an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 12, January - April 2015,
ISSN 1552-5112
Disenchanted
Naturalism
Naturalism is the label for the thesis that
the tools we should use in answering philosophical problems are the methods and
findings of the mature sciences—from physics across to biology and increasingly
neuroscience. It enables us to rule out answers to philosophical questions that
are incompatible with scientific findings. It enables us to rule out
epistemological pluralism—that the house of knowledge has many mansions, as
well as skepticism about the reach of science. It bids us doubt that there are
facts about reality that science cannot grasp. It gives us confidence to assert
that by now in the development of science, absence of evidence is prima facie good grounds for evidence of
absence: this goes for God, and a great deal else.
I
think naturalism is right, but I also think science forces upon us a very
disillusioned “take” on reality. It forces us to say ‘No’ in response to many
questions to which most everyone hopes the answers are ‘Yes.’ These are the
questions about purpose in nature, the meaning of life, the grounds of
morality, the significance of consciousness, the character of thought, the
freedom of the will, the limits of human self-understanding, and the trajectory
of human history. The negative answers to these questions that science provides
are ones that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify,
reinterpret, or recast to avoid science’s harsh conclusions. I dissent from the
consensus of these philosophers who have sought to reconcile science with
common sense or the manifest image or the wisdom of our culture. My excuse is
that I stand on the shoulders of giants: the many heroic naturalists who have
tried vainly, I think, to find a more upbeat version of naturalism than this
one.
1. Life’s Persistent Questions
There is a set of persistent philosophical
questions that keep ordinary people up at night. They all have simple answers,
ones we can pretty well read off from science. Because the answers are not the
ones we want, taking science’s word for them will be accused of “scientism”—the
unwarranted and exaggerated respect for science. I plead guilty to the charge,
while taking exception to the ‘unwarranted’ and ‘exaggerated’ part. Like a few
others, I take a page out of the PR of the gay and lesbian community and
(mis)appropriate the word ‘scientistic’ the way they did words like ‘gay’ and
‘queer.’ Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously
should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting
science’s description of the nature of reality. You don’t have to be a
scientist to be scientistic. In fact, most scientists aren’t. Why not?
Most scientists are reluctant to admit
science’s answers to the persistent questions are obvious. There are more than
enough reasons for their reluctance. The best reason is that the answers to the
persistent questions are not what people want to hear, and the bad news may
lead them to kill the messenger—scientific research. It’s people who pay for
science through their support of the NIH, the NSF, in the US, the Medical
Research Council in the UK, the CNRS in France, the Max Planck Institutes in
Germany, and the universities where most research happens. So, scientists have
an incentive to cover up. They have a couple of other reasons too: science is
fallible and scientists are taught never to be definitive even about their own
conclusions; the persistent questions are so broad that no scientist’s research
program addresses them directly, and few are prepared to stick their necks out
beyond their specialty when they don’t have to.
For scientists staying mum about science’s real answers to the
persistent questions is prudentially over-determined.
Even if scientists came clean however, most
people wouldn’t accept the answers science gives to the persistent questions,
because they can’t understand the answers. The reason is that the answers don’t
come in the form of stories with plots. What science has discovered about
reality can’t be packaged into whodunnit narratives about motives and actions.
The human mind is the product of a long process of selection for being able to
scope out other people’s motives. The way nature solved the problem of endowing
us with that ability is by making us conspiracy theorists—we see motives
everywhere in nature, and our curiosity is only satisfied when we learn the
“meaning” of things—whose purposes they serve. The fundamental laws of nature
are mostly timeless mathematical truths that work just as well backwards as
forward, and in which purposes have no role. That’s why most people have a hard
time wrapping their minds around physics or chemistry. It’s why science writers
are always advised to get the science across to people by telling a story, and
why it never really works. Science’s laws and theories just don’t come in
stories with surprising starts, exciting middles and satisfying dénouements. That makes them hard to
remember and hard to understand. Our demand for plotted narratives is the
greatest obstacle to getting a grip on reality. It’s also what greases the
skids down the slippery slope to religion’s “greatest story ever told.”
The long-term advance of scientific
understanding has shown why we are suckers for a good story. It has also shown
why such stories never provide real understanding about the nature of reality.
2. The physical facts fix all the facts
What is the world really like? It’s
fermions and bosons, and everything that can be made up of them, and nothing
that can’t be made up of them. All the facts about fermions and bosons
determine or “fix” all the other facts about reality and what exists in this
universe or any other if, as physics may end up showing, there are other ones.
Another way of expressing this fact-fixing by physics is to say that all the
other facts—the chemical, biological, psychological, social, economic,
political, cultural facts supervene on the physical facts and are ultimately
explained by them. And if physics can’t in principle fix a putative fact, it is
no fact after all. In effect, scientism’s metaphysics is, to more than a first
approximation, given by what physics tell us about the universe. The reason we
trust physics to be scientism’s metaphysics is its track record of
fantastically powerful explanation, prediction and technological application.
