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.
If we are no more than intelligent animals, than why not experiment on those whose intelligence is weak, not much more than say an ape or monkey, or infants, maybe infants themselves? Was Josef Mengele guilty of a crime or should his experiments be accepted for the betterment of mankind, and we should be thankful for his forward thinking.
What happened before the big bang? God.
Tony,
See the second paragraph in comment #30. We don’t allow others to do such things because we value our own protection from being experimented on against our will. But, we DO experiment on those with a weak intelligence (to a certain limit) with various drugs for ADHD, ADD, Schizophrenia, Depression, Down Syndrome, Alzheimer’s, Dementia, etc. We don’t know the full effects of those drugs; that’s why you see all these commercials on tv for law suits against companies that make drugs to control neurological behavior. Those people have to choose to take those drugs; it is their choice to be experimented upon.
The attempt to goad people into a religious argument is covered in another post. There’s no mention of the big bang in the post above.
You people are awesome.
Yikes — no ecologists? OK, it’s certainly a superb group but I think your domain is missing one axis.
Interesting questions! Perhaps belief in God and morality are evolutionary advantaged human traits and therefore Naturalism – moral behavior – theism – and liking choc. ice cream can co-exist in the human mind.
Another question about consciousness might be ….why did the phenomena of consciousness happen to me? A possibly eternally evolving situation continued until My exclusive combination of atoms happened……Yours too…….but why am I here and you there? Without what I think of as God, something might exist here, but why would it be me?
On the time question it seems that inflation would appear to speed it up.
@83
To me it seems that it is the other way around.
sounds like a fun party/sorcerer convention
This is what happened before the Big Bang: http://youtu.be/9bZkp7q19f0
6. Peter Morgan Says:
October 11th, 2012 at 11:51 am
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?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_pantheism
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Modern science explains the world based on empiricism. When it is used to explain to us the Empire imaginary reality, ie, the essence of reality given. Rene Descartes said that reality never look the way we see it. Therefore, based on the error in the knowledge of science is shaping our image of all phenomena in nature. It is, without a doubt, our ideas about the world in which we live malformed. These facts can be experimentally proven. Hence the need to outdated methods of empirical findings replaced with new modern methods.