[NB: This post is actually a repost of an essay I wrote back in 2008-- here.]
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) is a wild metaphysical ride-- imagine Tom Robbins for kids-- that takes the reader through multiple alternate universes, many of which appear to be variations on our own, but at least one of which features an earth on which no human life evolved (the mulefa of that world are sentient, but not human: imagine elephants on motorcycles). We encounter only an infinitesimal fraction of the universes out there; more are born every moment.
The manner in which Pullman's universes are born is boilerplate sci-fi (for a classic example, see Larry Niven's short story, "All the Myriad Ways," in his collection of the same title): as sentient beings are faced with choices, each choice results in a mitotic split by which new universes are born, each universe containing an alternate version of the sentient being who has passed beyond the moment of choice. If a certain Being X has twenty possible choices at a given moment, then twenty different universes will be born, each one instantiating one of those twenty choices. Of course, assuming the existence of libertarian free will, each sentient individual actually faces an infinity of possible actions each moment, so each individual is "producing" infinities upon infinities of universes every moment. If you think that's complicated, apply that scenario to every sentient being.
The idea that we live in an ever-burgeoning froth of universes is evocative, but is also, in my opinion, unworkable. I want to talk first about the narrative problems it poses for Pullman's plot (this will require explaining the story a bit), and later on about the philosophical problems inherent in a frothy metaphysic.
1. Narrative Problems
Pullman obviously can't lead us through every single universe; for his story to have any coherence, he must confine his narrative to just a few universes. The ones we encounter are:
1. Lyra Belacqua's world
2. Will Parry's world (which is also our world)
3. The world of Cittàgazze (characterized by the predominance of Italian culture, the presence of Coca Cola, and the general lack of adults in the big cities)
4. The world of Lord Asriel's fortress
5. The world of the mulefa, where Mary Malone constructs her amber spyglass
Beings from other universes appear in the story, but we never visit those places.
All the parallel/alternate universes are connected, however, by the existence of Dust, which is particles of consciousness. When matter evolves to the point where sentience appears, there Dust is found. The universes are also connected to the Abyss: interdimensional explosions that rip the fabric of space-time can create holes in many alternate worlds at once, and the Dust from those worlds will begin to drain into that singular Abyss.
It is possible that the universes are also connected "at the top": the idea that all the universes are the products of a single creator God is alluded to in the books, although God is never actually seen, and God's existence is never confirmed. Much of the story focuses instead on The Authority, the first and greatest angel to be formed from the coalescence of Dust. The Authority crowned himself God and told all who followed that he was the creator.
Angels can pass easily between alternate universes without disturbing the overall frothy structure of the Great Metaphysic (my term for the sum total of all universes, not Pullman's). It seems that angels, despite being the most highly sentient of sentient beings, do not produce new universes with their choices. Pullman never directly addresses this issue. Humans, too, can pass from one universe to another; in fact, many doors between worlds remain open because the humans who created them have forgotten to reclose them.
If I've read Pullman correctly, the human ability to travel between worlds began about three hundred years ago in the world of Cittàgazze, where someone or a group of someones created a tool called the "subtle knife." The blade is of modest size and two-edged; one edge cuts through any material (reminiscent of a lightsaber); the other edge, when the proper owner of the knife achieves the correct state of mind, cuts through the fabric of one's universe and, depending on the direction of one's concentration, can slice a window or hole into an alternate world. Shifts in cuts and concentration are what allow the knife wielder to open doors to different worlds. A conscientious user of the knife can step through the threshold and reseal the tear, if he so wishes.
But over the course of three centuries, the various users of the subtle knife have secretly entered different universes, pilfering items and technologies found in them, often leaving the doors between worlds open. Each tear allows a little of the Abyss to peek through, and soul-eating Specters, the children of the Abyss, are created every time a cut with the subtle knife is made. As a result, a good part of the trilogy is devoted to the question of how to repair the open doors, stanch the flow of Dust into the Abyss, and stop the spread of the Specters.