If what physics says about reality doesn’t go, that track record would be a
totally inexplicable mystery or coincidence. Neither science not scientism stands
still for coincidence. The no miracles/inference to the best explanation
arguments for scientific realism are on the right track. Their alternatives are
obviously mistaken.
Physics
is by no means finished, and it may hold out even more surprises for common
sense than it already has provided. In addition it faces several problems—the
nature of dark matter and dark energy, superstring theory v. quantum loop
gravity or even some other way of unifying the standard model of particle
physics and general relativity. Finally, there is the problem of attaching a
coherent interpretation to quantum mechanics’ basic notion of a superposition.
We need only to grasp just enough about these problems to see that no matter
how things turn out in physics, they won’t make any difference for science’s
answers to the persistent questions. All we need to answer these questions are
two things pretty well fixed in physics: first, the 2nd law of
thermodynamics—that entropy increases almost everywhere almost all the time;
second, the repudiation of future causes, current purposes, or past designs.
And these were purged from science by the Newtonian revolution in the late 17th
century.
3: How physics fakes design
Ever since
It’s not easy to put together the details
of how purely physical processes have produced adaptation. But the broad
theoretical description is clear and unsurprising. The thermodynamic noise
among the molecules present on the Earth about 3 billion years ago every so
often randomly produced molecules that combine stability with replication—the
first sliver of an adaptation, produced from zero adaptation. Eventually it
produced some molecules with enough stability and replicability to be
themselves subject to more thermodynamically random variation that piled new
adaptation on the earlier ones, and also locked the earlier ones in, since the
process driven by the 2nd law is temporally asymmetrical—entropy can’t go home
again. Repeat the process enough times and the rest is history—natural history.
That’s how physics fakes design.
Some philosophers think that this process
produces real purpose, not merely the appearance of it. They think, with the 19th
century biologist, Assa Gray (1976) , that
4. IKEA
didn’t make natural history: Good design is rare, expensive and accidental
It’s not just that 2d law processes can
power the appearance of adaptations through natural selection. In fact, if the
physical facts fix all the facts, natural selection is the only way adaptations
can emerge anywhere in the universe, or any other universe governed by the 2nd
law. That is because there are at least three criteria that physical fact
fixing imposes on any mechanism that produces adaptations. And the only way to
satisfy them is via the process
1) The process producing adaptations must
begin with zero adaptation. A process that requires prior existence of the
merest sliver of an adaptation to get itself started begs the question, since
we will need to know how that sliver of adaptation came to be.
2) That first merest sliver must appear by
random chance alone and very infrequently. Further adaptations will have to be
built from prior adaptations in the same way they were. This is because physics excludes purpose or
any hint of it.
3) The process that produces adaptations
has to harness the 2nd law. It is the sole source of temporally asymmetrical
processes in the universe and the process of building adaptations is an
asymmetrical one. For that reason the process that produces adaptations has to
be energetically expensive, indeed wasteful, since the 2nd law which mandates
the persistence of disorder and demands that increases in local order be paid
for by net increases in global disorder.
If the starting point for building
adaptations is zero adaptation, then the only way the very first, smallest,
slightest sliver of an adaptation could have appeared is by the
‘deck-shuffling” of thermodynamic processes—atoms and molecules just bumping
into each other in large enough numbers over long enough time so that a few stable
replicating molecules will emerge as just a matter of random chance, like
tossing a fair coin heads 10 times in a row. In a world of objective chance it
happens, but not often. The 2nd law makes this a world of objective chance.
Adaptational evolution is an asymmetrical
process. But, except for one law, all the laws of nature—including the quantum
mechanical ones--are temporally symmetrical: they don’t specify an
earlier/later order to events. The only one that gives sequences a temporal
order from earlier to later is the 2nd law. That brings us to the third
requirement: adaptational evolution has to be expensive, indeed wasteful,
profligate in its dissipation of order.
The
first adaptation will have to be a chance event, and all improvements on it will
have to be chance events—just as Darwinian theory says. The preservation of
local order will have to use up more global order than what is preserved: of
course nothing can do that better than sexual reproduction, the engine of
Darwinian processes. In fact, without replication and mortality, 2d law entropy
increase, on Earth, at any rate may grind to a halt. The only things in the
universe that don’t dissipate order are diamond crystals and the like, things
which reach a structural energy minimizing order and remain there almost for
ever.
Entropy also drives the global and local
changes in the environmental filters that shift the direction of adaptational
evolution—whether it’s the shift from a carbon-dioxide atmosphere to an oxygen
one, or the arrival of a dinosaur-killing asteroid. Adaptational evolution will
have to be wasteful. That can’t be avoided since the process is asymmetrical
and therefore can only be driven by the 2nd law.
This
makes the mechanism
5. Nice Nihilism: The Bad News About Morality
and The Good News
If
there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter,
the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it
is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on
which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value,
of human life, primate life, mammalian life or biological life in general.
