This piece, by exapologist, is one that I have been meaning to answer for some time, as one of the primary defenders of an anti-naturalistic apologetic argument. I should point out, first, that C. S. Lewis never took his argument as an immediate inference from an argument against what he calls naturalism (which might be identified as some conservative form of naturalism) to the conclusion that God exists. Lewis bought the argument in the course of discussion with the anthroposophist Owen Barfield, and it was the springboard for his conversion, not to theism, but to absolute idealism. So, in my most recent treatments of the Argument from Reason, I start by asking a fundamental question: are the basic causes of the universe mentalistic or non-mentalistic. There are surely other possible mentalistic world-views that are mentalistic but not traditionally theistic, but we are going to have to see what thsoe are.
Next, I identify four features of the mental: intentionality, purpose, subjectivity and normativity. Admission of any of these into the basic building blocks of the universe (as opposed to system by-products at the level of, say, brains), has to be excluded on any view that can be reasonably called naturalistic.
In fact there are three doctrines of what I would call a minimal naturalism: mechanism at the basic level, which means exclusion of the four features of the mental, the causal closure of the basic level, and the supervenience of at least anything in causal connection upon what is on the basic level.
What this does with abstract objects is interesting. It doesn't rule them out by definition. However, since the physical has to be causally closed, they can't have anything to do with anything that goes on in the world or, in particular, what goes on in the mind or brain. Otherwise, either the basic level isn't mechanistic, or the basic level isn't causally closed. If this minimal naturalism is true, then it seems like, even if there are abstract objects, I couldn't know that they exist.
Now, why should naturalistic accept this kind of picture? Well, think about it. The world began, if it did, with a big bang. Nothing mental was going on. Matter moved around and obeyed the laws of matter. Then "the mental" emerged. Now, a traditional naturalist will just say that the mental is a system by-product of the physical. I maintain that, if that were so, there would be some logical entailment from the non-mental to the mental. But, as I have argued at some length, there isn't. All the non-mental information, in however much detail it is given, has to leave the mental, at best, indeterminate. And yet there have to be determinate truths about what we mean when we say things.
If we now put the "mental" into the basic building-blocks, what happens? If Mind really is behind everything, you can avoid the notion of the personal God of theism, but you have knocked out some pretty significant options, and theism, among other doctrines, at the very least, gets to pick up some of the probabilistic slack.
ex-apologist: On a Common Apologetic Strategy
21 comments:
The fact that the definition of "naturalism" has gotten so stretched that full-blown dualism, or even panpsychism, can conceivably fall under its domain is breathtaking.
But then again, I suppose I'm a naturalist. An orthodox catholic thomistic naturalist.
You should join the club, Victor. The naturalist defending the AfR and, I suppose, naturalistic theism. And if people call your commitment to naturalism suspect, you can simply add "Well, I'm just a very liberal naturalist, you see."
Hi Victor,
I need some clarification.
. . . So, in my most recent treatments of the Argument from Reason, I start by asking a fundamental question: are the basic causes of the universe mentalistic or non-mentalistic . . .
. . . The world began, if it did, with a big bang. Nothing mental was going on. Matter moved around and obeyed the laws of matter. Then "the mental" emerged . . .
. . . If we now put the "mental" into the basic building-blocks, what happens? If Mind really is behind everything, you can avoid the notion of the personal God of theism, but you have knocked out some pretty significant options, and theism, among other doctrines, at the very least, gets to pick up some of the probabilistic slack.
Ok, this sound to me more like the Argument from Consciousness (AC) than the AfR. Consciousness exists; where did it come from/what explains its existence; either it was here from the beginning (mentalistic universe) or it was not (non-mentalistic universe); the latter would be getting something from nothing; so consciousness was probably here from the beginning and theism is a good option for that.
This not the kind of AC that Swinburne or Adams has defended, but it´s pretty close to what J.P. Moreland has argued. Moreland uses quite similar argument that the one above to justify a premise in his AC according to which "there is no scientific explanation for the existence of mental entities".
