A wonderful forum – from doubts about science “a history of failed experiments” (my comment is that all science is conducted in an artificial construct in which all relationships which are in the real world are controlled or cancelled, therefore information extracted is only of particular relevance and often damaging to the whole environment/culture of humanity.
As for poetry, I’m
a poet myself who has written in form – 100 pages of terza rima, 50 pages of decima rima, two sets of 49 sonnets – crowns of sonnets, several examples of rhyming couplets, have invented a new form – the Zeus – which has thirteen lines and random rhymes, but rhymes, also have written “free verse” which is impressionistic – the problem with free verse it that it tends to become prose, and finally all effots tend to look like telegraphese, or cut-up prose.
Form does not impose artificial structures, it is in harmony with the ondulations of brain waves, breathing bodies, and beating hearts, and once understood, goes to those deep currents underneath which encompass all meaning.
I enjoyed the alternate point of view of the article, “Slums from the Qing Dynasty are Still Slums, ” by David Stanway, regarding the effect of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River area of China.
I think Stanway leans over too far, however, in the direction of supporting any old kind of modern engineering, and he may be in danger of falling into a reservoir of error. He claims the dam will help with flood control, yet he does not support this claim. Perhaps he believes all statements issued by the Chinese government.
When one looks at a similar project, the Aswan Dam in Egypt, problems have appeared; for example, the alluvial soil of the Nile Delta is going away since the annual flood has disappeared. In the Pacific Northwest of the United States, dams, once thought to be a great blessing have become a mixed one, and salmon fisheries are in danger.
The article gives the impression that all environmental concerns must be dismissed simply because they are environmental concerns. Such an attitude shows a starry-eyed idealism in favor of progress, rather similar, in fact, to the starry-eyed idealism of the nature-lover Stanway decries.
Let’s have some balance on an important issue like this and consider culture and the environment as well as short-term economic gain.
Once again, the modern “either/or”. The Extremes are usually in error as the ancients well understood. How have we forgotten this simple lesson?
Yes, the physical mind is a “robot” to use this silly term. Yes, our behaviour can be often shown to be unfree (by 300 ms or otherwise). Man is indeed a creature of habit. But it didn’t take a scientific experiment to know this perennial truth. Does knowing this have a bearing on the question? What about deliberate, long-term formation of one’s own habits? What of calm, reflective introspection? Meditation? You know, the states that theists and humanists so vaunt and seek? Does demonstrating the presence of deeply ingrained habits and involuntary behaviours (which many religions and humanist ideologies pit their greatest tools precisely to overcome) throw out any ideology or simply reinforce them?
To implicitly choose science as a higher standard than humanism (an ideology) is commendable and easy in today’s world, especially Britain. Just as proclaiming the authority of the Roman See was commendable and easy in the 14th Century.
Fortunately for humanity, true science is always commendable. But true science, free from ideology, does not presuppose what consciousness is, even its material nature. It doesn’t even presuppose something as simple as the atom. It keeps digging, splitting, and nature opens bigger and more complicated at each turn. Science works to discover, measure, explain, and control its observable subject. To the point : only “ideologized” science assumes that every element of the universe is going to fit into some neat preconceived box, just like religion fixates on the binary destinations of her “souls”.
Sure, neuroscience is rapidly assembling evidence. It is exciting and fascinating. But, this is a far cry from saying it has all the evidence needed to describe something like the nature of consciousness. It is certainly not time to use this statement as a premise of an argument leading somewhere. The last time I checked, people who sold things (yes, even the famously quoted Cardinal Dawkins) before they could deliver the product were at best, overenthusiastic salesmen. Thankfully, scientists and authors don’t have to worry about overvaluing their offerings like Wall-Street stocks these days.
People who buy tired out and decades overdue “still in development” products and ideas is, to me, strikingly similar to those intelligent people who are praying (and waiting) for their afterlife whilst sipping wine that is not quite wine and chewing wafers that are not even food. Perhaps the promised product will be delivered? Until then, I will believe in science that is proven, I will do business with firms that deliver products on time and I will drive a car with a running motor.
When will we moderns stop crashing into the side of the guard-rails? Didn’t the 20th Century warn us? “Either Religion or Determinism” seem as ideological as “either Free-Market or Socialistic” in a modern, regulated economy.
“The brain is rapidly giving up its secrets to neuroscientists and there are philosophical theories available – for example, eliminative materialism and epiphenomenalism – which offer a way of dealing with issues of consciousness without denying the explanatory power of a reductive, physicalist approach. To preclude the possibility that science might be successful in this area, on the grounds that it results in theories that are counter-intuitive, is bad science and bad philosophy.”
