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Thursday, 19 May 2005

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John Gallagher

Are the only two choices Naturalism or Theism? Or is this a false dichotomy? Some religions such as Buddhism posit a spiritual existence without a deity.

Bill Vallicella

Read my fifth sentence.

Steve Esser

I think one can make a more serious effort to expand naturalism to include the fact that systems throughout nature have a true intrinsic first-person intentional aspect. A successful effort would not say other parts of nature have anything approaching full-bore human consciousness, which is the panpsychist idea that nearly everyone else views as absurd. It would instead show that what we know as human first person experience is built up from a fundamental aspect of the world (which may also be an ingredient necessary for real causation). This isn't easy to work out, of course, but IMO holds more promise than tradtional materialism and dualism.

Bill Vallicella

Steve, The devil is in the details, and I have yet to see how one builds a gradualist bridge from natural processes to mind.

Malcolm Pollack

"Unfortunately, there is just too much that naturalism cannot explain. For one thing, it cannot explain why anything contingent exists in the first place." In other words: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Even if I leave aside the popular view among physicists that Nothing might simply be unstable, I must ask how theism can explain why anything contingent exists in the first place, without merely declaring that the Deity is, well, just not contingent. One intellectually and theologically consistent response to the question, of course, is to say "Quite right! God is not contingent. Haven't you been listening?" But if one doubts the existence of God, then such an answer is obviously not very satisfying, and even believers get no answer as to why God is not contingent. And if theists are allowed such latitude, why can't we naturalist-leaning types follow suit and just announce that Nature is not contingent? Einstein, who seemed to want it both ways, suspected that as far as God's design for the Universe was concerned, He simply had no choice in the matter. Mightn't it be premature to sign off on what naturalism can and cannot explain? I certainly agree that there is much that naturalism has not explained. Although the "gradualist bridge from natural processes to mind" is still incomplete, I think it is also fair to say that "I have yet to see" it proven that it will always be. At the very least we need be in no rush to make up Gods of the Gaps to fill the void. We can take our time, as Wittgenstein suggested. Regards, Malcolm Pollack

Malcolm Pollack

By the way, I cheerfully defer to the work you have done on the detailed philosophical problem of existence. I am only pointing out that if we are looking for origin-of-everything explanations, I have yet to see how the theistic "God did it" isn't mere question-begging. And most of what naturalism addresses is far removed from the question of the origin and contingency of the world itself (although I would not agree that such questions have in any way been demonstrated to be beyond naturalism's potential grasp); more to the point, given that the world does indeed seem to exist, I think naturalism is in a position to take a pretty good whack at the problems of the emergence from simple initial conditions, and mechanics of, consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, and so forth. Certainly I'd say that Dennett, Pinker, Dawkins, et al. are pursuing promising lines of inquiry as far as the "gradualist bridge" is concerned -- promising enough, at least, that there is no reason to give up on them just yet. Regards, Malcolm Pollack

Malcolm Pollack

Nothing is unstable? What are the good physicists doing, reifying Nothing, making of it a something? Yes, I had a feeling that you would not let that one go by. I was talking about what to a physicist amounts to "nothing": namely the vacuum, or "empty" spacetime, which is as close to genuine nothingness as we appear to be able to get in the actualized world. I'm a bit queasy about the very idea of some sort of idealized Nothingness (in the sense of your "who did you see? Nobody" example) preceding the World, not only because I have difficulty with imagining how Nothing can somehow change its state to become Something (how can Nothing have a state, or the potential to change, in the first place?), but also because in the prevailing cosmological view it is spacetime, not just extended space, that wraps in on itself at the Big Bang - so there is not a meaningful sense in which anything could have temporally preceded the World, any more than there is any place that is north of the North Pole. Why is God necessary rather than contingent? That's easy. The very concept of God is the concept of a being than which no greater can be conceived, which entails in short steps that God is a necessary being. This is not to say that God exists. It is to say that if God exists, then God necessarily exists, and if God does not exist, then God is impossible. That was Anselm's insight. I have indeed heard Anselm's argument, which as I recall was picked up by Descartes as well. But as you point out there are two choices - God either exists, and necessarily so, or he does not, and is impossible. Is that selection itself contingent? It seems to me, also, that the idea of God being necessary in order to enable the creation of contingent "child" objects get a good deal of unnecessary intuitional window dressing from the use of the term "being", which is freighted with all sorts of anthropomorphic connotations: life, intelligence, consciousness, etc. It has always struck me that this argument of necessity implies that there is necessarily some BE-ing, some existing Non-Nothingness, that is required for contingent items to become possible, but what that might look like is anybody's guess - what is "God" to one person is a set of laws and initial conditions to another. Similarly, with all the time in the world one cannot build a gradualist bridge from the physical to the mental. Well, at one point the composition of stars was thought to be something that would be forever unknown - quite obviously so, because we wouldn't be able to build a bridge to them, either. ...mental states have a "first person ontology" (in Searle's phrase) which makes it impossible to understand them in natural-scientific terms. Impossible? Granted, mental states differ from everything else in that the very thing that is most interesting about them is the part that is subjective. But let's not toss in the towel just yet! If we assume as a working hypothesis that the subjective experience of consciousness is entirely a result of the activity of the physical brain, and we reach the point of being able to watch the brain and say "now she is thinking this, and feeling that, and if we suppress the action of this glial bundle she will lose consciousness, but if we link these neurons over here she will see her present situation in a wistful but amusingly ironic light, and will first laugh, then sigh", etc., then in what meaningful sense is there anything left to account for? In other words, if it became possible to map subjective experience reliably onto third-person phenomenology, then what is really left over? Not that we are close to this, of course, but nobody has shown that it is impossible in principle. On a personal note I do hope you don't mind me occupying so much of your bandwidth these past few days, by the way. As an amateur and layman I very much appreciate the opportunity to have such an interesting discussion of these persistent questions.

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