s the exact work that Nagel would have needed to do in order to deflect the criticisms that Leiter and Weisberg bring against him, it’s work that obviously needs to be done if one is going to defend Nagel’s views at this point in the history of philosophy of mind, and Nagel just doesn’t do it.
He’s coasting on his earlier achievements, and he’s not doing the hard work that remains to be done. Mind and Cosmos contains the tantalizing possibilities of a good book, maybe even a great book, but the check simply does not get cashed.
@bornagain
in regards to consciousness and wave collapse, many physicists do not accept that consciousness causes wave collapse and posit other explanations.
KN:
“His short, tightly argued, exacting new book is a work of considerable courage and importance.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/331656/rationality-vs-darwinism
Thank you for the link, Mung. I’m not inclined to read the article at home, because I don’t want to give National Review twenty-five cents, but I’ll see if it’s available through my institution.
Provisionally, though: Aeschliman is a professor of education and literature; Leiter and Weisberg are professors of philosophy. The argumentative standards are quite different, and especially with regards to what is expected from a philosopher as well-known as Nagel is. Dupre, to whom Fuller refers in his review above, take a similarly dim view of the book here.
In any event, I’ve read it myself, I stand by my assessment, and anyone who wishes to take issue with me is perfectly free to do so.
Please note: I’m actually quite sympathetic to the general point of view that Nagel sketches. I just don’t think he does a good job of articulating and defending it.
See links @3 as well. 🙂
ma35tr0 states:
Indeed even Leggett himself, who devised the most recent inequality which violated realism, though he saw the results first hand, is averse to the (Theistic) implications of its violation:
But there are other lines of evidence from quantum mechanics, as well ma35tr0, which clearly implicate the active role of consciousness in quantum mechanics besides the violation of Bell’s and Leggett’s inequalities, for instance:
In the following video, at the 37:00 minute mark, Anton Zeilinger, a leading researcher in quantum teleportation with many breakthroughs under his belt, humorously reflects on just how deeply determinism has been undermined by quantum mechanics by saying such a deep lack of determinism may provide some of us a loop hole when they meet God on judgment day.
Personally, I feel that such a deep undermining of determinism by quantum mechanics, far from providing a ‘loop hole’ on judgement day, actually restores free will to its rightful place in the grand scheme of things, thus making God’s final judgments on men’s souls all the more fully binding since man truly is a ‘free moral agent’ as Theism has always maintained. And to solidify this theistic claim for how reality is constructed, the following study came along a few months after I had seen Dr. Zeilinger’s video:
So just as I had suspected after watching Dr. Zeilinger’s video, it is found that a required assumption of ‘free will’ in quantum mechanics is what necessarily drives the completely random (non-deterministic) aspect of quantum mechanics. Moreover, it was shown in the paper that one cannot ever improve the predictive power of quantum mechanics by ever removing free will conscious observation as a starting assumption in Quantum Mechanics!
of note:
Needless to say, finding ‘free will conscious observation’ to be ‘built into’ our best description of foundational reality, quantum mechanics, as a starting assumption, ‘free will observation’ which is indeed the driving aspect of randomness in quantum mechanics, is VERY antithetical to the entire materialistic philosophy which demands that a ‘non-telological randomness’ be the driving force of creativity in Darwinian evolution! Also of interest:
I once asked a evolutionist, after showing him the preceding experiments, “Since you ultimately believe that the ‘god of random chance’ produced everything we see around us, what in the world is my mind doing pushing your god around?”
Of note: since our free will choices figure so prominently in how reality is actually found to be constructed in our understanding of quantum mechanics, I think a Christian perspective on just how important our choices are in this temporal life, in regards to our eternal destiny, is very fitting:
further notes that may be of interest to some:
One can see Plantinga’s modal argument, for the soul/mind, being played out here at the 3:39 minute mark in which the animator’s imagine being outside all of space-time, matter energy in the universe. i.e. Thus demonstrating a property of ‘a’ that is not true of ‘b’ as Plantinga put it in his argument.
