Many cosmological arguments, though not all, argue that the universe began to exist; and since everything that began to exist was caused by something else, the universe was caused by something else. With Big Bang cosmology this point has received empirical confirmation: according to the Big Bang, the universe -- that is, matter, energy, space, and time -- began to exist. Thus, something that exists independently of matter, energy, space, and time brought them into existence.
One objection to such arguments is that, even if the Big Bang has a cause, there's no reason to think this cause is God, much less the God of the Bible. I have to admit, I've never felt the force of this objection. I mean, is there any other issue where if you don't prove everything about it with a single argument, you prove nothing about it? The Big Bang only proves that there is an immaterial, spaceless (hence omnipresent and transcendent), timeless, and unimaginably powerful cause of the universe, and the response is, "Yeah, so?" Really? Of course the Big Bang doesn't prove that the cause of the universe is the ground of morality, of course it doesn't prove that Jesus rose from the dead, etc. But has anyone ever claimed it does? Why can't it function as part of a cumulative case argument?
What this objection is really focusing on, I think, is whether the cause of the universe is a mind -- or at least, as C. S. Lewis puts it, "more like a mind than it is like anything else we know". A cause that was not a mind would be mechanistic, since a mechanistic cause is one which produces its effect automatically. That is, if the cause is present, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the effect to take place are met; and since the necessary and sufficient conditions for the effect to take place are met, the effect takes place.
But since the scientific evidence proves that we are dealing with the beginning of time itself, the cause of the universe must be timeless. So is it possible to have a timeless mechanistic cause that produces a temporal effect (in this case, the universe)? It is difficult to see how this would be possible. A timeless mechanistic cause would produce its effect timelessly, since the necessary and sufficient conditions for its effect's occurrence are timelessly present. But in the case under discussion, the effect (the universe) is not timelessly present, and yet must have a timeless cause, since time is part of the effect. Therefore, the cause of the universe cannot be mechanistic or automatic; it must be non-mechanistic. It must be an entity with the capacity of choosing to create the universe as a finite, temporal effect. And the ability to choose is an inherently mental act. Therefore, the entity responsible for creating the universe must be a mind, a personal agent with free will. As William Lane Craig puts it in The Kalām Cosmological Argument, "For while a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions would either produce the effect from eternity or not at all, a personal being may freely choose to create at any time wholly apart from any distinguishing conditions of one moment from another. For it is the very function of will to distinguish like from like."
So it seems that cosmological arguments based on Big Bang cosmology prove, among other things, that the cause of the universe is an incredibly powerful Mind. This obviously matches up with the Judeo-Christian concept of God. One could still object that the Judeo-Christian God has other traits that these cosmological arguments don't prove, but I'm afraid I'm too overawed by what they do prove to think this objection amounts to much.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
A Spherical Argument
One way that is still used to denigrate and mock Christianity, as well as the ancients and medievals, is the suggestion that, prior to Columbus, everyone thought the Earth was flat. This belief was rooted in religious dogma and was therefore unchallengeable until it was demonstrated empirically to be false; and even then many people continued to affirm it. It is held up as a primary example of the folly of religion in contrast to the wisdom of science.
I fortunately grew up knowing that this story line was bogus. People did not think that the Earth was flat before Columbus. Every educated person from about the third century BC onward knew the Earth was round. Columbus was trying to discover an alternate passage to the East Indies by sailing west. He had to convince people that such a route would be superior to the common one of going south, around Africa, and then east; but he didn't have to convince anyone that the Earth is round. Besides, how exactly did Columbus's voyage prove the sphericity of the Earth? He didn't circumnavigate the globe; he didn't reach some place traveling west that had already been reached by traveling east. Isn't it obvious that this narrative is false?
I thought that these things were fairly well-known. I suspected that anyone who seriously thought otherwise essentially got their knowledge on the subject from Bugs Bunny cartoons.
It just amazes me that people take this urban legend seriously. I think, for example, of the globus cruciger, that ball with a cross on top of it that kings would hold. The ball was supposed to represent the earth, with the cross on top representing Christ's dominion over it, and the sovereign would hold it to show that "he's got the whole world in his hands." The earliest of these dates to the fifth century, before the fall of Rome, and they were used throughout the Middle Ages. In fact, orbs without the cross were common for centuries beforehand. Thus, any claim that the ancients or medievals thought the earth was flat can't even get started. You can see plenty of pictures of them online, and you can watch a short documentary on the globus cruciger here.
Unfortunately, there are still people, including historians (so I can't lay the blame on the side of popular culture), who believe that Columbus was trying to prove the Earth is round. The go-to book to refute such claims is Jeffrey Burton Russell's Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. There are also some excellent resources online: see here, here, here, here, and here, for example. James has pointed to a recent book promulgating this claim, ironically entitled House of Wisdom.
Regarding the Bible, there are passages which refer to "the ends of the earth" and "the four corners of the earth." However, they do not amount to an assertion that the earth is flat anymore than our use of terms such as "sunset" and "sunrise" amount to assertions that the sun revolves around the earth. "The ends of the earth" merely refers to the most distant places, and "the four corners of the earth" refers to the most distant places in the four directions in which one can go (north, south, east, and west).
Regarding Christian history, there are a few historical figures who went against the flow, but this does not negate the consensus view. The extent to which a flat earth was accepted in ancient and medieval Christianity is sometimes exaggerated based on criticisms of the theory of "antipodes." But this seems to be a misunderstanding: "antipodes" referred to people who were alleged to live on the other side of the earth. The Christian authors who rejected this (not all did) pointed to the almost universally-held belief that it was impossible to travel from one side to the other, "either because the sea was too wide to sail across or because the equatorial zones were too hot to sail through" (Russell). Therefore, no one from one side of the earth could have gotten to the other side, so that if there were people on the other side of the earth they could not share a common origin with us. Some have unfortunately taken these statements to mean that they were denying there was an "other side" of the world at all. But these authors were making anthropological statements, not geographical ones.
The only individuals who clearly affirmed a flat earth were Lactantius (third and fourth centuries), whose "views eventually led to his works being condemned as heretical after his death" (Russell); Severian (fourth century); and Cosmas Indicopleustes (sixth century) who exerted virtually zero influence on his contemporaries or the Middle Ages: "The first translation of Cosmas into Latin, his very first introduction into western Europe, was not until 1706. He had absolutely no influence on medieval western thought" (Russell). By way of contrast, Copernicus translated some short writings of Theophylactus Simocatta from Greek to Latin in 1509. While this was the first such translation published in Poland, and thus had some importance in that regard, the text he chose was not. The reason he chose Theophylactus is because all the good stuff had already been translated, so he had to settle for the dregs. Cosmas wasn't translated for another two centuries. To suggest he was even taken seriously by the handful of people who read him is just absurd.
Additionally, Diodore of Tarsus (fourth century) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (fourth and fifth centuries) are referenced by other Christians as affirming a flat earth in order to refute them, but the actual writings in question are lost. Isidore of Seville (sixth and seventh centuries) is often given as an example of a flat-earther, because some of his writings seem to affirm corollaries of a flat earth. But since he also gives a figure for the earth's circumference (80,000 stadia) and affirms that the sky is spherical and equidistant from the earth on all sides, it is difficult to attribute a belief in a flat earth to him.
So Lactantius, Severian, Cosmas Indicopleustes, Diodore, and Theodore of Mopsuestia make a grand total of five Christian writers who affirmed, or apparently affirmed, a flat earth, all of whom lived in late Antiquity at the very latest, and none of whom were taken seriously.
So how did such a silly idea become so popular? According to Russell, it goes back to about 1830 when Washington Irving published his story of Columbus, and took some license with the historical account. In Irving's story, Columbus wasn't trying to discover an alternate route to the East Indies by sailing west around the world: he was trying to prove more basically that the Earth is round in the first place. Before this time, everyone thought the Earth was flat because that's what the Bible teaches. Columbus's detractors were the priests and inquisitors who didn't want anyone challenging their authority to proclaim what reality was or wasn't.
Despite the absurdity of these claims, by about 1870, western society had pretty much uncritically accepted the idea that everyone thought the world was flat prior to Columbus's voyages (including, ironically, some Christians who took it upon themselves to defend flat-earthism). There were two primary reasons for this naïve acceptance that the ancients and medievals thought the earth was flat: First, the 19th century was a time of great optimism for the human race. People thought that we were quickly advancing towards a manmade utopia, and for many this implied the superiority of modern man over his predecessors. Thus, it was very conducive to this worldview to portray those who lived prior to the Enlightenment as a bunch of uneducated half-wits who didn’t even know the earth is round. World War I pretty much eradicated the optimism, but much of the disrespect for and contempt of our predecessors remained and remains still.
Second, at this time, some people were very confident that scientific discoveries would eventually explain everything without any recourse to God (naturalism). However, many scientists did not accept naturalism, so a cultural campaign was initiated which sought to identify it with science itself, and to this end represented any denial of naturalism as part and parcel of ignorant religious believers getting in the way of truth and progress. Examples were found, twisted, and sometimes completely invented in order to illustrate the point. The flat earth was a perfect candidate for one of these "examples": in Irving's story, he had made Columbus's opponents the priests and inquisitors who didn’t want anyone challenging their authority to make pronouncements about what constituted reality. Indeed, a lot of naturalism's credibility comes from the degree of absurdity in examples of what religious people believe or have believed about the physical world. When this degree of absurdity turns out to be misinformed -- either totally invented or significantly misrepresented -- naturalism no longer appears as obvious.
So the flat earth myth isn't just an urban legend; it's propaganda, deliberate misinformation that is presented in order to prop up a position without going through the tedium of finding actual evidence for it. It doesn't bode well for your worldview if you have to change reality in order to make it fit.
I fortunately grew up knowing that this story line was bogus. People did not think that the Earth was flat before Columbus. Every educated person from about the third century BC onward knew the Earth was round. Columbus was trying to discover an alternate passage to the East Indies by sailing west. He had to convince people that such a route would be superior to the common one of going south, around Africa, and then east; but he didn't have to convince anyone that the Earth is round. Besides, how exactly did Columbus's voyage prove the sphericity of the Earth? He didn't circumnavigate the globe; he didn't reach some place traveling west that had already been reached by traveling east. Isn't it obvious that this narrative is false?
I thought that these things were fairly well-known. I suspected that anyone who seriously thought otherwise essentially got their knowledge on the subject from Bugs Bunny cartoons.
It just amazes me that people take this urban legend seriously. I think, for example, of the globus cruciger, that ball with a cross on top of it that kings would hold. The ball was supposed to represent the earth, with the cross on top representing Christ's dominion over it, and the sovereign would hold it to show that "he's got the whole world in his hands." The earliest of these dates to the fifth century, before the fall of Rome, and they were used throughout the Middle Ages. In fact, orbs without the cross were common for centuries beforehand. Thus, any claim that the ancients or medievals thought the earth was flat can't even get started. You can see plenty of pictures of them online, and you can watch a short documentary on the globus cruciger here.
Unfortunately, there are still people, including historians (so I can't lay the blame on the side of popular culture), who believe that Columbus was trying to prove the Earth is round. The go-to book to refute such claims is Jeffrey Burton Russell's Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. There are also some excellent resources online: see here, here, here, here, and here, for example. James has pointed to a recent book promulgating this claim, ironically entitled House of Wisdom.