Whether the brain is giving up its secrets or not is questionable at least- even in principle -because without the 1st person reports of a subject all neuroscience could produce (beyond reflex action correlates) would be pretty scan pictures. The fundamental problem with both epiphenomenalism and elimitivism is that they do not deal with issues of consciousness- they simply deny either that it exists or that it is relevant if it does.
To base a world-view on the possibility that it might be proved true in the future is simple faith and non-science as well as non-philosophy.
“In an endnote in his book, The Selfish Gene (2nd Edition), Richard Dawkins writes: “If…you are not religious, then face up to the following question. What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one?” It may be that complicated robots have consciousness, free will and agency; that is, that they have the things which are important to many humanists. Unfortunately, it may also be that they do not, and to deny this possibility requires a leap of faith. ”
I assume that you are not referring to present robots(though they syntax implies it)? Agency, at least, is pretty easy to deny to any existing robot. Since any potential robots would develop from present programming and design it could be questioned whether they ever could have agency other than that of their programmer/designers. Dawkins is always amusing, if a little incoherent in defense of his religion, but if he asserts that he is a robot (lacking agency, free will,and subjective consciousness-which is the definition of “robot”) I see no reason not to believe him. I do question why I should bother listening to a machine tell me that they are a machine? Since I have the missing qualities(to some limited extent)-listening to Dawkins is a bit like listening to my car discuss my life.
I am not, by the way, endorsing “humanism”- the notion of human exceptionalism is one of the more incoherent(and destructive) notions of the Judeo-Christian mythology.
Malik’s response sidesteps the basic argument in Strangroom’s article, which is that humanism’s take on the nature of human consciousness is a set of ideological beliefs, and as such might just possibly be wrong, and that in fact some scientific findings seem to entail its being wrong. To answer that science itself requires those beliefs is no more than a petition of principle, and a sophistic device. As Thomas rightly points out, this comes from postulating an either-or dichotomy between materialist determinism of a simplistic kind, and a humanism which is itself a kind of idealism or lay spiritualism.
But Thomas’s apparent reduction of the problem to the time-honored recognition of the role of habits in human decision-making (” Man is indeed a creature of habit. But it didn’t take a scientific experiment to know this perennial truth. Does knowing this have a bearing on the question? What about deliberate, long-term formation of one’s own habits? “) seems itself a bit shallow, and implies a refuge for a transcendent role of the mind. What of the possibility that such deliberate, long-term processes be themselves chains of micro-events surging out of operations in the unconscious brain?
The rest of Thomas’s letter does invite one to defer judgment until more results are in from scientific researches into the nature and function of consciousness, and seems proper and prudent advice. Still, it can be argued that there is some validity, indeed a measure of urgency in facing up to this philosophical challenge to basic notions such as autonomy and responsibility, among others. I would dearly like to know what other readers of this exchange who despair, as Thomas and I do, of all ideological stances how they deal whith the possible loss of such apparently fundamental standards of standards of our traditional thinking on human conduct.
In effect, can there still be reference to such a thing as “conduct” (which implies direction), or is “behavior” the only appropriate concept? My own provisional belief on the matter is that consciousness as a brain function emerged from evolution can hardly be a useless appendage, and plays an important role in determining behavior, even if it is not that of initiator. Perhaps is it more of a monitor… Can this be enough to make sense of our conscious efforts at self-betterment?
“To understand what is wrong with Stangroom?s argument, let us accept for the moment his claim that science will eventually show ?the stuff of the inner life of human beings ? consciousness, agency, will, sensation, etc? to be just physical, so that ?in one way or another, they will disappear completely?.”
when Stangroom actually said:
“Rather, the point is that science is in the business of providing reductive, causal explanations of the phenomena that it investigates. Consequently, when it turns its gaze to the stuff of the inner life of human beings – consciousness, agency, will, sensation, etc. – there is the possibility that these things will turn out just to be physical, or indeed that, in one way or another, they will disappear completely.”
Note well the phrase, “there is the possibility”. Malik’s statement is nothing other than misrepresentation, and I do not give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.
If one’s belief system is not flexible enough to include possibilities and a rigorous attention to searching for and considering all logical possibilities to a situation, one will surely overlook them. Example: my brother, an editor, noticed an error in an article I sent him, and decried its effect on the author’s point. Upon reflection, could not the proofreader or copy editor of the article have introduced the error? Certainly. It’s a possibility my brother did not consider and which led him to belittle the author’s overall point. Ridiculous.
