tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-252680312024-03-14T01:23:50.486-04:00Memeing NaturalismOccasional explorations of science-based, humanistic naturalism and its implications, with a focus on current news and commentary.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.comBlogger50125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-71462629963467697562016-07-16T14:08:00.002-04:002016-07-18T07:30:07.554-04:00Can we live under the idea of determinism?<div class="MsoNormal">
Interviewed <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rZfSTpjGl8&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">here</a>, the philosopher John Searle is an articulate, unabashed incompatibilist,
someone who holds that free will is incompatible with determinism - the fact (if it is a
fact) that there are causally sufficient conditions for our character,
thoughts, deliberations and actions. He says there is good reason to suppose
determinism is true about human behavior, given what we know, but he also says that
we experience having free will (that we and our actions are <i>not</i> causally determined). Thus we have
inconsistent but equally plausible conclusions about human agency, which blocks
progress on the free will problem.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But do we really experience “that [our] decisions themselves
were not forced by antecedently sufficient causal conditions”? I don’t think so. We sometimes don’t
experience or otherwise know what the causes of our decisions are, on the
assumption they have causes (sometimes the causes are obvious). However, what we
<i>don’t </i>experience is the purported fact that they aren’t caused. And we can’t
conclude from our experience of the ignorance of the (possible) causes of our
decisions that they actually are uncaused. So it seems Searle is mistaken about
what he thinks is the experience of free will, that which drives our conviction
we have it. Further, and more generally, why should we take subjective
experience as being a secure basis for drawing conclusions about any
substantive, factual matter – in this case the conclusion we have (incompatibilist)
free will? Drop that assumption and the problem of free will as Searle poses it
disappears: there is no good reason to suppose we are uncaused creatures, in any
respect, so we should accept that we aren’t. Moreover, indeterminism, should it
play a role in our lives, wouldn’t add to our powers of control or origination,
see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/free-will/what-should-we-tell-people-about-free-will">here</a>.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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Searle says (start at about 3:30) “when it comes to free
will, you can’t live your life on the assumption of determinism.” Why not,
precisely? Well, he says that you can’t sit back and wait for determinism to
happen, for instance when choosing a meal at a restaurant, because if you do, the
refusal to engage in decision-making is itself free will in operation (“that
refusal is only intelligible to you as an exercise of free will”). But of
course this begs the question of whether conscious decisions are caused or not,
and the neuro-biological evidence strongly suggests that they are, as Searle
himself concedes at the end of this interview (see quote below). So I can indeed “wait for determinism
to happen” by deciding not to decide – it’s all a fully caused process in which
the waiting itself is included. But of course I will at some point be forced to
decide (the waiter is waiting too!) – and I’ll likely be conscious of having
been pressured by circumstances to choose. <o:p></o:p></div>
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If free will is an illusion, says Searle, then it’s a puzzle
that evolution would have given us “this expensive [that is, glucose-intensive]
mechanism for conscious rational decision-making and it’s all useless, all
epiphenomenal.” That evolution went to such pains seemingly counts against the
idea that free will (as conscious rational decision-making) is an illusion. Indeed, rational
decision-making and its neural mechanisms are of course essential to successful
behavior control, but only under the idea of determinism: our reasoning plays a
role in causing behavior. What’s epiphenomenal (causally inert), from a
scientific explanatory standpoint, is the <i>experience</i>
of free will. So there’s no particular puzzle here, so long as we don’t take
that experience as referring to something real outside cause and effect (many
folks do, apparently). </div>
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<o:p></o:p>At the end of the interview Searle says</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But the tougher
question is what about the level of the neuro-biology? If the neuro-biological
level is causally sufficient to determine your behavior, then the fact that you
have the experience of freedom at the higher level is really irrelevant.</blockquote>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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In my experience, the relevance and importance of the experience
of freedom doesn’t diminish when living on the assumption of determinism (as I do).
The experience of freedom, properly construed, isn’t that we are uncaused in
some respect, but that no one is forcing our hand, that we get to do what we
want, more or less. It corresponds to very real, concrete senses of freedom of
belief and action that we enjoy in an open society where we are more or less
left alone to think and do what we want, so long as we don’t hurt others or
infringe on their freedoms. <o:p></o:p></div>
Searle suggests at one point that if determinism is true,
then “we’re at the mercy of causal forces.” Not so, or at least not always, since as
individuals we are tightly knit, highly organized wielders of causal forces ourselves,
often putting other things and people at <i>our</i>
mercy. If we should start living under the idea of determinism (not holding my
breath here), we might actually become <i>less</i>
at the mercy of impersonal causal forces, and more merciful and compassionate
in how we exert our very real power and control, one goal of <a href="http://naturalism.org/">naturalism.org</a>.<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-79443585672796378572016-07-08T07:42:00.000-04:002016-07-08T07:48:45.450-04:00Harris and Dennett on free will: could they have done otherwise?<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Sam Harris <a href="https://soundcloud.com/samharrisorg/free-will-revisited-a-conversation-with-daniel-dennett" target="_blank">podcasted </a>a conversation with Dan Dennett about free will in which they try to sort out their differences. Here I offer what I hope is some even-handed commentary that might contribute to an amicable reconciliation, well underway apparently. Your reactions welcome over at the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/2218407727/" target="_blank">FB naturalism group</a>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><u style="font-size: 12.8px;">Could have done otherwise</u><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">. As a good determinist, Dan knows that we couldn’t have done otherwise in actual situations, but he denies this has relevance for human agency. What matters (is worth wanting), he says, is being able to pick out competent agents that can be held responsible. We do this by considering counterfactual situations: does the agent have enough degrees of freedom of action that, had the situation been somewhat different, he might or would have done otherwise? Fine, but pointing out that we couldn’t have done otherwise in </span><i style="font-size: 12.8px;">actual</i><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">situations – what Sam often adverts to in “rewinding the tape” – is also important since it gets at a fundamental truth about ourselves that many (most?) folks, being libertarians, don’t recognize. Getting the word out about this can help to soften retributive and punitive attitudes based in the idea that we are miniature first causes and ultimate self-shapers. This isn’t Dan’s concern, but as Sam rightly says libertarianism is the central issue when it comes to naturalizing agency (so to that extent Dan is “failing to interact with some core features” of folk free will). The truths of neuroscience are compatible with much</span><i style="font-size: 12.8px;"> but not all</i><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">of most folks’ understanding of responsibility and desert and the ways in which we currently treat each other.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><u style="font-size: 12.8px;">Explanation and excuses.</u><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> Sam argues there’s something exculpatory about determinism and not being ultimately self-caused. But as Dan points out, cosmic bad luck and being the end result of an explanatory causal chain don’t count as excuses when standing in the dock. But it’s still important to see that the person standing there is cosmically and perhaps locally unlucky to have been determined to become a responsible agent that made a bad choice. There’s no way in the actual world that he could have turned out or acted otherwise in a way that would have been up to him. This is so even though his actions </span><i style="font-size: 12.8px;">are</i><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> up to (controlled by) him as a reasons-responsive, deterrable agent. So our status as responsible agents doesn’t obviate the fact that some of us are simply cosmically unlucky to end up like Madoff, a point Dan never concedes despite Sam’s constant adverting to determinism.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><u style="font-size: 12.8px;">Self-shaping</u><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">. Dan argues that we are proximate, do-it-yourself, self-shapers even though we’re not ultimately self-originated. True, but pointing this out can be used to deflect attention from the fact that the course of self-authorship is completely set by factors outside one’s control. Some of us are lucky to have been bequeathed the biological and environmental conditions that produce good choices in setting our priorities and habits, and then in controlling our actions to good ends. And as Dan says, some people fail miserably at this – they are the unlucky ones. To deny that luck swallows everything, that it goes all the way down, including the process and outcomes of self-formation, is to assert that we stand outside natural law. Drawing attention to proximate self-formation and proclaiming the duty to become a good citizen are fine but shouldn’t be used to hide or downplay the big deterministic picture.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><u style="font-size: 12.8px;">Control and consciousness</u><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">. Dan claims rightly that we are pretty decent controllers even if we aren’t ultimately in control or in control of everything. We’re not in control of our brains since we are our brains, but such is the necessary fate of any autonomous cognitive system. The system controls its behavior and some downstream effects, not its own control processes except as they become targets of meta-control over time (Dan: at the “temporally macro level”). That consciousness might lag or not be privy to its neural antecedents is no threat to agency, although it does help overthrow the intuition that we exist as immaterial controllers. The neural processes associated with consciousness obviously play crucial roles in behavior control, even though the causal role of experience itself is contested. In any case, we’re not passive puppets but active agents with robust causal powers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><u style="font-size: 12.8px;">Consequentialism and criminal justice</u><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">. Both Sam and Dan endorse a consequentialist, pragmatic conception of responsibility and criminal justice. Dan emphasizes the need for punishment for general deterrence and maintaining respect for the law, but with reasonable and revisable excusing conditions. Although he concedes the necessity of punishment, Sam is more concerned to point out the fully determined, unlucky, non-ultimately self-authored status of offenders, which should help to reduce punitive attitudes based in libertarianism and motivate a shift from retributivism to a more humane consequentialism. Lack of libertarian agency - the revolution in our self-concept driven by naturalism - doesn’t count as an excuse, but it does require we rethink our justifications for punishment and the nature of desert.</span></span></div>
Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-23430082814075503612010-11-28T17:26:00.002-05:002010-11-28T17:30:12.695-05:00Leveraging Harris: making moral progress by denying free will<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua'; font-size: medium; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; ">In his latest book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211">The Moral Landscape</a></i>, Sam Harris devotes 10 pages (pp. 102-112) to debunking contra-causal free will and drawing out the progressive implications for our beliefs, attitudes and social practices. This is a most welcome development since Harris commands a wide readership and considerable respect (although by no means universal agreement) among atheists, humanists, skeptics and freethinkers. Such readers are among those most likely to be receptive to the thesis – radical from the traditional dualistic religious perspective, but a scientific commonplace – that we aren’t causal exceptions to nature. The Center for Naturalism has long been promoting the challenge to the soul and its supernatural freedom as a science-based route to more effective and compassionate interpersonal relations and social policies, so we’re very pleased that Harris takes up this challenge so forcefully. Having dispatched the Big God of the major Abrahamic religions in <i>The End of Faith</i>, the <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/atheism.htm#littlegod">little god of free will</a> is a next logical target. </span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua'; font-size: medium; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; "><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua'; font-size: medium; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; "><a href="http://www.naturalism.org/roundup.htm#Harris">Continued at Naturalism.Org</a>, comments welcome at this location. </span></div>Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-31251110033702120632009-11-14T15:28:00.007-05:002009-11-15T11:48:05.407-05:00Causation and CulpabilityAt <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/hola-from-puebla/">Why Evolution is True</a>, Jerry Coyne, stout defender of science against anti-evolutionists and <a href="http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/2009/06/putting-epistemology-first.html">accomodationists</a>, describes attending a conference with psychologist Philip Zimbardo, known for his <a href="http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/">situational analysis</a> of why good people end up doing bad things. Coyne writes (my bolding in the second paragraph):<br /><blockquote>…Zimbardo said, “There are no bad apples, just bad barrels.” Do have a look at Zimbardo’s <a href="http://http/www.prisonexp.org/">Stanford Prison Experiment webpage</a>: that work, done in the ’70s, is still a <em>sine qua non</em> in psychology texts as it raised disturbing questions about how nice people can become evil very quickly.<br /><br />I was not completely convinced by this extreme environmentalism. For one thing, <strong>it’s an easy way to exculpate people who commit antisocial or criminal acts</strong>; for another, there do seem to be some people who are of inherently good<br />character and prone to do heroic things in circumstances where others are<br />apathetic. On the other hand, I keep thinking of Daniel Goldhagen’s book, <em>Hitler’s Willing Executioners</em>, which showed how everyday Germans, most of whom we’d consider nice, well-meaning people, became avid supporters of the Holocaust.</blockquote>I want to nit pick the bolded phrase since it encapsulates what I think is a widespread misunderstanding about causation and culpability. Coyne is of course right that there are dispositional (characterological) as well as environmental (situational) factors that determine behavior, but whatever the balance is between them, a full causal explanation of behavior is not exculpating. To suppose that we can hold people responsible only if they are uncaused in some respect sets an impossible standard for responsibility. After all, there’s no reason to think people are uncaused in some respect or ultimately self-caused, a logical impossibility. And even if Zimbardo were right that people’s dispositions and characters count for very little, we would still have to hold individuals accountable as a means to deter wrongful acts, such as the torture at Abu Ghraib (about which see Zimbardo’s book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Effect-Understanding-Good-People/dp/1400064112"><em>The Lucifer Effect</em></a> and his interview with philosopher Tamler Sommers in Sommer’s new book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=A+Very+Bad+Wizard%3A+Morality+Behind+the+Curtain"><em>A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain</em></a>, highly recommended).<br /><br />What Zimbardo’s analysis does, crucially, is to broaden the scope of accountability to include not just individuals and their traits, but the systemic, institutional and policy factors that bring out the worst in human nature. Understanding how those factors cause individuals to act badly gives us that much more potential power to prevent wrong-doing, so it’s important not to let a narrow, dispositionist and perhaps even <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/freewill.htm">contra-causal</a> conception of culpability block our appreciation of situational influences. Hence my nit-picking of Coyne’s comment.