It's all quite complicated, and I'm afraid it's also unworkable from a narrative point of view. The problem is this: if there's one Cittàgazze world, there are many-- an infinity of them, in fact. The moment the subtle knife was created, there wouldn't have been only one such knife, as Pullman's story implies: there would have been an infinity of them, too, with an infinity of people doing an infinite amount of damage to the Great Metaphysic. The plot of the trilogy wraps itself up far too neatly (and happily), and this is problematic because Pullman obviously wants to write a smart story for smart kids, a story that works on many levels. Astute young readers will catch on to the same problems I'm talking about here, and will have the same doubts about the conclusion of Pullman's trilogy.
With a blossoming infinity of subtle knives out there, a simple resolution is quite impossible. How would you track down and stop the wielders when each wielder is producing an infinity of new wielders at every moment? I conclude that Pullman bit off more than he could chew when he decided on such a freewheeling many-worlds scenario for his story. He could have avoided the chaos by hewing to a more modest alternate-universe paradigm, such as can be found in CS Lewis's Narnia series, where God's anteroom is a forest filled with still pools of water, each pool a gateway to a self-contained universe, and little to no interpenetration between universes except whatever God allows. Pullman could also have gone for an even more restricted scenario, such as the one in Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, which deals with only one alternate world created by a being who, in our world, appears to be a Hindu monk. In terms of narrative, neatness counts, and the more I think about Pullman's story, the less I like this aspect of it. What a contrast with that other well-known series, the Harry Potter heptalogy! JK Rowling offers us only one world, one with quite enough action to keep us occupied, thank you very much. When put next to Pullman's trilogy, Rowling's series looks relentlessly linear.
2. Philosophical Problems
Now let's turn to the matter of the frothy metaphysic itself.
I'm a big fan of Occam's Razor, which states that we should "not multiply entities beyond necessity." This is normally interpreted to mean "the simplest, most elegant explanation for a given state of affairs is probably the correct one," but in the case of Pullman's Great Metaphysic, there's no need to reinterpret Occam: Pullman's story quite literally multiplies entities beyond necessity!
But let's think for a moment in terms of simple, elegant explanations. Which explanation for the current state of affairs strikes you as simpler and more elegant?
1. There is only one universe.
2. There is an infinity of universes, with new ones being created all the time as sentient beings make choices.
The idea that this one reality (and there can only ever be one reality, as I explained back in this post) contains one universe strikes me intuitively as correct. Parallel universes seem to me to feed an anthropocentric need to spread our egos as far and wide as possible: what a nice fantasy to think that somewhere out there is an alternate Kevin who is at this very moment sipping Mai Tais and surrounded by gorgeous women!
So the froth model seems to fail the test of Occam's Razor, a truly subtle knife if ever there was one. I also think the notion of a frothing reality presents us with a problem only vaguely alluded to earlier: the problem of freedom.
Freedom, conventionally defined, is the ability to do otherwise than what one has done. This suggests that, at a given choice-moment, there is the actual choice made and, potentially, an infinity of counterfactuals, the ghosts of alternatives unexplored. In the froth model, however, there are no counterfactuals: all possibilities are actualized! Stepping back to the God's-eye view, we can see that this means there is no freedom, no shadowy "otherwise." Those "otherwises" actually exist in-- as-- other worlds.
Let's simplify the situation and pretend that at moment M, when Kevin makes a choice, reality suddenly switches to the froth model, and that only Kevin is the generator of universes. What this means, from the God's-eye perspective, is that Kevin is a being whose true shape spreads across a multiverse and resembles a great, branching structure. That structure contains no potentiality, because every single one of Kevin's choices is actualized in some universe somewhere. The shape of this structure is therefore fixed: the branch-Kevin, taken as a whole, is not free. If we follow Kevin along only one world-line, we can see how he might think of himself as free-- how, from his limited perspective, he might come to regret the would-haves and could-haves in his life. But Kevin in his entirety, the infinitely ramified Kevin, isn't free at all: his plural existences cover all possibilities, leaving no counterfactuals.
