Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.

I’ve spent the past fifteen minutes trying it. So far, it’s worked every time, and it hasn’t taken very many clicks, either.

Bill writes:

Our question is whether numbers themselves are mental constructions, not whether numerals are mental constructions. This is connected with the question of whether mathematics is in any sense conventional. No doubt notation systems are conventional, i.e. decided upon by human beings (or whatever other intelligent critters there might be elsewhere); but it doesn’t follow that numbers or other mathematical objects are.

If numbers themselves are mental constructions, then they depend on our existence for their existence. Their existence is a mental existnce in or before our minds, and thus a dependent mode of existence. (Forget about extraterrestrial intelligences for the nonce.) The same goes for the truths in which they are involved. (Thus 7 and 9 and 16 are involved in the truth expressed by ’7 + 9 = 16′.) But we didn’t always exist. So if numbers depend ion us, they they didn’t always exist. Consider a time before any minds existed, some time after the Big Bang and before the emergence of life on earth, say.

During that interval, the speed of light and the speed of sound were the same as they are now, and during that time the former was greater than the latter, as is the case now. Let ‘c’ denote the speed of light in a vacuum. C is identical to some number, which number depending on the units of measurement one employs. So c = 186,000 miles/sec (approximately). In the metric system, c = 300,000 km/sec (approximately). The point is that once the system of measurement is fixed — which of course is conventional — then some definite number is the SOL. Similarly with the speed of sound, SOS. Now

1. SOL > SOS

is true now and was true at the time when no humans existed. Of course, at that time the concept or notion or idea greater than (taken in its mathematical sense) did not exist since concepts (notions, ideas) cannot exist except ‘in’ a mind. (‘In’ here not to be taken spatially.) But the mathematical relation picked out by ‘>’ existed.

For if it did not, then (1) could not have been true at the time in question. And the same goes for the relational fact of SOL’s being greater than SOS. That fact obtained at the time when no minds existed. So its constituents (the numbers and the greater than relation) had to exist at that time as well.

Therefore, mathematical objects cannot be our mental creations.

Hmmm. My question for Bill is:

Why is “speed” itself anything more than human shorthand for modeling a particular aspect of the different configurations of the world at different times? Let’s say that spacetime event A is “a car over here at some instant of time”, and event B is “the same car over there at some other instant of time”. It’s not until we come along, with a need to model this in a handy way, that we develop the concept of “speed” as

(the spatial component of the separation of events A and B, represented by our minds as a number)

…divided by…

(the temporal component of the separation of events A and B, represented by our minds as a number).

But in a world without minds to make such representations, there’s nothing intrinsically numerical about a separation; it’s just an event over here, and another over there. It’s not until we seek to quantify it, for our own purposes, that numbers enter the picture.

I think, then, that Bill is smuggling in his numbers when he introduces the concept of “speed”, and pulling them out again at the end.

(I realize there probably wouldn’t be a car in the first place in a world without minds, but you get the point: the world just IS. It isn’t until we needed to describe it that we needed numbers, so we invented them.)

The contrasting view (and the one that I incline toward) is that consciousness arises, in some way that we do not yet understand, from the workings of the brain — which means that before there were any brains in in the world, there was no consciousness — and that reason is a practical affair, a Good Trick that we have learned as a highly effective (and therefore highly adaptive) way of modeling the world so as to predict those aspects of the future that have, over the eons, had some bearing on our reproductive success.

C.S. Lewis considered this physicalist view of reason to be “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism”. Genuine Reason, he argued, must flow according to the logical relations between ground and consequent, while any form of “reason” instantiated as a purely physical system can only proceed according to physical cause and effect. Therefore, he argued, our Reason must cannot rest upon a purely physical foundation, or we wouldn’t be able to trust it.

For Lewis this was a sort of reductio ad absurdum: of course we do consider reason to be trustworthy, and so the only possible basis fit can possibly have is one that transcends the “merely” physical. But as I argued in a post some time ago, there’s another possibility: that our reason actually is quite limited and imperfect, in ways that are hard for us to see — just as we’d expect from a purely practical brain-based system that has been cobbled together over the eons by natural selection. Our trust, in other words, may go too far.

A great deal of clever experimentation and neuro-psychological research has been done since C.S. Lewis died (on November 22nd, 1963, by the way), and the peculiarities, defaults, and curious limitations of human cognition have become far more apparent. Among the more recent ideas about why we reason the way we do is one put forward by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier in a paper called Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Their premise? As Jonathan Haidt explains:

“Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”

Here’s the abstract:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

It’s an interesting idea, though my first impression is that it sounds a bit all-or-nothing: while I can easily see how such social factors could have exerted a strong selection pressure, it seems to me that more objective feedback from the real world must have had a major role to play also.

But I’ve only just run across this, and haven’t yet read the paper (or the article linked below), so I can’t say yet if it makes a truly persuasive, well-reasoned argument.