People have also sought moral rules, codes and principles which are supposed to
distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much)
meaning or as much value (as ours). Scientism must reject all of these straws
that people have grasped. It’s not hard to show why. Science has to be
nihilistic about ethics and morality. All we really need to show this are two
premises:
1. All cultures, and almost everyone in
them, endorse most of the same core moral principles as binding on everyone.
2. The core moral principles have
significant consequences for human biological fitness—for our survival and
reproduction.
It’s obvious that in a world where all the
facts are fixed by physical facts, there can be no set of free floating
independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are
uniquely equipped to discern and act upon. So, if we hope to scientifically
ground the core morality that every one (save some psychopaths and sociopaths)
endorses, as the right morality, we face a very serious problem. The only way
all or most normal humans could have come to share a core morality is through
selection of alternative moral codes or systems, a process that resulted in just
one winning the evolutionary struggle and becoming “fixed” in the population.
If our universally shared moral core were both the one selected for and also
the right moral core, then the correlation of being right and being selected
for couldn’t be a coincidence. Scientism doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences.
Either our core morality is an adaptation because it is the right core morality
or it’s the right core morality because it’s an adaptation, or it’s not right,
but only feels right to us. Notice this
is a problem very similar to the one Plato identified for religious sermonizing
about morality in the Euthyphro:
either morality is right because it’s beloved by the gods, or vice versa.
It’s
easy to show that neither of the two alternatives a scientific justification of
morality faces can be right. Just
because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it
right. Think of the adaptational benefits of racist, xenophobic or patriarchal
norms. You can’t justify morality by showing its Darwinian pedigree. That way
lies the moral disaster of Social Spencerism (better but wrongly known as
Social Darwinism. See Spencer, 1851). The other alternative—that our moral core
was selected for because it was true, correct or right--is an equally far-fetched
idea. And in part for the same reasons.
The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true
beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent. Think of
folk physics, folk biology, and most of all folk psychology. Since natural
selection has no foresight, we have no idea whether the moral core we now
endorse will hold up, be selected for, over the long-term future of our
species, if any.
If we are going to limit ourselves to the
resources of science to ground knowledge, then there can't be any moral
knowledge. Whence nihilism.
This
nihilistic blow is cushioned by the realization that Darwinian processes
operating on our forbearers in the main selected for niceness! The core
morality of cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism that was selected for in
the environment of hunter-gatherers and early agrarians, continues to dominate
our lives and social institutions. We may hope the environment of modern humans
does not become different enough eventually to select against niceness. But we
can’t invest our moral core with more grounding than this: it was a
convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning
to be found in that conclusion.
How
can we be confident that we were selected for niceness? Because it was the only
solution to the design problem from hell that faced us on the African savanna,
and it capitalized on two features we shared with some other primates and
mammals. The design problem was a “triple whammy”: by the time we found
ourselves forced out of the rain forest and pretty far down the food chain in
the veldt, we were producing too many off-spring, having them too close
together, and these off-spring required a long child hood, owing to the need
for postnatal brain development. Compared to other primates our birth spacing
was much closer, and we were living much longer: so that we kept having
offspring for longer. Additionally the birth canal was too narrow to allow for
much prenatal neural development. Meanwhile the only source of protein was
scavenging whatever the top predators might leave. Unless Mother Nature found a
way to turn large populations of young children with long periods of
dependence, these three traits were bound to carry us to extinction. Of course we
came out of the rain forest with three advantages: the use of stone tools that
we learned could break into marrow and brain inaccessible to predators; a
theory of mind—or rather a capacity to predict the behavior of conspecifics.
Both of which we shared with other primates. Plus, we had a third trait they
lacked but we shared with a few other species—dogs, tamarinds, dolphins—a
tendency to cooperative child-rearing. Who knows why we lucked out with this
one, but it was crucial.
Theory
of mind and cooperative child-rearing synergize to free individuals for the
division of labor, hunting, gathering, child-rearing; long childhood and large
brains can be exploited for teaching the labor specializations. The result is a
co-evolutionary cycle that improves them and selects for improvements in those
traits—improved theory of mind and greater inclination to cooperatively rear
children, until we get morality and technology.
After
enough cycles the result is nice bell-shaped distribution of niceness, with a
small number of people at the extreme ends of unconditional altruism and
egoistic sociopathy. It can’t be helped of course. Variation is the rule and
there is really no way to stamp out the sociopathy. All we can do is protect
ourselves from it.
The
survival of puny animals like us depended so much on being able to scope out
other people’s and other animals tactics and stratagems that Mother Nature had
to glom on to the first device that came along, no matter how quick and dirty,
to do the job. As with many other such circumstances, it overshot and made us
into conspiracy theorists: seeing motives everywhere instead of just in the
behavior of complex animals. In fact, the ability we call theory of mind
eventually spawned the illusion of intentionality, and with it plans, plots,
and the love of narratives. It was probably a cheap price to pay for survival.
It doesn’t begin to do serious damage till well after we hit upon science.
