Some of you might be familiar with the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop I organized way back in 2012. For two and a half days, an interdisciplinary group of naturalists (in the sense of “not believing in the supernatural”) sat around to hash out the following basic question: “So we don’t believe in God, what next?” How do we describe reality, how can we be moral, what are free will and consciousness, those kinds of things. Participants included Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Terrence Deacon, Simon DeDeo, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Janna Levin, Massimo Pigliucci, David Poeppel, Nicholas Pritzker, Alex Rosenberg, Don Ross, and Steven Weinberg.
Happily we recorded all of the sessions to video, and put them on YouTube. Unhappily, those were just unedited proceedings of each session — so ten videos, at least an hour and a half each, full of gems but without any very clear way to find them if you weren’t patient enough to sift through the entire thing.
No more! Thanks to the heroic efforts of Gia Mora, the proceedings have been edited down to a number of much more accessible and content-centered highlights. There are over 80 videos (!), with a median length of maybe 5 minutes, though they range up to about 20 minutes and down to less than one. Each video centers on a particular idea, theme, or point of discussion, so you can dive right into whatever particular issues you may be interested in. Here, for example, is a conversation on “Mattering and Secular Communities,” featuring Rebecca Goldstein, Dan Dennett, and Owen Flanagan.
The videos can be seen on the workshop web page, or on my YouTube channel. They’re divided into categories:
- Introductions
- Consciousness
- Emergence and Reduction
- What Is Real?
- Morality
- Meaning
- Free Will
- Philosophy and Science
- Final Thoughts
A lot of good stuff in there. Enjoy!
@Simon:
If you agree with what the Nicene Creed says — “maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen” — then that implies that you agree that God is not composed of anything else, since then that something else would be something that God did not make.
It isn’t relevant to what I am trying to get at, to try and specify any further what God is. Regardless of the details of what you might think that “being” or “Person” mean, they imply that God is at least a mind, which is not itself composed of anything else.
Which is to say, by implication, God is supernatural by the definition that I suggested above, because God is a mind not composed of anything else. You have not offered any argument for why that definition might be incorrect or in applicable.
Owlmirror
‘If you agree with what the Nicene Creed says — “maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen” — then that implies that you agree that God is not composed of anything else, since then that something else would be something that God did not make.’
The way I take this is that the clause ‘all that is’ self-evidently excludes God himself, since you cannot make yourself. The ‘physical’ (whatever that might mean in this context, see John 5v37) form of God is therefore not addressed by this precept. God’s attribute of ‘aseity’ is the attribute of self-existence. It seems to be beyond the scope of causative modelling and therefore beyond proof or modelling by normal definitions of the scientific method.
‘Richard Carrier summarized it as: Hence, I propose a general rule that covers all and thus distinguishes naturalism from supernaturalism: If naturalism is true, everything mental is caused by the nonmental, whereas if supernaturalism is true, at least one thing is not.’
If there is a hard and mutually exclusive edge between the definitions then yes, this statement must be true. However, many people don’t use the words ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ in this way. They actually think and reason as if their thoughts had objective reality, even if they claim to be naturalists. For example the very fact that we assume we are having a meaningful discussion on ‘mind’ already suggests to me that we really believe at root level that we are in some way ‘over’ the merely physical. In other words, ‘mind’ is not simply something physics does to ‘us’. ‘Thinking’ is something we truly ‘do’. Is that a merely academic distinction? By that train of thought, if it’s valid, we are already supernatural, by your quoted definition, before we consider God and his realm.
Penrose has succinctly defined the ‘mind-matter (and maths)’ paradox as I mentioned before here. However he continues to search for an explanation for mind within the maths/physics paradigm.
(He leaves the interesting question of ‘how is the absolute veracity of maths ascertained’. In other words, does ‘maths’ also have the attribute of ‘aseity’).
@Simon:
If closed timelike curves are possible, self-creation might be possible. It’s wildly speculative, but I don’t think it’s quite at the point of being logically impossible.
Actually, I suspect that most of them do, and don’t realize it, just like you did.
Why wouldn’t thoughts have objective reality under naturalism? Thoughts are examples of the operation of the brain. Again, as long as we’re clear that thoughts are the result of a process, and are not some kind of separate substance, or the operation of a mindlike substance, we’re not being inconsistent.
Have you actually read any of Sean Carroll’s works? He is careful to emphasize that mind and consciousness and related phenomena are emergent processes of the physical, but are still nevertheless physical.
Even phrasing that way seems to assume that ‘we’ are somehow separate from the laws of physics. This might be something that you and other supernaturalists believe, but it is not correct under naturalism.
Mind is something that physics does; there is no ‘us’ distinct from physics, under naturalism.
Great to hear about the editing/organizing efforts. I watched the original videos all the way through, and discovered a lot of good books to read by the participants. Two of the best books I have ever read (ever!) were Jerry Coyne’s “Faith vs. Fact” and “Why Evolution Is True.”
When I saw the headline of this blog entry, I was hoping it would be about some new activity of some or all of the group.
Owlmirror
I’ve read/skimmed ‘the Big Picture’ and ‘From Eternity to Here’. I find Sean informative, polite and interesting at times but very far from definitive for me personally. You can spin many stories about the big picture without much likelihood of hard contradiction, paradoxically, especially if you know where the solid science actually is. As usual some of the evolutionary theorising is very implausible and some of it is wrong in places, e.g. the stuff about algorithmic optimisation I recently read.
As a former designer of digital systems which invariably are designed assuming the reality of a forward time continuum and when built use sequential time evolution I find his views on time hard to swallow.
If ‘you’ are not objectively separate to some degree from your physical representation, then neither is your ‘mind’ and its ‘thoughts’ separate from its physical representation. Just neurons buzzing in some meaningless way. Obviously I don’t agree.