Why compatibilism and materialism are incompatible

 As I see it, materialism has three components. One is the causal close of the physical. The second is the mechanism of the physical, that there are no mental states in the supervenience base. Causation occurs without purpose at the basic level. The thrd is the supervenience of all other states on the physical. The second is the tripper for materialist who wants to be a compatibilist. An action caused by a desire is not mechanistically caused. The brain state that is the desire might cause the brain state that begins the action, but not because of the content of the desire. Think of this. Suppose an opera singer were to tell someone 'Look at that glass window. I will tell it to shatter, and it will listen to me and shatter. She sings 'Shatter now" and it shatters. But the shattering has nothing to do with the content of the words she sings. Hence compatibilist free will, which requires causation by desire, is impossible on materialism.

Materialism and determinism

If we are simply material beings, aren't our actions determined by the laws of  physics? Particles in the brain are governed by the laws of physics, and if this is so, doesn't that mean that the brain is determined by the laws of physics? 

Is the mental on the ground floor?

BI asked: How does supernaturalism solve the problem of consciousness?

To respond to this, I am transferring in some material I posted on Dangerous Idea 2, which eventually became part of my essay in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Here's the general idea: when we call something material, or even natural, we are presuming that, at the basic level of analysis, mental characteristics are not present. If, on the other hand, the basic building blocks of the universe are not restricted to the non-mental, then the mental is already present at the basic level of analysis. With naturalistic views, as I am understanding them, we start with a supervenience base that is mental-free, and then we have to account for the existence of mind. With "supernaturalistic" views (and I don't really like the term here, but OK, though Lewis had no problem with it), you start with the mental on the ground floor, so it is far less difficult to see how the mental could arise. It is not to be completely explained in terms of the non-mental. 

There are four features of the mental which someone who denies the ultimacy of mind maintain must not be found on the rock bottom level of the universe. The first mark of the mental is purpose. If there is purpose in the world, it betokens the existence of a mind that has that purpose. So for anyone who denies the ultimacy of the mind, an explanation in terms of purposes requires a further non-purposive explanation to account for the purpose explanation. The second mark of the mental is intentionality or about-ness. Genuinely non-mental states are not about anything at all. The third mark of the mental is normativity. If there is normativity, there has to be a mind for which something is normative. A normative explanation must be explained further in terms of the non-normative. Finally, the fourth mark of the mental is subjectivity. If there is a perspective from which something is viewed, that means, once again, that a mind is present. A genuinely non-mental account of a state of affairs will leave out of account anything that indicates what it is like to be in that state.

If the mind is not ultimate, then any explanation that is given in terms of any of these four marks must be given a further explanation in which these marks are washed out of the equation.

IV. Minimal Materialism

There seem to be three minimal characteristics of a world-view which affirms that the mind is not ultimate. First, the “basic level” must be mechanistic, and by that I mean that it is free of purpose, free of intentionality, free of normativity, and free of subjectivity. It is not implied here that a naturalistic world must be deterministic. However, whatever is not deterministic in such a world is brute chance and nothing more.

Second, “basic level” must be causally closed. Nothing that exists independently from the physical world can cause anything to occur in the physical world. Second, the level of basic physics must be causally closed. That is, if a physical event has a cause at time t, then it has a physical cause at time t. Even that cause is not a determining cause; there cannot be something non-physical that plays a role in producing a physical event. If you knew everything about the physical level (the laws and the facts) before an event occurred, you could add nothing to your ability to predict where the particles will be in the future by knowing anything about anything outside of basic physics.

Third, whatever is not physical, at least if it is in space and time, must supervene on the physical. Given the physical, everything else is a necessary consequence. In short, what the world is at bottom is a mindless system of events at the level of fundamental particles, and everything else that exists must exist in virtue of what is going on at that basic level. This understanding of a broadly materialist world-view is not a tendentiously defined form of reductionism; it is what most people who would regard themselves as being in the broadly materialist camp would agree with, a sort of “minimal materialism.” Not only that, but I maintain that any world-view that could reasonably be called “naturalistic” is going to have these features, and the difficulties that I will be advancing against a “broadly materialist” world-view thus defined will be a difficulty that will exist for any kind of naturalism that I can think of.

Sins of the physicalist literature

Back before I opened Dangerous Idea, I gave this response to physicalist critics of the AFR, on Bill Vallicella's blog.

 A lot of the physicalist literature is guilty of one or all of the following sins, which in my estimation are:
1) A dogmatic pre-commitment to materialism.
2) Changing the explanandum in order to make the physicalistic explanation possible.
3) Presuming the very ideas one is trying to explain naturalistically.
4) Issuing gigantic promissory notes to future science, when we have no idea how future science will go.

Ross's Immaterial Aspects of Thought

A redated post.