As to Malik’s supposition of Stangroom’s point, “we are simply physical objects like any other physical object,” out of what wormhole did he pull this? We are not by any means “physical objects like any other physical object.” Nor is a nematode like a brick like a daffodil. This is what happens when you lose a sense of context, which Malik has clearly lost here. It’s also the sign of an inflexible belief system. Because science is the study of the physical world, it boots nothing to attempt to use metaphysics in science. Thus, on that level, science must treat humans as physical objects. Does that mean that scientific — and only scientific — study of humans is valid? Of course not, and no good scientist would say so. that’s where John Gray gets it wrong. Science, afterall, is a human endeavor. Unlike Malik, I do not see this as somehow transcending “our evolutionary heritage,” but rather rising from it. To me, he takes a dim view of Darwinian evolution and humans place within it. Still, there’s the possibility that spirit, along with mentation, is all in the mind ;-)
As to the veracity of scientific research and “truths,” it is again a matter of context. As the late, great David Bohm put it, a scientific truth may well meet its logical limit in light of new evidence (as example he gives Newtonian physics in light of the work of Einstein). This, of course, does not render Newtonian physics moot, invalid, or untrue. It simply puts it in a larger, and thus, more proper context. If scientific “discoveries” are not viewed in this way, they will surely mislead. As to the breaking of physical laws, what can I say, except that Malik has a poor understanding of science.
Malik, throughout his rebuttal, shies away from possibilities, starting with his misrepresentation of Stangroom’s point.
“Uniquely among organisms, human beings are both objects of nature and subjects that can, to some extent at least, shape our own fate. We are biological beings, and under the purview of biological and physical laws. But we are also reflexive, rational, social beings, who can design ways of breaking the constraints of biological and physical laws.”
1. I would like one example of how humanity has actually “broken” a constraint of physical law? That we are “reflexive” I wouldn’t deny-but then so is a prokaryote. “Uniqueness”
here seems a odd term; what other creature is not capable of shaping-to some extent-its own fate?
“To study nature scientifically requires us to make a distinction between a humanity that is a thinking subject and a nature that presents itself to thought but is itself incapable of thought. When studying ‘external’ nature the distinction between the thinking subject and the object of study is easy to make. ”
2. I do think the Cartesian notion that only humans can “think” has been effectively laid to rest, along with the rest of his superstition (like that defining all other beings as insensate machines). I also find the distinction of nature as “object” made here is now recognized as not as “easy” as Mr. Malik imagines.
“Our very capacity to reflect upon nature, then, takes us in a certain fashion outside of nature, for if we could not view nature in some sense from the outside we could not reflect upon it objectively.”
3. This, of course, is the foundation of much criticism regarding whether an entirely “objective” view is even possible. It might be-for a machine; but not likely for a human.
“But society has an existence beyond those individuals and families.”
4. I hope the suggestion here is not that society(a structure lacking both boundary and brain)
somehow transcends the individual in value?
“In recent decades, though, there has been redefinition of naturalism which is now widely taken to mean, not simply the rejection of supernatural explanations, but the acceptance of the idea that the explanations of natural science suffice to explain all phenomena, not just the phenomena of nature. Naturalism has been reformulated as an all-embracing physicalism.”
5. But this is exactly the logical consequence following the rejection of any condition other than the natural as physically explicable-excluding any consideration of “mind” as non-physical.
“The alternative to mechanism is not mysticism. The distinction I am drawing is between a mechanistic, a mysterian and a materialist view of the world. A mechanistic view sees human beings largely as objects through which nature acts. A mysterian view suggests that there are aspects of human existence not knowable to mere mortals. A materialist view, on the other hand, understands human beings without resort to mystical explanations. But it also sees humans as exceptional because humans, unlike any other beings, possess consciousness and agency. ”
6.Given that humans are only part of an interconnected reality that includes the universe(and all possible universes?) and all events of its past it would seem that the “mysterian” could claim the rational edge in this comparison.
” There is a widespread feeling that every impression that humans make upon the world is for the worse.”
7.In planetary terms can any other conclusion be valid without denying the most obvious facts?
A prime expression of such pessimism is the denigration of the human subject and of human agency. Historically, humanism – a desire to place human beings at the centre of philosophical debate; a view of human reason as a tool through which to understand both the natural and the social world; a conviction that humankind could achieve freedom, both from the constraints of nature and the tyranny of other humans, through the agency of its own efforts – was the philosophy at the heart of both the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Today, though, such a view is often dismissed as arrogant, naive, even irrational.”
