If materialism is true, do brains exist?

 If materialism is true, do brains exist? The particles of what we call the brain exist, but the brain, as an entity over and above the parts that make it up, does it exist?

Hume said "I answer, that the uniting of these parts into a whole, like the uniting of several distinct counties into one kingdom, or several distinct members into one body, is performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no influence on the nature of things.

The mind is the brain? The brain is a product of the mind, if Hume is right.

A summary of Lewis-Anscombe (at least in part)

 

            Lewis had originally argued that if naturalism/materialism is true, then all thoughts are produced by irrational causes, that is, the motions of atoms in the brain. Since atoms in the brain move the way they do because of the laws of physical and their original positions, if naturalism is true, then our beliefs would end up being no more likely to be true than false.

            We ordinarily distinguish between people who, to use Lewis's example, form the belief that the neighbor's black dog is dangerous by inferring it from evidence (they have seen it muzzled, messengers avoid the house), and people who form the belief that the dog is dangerous because they were bit by a black dog in childhood and have been terrified of black dogs since. One of these people is being rational, the other isn't. But, he argued, the real causes for everyone's beliefs, if naturalism is true, have to be blind physical causes, and therefore the distinction between people who form their beliefs rationally and those who don't breaks down. If naturalism is true no one ever believes anything for a reason, and if we are forced to assume that some people believe some things for a reason (which is certainly what scientists imply when they claim we should believe something because scientific evidence supports it), then we have to reject naturalism.

I think a lot of materialists would respond to this either by appealing to computers or appealing to evolution (though Lewis anticipated the argument from evolution). Anscombe does neither. She starts by distinguishing irrational causes from merely nonrational causes--she says that irrational causes are, basically, causal mechanisms that typically produce errors, while non-rational ones need not be shown to show that proclivity. However, to get an anti-naturalist result through this kind of argument is to confuse reasons-explanations with causal explanations. If someone gives an argument to the effect that the dog is dangerous based on evidence you can't rebut that argument by saying that the real reason the person believes the dog dangerous is because he was bitten in childhood. That's the fallacy that Lewis himself criticized as Bulverism, and is known in the logic books as the ad hominem circumstantial fallacy.

            However, Anscombe then considers the response that what Lewis is claiming is that if naturalism is true, then, as a matter of actual fact, logic and evidence are never relevant to the actual production of any belief, because a full explanation of every belief can be produced in terms of physical, not rational causes. However, full explanations for every event are simply explanations that answer completely what we want to know about the event. And if I ask for why you believe something I am asking for grounds, not causes, what I want is what I get if I ask you why you believe something. Casual laws are based on observed regularities, but reasons are elicited from people when you ask why they believe something or did something. Wittgensteinians typically held that reasons weren't causes at all, and that Wittgensteinian position seems to be built into Anscombe's response to Lewis.  Naturalism, Anscombe says, just says we can have causal explanations for all our thoughts in terms of causal laws, but that doesn't mean, as Lewis implies, that there are no reasons. One way of looking at this would be to say that talk of reasons and talk of causes occur in different language games, so there is no real conflict.

I maintain that although Anscombe has provided an attack on an anti-naturalist argument, but a modern naturalist might not, or should not, be inclined to stand up and cheer. Naturalism, I maintain, is an attempt to provide a comprehensive ontology, it is committed to the idea that other non-scientific explanations have to be either absorbed into the universe of naturalistic explanation or eliminated. While anti-causalist theories of reasons were popular in the 50s and early 60s, most naturalists today, I think, would follow Donald Davidson in saying that reasons are causes. I once gave a paper on the Anscombe exchange at a faculty colloquium at a secular philosophy department. The consensus  was I had a good critique of Anscombe, but that Anscombe's criticisms of Lewis's argument weren't interesting.

 

        First of all, explanations, causal or not, have an ontology, and naturalism isn't just a claim about causal explanations, it makes ontological restrictions. If I explain the presence of presents under the Christmas tree in terms of the munificence of Santa Claus, I imply that Santa is real. If I explain my belief in terms of reasons, then I imply that reasons exist, whether that explanations is a causal explanation or not.

            They do maintain that a total causal story, from big bang to big crunch, can be given for every event, and that causal story is part of a closed and nonteleological system. Lewis asked,

But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?

