Naturalism in the news

On the subject of naturalism, Raymond Tallis opines in The Guardian, Massimo Pigliucci reports at Philosophy Now, and Daniel Dennett is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.  James Ladyman, co-author of the influential Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, gets a prominent mention in each piece.  Which gives me an excuse for some photoshopping fun (with apologies both to Ladyman and to Tim Meadows).

 
Tallis argues that “far from having replaced metaphysics, science is in a mess and needs help.”  Amen to that.  Three of Tallis’s points merit special comment.  He writes:

The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).

This is an issue about which Tallis says much more in his important book Aping Mankind.  What needs to be emphasized, though, is that the problem is a problem in principle, and that it isn’t going to be solved by further application of existing methods precisely because the problem is generated by the application of existing methods.  As I have argued in many places, most recently and ad nauseam in my series of posts on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, the problem of consciousness is a result of the move Galileo, Descartes, and Co. made of taking color, sound, heat, cold, and other sensory qualities out of the material world and relocating them in the mind’s experience of that world.  Having thus made matter essentially devoid of qualia and qualia essentially immaterial, there is no way on this picture of things you are ever going to “naturalize” qualia.  You are stuck either with a Cartesian-style dualism (or something like a David Chalmers- or Galen Strawson-style panpsychism, which is really just a riff on dualism), or with an incoherent eliminativism.  (Incoherent because the qualitative experience whose existence you will be denying in the name of science forms the evidential base of science -- a problem Democritus and Schrödinger saw but Dennett does not, pushing in the interview linked to above his usual line that consciousness is an “illusion.”)  The only true solution to the problem is to see that the post-Cartesian conception of matter does not capture the entirety of its real nature in the first place, but is merely a useful simplification.

Continuing with Tallis:

And then there is the mishandling of time. The physicist Lee Smolin's recent book, Time Reborn, links the crisis in physics with its failure to acknowledge the fundamental reality of time.  Physics is predisposed to lose time because its mathematical gaze freezes change.  Tensed time, the difference between a remembered or regretted past and an anticipated or feared future, is particularly elusive.  This worried Einstein: in a famous conversation, he mourned the fact that the present tense, "now", lay "just outside of the realm of science".

Paging Aristotle.  Here again we have a problem that is generated by existing scientific methods and therefore will not in principle be solved by those methods.  In this case the problem is, as Tallis puts it, that the “mathematical gaze” of physics “freezes change.”  But change -- which is the actualization of potential, as Aristotle argued -- cannot in principle be eliminated, any more than qualitative experience can be.  The most you can do is shuffle it around like the pea in a shell game, as I have argued in several places (and at greatest length in “Motion in Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein,” forthcoming in Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics).  And once again the true solution will only be found by seeing that the “mathematical gaze” does not and cannot in principle capture the whole of the natural order in the first place.

One last in-principle problem for naturalism noted by Tallis concerns ultimate explanation:

Recent attempts to explain how the universe came out of nothing, which rely on… the inexplicable free gift of the laws of nature waiting in the wings for the moment of creation, reveal conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication.

Here Tallis is alluding, of course, to the views of scientists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss, who suggest that the laws of physics can provide the sort of ultimate explanation that in fact only a cosmological argument (rightly understood, as these days it usually is not) can provide.  Among the problems with such claims is that on any construal of what a “law of nature” is, the laws of physics simply could not be an ultimate explanation.  If “laws” are what Newton and Descartes thought they were -- divine decrees about how otherwise inert matter will operate -- then the ultimate explanation lies in the divine decrees themselves, not in the laws.  If “laws” are something like Platonic entities in which the material world participates, then we need an explanation of how the world comes to participate in the laws, and why these laws rather than some alternative.  If “laws” are mere descriptions of regularities, then they merely re-describe what is to be explained rather than actually explaining what needs to be explained.  If “laws” are a shorthand description of the way material substances will tend to operate given their natures (the correct account of laws, in my view) then the existence of laws presupposes the existence of the material world and thus cannot explain the existence of the material world. 

Even Dennett acknowledges, in the 3:AM Magazine interview, that Krauss “could/should have been rather more circumspect and modest about what he was doing—since he was neither answering the philosophers’ ancient question flat out nor clearly replacing that question with a better question.”  Though he also adds that the philosophers’ question “now looks to me like a much less important question and maybe not even a question worth trying to answer at all.”  This, of course, is the ideological naturalist’s standard, desperate, question-begging move:  Every question worth asking can be answered by naturalism; so those questions that naturalism can’t answer must not really be questions worth asking.  Nothing to see here, move along please.

You’ll also find in the interview the usual oversimplifications and attacks on straw men vis-à-vis theism and dualism.  To give the Dennett his due, however, he there expresses his long-held view that reductionism fails to capture the “real patterns” that exist at many levels of the natural order higher than the level described by physics.  Pigliucci expresses similar views, writing:

It seems to me that, at least at first sight, ontological reductionism goes against the available empirical evidence, in that the universe appears to be characterized by layers of complexity, with new types of behavior of matter ‘emerging’ with increasing complexity… If this is so, then one needs some extra empirical reason to accept ontological reductionism. I asked Nobel physicist Weinberg why he thought ontological reductionism was true, to which he responded that he saw “no reason in principle” for it to be wrong. Wait a minute, I replied, this is either an argument from ignorance (ouch!) or, at best, a promissory note that Weinberg knows can never be cashed because of our practical limits.

The trouble, however, is this.  As I have also noted in my series of posts on Nagel, it is no good for a naturalist like Dennett or Pigliucci merely to affirm that there are levels of reality irreducible to what physics tells us about and then self-apply the label “non-reductive naturalist.”  For we need to know exactly how the resulting “naturalism” differs from an Aristotelian conception of nature, or a dualistic conception of nature, or any other of the conceptions of nature that naturalism was supposed to be providing us an alternative to.  And we need an answer that doesn’t either caricature, or beg the question against, these other views.  I say that no such answer is forthcoming.