I’m very excited about a workshop I’ll be at later this month: Moving Naturalism Forward. By “naturalism” we mean the simple idea that the natural world, obeying natural laws, is all there is. No supernatural realm, spirits, or ineffable dualistic essences affecting what happens in the universe. Clearly the idea is closely related to atheism (I can’t imagine anyone is both a naturalist and a theist), but the focus is on understanding how the world actually does work rather than just rejecting one set of ideas.
Once you accept that we live in a self-contained universe governed by impersonal laws of nature, the hard work has just begun, as we are faced with a daunting list of challenges. The naturalist worldview comes into conflict with our “folk” understanding of human life in multiple ways, and we need to figure out what can be salvaged and what has to go. We’ve identified these particular issues for discussion:
- Free will. If people are collections of atoms obeying the laws of physics, is it sensible to say that they make choices?
- Morality. What is the origin of right and wrong? Are there objective standards?
- Meaning. Why live? Is there a rational justification for finding meaning in human existence?
- Purpose. Do teleological concepts play a useful role in our description of natural phenomena?
- Epistemology. Is science unique as a method for discovering true knowledge?
- Emergence. Does reductionism provide the best path to understanding complex systems, or do different levels of description have autonomous existence?
- Consciousness. How do the phenomena of consciousness arise from the collective behavior of inanimate matter?
- Evolution. Can the ideas of natural selection be usefully extended to areas outside of biology, or can evolution be subsumed within a more general theory of complex systems?
- Determinism. To what extent is the future determined given quantum uncertainty and chaos theory, and does it matter?
(Massimo Pigliucci has already started blogging about some of the questions we’ll be discussing.)
To hash all this out, we’re collecting a small, interdisciplinary group of people to share different perspectives and see whether we can’t agree on some central claims. We have an amazing collection of people — the only regret is that, because we wanted from the start to keep it very small, we had to leave out any number of other potential participants who would have been great to hear from.
- Hilary Bok, Philosophy
- Patricia Churchland, Neuroscience/Philosophy
- Jerry Coyne, Biology
- Richard Dawkins, Biology
- Terrence Deacon, Anthropology
- Simon DeDeo, Complex Systems
- Daniel Dennett, Philosophy
- Owen Flanagan, Philosophy
- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Philosophy/Literature
- Janna Levin, Physics/Literature
- Massimo Pigliucci, Philosophy
- David Poeppel, Neuroscience
- Lisa Randall, Physics
- Alex Rosenberg, Philosophy
- Don Ross, Economics
- Steven Weinberg, Physics
We’re stashing ourselves in an out-of-the-way venue in western Massachusetts, and to facilitate conversations there will be no audience, only participants. But we are making an effort to record all the proceedings, and hope to put the videos online quickly. Hopefully this event will help spark a broader conversation (which is already ongoing, of course) about what it means to be a human being in a natural world.
wow! awesome company.
Okay, there is a God, I have had the pleasure to meet, now that I have answered that question, I have one for you. Okay, now that I have had the opportunity to say that, I have a question, it may sound dumb, but it has to do with the passage of time. Has the passage of time been the same throughout the big bang and inflation and up to the present, or has it varied and does it vary in different areas of the universe, such as a river would going from its source to its ocean, with eddies, whirlpools, etc.?
You forgot the Pope. He He.
Sounds like a fabulous event and a great choice of participants! I look forward to your report…
Geez, talk about a who’s who of outstanding rational thinkers. What makes these sorts of workshops interesting is the conversations, much more than, say, any one person’s speech. Please could we have video of at least a few of the conversations. I really would be surprised if this didn’t go right up there with the best TED talks in terms of general interest.
In response to your “(I can’t imagine anyone is both a naturalist and a theist)”: perhaps it’s too much of a splitting of definitions, but cannot a Naturalist be a Pantheist? Does someone who declares themselves to be a Pantheist, with howsoever much delicacy about the details, preclude themselves from being accepted in the ranks of Naturalists?
Josh– It will be mostly conversations, not formal talks. All will be recorded and shared, or at least that’s the plan.
Peter– I never really understood pantheism, or was convinced that it was a sensible stance, so I guess all I can say is “maybe.”
I was cross-checking with my list of big questions to find how many of the questions from my list are being covered. I think few other issues which need attention are as follows:
1. Why laws of nature/physics are always mathematical ? Why nature cares so much for mathematics ? Are laws of nature actually there or these are the constructs of our mind to make the navigation easier ?
2. Living and non-living things all are made of the same stuff then why they are so different ? Is the difference between non-living and living things is qualitative or it is quantitative.
3. Can we identify those abilities of human brain/mind which a computer will never be able to achieve ?
4. How to know that science as we know and practice is the only way to know and understand the nature ?
can’t wait to see it on line, Sean. I know it’ll be a very interesting workshop. Gosh, I wish I can be there to see.
