User-Friendly Naturalism Videos

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.

Mattering and Secular Communities: Rebecca Goldstein et al

The videos can be seen on the workshop web page, or on my YouTube channel. They’re divided into categories:

A lot of good stuff in there. Enjoy!

55 Comments

55 thoughts on “User-Friendly Naturalism Videos”

  1. As always, this is fantastic! Now, I wonder what our country would be like if your panel members ran the country?
    Great public education for all.
    Huge diplomatic core, putting an end to centuries old conflicts without war.
    Smallest military on record.
    Nationalized healthcare that works for everyone
    Gender equity
    Tolerance
    Inclusion
    Dare to dream

  2. This seems to bear out what I have always said, put a bunch of highly intelligent people in a room together and ask them to talk about free will and they will talk gibberish.

    Perhaps the subject should be off the agenda

    For the rest of the subjects they seem to be making quite a lot of sense.

  3. I rather enjoy the raw video format, and very much enjoyed these particular videos. But I certainly can see the convenience of having them broken down like this. Great for future reference. And I can appreciate the effort that it took!

  4. Thank’s for this great resource. Gia Mora’s done as much for moving naturalism forward as the participants.

  5. Christopher Wojcik

    This is great…though maybe I shouldn’t admit I’m glad the unedited versions exist because I’ve watched the whole thing!

    Hope you do another one like it some day.

  6. Sean — surely you mean “coarse graining”, not “course graining”?

    A great listen to DeDeo defending and clarifying.

  7. You are attempting to reject transcendence, the external derivation and calibration of our realities.

    So you guys have managed to convinced yourselves everything made itself ‘by accident’, to presume to use a slightly emotive term born of consciousness. You believe math, physical law, energy-matter and space-time conflated from nothing whatever (if not, you worship math-physics as eternal immutable realities, additionally having the power to substantiate universes). Then eventually abiogenesis occurred and conscious entities arose and developed. Yet despite that, in your worldview, you are able to meaningfully self-analyse and pontificate using the brain that ‘evolution’ gave you. That despite the fact that your thought processes are merely chemical processes in the evolved lump of matter popularly referred to as a brain. Those thought processes are themselves the outworking of undergirding deterministic mathematical-physical processes, and therefore cannot be considered to have ‘objectivity’. Within your worldview, there can be no transcendent reality for the states or conclusions of mind. Remember, basic physics wins in your worldview.

    Even if you convince yourselves that ‘evolution’ gives you a degree of ‘freedom’ from the constraints of hard physics determinism, you are left with a brain which evolved to survive and propagate by any means necessary, guile included, not to determine final truth about one’s existence.

    You guys are wandering around in the dark, if seen by people who accept transcendence. But you are also wandering round in the dark as people who reject it. Your worldview itself precludes you rationally and successfully evaluating and pronouncing on your worldview.

    All points more strongly than ever to a need for transcendence. Our consciousness is a granted phenomenon, with a reality external to the material paradigm.

  8. Very good! Thank you so much. I do not have the time to wade through long videos!

  9. Did the group ever try and articulate a clear definition of what naturalism is; the definition of the term as opposed to supernaturalism?
     
    I am personally partial to something like: naturalism is the thesis that there is nothing that is fundamentally mindlike; minds are the emergent result of something that is not fundamentally mindlike itself [atoms forming molecules forming cells forming neural networks interacting together]. I think you [SMC] articulated something like: “mind is process, not a substance”, in “The Big Picture”.
     
    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.

  10. For a definition of free will:

    “When considering a set of ostensibly possible but mutually exclusive future alternatives, there are at least some occasions when more than one of those alternatives is not already impossible and my conscious volition is what makes one alternative obtain over the others”.

    Also, it would be good if people who say that moral responsibility is consistent with determinism would clarify that they mean that people can be blamed or held morally responsible for things that they could not possibly have prevented.

  11. What a pleasant surprise and gift.
    Thank you Sean Carroll and Gia Mora.
    I’m pleased to be able to blab to others about their availability.
    Cheers.

  12. Thank you Sean and Gia Mora! What a wonderful privilege to be able to be a fly on the wall in such a setting and gathering. Yet while listening a disquieting feeling came over me every time one of the participants felt the need to mention the oblique or direct challenges, pressures and potential menace to many of the ideas under discussion from religious fundamentalists which six years on are all the more evident and present perhaps than in 2012. Was that moment in 2012 an apex of sorts which now has been past and we have already unknowingly stepped over an unseen threshold from which in the decades hence these intellectual achievements will become ignored, censored or worse effaced? Can we really pride ourselves on the ubiquity and security of archived knowlege in “clouds” or in hard drives that might not suffer the fate of the bulk of aquired knowlege from the ancient world so energetically destroyed by the barbarity of early Christians such as the Visigoths or possibly again in the future by their equally committed spiritually equivalent descendents? Scan the list of lost books of say just Thoephrastus: On the Astronomy of Democritus; On Indivisible Lines; On Physics(18books!);Of Botanical Researches(10 books)On Data; On Diversity of Sounds Made By Animals; On Wine and Oil; On Honey; OnTyranny.

