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.
Does the “naturalistic” view excise meaning from life? Isn’t such meaning an illusion if you take naturalism to it’s logical conclusion? Yet we “feel” meaning. Illusion too?
I’d argue for something beyond the physical – a soul, spirit or whatever to account for this. It’s a pity there aren’t a couple of academic panellists at this workshop who could present this viewpoint.
@Mitchell Porter:
Consciousness is an illusion produced by the brain in the same sense that color is an illusion produced by the brain, there is no such thing as an objective color red it is just an internal representation of a certain portion of EM spectrum, what I see as red you could see as what I call blue and we would never know. But it’s not true that color doesn’t exist, it is an abstract internal representation of a certain property of the underlying reality (and it is extracted from it by real biophysical process).
In the similar sense consciousness is just an internal abstract representation produced by the brain of the underlying decision process of the brain (a complex biophysical process that is real). This representation is needed for self reference – future decisions need to be informed by prior ones so there is a need to represent and memorize them somehow. An “internal voice” turned out to be a good way to do so perhaps because it can take advantage of the same facilities used for remembering other voices.
So to drive this point home, if you wrote a computer program that constantly evaluated it’s inputs and produced decisions based on them and among it’s inputs were abstract representations of it’s past decisions this program would be conscious in the same sense that humans are conscious. Of course this simple consciousness wouldn’t have the form of an “internal voice” but it would still be there and have some form, talking about what form that would be is pointless in the same way as trying to describe how one experiences red color. They are internal representations which only make sense internally and there is no language that would allow us to express them in an objective way that would make sense externally.
Of course it doesn’t solve all the problems, the main puzzle that remains is how does the brain transform the underlying biophysical processes into the rich internal world, how does it translate one wavelength into “blue” and another into “red,” could we make us experience another completely new color just by rewiring neurons? And so on.
@Sean Carroll
“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”
‘Once I accept…’??!? No, I don’t think so. (damn, it’s that pesky free will thing again!!)
“………we need to figure out what can be salvaged and what has to go”
Who is this ‘We’ who will be determining what ‘can be salvaged and what has to go’ mein Herr Professor Doktor ? (damn, now my free will keeps repeating Achtung! Achtung!)
You do realize you are not acting like a scientist or a physicist anymore don’t you Sean? You have philosophically crossed a line into something else entirely…into a kind of advocacy the world has unfortunately seen many times before…and you are following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Marx, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, all of whom had such fine intentions how to help the rest of lowly humanity with our little ‘folk’ understanding problems. Once again I say, No, no thank you.
The market of ideas is not for you and your elite like minded to determine, dictate, prune, or control, it’s for ‘folks’ to look upon and decide for themselves as they excercise the very free will you are attempting to dissect in your impersonal ‘naturalist’ workshop (reductio ad absurdum 101).
I do hope you will take a step back and reconsider the ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ of YOUR choices and ideas. The fact that you have them to consider answers the question of their existence and relevence whether or not you understand their operation.
P.S. “Moving Naturalism Forward” sounds like communist/socialist/marxist agitprop. “Forward” appears in enough collectivist literature as to be considered a ‘buzzword’ and is a bad choice of wording for either a physicist, a president, or other down-low fellow travellers.
Christian Takacs thank you so much for your fine example of Argumentum ad Hitlerum.
Are you serious, or have I been Poed?
Christian Takacs, it is people like Dr. Carroll and the “elite like minded” to drag humanity kicking and screaming out of the cave and have us see reality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave
Sean, ignore the above comments. “Moving Naturalism Forward” is going to be a great workshop. It is far better than any organized religion which are cults.
@ Tony Sidaway,
Mentioning Hitler in an argument does not make it Argumentum ad Hitlerum, especially when the comparison is warranted. My father’s family was on the receiving end of Hitler’s fine reform efforts to educate what he considered ‘wrongful thinking’ and sadly many did not survive his…instruction, those that lived were given a refresher course by the Russian communists, so I am not amused when someone who has decided they know so much better than me decides he is going to school me in ‘correct thinking’. If one doesn’t want to be compared to a Nazi socialist, perhaps one shouldn’t use the language of a Nazi socialist, Vorwarts! Vorwarts! be damned. You might want to read up on other socialist/marxist campaign slogans as well and see if you recognize a trend. Google ‘forwards in politics’ if you are too lazy to research.