6. Never
let your conscience be your guide
Understanding
our own psychological make-up and our thought processes are among the most
daunting of problems facing science. That’s why less progress has been made in
psychology than understanding the rest of the universe. On the other hand,
because we have immediate introspective access to our minds, most people think
they really understand their minds better than anything else. Descartes got
sucked into this delusion 500 years ago and made introspective certainty the
foundation of knowledge instead of the most tempting distraction from it.
Neuroscience
will eventually enable us to understand the mind by showing us how the brain
works. But we already know enough about it to take nothing introspection tells
us about the mind on trust. The phenomenon of blindsight—people who don’t have
any conscious color experiences can tell the color of a thing—is enough to give
us pause about the most apparently certain conclusion introspection insists on:
that when you see a color you have a color experience. Then there is the fact,
discovered by Benjamin Libet, that actions are already determined by your brain
before you consciously decide to do them! (As for determinism and the denial of
real free will, that is a conclusion which, so to speak, goes without saying
for scientism.) We have to add to the discovery of these illusions of the will
and of sensory experience, robust experimental results which reveal that we
actually navigate the world looking through the rear-view mirror! We don’t even
see what is in front of our eyes, but continually make guesses about it based
on what has worked out in our individual and evolutionary past. Along with so
much more that neuroscience is uncovering about the brain, uncovering the
illusion that we are looking through the windshield instead of the rear-view
mirror, reveals that the mind is no more a purpose-driven system than anything
else in nature. This is just what scientism leads us to expect. There are no
purposes in nature; physics has ruled them out, and
7. The
brain does everything without thinking about anything at all
The human brain is probably the most
efficient information storage device that has ever appeared in the universe.
But it doesn’t store or utilize information in anything like the way conscious
introspection reports. According to introspection we have original underived
intentionality, and everything else—speech, writing, everything we use as
symbols—gets its derived intentionality from original intentionality in the
brain. The trouble is that we have good reasons from physics to see that
original intentionality is impossible and better reasons from neuroscience and
AI to see that the brain doesn’t need any original intentionality to do its
job. The remaining mystery is to explain where the illusion came from and why
we are stuck with it.
“Original intentionality” is John Searle’s
useful way of designating the fact that for anything else in nature to be a
symbol, to be about stuff, there have to be brain states—sets of neural
circuits wired together—that confer intentionality on it: that is, there have
to be clumps of matter, presumably in the brain, that, just in virtue of their
composition, are about clumps of
matter outside the brain: If I believe that Paris is the capital of France,
there has to be a clump of matter—some wet stuff in my brain—that is about
Paris, that refer to it, point to it, indicate it, that is ‘about’ it just in
virtue of the neuron’s shape, size, wiring, and their other purely physical
features. But physics fixes all the facts, and it assures us that there cannot
be clumps of matter—combinations of fermions and bosons—that just are, in virtue of their constitution, about other
clumps of matter. So, no original intentionality.
You will doubtless be tempted to reply that
it’s not just the clump of matter—the bit of porridge in the brain--that is, by
itself, about Paris; it’s the neural circuits plus other clumps of matter
causal connected to it in the right way.
Original intentionality is causal role with respect to other clumps of matter
(remember that science only recognizes clumps of matter and fields of force).
But piling up clumps of matter without original intentionality, and having them
participate in complex causal processes with one another won’t produce original
intentionality—it’s still just fermions and bosons. There is no better proof of
this than the limitations of teleosemantics.
Teleosemantics isn’t just the best
naturalism can do to provide an account of original intentionality. It is the
only possible account of it if the physical facts fix all the facts. Brain
states and the behavior they bring about are among the most purposefully
appearing things and events in the universe. The only way they can discharge
their appearance of purpose in a world where physics has banned real purpose is
via a Darwinian process of blind variation and natural selection. The essence
of intentionality is purpose, as Dennett (1969), Bennett (1976), Dretske (1988)
, Millikan (1984), Papineau (1993), Neander 2006), Matthen (1988), and Loyd
(1989) have shown. But teleosemantics can’t individuate intentional content. No
amount of environmental appropriateness of a neural state or its effects is
fine-grained enough to give unique propositional content to the neural state,
to confer on it the sort of specific aboutness
that original intentionality requires. Teleosemantics can’t solve what Fodor
calls the disjunction problem. So much the worse for original intentionality!
If Darwinism about the brain can’t give us unique propositional content, then
there is none. Because if Darwinism can’t give us content, nothing can. The
conclusion to draw is that the brain does acquire, store, or deploy its
information propositionally, in ways that require original intentionality.