So I have understood that AC argues non-naturalism from the existence of consciousness/mental states, and AfR uses specifically the possibility of rational inference as a premise. So why isn´t what you are saying here more AC than AfR? Could you clarify the difference between the two arguments?
If the necessary and sufficient conditions of "mental events" is explicable only in terms of "science", or in "physicalist" ontology, then things like "rational inference", "soundness", "validity", etc., are rendered moot.
In terms of naturalism, the "knowing process" is caused, and therefore determined, by the operations of the material universe. If that's the case, whence all the talk and hoopla about the "irrational" and "superstitious thinking" of theists?"
Why can't the naturalist accept the "fact" that theists and theism are simply the by-products of their "natural environment", just as atheists allegedly are?
It looks as though naturalists really aren't naturalists after all. If they really are naturalists, then they ought to accept the fact that "religion" is an "inviolable" feature of nature and her laws....and, I might add, it has featured very prominently since mankind's inception.
What's more, "scientific" explanations aren't really explanations. They are, in the end, also by-products of nature's "inviolable" law.
This sort of cognitive nihilism is precisely why I reject naturalism.
Naturalism is no less "superstitious" than theism. In fact, it's more so. First, you have a universe that just appears out of nowhere. Then it performs an occult and magical ability to generate material, from nothing....and go on to expand into the universe we see today. But not just a universe of mere matter....it's also a universe of order and complexity. Nature has also provisioned a planet "teeming with life". And not just "life", but with beings who possess some sort of "mental" life. And, unlike nature herself, these "mental" beings can do something that nature can't do; namely, contemplate nature in all her splendor.
I have said it before, but I'll say it again:
This is the grandest form of alchemy and magic that I can think of.
Atheists don't get off the hook by stipulating that supernaturalism is superstitious and weird. Naturalism, itself, is superstitious and weird. What makes it (naturalism) weirder is that it, just like "supernaturalism", still pulls a rabbit out of the magician's hat. But, the real difference between "naturalism" and "supernaturalism" is that naturalists believe that you can pull the rabbit out of the hat without the benefit of the magician.
Two distinctives of the argument from reason that make it different from other arguments from consciousness. First, the AFR begins with a contemplation of propositional states, such as S believes that P. The difficulty for naturalism arises, in the first instance, because the "physical" leaves the mental indeterminate. Whereas arguments from consciousness tend to focus on qualia, such as "s tastes pineapple upside down cake." And the AFR goes on from there to look at the causal relations that we have to be in if we can truly say "S believes that P because he inferred it from reason R." Second, one difference between the AFR and the AFC is that while someone could just say "Consciousness, as you are understanding it, doesn't really exist. It's just a 'user illusion.' I don't think this is a good move for the naturalist, but facing the AFR, the AFR defender can respond by saying that the claim to believe something for a reason is essential to the operation of the natural sciences. If reasons never bring it about that we believe anything, then no one believes in evolution because of the evidence from the fossil record, and no one ever believes in atheism because of the argument from evil. So, this is somewhere naturalists don't want to go.
I attacked these kind of conceivability arguments today at philosophy of brains. Post is here. Focus is on consciousness and chalmers, but applies to AfR too (I personally found AfC much harder to deal with than AfR).
Here's the money quote:
Vitalists couldn't conceive of how physico-chemical facts related to certain biological facts, and used this to infer that the physico-chemical picture of life was incomplete. The vitalist Driesch stated the strategy quite nicely when he claimed (in 'Science and Philosophy of the Organism' (1908), p105):
[S]omething new and elemental must always be introduced whenever what is known of other elemental facts is proved to be unable to explain the facts in a new field of investigation.
Driesch's argument for vitalism was an application of that general inference rule. For instance, he argues (ibid, 142):
No kind of causality based upon the constellations of single physical and chemical acts can account for organic individual development; this development is not to be explained by any hypothesis about configuration of physical and chemical agents. Therefore there must be something else which is to be regarded as the sufficient reason of individual form-production...
This is a good example of a conceivability argument hitting the rocks.
Chalmers would likely argue that the analogy fails because in Dreisch's argument the target facts were "easy" facts about development, not "hard" phenomenal facts.