I somehow doubt that reality is this complicated. I may be wrong, but Occam's Razor is quite persuasive: it's more fruitful to think we all inhabit a single, non-frothing reality, and that counterfactuals, whatever they are and whatever their ontological status, drop away as we pass through each moment of choice.* It also makes little sense, thermodynamically speaking, to say that we, or that our decisions, somehow create whole universes. Easier to adopt the creaturely view that we arise out of a universal matrix, retain some coherence for a time, and then slough back into the cosmic churning-- scattered and dissipated, and never to return exactly as we were.
In conclusion, then: while I found Pullman's trilogy to be a great read, it may have failed in the exploration of one of its most central ideas-- the notion of a ramifying multiverse. The neat conclusion of the trilogy did not take the metaphysic seriously enough, and as a result, the conclusion rang false.
*The same could be said for quantum-level fluctuations in the structure of abiotic matter. Why should sentience be the sole producer of universes?
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Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Friday, April 20, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
agree and disagree
I've been a faithful reader of the writings of Dr. William Vallicella for years. He and I have some fundamental disagreements, but I admire the clarity of his writing and can appreciate the reasonableness of his positions. His recent post on Daniel Dennett, anthropomorphism, and the "deformation" of the God-concept offers a good example of how I can read a "Vallicellian" essay and come away both agreeing and disagreeing with its various claims.
A bit of background: Vallicella is a theist, i.e., he believes that ultimate reality is personal. Regarding the status of human beings, he advocates a point of view that he styles ontotheological personalism. The onto- comes from the Greek on/ontos, which means "being/existence." (The terms ontology and ontological are central to most Western philosophy.) The personalism in question is, roughly, the idea that there is something about human beings that is irreducibly personal, i.e., people cannot be explained fully by scientific/empirical examination and analysis; their personhood can't be broken down into smaller parts. This personalism has its being (ontos) grounded in God (theos): hence ontotheological personalism.
This puts Vallicella in conflict with scientific atheists who believe, like philosopher Daniel Dennett, that the human mind can be explained in purely physical terms (i.e., brain activity). On his blog, Vallicella routinely critiques physicalism, the philosophy of mind that says The mind is what the brain does. Lately, he has also been writing on the spectrum of possible God-concepts, ranging from a God that is utterly physical and totally anthropomorphic to a God that is so depersonalized as to be no more than an abstract concept. Vallicella wishes to avoid these two extremes.
My own theological orientation is far different from Vallicella's. While I consider myself Christian, this is more of a sociological designation than a theological one: I've been too steeped in Asian philosophy to be a theological Christian. There's very little, in terms of Christian doctrine, that I literally believe; my own sympathies, at this point, are mostly with scientific skeptics and philosophically inclined Taoists and Buddhists; I haven't been a classical theist for a long time (I'd call myself a nontheist, i.e., someone for whom the question "Does God exist?" has no rational, discursive answer). I see reality as an intercausal being-in-process and take a very dim view of most shows of religious piety. My own philosophy of mind is probably much closer to Dennett's than it is to Vallicella's: I see the mind as something that arises from the brain; it is, in fact, utterly dependent on the brain for its existence. At the same time, I'm not so naïve as to think that the brain's activity is totally predictable: cogitation, being a supervenient phenomenon (i.e., something that arises from a lower stratum of being), follows its own rules. As author Robert Pirsig analogized it in his book Lila (I'm taking some liberties, here): it's like the difference between computer hardware and software-- each follows its own rules, but software depends on the hardware for its functioning.
With that background in place, let's turn to Vallicella's post on Dennett, anthropomorphism, and the "deformation" of the God-concept. He writes:
I think Vallicella has a point, here. Atheists, especially these days as the so-called New Atheism gains in popularity, seem unable to acknowledge that modern folk might actually conceptualize ultimate reality in ways that are philosophically and morally sophisticated. This is unfortunate, because it does indeed mean the atheists are furiously attacking straw men as opposed to real targets. There can't be any real dialogue when people insist on talking past each other. I'd add that this problem isn't confined to the atheists: religious folk too often attack science before they've made the effort to understand it. One example might be the Christian fundamentalist's dismissal of evolutionary theory because "the probability that development X or Y could have occurred is infinitesimally small." This sort of argument shows great ignorance about the massive timescales on which biologists have to think when pondering the phenomenon of evolution. No legitimate scientist believes evolution is a theory: there are theories of evolution, but evolution itself is a fact. (To his credit, Vallicella has no problem with the idea that humans evolved. He's a philosophical theist, not a religious fundamentalist.)