One way to see this is to follow the
developments in neuroscience since Kandel (2009) first figured out the
molecular biology of learning in the Sea Slug. What he figured out was the
sequence of changes in synapses that produce short-term memory learning and the
changes in somatic gene expression that produce long-term memory. It turns out
to be just a matter of either organizing extant synaptic circuits in new wiring
patterns, or switching on genes in neurons that produce new synapses. No
intentionality in Sea Slug memory storage, just new circuitry responding with
new outputs to new inputs. Then Kandel turned to mammals and found exactly the
same synaptic changes and somatic gene expression in short and long term memory
in the rat hippocampus: the difference between rats and sea slugs is that what
goes on in the former is just a lot more of exactly the same as what goes on in
the latter. No matter how tempting it is to accord propositional knowledge to
the rat--brain states that are about the rat’s environment—there is no neural
scope for it, unless you want to go back and say that the neural ganglia of the
Sea Slug have some original intentionality. More of the same research showed
Kandel that storage of information in the human hippocampus was no different a
process: it involves the same neurotransmitters making exactly the same short
term changes and the same somatic genes as operate in the sea slug churning out
the same signals that direct production of the same new synapses in long term
information storage. The difference between humans and rats and sea slugs is of
course, proportionately larger numbers of neurons involved in more complicated
circuits. But there is still no room for original intentionality. What is going
on in all three cases is just input/output wiring and rewiring. The brain does
everything without thinking about
anything at all. And in case you still had any doubts there is Watson, the
Jeopardy-playing computer, storing as much information as we do, without any
original intentionality.
But consciousness is screaming at us almost
from the cradle to the grave that thought is about stuff. That this is one thing we can’t be wrong about,
Descartes (1641) insisted. So, the real problem is to figure out where illusion
comes from. That conscious intentionality is an illusion is something scientism
can be sure of. The reason is obvious: all the arguments that one clump of
matter—no matter how complicated--can’t just by itself be about another clump
of matter goes for the clumps of matter that are our conscious thoughts too!
The mind is the brain. Conscious thoughts; just like unconscious ones are
complex combinations of neural cells, along with ions and macromolecules moving
between them. The tokens or markers being put together and moved around in
consciousness can no more have original intentionality than anything else that
is purely physical. All they can do is confer the illusion of it. What we need
to explain is how the illusion arises.
8.
Farewell to the Purpose-Driven Life
Solving the puzzle of where the illusion
of intentionality in consciousness comes from is not much less formidable a
task than figuring out what the function of consciousness is to begin with.
Most probably, consciousness is too big a deal to have just one function. But
one of its functions is not constituting or containing original intentionality.
And fostering the illusion of original intentionality can’t be one of its
functions either.
The illusion of original intentionality has
its origin in the fact that while the brain stores information in
non-propositional data structures of some kind, it extracts and deploys the
information in temporally-extended processes, such as noises and marks—and
eventually speech and writing; and it is these together with the conscious
states that they result in, that generate the illusion of propositional
content.
The interior monologue that introspection
carries on is a silent version of the play (the tokening) of noise, ink-marks
and pixels that passes for public communication. Like public speech and writing,
our introspective stream of consciousness doesn’t record or report what the
brain is actually doing, because the brain can’t store or manipulate
information in thoughts about stuff. That requires aboutness. Conscious
introspection is not just wrong about sensory experience, it’s no guide to
cognition either. Whatever the brain does, it doesn’t operate on statements
that are “about” things, facts, events that are outside of the mind. The
sentences in speech, writing and thought do not express unique determinate or
even small numbers of determinate statements or propositions that constitute
their content, or what they are about. The illusion that they do gets built up
in each brain anew during the developmental ontogeny of every language-learning
child, and has been built up in hominid evolution from grunts, shrieks,
eventually clicks and gestures coordinated with behavior, all the way to
Chinese characters and Kanji calligraphy. The emergence of generative,
transformational, syntactic, phonological and morphological features of those
noises and marks that constitute language have great adaptive value and were
crucial to moving our ancestors from the bottom of the savanna food chain to
the top in a matter of less than a million years. It’s even possible that the
silent version of those noises and mental version of those marks had a role to
play in our eventual supremacy and were therefore selected for. But it wasn’t
because they bear original intentionality.
If the brain cannot be the locus of
original intentionality, then original intentionality just doesn’t exist. But
without intentionality, we have to recognize that most of our conceptions about
ourselves are also illusions. If plans, projects, purposes, plots, stories,
narratives and the other ways we organize our lives and explain ourselves to
others and ourselves, all require intentionality, then they too, are all
illusions. And if the meaning of life is a matter of our thoughts and actions
being imbued with propositional content, then a scientistic view is not going
to be able to take the meaning of life seriously except as the symptom of
illusion—deep and powerful, pervasive and impossible to surrender except very
intermittently, but an illusion for all that.
On the other hand, it will come as no
surprise that our beliefs and desires, our plans and projects, our hopes,
fears, prejudices, commitments, ideologies and the purposes we espouse are so
bad at explaining what we do, either as individuals or in groups. Folk
psychology has been struggling without success for literally thousands of years
to enable us to improve the understanding of human affairs, while science
needed only a few centuries to enable us to understand everything else to great
precision. The reason is obvious: biography and history, even when they get
their chronologies right, stitch them together using the thread of words—sounds
and inscriptions that are supposed to express thoughts about things in the
heads of human agents. But there are no thoughts about things—no distinct
statements or propositions—in people’s heads. What we attribute to people in
the idiom of folk psychology as the beliefs and desires that actually move them
to action, does a vey imprecise job of identifying the real causal variables in
human brains. When we pile on folk psychological explanations into human
histories that comport the lives of dozens or thousands, the result must be
even less precise.