Learn more here.

(The study might have been somewhat slanted, however; one of the metrics used for confidence in naturalism was “liking Dawkins”.)

Two things stand out: first, that people’s views on intelligent design vs. Darwinian evolution were unformed enough, prior to their participating in the study, as to be influenced in any significant measure by reading the brief synopses given to them of the two positions; second, the conclusion by one of the researchers that the study shows that people “may need to be explicitly taught” that a naturalistic worldview can provide a solid philosophical foundation for purpose and meaning.

Story here.

People do want there to be absolute moral truths, and many people feel that there can’t be any such truths in the absence of God. Without an absolute authority to appeal to, moral disagreements cannot be resolved, the center will not hold, and society will disintegrate in relativism and nihilism. Plenty of folks will tell you that this is already happening.

But grounding moral truth in divine command — the whim of God — has its problems too. What if God commanded us tomorrow to fry our children in hot oil? We would mutiny in moral revulsion. It seems, then that there is some deeper moral truth to which we expect God to adhere, and with which we would still comply even if He didn’t. So why not cut out the middleman?

What, though, can moral “truth” be under a Godless, naturalistic worldview? Answering this question has has been one of the most pressing challenges for our current crop of atheist intellectuals, many of whom are scientists and philosophers working in the relevant fields of biology, evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It’s pressing because before they can wean our civilization away from religion, as they would like to do, they need to come up with a new story about the foundations of morality. People still want their moral truth.

There are at least a couple of ways it can go. One way is to say that yes, there are moral facts, and they are simply “there”, existing alongside other Platonic abstracta like mathematical truths. It is a mathematical fact that any angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle; in the same way, it is simply a moral fact that torturing children is evil.

The problem with this (even if we accept the actual existence of Platonic abstracta, which I’m reluctant to do) is that we have objective ways of verifying mathematical facts: if you deny that any angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle, I can offer a simple proof. (I can also suggest that you just go out and start inscribing; you’ll soon see that you always get a right angle.)

But we have nothing like that for moral truths. If you and I disagree, say, about whether bestiality is morally wrong, it seems there’s no authority to which we can appeal the matter, other than social convention, religious dogma, and the subjective moral intuitions of our own consciences.

The angle that folks like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker are working these days is to claim that there actually is a naturalistic foundation upon which moral truths can rest. It is nothing more or less than the “fact of the matter” about which codes of behavior best enable intelligent social primates like us to live together successfully in thriving and happy groups. In other words, there are accessible natural facts about which moral systems maximize our fitness.

But wait — is that it? We want bedrock moral truth here, not just what happens to optimize our Darwinian outcomes.

Well, how deep do we really need to drill? Let’s say that reciprocal altruism is such a powerful fitness-maximizer that any intelligent, social life-form will either hit on it and thrive, or miss it and dwindle into misery and extinction. In other words, it is a basic fact of the Universe that a moral system based on reciprocal altruism is the optimal, most fruitful strategy for generating successful and well-functioning social groups.

“That’s all well and good,” the absolutist might say, “but all this is awfully contingent. What if it maximized our fitness to pick a child at random once a week, roast him over a slow fire, and eat him? Then we’d see that as an obvious moral ‘truth’.”

“But you see,” comes the reply, “it seems that the world is so constituted that doing what you suggest doesn’t maximize our fitness. Instead, it turns out that there are other things that clearly do — things like the Golden Rule — and with careful study we can learn what they are, with enough certainty that we can say with confidence that any society that does roast and eat its children is making a factual moral error.”

“Well”, says the absolutist, “that may be, but even so you still haven’t got me an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Why should some brute fact about the superior Darwinian fitness of altruistic groups mean that we ‘ought’ to be altruistic? Even if we do develop a metrical science of human well-being, and learn very clearly what types of behavior increase and diminish it, all we’ve done is establish some facts about social animals. But there is still nothing in Nature that makes it a moral fact that we ought to encourage behavior that will maximize human well-being; that is still just a subjective valuation on our part.”

To which our Sam Harris might answer:

“So what? If you can know with certainty that one direction leads to a maximally miserable world, and the other to a maximally happy one, what deeper moral ‘truth’ do you need? Your insistence on supernatural bedrock is nothing more than an intellectual fetish, of no practical value. Why should anyone care about that?”

So there it is, if I understand it all correctly: there are natural moral facts, because there are optimal strategies for maximizing well-being — strategies that are optimal for any intelligent social creature. And this is different from simply positing moral facts as Platonic objects, because we can actually use the tools of natural science to discover what these optimal moral systems are.

Are you convinced? I’m not — but I will say it is certainly an interesting argument, and not without its merits. And again, to be fair, I haven’t even read Sam Harris’s book yet, so I should be careful about putting words in his mouth. I do think I get the gist of it, though; these ideas have been in the air for a while now (I even had a chance to discuss them briefly with Steven Pinker up in Wellfleet a couple of summers ago, after a talk he gave for our local library, and what he said then was pretty much what Sam Harris appears to be saying here).