Later on, Vallicella writes:
Here, too, I agree with Vallicella's analysis of Dennett. This is indeed a popular form of attack on theism. Dennett might be accused, here, of committing the fallacy of the excluded middle: he's offering two stark alternatives on the (false) assumption that no middle-ground option is available.
Thus far, I've been in agreement with Vallicella, not because I'm a theist as he is, but because his accusations against Dennett strike me as reasonable. Dennett could have strengthened his own arguments by targeting a more philosophically sophisticated concept of God. Attacking the God of scriptural literalists is far too easy. (Dennett might shoot back that the world is full of scriptural literalists, which would be a fair point!) But Vallicella also makes some claims with which I disagree. To wit:
This is where Vallicella and I part ways. First, I find his dismissal of Tillich's theology to be overly hasty. Tillich was, in my opinion, saying something quite meaningful in defining God as "ultimate concern." The phrase was never intended to mean, the way his detractors argued, that "If golf is my ultimate concern, because I think about it all the time, then golf is effectively my God." The word "ultimate," as used by Tillich, still refers to that which lies at the utterest edge of reality. Golf, while entertaining, doesn't fit that criterion. The term "concern," too, was well chosen, for this is what human beings, at their best, are supposed to embody: concern for others, for the world, for all of existence. Concern involves an outward turn-- what theologian John Hick might call a shift from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness. Ultimate concern, then, is concern about the ultimate. How is this so different from what other philosophers and mystics have said and written?
I also disagree completely with Vallicella's characterization of neuroscience. For him, neuroscience will never "teach us anything about consciousness." The reality, though, is that neuroscientific theories are paving the way for us to make machines-- robots-- whose behaviors are becoming increasingly complex. If one definition of "intelligence" is "problem-solving ability," then by that standard we have been building increasingly intelligent machines for years. Soon, intelligence will come to mean more than the ability to win at chess or participate in a Jeopardy! competition: it will mean the advent of machines that react without confusion in fluid social or physical situations. While true machine consciousness is probably a long way off, I don't see its realization as an impossible goal. Intelligence isn't consciousness, but it's a vital component of consciousness. One day, a machine is going to stare at us with the same speculative curiosity we train on it.
My point is that the increasing complexity of machine behaviors is the result of scientific theories that are grounded in a naturalistic (or, more precisely, physicalist) philosophy of mind. If mind is indeed utterly dependent on matter, as I believe it is, then we will one day be able to arrange matter in such a way as to form minds. This won't convince the diehard substance dualists,* of course; they'll go on believing that mind is somehow independent of matter without ever being able to explain how a particular mind is connected to a particular body. Unfortunately, their philosophy of mind can promise no progress: you can't strive to create artificial intelligence if you believe it's inherently unachievable.
As I wrote in Water from a Skull, the problem for people in Vallicella's camp is that they are participating in willful ignorance about the nature of mind. They spend their time critiquing the constructive efforts being made by scientists, while offering no new insights of their own. Their stance is little more than a case against physicalism; there's no real case for substance dualism. In fact, for their stance to hold water, they have to deny that mind, consciousness, has a knowable nature. The so-called "zombie" problem in philosophy of mind makes this clear.
Imagine a being that looks and acts perfectly human, yet has no actual consciousness-- no real feelings, no true sense of selfhood, nothing that comes with possessing an ego. It might cry, but that act is merely an observable behavior, indicating nothing about the being's inner reality. It might laugh at jokes, but that's also no indication that it's experiencing the humor behind the joke. That hypothetical being is called a zombie by philosophers, and there's a big debate over whether zombies can possibly exist. The TV series Battlestar Galactica (and, before it, the movie Blade Runner) dealt with the zombie problem. Are the Cylons, who were created by humans and who look and act just like them, actual persons? Or are they "toasters"-- lifeless robots that merely simulate humans? The TV show ends up promoting the idea that Cylons are people, too: they have thoughts, feelings, inner lives. They're capable of love and hate; they have dreams and ambitions.