All this goes even more so for the
interpretative humanities. The demand of the humanities, that we account for
works of art and artifacts, in terms of their meanings, is part of the
insatiable hunger for stories with plots, narratives, and whodunnits that human
kind have insisted on since natural selection made us into conspiracy theorists
a half a million years ago or so. This is a taste it will be too hard to shake
in everyday life. The fiction best-seller list will always be with us. But we
need to move most of the works now on the non-fiction list to their rightful
places among the magical realist romances, the historical and biographical
novels, and the literary confessions. For they secure their meretricious appeal
on the back of our love for narratives, and these in turn report transactions
in the illusory realm of original and derived intentionality.
9. Life’s
illusions I recall, but I really don’t know life at all.
If the mind is the brain (and scientism
can’t allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness
seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or about
the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking our selves
seriously too. We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring
agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while
it also tracks much of what is going on around us.
The self, person, soul, transcendental
unity of apperception, the “I” in the mind has to be numerically identical over
time. Stages of consciousness or
seeming-memories that are causally connected in the “right way” or a succession
of selves that are qualitatively similar to their near neighbors, or
ship-of-Theseus replacements over time, are just not going to cut it. To see
why just think about the films Freaky
Friday or Trading Places: even 6
year old kids have no trouble understanding these movies, even though mom and
daughter, dad and son, don’t exchange so much as a fermion or a boson, and
switch bodies while remaining numerically identical. None of the substitutes
for the self that naturalists and neuroscientists have contemplated to solve the
problem of personal identity either last long enough or are composed of the
right sort of numerically unchanged stuff to do the work of enabling us to
understand these movies.
There seems to be only one way we make
sense of the person whose identity endures over time and over bodily change.
This way is by positing a concrete but non-spatial entity with a point of view
somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears in the middle of our heads.
Since physics has excluded the existence of anything concrete but non-spatial,
and since physics fixes all the facts, we have to give up this last illusion
consciousness foists on us. But of course Scientism can explain away the
illusion of an enduring self as one that natural selection imposed on our
introspections, along with an accompanying penchant for stories. After all it
is pretty clear that they solve a couple of major design problems for bodies
like ours that have to hang around long enough to leave copies of their genes
and protect them while they are growing up. Maybe we can find one of the
functions of consciousness in the way it helps foster the illusion of self and
so keeps us investing in future pay-offs that our current and occurent selves
won’t be around to collect.
The multiple substitutes for the numerically
identical, enduring self that Damasio (2010), for example, hypothesizes, or the
causal chain that David Lewis (1976) invokes, just change the subject, instead
of solving the problem that has daunted us at least since Locke. Changing the
subject and providing an improvement on the impossible conception that common
sense saddles us with may be an admirable achievement of naturalism. But it is
no more a scientific vindication of received wisdom than teleosemantics without
propositional content. It’s eliminativism, slightly sugar-coated.
9. History
is bunk (and the social sciences are myopic)
Having
come this far, science now has the resources to explain the frustrations and
the failure of the social sciences and history, and to provide a firm basis on
which to establish reasonable expectations about the prospects for the human
sciences, qua sciences.
Intentional
content being an illusion, the weakness of content-driven explanations of human
action—our own and others—is obvious. The limitation it imposes will be
exacerbated when we come to explain the behavior of historical agents and even
worse, when we attempt to explain the results of their interactions with one
another. Meanwhile, the taste for plots, stories and whodunnits that Mother
Nature instilled, will make it impossible ever to shake the attractions of
narrative. So history and biography will always be with us, but they will never
provide much more than diverting stories, and post hoc rationalizations.
But there is a much deeper reason for
naturalism to be pessimistic about the uses of history: reason enough to
conclude that Santayana’s (1905) or Churchill’s (1947) argument for taking
history seriously—to know the future--will never be borne out. Recall the
stirring phrases: “those who do not learn the lessons of history are suffered
to repeat them,” and “The further back you look, the farther forward you can
see.” Bunk.
Human history is the process of
coordination, accommodation, and competition of adaptations—initially,
genetically encoded ones, and eventually, culturally transmitted ones. The
process results in local equilibria of varying lengths of time, punctuated at
an accelerating rate by arms races. The result is the irrelevance of the
distant past to the distant future and the ever-increasing myopia of the recent
past as a guide to the near future.
As
we know from the biological case, nothing is forever: arms races will
eventually break up the most long lived cases of accommodation, cooperation and
even break up live-and-let live neutrality between traits. What is more, the
space of variations in which natural selection searches for ways to break up
these local equilibria is vast beyond even the dreams of the evolutionary
biologist. Who would have thought of the arrangement whereby the male of a
species lives on the tongue of the female?
Now, why suppose that the unpredictability
of Darwinian trajectories in biology also bedevil human affairs?
Two reasons:
1.
Almost all significant features of human affairs—historical actions, events,
processes, norms, organizations, institutions, etc.—have functions—i.e.
adaptations, or else they are the direct results of such adaptations.