Snide comment aside, did you read anything in my argument besides the name ‘Hitler’? Sean Carroll’s list of topics for his workshop is directed at the specific purpose of promoting an agenda, he even says “we need to figure out what can be salvaged and what has to go” To what end? When a cosmic nihilist fingers the topics of free will, meaning, and morality, it doesn’t take a Phd graduate to figure out where they are going with it or what conclusion they have already drawn.
It’s pretty clear Mr. Carroll enjoys knocking on other people’s belief systems while he smugly hides behind his own ‘naturalist worldview’ epistemology that depends upon a very supernatural duality of mathematical platonism to function as the framework from which he hangs his empiricism. In short, Carroll hides the supernatural aspects or axioms of his own belief system (the essentially platonistic belief that math is the pure source or ‘essense’ of reality) while aggressively attacking others for their differing unhidden supernatural axioms of belief.
I have a feeling that this conference would have profited from people who have less of an axe to grind. No doubt they are a smart group, and they will find stuff to disagree about, but I have a feeling this might turn into a retreat of the preachers and choir – with inevitable results. If I put my worry more concretely, it would be this: You’ve picked a group of naturalists who agree too much about what counts as “moving forward”! If you were looking for genuine alternatives, you might have considered inviting atheists like Alain de Botton.
@William,
Oh yes, please, lets look at the allegory of the cave. Platonistic philosophy is the belief that a supernatural/spiritual or otherworldly reality that is somehow ideal/divine is the source and inspiration of all that happens in this reality. My dear Glaucon, Why on earth would you use this allegory as your argument when it makes my point and demolishes yours? If you believe to drag humanity kicking and screaming out of a cave to force them into seeing your point of view is enlightening imagery, please try very hard to imagine what they might do to you in return for this act? Forcing what you think is true on other people is not a persuasive argument, or even a valid argument, it is called Argumentum ad baculum, and it ALWAYS ends badly.
@David Lau,
Nothing wrong with showing your support, but you might consider reading up on the definition of organized religion and cults. They can intersect, but they aren’t the same thing. Also be aware that Sean belongs to an organized belief system too, and he most likely would not appreciate it being called a cult.
Christian Takacs , how is your argument different from saying “anyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi” ?
Also, I don’t see how anything is being forced on you. A bunch of people are getting together to discuss a bunch of stuff. That’s it. There are no repercussions for you, so I don’t understand why you are so upset.
@AI #52
Nice try 🙂
It’s a good attempt at “explaining” consciousness since we certainly don’t appear to be conscious as embryos or very young babies. It seems like a significant amount of mental representation of the world must be constructed in our neural machinery before we begin to experience consciousness.
However, a computer program is a determinisitic algorithm, and Bell theorems show that the universe isn’t (unless it is superdeterministic or nonlocal).
Also, in addition to this very strong counter evidence, you have to admit that it is a very depressing view of Nature. So combined with the good evidence that Nature is nondeterministic and the hope that existence isn’t meaningless, I believe consciousness requires more than deterministic self-reference.
Theist here, but with strong naturalist sympathies, for what it’s worth. Thanks for planning to put these out on the web.
I would like to second the thought that a wider variety of non-theist thinkers should be included. I’d have suggested more humanists (besides philosophers).
Big list, but a fairly uninteresting one from my standpoint, in that most of the answers to these questions are obvious. The fact that they’re being debated at all tells me that this is going to be more about philosophy and people who don’t want to give up their personal beliefs than actually looking to the evidence the universe has given us.
TL/DR summary: five no, one yes, one maybe, and two unknown
Free Will: No
Morality: Evolution/No
Meaning: Evolution/No
Purpose: No
Epistemology: No, because ‘true knowledge’ is ill defined
Emergence: It depends, this question is poorly worded
Consciousness: Good question. We won’t know without more research
Evolution: Yes, and poorly worded question
Determinism: Good question. It probably matters
The long answers:
Free will – Us humans like to act as though we have free will, but in reality we don’t. It’s an illusion. But just because it’s an illusion doesn’t mean we should act as though we don’t have any.
Morality – The origin of right and wrong is that we happened to evolve in/with an environment where adherence to certain social norms called ‘morals’ improved reproduction rate for those individuals who did so. There are no objective morals. At all.
Meaning – I live because my atoms and molecules happen to be arranged in a way that makes me want to live. There is no overarching meaning to be found in human existence.
Purpose – No. Teleological concepts play no useful role in our description of natural phenomena. Nature was not designed.
Epistemology – Science isn’t unique as a method for discovering knowledge. Other mechanisms, such as logic, can produce information without any need for our physical universe, for example in the cases of abstract mathematical systems. For discovering knowledge about our universe, there are many methods. However, science is far and away the most effective one that we’ve found. Ever.