Let's snap back to our own reality. Imagine an AI (artificial intelligence) expert talking with a substance dualist about the possibility of creating Cylon-like artificial life. "All you'll end up creating is a zombie!" declares the substance dualist. "It won't have sentience! No feelings, no real self-awareness, no interiority!" "And you know this how?" asks the AI expert. "Can we ever design a test to detect consciousness?" "No!" blusters the dualist. You see, the substance dualist is trying argue two things at once: (1) that we'll never know whether we've created a true machine consciousness, and (2) that whatever we create will be a zombie. Obviously, these two prongs are contradictory, but let's concentrate on the first prong.
Dualists can't argue that "we'll never know whether the being's really conscious" unless they're convinced that the nature of mind is essentially unknowable, i.e., that we'll always be ignorant about mind. If you want to make a test to determine whether someone has a disease, you have to know the markers for the disease in question: you have to know something about the disease's nature. The more you know, the more accurate the test. By the same token, if you want to know whether something has a mind, you have to know something about the nature of consciousness. It's a lame cop-out to argue that we can never know what mind is, but that's basically what substance dualists have been doing for years, and it's the only argument they've got. All the other arguments they make against physicalism are in support of this basic thesis.
Vallicella's positions are always well thought-out and reasonable, but there are some areas in which he and I are doomed, I think, to eternal disagreement. Philosophy of mind is one of those areas; theism is another. He thinks the physicalists are blinded by their scientistic ideology; physicalists see him (and substance dualists in general) as deliberately ignoring the evidence of science. I'm willing to grant that the mind remains a mystery, but I believe the mystery isn't indissoluble.
It's possible to respect people with whom one disagrees, and even to learn from them. To any students who might have taken the time to read this meditation: I hope you find yourselves challenged and invigorated by the different points of view that you'll run across in your high school and college readings. I hope you encounter thinkers who make you angry, who challenge your assumptions, who shock you into looking at the world from a different perspective. I hope you enrich your own lives by incorporating those perspectives into your own. Life is all about growth and constructive change, but sometimes the best change involves the tearing-down of old mental paradigms so that new, more robust paradigms can replace them. I hope your perspective matures as you wrestle with various authors, and that you never dismiss the entirety of a thinker's argument simply because you dislike parts of it. A mature viewpoint involves an appreciation of the world's complexity. Beware black-and-white solutions to complicated problems.
As process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said: "Seek simplicity, and distrust it."
*Substance dualism, a perspective most famously laid out by philosopher René Descartes (he of cogito ergo sum fame), is the belief that mind and matter are substantially different from each other. Thoughts are mental phenomena, not physical. Substance dualists come in different shapes and sizes; many of them would argue that there is some sort of mind-brain connection, but even the dualists who acknowledge this connection would say that there remains a fundamental difference between, as Descartes called them, res cogitans (mental phenomena) and res extensa (physical phenomena). Vallicella has never overtly called himself a substance dualist, but he repeatedly expresses sympathy with their point of view.
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A bit of background: Vallicella is a theist, i.e., he believes that ultimate reality is personal. Regarding the status of human beings, he advocates a point of view that he styles ontotheological personalism. The onto- comes from the Greek on/ontos, which means "being/existence." (The terms ontology and ontological are central to most Western philosophy.) The personalism in question is, roughly, the idea that there is something about human beings that is irreducibly personal, i.e., people cannot be explained fully by scientific/empirical examination and analysis; their personhood can't be broken down into smaller parts. This personalism has its being (ontos) grounded in God (theos): hence ontotheological personalism.
