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.
Mr. Anthony has it nailed — have fun celebrating life and exploring for the pure curiosity and wonder of it all.
Maybe Buddha had it figured out 2500 years ago. Stuff comes at us. Reactions happen. Intelligent minds study reactions. Compare to personal intentions for contentment and kindness. Factor in skillful behaviors (perhaps morality, or whatever). Adjust behaviors to meet intentions for contentment through mindfulness of what is happening just now. Maybe find a deeper power in universal connections.
Have fun, and find joy in all of it. It goes away soon enough.
I wonder what that group of people thinks about this effort: http://www.churchofreality.org/
I am very curious to know the results.
I notice the meeting is gathering almost only US-based people, apart from Ross and Dawkins, who are still native english-speakers. A genuine question: is that just by chance, or does it rather reveal something about the interest of, e.g., french and german physicists, biologists, anthropologists, philosophers, etc. about these questions?
It’s interesting because all of those topics are both yes and no. Freewill for instance. It depends on the level of superposition you’re considering. You’re hungry and you need food or you’ll die. You’re going to eat. What you choose to eat after years of hormonal conditioning is your choice. The less intelligent(could be read “experienced”) a person is (either by age or ignorance), the more likely they are to eat whatever is closest and easiest. A smarter person will wait and weigh their choices, looking for a healthy option or something that will at least taste really good if it’s not healthy; something that will satisfy the alert signals either way. So within all equations, the end result is the same. The only choice is how you get to that end result and what/if there is a remainder at the end of that PDE.
The same thing goes for morality. We don’t allow killing and rape in our societies(most of them) because we don’t want the possibility of something like that happening to us to exist. Our morals exist because we possess the ability to conceptualize what it would feel like to be stabbed or shot, even if we’ve never been stabbed or shot before. The thought process would go something like “I’ve had a paper cut before and that hurt like hell, so I can only imagine how badge a 5 inch deep paper cut would be with something made out of metal”. The way we experience nature as a civilization is based on the way we experience it personally. It just so happens that we are all pretty similar within a certain set of limits.
“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.”
I can make the same statements about Penrose as Penrose can make about a hypothetical machine. Does that prove that I am as far beyond Penrose as Penrose is beyond the machine? If not, why not?
“We don’t allow killing and rape in our societies(most of them) because we don’t want the possibility of something like that happening to us to exist. Our morals exist because we possess the ability to conceptualize what it would feel like to be stabbed or shot, even if we’ve never been stabbed or shot before. The thought process would go something like “I’ve had a paper cut before and that hurt like hell, so I can only imagine how badge a 5 inch deep paper cut would be with something made out of metal”. “
Cue debate on (male and female) circumcision.
Erik, re: Church of Reality
I’ve been to the site and posted on the forums. I wrote it off as a failed attempt to create a cult for the personal satisfaction of the founder.
Try humanism. It might not be sexy, but we can change that.
”Moving Supernaturalism Backward” will give you a broader public.
I really don’t understand what is wrong with Materialism, and why you instead choose to opt for the Naturalism name. Maybe you discussed it earlier, or some place else, but to me “Naturalism” seems to take up the Materialism vs. Idealism discussion, which we already had some 150 years ago. To not acknowledge that (and not to recap what was wrong, not acknowledge what was right, and not to see what we learned from that discussion!) is either a massive error of oversight. Or else it reeks of intentional dissociation with the Materialistic movement, possibly because its association with Karl Marx and Communism. And frankly either one of which would not be good sign as to the prospects of the “Naturalistic enterprise”, so I hope I’m wrong.
Sean, this is great. It will help get worldview naturalism out there as a successor to atheism among secularists, something that can really compete with supernaturalisms for those in the market for a positive worldview (not everyone is). Except for emergence and evolution, I think most of the questions on the agenda are touched on in “Systematizing Naturalism: Answering Life’s Vital Questions” at http://www.naturalism.org/systematizing_naturalism.htm and the various articles linked there.