This would be to miss the point that we need to exercise extreme caution when consulting our conceptual intuitions about what follows from what. That we now believe one group of facts is easy to reach from the other is clearly a contingent fact. What guarantee can Chalmers offer that he isn't falling victim to a similar failure of imagination, lured by his contingent limited understanding of facts about brains and facts about consciousness?
Before someone says, as someone always does: fine but you could make the same argument about naturalism: 'If the targets aren't well defined why think consciousness is part of nature?' That would miss my point, which was to block an argument against naturalism (that's what AfR and AfC are, after all: they don't offer anything positive, which is fairly typical of the dualists).
What guarantee can Chalmers offer that he isn't falling victim to a similar failure of imagination, lured by his contingent limited understanding of facts about brains and facts about consciousness?
So, your criticism of / argument against Chalmers (and, I assume, others) here is "you don't have perfect knowledge so you could be wrong!"? That seems so weak that it's hard to view it as an "argument" doing any "blocking". Chalmers has also cited and responded to the vitalism move in the past, though I'm sure you've read that.
Of course, there's another problem present in your specific quote:
[S]omething new and elemental must always be introduced whenever what is known of other elemental facts is proved to be unable to explain the facts in a new field of investigation.
Driesch was writing that in 1908. Now, here's my question: If Driesch's quote above was regarding physics rather than biology, would you still be using him as an example of "how intuitions can go wrong"? Further, if certain biological facts require our new understanding of physics, wouldn't Driesch's own quote still stand?
Also, I'm not sure if you read Victor's link, since the blogger was claiming Chalmers & company as naturalists. Sure, they're "light" naturalists, but naturalists all the same. Chalmers himself would call himself a naturalist, as would the others on that list I believe. To my knowledge, no philosopher challenges their being naturalists either.
That "naturalism" (and even, as per Strawson, materialism/physicalism) has become so elastic itself has the makings of an argument against "naturalism".
Crude: The fact that his argument is an instance of a known failed inference pattern makes me question that inference pattern.
His entire argument is predicated upon being unable to conceive of how consciousness might arise in a biological system. That is a boring psychological fact about Chalmers, and I showed an example of such type of conceivability arguments run amok.
I know Chalmers discusses vitalism, which is why I addressed what he says about it in the post. It's also why I used the energy-mass analogy too (200 years ago people couldn't conceive of a logical route from mass to energy).
Crude: I'm not very interested in terminological quibbles. I was discussing Victor's claims in the post and comments as instances of a general conceivability argument.
For some reason this type of argument from gaps in knowledge is compelling to many Christians: Dembski formalizes the error in his explanatory filter.
For the record, when I call myself a naturalist, I mean basically what Victor says, but I know others use it more liberally like Chalmers, Gregg Rosenberg, etc.. I avoid terminology quibbles as much as possible just be consistent is what's important I don't care what you call it, within reason.
The fact that his argument is an instance of a known failed inference pattern makes me question that inference pattern.
But it's not a "known failed inference pattern". Not given your own Driesch quote. Or are you going to say that "something new and elemental" has never been added to science, even to our basic understanding of physics? Even in rather "recent" times?
I also pointed out that Chalmers is not an anti-naturalist - he's, by his own and others' views, a naturalist.
And just for the hell of it, I'll throw in a quote from Chomsky on the mind-body problem, since I doubt anyone would accuse him of being some kind of anti-naturalist:
The mind-body problem can be posed sensibly only insofar as we have a definite conception of body. If we have no such definite and fixed conception, we cannot ask whether some phenomena fall beyond its range.
[...]
There is no longer any definite conception of body. Rather, the material world is whatever we discover it to be, with whatever properties it must be assumed to have for the purposes of explanatory theory. Any intelligible theory that offers genuine explanations and that can be assimilated to the core notions of physics becomes part of the theory of the material world, part of our account of body. If we have such a theory in some domain, we seek to assimilate it to the core notions of physics, perhaps modifying these notions as we carry out this enterprise.