Regarding the Bible, there are passages which refer to "the ends of the earth" and "the four corners of the earth." However, they do not amount to an assertion that the earth is flat anymore than our use of terms such as "sunset" and "sunrise" amount to assertions that the sun revolves around the earth. "The ends of the earth" merely refers to the most distant places, and "the four corners of the earth" refers to the most distant places in the four directions in which one can go (north, south, east, and west).
Regarding Christian history, there are a few historical figures who went against the flow, but this does not negate the consensus view. The extent to which a flat earth was accepted in ancient and medieval Christianity is sometimes exaggerated based on criticisms of the theory of "antipodes." But this seems to be a misunderstanding: "antipodes" referred to people who were alleged to live on the other side of the earth. The Christian authors who rejected this (not all did) pointed to the almost universally-held belief that it was impossible to travel from one side to the other, "either because the sea was too wide to sail across or because the equatorial zones were too hot to sail through" (Russell). Therefore, no one from one side of the earth could have gotten to the other side, so that if there were people on the other side of the earth they could not share a common origin with us. Some have unfortunately taken these statements to mean that they were denying there was an "other side" of the world at all. But these authors were making anthropological statements, not geographical ones.
The only individuals who clearly affirmed a flat earth were Lactantius (third and fourth centuries), whose "views eventually led to his works being condemned as heretical after his death" (Russell); Severian (fourth century); and Cosmas Indicopleustes (sixth century) who exerted virtually zero influence on his contemporaries or the Middle Ages: "The first translation of Cosmas into Latin, his very first introduction into western Europe, was not until 1706. He had absolutely no influence on medieval western thought" (Russell). By way of contrast, Copernicus translated some short writings of Theophylactus Simocatta from Greek to Latin in 1509. While this was the first such translation published in Poland, and thus had some importance in that regard, the text he chose was not. The reason he chose Theophylactus is because all the good stuff had already been translated, so he had to settle for the dregs. Cosmas wasn't translated for another two centuries. To suggest he was even taken seriously by the handful of people who read him is just absurd.
Additionally, Diodore of Tarsus (fourth century) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (fourth and fifth centuries) are referenced by other Christians as affirming a flat earth in order to refute them, but the actual writings in question are lost. Isidore of Seville (sixth and seventh centuries) is often given as an example of a flat-earther, because some of his writings seem to affirm corollaries of a flat earth. But since he also gives a figure for the earth's circumference (80,000 stadia) and affirms that the sky is spherical and equidistant from the earth on all sides, it is difficult to attribute a belief in a flat earth to him.
So Lactantius, Severian, Cosmas Indicopleustes, Diodore, and Theodore of Mopsuestia make a grand total of five Christian writers who affirmed, or apparently affirmed, a flat earth, all of whom lived in late Antiquity at the very latest, and none of whom were taken seriously.
So how did such a silly idea become so popular? According to Russell, it goes back to about 1830 when Washington Irving published his story of Columbus, and took some license with the historical account. In Irving's story, Columbus wasn't trying to discover an alternate route to the East Indies by sailing west around the world: he was trying to prove more basically that the Earth is round in the first place. Before this time, everyone thought the Earth was flat because that's what the Bible teaches. Columbus's detractors were the priests and inquisitors who didn't want anyone challenging their authority to proclaim what reality was or wasn't.
Despite the absurdity of these claims, by about 1870, western society had pretty much uncritically accepted the idea that everyone thought the world was flat prior to Columbus's voyages (including, ironically, some Christians who took it upon themselves to defend flat-earthism). There were two primary reasons for this naïve acceptance that the ancients and medievals thought the earth was flat: First, the 19th century was a time of great optimism for the human race. People thought that we were quickly advancing towards a manmade utopia, and for many this implied the superiority of modern man over his predecessors. Thus, it was very conducive to this worldview to portray those who lived prior to the Enlightenment as a bunch of uneducated half-wits who didn’t even know the earth is round. World War I pretty much eradicated the optimism, but much of the disrespect for and contempt of our predecessors remained and remains still.
Second, at this time, some people were very confident that scientific discoveries would eventually explain everything without any recourse to God (naturalism). However, many scientists did not accept naturalism, so a cultural campaign was initiated which sought to identify it with science itself, and to this end represented any denial of naturalism as part and parcel of ignorant religious believers getting in the way of truth and progress. Examples were found, twisted, and sometimes completely invented in order to illustrate the point. The flat earth was a perfect candidate for one of these "examples": in Irving's story, he had made Columbus's opponents the priests and inquisitors who didn’t want anyone challenging their authority to make pronouncements about what constituted reality. Indeed, a lot of naturalism's credibility comes from the degree of absurdity in examples of what religious people believe or have believed about the physical world. When this degree of absurdity turns out to be misinformed -- either totally invented or significantly misrepresented -- naturalism no longer appears as obvious.
So the flat earth myth isn't just an urban legend; it's propaganda, deliberate misinformation that is presented in order to prop up a position without going through the tedium of finding actual evidence for it. It doesn't bode well for your worldview if you have to change reality in order to make it fit.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Doubting Darwin's Doubt
Alvin Plantinga, in his Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, employs what he calls "Darwin's Doubt". He quotes a letter Charles Darwin wrote to William Graham where Darwin asks whether our beliefs can be considered trustworthy if they are result of our evolutionary ancestors' struggle for survival, and suggests that if the lower animals have cognitive states like beliefs we wouldn't consider them trustworthy. Thus Darwin himself had an inkling of the problem that Plantinga's problem addresses: if our minds are merely the product of evolution, why should we trust them? In particular, why should we trust them when they tell us about evolution?
This suggests that the object of Darwin's Doubt was Darwin's own belief in evolution. But the letter itself suggests something different, something that I find even more interesting. Below is the entire letter, taken from volume 1 (pp. 315-17) of The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, edited by his son Francis Darwin.
Pay no attention to that racist behind the curtain. Francis Darwin footnotes the phrase "that the Universe is not the result of chance" with the following:
So what Darwin was doubting was not evolution but his own belief or impression that the universe shows itself to be the product of intelligence, of mind. That is what he questions in light of evolution.
This isn't a gotcha! moment for Plantinga however. On the one hand, the letter could easily be understood as saying that doubting the belief in an intelligent creator opens the door to doubting all of our cognitive faculties. This is how Plantinga presents the issue, by taking it the further step of applying it to our belief in naturalism and even evolution itself, but Darwin could have been implying it in the letter already. Regardless, even if Darwin didn't apply it this way, it doesn't mean that we can't.
On the other hand, Darwin may just be applying his doubt to the beliefs that were inconvenient for him in some way. That's also a possible interpretation of the letter, but I think it's far too uncharitable. It accuses Darwin of being inconsistent and using ad hoc reasoning; worse than that, of doing so consciously. I'm very uncomfortable with charging Darwin with dishonesty.
On the third hand, perhaps Darwin was only applying this doubt to the thoughts we have before we turn a critical eye on them, our instinctive reactions prior to having the light of reason shone upon them. He doesn't say that in the letter either, but I think the letter could also be reasonably understood this way. In that case, he wouldn't be applying his doubt to evolution, because his belief in evolution is precisely the product of critical thinking. He doesn't doubt the process of reason or rationality, just the building blocks that the process works with.
Again, it's certainly possible that that's all Darwin meant. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any reason for applying it to one and not the other. In fact, most arguments like Plantinga's explicitly question whether the process of reasoning could be trusted if our minds are what they are merely in order to increase the likelihood of our survival and propagation. It certainly seems that reason is veracious, but why should we trust this "seeming"? Perhaps it was useful to our survival to have an overwhelming impression of the veracity of reason -- just as Darwin had the occasional overwhelming impression that nature is a product of a divine mind -- regardless of whether reason actually is veracious. So Darwin's Doubt applies. Indeed, Darwin's Doubt is a universal acid, eating through every traditional concept and leaving in its wake ... well, nothing. It's an acid.
But now, to return to the elephant in the room, Darwin had the overwhelming impression that the order present in nature bespeaks of a divine mind. That strikes me as a pretty big deal. Moreover, this belief was still coming over Darwin with "overwhelming force", albeit intermittently, within a year of his death. And he gets himself out of that belief by suggesting that evolution by itself makes it difficult to see why our beliefs should be trustworthy, a point that kicks the door wide open to Plantinga's argument and the charge that naturalism is ultimately self-defeating. Again, Darwin may not have intended to apply his doubt to his own belief in evolution, but there's no reason it would apply to one and not the other. The point of course is not to challenge whether evolution is true but to challenge whether it's the whole story: if it were then the belief that it's the whole story would not be trustworthy.
This suggests that the object of Darwin's Doubt was Darwin's own belief in evolution. But the letter itself suggests something different, something that I find even more interesting. Below is the entire letter, taken from volume 1 (pp. 315-17) of The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, edited by his son Francis Darwin.
Down, July 3rd, 1881.
Dear Sir,
I hope that you will not think it intrusive on my part to thank you heartily for the pleasure which I have derived from reading your admirably written 'Creed of science,' though I have not yet quite finished it, as now that I am old I read very slowly. It is a very long time since any other book has interested me so much. The work must have cost you several years and much hard labour with full leisure for work. You would not probably expect any one fully to agree with you on so many abstruse subjects; and there are some points in your book which I cannot digest. The chief one is that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. I cannot see this. Not to mention that many expect that the several great laws will some day be found to follow inevitably from some one single law, yet taking the laws as we now know them, and look at the moon, where the law of gravitation -- and no doubt of the conservation of energy -- of the atomic theory, &c. &c., hold good, and I cannot see that there is then necessarily any purpose. Would there be purpose if the lowest organisms alone, destitute of consciousness existed in the moon? But I have had no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? Secondly, I think that I could make somewhat of a case against the enormous importance which you attribute to our greatest men; I have been accustomed to think, second, third, and fourth rate men of very high importance, at least in the case of Science. Lastly, I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world. But I will write no more, and not even mention the many points in your work which have much interested me. I have indeed cause to apologise for troubling you with my impressions, and my sole excuse is the excitement in my mind which your book has aroused.
I beg leave to remain,
Dear Sir,
Yours faithfully and obliged
Charles Darwin
Pay no attention to that racist behind the curtain. Francis Darwin footnotes the phrase "that the Universe is not the result of chance" with the following:
The Duke of Argyll ('Good Words,' Ap. 1885, p. 244) has recorded a few words on this subject, spoken by my father in the last year of his life. "... in the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his own remarkable works on the 'Fertilisation of Orchids,' and upon 'The Earthworms,' and various other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature -- I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin's answer. He looked at me very hard and said, 'Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,' and he shook his head vaguely, adding, 'it seems to go away.'"
So what Darwin was doubting was not evolution but his own belief or impression that the universe shows itself to be the product of intelligence, of mind. That is what he questions in light of evolution.
This isn't a gotcha! moment for Plantinga however. On the one hand, the letter could easily be understood as saying that doubting the belief in an intelligent creator opens the door to doubting all of our cognitive faculties. This is how Plantinga presents the issue, by taking it the further step of applying it to our belief in naturalism and even evolution itself, but Darwin could have been implying it in the letter already. Regardless, even if Darwin didn't apply it this way, it doesn't mean that we can't.