What isn’t on the agenda are the possible political and policy ramifications of a naturalistic orientation. It’s no coincidence that those who take science seriously end up more progressive than not, given the naturalistic challenge to libertarian free will, http://www.naturalism.org/progressivepolitics.htm and to traditional, non-empirical justifications for discrimination, http://www.naturalism.org/enlightenment1.htm#empiricism
Even consciousness is tied in with the principle of superposition. It could be explained like a computer and the various levels of programming that go with it. 1(s) and o(s) of simple binary information exchange are positive and negative phases. A (rather large) group of binary information exchanges occurs with each particle interaction, analogous to C+ programming code (I think; it’s been a while since 10th grade computer science). A group of particles interacting results in a chemical interaction(I know I’m sacrificing details; it’s a blog). A hormonal interaction/exchange is the result of groups of chemical interactions… The code becomes more complex until it reaches the level of human consciousness. Consciousness seems mystical because we’re not that good with it yet; we have trouble believing that there’s really much more to it because our thoughts seem so much less complex than the mechanisms that give rise to them, but it’s hard to control code that complex without fully understanding it and considering the very short period of time that these information exchanges take place in order to produce our consciousness. Consider that if you’re dehydrated, you make some pretty stupid mistakes. If you’re missing a vitamin as simple and manganese, you make stupid neurological mistakes. Chaos theory and the principles of superposition really do permeate all of nature. Consciousness and the process of making a decision are the result of decoherence in an integrated quantum system.
This video explains it all: http://eeuauaughhhuauaahh.ytmnd.com/
Are free will and consciousness not connected? The inanimate particle will obey the laws of physics in a box of gas, the most likely scenario is that the a cloud of gas will be equally distributed throughout the box as the particles bounce about every which way. But a particle is unlikely to be headed in a given direction and suddenly “change its mind” and alter course.
However, what if you put 10 people in a room? Let’s say 5 know each other and 5 are strangers to everyone else. And just for fun, let’s say they are in microgravity so they really could be evenly distributed (as opposed to being stuck to the ground due to gravity). The 5 who know each other might try to hang close to each other. Maybe one had a bad day and wants to be alone. Will the strangers find unity because they are all in the same situation and form a secondary clump? Will one who is more outgoing go to the familiar group and introduce him/herself? What guides their “choices”? Where does one’s extroverted/introverted personality come from and what guides it?
just my 2 cents, since my day is apparently boring.
I think there are plenty of animals (including humans) who are conscious but lack free will. That’s not to say that every animal lacks free will, but that it is a special trait that not all systems possess. You aren’t born with free will. You are born “with consciousness”. Babies eat, poop, and sleep. They aren’t able to choose when or where they do any of those fundamental things which keep them alive, yet later on in life we are able to control them. Free will stems from analysis. As a human’s ability to analyze increases over time, then their ability to choose becomes greater. The decision to be introverted or extroverted also stems from the ability to analyze a system. And as most people joke, when your ability to analyze decreases with age and your body starts to break down, you start loosing the ability to choose when you eat, poop, and sleep. The ability to choose whether or not to omit yourself or include yourself in a social situation is also lost or gained depending on the integrity of the hormonal computer system that we call our bodies and brains.
Lots of Relativism in those issues of discussion for how to move Naturalism forward (“are there objective standards for right and wrong?”).
Here’s a sobering reminder of pitfalls in the service of the “greater good”- the medical profession in Nazi Germany was widely involved in a host of what we would consider horrific abuses- however-
“The German physicians believed they were behaving morally and following the dictates of the Hippocratic Oath by transforming the doctor-patient relationship into a new relationship in which the state became the doctor and the German people became the ‘patient,’ or the volk,” said Sheldon Rubenfeld, MD, clinical professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and president of the Center for Medicine After the Holocaust, in Houston, in an e-mail. Thus, by this reasoning, German physicians rationalized eugenic sterilization, euthanasia, and, ultimately, elimination of Jewish, black, homosexual, Roma, and other “genetically inferior” individuals as treatment of their “patient,” the volk, said Rubenfeld. Another rationale for their actions resonated among the public. “The economic advantages of eliminating expensive utilizers of health care resources were also widely touted and readily accepted by a receptive citizenry during a worldwide depression,” he said.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1346175
Why does mankind continue to hate, steal, kill, lust, be jealous, be filled with pride=self love, meaning to judge another according to his or her standards. Even in the age of the star ship Enterprise and Captain Kirk, war was a constant, not to mention bald heads, okay so I did. What is it in human nature that fails, or is this okay, just mankind’s natural bent and if not, what is it within us that tells us that somehow it is wrong or improper behavior. In nature it’s the survival of the fittest, is this what we should accept as normal, and if not what tells us otherwise.
Also what is concience, not just self awareness, but the voice inside us that tells us what is right or wrong, where did it come from?
When all else fails to move naturalism forward then add more cowbell.