Does arguing that something "new and elemental" should be added to science when current understandings don't seem fit to the task suffice to make someone a vitalist? Because if so, you've got quite a lot more "vitalists" on your hands than Driesch, and that "vitalism" would seem to have quite a number of endorsements and success to its name.
I'm not very interested in terminological quibbles.
Few are, until it matters to their point. You go on to say..
For some reason this type of argument from gaps in knowledge is compelling to many Christians
Really? Because from where I sit, it seems to be compelling to many naturalists.
Crude: That someone can't conceive of how X could happen is not sufficient to show that X doesn't happen. Indeed, there are many cases in the history of science where such conceivability arguments have been refuted.
What do you disagree with, specifically?
Crude I realized you misunderstood my argument. It would probably be more clear at the site where the full post resides as I just pasted an excerpt in here.
I actually agree with Driesch's claim that "[S]omething new and elemental must always be introduced whenever what is known of other elemental facts is proved to be unable to explain the facts in a new field of investigation."
Driesch seems reasonable with that claim. It's his "proof" based on personal conceivability that was crappy. Such arguments are arguments from ignorance. He couldn't conceive of how physico-chemical facts could explain facts of development, and decided that this was an extremely important fact about the world, rather than a rather boring psychological fact about what he could conceive.
Chalmers uses the exact same argument, just substitute consciousness for 'development.'
I recommend that dualists skew their work away from trying to refute physicalism (the arguments never work in the end), and develop a positive theory based on the evidence.
Crude: That someone can't conceive of how X could happen is not sufficient to show that X doesn't happen. Indeed, there are many cases in the history of science where such conceivability arguments have been refuted.
The example you yourself gave - I didn't choose the vitalism quote, you did - was of Dreisch saying "Something new and elemental must always be introduced whenever what is known of other elemental facts is proved to be unable to explain the facts in a new field of investigation."
You called this "a known failed pattern of inference". I'm disputing that, pointing out that "new and elemental" concepts and ideas have been introduced into science in major ways, even recently, due to what amounts to Dreisch's pattern of inference. Therefore, your judgment of it is flawed. Does it mean that every time someone says "We need something new and elemental here!" they're correct? No, but it doesn't have to be to speak against you here.
What's more, "That someone can't conceive of how X could happen is not sufficient to show that X doesn't happen" does not speak to Chalmers' or other's views: They think X certainly does happen, but they question how it can given assumptions Y. And surprise! Some of those naturalists do the exact same thing, saying that given what we "know" (rather, their philosophical commitments), certain things (aboutness, qualia, etc) can't 'really be' in the world.
As I said, the best and most reasonable way to take your post was "You don't have perfect knowledge so you could be wrong!" Great! Apt advice. For naturalists too.
Crude I realized you misunderstood my argument.
Not at all. You just seem to realize it or its presentation has some serious flaws.
He couldn't conceive of how physico-chemical facts could explain facts of development, and decided that this was an extremely important fact about the world, rather than a rather boring psychological fact about what he could conceive.
As I said, you could apply Driesch's exact quote about "elementals" to physics of the time, and suddenly he'd have been dead right. Even Bohmians, not the most popular bunch, introduce something 'new and elemental' with the pilot wave.
What's more, the conception of the biological changed pretty drastically since Driesch's time with the concept of information and language being introduced by DNA, etc. Driesch seems to have been right about his criticisms given what was known, but wrong about what possible additions could have met the challenge.
It's just a bad example, and serves Chalmers and company far more than it does you. The "people have thought we needed to add elemental concepts to science in the past and have been wrong" argument snaps once it's admitted "except for all those times they were right".
I recommend that dualists skew their work away from trying to refute physicalism (the arguments never work in the end)
I refer to VanInwagen's quote that philosophy hasn't settled a question since its inception. You may as well swap 'dualists' and 'physicalism' in your sentence - it'd be as true.
The main difference is that quite a lot of the "naturalists" and "physicalists" of today were the panpsychists, neutral monists, strong emergentists, and even teleologists of yesterday. Looks like natural selection has bestowed some chameleon traits upon that species.