On the other hand, Darwin may just be applying his doubt to the beliefs that were inconvenient for him in some way. That's also a possible interpretation of the letter, but I think it's far too uncharitable. It accuses Darwin of being inconsistent and using ad hoc reasoning; worse than that, of doing so consciously. I'm very uncomfortable with charging Darwin with dishonesty.
On the third hand, perhaps Darwin was only applying this doubt to the thoughts we have before we turn a critical eye on them, our instinctive reactions prior to having the light of reason shone upon them. He doesn't say that in the letter either, but I think the letter could also be reasonably understood this way. In that case, he wouldn't be applying his doubt to evolution, because his belief in evolution is precisely the product of critical thinking. He doesn't doubt the process of reason or rationality, just the building blocks that the process works with.
Again, it's certainly possible that that's all Darwin meant. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any reason for applying it to one and not the other. In fact, most arguments like Plantinga's explicitly question whether the process of reasoning could be trusted if our minds are what they are merely in order to increase the likelihood of our survival and propagation. It certainly seems that reason is veracious, but why should we trust this "seeming"? Perhaps it was useful to our survival to have an overwhelming impression of the veracity of reason -- just as Darwin had the occasional overwhelming impression that nature is a product of a divine mind -- regardless of whether reason actually is veracious. So Darwin's Doubt applies. Indeed, Darwin's Doubt is a universal acid, eating through every traditional concept and leaving in its wake ... well, nothing. It's an acid.
But now, to return to the elephant in the room, Darwin had the overwhelming impression that the order present in nature bespeaks of a divine mind. That strikes me as a pretty big deal. Moreover, this belief was still coming over Darwin with "overwhelming force", albeit intermittently, within a year of his death. And he gets himself out of that belief by suggesting that evolution by itself makes it difficult to see why our beliefs should be trustworthy, a point that kicks the door wide open to Plantinga's argument and the charge that naturalism is ultimately self-defeating. Again, Darwin may not have intended to apply his doubt to his own belief in evolution, but there's no reason it would apply to one and not the other. The point of course is not to challenge whether evolution is true but to challenge whether it's the whole story: if it were then the belief that it's the whole story would not be trustworthy.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Some Comments on Neurophilosophy
I was just re-reading some sections of Neurophilosohy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain by Patricia Smith Churchland, in which she advocates eliminative materialism. This is the view that our common ways of thinking about or conceptualizing our cognitive processes -- including "beliefs", "reasoning," and even "thinking" and "conceptualizing" -- are radically mistaken and so must be entirely replaced with neurophysiological processes and terms. The old wine, which they call "folk psychology" to put it on a par with folk religion, cannot fit in the new wineskins of neurological science, and so should be discarded. I encountered some interesting statements at the end of chapter 9 of Neurophilosophy, and so reproduce it here in red font with my comments interspersed. It's kind of like a fisking from days of yore, except I don't intend any disrespect for my subject.
This argument has had multiple expression through the years. C. S. Lewis's Argument from Reason; J. R. Lucas's Gödelian Argument against strong AI; Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism; etc.
As we'll see shortly, claiming that folk psychology is a theory is the linchpin to the eliminativist project; you remove that and the whole structure collapses. For now I'll just point out that it's highly contentious to suggest that folk psychology constitutes a theory. Theories explain data. What the eliminativist calls folk psychology is the data itself: beliefs, concepts, chains of reasoning, etc. We directly experience these things, they are simply given. Any theory, therefore, must explain them. A theory which denied their existence, as eliminativism does, would be completely inadequate. Worse than that, it couldn't even get off the ground, since the data it would purport to explain would be much less secure as data than what the eliminativist denies. In fact, the data it seeks to explain could very well be derived from what the eliminativist denies.
But how could he be correct in his criticisms if they are expressed in a system that is entirely corrupt? If folk psychology falls, then the specific elements of folk psychology that were used in the formulation of eliminative materialism will fall with it. Isn't this obvious?
This is pretty speculative on her part, but leaving that aside, translation from one system to another can only be done if both are coherent. If one of them is not, then translation would be impossible, there being either nothing to translate from or nothing to translate to. Since the eliminativist's claim is that the old system is entirely corrupt, to talk about translating it into another superior system is simply incoherent.
Churchland suggests we can have a placeholder ("gronkify") to stand for what we usually term "belief." This, allegedly, avoids the problem of saying she believes there are no beliefs without having to go through all the rigamarole of showing exactly what is happening when we say "belief." But "placeholder" is a concept within the system she's denying. I can only make sense of what she's saying if I presuppose the basic validity of folk psychology. This is true regardless of what you think the fundamental unit is: the word, the phrase, the sentence, the concept, whatever. I only know that any unit is valid if the underlying system is valid; and the eliminativist uses these units -- thus presupposes their validity -- in order to deny their validity. This is self-defeating.
The eliminativist may argue that while they're denying that there are beliefs, thoughts, chains of reasoning, etc., they're not denying that something is happening; only that the way we conceive or perceive what's happening is completely invalid. This reminds me of Cratylus who eventually became so convinced that language could not communicate information that he renounced it entirely and stopped speaking. However, when people got in his face and screamed at him, he would wiggle his finger, as if to say, "Something's happening." Yet the eliminative materialist is even less rational than this, since they want to communicate their claim to others, after denying the possibility of communication. It's as if Cratylus wrote books to communicate why he rejected the possibility of communicating.
In response, an eliminativist might provide a parallel, such as how what used to be thought was demonic possession is now recognized as mental illness. The description "demonic possession" was wholly incorrect, but it did pick out an actual feature of the world. Ignoring everything else about this (if it picks out an actual feature, how can it be wholly incorrect?), the problem is that it treats "belief" as if it were an interpretation of what is actually going on. This assumes, again, that folk psychology is a theory. But belief is part of the data; it is not an interpretation of something else, it's the ground level.
At any rate, the eliminativist's claim is not one of translation but of elimination; hence the name. If someone were an eliminativist about language and argued that all languages are completely invalid and must be rejected in favor of a potential future language that we might produce someday, how could he tell this to anyone? Any attempt to describe it could only be done in the very languages he said were wholly corrupt and invalid. Again: if the languages are completely invalid, then those parts of the languages used to express his claims are invalid. In other words, by making this claim about language, the person makes it impossible to tell someone who uses those languages about his theories.
Even so, I think we can just barely comprehend the claim that our language is untrustworthy and a future language will replace it because a) we know there are other languages, and so have a context in which we can put this claim; and b) while any expression of this language-eliminativism would be self-defeating, since it would be in language, it's not immediately evident that we can't think about it. Language and thought have a close and complex relationship, but there are plenty of philosophers who argue that language does not completely circumscribe our thought; we can think beyond the box of whatever language we speak (supposedly). But with the eliminative materialist this option is not available: he can't even think about, contemplate, or get any idea of what eliminative materialism means because he can only do so within the old framework that he pretends to reject.
If the only available language were completely corrupt, and if people could only think in language, then they could never formulate a new and better language, because they would have no way of doing so. Any attempt could only get underway by presupposing the validity of the language in which they think and speak.
The reference is to Churchland's short article "Is Determinism Self-Refuting?" in Mind 90 (new series, 1981), a response to Karl Popper's version of the argument that determinism is self-defeating (Popper responded in a short article of his own with the same title in Mind 92, 1983). Churchland's counter-argument that such arguments beg the question has been repeated many times in the literature. Basically, the claim is that the vitalist implicitly presupposes that vitalism is a necessary condition of asserting anything, and then applies this presupposition of vitalism to the anti-vitalist position, discovering unsurprisingly that it renders it self-defeating. Thus he begs the question: he presupposes the truth of his position in order to argue against a contrary position. Essentially, the vitalist ignores the very claim that the anti-vitalist is making, and applies a standard that the anti-vitalist would obviously reject. All the anti-vitalist has to do is deny the implicit presupposition that vitalism is a necessary condition of assertion.
There are several things one could say in response to this, but I'll just focus on three: first, the anti-eliminativist argument and the anti-vitalist argument do not seem parallel. The vitalist is not claiming to directly perceive vital spirits, he perceives that he is alive and posits a vital spirit as an explanation of this datum. The anti-vitalist does not deny the datum, only the interpretation. The eliminativist, however, is claiming that beliefs, concepts, ideas, thoughts, chains of reasoning, etc., are all bogus. Since we directly perceive beliefs, ideas, thoughts, et al., he is therefore not challenging an interpretation but denying the given data. The parallel would be (as Lynne Rudder Baker argued in Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism) an anti-vitalist who denied that he is alive. So, contrary to Churchland's claim here, these arguments do not commit "exactly the same mistake."
Now I think the eliminativist would respond by pointing to Quine and arguing that the distinction between data and theory has been shown to be artificial. I would respond that while the border country may be difficult to define clearly, to suggest that there simply is no raw data -- ever -- is absurd. We do directly experience some things, and if your worldview cannot account for that, your worldview is deficient. The point of worldviews, after all, is to account for varying facts. If the only way you can make your worldview work is to deny the most basic and universal facts, it doesn't merely fail: it's unworthy of being taken seriously by anyone.
Eliminativists see folk psychology as being on a par with geocentrism, and their radical-new-conception-that-consists-almost-entirely-of-placeholders as on a par with heliocentrism. But their position is much more extreme than this. A sidereal-eliminativist would deny that the stars exist; more basically, would deny that there are lights in the sky. If people pointed up to the night sky and said, "But I see lights right there," our sidereal-eliminativist would respond, "No, you don't. Once we complete a full stellar theory, we will see that these lights do not exist. It seems strange, but trust me: I'm a philosopher."
Second, question-begging is only a fallacy within the framework of the folk psychology that the eliminativist is claiming to reject. If the whole framework is bogus, why would this particular element be valid? In order for this objection to take hold, the eliminativist has to grant to his opponent the validity of folk psychology; but this obviates his entire claim, that folk psychology is not valid.
Third, it seems to me that Churchland's counter-argument would apply to any claim that something is self-defeating. For example, suppose I scream at the top of my lungs, "I ALWAYS SPEAK SOFTLY!" Someone tells me that my claim is self-defeating, since I did not say it softly. I then respond, "That begs the question. My whole claim, after all, is that I always speak softly. You're ignoring what I'm actually saying and applying a standard to my statement that I reject, namely, the standard that I don't always speak softly. I simply reject that claim, as my statement should make clear." Isn't it obvious that such a response doesn't work? Isn't it obvious that my claim is self-defeating? The person who tells me my claim is self-defeating is not assuming that my asserted claim is false, he's taking it as an actual statement, applying what it says to itself, and then pointing out that it undercuts its own presentation. That's how any claim that something is self-defeating works.
What this shows is that the anti-eliminativist's argument that eliminativism is self-defeating is logically prior to the eliminativist's counter-argument that the anti-eliminativist is begging the question. In order to say that the eliminativist's claim is self-defeating, he has to take what the eliminativist says, apply it to the eliminativist's claim itself, and then show that, if we assume the eliminativist's claims are true or valid or whatever, then the eliminativist's claims are not true or valid or whatever. The counter-response (that he is assuming the eliminativist's claim is false by applying standards to it that it denies) ignores the fact the eliminativist is presupposing the standards he claims to reject. That's the point: his position could only be valid if he hasn't really rejected the framework he says he has rejected. It's built upon the foundation of what he's dismissed as bogus.
Even if there were an available replacement theory, the grand-scale criticism could never be stated within the theory being criticized, since it would necessarily presuppose the categories of the theory being rejected as fallacious.