And Anscombe said “We haven’t got an answer” to the question Lewis asked here.

 

 

Is empathy a sin?

 Here. 

Would contemporary materialists like Anscombe's response to Lewis?

Maybe not.

 What happens to Lewis's argument before and after Anscombe is interesting. He had a number of versions of it, and some of them actually had strengths that the Miracles presentations do not have. In addition, the argument had plenty of advocates before Lewis, so Lewis thought of himself as defending a "philosophical chestnut." At one time this type of argument actually prevented militant atheist Haldane from embracing materialism, at least until he changed his mind (for reasons that were very different from Anscombe's). I looked at J. J. C. Smart's Philosophy and Scientific Realism, published, I think in 1961. Lewis's argument is mentioned, Anscombe is not mentioned, but Flew's exchange in the Rationalist Annual is (my dissertation advisor thought Flew's original essay was out and out plagiarism of Anscombe), and Haldane's argument and retraction are mentioned. When materialist theories of mind become prominent in the 1960s, arguments of the Lewis variety seem to be almost completely marginalized.

It is an interesting question as to whether a contemporary materialist would be entirely happy with Anscombe's paper. She claims, of course, that it gets Lewis-type arguments off their backs, but it seems to imply a lot of language-game theory that materialists would not like much at all. (Are science and religion just different language games, with no conflict between them? And saying that reasons-explanations are not causal explanations doesn't answer how such explanations can be given within the constraints of naturalism, or whether they make naturalistically unacceptable ontological commitments. Don't materialists today say that reasons ARE causes, just, in the last analysis, physical causes?

My interview with Reasonable Faith

 Here. 

Climates of opinion

 

In The Problem of Pain Lewis indicated that he took a very low view of “climates of opinion.” They do tend to shift. When I was in college, psychology departments were dominated by behaviorists. When I was getting my doctorate in philosophy, some 10 or so years later, the behaviorist era was being dismissed as “the bad old days.” In biology sociobiology is still considered debatable. In philosophy movements like Absolute Idealism, or Deconstruction, or Logical Positivism, or Naturalized Epistemology, or Eliminative Materialism, or Critical Race Theory, or even New Atheism, have their ups and downs.

Good and bad reasons for restricting immigration

On what grounds do we justly restrict people from entering out country? Well, we don't want criminals, weapons, drugs, or infectious diseases coming in, so we should screen those out. If we are refusing to let people into our country because we don't want too many s****s, n*****s, and k***s in America, those are bad reasons. You'd think that would be obvious, but one of the main advisors on immigration in the last administration was an out and out white nationalism. See here.

Between the obvious good reasons, and obvious bad reasons, what reasons are valid?

Everything old is new again

 Heard any new arguments against vaccination? Probably not. All the arguments against the COVID vaccine were used by opponents of the smallpox vaccine. 

Here. 

By the way, have you run into anyone lately who as contracted smallpox? How 'bout polio. Those  used to be dreaded diseases. I wonder what  happened to them. 

There's a new article out on Jesus mythicism, so it must be Christmas

A redated post. No it's not Christmas. 

Here. 

This article compares them to anti-vaccinationists.

Legal immigration

 The REAL issue between me and people like Trump administration supporters is this. I think that most of who or what that tries to come over the border is benign, consisting mostly of people looking for a better life in much the way our ancestors did. Due to our prohibitive requirements for LEGAL immigration, people end up trying to come into the country illegally, and sometimes succeed and for the most part become law-abiding citizens. I have been a sub in public schools and have taught a lot of their kids. They weren't on their best behavior for me, but they are not bad kids, and they are certainly not murderers and rapists. Their undocumented parents work for a living. They should have had the opportunity to come here legally. We would need a lot less border security if we turned the ports of entry on the Southern border into little Ellis Islands instead of trying to build the Great Wall of China down there. Think about asylum seekers. They're trying to come here LEGALLY. Yeah, we would become a majority-minority country sooner, but so what? Yeah, they might need public assistance sometimes, because we let people work in America, in many cases, without paying them a living wage. This is NOT an open borders position because there still criminals, and drugs, and weapons that we need to keep out, and we would still need border security to keep those people and things out. But I think we can go a long way toward fixing illegal immigration by creating more fairness in the area of legal immigration. "Give me your tired, your poor," shouldn't just be pretty words on a statue. It's still good public policy.