Crude: again, you misunderstood as shown when you said:
The example you yourself gave - I didn't choose the vitalism quote, you did - was of Dreisch saying "Something new and elemental must always be introduced whenever what is known of other elemental facts is proved to be unable to explain the facts in a new field of investigation."
You called this "a known failed pattern of inference".
No I did not, that's precisely your misunderstanding that I just pointed out.
The problem isn't with that claim (p 105 of his book). It's with his subsequent claim (p 146). That second claim is a conceivabiltity argument, and that's the style of inference that I was attacking. Not the basic set up.
If you saw the original post that would have been more clear, as I spent half of it making that point in Chalmers' favor, against Polgar.
I discussed two approaches to attacking Chalmers.
The first, which I eschew, is the one you think I was attacking. That's the first half of my post titled supervenience and reduction. I explicitly call it 'the weaker front' because I don't buy it.
The second half, I attack conceivability arguments as a means to establish failure of supervenience/reduction. That's what is the failed pattern of inference in Driesch/Chalmers, and what I called the 'more promising' front for attacking Chalmers.
Anyway, you saw that one quote from Driesch, thought I was attacking it, but I wasn't. Of course science expands. A few hundred years ago, even 'charge' wasn't in our inventory of basic properties.
My point, as I said above many times, was that conceivability arguments aren't very strong. As I said:
"That someone can't conceive of how X could happen is not sufficient to show that X doesn't happen. Indeed, there are many cases in the history of science where such conceivability arguments have been refuted."
Just to be clear, there are two claims:
1. Failure of supervenience/reduction implies physicalism is false.
2. To establish said failure of supervenience, we can use a conceivability argument.
Polgar attacked 1, but I think 1 is fine (first half of my post). Victor is fine with 1, I'm fine with 1, most people (I thought) are fine with 1.
My problem is with number 2, and used vitalism as an example. I also used energy-mass as an example, I could have used a ton of other examples (e.g., I can't imagine how an eye could evolve type arguments too are a dime a dozen).
I cited both Driesch's advocacy of 1 (which I'm fine with) and of 2.
Anyway, hopefully that's more clear I admit by just picking the quote selection from my original post, it may have muddied the waters a bit.
I don't spend my time refuting dualism. I do sometimes take the time to respond to their attempts to refute physicalism, but mostly I read the experimental literature on consciousness and develop theories based on that.
Anyway, sorry if it wasn't clear at first: the original post it is much more clear and explicit.
The second half, I attack conceivability arguments as a means to establish failure of supervenience/reduction. That's what is the failed pattern of inference in Driesch/Chalmers, and what I called the 'more promising' front for attacking Chalmers.
Driesch wasn't wrong to think that what was known about biology and physics at the time was incomplete and that new ideas - elemental ones, fundamental ones - had to be brought in to make sense of development. The problem for Driesch was with what he specifically embraced as being required to bridge the gap. Since Driesch's time, information and coded language and such has become part of the biological picture. Driesch was right about elements need, right about the gap, but wrong about his particular remedy.
But therein lies a key difference with Chalmers: He's not advocating any specific remedy. In fact, he pretty famously covers a wide range of possible answers (everything from panpsychism to neutral monism to a quantum solution, etc) without putting much stock in one answer over the other.
And to reiterate Chomsky's point: It's hard to even properly articulate the mind-body problem nowadays, in part because the "physical" has been upended and revised in a process that has yet to end. I've brought this point up to Chalmers in an email (asking his reply given that some people tag neutral monism or panpsychism as physicalism/materialism.) His response was basically - surprise - he's not that concerned about terminological quibbles.
To repeat something else: It's not "dualists versus the naturalists" anymore. Now there are naturalists who are dualists, or who reject physicalism, or whose physicalism just happens to be what used to be called panpsychism or neutral monism, etc.
2. To establish said failure of supervenience, we can use a conceivability argument.
And back to the VanInwagen point, and even my earlier point about perfect knowledge. Establish to the point of utter certainty? No, but few things if any can get established like that anyway. (I used to think certain basic rules of reasoning - the law of causality, the law of non-contradiction - were beyond denial, until I saw too many people explicitly deny them.) Can it lend credence, even strongly, to a view? Sure. I don't see how a chastisement which melts down to "You can never be sure!" dents that much.