There are a lot more questions to ask, and soft spots to poke at, but it’s late now; they can wait for another post.

I still haven’t read his book, but I’ve been awfully skeptical that Harris can pull this thousand-pound rabbit out of the hat. Many have tried, and all have failed, and I have no doubt that most philosophers will greet this latest attempt as just another perpetual-motion machine. Reason tells us the thing can’t be done; any stack of “oughts” must ultimately bottom out on some subjective valuation, or on the whim of God — take your choice.

Nevertheless, it looks as if Dr. Harris is really serious about this, and in a long response to the book’s many harsh critics, he has mounted a spirited defense. His point is that there are various “facts of the matter” about human well-being, and that it is within our grasp to develop a moral code that tends to increase, rather than decrease, that well-being. (Utilitarianism, in other words, harnessed to a forthcoming metrical science of human happiness.) He argues that the vicious philosophical regress of “oughts” can be foreclosed by simple common sense; it’s just obvious that we “ought” to favor a moral framework that moves the world in the direction of decreasing human misery.

I probably shouldn’t say much more about it until I’ve read the book.

Among the linked items in Harris’s response is a televised “debate” on the question “Does God Have a Future?” Brandishing the pikestaffs of rational naturalism are doughty Sam Harris and Michael Shermer; arrayed against them are the grotesque New Age flim-flam man Deepak Chopra (who reminds me more and more, as time goes by, of Liberace) and a spectacular hot-air balloon by the name of Jean Houston, awareness of whose existence I had been spared till now. (Serious intellectual theism, sad to say, went entirely unrepresented.)

Have a look here, and watch words lose all meaning.

Dr. Harris has been working for a while now to try to put morality on an objective footing (something I think can’t be done). His premise, if I may sum it up with extreme brevity, is that there are some moral systems that are more conducive to human well-being, and others that are less so — and so the search for an optimal moral system becomes a pragmatic, empirical question, and falls squarely within the purview of science.

I haven’t read his book, but he has spoken about this elsewhere, and it is the same argument that Steven Pinker gave when I met him briefly in Wellfleet a couple of years ago and asked him his opinion on the topic. It is entirely understandable that prominent atheist intellectuals like Harris and Pinker would like to find a way to offer an objective grounding for morality, as the obliteration of such a foundation has made marketing their product rather more difficult, at least here in America.

The idea seems to center on the enormously useful idea, long familiar to evolutionary theorists, of a “fitness landscape” with peaks and valleys representing, in abstract form, the niches available to natural selection. Species will tend to occupy the peaks, and as the peaks shift, the species tends to adapt accordingly. (When a peak (i.e., a niche) disappears altogether — as for example, happens to the “arboreal insectivore” niche when a forest is cut down — the species can’t adapt fast enough to cross the valley to the next available fitness peak, and goes extinct.) Another way to put it might be to say that the peaks represents islands of viable designs in the sea of possible genotypes.

Sam Harris’s suggestion is that there is also a moral “fitness space” that defines peaks and valleys of human well-being. If this is so, then it begins to offer an objective basis for comparison of various moral systems. Harris’s point seems to be that some moral systems will be seen to tower over others.

It’s a nice idea, and I will read his book, but I wonder about a few things.

First, it seems that Dr. Harris is arguing that some moral systems occupy quantitatively higher “peaks” in the well-being landscape than others. But what metric does one use to measure “well-being”? Biological fitness offers the obvious yardstick of reproductive success. What altimeter will Harris use to measure the peaks in his moral landscape? Material wealth? Liberty? Spiritual satisfaction?

Second, peaks in these kinds of abstract spaces are local maxima. Species tend to remain on local peaks even if there is a much higher one across the valley, for the simple reason that every direction from where they currently stand is down — and the valley floor, which must be crossed to get to the next peak over, is lethal. Even if Dr. Harris can confidently devise some acceptable metric for comparing the fitness score of known moral systems, how can he know that whatever one he ends up recommending is not merely the highest peak in the visible neighborhood? (I imagine he would concede that this is indeed a possibility, but that his system at least allows us to make an objective comparison.)

Finally, I am sure that Dr. Harris would agree that what contributes to human “well-being”, however he chooses to measure it, is a contingent fact of nature. If it turns out, as an empirical fact, that the moral system that leads to the greatest well-being according to his yardstick includes slaughtering your enemies and enslaving their women, or killing and eating sickly babies, etc., then presumably he will be impartial enough to declare that system the summum bonum. “Good”, then, becomes “whatever maximizes some well-being factor X”. This result — that if a moral system based on pediatric cannibalism had turned out to be a strategy that maximizes X, then baby-eating would be morally “good”, and objectively so — is going to be a very hard sell to a great many people, I think.