Tony,
I met the Easter bunny the other day, he was hanging out with a Leprechaun named Paddy and a pink unicorn. Thor was there as well he told me to say hi.
God? Her name is a four letter word. A four letter word beginning with F. She don’t like you, you’re in big trouble. In my 74 years she’s been good to me, but she’s given, then demolished, my most precious gift. Her name is Fate.
Science will never be able to determine the existence of a Creator God, it simply doesn’t have the capability and never, never will. Try and put Wisdom under a microscope, or Love it cannot be done, because God is an entirely different being from anything that you can imagine. Try to imagine Love as a Being or Wisdom, that is, unconditional Love not the self serving kind found in nature, often better known as pride, or self preservation.
Are these questions supposed to be scientific, or philosophical?
If scientific, most of them seem unanswerable. Most obviously “why live?” which is not a scientific question (much like “should I have chocolate or vanilla ice cream?”). More subtlety, “why consciousness?” which cannot be probed by science, which assumes a conscious observer and cannot probe or observe the universe except through this observer (Dennet always makes this mistake in his books)
If philosophical, it doesn’t seem quite honest to describe the Universe as naturalistic, since it clearly contains your consciousness, which has no scientific basis (see above) and very likely many others, all of which are very important to the questions you pose.
Sean, the list of participants is impressive, but I think you are missing a mathematician in there. Or someone knowledgeable in formal logic. This is relevant to the most of the topics you mentioned, IMO. To give you an idea of what I mean, here is my take on some of them:
“Free will. If people are collections of atoms obeying the laws of physics, is it sensible to say that they make choices?”
Yes, a human brain is a complex system, probably exhibiting chaotic time-evolution (like weather, fire, etc.). So the Goedel’s first incompleteness theorem might come into play, saying that you need additional laws (additional to all laws of physics) to describe its behavior. Such a law may or may not exist. If it doesn’t exist, the behavior of the human brain is unpredictable beyond any power of laws of physics. That would be a reasonable point for the origin of free will. // Btw, one can use the same argument for the existence of God, there is no way to exclude that option. //
“Morality. What is the origin of right and wrong? Are there objective standards?”
Experience tells us that Nature does not distinguish good and evil. Just look at the animal kingdom, where animal behavior is completely void of any concept of morality. So in a sense morality is a human construct. However, bar some geographic and historic fluctuations, roughly all humans share a same (or at least similar) set of moral laws. This kind of collective behavior suggests that there is either some external input of what is moral (religion, God, revelations…), or that moral behavior is emergent as evolutionary preffered behavior. Either way, it appears to be observationally objective, with some error bars. 🙂
“Meaning. Why live? Is there a rational justification for finding meaning in human existence?”
I think that religion is the only discipline which can give a satisfactory answer to this question. I am looking forward to hear what will a group of naturalists be able to come up with, regarding this topic.
“Purpose. Do teleological concepts play a useful role in our description of natural phenomena?”
I don’t quite understand this question, so no comment.
“Epistemology. Is science unique as a method for discovering true knowledge?”
It isn’t. Again, the Goedel’s incompleteness theorem is the main reference — there is a difference between truth and provability. Science can discover things that are reproducible by experiment, and describable by a finite set of axioms. Everything else (and according to Goedel, the “else” must always exist) is beyond science. Adding new axioms to science (i.e. formulating new laws of nature) cannot fundamentally help, since the number of axioms we have will always be finite, and therefore incomplete. In other words, a “theory of everything” cannot exist. What can (and does) exist is the “theory of everything so far”, but that is (and always will be) incomplete. There will always be knowledge not encompassed by science.
“Emergence. Does reductionism provide the best path to understanding complex systems, or do different levels of description have autonomous existence?”
This is related to determinism (below). As you also noted, the combination of chaos theory and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle suggests that complex systems cannot be understood by studying the basic constituents. Consequently, the complex systems behave according to their own laws of nature, or in the absence of those, they have a form of “free will”.
“Consciousness. How do the phenomena of consciousness arise from the collective behavior of inanimate matter?”
Again, chaotic systems, coupled to Goedel’s unprovable-but-true statements, open the door for the concept of consciousness to be a qualitatively new phenomenon, not describable by laws of physics, regardless of the fact that every elementary particle in the human brain obeys those laws. Similar to the free will question, the God question, the consciousness question, etc.
“Evolution. Can the ideas of natural selection be usefully extended to areas outside of biology, or can evolution be subsumed within a more general theory of complex systems?”
I don’t quite understand this question either.
“Determinism. To what extent is the future determined given quantum uncertainty and chaos theory, and does it matter?”
Determinism is dead, it is experimentally falsifiable and falsified. Both in the small-scale realm (quantum mechanics) and in the everyday-scale realm (chaos theory). It is just a matter of time, and a matter of people sticking to old habits, before this is universally accepted. Just like some people still have trouble accepting the lack of local realism, despite the experimental violation of Bell’s inequalities. Similarly, the lifetime of the concept of determinism is governed only by inertia of people’s prejudices from early youth&education.