<br /><br />Curiously enough, however, I’m not sure that Zimbardo himself is completely consistent in the application of his thesis. At a talk he gave in Cambridge, I asked him if his analysis of the Abu Ghraib situation didn’t also apply to George W. Bush and then vice-president Dick Cheney. Weren’t they too the product of a situation, of political parties, ideologies and the lure of power, not self-created monsters? He hemmed and hawed, clearly unwilling to endorse such an apparently exculpating explanation of people he considered evil incarnate. But again, such an explanation <em>wouldn’t</em> be exculpating since we can, and must, still hold Bush and Cheney responsible despite the fact that they were <em><a href="http://www.naturalism.org/determinism.htm">fully caused</a></em>, by their situation and innate endowments, to be who they are, and act as they did. In his interview with Tamler Sommers, Zimbardo agrees with Sommers that contra-causal free will is an illusion, but he also says the higher-ups like Bush and Cheney bear greater responsibility since they <em>create</em> the systems that corrupt the underlings. But of course neither Bush nor Cheney created the system that created <em>them</em>, a crucial point Zimbardo seems unwilling to acknowledge, or at least vacillates on (read the interview, see what you think). The buck stops <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/strawson_interview.htm"><em>nowhere</em></a>, which means interventions are appropriate <em>everywhere</em> they will do some good, including the reform of systems that create and enable nefarious leaders.<br /><br />If Zimbardo, one of the major proponents of situationism (and more broadly the causal explanation of behavior) can’t fully accept that causation applies to <em>all</em> of us, even presidents and vice-presidents, this just illustrates the power of contra-causal thinking. Indeed, Zimbardo says in the interview, "I don't really believe in free will, but I can't live without it" (p. 50). Nonsense! Please try harder. As long as we suppose the wrongs that people do are not the fully determined outcome of a host of social, environmental and biological factors, including an electorate that can put the likes of Bush and Cheney in power and an administrative system that allowed them to pursue a needless war in Iraq, then we’re at a serious disadvantage in our attempts to make the world a better place. By pinning blame on the bad apple alone, we’ll be blind to, and lose control over, the causes of bad apples.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-34565025595273350742009-11-14T11:43:00.002-05:002009-11-14T11:55:52.037-05:00Is Naturalism Nihilistic?This is an invited response to Alex Rosenberg’s essay at On the Human, <a href="http://onthehuman.org/2009/11/the-disenchanted-naturalists-guide-to-reality/">The disenchanted naturalist's guide to reality</a>, in which he suggests that naturalism leads to scientism and thence to nihilism. Nothing remotely like this is true, and seeing why not is a good opportunity to make some observations about naturalism and normativity – about where standards of right and wrong, and true and false come from if nature is all there is. I’m happy to report that most of the other commentators declined Rosenberg’s gambit, so they rightly remain <em>un</em>-disenchanted naturalists. The supposed relationship between naturalism and nihilism has been debunked previously at Memeing Naturalism, see <a href="http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/2008/03/naturalism-and-nihilism.html">here</a>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.naturalism.org/scientism.htm">Scientism</a> as Rosenberg describes it isn’t equivalent to or implied by naturalism, a worldview that takes science as its guide to reality. He says “Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.” But science alone isn’t in a position to be nihilistic. Science arguably provides the best answers to factual questions about what exists, but doesn’t itself have the resources or competence to answer (in the negative, as Rosenberg would have it) the “persistent questions” of human meaning, purpose and morality. To suppose science alone <em>can</em> answer such questions is indeed to be scientistic in the original and rightly pejorative sense. After all, when considering the big questions, we ordinarily avail ourselves of all the philosophical and practical resources <em>outside</em> science, such as ethical and political theory, religious and secular traditions, maxims, rules of thumb, and other sources of wisdom on how best to live and find meaning.<br /><br />It isn’t surprising that Rosenberg’s hyper-reductive scientism ends up in nihilism, since of course we don’t find values or purpose or meaning at the level of what he thinks science shows to be the only reality: fermions and bosons. But such austere physicalism isn’t forced on the naturalist, who can countenance higher-level ontologies, including mental states, so long as they play useful roles in our best (most predictive, transparent and unifying) explanations and theories. So far as science can tell, human beings (physical organisms) and their projects (their behavior) are just as real as their sub-atomic constituents, which after all are not directly observed but theoretical posits par excellence. Naturalism still leaves plenty of room for purpose, meaning and morality so long as these are understood as what they actually are under naturalism: human, creaturely concerns that need no cosmic or sub-atomic backup. To see this is to <em>naturalize</em> purpose, meaning and morality, to relativize them to naturally occurring needs and interests; it isn’t to annihilate them.<br /><br />Rosenberg underestimates the extent to which scientific explanations can be understood and found inspirational by non-scientists, for instance the grand stories of cosmic and biological evolution. To discover ourselves full participants in nature, historically and in the present moment, need not be demoralizing as Carl Sagan so wonderfully demonstrated. Crucially, scientific explanations don’t entail that human existential and ethical concerns are unreal or unfulfillable, only that they are situated in a natural world that, logically enough, has no capacity to validate them. Only the assumption that addressing such concerns requires an appeal to supernatural or extra-human standards would lead us to suppose that naturalized meaning and morality aren’t the real thing. But there’s no good reason to make that assumption.<br /><br />Rosenberg says that “If the physical facts fix all the facts…then in doing so, it rules out purposes altogether, in biology, in human affairs, and in human thought-processes.” But the physical level of description doesn’t compete with, or supplant, higher level descriptions of human behavior involving purposes and other intentional states, conscious and unconscious. There’s no making sense of behavior at our level without them. True, science reveals no purpose in evolution or nature, but that doesn’t show that our purposes are illusions, that we don’t <em>really</em> believe, desire, plan, etc. Purposes and intentional states are <em>real</em>-ized in physical organisms such as ourselves.<br /><br />He makes the same sort of claim about morality: “There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon.” Agreed: for the naturalist norms aren’t free floating, but are rooted in our evolved needs and desires for flourishing in community with others (hence ethical norms of fairness and reciprocity) and for making accurate predictions about the world (hence cognitive norms of rationality, evidence and inference). But even though we don’t find anything intrinsically normative in nature taken as a whole, or at the level of physical facts about fermions and bosons, these norms are just as real as the human beings that depend on them for getting by in the world. From a naturalistic standpoint, the normative force attached to our moral core – our judgment that it’s <em>correct</em> – can only be a function of the fact that it serves basic human needs as shaped by evolution: if you want to get along with others (and you likely do) then you <em>should</em> in general behave morally. That this explanation shows our moral core to be an adaptation, along with much else about us, doesn’t debunk normativity as unreal, only naturalizes it.<br /><br />Rosenberg’s reductive stripping away of higher level human perspectives continues down the line, for meaning, history, consciousness, the self, free will, and even knowledge (a perilously self-undermining tack to take). But the mistake in all this is to suppose that physicalist, mechanistic, sub-personal and selectionist explanations leave no room in naturalism for the higher level ontologies and explanations that comprise the need-driven normative realms of cognition, meaning and morality. That the brain doesn’t traffic in propositions, and that consciousness isn’t a direct mirroring of the world, doesn’t mean that language-using <em>persons</em> don’t have propositional knowledge or entertain accurate beliefs. That semantic meaning isn’t a “fact about reality” considered at the sub-atomic level doesn’t render unreal our linguistic referential capacities, or our ability to tell truthful and instructive stories about historical events. No original intentionality is needed, only the <em>constructed</em> intentionality made possible by being creatures whose brains instantiate mental models that track the world. Seeing that the consciously experienced self is naturalistically not a soul, but a neurally realized pattern (a “real pattern” Dennett would say) is to explain selves and self-concern, not to explain them away. That we aren’t contra-causally free doesn’t mean we cease being moral agents responsive to the prospect of rewards and sanctions, although it might entail that we rethink some of our more punitive responsibility practices.<br /><br />The processes of naturalization spurred by science may indeed upset some cherished supernatural and theistic conceptions of the self, freedom, consciousness, morality, meaning and knowledge, which may in turn prompt changes in mainstream concepts and practices. But naturalism does not entail the scientistic elimination and debunking of all that matters to human beings; it simply places this mattering within nature as a set of creaturely concerns that other sentient beings might conceivably share with us. That nature, taken as a whole, or understood sub-atomically, does not validate our naturally occurring concerns and capacities isn’t a reason to give up on them, and indeed we’re pretty much constitutionally unable to do so. So naturalists need not be, shouldn’t be, and in the end <em>can’t</em> be, scientistic eliminativists or nihilists.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-22670577305460794822009-09-27T20:14:00.004-04:002009-09-28T10:39:35.754-04:00The Mitigation Response: Getting Smart on CrimeThe French proverb has it that “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” – to understand all is to forgive all. Although it isn’t good interpersonal or social policy to forgive those who show no sincere signs of regret, or could continue to harm us, the saying nevertheless captures an important feature of human psychology. Understanding the causal antecedents of wrongful behavior, and more basically seeing that it <em>had </em>causal antecedents – it didn’t come out of the blue – often reduces blame focused on the offender. We see the role of the factors that created him and the opportunity for wrongdoing, and know that had those been different, he might well not have done wrong. This in effect distributes causal responsibility for the offense, so that the offender ceases to be an ultimate, point-like originator of action.<br /><br />It’s appropriate that this change in our perception of causal responsibility mitigates perceived blameworthiness. To blame is to assign responsibility and seek redress, and as it becomes clear the offender is <em>not</em> self-made, but only the most proximate cause of harm, the smart course of action is to widen the scope of redress to include <em>his</em> causes – his formative environment and current situation. The tendency for blame focused on the offender to diminish in light of his causal story is an adaptive reallocation of emotional and attentional resources. It frees us up to consider a wider, more effective strategy in preventing future wrong-doings.<br /><br />All this has implications for criminal justice, in that drawing attention to the causes of <em>criminals</em>, not just crime, might make us smarter in dealing with it. But just how real and robust is the psychological tendency described above, what we might call the mitigation response? Is there empirical evidence that understanding and appreciating causation actually reduces our desire to punish? Might it attenuate our desire for retribution, which aims only to inflict suffering on the offender, not produce good social consequences?<br /><br />Some preliminary research supports these hypotheses. A series of studies conducted by psychologists Azim Shariff, Joshua Greene, and Jonathan Schooler indicates that heightening the salience of determinism reduces the attribution of moral blameworthiness, the perception of free will, and the desire for punishment (“Beyond Retribution?: Effects of Encouraging a Deterministic Worldview on Punishment,” in preparation). Individuals exposed to explicit arguments in favor of determinism and against free will, or (in another study) scientific articles merely suggestive of determinism, were less likely to impose long prison sentences on a hypothetical murderer. The results also indicated that imposing shorter sentences was mediated by reductions in perceived blameworthiness, arguably the main factor motivating retributive, as opposed to consequentialist, punishment (about the difference see <a href="http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/GreeneCohenPhilTrans-04.pdf">here</a>). It looks as though these experiments induced the mitigation response.<br /><br />They also suggest that educating the public about causation, in particular that human beings and their acts are likely <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/determinism.htm">fully caused</a>, might help shift our criminal justice priorities away from retributive punishment, the law’s current preoccupation, and <em>toward</em> prevention, rehabilitation and restitution, while maintaining deterrence and public safety. By widening the consideration of causes outside the perpetrator (but <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm">not forgetting</a> him either!), the “deterministic worldview” can humanize criminal justice by motivating the idea that any suffering inflicted on him must have a solid consequentialist rationale: only inflict it if nothing non-punitive works to reduce the future harms coming from crime, and only if the suffering inflicted is less than the harm being reduced.<br /><br />The mitigation response, generated by appreciating the offender’s causal history of being shaped by criminogenic influences, can thus play a role in changing attitudes about blame and punishment. We should take full advantage of it in crafting a humane and smart approach to crime reduction.<br /><br />(About a smarter, less draconian approach to criminal justice, have a look at Mark Kleiman's <a href="http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/22670">appearance on Bloggingheads </a>with Reihan Salam.)Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-85671675589917939082009-07-16T18:21:00.004-04:002009-07-16T18:43:01.113-04:00Freedom From Free WillBack in February 2008, the <em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/health/19beha.html?_r=1&ref=health">New York Times</a></em> and many other news outlets made mention of <a href="http://www.carlsonschool.umn.edu/assets/91974.pdf">research </a>conducted by Jonathan Schooler and Kathleen Vohs which suggested that people cheat more when induced to believe they don’t have free will (discussed at Memeing Naturalism <a href="http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/2008/09/not-to-panic-everythings-under-control.html">here</a>). This finding, they argued, raises concerns about disseminating the idea that we might be fully caused in our behavior: we might get demoralized by determinism. Perhaps we should maintain at least the fiction of free will even if we don’t actually have it. But perhaps not. That we need not be demoralized by determinism is argued <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm">here</a>, and that determinism is in fact indispensable to us <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/determinism.htm">here</a>.<br /><br />These concerns resurfaced in a debate between psychologists Roy Baumeister and John Bargh at the recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology convention in Tampa. Their presentations are on YouTube <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5368923768346222856&ei=FbROSo-xNI-6qQK77vjsCw&q=john+bargh&hl=en">here </a>and <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8683264038263484145&ei=">here </a>respectively, and the debate continues on their <em>Psychology Today</em> blogs <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cultural-animal">here </a>and <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-natural-unconscious">here</a>. Baumeister, worried about demoralization, is very concerned to spike the idea that human behavior is fully determined, so he floats the unlikely proposal that causation at the macro level isn’t deterministic (same causes, same effects) but more a matter of probabilities (same causes, a <em>range</em> of possible effects). The latter is likely true for micro-level quantum phenomena but there’s no evidence that it’s true at the level of human behavior. I try to steer him straight about determinism <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cultural-animal/200902/just-exactly-what-is-determinism-0/comments#comment-56484">here</a>, and try to persuade him that determinism <em>isn’t</em> demoralizing <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cultural-animal/200906/free-will-the-tampa-spsp-conference-the-great-debate/comments#comment-64540">here</a>, with help from philosopher Tamler Sommers. Further, Baumeister’s view of free will itself is somewhat confused, a mixture of naturalistic compatibilism and contra-causal libertarianism, so I try to clarify things for him <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cultural-animal/200906/john-bargh-and-some-misunderstandings-about-free-will/comments#comment-64215">here</a>. Fortunately he’s a forgiving soul and seems completely unfazed by my meddling.