But I haven’t read the book — it comes out on the 5th — so perhaps Dr. Harris has anticipated these questions, and has satisfying answers to them. I wonder what they could be.

Recall the myth of Cupid, who flutters about on his cherubic wings making people fall in love by shooting them with his little bow and arrow. This is such a lame cartoonists’ convention that it’s hard to believe that anybody ever took any version of it seriously. But we can pretend: Suppose that once upon a time there were people who believed that an invisible arrow from a flying god was a sort of inoculation that caused people to fall in love. And suppose some killjoy scientist came along and showed them that this was simply not true: No such flying gods exist. “He’s just shown that nobody ever falls in love, not really. The idea of falling in love is just a nice — maybe even a necessary — fiction. It never happens.” That is what some might say. Others, one hopes, would want to deny it: “No. Love is quite real, and so is falling in love. It just isn’t what people used to think it is. It’s just as good — maybe even better. True love doesn’t involve any flying gods.” The issue of free will is like this. If you are one of those who believe that free will is only really free will if it springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision into your motor cortex, then, given what you mean by free will, my view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you think free will might be morally important without being supernatural, then my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably thought it was.

Freedom Evolves, p. 222-223

Given that, as most religions claim —

1) There is an afterlife of infinite duration;

2) Those who live in strict accordance with the religion’s requirements and prohibitions will be eternally rewarded in the afterlife;

3) Those who instead violate the religion’s requirements and prohibitions will be eternally punished;

4) The quality of these rewards or punishments far exceeds anything we might experience in our brief mortal lives;

– does it not follow that it is irrational not to dedicate everything in one’s earthly life to the fulfillment of one’s religious obligations, with everything else taking a distant second place?

As Bill’s reader put it:

If this ranking system is correct, it is hard to see how it could ever be rational for one to pursue any set of mortal goods—no matter how well they rank on the finite scale—when one could spend the same time and resources in the pursuit of the afterlife goods or avoiding afterlife evils, which are both endless in duration and of infinitely great quality. If extreme fasts are pleasing to God, and increase my chances of obtaining salvation by a tiny bit, then the rational thing for me to do is to live in such an ascetic state for as long as possible, unless it prevents me from doing other activities that could do even more to promote my own salvation.

The argument given, then, mitigates strongly against religious moderation as a rational approach. Here in the West, where we place paramount value on Diversity, inclusiveness, and religious pluralism, we regard religious “moderates” with far higher esteem than those we consider to be “fundamentalists” or “extremists”. But does this make sense? Given the stakes, why would any rational believer be moderate?

The discussion turns to epistemic limitations. Certainly the polyinfinite goods of the afterlife, if genuine, outweigh the transient goods of this one. But if we cannot know with certainty that the rewards of religious fidelity are real, and are guaranteed, then perhaps they don’t tip the scales against the known pleasures of the mortal world. How is one to balance the two?

As Bill acknowledges, this is a difficult question, and he doesn’t claim to have the answer. But he focuses the inquiry with his usual clarity. One thing that emerges quite clearly is that religious “moderation”, if it is to be rationally motivated, seems to necessitate doubt. Or, to put it another way: for anyone who would make no distinction between his belief and certain knowledge, religious moderation is not a rational choice.

Read the post here.

Read it here.

It’s a pity. This narrow, anthropocentric definition of “design”, a categorical relic of a prior era of human understanding, leaves us with no proper term for the difference between a rock, which obviously is not “for” anything, and an eagle’s eye, which obviously is.

My view (see here, for example) has always been that we ought to broaden the definition of “design” to include not only the products of conscious agency, but also the creations of the mindless, but stupendously productive, engine of natural selection. I unapologetically see the human heart, for example, as having been designed to pump blood (so unapologetically, in fact, that I can say so without scare-quotes).

Today, however, I ran across an article at American Scientist that, after a nod in the direction of the tar-pit, argues that we should not broaden, but further restrict our ascription of design. The authors suggest that even a great many of the things we uncontroversially regard as designed — can-openers, airplanes, and so on — are not really “designed” at all, but are themselves products of the same sort of selection-by-trial-and-error that generates the design of living organisms.

The argument is interesting in that if you carry it far enough, it really holds the materialist’s feet to the fire: if the human mind is itself the product of, and operates strictly according to, the lawful processes of the material world, then we may arrive at the conclusion that there is none of what we traditionally mean by “design” to be found anywhere. In other words, while I have been willing to make a conventional distinction between the products of conscious agency and the products of natural selection, but think that the meaning of the word “design” should be applicable to both, it can fairly be argued, if materialism is true, that the distinction is ultimately meaningless.

Read the essay here.

The argument made by both is that if the world is, as secular-humanist types are inclined to suppose, an elaborate causal clockwork and nothing more, then it is inconsistent for us to speak, in any context whatsoever, in normative terms. In their view, if I, a Darwinist, say something like “I really ought to get this sutured up” or “you shouldn’t fire that thing in the house”, I am being dishonest; I am “smuggling” in a teleological stance that is inconsistent with my metaphysics.