See also this by Russell Howell on why we wouldn't be mathematicians in a naturalistic universe.

Craig on Materialism

Here.

Are indexicals a threat to materialism

Bill Vallicella thinks they are, and I am inclined to agree.

Ed Feser on the Materialist Shell Game

A redated post.

Along the same lines, here's a Lewis quote, from The Empty Universe:

The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple. We can observe a single one-way progression. At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life, and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance gradually empties this rich and genial universe, first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account:classified as out sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed “souls” or ‘selves” or “minds’ to human organisms, as when we attributed Dryads to the trees. Animism, apparently, begins at home. We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications. Man is indeed akin to the gods, that is, he is no less phantasmal than they. Just as the Dryad is a “ghost,” an abbreviated symbol for certain verifiable facts about his behaviour: a symbol mistaken for a thing. And just as we have been broken of our bad habit of personifying trees, so we must now be broken of our habit of personifying men; a reform already effected in the political field. There never was a Subjective account into which we could transfer the items which the Subject had lost. There is no “consciousness” to contain, as images or private experiences, all the lost gods, colours, and concepts. Consciousness is “not the sort of noun that can be used that way.”

William Dembski's critique of materialism

He compares materialist philosophy of mind to alchemy. A redated post.

The Waning of Materialism

Edited by Koons and Bealer.

If intentionality is irreducible, then materialism is false

"If intentionality is irreducible, then materialism is false. For such an irreducible characteristic has no place in physics as we now perceive physics. The materialist is committed to giving some reductive account of intentionality of the mental. Such an account is not all that easy to give.”




David Armstrong, "Naturalism, Materialism, and First Philosophy," in

Contemporary Materialism: A Reader, ed . Paul K. Moser and J. D. Trout (New York:

Routledge, 1995), p. 57.

HT: Pat Parks

Supervenience, selfhood, and physicalism

The supervenience principle (a central principle of minimal materialism) says there is no difference between possible worlds without a physical difference. But it seems to me that the world could be physically identical to this one, but the person in it who is the psychological center of it, the "me", as it were, could be living in the White House instead of in Glendale, Arizona. Or indeed, I could have lived 1000 years ago and be dead by now. There is a contingent truth that I am Victor Reppert and not some other person. For every person there seems to be a contingent fact that they happen to be in that inner world and not some other inner world. And if that is the case, then it looks to be as if there are truths about the world that are not explained by the set of physical truths.




This does seem explicable if what is at the base of reality is more like a mind than anything else. But if what is at the base of reality is more like a rock than anything else, how do these contingent facts emerge? It looks logically impossible to me.

An argument from the Privacy of Mental States

1. Mental states are immediate, first-hand, and private.


2. Physical states are public, and available to multiple observers.

3. Therefore, mental states and physical states cannot be identical.

Could I have been Obama? An argument against materialism

1. If everything is material, then all true statements about reality should follow necessarily from the set of true statements describing the physical world.


2. However, there are some statements about the world, such as “I am Dr. Reppert,” which do not follow necessarily from the set of physical world. There is a world physically identical to this one in which I am Barack Obama, not Dr. Reppert.

Therefore, not everything is material.

Materialist Strategies

Defenders of materialism usually use three types of arguments to criticize the family of arguments I presented earlier. They use Error replies if they think the item that the antimaterialist is setting up for explanation can be denied. They use Reconciliation objections if they suppose that the item in question can be fitted within a materialist ontology. Moreover, they also use Inadequacy objection to argue that whatever difficulties there may be in explaining the matter in materialist terms, it does not get us any better if we accept some mentalistic worldview such as theism. We can see this typology at work in responses to the argument from objective moral values. Materialist critics of the moral argument can argue that there is really no objective morality, they can say objective morality is compatible with materialism, or they can use arguments such as the Euthyphro dilemma to argue that whatever we cannot explain about morality in materialist terms cannot better be explained by appealing to nonmaterial entities such as God.

However, it is important to notice something about materialist philosophies. They not only believe that the world is material, they also perforce believe that the truth about that material world can be discovered, and is being discovered, by people in the sciences, and that, furthermore, there are philosophical arguments that ought to persuade people to eschew mentalistic worldviews in favor of materialistic ones. They do think that we can better discover the nature of the world by observation and experimentation than by reading tea leaves. Arguments from reason are arguments that appeal to necessary conditions of rational thought and inquiry. Thus, they have what on the face of things is an advantage over other arguments, in that they have a built-in defense against error theory responses. If there is no truth, they cannot say that materialism is true. If there are no beliefs, then they cannot say we ought to believe that materialism is true. If there is no mental causation, then they cannot say that our beliefs ought to be based on supporting evidence. If there are no logical laws, the we cannot say that the argument from evil is a good argument. If our rational faculties as a whole are unreliable, then we cannot argue that the religious beliefs are formed by irrational belief-producing mechanisms. Hence, arguments from reason have what I call a transcendental impact — that is, appeal to things that, if denied, undermine the most fundamental convictions of philosophical materialists.