Again, we are told that the explananda are not given but are "in the vocabulary of the available theory." That is, they are interpretations, part of an overarching theory which can therefore be dismissed. But if they're actually raw data, the ground level, that needs to be explained, eliminative materialism falls to the ground, since it doesn't explain them; it explains them away.
Look, odd claims can be true. Reality is odd. But my conception of what it means to be "odd" is a part of the folk psychology framework that Churchland says she rejects. Outside of that, I can't make any sense of what she's saying; and that's the crux of the issue. If I'm in the throes of a false universal system, I can never get out of it to a better system, because any reason or ground for getting out of it would form a part of the system that I want to reject. Any chain of argument away from it would only be valid within that system; and once that system is rejected, the argument no longer holds, and I no longer have a reason for leaving the system. Moreover, this applies to everyone, including Patricia Churchland. How could evidence, reason, and argument have persuaded her to abandon folk psychology if evidence, reason, and argument are only valid within the confines of folk psychology? She's borrowing folk psychology's tools and mortar in order to construct an edifice that denies the existence of its own foundation and materiel.
I read this, and then my wife called from the other room, "What's so funny?" because, yes, I was laughing out loud. Churchland doesn't make predictions about such matters? Seriously? I don't mean any disrespect to her, but her whole position is a radical, gratuitous prediction of what science might discover someday, given a very particular (and implausible) set of preconditions. Eliminative materialism assumes a naïve scientific realism and extends into the future (i.e. predicts) what it might lead to. The fact that it would lead us to reject any kind of scientific realism is a small price to pay for ... what exactly? Truth? Logical consistency? Reason? These are all a part of the system she says she rejects.
There's a partial truth here, but as usual, it's being distorted. The geocentric theory of the universe was a crucial element in Aristotelian and Ptolemaic astronomy -- that is, the science of the day -- and Christians looked for passages in the Bible to accommodate it, such as "The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved" (1 Chronicles 16:30; Psalm 93:1; 96:10; cf. Psalm 104:5). But, I'm sorry, these aren't "crucial sections of the Bible"; no doctrine is dependent on them, no theology is called into question by recognizing that their perspective is the surface of the earth rather than somewhere out in space looking down at the earth. As for the geocentric model in general, the center of the universe was considered the least prestigious, the least honorable, location therein; this is why hell was thought to be at the center of the earth, and Satan at the center of hell. Anyone who has studied ancient and medieval cosmology knows this. I wrote about this recently here, and you can read an excellent essay on it by Dennis Danielson, a literary historian, here.
The doctrine of creation, however, is crucial, and modern scientific discoveries have ruled out certain interpretations of Genesis 1 and 2. However, Churchland has erred if she thinks those interpretations exhaust traditional Christian thought on the issue. Historically, Christians have often understood the creation narratives metaphorically. Origen, one of the most important Church Fathers from the second and third centuries, went so far as to ridicule people who thought they referred to actual events (De Principiis 4:1:16). The point being that Christian doctrine has always left plenty of room for such interpretations, and modern scientific discoveries don't touch them. Regarding evolution in particular, I would just point out that many Church Fathers and medieval theologians (such as Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Bonaventure, etc.) held the doctrine of rationes seminales according to which God created everything in "seed" form which then developed accordingly. Since such views were widely accepted within Christianity a millennium and a half before Darwin, I just don't see much difficulty here.
At any rate, I think Churchland's reference to these issues reveals something more about her presuppositions and motivations, and those of eliminative materialists in general. She's not just assuming a naïve scientific realism, she's presupposing the conflict thesis, the view that science and religion (or at least science and Christianity) are at war, and science is winning. She's extending into the future (predicting) what the end result of this war will be. The biggest problem with this is that the conflict thesis is almost completely rejected by historians of science. It is a wildly inaccurate view of how science and Christianity have interacted in history. So not only is her position self-defeating, not only is it implausible in the extreme, it's actually based on a discarded theory about the historical interaction between science and Christianity.
Well, again, I think there's a partial truth here. The rejection of geocentrism did certainly undermine the power of the Catholic church to some extent. I would reiterate, though, that it failed to undermine any serious doctrinal issue. Traditionally, Christians had accommodated Ptolemy's geocentric model into their hamartiology or doctrine of sin: what was sinful was heavy and fell towards the center; what was light was holy and moved up into the heavens. This is also why they thought the earth didn't move and the heavens did: what was heavy/sinful didn't move and what was light/holy did. When the heliocentric system was presented it was seen as upgrading the earth to the status of a heavenly object and as downgrading the sun (in many ways the source of life, so it could have been perceived as an affront) to the center. Now if this link between geocentrism and the Christian doctrine of sin was thought to be an inextricable link, even mistakenly so, rather than borne out of an attempt to accommodate the science of the day, heliocentrism could have been perceived as contradicting something important to man's self-conception. But as far as I can tell this was not the case. I could certainly be wrong, but what I've read about this focused on the idea that heliocentrism challenged the Catholic church's authority by questioning something it had made a pronouncement on; not to mention the fact that the staunch defenses of geocentrism were made by the scientists on scientific grounds rather than theologians on theological grounds.
Yes, she's actually referencing Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, a work so thoroughly rejected by historians of science that anyone should be embarassed to base any argument on it at all. It has repeatedly been shown to be nothing more than a work of propaganda. "The moral property of anesthesia" refers to the claim that using anesthesia to relieve the pains of childbirth nullified the curse of Eve which was God's punishment on humanity because of the Fall, and therefore set man up against God. Except no such objection was raised; Andrew Dickson White just made it up. Similarly, the moral significance of disease and immunization refers to the claim that Pope Leo XII condemned vaccinations because disease was a righteous punishment from God. Of course, Leo never said or wrote any such thing, nor has any other pope, it's a complete fabrication.
The only claim Churchland refers to that has any validity is contraception, since some Christians reject birth control. However, only the Catholic church does this; Protestant and Orthodox churches generally do not. And the Catholic church's stance is not some knee-jerk reaction, it is a well thought-out position, as exemplified by the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. This doesn't mean we have to agree with it, but we should at least be thoughtful about it.
Once again we see that the eliminative materialist program is motivated by a demonstrably false theory of the historical relationship between science and Christianity. That Churchland would be so uncritical about Andrew Dickson White, that she would have such blind faith in a discarded theory about the history of science, while simultaneously being hyper-critical of the most basic and obvious things about ourselves and the world, shows that she and her fellow eliminativists are not applying the same standards to their own position that they apply to those they dislike. And how could they? The standards they apply to other positions are basically to completely reject them, turn away, and never look back. It doesn't really matter what the truth is, they'll try to make reality conform to their theory rather than the other way around. Except "truth," "reality," "theory," and everything else are just parts of the washed-up theory of folk psychology. They only have to accept them when they want to.
The prospect of transforming folk psychology as we know and love it has prompted objections, some of which I have already covered, but others of which I must consider separately here. One popular objection is that eliminative materialism is self-refuting. In order to state his position, the argument goes, the eliminativist must believe what he says, but what he says is "There really are no such states as beliefs." However, if there are no beliefs, then the eliminativist cannot believe what he says. Or if he believes what he says, then there really are beliefs. The eliminativist can expect to be taken seriously only if his claim cannot, and he thereby refutes himself.
This argument has had multiple expression through the years. C. S. Lewis's Argument from Reason; J. R. Lucas's Gödelian Argument against strong AI; Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism; etc.
What the eliminativist is fumbling to say is that folk psychology is seriously inadequate as a theory.
As we'll see shortly, claiming that folk psychology is a theory is the linchpin to the eliminativist project; you remove that and the whole structure collapses. For now I'll just point out that it's highly contentious to suggest that folk psychology constitutes a theory. Theories explain data. What the eliminativist calls folk psychology is the data itself: beliefs, concepts, chains of reasoning, etc. We directly experience these things, they are simply given. Any theory, therefore, must explain them. A theory which denied their existence, as eliminativism does, would be completely inadequate. Worse than that, it couldn't even get off the ground, since the data it would purport to explain would be much less secure as data than what the eliminativist denies. In fact, the data it seeks to explain could very well be derived from what the eliminativist denies.
Now within the confines of that very theoretical framework we are bound to describe the eliminativist as believing there are no beliefs; however, this is not because folk psychology is bound to be true, but only because we are confined within the framework the eliminativist wishes to criticize and no alternative framework is available. If the eliminativist is correct in his criticisms,
But how could he be correct in his criticisms if they are expressed in a system that is entirely corrupt? If folk psychology falls, then the specific elements of folk psychology that were used in the formulation of eliminative materialism will fall with it. Isn't this obvious?
and if the old framework is revised and replaced, then by using the new vocabulary the eliminativist's criticisms could be restated with greater sophistication and with no danger of pragmatic contradiction. (For example, the new eliminativist might declare, "I gronkify beliefs," where gronkification is a neuropsychological state defined within the mature new theory.)
This is pretty speculative on her part, but leaving that aside, translation from one system to another can only be done if both are coherent. If one of them is not, then translation would be impossible, there being either nothing to translate from or nothing to translate to. Since the eliminativist's claim is that the old system is entirely corrupt, to talk about translating it into another superior system is simply incoherent.
Churchland suggests we can have a placeholder ("gronkify") to stand for what we usually term "belief." This, allegedly, avoids the problem of saying she believes there are no beliefs without having to go through all the rigamarole of showing exactly what is happening when we say "belief." But "placeholder" is a concept within the system she's denying. I can only make sense of what she's saying if I presuppose the basic validity of folk psychology. This is true regardless of what you think the fundamental unit is: the word, the phrase, the sentence, the concept, whatever. I only know that any unit is valid if the underlying system is valid; and the eliminativist uses these units -- thus presupposes their validity -- in order to deny their validity. This is self-defeating.
The eliminativist may argue that while they're denying that there are beliefs, thoughts, chains of reasoning, etc., they're not denying that something is happening; only that the way we conceive or perceive what's happening is completely invalid. This reminds me of Cratylus who eventually became so convinced that language could not communicate information that he renounced it entirely and stopped speaking. However, when people got in his face and screamed at him, he would wiggle his finger, as if to say, "Something's happening." Yet the eliminative materialist is even less rational than this, since they want to communicate their claim to others, after denying the possibility of communication. It's as if Cratylus wrote books to communicate why he rejected the possibility of communicating.
In response, an eliminativist might provide a parallel, such as how what used to be thought was demonic possession is now recognized as mental illness. The description "demonic possession" was wholly incorrect, but it did pick out an actual feature of the world. Ignoring everything else about this (if it picks out an actual feature, how can it be wholly incorrect?), the problem is that it treats "belief" as if it were an interpretation of what is actually going on. This assumes, again, that folk psychology is a theory. But belief is part of the data; it is not an interpretation of something else, it's the ground level.
At any rate, the eliminativist's claim is not one of translation but of elimination; hence the name. If someone were an eliminativist about language and argued that all languages are completely invalid and must be rejected in favor of a potential future language that we might produce someday, how could he tell this to anyone? Any attempt to describe it could only be done in the very languages he said were wholly corrupt and invalid. Again: if the languages are completely invalid, then those parts of the languages used to express his claims are invalid. In other words, by making this claim about language, the person makes it impossible to tell someone who uses those languages about his theories.