What both fail to grasp is that they insist upon a false dichotomy: that teleology either exists in the world absolutely, at the level of metaphysical bedrock, or it doesn’t exist at all. What they cannot, or will not, do is to consider the possibility that purposes can enter the world as an emergent property, or by-product, of living systems. This view is of course unavailable to Mr. Auster, given that the only mechanism yet proposed by which such emergence can occur is the one first described by Darwin — but it should be accessible, I should think, to Dr. Fish.

The problem, really, is definitional: both Auster and Fish will acknowledge that we are obviously motivated by normative dispositions, and will also agree that our artifacts, and indeed even the various parts of the bodies of living things, have purposes. The issue then, is what constitutes a “real” purpose, as opposed to a merely illusory, “smuggled” ascription of purpose. To both men it seems that only a purpose that exists distinctly from, and logically prior to, the purely physical manifestation of the system that acts upon it can be considered genuine. Ultimately any such “real” teleology must either repose, through us, in God, or exist as a brute metaphysical fact — or not exist at all.

But this is a mere convention, a definition, a habit of thought; I think it is what is sometimes called a “frame error”. Why must we accept it? Why insist that purpose must have a grounding, as purpose, prior to the physical systems that instantiate it? Why can it not be an emergent property of systems built out of purposeless components of the world, by purposeless processes, and relevant only to those systems? The objection appears to be that it is just obvious that purposelessness cannot give rise to purpose, that matter cannot give rise to intention. And if we accept that objection, as both Auster and Fish seem to, then indeed we do have only two choices: to deny the existence of all purpose, and to declare any normative assertion a sham and a fraud, or to insist on a transcendent grounding in some metaphysical foundation — either God or brute fact. On this view, when we look at the exquisite “design” of a bird’s wing, we must either say that some intentional artificer brought it into being for the sake of an Aristotelian final cause, or that, despite its many superb optimizations and aerodynamic features, we must not suggest that it is in any sense “for” flying. And because a bird’s wing so obviously is “for” flying, this is often presented, by Auster and others, as a reductio ad absurdum of naturalism, and evidence in favor of this or that metaphysics, usually some sort of theism.

But, as others have pointed out (including me: see, for example, here, here, and here), there is another way we can look at this: that there is a process by which systems can arise that bring into existence their own purposes, purposes that exist only at the level of, and within the scope and context of, the systems themselves. I will not rehearse the arguments here; I’m sure they are familiar enough to readers of this website, and I have examined them in more detail in the links above.

So when a phototropic plant inclines itself toward the sun, it is perfectly sensible to say the plant is doing so for the purpose of gathering more light: despite being a purely physical system, as an evolved, living physical system it is a system that has interests. (Note also that it is not at all necessary for the plant to understand, or even be aware of, those interests; forming such representations is a costly, and largely unnecessary, luxury that only a very few living systems can afford.)

Now you may object by saying “No, that isn’t real purpose, that only looks like purpose!” And I will respond by saying that your intuition misleads you: that purpose like this is as real as it gets, and that your intuitive understanding of what “purpose” must be is at the very least arbitrarily restrictive, and misses what is, most likely, the true nature of all the purpose in the living world.

Simply put, living things are special. By virtue of their being the product of a natural engine of design, they are by their very nature purposeful — even though the process that generates them isn’t.

So where does this leave us in terms of normativity? It means that normative statements have no absolutely objective truth-value; they must be considered within a particular scope. In other words, any normative assertion must be evaluated in terms of the aim and purpose of the object of the assertion. Living things have an interest in survival, which requires feeding; therefore it is coherent to say that a hungry snake within range of a mouse “ought” to strike; it must be borne in mind that this “ought” applies only in the context of a snake that has an interest in surviving. It is what we would think we ought to do if we were in the snake’s position, given what we know about snakes, and about hungry animals generally. The snake need not be aware of any of this, or even conscious at all, but we, given the context, can predict the snake’s behavior because we understand what its interests are. We humans are in a far more complex position: we not only have interests, but we can think about our interests, evaluate and modify them in the light of other interests, and so on. But the principle is the same: any normative assertions we make are comprehensible only within the scope of our own aims and interests, which are in turn the emergent product of the processes that brought us into existence, and to our present situation.

I must make clear that all of this still leaves us a long way from anything resembling moral absolutes: as I have written elsewhere, I don’t think there is any such thing. The closest we can come, I think, is to acknowledge that moral systems are conducive to human flourishing in various ways, that we are by nature moral animals who are predisposed to condition our behavior according to such systems, and that we have no reason to reject this part of our nature. (Whether a naturalistic understanding of the non-transcendent nature of our moral intuitions is corrosive to their expression, however, is another question.)