John Beversluis, 1934-2021

 Admirers of C. S. Lewis were upset and very critical when John wrote "C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion." But while I strongly disagreed with his views on Lewis, he, like Socrates, asked the kinds of critical questions that people in Lewis studies were all too unwilling to raise before his book was written. His revised book on Lewis was a great improvement over the first edition.  Even those who think more highly of Lewis's apologetics than he did should recognize that the study of Lewis's work is richer, not poorer for his efforts. And his writings also point the way for those who don't accept Lewis's arguments to find a great deal to appreciate, as he did. 

 The book was first published in 1985 by Eerdmans, a Christian publisher who had published a couple of Lewis anthologies, and later revised in 2007 for Prometheus Books, an secularist publishing house. 

On useful discussions

 Discussion with intellectual opponents is something I have valued over time. Sometimes people are convinced that you are right, but not usually. Sometimes you can convince them that not everyone on your side of the issue is ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked. That's a victory not to be sneezed at. But sometimes you really end up talking to a brick wall. John Loftus, for example, started out as someone that you could have a dialogue with, and then, under the influence of New Atheism, he ceased to be one. Sometimes coming up with a realization on both sides of the issue of exactly what your disagreement consists in is a major accomplishment, even if no one is persuaded. 

I am pretty much a free speech guy when it comes to these discussions, and ban people only with the greatest reluctance. Others are, to be sure, more selective. 

I remember one time reading a paper that someone had written about miracles for an undergrad philosophy journal. I wrote a detailed critique of it, and then forgot all about it. Years later I heard from the person, telling me how appreciative they were of my response and that they were no a Christian. 

I do think that if you cut everyone on the other side off from your discussion you lose the opportunity to be told when you are misrepresenting the other side. That's the downside. You are also out of the business of trying to show people on the other side that you are right and they are not. For me, the downsides of doing this outweigh any upsides I can think of. But that's just me. 

On the belief that the other side can't be reasoned with

 One philosopher and blogger that I know has indicated that he now will accept friend requests on Facebook only from those who share his conservative political views. Liberals, he says, are anti-logic and inaccessible to reason. 

On the other hand, if conservatism is true, it isn't the conservatives who stand in need  of persuading. 

I suppose you could take that attitude on either side of the political spectrum, or the religious spectrum for that matter. On religious questions, sometimes Christians bring out Rom. 1: 18-20 to explain nonbelief. 

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

This may be true, but bringing this up to an atheist leaves you with the job of proving that it is so. Just asserting it does nothing and accomplishes less. 

At the same time I have seen atheists, under the influence of the new atheists, go from fostering real discussion between themselves and believers to treating them as if they cannot be reasoned with. John Loftus is who I have in mind  here. 

C. S. Lewis founded the Oxford Socratic Club on the idea that Christians should open a dialogue with those who don't believe and have real discussions. In politics, I don't think American democracy can survive the conviction that the other side can't be reasoned with. Nor can it survive the widespread belief that the other side is so evil that anything done to support one's own side is OK, since the alternative is, well, the eeevil other side. 

A Jewish Scientist Defends His Faith--and uses the argument from reason

 Benjamin Fain was a Russian Jewish scientist, a dissident who worked for the welfare of Soviet Jewry. He wrote three books: Creation Ex Nihilo, (2007), Law and Providence (2011), and the Poverty of Secularism (2013). He has an interesting discussion in Creation Ex Nihilo of J. B. S. Haldane, whom crossed swords with Lewis, but whom Lewis quotes in the third chapter of Miracles. 

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason for supposing that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. (Possible Worlds, 1927). 

But he changed his mind in 1954 in "I Repent an Error." 

Fain explains: The objection to his original explanation can be phrased as follows: computers act in accordance with the laws of physics, and despite this they can act in accordance with the laws of logic. The human mind can be represented by the brain, which we can compare to the computer. It is simultaneously a physical and a logical being. Out of this comes the completely materialistic explanation of the mind, or the self.