<br /><br />Bargh, on the other hand, is a model of clarity in his responses to Baumeister (<a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-natural-unconscious/200906/the-will-is-caused-not-free">here </a>and <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-natural-unconscious/200907/roy-baumeister-and-some-misunderstandings-about-john-bargh">here</a>), so hasn’t needed any helpful hints. He’s properly skeptical about contra-causal free will and makes these two important points, among many other good observations:<br /><br />1) Where’s the research, and publicity, about possible <em>positive</em> effects of disbelief in free will? All the focus so far has been on the downsides of determinism, at least what we’ve heard about. Interestingly, Bargh mentions that Jonathan Schooler, who brought us the study on cheating, also found that “telling experimental participants that free will did not exist caused those participants to be more forgiving towards the transgressions of others.” But there have been no press releases or news stories about this to my knowledge. With any luck, Bargh and others will research the benefits of free will skepticism, so stay tuned.<br /><br />2) Bargh says it’s crucially important that if we don’t have free will, people should know about it. Why? In order to <em>empower</em> them. He says:<br /><blockquote><p>To my mind, one potential benefit to getting people to not believe so strongly in the power of their own personal agency or free will is that they might then be more concerned about external influences or even explicit attempts by advertisers, government, etc. to control what they do (eat, drink, buy, vote). Research by Tim Wilson and Nancy Brekke (Psychological Bulletin, 1994) has shown that people do not worry very much about these influence attempts because they believe they are the captains of their minds and in near-complete control over their judgments and behaviors. For example, people do not believe negative campaign advertising affects them, and so do not attempt to counteract or defend themselves from the effects of such ads, yet that variety of campaign advertising is in actuality so effective that it became nearly the exclusive form of campaign ads during the recent 2008 US presidential election. And Jennifer Harris and colleagues in our ACME lab have recently shown unconscious effects of television ads on snack food and cigarette consumption, such that these ads contribute to societal health problems of obesity and smoking (see <a href="http://www.yale.edu/acmelab/publications.html">www.yale.edu/acmelab/publications.html</a>). Thus I can see significant positive benefits in informing people of their (at least relative) lack of free will in the behavioral impulses triggered by the ads, both in their own health outcomes and in their ability to counteract presumed unwanted influences on their<br />important decisions, such as who they want to lead their country. Indeed, given that Baumeister has expressed his belief that telling people that free will may not exist is 'irresponsible', I can make the case that <em>not</em> telling them is perhaps even more irresponsible, because it leaves them at the mercy of corporations and governments who are not quite so naive. </p></blockquote><p>Here Bargh agrees with behaviorist B.F. Skinner: the myth of radically “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Freedom_and_Dignity#Quotations">autonomous man</a>” is used to lull people into being more easily controlled. Moreover, it helps in blaming and punishing victims (they cause their own misfortunes), and draws attention away from the actual reasons people fail to flourish (don’t blame circumstances, just blame individuals). In helping to challenge conventional wisdom about free will, Bargh is bringing power to the people, if only they could be convinced. They are, paradoxically enough, made <em>less</em> free by their own beliefs about freedom, which is why we needn’t be shy about advertising the truth about human agency. Freedom from free will is a liberation movement waiting to happen, should naturalism take hold. If it does, we can thank John Bargh for his straight talk on a matter many suppose should be kept under wraps. </p>Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-76220116481300920622009-06-15T13:19:00.005-04:002009-06-15T14:18:13.630-04:00Putting epistemology firstThe debate over so-called <a href="http://www.edge.org/discourse/accomodationism.html">accomodationism</a> (notably between <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/04/27/atheists-for-common-cause-with-the-religious-on-evolution/">Chris Mooney</a> and <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/truckling-to-the-faithful-a-spoonful-of-jesus-helps-darwin-go-down/">Jerry Coyne</a>, with significant contributions by <a href="http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2009/06/noma-no-more-great-accommodationism.html">Russell Blackford</a>, <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2009/06/miller_joins_the_party.php">Jason Rosenhouse</a> and <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/06/theistic_evolutionist_beats_ha.php">P.Z.Meyers</a>) has, fortunately, raised what I think is the fundamental issue between naturalism and supernaturalism: how we know what's real. The National Center for Science Education and the National Association of Science seem to grant religion a special domain of epistemic competence in being able to decide the question of whether the supernatural exists, a domain in which science, they say, has no competence. But this seems wrong, as argued <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/epistemology.htm#rivals">here</a>. Science <em>can</em> investigate supernatural hypotheses if they have testable content, and religion has no special reliable mode of knowing which shows that something beyond nature exists, although theologians such as <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/projecting_god.htm">John F. Haught</a> try to make the case that it does.<br /><br />Of course there are important questions we can ask about reality outside the direct purview of scientific theorizing. Supernaturalist Ken Miller <a href="http://www.millerandlevine.com/evolution/Coyne-Accommodation.htm">suggests some</a>: "Why does science work? Why is the world around us organized in a way that makes it accessible to our powers of logic and observation?" And he points to "the deeper questions of why we are here and whether existence has a purpose." To the extent these questions involve matters of fact, or that they imply a factual state of affairs within which we ask them, we'll want to use our most reliable mode of knowing to ascertain those facts, which is science. What is the nature of existence, that it might or might not have a purpose? What is it about the methods of science that explains why it works so well? Science, and more broadly <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/secularism.htm#empiricism">intersubjective empiricism</a>, obviously has a role in investigating the nature of existence and the nature of scientific practice itself since these are empirical questions. To the extent these questions <em>aren’t</em> directly factual, but involve conceptual analysis, they are ordinarily deemed philosophical. But the neat distinction between empirical and conceptual investigation has been blurred considerably by the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/">naturalistic turn</a> in philosophy over the last century, so that we might call Miller’s questions “philo-scientific” questions, ones which arguably require the collaboration of science and philosophy to address.<br /><br />What Miller and other supernaturalists such as Francis Collins at <a href="http://biologos.org/">Biologos</a> seem to suggest, however, is that religion and religious faith have some additional expertise, knowledge or epistemic competence beyond what science and philosophy have to offer in answering such questions. They believe that there are specifically religious, non-scientific ways of reliably knowing reality that can help answer the questions of why the world is accessible to logic and observation, and of ultimate meaning and purpose. If so, how do these ways of knowing work, such that we can see that they’re trustworthy? Does theology, usually in the business of defending the existence of something beyond nature, have a special philosophical or epistemic competence such that it provides insights into reality not available to naturalistic philosophy? If so, what is this? In a must read <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/naturalism.html">essay on naturalism</a>, Barbara Forrest quotes Sidney Hook asking the crucial question:<br /><blockquote>“Is there a different kind of knowledge that makes ... [the supernatural] an accessible object of knowledge in a manner inaccessible by the only reliable method we have so far successfully employed to establish truths about other facts? Are there other than empirical facts, say spiritual or transcendent facts? Show them to us...” </blockquote>This is a reasonable demand that any cognitively responsible supernaturalist should be able, and feel obligated, to meet. Of course it isn’t as if naturalists claim to have all the answers to the big or even middle-sized questions, but the methods of inquiry we stick with have been proven pretty reliable. If there are any rival methods that establish the existence of something beyond nature that informs such answers, we want to know about them. If there aren’t, then supernaturalists are skating on thin epistemic ice.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-50925732791071940982009-03-16T12:10:00.004-04:002009-03-16T12:19:03.213-04:00Getting Along: Civil Disagreements with a Thinking ChristianIt’s always salutary to get evaluated by a strong critic of your position, someone who doesn’t share your preconceptions and assumptions and who therefore is able to detect weaknesses in your premises and arguments. Being an advocate of a worldview is to be biased in its favor, and it’s good to achieve some virtual distance from your commitments by looking at them through the eyes of an opponent.<br /><br />Tom Gilson at <a href="http://www.thinkingchristian.net/">Thinking Christian</a> was kind enough to offer a critique of <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/epistemology.htm">Reality and its rivals</a>, an article that discusses the justifications for intersubjective empiricism (exemplified by science) as our most reliable way of knowing, how empiricism tends to support naturalism, and the ethical obligation we have to one another to be empiricists (and thus, perhaps, naturalists). He then invited me to a debate in three parts, which you can read <a href="http://www.thinkingchristian.net/series/tom-clark-and-naturalism/">here</a>.<br /><br />I won’t reprise the arguments since the disagreements are perhaps less important than the tone of the discourse, which was pretty amicable. Since it’s unlikely that unanimity on the fundamental questions that worldviews address will ever be achieved, it’s crucial that worldview adversaries share a belief in live-and-let-live tolerance, otherwise things can get very nasty, as the history of ideological conflict shows. They should agree that maintaining an irenic philosophical pluralism is more important than achieving world domination for their worldview, because that’s simply not achievable given human diversity. Better we disagree peacefully than try to enforce an untenable uniformity.<br /><br />I wrapped up my contributions by noting all the common ground that had come to light during the debate. I’ll quote that and the end of Tom Gilson’s reply, just as an example of how focusing on commonalities helps to generate cross-ideological comity. To put it succinctly and imperatively: everybody play nice!<br /><br />Clark <a href="http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2009/01/knowledge-and-evidence-third-response-to-tom-clark/#comment-11448">writes</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>…But what I’ve learned from this debate is that we agree about those [epistemic] commitments more than I expected. We agree that “first person data” – for instance the subjective experience of being embraced by God – aren’t alone adequate to prove the claim of God’s existence. We agree (I think) that intersubjective evidence using public objects is necessary to justify that claim to persons not having such experience. We agree that history and philosophy have intersubjective elements to them, and we agree (I think) that one can’t simply reason one’s way to God: philosophical arguments supporting God’s existence involve premises about how the world actually is in various respects (otherwise you wouldn’t be interested in history or science, which of course you are). We also agree that there are unsolved mysteries about how the world works, that dogmatism is to be avoided, and that argument, not force, is the best way to resolve worldview differences. And if they can’t be resolved, we agree that we can still live peacefully together in an open society (my cardinal value). So all told we agree on a lot, and for that and the very civil discourse I’ve encountered here, I’m most grateful.</blockquote><br />Gilson <a href="http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2009/01/knowledge-and-evidence-third-response-to-tom-clark/#comment-11474">responds</a>:<br /><blockquote>...I continue to hold that God can communicate his reality to persons in a private manner, and that he does so, and that the shared reality of that experience among believers is as valid as persons’ shared experience of “red.” This is in addition to, not instead of, external inter-subjective validations.<br /><br />I agree that there is epistemological value in your two requirements [the <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/projecting_god.htm#justify">insulation</a> and <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/projecting_god.htm#public">public object</a> requirements], but I hold that to place complete reliance on them is self-defeating. I think you probably have agreed with that in the end, but I’m not entirely sure.<br /><br />This has been an interesting discussion. There’s room for more response here, and (whether this is good news to you or not I don’t know!) I have two further topics to address from your epistemology article, relating to meaning and ethics, so I’ll take those up in blog posts before long. I appreciate your excellent interaction!<br /></blockquote>Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-48586017770110339392009-03-16T10:49:00.004-04:002009-03-16T10:59:24.275-04:00The Wisdom of AliceIt would be nice if a worldview were not only true, but livable. As yet, there aren’t many thorough-going naturalists to provide data, but a hardy few have reported back on the livability of naturalism and it mostly seems to pass the test, see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/living1.htm">Living in light of naturalism</a>. Below are some updates from <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/living1.htm#1">Alice</a> in Australia at the <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/naturalismphilosophyforum/">Naturalism Philosophy Forum</a> (open membership), who describes some of the practical and psychological advantages of taking a consistently cause and effect view of ourselves, and the understandable suspicions many folks have about it. She also describes applying naturalism to child-rearing, as does Stephen, another member of the Forum. If a worldview can pass <em>that</em> test, then clearly it’s a winner! Enjoy…<br /><br />Alice <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/naturalismphilosophyforum/message/4800">writes</a>:<br /><br />I’m really happy with my understanding of the world based on what I understand Naturalism to be telling me. In the past I’ve found that I was coming up with theories, then when I came across a theory that made sense I was applying it, but it never went smoothly, something always came up that didn’t fit in with my theory. So I jumped from theory to theory until finding Naturalism in July 2007. 18 months is probably the longest that I’ve had a theory that I’ve applied to my life where in 18 months I’ve not yet had a contradiction to the reality that I’ve experienced. I feel enlightened. I tell my friends this and they’re not sure what to think. When things go wrong in my marriage and I ‘attempt’ to speak with my mother about it – she tells me ‘well you’ve made your choices’, so then I tell her, I don’t have free will, she seems to think I’m trying to cop out of something and is very disapproving of me. In fact most people are disapproving of my belief in NFWism [no free will-ism: not having contra-causal free will]. I’m just really sorry they don’t ‘get it’. NFWism allows me complete acceptance of what is. It allows me to have compassion for all people. It allows me to make informed decisions and respond to everyone with the understanding that they ‘couldn’t have done otherwise’. This is an emancipating position. Yet still people look at me and think I’m some how being a smart-arsed shirker of responsibility, who hasn’t quite understood how life works yet – a dreamer who really doesn’t get it! Ironic that they have it so back to front – and yet my world view allows me to have total compassion for them and their attitude – whilst they look at me in judgment. It really throws the Christian door knockers - LOL!<br /><br />On child-rearing:<br /><br />…So the better I understand Naturalism, the better I can enact those principles in my life and use the rationality of naturalism in my thoughts and actions, the more likely that is going to permeate all my relationships and influence those around me. My eldest is currently 7 years old, and I find overt examples of my Naturalistic world perspective come out in my discussions with him regarding interactions between himself and his younger brother. Kids are very good at detecting false realities, so I have to be careful what I say if I want to maintain any authority or respect. I find that if I stick to Naturalistic parameters, my argument is quite based in reality and therefore acceptable.