Even so, I think we can just barely comprehend the claim that our language is untrustworthy and a future language will replace it because a) we know there are other languages, and so have a context in which we can put this claim; and b) while any expression of this language-eliminativism would be self-defeating, since it would be in language, it's not immediately evident that we can't think about it. Language and thought have a close and complex relationship, but there are plenty of philosophers who argue that language does not completely circumscribe our thought; we can think beyond the box of whatever language we speak (supposedly). But with the eliminative materialist this option is not available: he can't even think about, contemplate, or get any idea of what eliminative materialism means because he can only do so within the old framework that he pretends to reject.
It would be foolish to suppose folk psychology must be true because at this stage of science to criticize it implies using it. All this shows is that folk psychology is the only theory available now.
If the only available language were completely corrupt, and if people could only think in language, then they could never formulate a new and better language, because they would have no way of doing so. Any attempt could only get underway by presupposing the validity of the language in which they think and speak.
By way of analogy, consider a biologist in the early nineteenth century who wishes to criticize vitalist theory as misconceived. He suggests that there is no such thing as vital spirit and that other accounts must be found to distinguish living things from nonliving things. Consider the following fanciful defense of vitalism:The anti-vitalist says that there is no such thing as vital spirit. This claim is self-refuting; the speaker can be expected to be taken seriously only if his claim cannot. For if the claim is true, then the speaker does not have vital spirit and must be dead. His claim is meaningful only if it is false. (Patricia S. Churchland 1981d)
The vitalist makes exactly the same mistake here as is made in the foray against the eliminativist.
The reference is to Churchland's short article "Is Determinism Self-Refuting?" in Mind 90 (new series, 1981), a response to Karl Popper's version of the argument that determinism is self-defeating (Popper responded in a short article of his own with the same title in Mind 92, 1983). Churchland's counter-argument that such arguments beg the question has been repeated many times in the literature. Basically, the claim is that the vitalist implicitly presupposes that vitalism is a necessary condition of asserting anything, and then applies this presupposition of vitalism to the anti-vitalist position, discovering unsurprisingly that it renders it self-defeating. Thus he begs the question: he presupposes the truth of his position in order to argue against a contrary position. Essentially, the vitalist ignores the very claim that the anti-vitalist is making, and applies a standard that the anti-vitalist would obviously reject. All the anti-vitalist has to do is deny the implicit presupposition that vitalism is a necessary condition of assertion.
There are several things one could say in response to this, but I'll just focus on three: first, the anti-eliminativist argument and the anti-vitalist argument do not seem parallel. The vitalist is not claiming to directly perceive vital spirits, he perceives that he is alive and posits a vital spirit as an explanation of this datum. The anti-vitalist does not deny the datum, only the interpretation. The eliminativist, however, is claiming that beliefs, concepts, ideas, thoughts, chains of reasoning, etc., are all bogus. Since we directly perceive beliefs, ideas, thoughts, et al., he is therefore not challenging an interpretation but denying the given data. The parallel would be (as Lynne Rudder Baker argued in Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism) an anti-vitalist who denied that he is alive. So, contrary to Churchland's claim here, these arguments do not commit "exactly the same mistake."
Now I think the eliminativist would respond by pointing to Quine and arguing that the distinction between data and theory has been shown to be artificial. I would respond that while the border country may be difficult to define clearly, to suggest that there simply is no raw data -- ever -- is absurd. We do directly experience some things, and if your worldview cannot account for that, your worldview is deficient. The point of worldviews, after all, is to account for varying facts. If the only way you can make your worldview work is to deny the most basic and universal facts, it doesn't merely fail: it's unworthy of being taken seriously by anyone.
Eliminativists see folk psychology as being on a par with geocentrism, and their radical-new-conception-that-consists-almost-entirely-of-placeholders as on a par with heliocentrism. But their position is much more extreme than this. A sidereal-eliminativist would deny that the stars exist; more basically, would deny that there are lights in the sky. If people pointed up to the night sky and said, "But I see lights right there," our sidereal-eliminativist would respond, "No, you don't. Once we complete a full stellar theory, we will see that these lights do not exist. It seems strange, but trust me: I'm a philosopher."
Second, question-begging is only a fallacy within the framework of the folk psychology that the eliminativist is claiming to reject. If the whole framework is bogus, why would this particular element be valid? In order for this objection to take hold, the eliminativist has to grant to his opponent the validity of folk psychology; but this obviates his entire claim, that folk psychology is not valid.
Third, it seems to me that Churchland's counter-argument would apply to any claim that something is self-defeating. For example, suppose I scream at the top of my lungs, "I ALWAYS SPEAK SOFTLY!" Someone tells me that my claim is self-defeating, since I did not say it softly. I then respond, "That begs the question. My whole claim, after all, is that I always speak softly. You're ignoring what I'm actually saying and applying a standard to my statement that I reject, namely, the standard that I don't always speak softly. I simply reject that claim, as my statement should make clear." Isn't it obvious that such a response doesn't work? Isn't it obvious that my claim is self-defeating? The person who tells me my claim is self-defeating is not assuming that my asserted claim is false, he's taking it as an actual statement, applying what it says to itself, and then pointing out that it undercuts its own presentation. That's how any claim that something is self-defeating works.
What this shows is that the anti-eliminativist's argument that eliminativism is self-defeating is logically prior to the eliminativist's counter-argument that the anti-eliminativist is begging the question. In order to say that the eliminativist's claim is self-defeating, he has to take what the eliminativist says, apply it to the eliminativist's claim itself, and then show that, if we assume the eliminativist's claims are true or valid or whatever, then the eliminativist's claims are not true or valid or whatever. The counter-response (that he is assuming the eliminativist's claim is false by applying standards to it that it denies) ignores the fact the eliminativist is presupposing the standards he claims to reject. That's the point: his position could only be valid if he hasn't really rejected the framework he says he has rejected. It's built upon the foundation of what he's dismissed as bogus.
He misidentifies the unique availability of a theory with the truth of the theory. I suspect that any grand-scale criticism of a deeply entrenched, broadly encompassing theory will seem to have a self-refuting flavor so long as no replacement theory is available.
Even if there were an available replacement theory, the grand-scale criticism could never be stated within the theory being criticized, since it would necessarily presuppose the categories of the theory being rejected as fallacious.
The reason is this: the available theory specifies not only what counts as an explanation but also the explananda themselves. That is, the phenomena that need explaining are specified in the vocabulary of the available theory (for example, the turning of the crystal spheres, the possession by demons, the transfer of caloric, the nature of consciousness).
Again, we are told that the explananda are not given but are "in the vocabulary of the available theory." That is, they are interpretations, part of an overarching theory which can therefore be dismissed. But if they're actually raw data, the ground level, that needs to be explained, eliminative materialism falls to the ground, since it doesn't explain them; it explains them away.
To tender sweeping criticisms of the entire old theory while still within its framework will therefore typically sound odd. But odd or not, such criticism nonetheless serves an essential role in steering a theory into readiness for revision.
Look, odd claims can be true. Reality is odd. But my conception of what it means to be "odd" is a part of the folk psychology framework that Churchland says she rejects. Outside of that, I can't make any sense of what she's saying; and that's the crux of the issue. If I'm in the throes of a false universal system, I can never get out of it to a better system, because any reason or ground for getting out of it would form a part of the system that I want to reject. Any chain of argument away from it would only be valid within that system; and once that system is rejected, the argument no longer holds, and I no longer have a reason for leaving the system. Moreover, this applies to everyone, including Patricia Churchland. How could evidence, reason, and argument have persuaded her to abandon folk psychology if evidence, reason, and argument are only valid within the confines of folk psychology? She's borrowing folk psychology's tools and mortar in order to construct an edifice that denies the existence of its own foundation and materiel.
Finally, it may be objected that the sentential paradigm will survive, whatever the theoretical revolutions and however thorough our understanding of the brain, because it is useful and natural and forms the nexus of our moral conceptions concerning responsibility, praise, and blame. By way of reply, it should first be mentioned that the issue now concerns a prediction about what will in fact be the social outcome of a theoretical revolution, and my inclination is to back off from making predictions about such matters.
I read this, and then my wife called from the other room, "What's so funny?" because, yes, I was laughing out loud. Churchland doesn't make predictions about such matters? Seriously? I don't mean any disrespect to her, but her whole position is a radical, gratuitous prediction of what science might discover someday, given a very particular (and implausible) set of preconditions. Eliminative materialism assumes a naïve scientific realism and extends into the future (i.e. predicts) what it might lead to. The fact that it would lead us to reject any kind of scientific realism is a small price to pay for ... what exactly? Truth? Logical consistency? Reason? These are all a part of the system she says she rejects.
Nevertheless, it may be useful to consider that objections cut from the same cloth were made on behalf of the geocentric theory of the universe and the creationist theory of man's origins. These theories were defended on grounds that they were useful and natural and were crucial elements in Christian doctrine. If the geocentric theory was wrong, if the creationist story was wrong, then crucial sections of the Bible could not be literally true and man's conception of himself and his place in the universe would be changed.
There's a partial truth here, but as usual, it's being distorted. The geocentric theory of the universe was a crucial element in Aristotelian and Ptolemaic astronomy -- that is, the science of the day -- and Christians looked for passages in the Bible to accommodate it, such as "The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved" (1 Chronicles 16:30; Psalm 93:1; 96:10; cf. Psalm 104:5). But, I'm sorry, these aren't "crucial sections of the Bible"; no doctrine is dependent on them, no theology is called into question by recognizing that their perspective is the surface of the earth rather than somewhere out in space looking down at the earth. As for the geocentric model in general, the center of the universe was considered the least prestigious, the least honorable, location therein; this is why hell was thought to be at the center of the earth, and Satan at the center of hell. Anyone who has studied ancient and medieval cosmology knows this. I wrote about this recently here, and you can read an excellent essay on it by Dennis Danielson, a literary historian, here.
The doctrine of creation, however, is crucial, and modern scientific discoveries have ruled out certain interpretations of Genesis 1 and 2. However, Churchland has erred if she thinks those interpretations exhaust traditional Christian thought on the issue. Historically, Christians have often understood the creation narratives metaphorically. Origen, one of the most important Church Fathers from the second and third centuries, went so far as to ridicule people who thought they referred to actual events (De Principiis 4:1:16). The point being that Christian doctrine has always left plenty of room for such interpretations, and modern scientific discoveries don't touch them. Regarding evolution in particular, I would just point out that many Church Fathers and medieval theologians (such as Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Bonaventure, etc.) held the doctrine of rationes seminales according to which God created everything in "seed" form which then developed accordingly. Since such views were widely accepted within Christianity a millennium and a half before Darwin, I just don't see much difficulty here.
At any rate, I think Churchland's reference to these issues reveals something more about her presuppositions and motivations, and those of eliminative materialists in general. She's not just assuming a naïve scientific realism, she's presupposing the conflict thesis, the view that science and religion (or at least science and Christianity) are at war, and science is winning. She's extending into the future (predicting) what the end result of this war will be. The biggest problem with this is that the conflict thesis is almost completely rejected by historians of science. It is a wildly inaccurate view of how science and Christianity have interacted in history. So not only is her position self-defeating, not only is it implausible in the extreme, it's actually based on a discarded theory about the historical interaction between science and Christianity.
The new physics and the new biology each did, in some degree, undermine the power of the Christian church and naturalize man's understanding of himself and the universe.