This puts Vallicella in conflict with scientific atheists who believe, like philosopher Daniel Dennett, that the human mind can be explained in purely physical terms (i.e., brain activity). On his blog, Vallicella routinely critiques physicalism, the philosophy of mind that says The mind is what the brain does. Lately, he has also been writing on the spectrum of possible God-concepts, ranging from a God that is utterly physical and totally anthropomorphic to a God that is so depersonalized as to be no more than an abstract concept. Vallicella wishes to avoid these two extremes.
My own theological orientation is far different from Vallicella's. While I consider myself Christian, this is more of a sociological designation than a theological one: I've been too steeped in Asian philosophy to be a theological Christian. There's very little, in terms of Christian doctrine, that I literally believe; my own sympathies, at this point, are mostly with scientific skeptics and philosophically inclined Taoists and Buddhists; I haven't been a classical theist for a long time (I'd call myself a nontheist, i.e., someone for whom the question "Does God exist?" has no rational, discursive answer). I see reality as an intercausal being-in-process and take a very dim view of most shows of religious piety. My own philosophy of mind is probably much closer to Dennett's than it is to Vallicella's: I see the mind as something that arises from the brain; it is, in fact, utterly dependent on the brain for its existence. At the same time, I'm not so naïve as to think that the brain's activity is totally predictable: cogitation, being a supervenient phenomenon (i.e., something that arises from a lower stratum of being), follows its own rules. As author Robert Pirsig analogized it in his book Lila (I'm taking some liberties, here): it's like the difference between computer hardware and software-- each follows its own rules, but software depends on the hardware for its functioning.
With that background in place, let's turn to Vallicella's post on Dennett, anthropomorphism, and the "deformation" of the God-concept. He writes:
One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)
Why speak of deformation rather than of reformation, transformation, or refinement?
I think Vallicella has a point, here. Atheists, especially these days as the so-called New Atheism gains in popularity, seem unable to acknowledge that modern folk might actually conceptualize ultimate reality in ways that are philosophically and morally sophisticated. This is unfortunate, because it does indeed mean the atheists are furiously attacking straw men as opposed to real targets. There can't be any real dialogue when people insist on talking past each other. I'd add that this problem isn't confined to the atheists: religious folk too often attack science before they've made the effort to understand it. One example might be the Christian fundamentalist's dismissal of evolutionary theory because "the probability that development X or Y could have occurred is infinitesimally small." This sort of argument shows great ignorance about the massive timescales on which biologists have to think when pondering the phenomenon of evolution. No legitimate scientist believes evolution is a theory: there are theories of evolution, but evolution itself is a fact. (To his credit, Vallicella has no problem with the idea that humans evolved. He's a philosophical theist, not a religious fundamentalist.)
Later on, Vallicella writes:
Dennett's view is that the "original monotheists" thought of God as a being one could literally listen to, and literally sit beside. (206) If so, the "original monotheists" thought of God as a physical being: "The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful." (206, emphasis in original). The suggestion here is that monotheism in its original form, prior to deformation, posited a Big Guy in the Sky, a human being Writ Large, something most definitely made in the image of man, and to that extent an anthropomorphic projection.
What Dennett is implying is that the original monotheistic conception of God had a definite content, but that this conception was deformed and rendered abstract to the point of being emptied of all content. Dennett is of course assuming that the only way the concept of God could have content is for it to have a materialistic, anthropomorphic content. Thus it is not possible on Dennett's scheme to interpret the anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament in a figurative way as pointing to a purely spiritual reality which, as purely spiritual, is neither physical nor human. Dennett thereby simply begs the question against every sophisticated version of theism.
Dennett seems in effect to be confronting the theist with a dilemma. Either your God is nothing but an anthropomorphic projection or it is is so devoid of recognizable attributes as to be meaningless. Either way, your God does not exist. Surely there is no Big Guy in the Sky, and if your God is just some Higher Power, some unknowable X, about which nothing can be said, then what exactly are you affirming when you affirm that this X exists? Theism is either the crude positing of something as unbelievable as Santa Claus or Wonder Woman, or else it says nothing at all.
Either crude anthropomorphism or utter vacuity. Compare the extremes of the spectrum of positions I set forth in Anthropomorphism in Religion.