"The Argument from Reason" in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, eds. (Wiley-Blackwell: 2009), p. 350.

New Anti-Materialist Book

HT: Ed Babinski.

Standard Materialism, Non-Standard Materialism, and Libertarian Free Will

I think there are standard and non-standard forms of materialism. I consider a form of materialism to be standard if it holds to three theses.




1) Reality at the basic level is mechanistic. There is no teleology, no intentionality, no subjectivity, and no normativity at the basic level.



2) The basic level (typically called physics) is causally closed.



3) Higher level states (such as the biological, the mental, or the sociological) supervene upon the physical. Given the physical, the higher level states must be exactly as they are.



It seems to me that if you accept this picture, nothing like libertarian free will can be coherently maintained. Now if one is trying to call oneself a materialist and reject part of this picture, in other words, if one adopts a non-standard form of materialism, in virtue of the fact that, say, everything in the mind has a spatial location, then you might be able to find room for libertarian free will.



Which always makes we wonder about Christians, like van Inwagen, who call themselves materialists. Do they really conform to the standard definition of materialism?

Barthism, Bulverism, and Besonianism

I remember a paper written by Hugo Meynell a long time ago which was called Three Sophistical Devices. Barthism is the view of just merely asseting something without providing any reason for believing it, just plumping for your position. Bulverism is, well, Lewis's name for what in logic is called the ad hominem circumstantial. Besonianism the idea that instead of having to face criticisms of your own position, you find out what the other guy's overall position is and attack that. So, for example, if I offer some criticisms of Marxian dialectical materialism, and you find out that I am a Catholic, then somehow criticisms of Catholicism are good reasons for rejecting my criticisms of dialectical materialism, even though the criticisms could have been made by a Muslim or a phenomenologist.

I'm starting to see some Besonianism in the discussion of Feser's views on materialism

Feser on the Case for Materialism

A redated post.

The most formidable argument against dualism has always been what I would call the argument from the onward march of science. Science, we are told, always pushed in a materialist direction, and it invariably resolves problems for materialist understandings of things that may have seemed insurmountable to a previous generation. So prior to the 19^th century, many otherwise naturalistic thinkers were reluctant to accept full-blown atheism, because they of what they took to be the undeniable evidence of design in nature, yet Darwin came along and showed us all how to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Arguments of any kind against materialism can do no better than point out some explanatory gap in the present materialist understanding of the world, but just as past gaps have been close by subsequent science, so difficulties that naturalistic science faces in coming to terms with things like consciousness, intentionality, and reason, are simply bumps in the road to be got over in good materialist fashion by the future course of science.

Edward Feser thinks this argument is not as strong is it might appear to be at first. He writes:

First, the advance of science, far from settling the mind-body problem in favor of materialism seems to have made it more acute. Modern science has, as noted in chapter 2, revealed that physical objects are composed of intrinsically colorless, tasteless, and odorless particles. Colors, tastes and odors thus, in some sense, exist only in the mind of the observer. But then it is mysterious how they are related to the brain, which, like other material objects, is composed on nothing more than colorless, tasteless, and odorless particles. Science also tells us that the appearance of purpose in nature is an illusion: strictly speaking, fins, for example, don’t have the purpose of propelling fish through the water, for they have in fact no purpose at all, being the products of the same meaningless and impersonal causal processes that are supposed to have brought about all complex phenomena, including organic phenomena. Rather, fins merely operate as if they had such a purpose, because the creatures that first developed them, as a result of random genetic mutation, just happened thereby to have a competitive advantage over those that did not. The result mimicked the products of purposeful design in reality, it is said, there was not design at all. But if purposes were “mind-dependent”—not truly present in the physical world but only projected on to it by us—then this makes that act of projection, and the intentionality of which it is an instance (as are human purposes, for that matter,) at least difficult to explain in terms of processes occurring in the brain, which seem intrinsically as brutely meaningless as and purposeless as are all other purely physical processes. In short, science has “explained” the sensible qualities and meaning that seem to common sense to exist in reality only by sweeping them under the rug of the mind, that is, it hasn’t really explained them at all, but merely put off any explanation by relocating them out of the physical realm and into the mental realm. There they remain, however, forming a considerable bump under the rug, one that seemingly cannot be removed by further scientific sweeping.

The Poofy Materialists

Barry Arrington claims that materialist cannot consistently use then "poof" objection to intelligent design, and then appeal to a mysterious emergence when, say, dealing with consciousness.