Well, again, I think there's a partial truth here. The rejection of geocentrism did certainly undermine the power of the Catholic church to some extent. I would reiterate, though, that it failed to undermine any serious doctrinal issue. Traditionally, Christians had accommodated Ptolemy's geocentric model into their hamartiology or doctrine of sin: what was sinful was heavy and fell towards the center; what was light was holy and moved up into the heavens. This is also why they thought the earth didn't move and the heavens did: what was heavy/sinful didn't move and what was light/holy did. When the heliocentric system was presented it was seen as upgrading the earth to the status of a heavenly object and as downgrading the sun (in many ways the source of life, so it could have been perceived as an affront) to the center. Now if this link between geocentrism and the Christian doctrine of sin was thought to be an inextricable link, even mistakenly so, rather than borne out of an attempt to accommodate the science of the day, heliocentrism could have been perceived as contradicting something important to man's self-conception. But as far as I can tell this was not the case. I could certainly be wrong, but what I've read about this focused on the idea that heliocentrism challenged the Catholic church's authority by questioning something it had made a pronouncement on; not to mention the fact that the staunch defenses of geocentrism were made by the scientists on scientific grounds rather than theologians on theological grounds.
But perhaps that was not a bad thing. At a minimum it is worth considering whether transformations in our moral conceptions to adhere more closely to the discovered facts of brain function might be no bad thing as well. Whether this is so will be a complex matter about which I feel ignorant, but it is certainly not a closed matter. It is at least conceivable that our moral and legal institutions will be seen by future generations to be as backward, superstitious, and primitive as we now see the Christian church's doctrine of past centuries concerning the moral significance of disease and the moral property of anesthesia, immunization, and contraception (White 1896).
Yes, she's actually referencing Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, a work so thoroughly rejected by historians of science that anyone should be embarassed to base any argument on it at all. It has repeatedly been shown to be nothing more than a work of propaganda. "The moral property of anesthesia" refers to the claim that using anesthesia to relieve the pains of childbirth nullified the curse of Eve which was God's punishment on humanity because of the Fall, and therefore set man up against God. Except no such objection was raised; Andrew Dickson White just made it up. Similarly, the moral significance of disease and immunization refers to the claim that Pope Leo XII condemned vaccinations because disease was a righteous punishment from God. Of course, Leo never said or wrote any such thing, nor has any other pope, it's a complete fabrication.
The only claim Churchland refers to that has any validity is contraception, since some Christians reject birth control. However, only the Catholic church does this; Protestant and Orthodox churches generally do not. And the Catholic church's stance is not some knee-jerk reaction, it is a well thought-out position, as exemplified by the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. This doesn't mean we have to agree with it, but we should at least be thoughtful about it.
Once again we see that the eliminative materialist program is motivated by a demonstrably false theory of the historical relationship between science and Christianity. That Churchland would be so uncritical about Andrew Dickson White, that she would have such blind faith in a discarded theory about the history of science, while simultaneously being hyper-critical of the most basic and obvious things about ourselves and the world, shows that she and her fellow eliminativists are not applying the same standards to their own position that they apply to those they dislike. And how could they? The standards they apply to other positions are basically to completely reject them, turn away, and never look back. It doesn't really matter what the truth is, they'll try to make reality conform to their theory rather than the other way around. Except "truth," "reality," "theory," and everything else are just parts of the washed-up theory of folk psychology. They only have to accept them when they want to.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
The Central Issue; or Location Isn't Everything
July 13, 2013: I have temporarily removed the content of this post because it has some similarities with an article I wrote that is being published in an academic journal. Even though a blogpost probably doesn't count as having previously published the material, I'm taking the content of this post offline in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety. I'll put it back online in a year or so.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Islamic Mysticism
I have always been baffled by Islamic mysticism, known as Sūfism. My reason for this (if one can have reasons for being confused) is that there are two Islamic doctrines that seem to contradict it. First, Muhammad is believed to be the last prophet. That means that there is no further revelation from God until the end of the world, according to Islam. But if God is not revealing anything further, it's difficult to see how there can be any room for mystical experience.
Second, according to Islam God is completely transcendent. He has absolutely no direct contact with human beings. Even Muhammad didn't receive the Qur'an from God, but from an angel who had, in turn, received it from God. But mysticism means experience of the absolute. So how in the world can there be any experience of God? Basic Islamic doctrine seems to rule it out. "Islamic mysticism" seems to me to be an oxymoron.
The reason I'm interested in this is because people tend to be confident in their religious beliefs because of religious experiences they have had which affirm them. The reason why many Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead, for example, is not because they have done an in-depth analysis of historical Jesus research, but because they have personally experienced Jesus as a living reality. Giving such people an abstract argument to the contrary is not a strong enough impetus to counter their experience. But with Islam, such experiences are largely ruled out of court. So why are some people who claim to be Muslims willing to commit horrendous crimes such as suicide bombings? How can they be so confident that their worldview is correct if that worldview entails that they do not and cannot experience God, and as such, can receive no personal sanction of their beliefs by him? It seems to me that such confidence is closer to political extremism than religious devotion.
At any rate, I recently read A History of Islamic Philosophy by Majid Fakhry, and he discusses this at one point. At first, he makes several points against Sūfism, including my second one.
Fakhry goes on, though, to suggest that there are some other Islamic doctrines which allow some form of mysticism.
I'm just not sure, though, that these considerations overrule the problems mentioned above. Someone can be very close to you in a sense, but this doesn't necessarily entail the possibility of direct communication. By way of contrast, Judaism and Christianity both affirm that God is as close to the individual person as she is to herself, and that there is further no barrier preventing direct contact. So both of these two other religions allow for mystical experience, while Islam does not.
To conclude: I have always been baffled by Islamic mysticism.
Second, according to Islam God is completely transcendent. He has absolutely no direct contact with human beings. Even Muhammad didn't receive the Qur'an from God, but from an angel who had, in turn, received it from God. But mysticism means experience of the absolute. So how in the world can there be any experience of God? Basic Islamic doctrine seems to rule it out. "Islamic mysticism" seems to me to be an oxymoron.
The reason I'm interested in this is because people tend to be confident in their religious beliefs because of religious experiences they have had which affirm them. The reason why many Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead, for example, is not because they have done an in-depth analysis of historical Jesus research, but because they have personally experienced Jesus as a living reality. Giving such people an abstract argument to the contrary is not a strong enough impetus to counter their experience. But with Islam, such experiences are largely ruled out of court. So why are some people who claim to be Muslims willing to commit horrendous crimes such as suicide bombings? How can they be so confident that their worldview is correct if that worldview entails that they do not and cannot experience God, and as such, can receive no personal sanction of their beliefs by him? It seems to me that such confidence is closer to political extremism than religious devotion.
At any rate, I recently read A History of Islamic Philosophy by Majid Fakhry, and he discusses this at one point. At first, he makes several points against Sūfism, including my second one.
Mysticism, defined as the attempt to reach out to the infinite and to be identified with it either through some kind of connaturality, as in Christianity, or through the total destruction of personal identity and the reversion to the primordial condition of undifferentiated unity, as in Hinduism and Buddhism, is discouraged by many teachings of the Islamic religion. First, the concept of the absolute transcendence of God "unto Him nothing is like," as the Koran express it [42:11], militates against the spirit of close or intimate relationship with God. Second, the ritual basis of the cult, with its rigid stipulations and forms, excludes the possibility of the unfettered reaching out to a reality beyond without conditions or restrictions. Third, the Islamic concept of the unity or continuity of man's life in this world and the next makes the "divorce" between finite and infinite existence in the form of withdrawal from the world much more difficult. The Muslim believer is called upon to accept this world of transient existence (dār fanā’) and cling to it, almost as much as he is called upon to seek the everlasting kingdom (dār baqā’) beyond and cling to it.
Fakhry goes on, though, to suggest that there are some other Islamic doctrines which allow some form of mysticism.
However, the Koran and the Traditions present another picture of the God-man relationship and the life-to-come which is very different from the one just outlined. Thus God is represented in this perspective as closer to the believer than "his jugular vein" (Koran 50, 15), and is so omnipresent and omniscient as to witness man's every deed and read his every thought. The ephemeral goods of this life are said to be utterly worthless in comparison with the everlasting goods of the life-to-come.
Moreover the spectacle of God's final judgment is drawn in such graphic and awe-inspiring terms, particularly in the early Meccan Sūrahs, that the reader is overwhelmed with the sense of the futility and wretchedness of man's estate in this life. Fear (al-khauf) not unnaturally became the chief expression of piety (wara‘, taqwā) and the token of a genuine religious vocation in the early centuries of Islam.
I'm just not sure, though, that these considerations overrule the problems mentioned above. Someone can be very close to you in a sense, but this doesn't necessarily entail the possibility of direct communication. By way of contrast, Judaism and Christianity both affirm that God is as close to the individual person as she is to herself, and that there is further no barrier preventing direct contact. So both of these two other religions allow for mystical experience, while Islam does not.
To conclude: I have always been baffled by Islamic mysticism.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Causality and the Big Bang
Since Big Bang cosmology is the claim that matter, energy, space, and time all sprang into existence, it strikes many people as similar to the theistic doctrine of creation ex nihilo (and by "similar" I mean "identical"). So some philosophers and some cosmologists have tried to find ways of avoiding the theistic implications.
One of the most common is to claim that causality is a physical phenomenon; it describes what takes place within the universe. You can't apply it to the beginning of the physical universe. The idea here is that causality is a posteriori like the laws of physics or chemistry, not a priori like the laws of logic. As such, it only describes the conditions inside the universe and can't be applied to the beginning of the universe itself. This is the tack taken by some illustrious philosophers, such as Adolf Grünbaum and Quentin Smith
It's certainly true that causality is not a priori in the same way the laws of logic are. We simply can't imagine the law of non-contradiction failing to hold, but we can imagine causality failing to hold -- that is, we can imagine (form a mental picture of) something popping into existence without a cause. But it's incorrect to say that we discover causality the same way we discover the laws of physics, i.e. through observation. Causality is derived from our basic intuition that something does not come from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit: out of nothing, nothing comes). To limit this intuition to physical processes would be a case of special pleading; there's no reason why it wouldn't apply to the beginning of the universe. Causality is not a physical principle, it's a metaphysical principle.
Perhaps one could suggest that once we have the principle of causality via intuition, we can then establish it via observation and continue to believe it based on the latter. But it's not clear to me how causality could be falsified, or what would count as observation of causality not holding. At best you could say that you didn't observe a cause of an effect, but everyone would infer that the effect does in fact have a cause and we just didn't observe it. It's not like you could set up a scientific experiment to observe the absence of causality, since if the conditions you set up are sufficient to bring about the effect, then obviously the former caused the latter. As such, I think William Lane Craig's argument that causality has never been falsified is an empty claim. There are plenty of times where we observe an effect without a cause, but no amount of such experiences will ever convince a sane person that the effects didn't have a cause, merely that the causes weren't observed.
Or, perhaps one could simply deny the intuition. There are problems with this though: for one thing, science presupposes causality. If causality goes out the window, science goes with it. This is not only absurd and unacceptable, it's a conclusion I doubt nontheists would be willing to accept, since they (mistakenly) think science is on their side. For another thing, while causality is not a priori in the same way that the laws of logic are, it is still a precondition of thought. If causality did not hold, then there would not be an appropriate connection between our beliefs and their objects, such that we could never know if any of them are true. So it's not merely scientific knowledge that would be endangered; if we deny causality, then the possibility of any knowledge becomes impossible. So it's not like this intuition is just some random assertion.