Here, too, I agree with Vallicella's analysis of Dennett. This is indeed a popular form of attack on theism. Dennett might be accused, here, of committing the fallacy of the excluded middle: he's offering two stark alternatives on the (false) assumption that no middle-ground option is available.
Thus far, I've been in agreement with Vallicella, not because I'm a theist as he is, but because his accusations against Dennett strike me as reasonable. Dennett could have strengthened his own arguments by targeting a more philosophically sophisticated concept of God. Attacking the God of scriptural literalists is far too easy. (Dennett might shoot back that the world is full of scriptural literalists, which would be a fair point!) But Vallicella also makes some claims with which I disagree. To wit:
Dennett's Dilemma -- to give it a name -- is quite reasonable if you grant him his underlying naturalistic and scientistic (not scientific) assumptions, namely, that there is exactly one world, the physical world, and that (future if not contemporary) natural science provides the only knowledge of it. On these assumptions, there simply is nothing that is not physical in nature. Therefore, if God exists, then God is physical in nature. But since no enlightened person can believe that a physical God exists, the only option a sophisticated theist can have is to so sophisticate and refine his conception of God as to drain it of all meaning. And thus, to fill out Dennett's line of thought in my own way, one ends up with pablum such as Tillich's talk of God as one "ultimate concern." If God is identified as the object of one's ultimate concern, then of course God, strictly speaking, does not exist. Dennett and I will surely agree on this point.
But why should we accept naturalism and scientism? It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain, but it takes a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-consciousness, intentionality, and the rest.
This is where Vallicella and I part ways. First, I find his dismissal of Tillich's theology to be overly hasty. Tillich was, in my opinion, saying something quite meaningful in defining God as "ultimate concern." The phrase was never intended to mean, the way his detractors argued, that "If golf is my ultimate concern, because I think about it all the time, then golf is effectively my God." The word "ultimate," as used by Tillich, still refers to that which lies at the utterest edge of reality. Golf, while entertaining, doesn't fit that criterion. The term "concern," too, was well chosen, for this is what human beings, at their best, are supposed to embody: concern for others, for the world, for all of existence. Concern involves an outward turn-- what theologian John Hick might call a shift from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness. Ultimate concern, then, is concern about the ultimate. How is this so different from what other philosophers and mystics have said and written?
I also disagree completely with Vallicella's characterization of neuroscience. For him, neuroscience will never "teach us anything about consciousness." The reality, though, is that neuroscientific theories are paving the way for us to make machines-- robots-- whose behaviors are becoming increasingly complex. If one definition of "intelligence" is "problem-solving ability," then by that standard we have been building increasingly intelligent machines for years. Soon, intelligence will come to mean more than the ability to win at chess or participate in a Jeopardy! competition: it will mean the advent of machines that react without confusion in fluid social or physical situations. While true machine consciousness is probably a long way off, I don't see its realization as an impossible goal. Intelligence isn't consciousness, but it's a vital component of consciousness. One day, a machine is going to stare at us with the same speculative curiosity we train on it.
My point is that the increasing complexity of machine behaviors is the result of scientific theories that are grounded in a naturalistic (or, more precisely, physicalist) philosophy of mind. If mind is indeed utterly dependent on matter, as I believe it is, then we will one day be able to arrange matter in such a way as to form minds. This won't convince the diehard substance dualists,* of course; they'll go on believing that mind is somehow independent of matter without ever being able to explain how a particular mind is connected to a particular body. Unfortunately, their philosophy of mind can promise no progress: you can't strive to create artificial intelligence if you believe it's inherently unachievable.
As I wrote in Water from a Skull, the problem for people in Vallicella's camp is that they are participating in willful ignorance about the nature of mind. They spend their time critiquing the constructive efforts being made by scientists, while offering no new insights of their own. Their stance is little more than a case against physicalism; there's no real case for substance dualism. In fact, for their stance to hold water, they have to deny that mind, consciousness, has a knowable nature. The so-called "zombie" problem in philosophy of mind makes this clear.