Empirical confirmation for the preceding modal argument, and video, is found in Harvard neurosurgeon’s Eben Alexander’s Near Death Experience: This following video interview of a Harvard Neurosurgeon, who had a Near Death Experience (NDE), is very interesting. His NDE was rather unique from typical NDEs in that he had completely lost brain wave function for 7 days while the rest of his body was on life support. As such he had what can be termed a ‘pure consciousness’ NDE that was dramatically different from the ‘typical’ Judeo-Christian NDE of going through a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension, seeing departed relatives, and having a life review. His NDE featured his ‘consciousness’ going completely outside the confines of space/time, matter/energy to experience ‘non-locally’ what he termed ‘the Core’, i.e to experience God. It is also interesting to note that he retained a ‘finite sense of self-identity’, as Theism would hold, and did not blend into the infinite consciousness/omniscience of God, as pantheism would hold.
It is also important to point out that there is a viable ‘quantum’ mechanism to explain why Dr. Alexander’s NDE was so different from ‘typical’ NDE’s of going through a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension and that allowed him to witness ‘the core’. There is found to be a different type of quantum information/entanglement in the brain than there is in the rest of the body:
And since Dr. Alexander’s brain was ‘shut down’ whilst the rest of his body was on life support, then that explains why the consciousness of his mind became separated from the soul of his body.,,, Here is the ‘normal’ quantum entanglement within the body that entangles (for lack of a better word) the entire soul with the material body:
Supplemental note:
quote:
OT: Explore the stellar neighborhood with new Milky Way visualization – November 15, 2012
http://phys.org/news/2012-11-e.....ation.html
Thank you for encouraging me to look at Feser’s reviews. I found some of his criticisms of Leiter and Weisberg apt, others struck me as “uncharitable” (along the lines of you, “c’mon, you know they didn’t mean that!”) — but, given how uncharitable Leiter and Weisberg were towards Nagel, allowances can be made (especially in light of how unbelievably petty academics tend to be).
However, there were also a few areas in which I think Feser continued Nagel’s confusions, despite the efforts made to alleviate those confusions, not only by Leiter and Weisberg, but also by John Dupre (whose review I linked to above), Eliot Sober (who reviewed Mind and Cosmos for the Boston Globe) and Alva Noe.
The basic problem with Nagel’s book –a point that Leiter & Weisberg and Dupre point out, though Feser repeats Nagel’s error — is that Nagel just assumes that science is committed to “materialism” and to “reductionism”. In 1974, when Nagel wrote the famous bat essay, it was easy to assume that those were basic features of science. That’s just not the case anymore. Philosophy of science has come a long way since then — in large part because philosophers of science have started paying a lot closer attention to how scientists actually reason in the lab and field.
Granted, the rejection of reductionism among philosophers of science has not really permeated the consciousness of the profession as a whole. In particular, philosophy of mind is still obsessed with reductionism, though much less so than it used to be. For more on this, I highly recommend Beyond Reduction, who nails the problem squarely on the head.
Indeed, it could well be that the big problem with how Nagel’s book has been reviewed is due to the disconnect between philosophers of science and philosophers of mind. Nagel is well-known and well-respected in philosophy of mind, not just for the “bat” essay but for other work as well. His recent “The Psychophysical Nexus” is really quite, quite excellent. But then he writes a book that seems to be about philosophy of science, and so philosophers of science go to review it — that’s the field of specialization for Weisberg, Dupre, and Sober — and they’re astonished to see that the reductionism that vanished from philosophy of science a generation ago still seems to be alive and kicking.
KN, That has to be one of the best Kindle values I’ve seen.
$60.00 hardback for only $16.37.
But it’s also available in paperback for $30.
“Trivia for Amazon bibliophiles: At Boston University, Horst was the roommate of sci-fi author Neal Stephenson.”
Also author of:
Symbols, Computation, and Intentionality: A Critique of the Computational Theory of Mind
They need to spend more time on internet blogs. 😉
Or that people who spend time on internet blogs need to read more! 🙂
touche’
Kantian Naturalist:
Just published:
Life’s Ratchet
Looks like it’s taking a while for the word to get out on all sides, eh?
Touche! 😉
My view, basically, is that the reducibility or irreducibility of “mind” to “matter” is not the most helpful way of thinking about the problem. I’m not on board with Nagel or Feser at a very basic level.