Here let me help you:
> Free will. If people are collections of atoms obeying the laws of physics, is it sensible to say that they make choices?
there is no free will, it is however sensible to say people make choices even if those choices are not free in any sense just as it is sensible to say that a computer program produced a particular output
> Morality. What is the origin of right and wrong? Are there objective standards?
utility, improving the fitness of a population
> Meaning. Why live? Is there a rational justification for finding meaning in human existence?
life has no meaning or purpose
> Purpose. Do teleological concepts play a useful role in our description of natural phenomena?
no
> Epistemology. Is science unique as a method for discovering true knowledge?
more or less yes, depending on how we define true knowledge it might also be deduced from existing knowledge
> Emergence. Does reductionism provide the best path to understanding complex systems, or do different levels of description have autonomous existence?
reductionism provides the only practical path
> Consciousness. How do the phenomena of consciousness arise from the collective behavior of inanimate matter?
illusion produced by the brain
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?
yes, can be whether that would be useful is another matter
Determinism. To what extent is the future determined given quantum uncertainty and chaos theory, and does it matter?
certainly at least somewhat determined, my bet would be completely determined
Also, where’s the beef?
The best thing is to be able to watch the conversations online. It is just not possible to miss this. Eagerly looking forward to it. Poor graduate students cannot afford to attend these on a short notice !! 🙁
Commenter “AI” describes consciousness as “illusion produced by the brain”.
You do know that an illusion is itself normally understood to be a type of conscious experience, right? A dream or a hallucination is still an instance of consciousness, it’s just deluded consciousness.
So “explaining” consciousness as an illusion can mean one of two things. Either your thesis is that consciousness is *always* deluded in some important way, or it is that consciousness *does not exist*.
If the meaning is that all consciousness is a delusion – well, you still haven’t explained consciousness per se, you’ve just made an unusual generalization about it. And perhaps you could be more specific about *what* the ubiquitous alleged illusion is – the aspect of conscious experience that is always present and always wrong.
If the meaning is that consciousness does not exist – it’s sort of charming to see someone struggle to express an idea that preposterous. “Consciousness is an illusion! It’s just an appearance, or it would be if there were appearances, which there aren’t. It’s just an appearance of an appearance… I mean, it’s a non-appearance… I struggle to express my concept, which in its sophistication exceeds what can be said in ordinary language…”
Or perhaps by consciousness you mean something more specific than “experience in all its forms”. Or perhaps you just don’t know what you’re talking about. There seem to be a lot of people out there who have some conceptual facility with physics or computer science, who have constructed a private model of the world in which it’s all physics or all computation, but who are mostly oblivious of the constructedness of their model.
I can’t resist stating my point with a silly modification of John 8:58 – “Before atoms and bits were, I am.” I’m not asserting an ontological primacy of consciousness over matter, as in metaphysical idealism; this is a phenomenological statement. Before a person learns to interpret the world as physics and computation, they nonetheless exist, life is happening to them, and they have some other “understanding” of it.
The simplest naturalism about consciousness is that which is oblivious to its own subjectivity, which simply interprets all external phenomena, including other people, as atoms and bits, but which remains in itself a being that thinks and wills, and doesn’t wonder how to understand itself in such terms. It’s a sort of unconscious ontological imperialism; the scientific ego doesn’t directly control the universe, but it “controls” the universe conceptually, in the sense that the universe has been reduced to concepts which the scientific ego originates and understands, and there is a type of power-gratification involved in this. (By the way, I’m not against the pursuit of personal empowerment; but a sense of power can blind you to the truth.)
But there may be a dawning of self-awareness, in which the scientific ego notices its own specific consciousness as the mysterious “place” where all this conceptualizing occurs and from which it originates. There are several paths from this point.
There may simply be a rejection of the old ideas, in favor of mysticism, relativism, or subjectivism; the attachment to the naturalistic construct is abandoned, not in favor of a detailed new construct, but rather to enjoy the feeling of freedom associated with not having definite beliefs and regarding oneself consciously as a co-creator of reality.
There may be a doubling-down on naturalism. The commenter above, “AI”, might be one of these people. Here we can distinguish between “compatibilist” and “eliminativist” approaches to the problem of *one’s own* consciousness. The compatibilists acknowledge that subjectivity is a “thing”, that consciousness has a “feel”, but they will say that’s just how being a computation “feels from the inside”. The eliminativists will say consciousness has no causal power (epiphenomenalism), or simply does not exist.
The open espousal of eliminativism is never very popular. Most naturalists are compatibilists, in the broad sense above – not just about “will” (personal agency, the idea that persons do have causal power), but about most of the basic subjective phenomena. Yes, they will say, I do have color experiences, but that’s just how it “feels” to have your neurons classify stimuli.
This naturalistic compatibilism is a dualism that (usually) does not know itself to be a dualism. It’s property dualism: along with the physical properties, brains have the property of “what it’s like to be that brain”. Also, along with being dualistic, this naturalism is also hopelessly vague about the subjective feels, it doesn’t describe them or think about them with any precision.