Emergence – Reductionism ultimately provides the best description of complex systems, but other levels of description may be more tractable, usable, and useful. Other levels do not have autonomous existence, as they are derivable from the lowest level description by using the appropriate approximations.
Consciousness – How consciousness arises from the collective behavior of inanimate matter is currently an open question. We do not know exactly how, but we do know that nothing more than the particles and forces present in our universe are required.
Evolution – This question is too ill-defined to be meaningful as stated. Natural selection is already used in a number of non-biological areas. Subsuming it into a more general theory of complex systems seems to me nothing more than word play, as natural selection as a general process is a simple and well understood operation. It’s like asking if addition could be subsumed into a more general theory of complex systems.
Determinism – This question is probably worth asking, as we do not know, and if we could get a solid answer, it would explain a lot about how the universe works. For short term human existence, no, it doesn’t matter.
Sean knows very well that I am not calling his belief system a cult. I am simply referring to organized religion. So not to worry. This is to comment #60.
“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.”
Most truly religious people (ie, not using religion to justify violence) accept the saying “God answers all prayers; sometimes the answer is No.” Even if you look at the extreme example of today’s radical Islam/fascism, it’s clear that this is a political choice, not a religious one- made by male youths in repressive societies without education, jobs or social contact with young women. The Chinese govt worries about maintaining job growth for this demographic, otherwise they riot- and it’s got nothing to do with religion.
You think humans will behave differently in a “natural” world, compared to the present than one with the occasional “supernatural” event? On what basis?
@Pah 61
He’s pretending to be upset because he’s an idiot troll. That’s why
Would like to see more women represented. 5 to 12 doesn’t seem appropriate for the noble goals of this meeting. Also perhaps someone a little less white may also help. Some suggestions for women: Ophelia Benson, Jennifer Ouellette, Natalie Angiers, Carolyn Porco, Leslie Cannold, Naomi Oreskes, Amanda Pustilnik. Nonwhite: Michio Kaku, Neil deGrasse Tyson, VS Ramachandran, Jim Al-Khalili, Alom Shaha, Shirley Ann Jackson, Betty Harris, Nagendra Kumar Singh. I raise this as one extremely convinced of the necessity for this conference and excited by the prospect of downloading the footage when it becomes available.
I think you made the group of atheists very very small with your definitions of naturalists and atheists, Aren’t naturalists natural atheists too?
AI #52 says
“Consciousness is an illusion produced by the brain in the same sense that color is an illusion produced by the brain, there is no such thing as an objective color red it is just an internal representation of a certain portion of EM spectrum, what I see as red you could see as what I call blue and we would never know. But it’s not true that color doesn’t exist, it is an abstract internal representation of a certain property of the underlying reality (and it is extracted from it by real biophysical process).”
The colors we see may be internal to consciousness, but they are anything but “abstract”. Perhaps you touch on this in your conclusion:
“the main puzzle that remains is how does the brain transform the underlying biophysical processes into the rich internal world, how does it translate one wavelength into “blue” and another into “red,” could we make us experience another completely new color just by rewiring neurons?”
In other words, you are satisfied that at some level, the account you gave – it’s all about computational states of the brain, which track external properties (wavelengths) or internal properties (decision process) – is fundamentally correct; but it doesn’t actually explain any of the manifest features of experienced color or of consciousness in general. (I’m assuming that the “rich internal world” is a reference to experience itself, being contrasted with the “abstract internal representations” which play a causal role in your theory).
I suggest that it is the “rich internal world” itself (and the self which perceives it) which directly plays some of the causal roles you are ascribing to the “abstract representations”. This is a problem if you think like an ordinary physicist (and to some extent, if you think like an ordinary neuroscientist), because there are no “experienced colors”, “selves”, etc., in physics; they aren’t there, therefore they can’t play a causal role in a theory based on ordinary physics.
However, physics these days is quite rich in unusual mathematical structures, and we don’t really know the nature of the things which make up those structures, apart from their cause and effect. So what I’m suggesting is that the conscious mind is something which, if we were describing it using current physics, would be one of those unusual mathematical structures; but fundamentally it is what it seems – color, the flow of time, “meaning” and all those other aspects of consciousness which get reduced to math or to function, are the fundamental reality of consciousness, and it’s the math, and the usual physical description, which is the abstraction.
This approach is meant to get away from the dualism, whereby we have the “physical brain” and then the qualia, etc, as something extra. The structure of self-plus-qualia that makes up consciousness as we know it, *is* the true nature of the conscious part of the brain.