<br /><br />I can’t see any problem with introducing all aspects of Naturalism including NFW [no contra-causal free will] to my children. Children integrate what they learn very easily and can also easily see when things don’t add up or make sense. If they feel safe they will talk about what is not adding up for them and allow you the opportunity to clarify concepts. One example of this for me was when my son’s friend told him that he would burn in hell because he didn’t believe in God. As my son approached me with his concerns, I was able to give my perspective, which was satisfactory and caused much relief.<br /><br />If you hold Naturalistic beliefs and are able to concurrently have good self-esteem then there is no reason why your child wouldn’t follow you to do the same. If anything Naturalism has improved my self-esteem, as I’m more grounded in reality, feel more confident about my understanding of the world and have more compassion for everyone around me, which has lead to my feeling more valuable in society and therefore created higher self-esteem.<br /><br />With my first child I had a go at punishment as a parenting technique. It caused us both lots of distress [and] it clearly didn’t work – it wasn’t effective in outcomes. Now I go for a more effective method – I change the circumstances so that I achieve the outcome I desire. The child may or may not understand what I’m doing, or why, but if I get the outcome I want and the child is not distressed it’s win-win. I have no concerns that this will create problems later on, as I explain everything I’m doing and allow the child to learn how to see other perspectives at their own rate – developing compassion (the ability to see another’s perspective) in the child is the key to socially functioning adults.<br /><br />And Stephen writes:<br /><br />…the other day I was talking to my daughter about what school she will be going to. She was worried in case she got "a rough one." I explained that she was an amazing biological machine able to adapt to the situation and do well if necessary, that this was the result of billions of years of natural selection going right back to the first self replicating molecule, that she couldn't take ultimate credit for the fact but still she has this amazing ability.Oh and I told her we'd get her Karate lessons too :-)<br /><br />She is 10, didn't bat an eye lid but it gave her justified confidence (along with the offer of karate lessons), she stopped worrying and cheered up.<br /><br />I think she's used to having one strange dude for a father :-)<br /><br />[Relatedly, see this interview with <a href="http://www.examiner.com/x-2580-LA-Parenting-Examiner~y2009m2d15-QA-with-the-Dale-McGowan-author-of-Parenting-Beyond-Belief">Dale McGowan</a> on raising kids without supernatural beliefs.]Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-79738291545988186012009-01-14T11:11:00.003-05:002009-01-16T10:49:42.574-05:00Science Wars: Dualism vs. MaterialismThe prestige of science is such that everyone wants it on their side. Science is a trusted arbiter of facts for most of us, at least when it comes to empirical questions on which evidence can be brought to bear. So it’s little wonder that even those with patently faith-based convictions about the nature of things should try to conscript it to their advantage. The obvious examples are creationists and advocates of intelligent design who argue that were it properly conducted, science would provide support for their supernatural hypotheses (see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/epistemology.htm#appropriating">here</a>). The argument thus becomes about the nature of science itself: does it have canonical methods and assumptions? What are these, and are certain scientists guilty of letting their worldview warp good scientific practice? If science as it’s commonly conducted doesn’t support your metaphysics, then the temptation might be to claim that mainstream scientists are guilty of malfeasance.<br /><br />The intelligent design controversy is perhaps the biggest front on the science wars, followed by disputes over the paranormal, but a new front is opening up around the issue of materialism or physicalism. Is science biased in favor of the materialist-physicalist assumption, the idea that nature fundamentally contains only material things? A small but vocal group of self-styled anti-materialist and dualist neuroscientists held a mind-body <a href="http://www.mindbodysymposium.com/">symposium</a> at the UN last year, arguing that science has indeed been hijacked by dogmatic materialists, who wrongly discount evidence for categorically non-physical phenomena. <em>New Scientist</em> ran a good <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026793.000-creationists-declare-war-over-the-brain.html">article</a> about it, quoting some well-respected mainstream scientists and philosophers who, unsurprisingly, see the <em>anti-materialists</em> as the dogmatists, intent on warping science to serve <em>their</em> agenda.<br /><br />These opposed positions are mirrored in two responses to the 2009 Edge question, <a href="http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_index.html">What will change everything?</a>. One is by biologist <a href="http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_9.html#sheldrake">Rupert Sheldrake</a>, who says materialism’s days are numbered: certain questions, for instance about the nature of consciousness, will never be answered unless science is liberated from its assumption that the physical world is all there is. He says “Confidence in materialism is draining away. Its leaders, like central bankers, keep printing promissory notes, but it has lost its credibility as the central dogma of science.” The other is by biologist <a href="http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_15.html#myersp">P. Z. Myers</a>, who says that materialism rules, and that eventually people will adjust to the idea they don’t have souls, widely believed to be the precious immaterial essence of our being: “Mind is clearly a product of the brain, and the old notions of souls and spirits are looking increasingly ludicrous…yet these are nearly universal ideas, all tangled up in people's rationalizations for an afterlife, for ultimate reward and punishment, and their concept of self.” Science writers John Horgan and George Johnson discuss Sheldrake, Myers and the materialism/anti-materialism conflict at <a href="http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/16873?in=00:14:26&out=00:27:45">Bloggingheads</a>, and there’s been a protracted debate between materialist Steven Novella and dualist Michael Egnor, both neuroscientists, at their respective blogs <a href="http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=438">here</a> and <a href="http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/01/its_time_for_me_to_unshatter_m.html#more">here</a>.<br /><br />So who’s right and how do we decide? Sheldrake and Myers are both credentialed, published biologists, so they must share considerable common ground in how they practice science on a day-to-day basis. But obviously that isn’t enough to keep them on the same page when it comes to the prospects for materialism.<br /><br />One way to moderate the argument, if not completely resolve it, is to see that science is primarily a method of inquiry, not a repository of metaphysical truths. Science has no particular commitment to materialism as a final conclusion about the world, it’s just that so far it hasn’t found evidence for, or explanatory justification for, categorically immaterial phenomena such as souls, spirits or disembodied minds and wills (whether agreement could be reached on the defining characteristics of such phenomena is an interesting and open question). If such evidence were to accrue, and were our best explanatory theories to incorporate non-physical entities, no good scientist would complain about it. It’s just the way things turned out. What scientists are after, qua scientists (and not worldview advocates), is explanatory transparency and reliable, maximally predictive models of reality (see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/objectivity.htm#rejoinder2">here</a>). No one can say in advance where these cognitive desiderata will take us. If Sheldrake and Myers could agree on this point, then their opposing opinions on materialism are not fundamentally about science, but bets on where science is likely to take us.<br /><br />Sheldrake seems to think science might be limited in its current menu of options when he says “But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.” Fair enough - no honest scientist supposes that we can know in advance what the final scientific explanations for life and mind <em>must</em> involve. Perhaps totally new fields of inquiry will develop (but I’m not holding my breath). However, what is very unlikely to change is the basic methodological constraints of science and its <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/science.htm#explanation">criteria of explanatory adequacy</a>, which require high levels of evidential support, explanatory transparency, and descriptive specificity for phenomena to be certified as real. It’s these requirements that have thus far ruled out creationism and intelligent design as tenable hypotheses, and they will apply equally to any hypothesis about categorically non-physical phenomena.<br /><br />Sheldrake says “science will be freer - and more fun” once divested of its materialist bias. But science, properly conducted, has no such bias, and its judgments on anti-materialist hypotheses will be determined by the same rather demanding rules of evidence and explanation it applies to any hypothesis, materialist or otherwise.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-23918395645552087602009-01-14T10:51:00.003-05:002009-01-14T11:10:14.341-05:00No Problem With Determinism<em>Psychology Today</em> hosts a wide variety of blogs written by psychologists, therapists, philosophers and other assorted professionals concerned with mind, body and behavior. New on the block is <a href="http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-among-many">One Among Many</a> by Brown University social psychologist Joachim I. Krueger, who posted recently on "<a href="http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-among-many/200901/troubles-with-determinism">Troubles with determinism</a>." As the title suggests, he worries that a consistently determinist view of ourselves might undercut our sense of agency and self-efficacy. As he puts it,<br /><blockquote>The problem of determinism is a deep one, and I think that neither scientific nor folk psychology have come to grips with it. In scientific psychology, there is constant friction between deterministic theories, such as behaviorism (or any other theory describing "mechanisms") and theories stressing human agency. What academic psychology seems to be telling us is that human behavior follows scientifically detectable laws and that at the same time we have the power to choose and change apart from these laws.</blockquote>It's crucial to see that determinism doesn't conflict with genuine human agency, including the power to change ourselves. Human beings, though caused in each and every respect, are <em>just as real</em> as the causes that shaped them, and they still have real causal powers to pursue their goals, including those set by psychotherapy. We can't logically attribute causal power to the factors that create human agents and yet deny it for the agents themselves (see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm">Avoiding demoralization by determinism</a>).<br /><br />Were there some part of a human being independent of determining influences, it would have no reason to choose one way or another, since it wouldn't be affected by, and thus responsive to, its own motives and reasons. Any exemption from determinism wouldn't give us a freedom (or responsibility) worth wanting, as philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, only a random factor introduced into behavior. So we don't need, and indeed shouldn't want, a power to choose that's independent of "scientifically detectable laws."<br /><br />As it turns out, there are now psychiatrists and therapists who are coming to grips with a deterministic, and more broadly, naturalistic understanding of behavior. Dr. Ron Pies, clinical professor of psychiatry at Tufts University in Boston, is one - see his papers on what he calls "psychiatric naturalism" in <em>Psychiatric Times</em>: <a href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/display/article/10168/54281">Hume's Fork and Psychiatry's Explanations: Determinism and the Dimensions of Freedom</a> and <a href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/display/article/10168/55086">Psychiatric Naturalism and the Dimensions of Freedom: Implications for Psychiatry and the Law</a>. (Pies <a href="http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-among-many/200901/troubles-with-determinism/comments">responds</a> to Krueger at the blog.)<br />In a therapeutic setting, seeing that one's behavior and that of others is fully caused works to reduce shame, blame (of self and others), anger and other responses predicated on the idea that we could have done otherwise in a situation. Indeed, Krueger recognizes a thorough-going determinism might make us more compassionate and <em>self</em>-compassionate, since, as he puts it, "We acted the way we did because we did our best and really couldn't have acted differently."<br /><br />The cause-and-effect understanding of ourselves not only generates compassion, but gives us control, since we won't suppose that any part of us escapes being shaped by our circumstances, internal and external. Instead, we'll look at the actual causes of behavior, and thus be in a much better position to design and target effective interventions. So the insight that we <em>don’t</em> have contra-causal free will can be a key tool in achieving therapeutic objectives. Far from causing trouble, determinism - the reliable patterning of events and actions - can serve us well in navigating the world.<br /><br />Further reading: <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/therapy.htm">Worldview Cognitive Therapy</a>Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-47229172402939358412008-11-09T13:49:00.005-05:002008-11-11T19:02:34.150-05:00After Free WillPaul Davies (not the <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/davies.htm">astrophysicist</a> but the philosopher at William and Mary) gets interviewed <a href="http://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2008/daviesafterfreewill-001.php">here</a> (and there’s an audio clip <a href="http://www.wm.edu/news/multimedia/pauldavies/index.php">here</a>) on the possibility that we might have to give up on free will and what that might mean for us. By free will he has in mind some sort of capacity to transcend the neural instantiation of personhood, and he rightly suggests that a science-based, naturalistic understanding of ourselves calls such a capacity into question.<br /><br />Of course <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/">compatibilists</a> (those who say free will is compatible with determinism) will argue that Davies is mistaken about what free will <em>is</em>, and that it has nothing to fear from science. But they will likely agree that what he <em>means</em> by free will might not survive a naturalistic understanding of ourselves. The obvious point being that we can avoid confusion on the free will issue by stating up front what capacity or characteristic of an agent we refer to when we say "X has free will." Or better yet, simply talk about the capacities and characteristics themselves, whether there’s reason to believe they exist, and what their existence or non-existence implies for how we think about ourselves and, for instance, our responsibility practices. Talk about free will, absent clear definitions, is simply a recipe for miscommunication.<br /><br />Davies himself speculates that even as strictly material creatures, we have robust, neurally based capacities for extracting and creating meaning that will likely see us through the death of free will as he defines it (the death of the contra-causal soul, more or less). He says there’s no evidence yet for such optimism, but I think there’s at least some anecdotal evidence coming in, see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/living1.htm">here</a>. And as Shaun Nichols pointed out at the end of his <a href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-vs-programmed-brain"><em>Scientific American</em> article</a> (discussed by yours truly <a href="http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/2008/09/not-to-panic-everythings-under-control.html">here</a>), there’s evidence that determinists don’t give up on moral responsibility. Life, meaning and ethics and will go on after the soul is gone. Not that it’s going quietly, see <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/brain/mg20026793.000-creationists-declare-war-over-the-brain.html">Creationists declare war over the brain</a> and Steven Novella's good 3 part commentary starting <a href="http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=402">here</a>.<br /><br />I also take some (friendly) issue with Davies' description of the poor beleaguered self: he says it gets pushed around by internal and external stimuli. But if we agree the self isn’t an immaterial soul, is there anything else we’d call the self that’s separate from neural activity or from the brain and body that could be pushed around? If not, then we might say there <em>is</em> no self, in which case the problem of being pushed around disappears. But we might instead say (and this is my preference) that the self or person is, for instance, an integrated, functionally coherent construction of physical and psychological parts (see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/medicalization.htm#construction">here</a>). This stable, identifiable agent is just as real as its causal antecedents and external environment, and therefore we can justifiably assign it causal powers, just as we assign causal powers to the antecedent factors that created it and the environment that impinges on it. So we shouldn’t feel demoralized, disempowered or in any sense <em>disestablished</em> when admitting our complete integration into the causal matrix (see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm">here</a>). After contra-causal free will is gone, we'll still be recognizable as people, moral agents, and the readily identifiable individuals we so reliably are. And again, life will go on with its usual ups and downs, but minus a major incitement to pride, contempt, resentment, shame, guilt, and other not-so-lovely reactive attitudes.