But doesn't quantum physics posit virtual particles coming into existence without causes? This is a misunderstanding. As Craig writes,
Another suggestion might be that Hume denied causality. But ignoring the fact that Hume was not inerrant, this is another misunderstanding. Hume argued that just because we've observed a particular cause producing a particular effect in the past, we cannot know that the cause will produce the same effect. In other words, he argued that we can't infer an effect from a cause. Those who deny causality applies to the creation of the universe are claiming that we can't infer a cause from an effect -- that just because we observe that an effect has taken place, we can't claim that it was caused. This is radically different from what Hume was claiming, and Hume explicitly repudiates such an idea as absurd.
A final claim might be to suggest that applying causality to the Big Bang is just as problematic for the traditional theistic doctrine of creation. The doctrine, after all, is called creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) and the intuition is that ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing, nothing comes). But again, this is a misunderstanding. Creation ex nihilo is the claim that the universe didn't have a material cause -- that it wasn't constructed out of some pre-existent "stuff". This is certainly a radical claim and we should recognize it as such. But it doesn't deny that the universe has an efficient cause -- some entity or agent that brings about the effect -- since the claim is that God is the efficient cause of the universe. Those who deny that causality would apply to the beginning of the universe, however, are claiming that the universe had neither a material cause nor an efficient cause. So I simply put it to you, which of these two explanations is more plausible: that the universe's beginning has an efficient cause but no material cause, or that it has neither?
Now it's all well and good to say that applying causality to the beginning of the universe creates some philosophical issues, but the alternative is that it just popped into existence without any cause whatsoever. That people who portray themselves as skeptics would be willing to accept this shows that their skepticism is absurdly selective. If this is the the only way to avoid believing in God then there's just no contest.
One of the most common is to claim that causality is a physical phenomenon; it describes what takes place within the universe. You can't apply it to the beginning of the physical universe. The idea here is that causality is a posteriori like the laws of physics or chemistry, not a priori like the laws of logic. As such, it only describes the conditions inside the universe and can't be applied to the beginning of the universe itself. This is the tack taken by some illustrious philosophers, such as Adolf Grünbaum and Quentin Smith
It's certainly true that causality is not a priori in the same way the laws of logic are. We simply can't imagine the law of non-contradiction failing to hold, but we can imagine causality failing to hold -- that is, we can imagine (form a mental picture of) something popping into existence without a cause. But it's incorrect to say that we discover causality the same way we discover the laws of physics, i.e. through observation. Causality is derived from our basic intuition that something does not come from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit: out of nothing, nothing comes). To limit this intuition to physical processes would be a case of special pleading; there's no reason why it wouldn't apply to the beginning of the universe. Causality is not a physical principle, it's a metaphysical principle.
Perhaps one could suggest that once we have the principle of causality via intuition, we can then establish it via observation and continue to believe it based on the latter. But it's not clear to me how causality could be falsified, or what would count as observation of causality not holding. At best you could say that you didn't observe a cause of an effect, but everyone would infer that the effect does in fact have a cause and we just didn't observe it. It's not like you could set up a scientific experiment to observe the absence of causality, since if the conditions you set up are sufficient to bring about the effect, then obviously the former caused the latter. As such, I think William Lane Craig's argument that causality has never been falsified is an empty claim. There are plenty of times where we observe an effect without a cause, but no amount of such experiences will ever convince a sane person that the effects didn't have a cause, merely that the causes weren't observed.
Or, perhaps one could simply deny the intuition. There are problems with this though: for one thing, science presupposes causality. If causality goes out the window, science goes with it. This is not only absurd and unacceptable, it's a conclusion I doubt nontheists would be willing to accept, since they (mistakenly) think science is on their side. For another thing, while causality is not a priori in the same way that the laws of logic are, it is still a precondition of thought. If causality did not hold, then there would not be an appropriate connection between our beliefs and their objects, such that we could never know if any of them are true. So it's not merely scientific knowledge that would be endangered; if we deny causality, then the possibility of any knowledge becomes impossible. So it's not like this intuition is just some random assertion.
But doesn't quantum physics posit virtual particles coming into existence without causes? This is a misunderstanding. As Craig writes,
... virtual particles do not literally come into existence spontaneously out of nothing. Rather the energy locked up in a vacuum fluctuates spontaneously in such a way as to convert into evanescent particles that return almost immediately to the vacuum. ... The microstructure of the quantum vacuum is a sea of continually forming and dissolving particles which borrow energy from the vacuum for their brief existence. A quantum vacuum is thus far from nothing, and vacuum fluctuations do not constitute an exception to the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Another suggestion might be that Hume denied causality. But ignoring the fact that Hume was not inerrant, this is another misunderstanding. Hume argued that just because we've observed a particular cause producing a particular effect in the past, we cannot know that the cause will produce the same effect. In other words, he argued that we can't infer an effect from a cause. Those who deny causality applies to the creation of the universe are claiming that we can't infer a cause from an effect -- that just because we observe that an effect has taken place, we can't claim that it was caused. This is radically different from what Hume was claiming, and Hume explicitly repudiates such an idea as absurd.
A final claim might be to suggest that applying causality to the Big Bang is just as problematic for the traditional theistic doctrine of creation. The doctrine, after all, is called creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) and the intuition is that ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing, nothing comes). But again, this is a misunderstanding. Creation ex nihilo is the claim that the universe didn't have a material cause -- that it wasn't constructed out of some pre-existent "stuff". This is certainly a radical claim and we should recognize it as such. But it doesn't deny that the universe has an efficient cause -- some entity or agent that brings about the effect -- since the claim is that God is the efficient cause of the universe. Those who deny that causality would apply to the beginning of the universe, however, are claiming that the universe had neither a material cause nor an efficient cause. So I simply put it to you, which of these two explanations is more plausible: that the universe's beginning has an efficient cause but no material cause, or that it has neither?
Now it's all well and good to say that applying causality to the beginning of the universe creates some philosophical issues, but the alternative is that it just popped into existence without any cause whatsoever. That people who portray themselves as skeptics would be willing to accept this shows that their skepticism is absurdly selective. If this is the the only way to avoid believing in God then there's just no contest.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Mind and Physicalism
I think Jaegwon Kim is the clearest contemporary expositor of philosophy of mind, not to mention one of its most important contributors. If you're interested in this subject at all, I highly recommend his books. For one thing, he really exposes the difficulties in accounting for the properties of the mind in physicalistic terms.
For example, in Philosophy of Mind and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough he discusses the problem of qualia. These are basically the first person experience of things, the "what it is like" to have a particular experience or be a particular entity (a bat, say). So when you experience pain, the qualia is not the firing of C-fibers, it's not the nerve endings, it's not your response to move away from whatever is causing it. The qualia is the pain, the "this hurts" experience. The difficulty in explaining qualia as physical properties is notorious, so much so that some philosophers feel it necessary to deny their existence (I guess the thinking is, if your philosophy conflicts with reality, the problem must be in the latter). The problem of qualia really opens the floodgates to the problems of explaining consciousness in general in terms of physical phenomena and processes.
Another example is where Kim discusses the difficulties in reconciling the causal closure of the physical with mental causation. Mental causation is simply the idea that the mind can cause a physical event (for example, that I can decide to pick up a pencil). But if the physical realm is causally closed, we are led to the problem of causal exclusion. In Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation, he writes,
Yet another example comes from a passage in Philosophy of Mind where Kim gives some detail about Donald Davidson's anomalous monism, as can be found in his collection, Essays on Actions and Events (which is on my to-read list). The point is that rational processes must follow different rules than (mere) physical processes, and so the former cannot be reduced to the latter.
I've mentioned three issues: the problem of qualia, the problem of mental causation, and the dichotomy between rational processes and physical processes. The difficulty in each case is reconciling some property of the mind with physicalism. One might be tempted to say, with Kim, that we can have Physicalism, or Something Near Enough; the fact that we have a few threads that are left hanging doesn't put the physicalist project in jeopardy. But the "hanging threads" metaphor implies that the threads are on the periphery. These three examples, however, are at the center of the cloth, touching, in some way, every other thread. If one of these threads were removed, the whole thing would unravel.
Next up is Kim's Supervenience and Mind. Wish me luck.
For example, in Philosophy of Mind and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough he discusses the problem of qualia. These are basically the first person experience of things, the "what it is like" to have a particular experience or be a particular entity (a bat, say). So when you experience pain, the qualia is not the firing of C-fibers, it's not the nerve endings, it's not your response to move away from whatever is causing it. The qualia is the pain, the "this hurts" experience. The difficulty in explaining qualia as physical properties is notorious, so much so that some philosophers feel it necessary to deny their existence (I guess the thinking is, if your philosophy conflicts with reality, the problem must be in the latter). The problem of qualia really opens the floodgates to the problems of explaining consciousness in general in terms of physical phenomena and processes.
Another example is where Kim discusses the difficulties in reconciling the causal closure of the physical with mental causation. Mental causation is simply the idea that the mind can cause a physical event (for example, that I can decide to pick up a pencil). But if the physical realm is causally closed, we are led to the problem of causal exclusion. In Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation, he writes,
To acknowledge mental event m (occurring at t) as a cause of physical event p but deny that p has a physical cause at t would be a clear violation of the causal closure of the physical domain, a relapse into Cartesian interactionist dualism which mixes physical and nonphysical events in a single causal chain. But to acknowledge that p has also a physical cause, p*, at t is to invite the question: Given that p has a physical cause p*, what causal work is left for m to contribute? The physical cause therefore threatens to exclude, and preempt, the mental cause. This is the problem of causal exclusion. The antireductive physicalist who wants to remain a mental realist, therefore, must give an account of how the mental cause and the physical cause of one and the same event are related to each other. ... Thus the problem of causal exclusion is to answer this question: Given that every physical event that has a cause has a physical cause, how is a mental cause also possible?
Yet another example comes from a passage in Philosophy of Mind where Kim gives some detail about Donald Davidson's anomalous monism, as can be found in his collection, Essays on Actions and Events (which is on my to-read list). The point is that rational processes must follow different rules than (mere) physical processes, and so the former cannot be reduced to the latter.