Crude said:
Driesch wasn't wrong to think that what was known about biology and physics at the time was incomplete and that new ideas - elemental ones, fundamental ones - had to be brought in to make sense of development.
You are making it sound like we need modern physics (e.g., QM) to explain the developmental facts he was examining.
That's not the case: vanilla molecular processes are sufficient to explain pattern formation and such. The key was the discovery of DNA.
If you read Driesch's book, he attacks the idea that there are molecules of inheritance (he would spit it out as "so called inheritance"), and dismiss the notion that such molecules could explain the patterns of animal development. He thought no molecular account would be able to explain them.
He was just wrong, and not because he was right that a new type of physics was needed. It wasn't: he just couldn't imagine how inheritance and development worked using molecular machines.
With the case of consciousness and brain processes, to take these terms that are just starting to be more fully characterized, and in response to one's lack of ability to see how they will connect, to confidently declare physicalism refuted? Mistake. It doesn't follow. There are too many cautionary tales of this strategy failing.
I don't claim to have a knock-down argument against the dualists. Just like the vitalism case, this will be settled by the science, not arguments from armchair pilots.
That said, what might a neuronal theory of consciousness look like?
We know the brain constructs a "portrait" or representation/simulation of what is happening in the world. Most of the neuronal representations are not conscious. This is known. A television contains a representation of the world, and is presumably not conscious, so representations are likely only a necessary not sufficient condition for being conscious.
What is it about conscious representational states: how are they special in terrestrial organisms? Perhaps a subset of our representational states are incorporated, with the help of attention, into an integrated representation of the state of the world at the present moment and in our general vicinity (where the latter is defined as close enough to activate sensory receptors).
These representations of what is happening 'here and now' have "first person" content that we'd expect of our conscious representational system. It is special in that it lets the brain distinguish representations in memory (e.g., the memory of a tiger in the past) from representations of what is most urgent, happening here and now (obviously of evolutionary importance). This representational system also has a special role in long-term planning (I experience a tootheache and this helps me plan my trip to the dentist), and formation of episodic memories.
Say we discover such a representational system with said properties (specious present, long-term plannig, episodic memory), and we then hypothesize that this is the representational system in the brain that is conscious. That is, the hypothesis would be that the discovered system has experience, and this would be tested extensively against the data, including phenomenology, personal first-person reports, hallucinations, phantom limbs, psychophysics, etc.. (there is no shortage of data.
The thesis is born out with all of these preditions, refined and updated with each round of experiments. Eventually we can predict precisely when and how consciousness will be eradicated or altered (and these predictions are born out), we are able to explain Libet's weird experiments on timing of consciousness wrt decisions to act, we observe reprsentational fluctuations that map 1:1 onto phenomenology: binocular rivalry and other ambiguous percepts flip back and forth with fluctuations in this representational system.
At some point, as the evidence based on the hypothesis that this representational system is a bioconscious system, I'd say we'd be on the way to a decent neuronal explanation of consciousness.
Because of such scenarios, I feel I can conceive of neuroscience explaining consciousness. An important feature is that we'd have a theory consistent with a broadly evolutionary account of the emergence of H sapiens, in which there is no evidence that a special substrate was added at any time during evolution to interact with nervous systems and influence behavior. That is, it would be good biology. This is hard to overstate.
At some point, as the neuroscience progresses, we will have things so detailed, I imagine that Chalmers' argument will look silly, as it will have made no contributions to the powerful theory developed under an alternative hypothesis. It will just be a voice getting quieter and quiter and less compelling. But just because I can imagine it doesn't make it so. That's where I differ with many of the dualists, I suppose.
but you have knocked out some pretty significant options, and theism, among other doctrines, at the very least, gets to pick up some of the probabilistic slack.
Suppose one were to knock out Islam as a version of theism. Should we then say that, by parity of reasoning, naturalism gets to pick up some of the probabilistic slack?
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