Finally, it appears — surprisingly — that Dr. Fish overlooks the necessary role of emotion in forming normative valuations, and focuses only on the fact that reason alone cannot tell us what we ought to do. But we’ve had enough for tonight, I think.

Here’s another meaty and nourishing morsel:

The idea of innovation … is improvement. Nevertheless, a man of this temperament will not himself be an ardent innovator. In the first place, he is not inclined to think that nothing is happening unless great changes are afoot and therefore he is not worried by the absence of innovation: the use and enjoyment of things as they are occupies most of his attention. Further, he is aware that not all innovation is, in fact, improvement; and he will think that to innovate without improving is either designed or inadvertent folly. Moreover, even when an innovation commends itself as a convincing improvement, he will look twice at its claims before accepting them. From his point of view, because every improvement involves change, the disruption entailed has always to be set against the benefit anticipated. But when he has satisfied himself about this, there will be other considerations to be taken into the account. Innovating is always an equivocal enterprise, in which gain and loss (even excluding the loss of familiarity) are so closely interwoven that it is exceedingly difficult to forecast the final up-shot: there is no such thing as an unqualified improvement. For innovating is an activity which generates not only the ‘improvement’ sought, but a new and complex situation of which this is only one of the components. The total change is always more extensive than the change designed; and the whole of what is entailed can neither be foreseen nor circumscribed. Thus, whenever there is innovation there is the certainty that the change will be greater than was intended, that there will be loss as well as gain and that the loss and the gain will not be equally distributed among the people affected; there is the chance that the benefits derived will be greater than those which were designed; and there is the risk that they will be off-set by changes for the worse.

The passage in boldface above gets right to the heart of the matter, the essence of conservatism, the very crux of the biscuit.

Oakeshott continues:

From all this the man of conservative temperament draws some appropriate conclusions. First, innovation entails certain loss and possible gain, therefore, the onus of proof, to show that the proposed change may be expected to be on the whole beneficial, rests with the would-be innovator. Secondly, he believes that the more closely an innovation resembles growth (that is, the more clearly it is intimated in and not merely imposed upon the situation) the less likely it is to result in a preponderance of loss. Thirdly, he thinks that an innovation which is a response to some specific defect, one designed to redress some specific disequilibrium, is more desirable than one which springs from a notion of a generally improved condition of human circumstances, and is far more desirable than one generated by a vision of perfection. Consequently, he prefers small and limited innovations to large and indefinite. Fourthly, he favours a slow rather than a rapid pace, and pauses to observe current consequences and make appropriate adjustments. And lastly, he believes the occasion to be important; and, other things being equal, he considers the most favourable occasion for innovation to be when the projected change is most likely to be limited to what is intended and least likely to be corrupted by undesired and unmanageable consequences.

Michael Oakeshott was born in 1901; he wrote this essay in 1956, the year I was born. He died in 1990. Imagine the changes he saw in his lifetime, and reflect on how the world has changed even since his death. Yet here we are still, voting for “change”, as if we weren’t getting it fast enough already.

I guess some things never change.

Have a look at this exchange with a reader, one who patiently tries to explain, as I have often done myself (see, for example, here, here, and here), why biologists use the language of intentionality when discussing evolution. We speak, without any qualms, about the “purpose” of the various “designs” of evolved organisms: a wing is “for” flying, a fang is “for” injecting venom, etc. The point is that designed things have purposes — a proposition with which even Mr. Auster would agree — but what he and others refuse to accept is that the rationale behind the existence of a wing or a fang need not be anyone’s consciously conceived or represented rationale: that there is in Nature a process from which design can emerge without the need for any teleological agency at all. Yes, there is a rationale for the existence of a wing, but it is not the bird’s, or even evolution’s, rationale; it is what Daniel Dennett has called a free-floating rationale. But it seems that Mr. Auster and like-minded like others simply cannot conceive of design — real, functional, finely tuned design — arising in the absence of a conscious and purposeful Designer. I am reluctant to psychologize, but perhaps their intuitions are simpy too irrevocably conditioned by their embedding in the world of human agency.

Mr. Auster’s reader, Richard Hoste, quotes a long passage from Daniel Dennett’s book Kinds of Minds, in which Dennett explains what he calls the “intentional stance”: the fact that it is easier to predict the behavior of a goal-seeking system by understanding the goal. The example Dennett uses is that of a skillful chess-player: if the situation on the board is such that there is only one move that will avoid checkmate, we can predict with near-certain confidence that the chess-player will make it. What is more, this is true whether or not the player is human: the behavior of a chess-playing computer is every bit as predictable, from the intentional stance, as that of a person.

Mr. Auster, during this exchange, shows promising signs of “getting it” — but then, just as we think he is about to grasp the nettle, disappoints us once again with this stupendously question-begging assertion:

[Darwinians] are stuck with a contradiction that they cannot escape, namely that it’s inherently impossible that organisms whose bodies carry out millions of highly purposeful functions came into being by a radically purposeless process.