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-17470439714618008022008-11-09T13:34:00.005-05:002009-06-19T15:40:32.468-04:00Worldview Naturalism in a NutshellIf you don’t believe in anything supernatural – gods, ghosts, immaterial souls and spirits – then you subscribe to naturalism, the idea that nature is all there is. The reason you’re a naturalist is likely that, wanting not to be deceived, you put stock in empirical, evidence-based ways of justifying beliefs about what’s real, as for instance exemplified by science. You probably (and rightly) hold that such beliefs are usually more reliable and more objective than those based in uncorroborated intuition, revelation, religious authority or sacred texts. Kept honest by philosophy and critical thinking, science reveals a single manifold of existence, what we call nature, containing an untold myriad of interconnected phenomena, from quarks to quasars. Nature is simply what we have good reason to believe exists.<br /><br />We can see, therefore, that naturalism as a metaphysical thesis is driven by a desire for a clear, reliable account of reality and how it works, a desire that generates an unflinching commitment to objectivity and explanatory transparency. Supernaturalism, on the other hand, thrives on non-scientific, non-empirical justifications for beliefs that allow us to project our hopes and fears onto the world, the opposite of objectivity. As naturalists, we might not always like what science reveals about ourselves or our situation, but that’s the psychological price of being what we might call <em>cognitively responsible</em>, of assuming our maturity as a species capable of representing reality.<br /><br />To be a thorough-going naturalist is to accept yourself as an entirely natural phenomenon. Just as science shows no evidence for a supernatural god “up there”, there’s no evidence for an immaterial soul or mental agent “in here”, supervising the body and brain. So naturalism involves a good deal more than atheism or skepticism – it’s the recognition that we are full-fledged participants in the natural order and as such we play by nature’s rules. We aren’t exempt from the various law-like regularities science discovers at the physical, chemical, biological, psychological and behavioral levels. The naturalistic understanding and acceptance of our fully caused, interdependent nature is directly at odds with the widespread belief (even among many freethinkers) that human beings have supernatural, contra-causal free will, and so are in but not fully of this world.<br /><br />The naturalist understands not only that we are not exceptions to natural laws, but that we don’t need to be in order to secure any central value (freedom, human rights, morality, moral responsibility) or capacity (reason, empathy, ingenuity, originality). We can positively affirm and celebrate the fact that <em>nature is enough</em>. Indeed, the realization that we are fully natural creatures has profoundly positive effects, increasing our sense of connection to the world and others, fostering tolerance, compassion and humility, and giving us greater control over our circumstances. This realization supports a progressive and effective engagement with the human condition in all its dimensions. So we can justly call it <em><a href="http://www.naturalism.org/landscape.htm">worldview naturalism</a></em>: an overarching cognitive, ethical and existential framework that serves the same function as supernatural worldviews, but without trafficking in illusions. By staying true to science, our most reliable means of representing reality, naturalists find themselves at home in the cosmos, astonished at the sheer scope and complexity of the natural world, and grateful for the chance to participate in the grand project of nature coming to know herself.<br /><br />Originally written for and posted at <a href="http://nirmukta.com/">Nirmukta</a> - thanks to Ajita Kamal.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-60304652996041934012008-09-10T13:49:00.005-04:002008-09-10T14:26:40.419-04:00Not to Panic, Everything's Under ControlIn a <em>Scientific American</em> <a href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-vs-programmed-brain">article</a> on free will, philosopher Shaun Nichols defines free will as being <em>incompatible</em> with determinism:<br /><blockquote>Many scientists and philosophers are convinced that <a href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=does-free-will-arise-free">free will</a> doesn’t exist at all. According to these skeptics, everything that happens is determined by what happened before—our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action—and this fact makes it impossible for anyone to do anything that is truly free.<br /></blockquote>He goes on to worry that “If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility?”<br /><br />He then discusses a study by two psychologists, Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler, that bears on this question. Their study purports to show that if people cease believing they are exceptions to determinism, then they are more likely to act immorally, in this case, cheat. (See <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm">here</a> for a detailed discussion.) Vohs and Schooler suggest that to maintain moral responsibility, it might be necessary to promulgate the belief that that we have a kind of <em>ultimate</em> control over ourselves that transcends cause and effect: a contra-causal free will. But this would require a systematic campaign of mass deception since there’s no good scientific evidence that we have such free will. Maintaining the fiction of ultimate control and contra-causal freedom would be a grand exercise in anti-science brainwashing, not exactly the hallmark of an open society. Of course the Bush administration tried something similar in its fight to discount the reality of global warming (see Chris Mooney’s book, <em>The Republican War on Science</em>), so there’s precedent for a deliberate disinformation campaign that would pit moral responsibility against determinism.<br /><br />But such dire and undemocratic measures are unnecessary. What Nichols doesn’t mention in the article is that many naturalistic philosophers think that we don’t need to be free from determinism to be morally responsible. There are good, easily understandable reasons to hold fully caused persons morally responsible, for instance, to <em>cause</em> them to behave morally and responsibly. Even if people are formed by factors that are ultimately beyond their control, they still have local, proximate control (what philosopher John Martin Fischer calls “<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=BeE49GhK4eAC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=John+Fischer+calls+%E2%80%9Cguidance+control%E2%80%9D&source=web&ots=ZdQT320SHe&sig=aGOyQk_eVYb_6CCsDhAw3u7pTio&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA56,M1">guidance control</a>”) in the sense that their actions are usually controlled by <em>their own</em> desires and motives. Whether or not people act on their desires and motives can obviously be influenced by the prospect of being held responsible. After all, every sane adult’s normal complement of cognitive capacities includes the capacity to anticipate praise and blame, to take into account the likelihood of being held accountable for their actions. Anticipating this, they unsurprisingly often make the choice to conform to moral norms.<br /><br />So we can see that acting morally and responsibly centrally involves the <em>causal influence</em> of moral norms on an individual’s choices and behavior. As a locus of proximate but not ultimate, contra-causal control, a person generally (but not always of course) acts in ways that reflect the moral consensus. Put concisely: morality leverages each person’s local self-control to achieve social stability. We don’t need to have <em>ultimate</em> control, that is, be exceptions to determinism, for this to work, and indeed any part of us free from causation would be for that reason impossible to influence. So it’s a good thing we likely aren’t exceptions to determinism. If we were, we’d be uncontrollable moral monads.<br /><br />Now, I take it that this commonsensical rationale for moral responsibility is not rocket science. It can be easily communicated in plain language (plainer than what I’ve used above), and what’s more, <em>it’s the case</em>. It’s how our moral responsibility practices actually work. This is why it’s puzzling that Nichols, who presumably knows of such rationales, said nothing about them in his <em>Scientific American</em> article. Had he done so, it might have forestalled the predictable free will/moral responsibility panic that sometimes ensues when people discover they are fully caused (for an instance of such panic incited by his article, see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/misrepresenting.htm">here</a>). That he didn’t can only help inflame the <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/culture_wars.htm">culture wars</a> between naturalism and supernaturalism.<br /><br />Nichols does, however, mention research indicating that most of those who believe people are determined in their behavior (a small minority of the total population, but which includes many philosophers and scientists) still believe people can be held responsible. This suggests that, as he puts it “if you come to believe in determinism, you won’t drop your moral attitudes.” This is comforting to know, but he says it raises puzzling questions:<br /><blockquote>People who explicitly deny free will often continue to hold themselves responsible for their actions and feel guilty for doing wrong. Have such people managed to accommodate the rest of their attitudes to their rejection of free will? Have they adjusted their notion of guilt and responsibility so that it really doesn’t depend on the existence of free will? Or is it that when they are in the thick of things, trying to decide what to do, trying to do the right thing, they just fall back into the belief that they do have free will after all?</blockquote>These puzzles are resolved by seeing, as suggested above, that yes, we can easily adjust our notions of guilt and responsibility to function perfectly well in the absence of contra-causal free will. Moral attitudes find sufficient justification in the necessity for <em>holding</em> each other morally responsible, so we don’t need to “fall back into the belief that [we] do have free will after all.” Of course, some of our attitudes and responsibility practices should change in light of a science-based naturalism, which shows human persons to be the fully caused outcomes of biology and culture. For example, absent contra-causal free will, retributive punishment is very difficult to justify, which has direct implications for our <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/criminal.htm">criminal justice system</a>. But there’s no deep puzzle about the survival of moral responsibility overall under naturalism. We remain moral agents since we are often prompted to act out of moral considerations, considerations that are upheld and enforced by holding each other responsible. So no need to panic, it’s going to be OK - better, actually.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-24365597826736756932008-09-01T16:05:00.020-04:002008-09-06T11:56:34.813-04:00Can Ray Tallis Be Reined In?Dear Ray,<br /><br />I hope this finds you well. I wrote in <a href="http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/2008/03/playing-catch-with-dr-tallis.html">Playing Catch With Dr. Tallis</a> last March that<br /><br /><blockquote>It isn’t clear that Tallis believes that persons have something supernatural or contra-causal at their core, since after all he’s a medical doctor and therefore most likely a physicalist. But his desire to wiggle free of determinism in defending free will necessarily introduces an obscurity into his account of human action. This is too bad, since otherwise his is a first class intelligence, one that naturalists would love to have on their team.</blockquote>I see from your April <a href="http://www.humanism.org.uk/uploadedFiles/cms/store/NEW_SECTION_379_379/ATTACHMENTS/Voltaire-Lecture-script.pdf">Voltaire lecture</a> for the British Humanist Association, "Is Human Freedom Possible?," that you <em>do</em> in fact think there’s something contra-causal about us. I’ve appended below some comments on your talk, the thrust of which is that we don’t evade determinism (put otherwise, we don’t have libertarian, contra-causal free will) and don’t need to in order to secure any human good. You will of course disagree, but at least my critique might stand as an example of a humanistic, progressive naturalism that’s perfectly at peace with the absence of libertarian freedom. We don't need to resort to what I see as your metaphysical extravagances and obscurities to defend Enlightenment values. Btw, I should say that I like many of your points about the complexity of the self and its actions and our embeddedness in the social context. I just don’t think that this makes us first causes.<br /><br />all the best,<br /><br />Tom Clark<br /><br /><br />Ray <a href="http://www.humanism.org.uk/uploadedFiles/cms/store/NEW_SECTION_379_379/ATTACHMENTS/Voltaire-Lecture-script.pdf">writes</a>:<br /><blockquote><p>"If we do not have individual freedom, or the capacity to be genuine agents, then the notion of political freedom, so crucial to progressive thought becomes more than a little problematic; which is why the issue of human freedom lies at the heart of the debate between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment."</p></blockquote><p>It seems to me we don’t need libertarian, contra-causal freedom of the sort you champion to have political freedom. Political freedom simply requires freedom <em>from</em> certain sorts of constraints and coercions, namely those imposed by despots and tyrannies. See <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/currents.htm#crazy">here</a>, for instance. Being uncaused in any respect wouldn't increase our freedom or power.<br /><br /></p><blockquote>"Most philosophers think that determinism is incompatible with free will."</blockquote>Actually the reverse is true: most philosophers these days are compatibilists of one sort or another.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>"There are, however, philosophers who believe that free will is compatible with determinism: the so-called compatibilists. As you will see, they include your Voltaire lecturer, though I believe that determinism applies only to the material world understood in material terms."</blockquote>By carving out an exception to determinism in some sort of transcendent, non-material intentionality, and by making that the necessary condition of human freedom, you define yourself as an incompatibilist. If determinism ruled everything, material and immaterial, you’d say we couldn’t be free, so for you freedom is incompatible with determinism.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>"Intentionality is entirely mysterious and not, at any rate, to be explained in terms of the processes and laws that operate in the material world. Its relevance tonight is that it is the beginning of the process by which human beings transcend the material world, without losing contact with it…"</blockquote>I’m not sure how you go from saying that intentionality is entirely mysterious to then saying that you know for sure it can’t be explained in material terms. As you know, philosophers are hot on the trail of naturalistic accounts of <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#9">intentionality</a> that don’t appeal to anything immaterial.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>"Intentionality is so central to the arguments about freedom and to everything I have to say today, that I want to dwell on it for a few more moments. The light enters the eye from the object and causes neural activity in the visual pathways. That is standard cause-and-effect as seen throughout the material world, where determinism reigns. The gaze looking out back at the object is anything but standard. The relationship that is established in this gaze, this counter-causal bounce-back that is intentionality, is more complex and key to human freedom." </blockquote>I’m wondering if you have any citations/references for the idea that there’s something contra (counter) -causal about intentionality, about how contra-causal processes could be reliable, and how they connect with standard causal mechanisms, e.g., neural processes.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>"Let me just go over again some of the consequences of the intentionality that is in the reverse direction to the flow of causality." </blockquote>Again, I’m wondering what “in reverse direction to the flow of causality” means and whether it has any established basis in the scientific literature. I’ve never encountered this claim before.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>"As our experiences are increasingly mediated by signs, intentionality expands beyond the body. We relate increasingly to an invisible, indeed immaterial world: the world of generality or of general possibility… The human world, in short, is a greatly expanded Space of Possibility that is not part of the material world."</blockquote>I take your point about the increasingly abstract and multifarious nature of relationships made possible by signs and language, but don’t see that they transcend their material instantiation. Human reasons, for instance, are one variety of causes that need a physical basis in the brain and body and other media to be causally effective, as Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown point out in <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/murphy.htm"><em>Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?