But this approach seems to be incompatible with the usual computational approach, which says that consciousness is a state machine whose implementation details don’t matter. That leads to dualism, because in that philosophy, you have the true, exact, detailed microphysical state of the brain, and then you have the coarse-grained “computational state”, and consciousness corresponds to the latter. Because of the coarse-graining, on this occasion you can’t avoid property dualism by identifying the physical entity with the psychological entity.
From all this I conclude that (1) nonclassical physics plays a role in conscious cognition (2) a generic simulation of a conscious mind isn’t necessarily conscious.
For fun, since others are doing it, I’ll have a go at some quickshot answers (saves having to read all those tedious philosophy books)
Free will. If people are collections of atoms obeying the laws of physics, is it sensible to say that they make choices?
Yes, if you assume physics is non-deterministic. Free-will/choice is then the evolution of a system capable of loading the dice wrt macroscopic probabilistic outcomes, without violating global unitary schrödinger evolution. If you assume only determinism, then no.
Morality. What is the origin of right and wrong? Are there objective standards?
Usefulness to functioning of society. Its origin is in evolution/education, since you have to teach babies not to hurt each other. Many animal species teach some basic morality to their young too.
Meaning. Why live? Is there a rational justification for finding meaning in human existence?
Yes, but you need to believe free-will, then you can be inspired by the creation of great art and contemplate the awesomeness of the possibilities for the future and your part in influencing it, even if it’s only to make another human being happy.
Purpose. Do teleological concepts play a useful role in our description of natural phenomena?
No, the future is undecided except for global evolution of a probabilistic wave-function and human/animal/alien free-will.
Epistemology. Is science unique as a method for discovering true knowledge?
Almost, but maths is too.Oh, and pure genius inspiration too!
Emergence. Does reductionism provide the best path to understanding complex systems, or do different levels of description have autonomous existence?
Each level has properties not describable in other levels, but I wouldn’t say that was autonomous existence. Reductionism may not be practical for many systems, and the simplest explanation will be a demonstration that it is emergent from a massively complex underlying system.
Consciousness. How do the phenomena of consciousness arise from the collective behavior of inanimate matter?
Probably a combination of neural modelling of inputs from external world and some yet unknown thing to science (ie something not explained by a theory of everything)
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?
Sure, aren’t genetic algorithms a big research area?
Determinism. To what extent is the future determined given quantum uncertainty and chaos theory, and does it matter?
In chaos theory the future is exactly determined but is unpredictable. In QM the future is not exactly determined but is predictable (at a macroscopic level). Luckily the world is quantum mechanical and it matters hugely, since it means the future is not yet decided, which gives everyone a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
How about having Ebben Alexander participate?
My 2ct,
Free will. The fundamental laws of physics are not deterministic. People’s free will is perfectly compatible with a stochastic universe.
Morality. The origin of right and wrong is biological survival encoded in our genes during evolution . I think that there is not objective standards.
Meaning. Why human existence requires a meaning?
Purpose. I do not know a single case where teleological concepts were useful.
Epistemology. It is a fact that scientific methods (do not confound with science) are optimal methods for discovering systematic (“true” is not the correct term) knowledge, but is difficult to say if we are already in the maximum of optimization or if we will discover better methods in the future.
Emergence. It is well-known that reductionism does not work for complex systems. But it is wrong to believe that the different levels of description have autonomous existence. The correct term is integrationism, as correctly noticed by Nobel laureate Jean Marie Lehn.
Consciousness. How do the phenomena of consciousness arise from the collective behavior of inanimate matter? Nobody knows still.
Evolution. The ideas of natural selection have already been usefully extended to areas outside of biology for example to selection of robust molecular entities in concrete chemical environments. Moreover, evolution is a subkind of the general theory of order through fluctuations.
Determinism. As explained above universe is stochastic. Determinism arise only as approximation. E.g. Schrödinger or Newtonian laws are only valid when we ignore such things as Poincaré resonances in physical systems as the Brussels school has shown recently.
42
Something tells me these questions have already been debated by plenty a smart naturalist and no progress has been made, nor ever will be made. Ironically, I find it very Occam’s Razor-ish to believe in Christ. It saves me the endless walking about in circles. And I can even explain why science works and why we find that the universe is suffused with beauty. Now, if that isn’t an appealing meta-narrative, I don’t know what is.
At the end of your workshop, stop by The Veritas Forum on the web. It’s a place where you can hear Christian intellectuals on their thinking about the very same questions. In the meantime, I’ll read about your thoughts on science, which I think are on firmer ground, with great interest.