What a pity, and how mistaken. Of course we can escape it; indeed, on our view, natural selection’s “radically purposeless” process is the only plausible account of how such purposeful functions can arise that doesn’t just “kick the can down the road”: to an invisible, immaterial agency whose own origin and purpose is simply left unaccounted for.

But it is clear, by now, I suppose, that there is little hope of rapprochement on this subject; the division between these two camps seems deep and unbridgeable. Each side thinks the other is in the grip of a delusional fixation upon axioms that are simply wrong, and as Luther said (and Bill V. recently reminded us): Contra Negantem Prima Principia Non Esse Disputandum — “One should not dispute with those who deny first principles.”

What I have enjoyed the most at MP has been following, and often participating in, the discussions in the comment threads. The quality of the comments varies, as one would expect (and I have recently been guilty, myself, of leaving some irritatingly trite and unfocused comments there of my own, which I regret) — but at their best the comment threads have been a real glimpse of serious philosophical work being done.

I’m sad to see, therefore, that Bill, obviously weary of keeping up with a rising tide of mediocre interlocutors, has apparently stopped taking comments. It’s understandable, and there are other fine blogs (such as Norman Geras’s) where comments are not allowed, but it is, I think, a disappointment for Bill’s readers — who can no longer find, in one place, daily examples of the argumentative thrust-and-parry by which philosophical positions are refined and defended.

I have a feeling Bill must miss it too, just a little. I hope he changes his mind.

Leave it to the French, who have always understood that we are doomed, to build upon this woeful scaffolding an intellectual edifice, a school of philosophy. It is called Resistentialism, and has been described as being “largely a matter of sitting inside a wet sack and moaning.”

You may learn more here.

Reading the New York Times the other day, I noticed the following in an Op-Ed piece by Nicholas Kristof about moral types:

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

“Professor Haidt” is the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has done extensive research into the orgins and underpinnings of human morality.

Here’s another quote, from Harvard’s Steven Pinker:

The moral design of nature is as bungled as its engineering design.

And here’s Stephen Jay Gould:

In the domain of organisms and their good designs, we have little reason to doubt the strong, probably dominant influence of deterministic forces like natural selection.

Here’s a biology text from the University of Chicago Press: The Evolution of Vertebrate Design.

From the abstract of a lecture given this month by the American Society of Cell Biology:

Familiar features help to elucidate the origins, functions and design parameters for the secretory pathway, endosymbiotic organelles, the cytoskeleton, and cell cycle control.

Here’s the title of a paper from the Journal of Mammalogy:

Allometric scaling of body length : Elastic or geometric similarity in mammalian design.

Here’s another scholarly paper, from the University of Bonn:

The biomechanical design and morphofunctional evolution of presacral vertebrae in Sauropodomorpha deduced from shape analysis and FESS.

What do all these quotations have in common? The word “design”.

When biologists use this word to describe the bodies of living creatures, they obviously have something different in mind than a pre-Darwinian speaker of English would. While both would use it to describe intricate assemblages of working parts that perform some function, the difference is that the modern, technical usage of the term carries no implication of teleology, of having been assembled by an intentional designer for a preordained purpose. In the evolution of life there are no Aristotelian “final causes”, no “skyhooks” lifting the process from above. In short: design sans Designer; design not by purposeful plan, but by natural process. But the use of the word seems apt enough otherwise; it certainly feels appropriate, for example, to look at an albatross’s body as an exquisitely designed flying machine.

To use the word in this way — even though those who do so quite explicitly understand that when they say “design” they have in mind a concept cleanly filleted of all teleology, as what is effectively an instance of technical jargon — remains nevertheless a source of philosophical vexation in some quarters. One of those quarters is the popular website The Maverick Philosopher, where the host, Dr William Vallicella, has devoted more than a few comments and posts lately to this very topic, for example this recent item.

This persistent inconsistency in the way the word “design” is understood is extremely unhelpful, and I see no sign of its being resolved anytime soon. (Another word similiarly fraught with confusion and disagreement is the word “for”; there are many intelligent and philosophically sophisticated people who maintain, for example, that our eyes, since they lack a conscious designer, and were shaped solely by evolution, are not “for” seeing.)

Daniel Dennett, who is himself rather a polarizing figure in these discussions, has made quite clear what “design” ought to mean in light of our radical new (and at 150 years old, very recent indeed, in the timeline of human thought and language) insights into the process by which living things, and indeed intentionality, have arrived on the scene. In a 2005 paper, Atheism and Evolution (which is well worth your time, and available here), Dennett writes:

A designed thing, then, is either a living thing or a part of a living thing, or the artifact of a living thing[.]

This seems almost exactly right to me, with one quibble: it is not quite general enough. This engine of design discovered by Darwin and Wallace will work with not only living things, but with anything that meets the essential qualifications: replication with variation, along with some sort of differential selection amongst the variants. It happens that living things are the only such replicators we know of at the moment, but the process does not strictly require life. (Indeed, at the close of Dennett’s article he talks about Lee Smolin’s provocative idea (see here) that universes themselves may be subject to such a process, replicating themselves by way of black holes.)