Imagine a being that looks and acts perfectly human, yet has no actual consciousness-- no real feelings, no true sense of selfhood, nothing that comes with possessing an ego. It might cry, but that act is merely an observable behavior, indicating nothing about the being's inner reality. It might laugh at jokes, but that's also no indication that it's experiencing the humor behind the joke. That hypothetical being is called a zombie by philosophers, and there's a big debate over whether zombies can possibly exist. The TV series Battlestar Galactica (and, before it, the movie Blade Runner) dealt with the zombie problem. Are the Cylons, who were created by humans and who look and act just like them, actual persons? Or are they "toasters"-- lifeless robots that merely simulate humans? The TV show ends up promoting the idea that Cylons are people, too: they have thoughts, feelings, inner lives. They're capable of love and hate; they have dreams and ambitions.
Let's snap back to our own reality. Imagine an AI (artificial intelligence) expert talking with a substance dualist about the possibility of creating Cylon-like artificial life. "All you'll end up creating is a zombie!" declares the substance dualist. "It won't have sentience! No feelings, no real self-awareness, no interiority!" "And you know this how?" asks the AI expert. "Can we ever design a test to detect consciousness?" "No!" blusters the dualist. You see, the substance dualist is trying argue two things at once: (1) that we'll never know whether we've created a true machine consciousness, and (2) that whatever we create will be a zombie. Obviously, these two prongs are contradictory, but let's concentrate on the first prong.
Dualists can't argue that "we'll never know whether the being's really conscious" unless they're convinced that the nature of mind is essentially unknowable, i.e., that we'll always be ignorant about mind. If you want to make a test to determine whether someone has a disease, you have to know the markers for the disease in question: you have to know something about the disease's nature. The more you know, the more accurate the test. By the same token, if you want to know whether something has a mind, you have to know something about the nature of consciousness. It's a lame cop-out to argue that we can never know what mind is, but that's basically what substance dualists have been doing for years, and it's the only argument they've got. All the other arguments they make against physicalism are in support of this basic thesis.
Vallicella's positions are always well thought-out and reasonable, but there are some areas in which he and I are doomed, I think, to eternal disagreement. Philosophy of mind is one of those areas; theism is another. He thinks the physicalists are blinded by their scientistic ideology; physicalists see him (and substance dualists in general) as deliberately ignoring the evidence of science. I'm willing to grant that the mind remains a mystery, but I believe the mystery isn't indissoluble.
It's possible to respect people with whom one disagrees, and even to learn from them. To any students who might have taken the time to read this meditation: I hope you find yourselves challenged and invigorated by the different points of view that you'll run across in your high school and college readings. I hope you encounter thinkers who make you angry, who challenge your assumptions, who shock you into looking at the world from a different perspective. I hope you enrich your own lives by incorporating those perspectives into your own. Life is all about growth and constructive change, but sometimes the best change involves the tearing-down of old mental paradigms so that new, more robust paradigms can replace them. I hope your perspective matures as you wrestle with various authors, and that you never dismiss the entirety of a thinker's argument simply because you dislike parts of it. A mature viewpoint involves an appreciation of the world's complexity. Beware black-and-white solutions to complicated problems.
As process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said: "Seek simplicity, and distrust it."
*Substance dualism, a perspective most famously laid out by philosopher René Descartes (he of cogito ergo sum fame), is the belief that mind and matter are substantially different from each other. Thoughts are mental phenomena, not physical. Substance dualists come in different shapes and sizes; many of them would argue that there is some sort of mind-brain connection, but even the dualists who acknowledge this connection would say that there remains a fundamental difference between, as Descartes called them, res cogitans (mental phenomena) and res extensa (physical phenomena). Vallicella has never overtly called himself a substance dualist, but he repeatedly expresses sympathy with their point of view.
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Saturday, February 4, 2012
Sam Harris on "the fireplace delusion"
Atheist thinker Sam Harris tries to offer fellow atheists a taste of what it's like to have cherished beliefs challenged as he attacks the notion that sitting before a fireplace on a cold winter's evening is a wholesome experience.
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