Also, the lack of determinism in Nature does matter, a lot. It opens the door to all the stuff from above — free will, consciousness, existence of God, non-scientific knowledge, etc.
But the bottom line is that you are lacking a participant who can teach the others about the conceptual consequences of Goedel’s incompleteness theorems (both of them), and the limits they place on the scientific method of obtaining knowledge.
“Evolution. Can the ideas of natural selection be usefully extended to areas outside of biology, or can evolution be subsumed within a more general theory of complex systems?”
I posit that natural selection lead evolution can and perhaps must happen when you have the following (and I happily accept there may be more conditions or avenues)
– a system where entities are produced by some form of copying of information
– the copying may be imperfect
– imperfect copies do not necessarily cause complete failure
– entities compete for some resource involved in their continued existence
I *think* that covers genetic programming systems running on your PC and human reproduction and maybe even evolution of galaxies by crashing and merging. But I’ve been wrong before.
@ jayanti (8):
“1. Why laws of nature/physics are always mathematical ? Why nature cares so much for mathematics ? Are laws of nature actually there or these are the constructs of our mind to make the navigation easier ?”
Mathematics is the construct of our minds, to make navigation easier, as you say. This is rather obvious, given that one needs to invent a whole new language of mathematics at every step when passing from Newtonian mechanics to general relativity to quantum mechanics to quantum field theory to (ultimately) quantum gravity. We always invent new math, in order to describe a new theory and experimental data. This is by design, there is nothing mysterious about the successfulness of math applied to laws of nature.
“3. Can we identify those abilities of human brain/mind which a computer will never be able to achieve ?”
Sure, some of them have been already identified: Goedel’s theorems are an example — an algorithmic process can never formulate such statements (but can prove them, if someone else formulates them). For an extensive discussion of this, read the book “Emperor’s New Mind” by Roger Penrose. The bottomline is that human brain is not an algorithmic machine, so the AI can never have the equivalent level of insight into knowledge. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the human brain cannot be simulated by a machine — the hardware that makes up the human brain is not the only possible hardware that can implement its functioning processes. The brain simulator would work as well (and also as bad) as a human brain. But it’s behavior would not be algorithmic.
4. How to know that science as we know and practice is the only way to know and understand the nature?
Actually, we know that science is not the only way to know and understand the nature. Read up on Goedel’s first and second incompleteness theorems for more info on this. Science can only describe effects that are experimentally reproducible, and those are not the only ones in nature.
What is Truth, what is Wisdom, what is Unconditional Love, know these and you will know God. Possess these and you will possess God and I think many of you do.
Well I’m a pagan so odds are my thoughts on this talk wont matter. I have something to properly convince you in some way or another that time just causes problems.
Time Lord worthy stuff, backed up by science for sure…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXcl38zbqmw
I support naturalists like I tolerate republicans: Cant live with ’em, cant live without ’em. 😀
Sean: Have you been to The End of Time? *giggles*
Space rules. Time drools. <3
Thank you! Greatly enjoyed all the videos on the Time conference by FQXi. Can’t wait to see these too.
@ vmarko: thanks I read your post and it was very clear and straightful ! Your answers to my questions are also very insightfull ! Thanks for that.
The “problem of consciousness” is severe and multifaceted enough to demonstrate that the true ontology of the world must be something very different from the way that physicists envision it. The part of physics that will survive is the quantitative part, not the confused hybrid concepts currently used to explain its qualitative implications. But a congress of vixra crackpots would be more likely to have a good new idea about this problem (along with 99 bad ideas), than this august gathering, for whom the qualitative picture of the world, “naturalism”, is the apriori conception to which everything else must fit.
Really interesting list of topics, and I mean that sincerely.
Trouble is, none of them currently have definite answers, and some of them can’t, even in principle.
This is why philosophy drives me batty. It’s the ultimate tease.
Yes, science cannot determine on the existence of God. It is not designed to be that way. However, science can point to the fact that we do not need a God to be where we are. What makes reading the Bible to show the existence of God? Religion cannot prove the existence of God as much as science cannot prove His non-existence.
I’m a naturalist through and through.
I don’t understand the ‘daunting list of challenges’. Call me a scientistic technocrat, but I think that once we’ve got the united-federation of planets up and running and people are free to contribute to art, science, and technology without having to worry about day-to-day survival or finances all those so-called ‘challenges’ are just mental masturbation.
The meaning of it all is clear to me: have fun celebrating life and exploring for the pure curiosity and wonder of it all. Why does there have to be more? When it comes to the big ethical decisions we just have to accept that we get to decide, so let’s pick something nice.
You’re going to discuss naturalistic approaches to morality without Sam Harris?