But the point is: a definition of the word “design” that does not include the process that created the staggeringly intricate designs of living things is simply inadequate. Such a definition rules out of court, by mere terminological fiat, nearly all of the design in the world, leaving only the tiny remnant, childishly crude by comparison, that we humans have managed. This absurd philosophical convention — and it is nothing more than that — is due, I maintain, to an atavistic, anthropocentric fixation on conscious agency, and in particular an obdurate resistance to the idea of intentionality as an objective feature of the natural world, and an equally dogmatic unwillingness to decouple the ideas of intentionality and consciousness.

Dennett continues:

Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning” was in fact a new and wonderful way of thinking, completely overturning the mind-first way that even David Hume had been unable to cast aside, and replacing it with a bubble-up vision in which intelligence — the concentrated, forward-looking intelligence of an anthropomorphic agent — emerges as just one of the products of mindless, mechanistic processes. These processes are fueled by untold billions of pointless, undesigned collisions, some vanishing small fraction of which fortuitously lead to tiny improvements in the lineages in which they occur. Thanks to Darwin’s principle of “descent with modification,” these ruthlessly tested design innovations accumulate over the eons, yielding breathtakingly brilliant designs that never had a designer — other than the purposeless, distributed process of natural selection itself.

The signatures of these unplanned innovations are everywhere to be found in a close examination of the marvels of nature, in the inside-out retina of the vertebrate eye, the half-discarded leftovers in the genes and organs of every species, the prodigious wastefulness and apparent cruelty of so many of nature’s processes. These departures from wisdom, frozen accidents, in the apt phrase of Francis Crick, confront the theist with a dilemma: if God is responsible for these designs, then His intelligence looks disturbingly like human obtuseness and callousness. Moreover, as our understanding of the mechanisms of evolution grows, we can sketch out ever more detailed accounts of the historical sequence of events by which the design innovations appeared and were incorporated into the branching tree of genomes. A voluminously predictive account of the creative process is now emerging, replete with thousands of mutually supporting details, and no contradictions at all. As the pieces of this mega-jigsaw-puzzle fall into place with increasing rapidity, there can be no reasonable doubt that it is, in all its broad outlines if not yet in all its unsettled details, the true story of how all living things came to have the designs we observe.

Dennett responds also to the pervasive prejudice that sees “mere” matter, and the “mindless” processes of Nature, as somehow too lowly to have produced something as exalted as we:

Between the richly detailed and ever-ramifying evolutionary story, and the featureless mystery of God the creator of all creatures great and small, there is no contest. This is a momentous reversal for the ancient conviction that God’s existence can be read off the wonders of nature. Anyone who has ever been struck by the magnificent intricacy of design and prodigious variety of the living world and wondered what–if not God–could possibly account for its existence must now confront not just a plausible alternative, but an alternative of breathtaking explanatory power supported by literally thousands of confirmed predictions and solved puzzles. Richard Dawkins has put the point crisply: “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (1986, p. 6).

Undermining the best argument anybody ever thought of for the existence of God is not, of course, proving the non-existence of God, and many careful thinkers who have accepted evolution by natural selection as the explanation of the wonders of the living world have cast about for other supports for their continuing belief in God. The idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection, could never accept the full inversion, proclaiming that “the marvelous complexity of forces which appear to control matter, if not actually to constitute it, are and must be mind-products.” (quoted by [Stephen Jay] Gould, [The Flamingo's Smile,] 1985, p.397.) More recently, the physicist Paul Davies, in his book, The Mind of God (1992, p.232), opines that the reflective power of human minds can be “no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless purposeless forces.” This is a most revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined prejudice. Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn’t the most important thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? Why should the importance or excellence of anything have to rain down on it from on high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin’s inversion suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of “mindless, purposeless forces.”

The community of evolutionary scientists and philosophers are already untroubled by the use of “design” in the broader sense that I am defending here; it might be seen, perhaps, as having been appropriated as technical language, in the way that many ordinary English words have been taken up in other technical fields. (Also, it is common for words to become more inclusive over time: for example, the word “guitar” once meant only what we would now refer to with the retronym “classical guitar” — the present argument over the use of “design” is rather like having a debate with a purist over whether my Stratocaster is really a “guitar” at all.) But so stubborn is the resistance to this broadening of the meaning of the word that I think we simply need a new one.

Any suggestions?

“If a man is a materialist, or a mechanist, or whatever he likes to call himself, I can see for him no escape from belief in a futilty so prolonged and complicated and diabolical and preposterous as to be worse than absurd: and, as I do not know that such a tragic absurdity is not a fact, I can only know my native inability to believe that it is one.”

There you are, then. Take your pick.