</em></a>. There is no opposition or contradiction between being “reason-driven” and “cause-pushed” (your terms, see below). As far as science can tell, the human world, including all its abstractions and concepts, is entirely encompassed by the material world, which is what’s amazing (but not miraculous): the material world, properly organized, does it all!<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>"This is where the buck starts: in a self that is not a thing, but not insubstantial, either: it is an embodied subject. This is the person as ‘an independent point of departure’ that Lucien Goldmann spoke of as central to the Enlightenment vision of humanity, of human freedom and human hopes for a better future."</blockquote>I’m not sure how the fact that persons are embodied subjects of many talents, reasons and capacities makes the buck start inside them. After all, every bit of who you are originated ultimately from circumstances you didn’t choose. This doesn’t mean you cease having your talents, for instance for self-improvement, only that you can’t take ultimate credit for them. Nor does the Enlightenment vision depend on persons being undetermined, self-caused <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/atheism.htm#littlegod">little gods</a>. As you properly note later on, any uncaused, undetermined element of ourselves would have no reason to act one way vs. another. As you put it: “that which has no given properties would have no basis for choosing one action rather than another.”<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>"The determinist case, which slims down our lives to a linear succession of causes and effects, ignores the self and its world; indeed ignores the Space of Possibility within which we operate." </blockquote>Not at all. Determinism doesn’t ignore or diminish the self, it only explains it, see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm">Don’t forget about me: avoiding demoralization by determinism</a>. Nor does a cause and effect view of things ignore possibility, since possibilities are constantly being considered and analyzed in human deliberations carried out by physical, deterministic neural processes in our brains and their external manifestations, such as your Voltaire lecture and this response. And of course randomness and indeterminism wouldn’t add anything to make us more free or rational. We want our cognitive processes to be reliable, accurate reflections of the world, and our actions to be reliable outcomes of our desires and deliberations. Introducing indeterminism or randomness anywhere in the human behavior-guiding process would subvert effective cognition and action.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>"To see actions as cause-pushed rather than reason-driven is, of course, to prepare them to be reinserted into a causal chain extending backwards from a present material event to the Big Bang; and this is wrong. If we fail to spot the error of this first step, we shall find it difficult to combat a determinist case against freedom."</blockquote>There’s no problem with tracing our selves and actions back to the Big Bang, it only shows our natural heritage. But wanting to be miniature first causes <em>is</em> problematic, since as science progresses setting ourselves up as <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/atheism.htm#littlegod">little gods</a> requires increasingly obscure accounts of human agency and intention, such as yours here. Not that your analysis of the complexity of human action and intention isn’t correct and enlightening in many respects, but we need not, and indeed cannot, insulate ourselves from the causal web in any respect.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>"Have I rescued my personal freedom from the jaws of material causation and determinism only to feed it to the equally slavering jaws of external psycho-social causation and cultural determinism?"</blockquote>Despite all I’ve said here and <a href="http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/2008/03/playing-catch-with-dr-tallis.html">elsewhere</a> it’s likely you will carry on in what I see as a quite unnecessary rescue mission. People very much like to hear that they are immaterial causal exceptions to nature. But of course we are no such things, nor do we need to be to have political freedom, moral responsibility and be effective, dignified agents, as explained at <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/">Naturalism.Org</a> and in <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/publications.htm">Encountering Naturalism</a>. A summary of some reassurances about human agency, morality, etc. in a universe without libertarian free will is <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/resource.htm#Encounter">here</a>.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-61745303810592258522008-07-14T13:09:00.005-04:002008-07-14T13:59:50.351-04:00The Case for Naturalistic SpiritualityBecause most folks are dualists, the idea of naturalistic spirituality still seems a contradiction in terms. Spirituality is generally thought to involve "higher planes," souls, spirits, and other supernatural phenomena. How can naturalists, including atheists, take spirituality seriously without violating a core tenet of their worldview, that no separate supernatural realm exists? Very easily, as Andre Comte-Sponville artfully argues in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Atheist-Spirituality/dp/0670018473/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216055493&sr=8-1">The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality</a></em>. Spirituality properly understood has nothing essentially to do with the supernatural, and is far too important a matter to leave to religionists and new-agers. To do so would have naturalists ignore central questions of life’s meaning and purpose, of how we can best live together given the ultimate nature of things, and what our relation to that nature is. None of this requires or implies god.<br /><br />This book is a delight and inspiration, without the least condescension or self-seriousness, beautifully direct, personal, touching, and profound. Comte-Sponville writes with the ease and assurance of someone who has thought deeply on these matters, and indeed he’s been writing and speaking for years on godless spirituality. The <em>Little Book</em> is the distillation of his wisdom, which is heir to both West (Spinoza, Pascal, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein and some modern French philosophers unknown to most American readers) and East (Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, Vedanta). Although he has no animus against faith, so long as it’s not imposed, his primary objectives in the book’s three chapters are to show that 1) we don’t need theistic religion for a viable ethics or community, 2) there are good reasons to believe god, traditionally conceived, doesn’t exist, and 3) spiritual experience is a naturalistically valid mirror of basic existential truths. We are embedded in an impersonal, self-subsistent, untranscendable and value-less reality – Spinoza’s Nature, the All – therefore values and meaning are human-relative affairs. But understanding and feeling that we are rooted in an ultimately mysterious non-human absolute can, by temporarily stripping away the self, afford us the peak spiritual experience of immanent unity. Naturalistic spirituality shows us that our lives, finite, conditioned and purposeful, open into the eternal, unconditioned and purposeless.<br /><br />Living in the post-modern, irreligious age (at least in France!), we must, he says, avoid the twin temptations of sophistry, that truth has no claim on us, and nihilism, that morality has no claim on us (Nietzsche: “Nothing is true, everything is allowed”). We are therefore enjoined to follow the Enlightenment in its insistence that there are truths and ethics to be had independent of religion. These are secured by <em>fidelity</em>, fidelity to rationalism: “to reason, to mind, to knowledge,” and to a progressive, practical humanism: “Our primary duty…that of living and behaving humanly.” Because impersonal nature affords us no recourse, this is a contingent, fallible project, but for that reason all the more worth pursuing:<br /><br /><blockquote>Nothing can guarantee the triumph of peace and justice or even any irreversible progress. Is that any reason to stop fighting for these things? Of course not! On the contrary, it is a powerful reason to go on paying the utmost attention to life, peace, justice…and our children. Life is all the more precious for being rare and fragile. Justice and peace are all the more necessary, all the more urgent, because nothing can guarantee their ultimate victory. (54)<br /></blockquote>Comte-Sponville provides a concise survey of the traditional arguments for god and their insuperable shortcomings, then goes on to give additional reasons for why it’s very likely (although not ultimately provable) that god doesn’t exist: there’s no good evidence he does; the untoward amount of evil and suffering in the world; the sheer <em>mediocrity</em> of the human animal (is such a creature the best god could do?), and the fact that theistic beliefs so patently conform to our deepest wishes. That god is all-good, and provides us with everything we could possibly want, is an excellent reason to suspect he does <em>not</em> exist! Given these reasons for doubt, it’s of the first importance that society keep church and state separate, allowing space for the right not to believe. He ends the second chapter saying:<br /><br /><blockquote>Freedom of thought is the only good that is perhaps more precious than peace, for the simple reason that, without it, peace would simply be another name for servitude.<br /></blockquote>The book contains much that’s personal to the author, which makes good reading and good sense. After all, even if they are informed by philosophies and traditions, spiritual matters <em>are</em> deeply personal – they are one’s <em>own</em> grappling with meaning and existence. In the 3rd chapter, he describes a transformative mystical experience that, as he puts it, let him finally understand what as a philosopher he’d been lecturing and writing about all these years. The elements of the experience are described as suspensions – suspensions of thought, of time, of the ego, “the tiny prison of the self.” This permits an opening into the self-less present:<br /><blockquote>What a relief, when the ego gets out of the way! Nothing remains but the All, with the body, marvelously, inside of it, as if restored to the world and itself. Nothing remains but the enormous thereness of being, nature and the universe, with no one left inside of us to be dismayed or reassured, or at least no one at this particular instant, in this particular body, to worry about dismay and reassurance, anxiety and danger… (149)<br /></blockquote><p>He points out that mystical experiences and the spirituality they express and inspire make a personal god, holding out hope for future salvation, unnecessary. Nature, being, the all, the absolute, reality (he says use whichever word suits you) is immediately sufficient, present and perfect, that is, without defect. Faith, belief, dogma, hope and fear play no role, so religion in the traditional sense becomes irrelevant. Nor is there any conflict between our best analytical and empirical modes of knowing – what we can pin down about nature – and the personal existential realizations stemming from experiences of unity. Such spirituality has nothing to fear from science.<br /><br />All told, Comte-Sponville, a true humanist and universalist, gives us a philosophically and anecdotally rich account of how those without faith can remain authentically ethical and engaged in life, even as it opens onto infinity. The human project is part of reality, but in no sense does it encompass reality, which rather encompasses us in its mystery. We have to make our peace with this, perhaps even find fulfillment in the fact we <em>aren’t</em> the measure of nature. Naturalists looking for enlightenment will find in this book an inspiring, profound expression of the spiritual possibilities inherent in their worldview. </p>Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-87482904691143083652008-07-12T10:50:00.003-04:002008-07-12T11:03:53.400-04:00The New Identity Crisis and the LawTom Wolfe, cultural knockabout, discovered the neuroscientific revolution and its apparently dire implications for our self-image some years ago, and wrote it up with typical flair in "<a href="http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/WolfeSoulDied.php">Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died</a>." His recent conversation with neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga at <a href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/07/tom_wolfe_michael_gazzaniga.php?page=all&p=y"><em>Seed</em></a> gets into the same territory, what <em>Seed</em> calls the new identity crisis: if there's no ghost in the machine (and it seems there isn't), what the bleep are we, anyway?! Worries about genetic and environmental determinism are now joined by neural angst in suggesting that you're basically a biological choice-making machine. But Gazzaniga says this way of being you might be OK:<br /><blockquote>But who is "you"? "You" is this person with this brain that has been interacting with this environment since you were born, learning about the good and the bad, the things that work and don't work. You've been making decisions all the way along, and now you have a new one and you want to be free to make it. So psychologically, the Interpreter is telling you you're making this decision. But the trick is understanding that your brain is basing the decision on past experience, on all the stuff it has learned. You want a reliable machine to make the actual act occur. You want to be responding rationally to any challenge that you get in the world, because you want that experience to be evaluated. That's all going on in your brain second by second, moment to moment. And as a result, you make a decision about it. And phenomenologically, when the decision finally comes out, you say, "Oh, that's me!"<br /></blockquote>Choices arrived at neuro-deterministically are what you rationally would <em>want</em> to make. You want to be a good anticipator of probabilities and contingencies based on past experience, and inserting something random, undetermined, or (a logical impossibility) ultimately self-caused, would simply add noise to the mostly reliable calculations your brain makes "second by second, moment to moment." So it's a good thing you don't have the free will to do something other than what your brain decides, even though it might feel like you do. And indeed, never did a choice-making machine feel so spontaneous!<br /><br />Gazzaniga, director of the MacArthur <a href="http://www.lawandneuroscienceproject.org/">Law and Neuroscience Project</a>, also properly points up a difficulty for criminal justice on this picture of the self:<br /><blockquote>So these ideas — what I call the ooze of neuroscience — are going out everywhere, and people are willing to accept that: "My brain did it. Officer, it wasn't me." These defenses are popping up all over the judicial system. But if we adopt that, then it's hard to see why we have a retributive response to a wrongdoing. It would seem to me to be morally wrong to blame someone for something that was going to happen anyway because of forces beyond their control. So people get into this loop, and they get very concerned about the nature of our retributive response. </blockquote>And well they should. Even though we can't and shouldn't let criminals go free just because they're fully caused to commit crimes, we should nevertheless rethink <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/beyond_retribution.htm">retribution</a>, the idea that criminals deserve to suffer whether or not it produces any positive personal or social outcome. The idea of reforming our punishment practices, stemming from the sea-change in our self-concept driven by neuroscience, has been taken up by a few philosophers, psychologists and others, including <a href="http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/2007/11/joshua-greene-battles-dualism.html">Joshua Greene</a> (Harvard), Jonathan Cohen (Princeton), Derk Pereboom (Cornell), and of course the Center For Naturalism (we've proposed a <a href="http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/proposals.htm#CCC">Council on Crime and Causality</a> to make the case for such reform).<br /><br />Curiously, and it isn't clear why, Gazzaniga is self-admittedly very hard-nosed about punishment, even to the point of wanting to toss the insanity defense, see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/criminal.htm#brain">here</a>. That a neuroscientist, of all people, thinks we should retributively punish those with serious mental disorders seems indefensible. But being very smart in one domain is no bar to being dead wrong in another. Relatedly, it's worth noting that the legal coordinator for the Law and Neuroscience Project, UPenn professor Stephen Morse, is also a retributivist, although not as hard-nosed as Gazzaniga (see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/morse.htm">here</a>). Those at the Project who think neuroscience has progressive implications for the law, such as UPenn's <a href="http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/responsibility2.html">Martha Farah</a>, might have some tough sledding ahead.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-47964916653072700212008-05-11T14:06:00.003-04:002008-05-11T14:11:55.072-04:00The Collective Rationality of ResponsibilityEverett Young writes:<br /><br />A thought occurred to me regarding the ongoing discussions of morality and ethics and the lack of free will. There's actually a very neat point that is hidden in your take on "holding people responsible" which I don't think is explicitly made, but could be made explicit. I'm borrowing here from some of the basics of political economy and game theory.