2. The only source of functions or
adaptations in nature—including human affairs--are Darwinian processes of blind
variation and environmental filtration.
All regularities among adaptations (or their direct results) are local
equilibria, which are eventually broken up by arms races. Such restricted
regularities have limited explanatory power underwritten by unrestricted
Darwinian regularities.
Premise 1 may seem dubious at first blush.
How could almost everything in human affairs be an adaptation? That sounds like
an idea worthy of Pollyanna or Voltaire’s (1947) Dr. Pangloss. Even in biology,
not everything turns out to be an adaptation. Much of evolution is a matter of
drift—the play of chance on small and sometimes even large populations that
leads to changes in the distribution of adaptations, and even to the
persistence of non-adaptive and maladaptive traits. Moreover, important
biological traits are themselves either the result of physical constraints or
were acquired as adaptations early enough in evolutionary processes to remain
fixed long after they ceased to be adaptations. Surely all the same must be
said of the course of human affairs. Indeed, for obvious reasons, there may
well be a greater role for drift and constraint in human affairs than
biological processes.
Of
course premise 1 does need to be understood as qualified by the reality of
drift and constraint in human affairs. In fact the plausibility of the claim
that premise 1 makes about the adaptedness of most features of human affairs
relies a great deal on the qualification ‘significant.’ There will be many
features of human affairs that are the result of drift, and yet few historians
or social scientists will accept the suggestion that what particularly
interests them about human affairs is the result of random drift alone or even
mainly. Similarly, social scientists will recognize constraints of many kinds
as forcing subsequent features of human affairs to adapt to them. But few
social scientists accord such constraints the fixed character that
constraints—especially physical ones—have in biological evolution. In fact, the
most revolutionary social changes in fact break down the oldest, firmest, and
most pervasive social constraints, as a result of processes of variation and
selection. The real issue is whether such variation is blind and the resultant
selection natural.
Reflection on human affairs does suggest
that even more than in biology, significant features of social life are largely
or even wholly adaptations for some one, or some group, or some practice. To
begin with almost all the vocabulary and taxonomy of common sense, history and
the human sciences are themselves thoroughly functional. As a consequence it
would be difficult for history and social science even to notice or describe
anything except in terms that attributed effects to it that are beneficial for
some one or something!
Human social life consists of adaptations
constructed—“intentionally” or otherwise--by individuals and groups to cope
with an environment that has mostly come to consist of other individuals and
groups and their adaptations.
Then there are the features of human life
that no one designed, that didn’t emerge unintentionally from actions and
events people did “design” or intend, but that are best thought of as
symbionts, or parasites, or sometimes combinations of both, living on human
life, and changing it for the better or for the worse, but always adapting to
ensure their own survival.
Chinese foot-binding is a nice example of
how this works. Foot-binding persisted for about a 1000 years in
Once we widen our focus, the claim that
almost everything of interest in human affairs has functions or adaptations
becomes far less Panglossian.
Human history, like natural history is
composed of a sequence of events, states, processes and individuals, all of
which have adaptive traits or are themselves adaptations of various sorts. In
the human case some have been contrived by human design (or so the narratives
of folk psychology tell us). But most,
including most artifacts, humans have “invented” through the same process of
blind variation and environmental filtration that produces adaptations in the
biological realm. Of course the mechanism of transmission of these adaptations
in the human case doesn’t involve genetic transmission; what it requires and in
fact utilizes is cultural transmission, a highly unfaithful transmission
channel. Moreover, cultural evolution is unlike biological evolution, where the
relevant selective environment mostly changes with geological slowness. In
human cultural evolution, the relevant selective environment is
ever-increasingly other people, other families, other groups, other cultures,
societies, their mores, norms, institutions, technologies, etc. Since the
environment in which humans operate is largely one created by humans, it
changes with accelerating rapidity over time. Once we entered the Holocene, if
not before, human history became a Darwinian process in which the adaptative
traits began to vary at accelerating rates while the environment filtering
among them for local improvements began to change at the same or an even
greater rate. The result was to interrupt, break down and put an end to local
equilibria, islands of stability, periods of tranquility and historical epochs,
with ever increasing rapidity. And the mechanism of this process of (sometimes
creative) destruction is the arms race that natural selection makes inevitable.
If most historically interesting traits are
adaptations and the process by which they interact is Darwinian, then human
history is not the blind leading the blind. It’s the blind wrestling with the
blind. It’s a fight in which neither side can see the other side’s current
moves clearly, nor reliably predict their next move or the outcome. Human
history is a nested series of arms races that never attain more than a temporary
and unstable equilibrium. And once unanticipated changes in science and
technology begin to take a hand in the destiny, eruption and direction taken by
arms races – the outcomes become as unpredictable as the growth of knowledge.
The lesson of history is that there are no lessons for the future; the further
back you look the more irrelevant your knowledge of the past to the future.
It’s rather funny to think that what Winston Churchill overlooked in his
defense of history were, of all things, arms races!