Rather, on my view, there are two different ‘reductions’ or ‘irreducibilities’ at stake: (1) the irreducibility of normative concepts, like personhood, agency, or intentionality, to natural-scientific concepts; (2) the irreducibility of one set of natural-scientific concepts, like organism or life, to physical-chemical concepts.
Once one is no longer working at the level of the whole organism, but instead at the level of biochemistry, translating from there to physics is relatively easy. Hoffmann, as a physicist, might be able to shed some light on biochemistry, but I’m considerably more skeptical as to whether his research will successfully “reduce” organisms to molecules.
(Here I’m using “reduction” and “emergence” as contrasting notions: it’s because emergence is real that reductions can’t work. But I’ll admit that I need to really work through that part of the story.)
Nagel continues the Cartesian project (in several ways, actually) of conflating these two kinds of irreducibility. On my view, one is an irreducibility of normative concepts to descriptive terms, the other is an irreducibility of one set of descriptive terms to another set of descriptive terms. So the irreducibility of agency, thought, intention, etc. to biological facts (e.g. about neurophysiology) is different in kind from the irreducibility of organisms to molecules, however sophisticated and interesting those molecules are.
p. 1 of Life’s Ratchet:
I found that Kant quote in section 81 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment and read the whole section, just to make sure I understood what Kant was doing there.
Kant’s concern there is the relation between teleology and mechanism, and after considering several theories of teleology, he settles on the theory of epigenesis. In the course of doing so, he also argues that biology must start from an organized system of matter, because a teleological system (such as organisms) could not have arise from a mechanistic system (such as matter).
Now, this might be surprising to some of you, but in the past few days I’ve decided that Kant is exactly right about this. Which means, interestingly, that any naturalistic solution to the problem of abiogenesis will require one of two approaches: (1) abandoning the mechanistic theory of matter or (2) treating organisms mechanistically. Despite the popularity of (2) among biochemists, I not only prefer (1) but I think it’s completely viable.
What happened is, on Wednesday I read “Bio-agency and the problem of action” by J. C. Skewes & C. A. Hooker (Biology and Philosophy 24 (3):283-300, 2009). I won’t get into all the details right now; suffice it to say that the way they set up the problem in what I find to be a deeply compelling fashion. Namely, the Aristotelian-Kantian notion that organisms are centers of their own causal activity is not compatible with linear effective causation — what you might call a “domino” theory of causation. So, what they propose to do is reject the domino theory of causation. Put otherwise, they reject mechanism. In its place they argue that dynamical systems theory can explain how autopoeitic systems arise.
Anyway, that’s why I agree with Kant. 🙂
http://www.springerlink.com/co.....g58n5g631/
Someone ought to write a paper. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Prior Planning.
Laughed when I heard Dr Eben Alexander, the neurosurgeon who had had the 7-day NDE, refer to ‘science’, and immediately after that, ‘neuroscience’, making the two-fingered quotation-mark signs, after the latter.
I thought of the female blogger who is a neurological specialist of some kind, linked either from here or from Dr Cornelius Hunter’s blog, and her withering dismissal of ‘neuroscience’ (if I remember correctly) on her blog, as even a half serious, scientific discipline; given the extremely limited understanding of the biology involved in the structure of the brain, never mind the brain’s relationship to consciousness.
Alvin Plantinga’s review of Nagel’s ‘Mind & Cosmos’.
http://www.tnr.com/print/artic.....lism-wrong
The review is quite interesting. One of the deep issues lurking beneath the surface here is whether it is Nagel’s desire for intelligible unity, or the idea that the desire for intelligibility can only be satisfied by unity, that accounts for the affinity between Nagel and Plantinga. (For another iteration of this affinity, see Nagel’s review of Plantinga in The New York Review of Books.)
Nagel, unlike Sellarsian pragmatists such as Rorty, Dennett, and myself, insists on what he calls “the ambition of transcendence” as central to the philosophical enterprise as such. Richard Rorty has written perceptively about the difference between Nagel and Dennett on intentionality; I can provide salient quotes if there’s interest.