<br /><br />It is certainly the case that by holding people responsible, their behavior is caused to be more pro-social. But there are two points I'd like to add here.<br /><br />The first is that I not only want to hold others responsible for their actions, but it's actually advantageous to me to be held responsible for my own actions! Why is this? It's not because I want to harm others wantonly--evolution has mostly made it so that most animals don't want to do that to conspecifics, even without the benefits of conscious, deliberative thought. No, actually, the reason I want to be held responsible for my actions is that if I'm not, then in a competitive world, others may be forced to defensively assume that, not being held responsible, I will outcompete them. They are then forced to "defect" in game-theoretical terms, or behave anti-socially toward me. I, in turn, knowing that <em>they</em> know that I'm not held responsible for my actions, know that they will anticipate this and will try to outcompete <em>me</em>, so when I'm not held responsible, I'm not just "free" to behave anti-socially, I'm <em>forced</em> to. Indeed, since everyone knows that everyone else is not held responsible for their actions, even the presence of a few anti-social people forces everyone in the population to behave anti-socially, producing a Hobbesian state. Ultimately, then, the absence of laws holding me responsible could, in many if not most populations (in particular, populations that are seeded with even a tiny number of defectors), <em>cause</em> me to behave anti-socially. This would be rational behavior as well as fully caused, at the macro level (i.e., I'm not talking about the neuronal level).<br /><br />The second point is that being held responsible not only benefits beings with no free will, it also benefits beings that aren't even conscious, entities that could not possibly experience any "want."<br /><br />There is an example I can think of, of a non-conscious entity which is designed for a certain purpose, and so it's clear what is "good" and what is "not good" for this entity. I'm speaking of a corporation. A corporation has no thoughts or feelings, certainly no free will of its own. But it does have a purpose: to make money for its investors. Now, a corporation is subject to the same causes and forces as an individual in a political economy sense. A good example would be a logging company. A logging company does <em>not</em> benefit from clear-cutting the forest. That might lead to short-term profit, but it also leads directly to the death of the corporation, because there are no more trees.<br /><br />However, the existence of a population of several logging companies logging the same forest leads almost certainly to the companies racing to clear-cut the forest as fast as possible, because each company "knows" that if it does not cut as many trees as possible, the competition will. How do they know the competition will? Because they know that the competition knows this same thing about them. Everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows, so every corporation must race to clear-cut the forest as fast as possible. This requires no free will and no consciousness. A non-conscious computer could run the corporation based on purely logical, rational principles, and would come up with the same strategy without a need for "evil" uncaused intent. There is only one solution, of course, to this tragedy of the commons: every corporation must be held responsible for over-cutting the forest--including disincentives, such as financial penalties. The corporations can only fulfill their chartered purpose if they are held responsible. This, without their even being conscious beings, let alone entertaining illusions of being free.<br /><br />I think this conclusively illustrates that "holding responsible" members of a society, whether those members are conscious or not, is not only good, but necessary for the common good. And rational organisms, even non-conscious ones, would not only elect to have "others" held responsible, but themselves too, because if they themselves are not held responsible, others will be caused to defy the law and defect, lest they be outcompeted. That is, if you and I are in competition, holding you responsible for what you do doesn't help me unless you know that I am also held responsible for what I do.<br /><br />Laws then are a rational solution to a collective action problem, not a moral concoction invented by beings who need to stop each other from making too much use of their freedom.<br /><br />________________<br /><br /><em>About the contributor</em>: Everett Young is a political science instructor and Ph.D. candidate specializing in political psychology at Stony Brook University. His research currently focuses on individual differences in cognitive process variables that may produce opinion formation along the left- right ideological dimension.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-30451561225310542262008-05-11T13:43:00.003-04:002008-05-11T13:51:08.760-04:00Do We Lack Character?Larry More writes:<br /><br />Dear Tom,<br /><br />I want to bring to your attention I book that I think you will find useful and interesting. It is entitled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lack-Character-Personality-Moral-Behavior/dp/0521608902/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210526725&sr=8-1"><em>Lack of Character</em></a> by John Doris, 2002. The author is a philosopher of ethics, and main theme of the book is that character (in what we speak of as "moral character") does not exist in the way that we tend to believe, and therefore character ethics is a rather different enterprise than we usually assume, which he goes on to discuss.<br /><br />Doris thoroughly reviews and discusses the social psychology research which has repeatedly evidenced that there is little empirical justification for our assuming any internal, temporal, or cross-situational consistency to behavior (as is implied, if not required, by our usual notions of moral character).<br /><br />As a psychologist, I remember well the furor that was created in 1968 when persistent findings of low trait-behavior correlations and negligible cross-situational consistency resulted in suggestions that there was no central personality structure. The urgency around this issue lasted over 10 years, and was never really resolved; the field just passed it by. It seems to me that this response was in some sense the same one that is now arising around naturalism, determinism, retribution, will-power, responsibility, and so on. Doris does no more than touch in passing on the philosophical issue of determinism vs. free will (a page on compatibilism) and talks about supernaturalism not at all. Nevertheless, I am thinking that his emphasis on situational influences on (determinants of) behavior mark this book as naturalistic in orientation.<br /><br />Although he doesn't seem to realize the importance of this direction, Doris' text actually touches on where we get our assumptions of a powerful single, coherent central self determining our actions. He points to substantial research regarding how children develop their conceptions of persons through their life-span; and even contrasts conceptions developed in other (less individualistic) cultures. Surely our notions of contra-causal free-will, the primacy of person over situation and the focus on individual responsibility raised to the level of metaphysical principle, our readiness to justify reflexive emotional reactions with judgmental cognitive categorizations, and to unwittingly engage in punitive retributive practices, -- etc -- all of these have such a developmental history. It strikes me that this is a sort of Foucauldian genealogical project, but there is a good bit of child-development research that bears on it. Showing how these concepts are embedded in a culturally-local developmental history that we (around here) share in common, does not of course directly challenge the "objective truth" of these points, but it surely would undermine and soften our reflexive attachment to them by offering (like I think Foucault's work did in its field) another direction of understanding.<br /><br />Anyway, Doris' book is written in a thoughtful and somewhat informal, personable style even though it is fairly heavily annotated and referenced. Although it doesn’t take sides in the freedom-determinism wars, it seems to me that it straddles both psychology and philosophy in a way similar to materials on Naturalism.Org, so I figured you would find it of interest.<br /><br />_____________<br /><br /><em>About the contributor</em>: Larry More is psychotherapist in the Philadelphia area with a masters in counseling from the University of Georgia. He has worked over 15 years in the substance abuse area with a family-therapy orientation, and has conducted a more generalized practice in the last 15. Since the 70's, his main intellectual interest has been in the topic of "the self," with a masters thesis focused on the notion that no such self exists. If so, what, then, is therapy ?Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-70064013461802762442008-03-06T11:10:00.004-05:002008-03-06T12:28:29.983-05:00Naturalism and NihilismIn an <a href="http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=4497">article</a> based on his recently published book <em>God and the New Atheism</em>, theologian John Haught argues that the new atheism is just as bad as “the politically and culturally insipid kind of theism it claims to be ousting.” He says the new atheism is essentially faith-based, replacing faith in god with faith in scientism. It’s “creedal,” dogmatic, without a stiff cognitive spine, a “life-numbing religiosity…religiosity in a new guise.” It’s therefore epistemically and morally inferior to the theism Haught champions, which has no truck with faith, at least not the insipid, life-numbing kind. Haught’s belief in god is instead based in what he calls a “richer empiricism” which goes beyond science, as explained in his book <em>Is Nature Enough?,</em> reviewed <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/haught.htm">here</a>.<br /><br />But is Haught being fair to tar atheism, and therefore naturalism, with the brush of religiosity and faith? Are naturalists creedal about scientism, which Haught defines as the idea that “science alone is a reliable road to true understanding of anything”? No. Naturalists don’t (or shouldn’t) suppose that all truths are scientific truths, only that science is our best guide to understanding the ultimate constituents of reality and the things they compose – the “furniture of the universe.” (More on distinguishing science from scientism is <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/scientism.htm">here</a>, <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/landscape.htm#scientism">here</a> and <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/currents.htm#scientism">here</a>.) Naturalists’ commitment to science in this regard isn’t a matter of faith, it’s based on experience – the widely shared experience that beliefs about the world based in science are generally more reliable than those that aren’t. If we want reliable beliefs, then it’s <em>rational</em> to stick with science, not a matter of faith. So it isn’t, as Haught says, self-contradictory to assert we shouldn’t base beliefs about the world on faith, but rather on science, since this assertion isn’t based on faith.<br /><br />Haught takes the new “soft-core” atheists to task for accepting mainstream values and modern lifestyles, saying that they aren’t being true to the real implications of atheism. The old hard-core atheists such as Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre saw that “a full acceptance of the death of God would require an asceticism completely missing in the new atheistic formulas.” They would advise, as Haught puts it, that<br /><br /><blockquote>If you're going to be an atheist, the most rugged version of godlessness demands complete consistency. Go all the way and think the business of atheism through to the bitter end. This means that before you get too comfortable with the godless world you long for, you will be required by the logic of any consistent skepticism to pass through the disorienting wilderness of nihilism. Do you have the courage to do that?</blockquote><p>For Haught, true atheism and naturalism necessarily end up in nihilism. Since the new atheists obviously aren’t nihilists, being good bourgeois and all, they aren’t real, rugged atheists. He asks</p><blockquote><p>Has [Sam] Harris really thought about what would happen if people adopted the hard-core atheist's belief that there is no transcendent basis for our moral valuations? What if people have the sense to ask whether Darwinian naturalism can provide a solid and enduring foundation for our truth claims and value judgments? Will a good science education make everyone simply decide to be good if the universe is inherently valueless and purposeless? At least the hard-core atheists tried to prepare their readers for the pointless world they would encounter if the death of God were taken seriously. </p></blockquote><p>The equation of naturalism with nihilism is a standard scare tactic, but it doesn’t bear on the truth or plausibility of naturalism or theism. Even if Darwinian naturalism can’t provide “a solid and enduring foundation for our truth claims and value judgments” this isn’t proof that it’s false, or that god exists. It’s only a reason to <em>hope</em> god exists, on the questionable assumption that his authority provides a secure basis for moral values (see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/landscape.htm#morality">here</a>).<br /><br />It turns out, however, that the hard-core atheists (at least as Haught describes them) were wrong: an atheistic naturalism doesn’t end up in nihilism, so we needn’t run scared into the arms of god. Without a transcendent, theistic basis for our moral valuations, there are still compelling reasons for naturalists to be moral: we are animals whose flourishing within a society critically depends on behaving morally toward others. Moreover, we are built by evolution to take moral rules as universally binding (see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/enlightenment1.htm#grip">here</a>). This explains why the new atheists are just normal folk, not nihilists, when it comes to values and lifestyles: they, like pretty much everyone else, are moral by nature.<br /><br />Haught closes with a question: </p><blockquote>Belief in God or the practice of religion is not necessary in order for people to be highly moral beings. We can agree with soft-core atheists on this point. But the real question, which comes not from me but from the hard-core atheists, is: Can you rationally justify your unconditional adherence to timeless values without implicitly invoking the existence of God?</blockquote>The answer, as we’ve seen, is an unequivocal yes. Of course it isn’t that naturalism avoids value conflict and moral ambiguity, but patently neither does theism, whether it’s what Haught considers the insipid, faith-based varieties, or the more "empirical" theological varieties. Since he admits that belief in god isn’t necessary for being moral, this puts naturalists and theists on at least an equal moral footing. That naturalists are not nihilists doesn’t implicitly invoke the existence of god, it’s simply evidence that morality is a natural phenomenon. As Dan Dennett would say, thank goodness!Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-53322391454577021302008-03-04T16:35:00.007-05:002008-03-04T16:52:49.914-05:00Playing Catch with Dr. TallisRaymond Tallis, physician, philosopher, poet and novelist, is a very smart and amusing champion of free will against determinism. You can see him in action as a panelist in Fora TV’s <a href="http://fora.tv/2007/10/28/Battle_of_Ideas_My_Brain_Made_Me_Do_It">Battle of Ideas</a>, where he read a <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2726643.ece">paper</a> denying that neuroscience can help us decide about criminal culpability (comments <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/soul_of_law.htm">here</a>). He’s also defended free will at the <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3893/">Manifesto Club</a> in London (comments <a href="http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/2007/11/worries-about-determinism-bedevil.html">here</a>), and most recently in the pages of Philosophy Now, in an article titled <a href="http://www.philosophynow.org/issue65/65tallis.htm">Who caught that ball?</a> (warning: sports metaphors ahead). Tallis is a one man whirlwind of well intentioned, well expressed, but ultimately misguided arguments to the effect that in order to be free and responsible, human beings must transcend causation in some respect. Here I’ll respond to his latest sally, returning the ball to his court.<br /><br />Tallis considers a cricket player who’s just made an amazing catch, and asks whether he deserves the praise coming from his teammates. On a close analysis of the rapid fire physical processes underlying the catch, most of which were necessarily carried out automatically and unthinkingly, it might appear that the player <em>himself</em> didn’t do much. He’s just the “lucky possesor of bodily mechanisms” that did the real work. Tallis points out that much of our behavior is in fact automatic and mechanistic, it “does itself” without intention on our part. If so, that seems to leave the conscious agent without much of a role to play. Further, as neuroscience is telling us, consciousness itself seems to be a function of the physical brain. If so, Tallis says we might worry that<br /><blockquote>...our <em>brain</em> is calling the shots. We persons are merely the site of those events we call ‘actions’. It all looks pretty bleak for those who believe that we really do <em>do</em> the things we think we do.</blockquote><br />In rebutting this point, he goes on to point out, quite properly, that it’s only by virtue of conscious, voluntary decisions (to practice hard, schedule his time, show up for games) that the cricket player is ultimately able to make the catch. Further, to understand all this requires not just consideration of his brain, but the whole person and the field of action in which he is engaged. We are active conscious agents, not merely a collection of passive, unconscious processes.