The
obstacle to useful knowledge from history that is posed by the arms race
character of human affairs is not avoidable by social science, no matter how
scientistic (in the old pejorative sense) it aims to be.
All the social sciences face exactly the same
explanatory problem that
If almost everything of interest to the
human sciences is a function or has a function or components with functions,
then naturalism must be Darwinian about them. Once purposes are ruled out of
nature—biological, social, psychological--there is only one way that something
with functions can be brought about, maintained, or changed over time: the
process that
The only advantage the non-historical
social sciences have over history is that they seek to explain the present, and
predict the near future, instead of explaining the more distant past with
alleged payoffs for the future. There are local equilibria that last longer
than a day or a week, and so produce local regularities—about TV ratings or
voting or interest rates or marriage rules or suicide rates. They may even last
long enough for social scientists to have enough time to uncover them. But they
never last long enough to be refined into tools for reliable prediction that
could confer confidence on explanations that cite them. When it comes to seeing
the future, history is blind and the social sciences myopic.
10. Is
this what the optimistic naturalists have been saying all along?
Could it be that the difference between
disenchanted naturalism and the more widespread view about its implications is
a matter of emphasis or seeing the cup half empty vs. half full? For example,
what is the difference between treating
To begin with, almost all naturalists adopt
a variety of physical anti-reductionism: about biology, about psychology, about
social, political and economic processes. As an epistemic reflection of
temporary and even long-standing barriers to our ability to see how the physical
facts fix all the facts, physical anti-reductionism is a live possibility. But
most naturalists treat it as a metaphysical thesis about levels of organization
in biology and psychology. They do so in order to make room for the causal
power of mental events and the real autonomy of biological processes from
molecular ones. None of these naturalists have a convincing explanation of how
metaphysical emergence is possible, but none are satisfied with a merely
epistemic emergentism. I think that Jaegwon Kim’s argument concerning
overdetermination vs. explanatory competition is enough to show why physicalist
reductionism won’t work. But at any rate, the difference between the
disenchanted naturalist and the one who hopes to leave most of what we believe
untouched, starts with this real difference. But it doesn’t end there.
And where the difference takes off is in
the implications physics has for purpose in the universe. If the 2nd law makes
Darwinian natural selection inevitable, then the notion that Darwinian natural
selection naturalizes purpose has to be surrendered! Physics and especially the
2nd law expunge purpose from the universe, and they do it not only in physics
and chemistry, but in biology and all the biological sciences—including the
sciences of man. That must include even the cognitive processes that we think
of as the home base of purpose, planning, intention, design, deliberation, and
action. Long before the Churchlands (1986, 2012) dreamed up eliminativism, its
truth was on the cards from physics. The only way to pretend that Darwinism
made purpose safe for causation is to change the subject, to redefine purpose
and all the other teleological notions so that they are just façon de parler, to use a bit of positivist jargon,
for processes foreordained by the almost invariable increase in entropy almost
everywhere almost all the time. Changing the subject by redefining crucial
terms seems to me to be the stock in trade of optimistic naturalism, and it is
what conveys the impression that the differences between it and disenchanted
naturalism are merely matters of emphasis.
Consider the widespread attempts to ground
ethics naturalistically. Almost all of them have rightly recognized that any
effort to do so must exploit the theory of natural selection. That there is no
other scientifically available resource for this project is a view I share. But
even the most optimistic of naturalists recognizes that natural selection
always tracks adaptations and rarely tracks truths. The most, therefore that a
naturalistic account of core morality can do is to reveal its prudential or
instrumental value for us. Even that is probably not on the cards, since a
400-year-old research program that starts with Hobbes and continues to Gauthier
has tried to do just this without success. If there is any more to core
morality than prudence, if in addition to be being prudent for creatures like
us there is some further right-making fact about core morality, naturalism
faces a massive and inexplicable coincidence: core morality is an adaptation
and it is the correct morality, and these two facts bear no explanatory
relation to one another. Disenchanted naturalism refuses to countenance massive
coincidence. Its only alternative is nihilism: that there is no fact of
correctness about morality to explain. Here too, reducing moral rightness to
prudence produces a naturalistic grounding of morality by changing the subject.
Most radical of all is the divergence
between disenchanted naturalism and optimistic naturalism about the mind. The
latter holds out the hope of a causal account of at least some human
propositional knowledge, perhaps a teleosemantic account, perhaps some other
theory of “real [intentional] patterns” in the brain. Disenchanted naturalism
holds that all the neural facts (including conscious introspection)
underdetermine unique propositional content, and there is no fact of the matter
even about which finite set of propositions a neural state “contains”.
Giving up original intentionality is the easy
part for disenchanted naturalism. The hard part is crafting an alternative
account of how the brain acquires, stores, and deploys information
non-propositionally. It’s easy to go dispositional about beliefs and desires.
Maps store information non-sententially and so perhaps non-propositionally, and
these may provide a model for how the brain does it. But the question remains
whether a radical eliminativism about intentionality has to get along without
truth or falsity altogether.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 12, January - April 2015,
ISSN 1552-5112
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