But Fain criticizes this rebuttal claiming rightly that adherence to logic is not internal to the computer itself. In the last analysis, if materialism is true, then physical laws, not logical laws, determine behavior. 

JImmy Carter

 Carter is often trotted out as the counterexample to the claim that personal virtue is important in selecting a President. We have seen what NOT considering personal virtue has gotten us. On the world stage he did more for world peace than any other President, and he made a serious effort to apply the teachings of Christianity to public life in a way that has not been seen before or since, including those Presidents so favored by the majority of white evangelicals.

Carter is interviewed here. 

C. S. Lewis's exchanges with philosophers

 

Looking at the Socratic Club record, it looks as if Lewis had memorable exchanges with four notable philosophers: C. E. M. Joad, H. H. Price, A. J. Ayer, and Elizabeth Anscombe. The responses to Joad and Price are found in God in the Dock. The exchange with Ayer was in response to Ayer’s harsh critique of a paper by Michael Foster in which Lewis took up Foster’s defense. In addition to these exchanges at the Oxford Socratic Club, there was also the response by Lewis to a critique of his paper on the humanitarian theory of punishment by the Australian philosopher J. J. C. Smart. It need not be concluded that Lewis won all the other exchanges, although Joad subsequently converted to Christianity and credited Lewis with playing an important role in his conversion. But none of the other exchanges with philosophers could reasonably thought of the kind of resounding defeat the Anscombe exchange is portrayed as being. Had Lewis been as incompetent as his is sometimes portrayed as being, it would not have taken an Anscombe to wipe the floor with him; Joad, Price, and Ayer would have done so as well.

God, how did you do it?

 We normally ask "how" when we wonder if someone or something has the power to do something. "How did you make an A on that exam? You usually make Cs in chemistry." "How did you make that long three-point shot?" "I've been practicing for hours a day every day." Naturally if God does something, he often uses processes, and it is helpful for us who want to harness the world to learn how to do the same thing. We like mechanistic, naturalistic, "hows" because they give us blind processes that we have the power to predict and control. If we ask how did the universe come into existence where there was no universe beforehand, we are asking where the power came from to produce the universe. If "how" means "where does the power come from?" God has the power within Himself, being omnipotent.

The Ambiguities of Emergentism

Emergentism is an ambiguous idea. Does it mean that a radically different kind of causation emerges, If the laws of physics are complete (except for maybe a chance factor), and no other kind of causation is considered physicalistically acceptable, then thought that occurs in the world occurs because there is good evidence that is is true. Only blind causes, the work of the blind watchmaker, are considered scientifically acceptable. But if that's really true, then we can never, for example, believe that evolution is true because the evidence for it is good. We can only believe in evolution, or not believe in it, depending on whether the atoms in our brain happen (blindly) to put us in the positions they need to be in to believe in evolution, or whether they put us in the positions they need to be in so that we will not believe in evolution. Only physical laws an facts, not logical relationships, can be relevant to where the atoms go, and our beliefs are functions of where the atoms in our brain are at any one time. This is a description of chance-and-necessity physicalism, from Taner Edis: 

Physical explanations combine rules and randomness, both of which are mindless…Hence quantum mechanics has an important role in formulating chance-and-necessity physicalism, according to which everything is physical, a combination of rule-bound and random processes, regardless of whether the most fundamental physical theory has yet been formulated…Religions usually take a top-down view, starting with an irreducible mind to shape the material world from above. Physicalism, whatever form it takes, supports a bottom-up understanding of the world, where life and mind are the results of complex interactions of fundamentally mindless components.

Taner Edis, “Arguments Involving Cosmology and Quantum Physics,” in Joseph M. Koterski and Graham Oppy ed., Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 2019), pp. 599-600.

The Groundhog Day Massacre

 The Anscombe-Lewis exchange took place on Feb. 2, 1948, Groundhog Day. I can see a movie about the two participants repeating the exchange over and over with different results. But Andie McDowell as Anscombe is a stretch. And Bill Murray as C. S. Lewis??? 

Lucas's Godelian argument against materialism

 Here. 

I had the chance to meet Lucas at a Wheaton Conference in, I think, 1989. 

Apparently, Godel reached the same conclusion in his Gibbs lecture of 1951, but it never came out until 1995.