Naturalism asks us to believe that we are just a pile of protons, electrons, etc., pushed and pulled willy-nilly by mindless attractions and repulsions — or even that we are, at bottom, nothing more than a set of solutions to some fundamental equations.
Yet we think and dream; we feel love and grief. We taste joy and sorrow, despair and ecstasy.
Seriously? Can that really be? How? Why?
Over at the Orthosphere, Richard Cocks wonders too.
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The essay by Cocks was excellent. As a side note, Sean Carroll is an excellent physicist and astronomer, but he is not a very good philosopher. I have a couple of his lecture series, and the physics is good but the philosophy is lacking.
Because when the number of leptons and baryons becomes too great, they need to be described at a higher level of abstraction, and physics gives way to chemistry. Add in enzymes, semi-permeable membranes, and DNA coding, and chemistry gives way to biology. And so on up.
Computers are just a lot of two-state switches and simple Boolean logic, but knowing that won’t help you write a web browser.
Dave,
Yes, of course. All of this is old hat to me; I am 63 years old and have been marinated in scientific materialism all my life.
What you say is certainly true, and it does a fine job of filling in the middle of the story, but it leaves a great mystery at both ends: ultimate origins on the one side, and our conscious experience at the other.
A web browser never departs from the physical magisterium. Despite its complexity, it is at bottom just a transducer that takes a physical input and produces as its output physical squiggles on a physical screen.
Nowhere in the reductionistic hierarchy you describe is an account of the leap from the linked chain of physical organization, of matter in motion, to the immaterial reality of the primary facts of our existence: our subjective self-awareness, and the presence all around us of a transcendent order.
I should add, pre-emptively, that there is good reason to believe that this is not the sort of thing that is subject to the “God-of-the-Gaps” kind of argument, which typically deals with unexplained material phenomena.
That there exists, side by side with the physical world, an undeniable reality of immaterial conscious experience that in fact constitutes the bedrock of our lives, is no mere “gap”.
It’s important to notice that the familiar naturalist position Dave asserts is really just an article of faith–at best. The claim is that we have “levels of description” such that the basic referents are always the same. Even though, as far as we can tell, there is no _actual_ translation or interpretation possible between these “levels”. Why should we believe this?
Consider a humdrum sentence like
“I want Bernie to be the Dem candidate”
It’s true (since I do want that). Now if Dave’s claim is correct what makes it true is ultimately some set of facts about fundamental physics. Which ones? No one has any remotely plausible detailed account of this. Which facts about electrons or whatever constitute my desire? Which of those facts constitutes the political state such that Bernie is the Dem candidate? We have _absolutely no idea_ even in principle how to discover this. We have no reason to believe that there are such facts other than a prior dogmatic commitment to naturalism.
Given our actual epistemic situation we would be equally justified in saying that facts about physics are just psychological facts at some more “abstract level of description”. That _could_ perhaps be true, for all we know, but there’s no reason at all to believe it.
Here is a further thing that’s always bothered me in addition to consciousness. If naturalism is true, there is truth. But truth doesn’t seem to be a natural property. What could it even mean to say that sentences of the form “x is true” are made true by electrons or leptons or whatever? Truth is surely not a physical thing of any kind. I don’t think anyone even understands how it could be. So if naturalism is true, naturalism is false. QED :)
Ha! Thanks, Jacques. A depth-charge in a handful of paragraphs. Well done.
I used to think that consciousness ’emerged’ as the brain grew larger through a greater number of synapses . . . until I wondered what ‘told’ the brain that the next synapse was the special one.
Jeffery Hodges
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