<br /><br />All this is certainly true, but Tallis seems to think that broadening our explanation to include the person and environment somehow escapes determinism:<br /><br /><blockquote>…we are always positioning ourselves to acquire the experience, skills, knowledge and even the attitudes that will enable us to perform effectively. And this is how it is with much of our lives, which consist of acting on ourselves in order to change ourselves, from going to a pub to have a drink to cheer oneself up, to paying good money to cut a better figure in Paris by polishing up one ’s French. Stuffing all this back in the brain and denying the larger background to our actions, which are to a significant degree chosen and shaped by us, is the first step to handing actions over to the impersonal material world and making determinism seem almost plausible.</blockquote>But the plausibility of determinism – the law-like cause and effect regularities exhibited by events in the world that science describes at many interlocking levels – isn’t abrogated by being a person, since after all we are fully embodied beings. Nor is it abrogated by being very complex, recursively self-modifying beings that have reasons and intentions. There’s no basis to suppose that our choices to self-modify, and the reasons for those choices, aren’t fully explicable as a function of the intricate causal interplay between us and our “larger background.” As Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown argue in their book, <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/murphy.htm"><em>Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?</em></a> (pp. 191-237), reasons aren’t opposed to causes, they are a category of causes. Indeed, to understand ourselves rationally <em>requires</em> that we analyze our choices and reasons in a deterministic fashion, to see them as causal operators with their own antecedents in our desires and motives, which in turn have their causal antecedents in our life history and genetics. Absent this sort of understanding, our behavior ends up an inexplicable, indeterministic fluke. In short, there’s no antinomy between determinism and personhood, between determinism and full-blooded voluntary intentional agency, or between determinism and the ability to modify ourselves or the environment to our own advantage. To suppose otherwise, as Tallis does, is to think we must be something more than natural creatures to be properly dignified and self-shaping. But this something more can only be an inexplicable, a-causal mystery.<br /><br />It’s ironic that by objecting to “stuffing all this back in the brain” Tallis actually distributes part of the responsibility for our choices to the wider context of action, including other people. This is not what a defender of a <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/strawson_interview.htm">buck-stopping free will</a> would want, one supposes. But the point (an own goal, perhaps) is nevertheless well-taken: seeing that choices arise within a larger background, that we are not “stand-alone brains” as he puts it, militates <em>against</em> the idea of an uninfluenced, self-caused chooser within the person that bears ultimate responsibility for action.<br /><br />Tallis ends his paper on a tentative note, saying that his argument “does not entirely refute the notion that we are small mechanisms in the great mechanism of the universe, but it makes it more difficult to hold.” This concession gives away a great deal, since the difficulty of holding a <em>properly nuanced</em> idea of ourselves as mechanisms is not that great. Remember, Tallis thinks for us not to be mechanisms we must transcend cause and effect determinism in some important respect; if we don’t, then we are mechanisms. Now, since we <em>don’t</em> transcend determinism (and importantly even if we did, that wouldn’t help us be responsible agents, see <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/fatalism.htm#The%20Flaw%20of%20Fatalism">here</a>) we <em>are</em> mechanisms, by Tallis’ definition.<br /><br />But notice what amazing mechanisms we are, namely the kind Tallis describes in his essay: capable of all sorts of self-modifying, intentional, conscious and voluntary actions. We are a far cry from <em>simple, inflexible</em> mechanisms, which is usually what people mean by the word. So perhaps we should use a word that better suits our capacities. How about <em>person</em>? So long as we don’t have something supernatural or contra-causal in mind when thinking about persons and their capacities, this is the way to go.<br /><br />It isn’t clear that Tallis believes that persons have something supernatural or contra-causal at their core, since after all he’s a medical doctor and therefore most likely a physicalist. But his desire to wiggle free of determinism in defending free will necessarily introduces an obscurity into his account of human action. This is too bad, since otherwise his is a first class intelligence, one that naturalists would love to have on their team. Meanwhile, Dr. Tallis, the ball is approaching rapidly.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-5570152813234239282008-02-13T11:06:00.003-05:002008-02-13T11:10:14.805-05:00Living with DarwinIn the culture wars, Charles Darwin is the icon of our conflicting attitudes toward science. His portrait is familiar: unsmiling, the troubled brow reflects the disturbing hypothesis generated by years of careful observation in the field and laboratory. We humans are, he conjectured, the outcome of an unsupervised process of natural selection. We are distant kin to the very earliest life forms, close cousins to chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas.<br /><br />The study of biological evolution has amply confirmed what Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett calls <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Dangerous-Idea-Evolution-Meanings/dp/068482471X">Darwin’s dangerous idea</a>, dangerous (to some) because the scientific explanation of human origins manifestly competes with the traditional religious belief that we are God’s intentional creations, made flesh in his image. Indeed, because he knew his hypothesis would be deeply controversial, Darwin delayed making his ideas known. Only when he learned that Alfred Russel Wallace was working along similar lines was he finally moved to publish.<br /><br />On his 199th birthday, Darwin’s legacy still disturbs many of us. But the potential to upset our most cherished convictions is the hallmark of science, the cognitive discipline that places public and experimental evidence above intuition, tradition, ideology and received truths. If we want to know how the world works, we must necessarily submit to the truths of nature, not cling to conventional wisdom, whether religious or secular.<br /><br />The drive to fully comprehend the human condition sometimes leads to disconcerting conclusions, so it’s little wonder we are of two minds about science. Cognitive neuroscience now joins evolutionary biology in the search for self-knowledge, and again the findings challenge our fondest hopes, in this case about the existence of the soul. The material brain, we are learning, accomplishes consciousness, perception, feeling, cognition, and the control of behavior quite nicely on its own. As Harvard neurophilosopher Joshua Greene <a href="http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Last-Stand.pdf">suggests</a>, this puts the immaterial, immortal soul out of a job.<br /><br />Given such (literally) dispiriting conclusions, science is sometimes portrayed as the big reductionist bully, robbing us of necessary reassurances. But these insults to our certainties are self-inflicted, since after all science is a quintessentially human enterprise. It evolved in response to one of our highest aspirations: the desire to discover, to the limit of our abilities, what is real and true from a culturally and personally unbound perspective.<br /><br />Precisely because it aims for universal knowledge, science can draw those of different cultures and backgrounds together. So it is, on the occasion of Darwin’s birthday, that the organizers of international <a href="http://www.darwinday.org/">Darwin Day</a> invite us to a “global celebration of science and humanity.” Despite its discomforts, science has given us much to be thankful for, and celebrating Darwin’s contribution is an apt expression of our appreciation.<br /><br />Still, as we probe deeper into the cosmos, and into the brain, it remains to be seen whether we can assimilate the scientific truth about ourselves. We are caught, it seems, between competing desires, for knowledge on the one hand and existential security on the other. Will we come of age as a species, daring to fulfill our potential as knowers, or will we retreat to empirically unwarranted consolations?<br /><br />As this drama plays out, we might recognize the nobility of staying unbowed under the impersonal gaze of science, of refusing the comforts of the soul and the supernatural. Moreover, as Darwin himself put it, there is grandeur in the scientific view of life, the majestic sweep of nature that has now produced us, a creature mindful of its own contingency. We may not play a starring role in existence as science reveals it, but we are nevertheless privileged to be here in Darwin’s world, marveling at the scale, complexity and diversity of what might well be an unscripted universe.<br /><br />Happy birthday, Charles!Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-74579553429051447912008-01-10T13:58:00.000-05:002008-01-10T14:12:43.643-05:00Displacing the Immaterial SelfThe naturalistic worldview has gained ground, slowly and incompletely, by means of scientific explanations for phenomena that have displaced supernatural explanations. The process of explanatory displacement has relegated god, in the unlikely event he exists, to the role of remote controller: the guy who got the ball rolling, but whose day-to-day supervision isn’t necessary. Things seem to happen quite nicely on their own, in accordance with physical laws and higher-level regularities we discover in the domains of biology, psychology and maybe someday even sociology.<br /><br />God hasn’t been the only victim of explanatory displacement. Our understanding of life no longer includes the rather elusive concepts of <em>élan vital</em> or protoplasm: we now see it’s all a matter of complex interlocking mechanisms that encode information and control reproduction and behavior.<br /><br />Next up, and it’s a biggie, is consciousness and the self. It seems pre-theoretically that the mind and body are very different things, and the mind, what we think of as the essential immaterial self, still seems beyond what physicalist science can account for.<br /><br />But they’re working on it. A team of scientists and philosophers, including neurophilosopher and Center for Naturalism advisor <a href="http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzinger/">Thomas Metzinger</a>, has published a fascinating paper on how the experience of being a self located in the body can be altered experimentally, thus mimicking, at least partially, so-called out of body experiences. As the abstract in <a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/epfd-tes081707.php">Science</a> has it:<br /><blockquote><p>…we designed an experiment that uses conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality to disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body. We found that during multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders. Our results indicate that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and are based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information.</p></blockquote><p>So the quintessential me that I so confidently and continuously feel sitting behind my eyes will move in response to perceptual cues (see the video on the experiment <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQAc_Z2OfQ">here</a>). This supports the idea that the felt sense of self is construction of the brain in response to sensory input, not the result of being an immaterial something or other. In short, it’s another instance of explanatory displacement, in which a materially based informational process explains what was previously thought to be a categorically mental phenomenon. Out of body experiences can now be understood as what the brain does, not a matter of the soul floating outside the body. As a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/science/24body.html">New York Times</a> article on the experiment put it:</p><blockquote>“The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to otherworldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, who, like Dr. Botvinick, had no role in the experiments. In what is popularly referred to as near-death experience, people who have been in the throes of severe and sudden injury or illness often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said and then, just as suddenly, finding themselves back inside their body. Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices.”</blockquote>The basic sense of self, according to the original paper, is attributable to the fact that we experience “the transparent content of a single, whole-body representation.” In effect, what we experience is a <em>model</em> of ourselves, interestingly enough. Further, in their conclusion the authors speculate that “humans’ daily experience of an embodied self and selfhood, as well as the illusion reported here, relies on brain mechanisms at the temporoparietal junction.” So it looks like the brain, astounding machine that it is, constructs the self, for the self. That’s quite a trick. In displacing the immaterial soul, the physicalist explanation of self doesn’t diminish us, rather it shows what amazing things the physical world can cook up, including, remarkably, our very selves.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25268031.post-25233570847218261812008-01-10T11:38:00.000-05:002008-01-10T14:53:52.773-05:00Behavior Tech: Lose Weight and Save the PlanetOn the strength of his expertise in consumer behavior and diet, Cornell food psychologist Brian Wansink has been appointed director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, home of the food pyramid. His 2006 book, <em>Mindless Eating</em>, has been getting attention and he was recently named Person of the Week on ABC World News (the interview and other news stories are posted on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mindless-Eating-More-Than-Think/dp/0553804340">Amazon</a>). His work is all about behavioral technology (behavior tech): how to actually get behavior to change in the direction we want. His thesis is that if we become aware of the determinants of our eating habits, especially the cues surrounding the presentation of food, we can gain more control over them. Supposing we can simply will our way to losing weight doesn’t cut it, since it turns out the will itself is controlled by various factors, internal and external.<br /><br />This of course isn’t a new idea, but it might seem that way since the myth of willpower perpetually overshadows the practical wisdom of understanding our determinants. We tend to be radical individualists, supposing that behavior is governed by a self that’s more or less immune to influences, but the science of behavior (remember BF Skinner?) calls that assumption into question. A smarter approach, which Wansink’s work exemplifies, is to admit we’re fully in the causal mix. Then we’re in a much better position to realize our ambitions, whether its weight loss or anything else, by means of manipulating our environment to elicit the behavior we want. Example: use smaller plates, keep serving platters and dishes of candy out of sight. The will is weak when temptation is nigh, so get smart and banish temptation.<br /><br />The idea of becoming aware of our determinants fits in nicely with some spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, which emphasizes the importance of self-knowledge gained through practices such as <a href="http://americanchan.org/page32/files/ThePragmaticBuddhistVol1No3">mindfulness meditation</a>. In fact, the deepest self-knowledge is that there isn’t a substantial self in there, controlling behavior and witnessing experience. We are physical, dynamic processes responsive to contingencies, not puppet masters of ourselves. This very un-American idea won’t catch on anytime soon, but it’s what both science and Buddhism tell us, and what Wansink is ultimately driving at (although he may not realize it).<br /><br />Getting good at controlling food intake is, as the ABC news story says, behavior change on a small, personal scale. But Wansink understands it can be scaled up: "If you can see that just making certain small changes can have this ripple effect on your life -- man, that's doing people a tremendous service that goes way beyond nutrition and physical activity and health." <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/behavior_tech.htm">Behavior tech on a large scale</a> is exactly what’s necessary to address looming collective threats to the environment and global stability. If we can agree on goals (and even many conservatives now admit that action on climate change is necessary), then we we’re much more likely to attain them if we understand the factors that shape behavior. But this first requires admitting that behavior is indeed <em>caused</em>, not a matter of self-initiated will.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the ideology of radical freedom – the idea that each of us can and should simply <em>choose</em> to make the right choice, independent of circumstances – prevents the smart application of behavior tech, for instance in building <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/medicalization.htm#environments">safe and healthy schools and communities</a> which elicit good behavior <em>by design</em>. Likewise, the <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/environment.htm#collapse">political will</a> to respond to climate change can be mustered, <em>if </em>we come to terms with the fact that the will itself is a function of conditions. Understanding our determinants, we can lose weight <em>and</em> save the planet.Tom Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08414754510736349472noreply@blogger.com0