A crucial premise of Davidson's argument is the thesis that the ascription of intentional states, like beliefs and desires, is regulated by certain principles of rationality, principles to ensure that the total set of such states ascribed to a subject will be as rational and coherent as possible. This is why, for example, we refrain from attributing to a person flatly and obviously contradictory beliefs -- even when the sentences uttered have the surface logical form of a contradiction. When someone replies, "Well, I do and don't" when asked, "Do you like Ross Perot?" we do not take her to be expressing a literally contradictory belief, the belief that she both likes and does not like Perot; rather, we take her to be saying something like "I like some aspects of Perot (say, his economic agenda), but I don't like certain other aspects (say, his international policy)." If she were to insist: "No, I don't mean that; I really both do and don't like Perot, period," we wouldn't know what to make of her utterance; perhaps her "and" doesn't mean what the English "and" means. We cast about for some consistent interpretation of her meaning because an interpreter of a person's speech and mental states is under the mandate that an acceptable interpretation must make her come out with a consistent and reasonably coherent set of beliefs -- as coherent and rational as evidence permits. When we fail to come up with a consistent interpretation, we are likely to blame our unsuccessful interpretive efforts rather than accuse our subject of harboring explicitly inconsistent beliefs. We also attribute to a subject beliefs that are obvious logical consequences of beliefs already attributed to him. For example, if we have ascribed to a person the belief that Boston is less than 50 miles from Providence, we would, and should, ascribe to him the belief that Boston is less than 60 miles from Providence, the belief that Boston is less than 70 miles from Providence, and countless others. We do not need independent evidence for these further belief attributions; if we are not prepared to attribute any one of these further beliefs, we should be prepared to withdraw the original belief attribution as well. Our concept of belief does not allow us to say that someone believes that Boston is within 50 miles of Providence but doesn't believe that it is within 70 miles of Providence -- unless we are able to give an intelligible explanation of how this could happen in the particular case involved. This principle, which requires that the set of beliefs be "closed" under obvious logical entailment, goes beyond the simple requirement of consistency in a person's belief system; it requires the belief system to be coherent as a whole -- it must in some sense hang together, without unexplained gaps. In any case, Davidson's thesis is that the requirement of rationality and coherence is of the essence of the mental -- that is, it is constitutive of the mental in the sense that it is exactly what makes the mental mental.
But it is clear that the physical domain is subject to no such requirement; as Davidson says, the principle of rationality and coherence has "no echo" in physical theory. But suppose that we have laws connecting beliefs with brain states; in particular, suppose we have laws that specify a neural substrate for each of our beliefs -- a series of laws of the form "N occurs to a person at t if and only if B occurs to that person at t," where N is a neural state and B is a belief with a particular content (e.g., the belief that there are birches in your yard). If such laws were available, we could attribute beliefs to a subject, one by one, independently of the constraints of the rationality principle. For in order to determine whether she has a certain belief B, all we need to do would be to ascertain whether B's neural substrate N is present in her; there would be no need to check whether this belief makes sense in the context of her other beliefs or even what other beliefs she has. In short, we could read her beliefs off her brain. Thus, neurophysiology would preempt the rationality principle, and the practice of belief attribution would no longer need to be regulated by the rationality principle. By being connected by law with neural state N, belief B becomes hostage to the constraints of physical theory. On Davidson's view, as we saw, the rationality principle is constitutive of mentality, and beliefs that have escaped its jurisdiction can no longer be considered mental states. If, therefore, belief is to retain its identity and integrity as a mental phenomenon, its attribution must be regulated by the rationality principle and hence cannot be connected by law to a physical substrate.
I've mentioned three issues: the problem of qualia, the problem of mental causation, and the dichotomy between rational processes and physical processes. The difficulty in each case is reconciling some property of the mind with physicalism. One might be tempted to say, with Kim, that we can have Physicalism, or Something Near Enough; the fact that we have a few threads that are left hanging doesn't put the physicalist project in jeopardy. But the "hanging threads" metaphor implies that the threads are on the periphery. These three examples, however, are at the center of the cloth, touching, in some way, every other thread. If one of these threads were removed, the whole thing would unravel.
Next up is Kim's Supervenience and Mind. Wish me luck.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Book Review: The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments
I just finished re-reading this book, having read it for one of my Master's theses. (Full bibliographical details: Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments: The Simplicity, Unity, and Identity of Thought and Soul from the Cambridge Platonists to Kant: A Study in the History of an Argument. Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Idees Minor, vol 13. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.) It's on the development and use of a particular philosophical argument throughout history, but primarily in the early Modern era. The Simplicity Argument is the claim that, "The essential nature of the soul consists in its power of thinking; thought, being immaterial, is unextended, i.e., simple (having no parts); and what is simple is (a) indestructible; (b) a unity; and (c) an identity." In the first chapter, Mijuskovic traces the argument back to Plato in the Phaedo, where Socrates argues that "in order for the soul to grasp the essence of immaterial forms, in knowledge, it must itself share in the attribute of immateriality." Aristotle also argues for the soul's immateriality, but interestingly, Mijuskovic does not employ the most obvious text to demonstrate this, namely, De Anima, but uses the Metaphysics instead. He doesn't appeal much to Medieval philosophy because he doesn't think the argument developed much in this time, but I would have liked to see how this argument related to the position of divine illumination, that human knowledge requires a direct link to God in order to be valid.The meat of the book, however, is the middle three chapters where he demonstrates how the Simplicity Argument was used to argue for the immortality of the soul, the unity of consciousness, and the identity of the (moral) self with thought. Mijuskovic really shows an in-depth knowledge of early Modern philosophy, appealing to most of the great philosophers of this era and even popular-level writers -- the latter to demonstrate how deeply the argument had permeated society at the time. It's interesting how some thinkers employed the argument for one of its uses but not for the others, like Descartes. He also points out how Locke argued (following Hobbes) that matter may be able to think, and so thought is not necessarily immaterial. But it should be pointed out that Locke argued that thought could not be explained simply as matter in motion: God had to "superadd" thought onto matter in order for the "matter can think" thesis to be possible (on this, see this essay and this essay by Margaret Wilson).
The most interesting of these chapters, for me, was on the unity of consciousness. Mijuskovic summarizes the Simplicity Argument's use here as follows:
The argument from the simplicity of thought and its postulation as the "transcendental" condition for the unity of consciousness most often occurs in opposition to the Epicurean-Hobbesian principle that senseless matter can think; and the argument always refers to the peculiar nature of consciousness and, especially, of selfconsciousness. Thus, for instance, the rationalist tradition involved in this epistemological aspect of the simplicity theory constantly stresses the idea that either all consciousness is actually selfconsciousness; or that there is something special, "rational," about selfconsciousness which essentially distinguishes it from mere sensation, perception, or consciousness. And that even if perception might conceivably be explained on Epicurean grounds, selfconsciousness could never be so understood. Furthermore, unless different "thoughts" or concepts inhered in something essentially unified and simple, they would fall apart and crumble into distinct pieces and a disunity of consciousness would thereby result. But the fact that we cannot divide our idea of, say, blue into pieces as we can partition a blue object demonstrates that there is something different in principle between ideas and objects; and if there were not, stones could think and reason as readily as minds. Thus unless consciousness were unified by something intrinsically simple, and therefore necessarily a unity (for what is simple must be a unity), sensation, perception, cognition, awareness, memory, reason, etc., would all be impossible.
He also goes over Hume's skepticism regarding the unity of consciousness and the soul's identity in some detail, concluding with an interesting point reminiscent of the Argument from Reason: "It may be noted, however, that Hume's ultimate scepticism concerning the self is, paradoxically enough, based on the reflexive character of thought, on selfconsciousness."
The final chapter goes over the argument's role in the development of Idealism. Mijuskovic argues that Kant's claim that space is merely an appearance is not based -- or at least is not solely based -- on his antinomies but also on the Simplicity Argument (indeed, it was Kant who referred to this argument as Rationalism's "Achilles").
In what ultimately may be traced back to "Platonic," "Aristotelian," "Neoplatonic," or "Cartesian" sources, the principle that both thoughts and minds are unextended seems to lead philosophically to a conclusion which states that whatever "appears in" or "belongs to" the mind also must be thereby necessarily unextended. For in whatever fashion we contrast or distinguish thoughts and minds (and term the former the attributes or accidents and the latter the substances, or if we identify the two) the important consideration revolves around the recognition of the essentially unextended nature of thoughts and minds. And if both thoughts and minds are incorporeal, and the immaterial is identified with the unextended ... then it follows that everything which is cognitively apprehended by the mind must likewise by essentially unextended. And indeed, even the common man -- who may be tempted to say figuratively that a thought is deep in meaning or that his cares weigh him down -- would find it literally meaningless to speak of an idea two feet deep or a pound in weight.
He concludes by pointing to some possible influences of this argument on 20th century philosophy, such as Husserlian phenomenology, and its relevance for combating certain reductivist philosophies, such as Behaviorism and Materialism. Overall it's an interesting book and a valuable contribution to the history of ideas.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Superman's Secret Identity
I was just re-reading my ridiculously long post on Nietzsche and realized something. Nietzsche makes a sharp distinction between the rational man and the intuitive man. The rational man lives his life by forcing everything into categories, allowing him to learn from mistakes so as not to make them again. This is unacceptable to Nietzsche for several reasons: first, classifying things like this would mean ignoring all the things about an experience that make it that particular experience and treating it as if it were the same as other experiences which are, by definition, different experiences. It is to ignore the uniqueness of each experience. Second, classifying things like this is motivated by fear: the fear of not being in control (by not being able to understand things), which amounts to a fear of life itself. It is the attempt to limit the effect life has on us. But you can't do this without also excluding the great joys that life offers as well. Thus, the rational man lives by fear, and lets this fear determine how he lives. He is afraid of life, running away from it. Third, classifying things like this can only be done if one accepts a Platonic/Christian worldview, which posits a world beyond the physical universe, a world of which the universe we experience is just a shadow or pale reflection. Nietzsche absolutely rejects such a worldview. Indeed, his philosophy is the working-out of the consequences of God's non-existence.
In contrast, the intuitive man -- the Übermensch (overman or superman) -- is the one who accepts life on its own terms, as it comes to him, not trying to understand it but just experiencing it, living it. He does not live negatively out of fear, but positively. This allows him to experience all the great joys that life has to offer. It also means that he will experience all the great pains and even horrors that life has to offer, and will never learn to avoid them -- in order to avoid them, he would have to learn from previous experiences not to do certain types of things, but that would mean classifying certain types of experience. Thus, the Übermensch rejects this, refuses to run away from life by living in fear, and allows himself to live life to its fullest.
But if that's the definition of the Übermensch -- someone who will not rationally think about things, will not try to understand things by comparing them with similar things in order to learn from them -- then a rather radical conclusion follows.
The Übermensch is ... Homer Simpson.
This can easily be verified by simply watching the Simpsons to determine for oneself that Homer exemplifies precisely these qualities.
So if you want to be a full-blooded Nietzschean, if you really want to reject the Platonic/Christian worldview, just be aware of what you're aspiring to. Homer Simpson: the ultimate realization of Nietzsche's philosophy.
In contrast, the intuitive man -- the Übermensch (overman or superman) -- is the one who accepts life on its own terms, as it comes to him, not trying to understand it but just experiencing it, living it. He does not live negatively out of fear, but positively. This allows him to experience all the great joys that life has to offer. It also means that he will experience all the great pains and even horrors that life has to offer, and will never learn to avoid them -- in order to avoid them, he would have to learn from previous experiences not to do certain types of things, but that would mean classifying certain types of experience. Thus, the Übermensch rejects this, refuses to run away from life by living in fear, and allows himself to live life to its fullest.
But if that's the definition of the Übermensch -- someone who will not rationally think about things, will not try to understand things by comparing them with similar things in order to learn from them -- then a rather radical conclusion follows.
The Übermensch is ... Homer Simpson.
This can easily be verified by simply watching the Simpsons to determine for oneself that Homer exemplifies precisely these qualities.
So if you want to be a full-blooded Nietzschean, if you really want to reject the Platonic/Christian worldview, just be aware of what you're aspiring to. Homer Simpson: the ultimate realization of Nietzsche's philosophy.
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