A third path, which I espouse, is new metaphysics, consistent with phenomenology *and* with physics. But it’s not easy, it doesn’t seem to be consistent with either a standard view of physical ontology, or with a standard view of the brain as a classical computer, in which all the events important for consciousness would have to be internal state-changes of trillions of physically isolated subsystems. The subjective unity of consciousness has to correspond to an objective ontological unity at some level. And this is why the crackpots, and the distinguished scientists who go rogue and indulge their weird personal ideas, are more likely to be the source of a genuine explanation of consciousness; because “naturalism” is being pursued with an apriori ontology which can only lead to compatibilist dualism or eliminativism.
Free will: We are not exactly free given the fact that we are bounded by the laws of nature. Although we have the seemingly power to make choices, good or bad, but they are not exactly free either. The choices we make have to fit our legal system and most of the time we have to conform to the society in whatever we choose to do. I do not believe any living things have complete free will. Mother Nature is in control of everything and we all have to conform to it. That does not require a God either. Just the natural laws of science having the complete free will.
Morality: Right vs wrong are prescriptive. What were right long ago are now wrong, and what were wrong are now right. These laws are constantly being revised and they are not consistent as natural laws of science which is descriptive. To distinguish between right and wrong is based on instinct. There are some fundamental moral standards that humans came to realize without needing a God to set the rules. It was purely basic instinct at the very beginning and now they got so convoluted with all of the prescriptions written.
Meaning: Why live? Is there a rational justification for finding meaning in human existence?
In a day to day living in this society, we can answer this question quite easily. We would say the purpose is to contribute to the society and make the world a better place to live for the next generation. If you are a decent parent, you will certainly agree with me on this. But if we look at it from the multiverse point of view, our universe spun out among billions of other universes, and all the right conditions suitable for life is inevitable. It bounds to happen. Life in the universe is not as uncommon as we think. Given that the life span of human is very short compare to the age of the universe, we are very insignificant within this universe, let alone among many other billions and billions of universes out there. I do not find true meaning in human existence except to survive the best we can given the short life span that we have. We continue to find ways and do whatever it takes to fulfill our urges. That’s life as I see it from the natural point of view.
Epistemology: Is science unique as a method for discovering true knowledge?
Science has come a long way. Two thousand years ago we would revolve around with mostly supernatural explanations. Nowadays with the development of cutting edge science, we would dance much less with them, and focus more on rational explanations before jumping into conclusions about the supernatural. Another two thousand years from now, we would do only less with the supernatural and more with the scientific routes. As time progresses, science will be able to discover more about the unknown. I do agree that science will never be able to answer everything and there will always be some unknown, but it is the best tool we have for discovering true knowledge. Science is much more reliable compare to fortune telling, Tarot cards, palm reading, claims from clairvoyants, exorcisms performances, ghost hunting reports, 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?
It is no doubt in my mind that evolution had taken place given all the substantial evidence that we gathered over the last hundreds of years. While the theory is on solid ground, it doesn’t explain everything that we know of. But it is far better than resorting it to some Higher Intellect Design which there is absolutely no basis of whatsoever. Evolution might just be an inner mechanism within a much bigger and more general system which science will eventually come to understand it. In two thousand years when we have this conversation again, we will certainly have a much better understanding of how the evolution process really works, and we would definitely be even more distant from the “God Hypothesis”.
Determinism: To what extent is the future determined given the quantum uncertainty and chaos theory, and does it matter?
I believe things happen for apparently no reasons and are in random. This is not the same for causation, of course. If we practice enough on certain things that we do, we get better at it and the chance of it happening gets higher. An example of this fact is speeding. If we do this constantly, then eventually we will get caught, not because of some bad karma falling on us. There are no rational explanations for freak accidents, uncontrollable terminal illnesses, natural born defects, etc, except we would say its bad luck. We cannot determine with 100% certainty in everything that we do. That’s why we take risks, and hoping things will turn out ok at the end. I do not believe in fate. We do have the power to make choices including risk taking and try to make things work out for us. We have the power to change gears in our lives, and not knowing if we would succeed in the end given all the factors and variables facing us in this ever increasing complex world. Will science someday be able to offer 100% certainty on everything? I claim not. Uncertainty is one of the traits of Mother Nature. We will never be able to defeat that. However, with the continual development of science, we will be able to uncover some parts of the uncertainty. As to why we are here to live and why there is something rather than nothing, I don’t think science can ever answer those questions satisfactorily. It just happens and that’s the way it is. If we ever resort the answer to a “God”, then why is He around and where did He come from? If we can’t answer that question, then what good is it to have that as the answer to everything?
Sean, you’re forgetting about Spinoza! (But, of course, no one else thought he was a theist…)
Determinismcontingency.