  13. Blurry

    I think you’ll find most Christians of an academic persuasion these days are simply not interested in distorting hard fact, or in redefining sound notions of hard fact. Rather in questioning what actually is reasonably hard fact and what is not.

    They are certainly interested in where the endeavours of scientists, in terms of hypothesising, could have become unreliable, simply because scientists have pushed the scientific method beyond its region of high reliability. High reliability is where theories are highly deterministic of reality and highly definitive as explanations . There’s not a problem with trying to push the scientific method. Unless we do, further progress will not be made. But it needs doing with realism about the reasonableness of the assumptions being made and the solidity of the conclusions.

    If the suggested mechanisms of material reductionism are sometimes questionable, because their explanatory power fails in places, or variables and outcomes are uncertain or speculative, we can certainly continue to search for a mechanism giving more accord with solid data, and/or better predictive powers. However, if we misrepresent the reliability of our conclusions so far, it also has a bearing on how objectively we can attempt to answer the metaphysical questions of our existence. There are other indicators and models of the human condition to be considered than those supposedly derived from material reductionism.

    I wonder whether you can see that many Christians are able to hold positions where intellectual and analytical rigour is necessary by means of demonstrated competence. This is unambiguously the case. The areas where they question are areas where the evidence and conclusions are still highly uncertain. The reliability of some of these areas happens to have a major bearing on the possibility of, and nature of, an intelligent agent being behind the cosmos. Examples of these areas; cosmology, certainly as we approach the Planck time, the absolute nature of the spatial metric, abiogenesis, macro-evolution, origin of consciousness.

    To acknowledge uncertainty in science is not to trash science, and neither is it intended to quash further research or diminish current solid science.

  14. Simon thanks for your very well thought very generous comment. My concern wasn´t so much with believers within the scientific community as such, for whom I´m sure the weight and rules of experimental evidence are respected, valued and rigorously abided by, but rather an emerging hostile environment fomented for the worst opportunistic reasons by philistine politicians ,”religious” leaders or corporate interests. One only needs to recall the blitzkrieg attempt at wholesale scrubbing and destruction last year of decades of climate studies at the EPA in order to satisfy global warming deniers among Trump´s constituency and clearly satisfy the interests of the fossil fuel industry as well. There was also the inquistional purging of accepted scientific terminology at the CDCs. Neither efforts apparently succeeded because of rapid responses by concerned individuals to upload files into safer domains and pushback from the director of the CDCs. Bless them! However the attempts did happen brazenly in the open and were made with a zealous vigor. Imagine if this had been more serriptitiously done? This should be a matter of serious concern beyond whatever one´s personal charished beliefs might be. Knowlege can just become lost due to its organic form of preservation by fire, flood, war, or loss of interest and cultural change but history has shown it often to be the case that design, effort and intention were vital ingredients if by the First Qin Emperor( yes two copies, like Noah, of everything were squirreled away but later lost to warfare )or by maraudering early Christians such as Alaric or the efforts of a Scott Pruitt. Indeed there are myriad of open questions with multiple possible interpretations and science should often be richer in doubt ( But some laws are unalterably established such as entropy or no progress could have been made. Hey some of the drill is just plain fact no further interpretation needed.) than in absolute certainties which is the source of its validity and advancement. That some scientists can be hold a traditional faith in a “Creator” I don´t doubt is possible and I respect their holding it but that they could always strikes me as a form of intellectual and/ or emotional compartmentalization. I still have trouble getting my head around how it is that that can happen when one is equipped with the mental aptitudes and training which elude most of us (like myself) and I can only respect the greater more refined abilities of those who seem to have a good track record ( Yes, that I will take on “faith” given my ignorance.) in these matters and can demonstrate it. I have often thought that the necessary idea of a Creator always belied the deep anxiety and intuition that we do know we are, if not absolutly alone in the universe, then the enormously unbridgeable cold distances in between add up to the same thing and sensing that need, fill our solitude with that comforting idea. I often imagine if we ever did make contact with other sentient beings out there that I would hear the mellow voice of “The Dude” say, ” Yeah…it complicated lots of ins and outs… a few hot beach parties happening out there across the great Cosmos but like you know man…nobody else has found a sponsor yet either.”

    Thanks again for your comment. Best wishes….And thanks as always to Sean Carrol for this forum and “space”.

  15. Ethical and moral choices involve a particular kind of mental capacity, possessed only by humans, which is fundamentally purposeful in its nature. This stands in stark contrast to the accidental and nonteleological premise of naturalism/materialism. In regard to freewill, the problem for naturalists is that naturalism requires everything in the universe to be law-abiding (but not necessarily predictable, because certain of the natural laws are probabilistic). In contrast, freewill is a mental capacity that exists in certain animals which, by definition, is unconstrained by natural laws.

  16. @Simon:

    The areas where [Christians] question are areas where the evidence and conclusions are still highly uncertain. The reliability of some of these areas happens to have a major bearing on the possibility of, and nature of, an intelligent agent being behind the cosmos. Examples of these areas; cosmology, certainly as we approach the Planck time, the absolute nature of the spatial metric, abiogenesis, macro-evolution, origin of consciousness.

    So . . . what you’re basically saying is that there are gaps in our knowledge, and maybe God is hiding out in one or more of those gaps?

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