8.In view of the real effect of European actions on nature and other societies in the last 3-400 years it is really difficult to arrive at any other conclusion but that of the “dismissal”.
This conversation suffers from a lack of philosophical clarity about the notion(s) of scientific explanation.
First, serious scientists of the mind and behavior no longer seek for “mechanistic explanations” of mind and behavior.” These are specific kinds of *partitive explanations*, in which the whole is explained exclusively in terms of the interaction of its parts. Neuroscience is strongly non-mechanistic insofar as it makes use of systems-theoretic models of brain activity. The non-mechanistic system of the mind and behavior also encompasses extra-neural structures and processes, such as the body and the environnment — one aspect of which is the social world. And there’s the rub: to explain mind and behavior will require something like a theory which predicts the interactions of social, bodily and neural systems. This is a tall order and probably not attainable.
Second, “reduction” is not identical with “being scientifically explained”. The former term is narrower than the latter, requiring the translation of all of the theoretical terms of one theory (for example, the folk-psychological theory Of the mind) into the terms of another (e.g., neuroscience). This has never been accomplished in any domain involving human behavior. Pace Richard Dawkins, there is nothing resembling a genetic- based reductive explanation of complex human behaviors or mentation. And the idea of reducing social institutions to the deterministic interactions of individual biological systems is even crazier.
Third, and more paradoxically, it’s common knowledge in the philosophy of science that explanation is itself a value-loaded term involving various criteria of adequacy (such as simplicity, comprehensiveness, etc.) along with their applications in fallible human judgments. Any total scientific explanation of human behavior would fail to be total unless it explained this (explanining) as well — but this is like the snake swallowing its tail.
I suspect that the scientific project, when understood clearly, itself implies a robust defense of some version of the “humanist ideology.”
The “Science and Religion” article makes the common assumption that religion, like science, is a search for truth.
This assumption is in turn based on the habit of treating all sentences as propositions, rather than as tools for accomplishing a variety of purposes.
If one looks at religion in this way, one sees only the weakest and most counterproductive aspect of religion: namely, the tendency of some religious people to portray religion as a matter of belief in the supernatural. One could also say that it is a tendency to treat mythology and other literary phenomena as if they were factual accounts.
I have no wish to give any support whatsoever to this tendency. Nevertheless it is clear to me that it does not represent the essence of religion, which has much more to do with inculcating certain feelings and general perspectives, and with social activities. I think that the religious people who characterize religion as a matter of belief are wrong; one might even say that they are prone to misinterpret their own experience. They share the tendency to treat all sentences as propositions; consequently they are only encouraged by the kind of polemic found in the article.
The cry for rational dialogue is fine, as long as there are disputed facts in question. But it makes no sense when the differences are at bottom matters of attitude and behavior. And it makes no political sense to seek dialogue with only the most obstinate and wrong-headed element of the group (that is, religious people) one wishes to engage.
Religion indeed inhabits “a separate sphere from that of science;” and it is quite strange for anyone to deny that it is “more like” poetry or story-telling than science – since to a large extent it IS poetry and story-telling (and music and dancing and meditation…). Only fundamentalists and secular polemicists cannot recognize the Bible as literature. Both groups insist that religious literature “makes assertions that we are expected to believe.” But this is only true in a trivial sense that would as well apply to Jane Austen (who also has a point of view, is concerned with morality, etc.).
The author asserts that religion cannot provide a “why” to complement the scientific “how”, because he or she misunderstands the grammatical context of the “why”, which is a context of purpose and dramatic or narrative coherence – not one of truth. Any debate about a person or community’s sense of purpose is not a debate about natural facts, but a conflict of vision or imagination. Literature is its natural expression; and likewise the sense of purposelessness is best expressed artistically, rather than presented as a fact of nature or metaphysics.
As for the expertise of religious people, the author focuses on the most grandiose, politically corrupt or pretetentious candidates, but ignores the real everyday expertise of charity workers, grief counselors, mediators and Masters of Cermonies found in religious ranks. The social expertise associated with religion is not due to its special access to a source of ethical “facts”, but only to its providing a special context for paying attention to moral issues, and a nuanced vocabulary for discussing them.
I have two suggestions.
The first is that you look at religious activity without the language. View the ritual and social behavior as a Martian would, and try deducing the meaning of the utterances from the behavior.
The second is that you consider the political consequences of harping on the “mistaken” character of religious utterances, and whether it would not be better to encourage the more reasonable amongst religious people to overcome their fundamentalist brethren, rather than reducing all religion to matters of belief.
Surprisingly, many Christians I am acquainted with assume first, that the historical claims of the Bible have adequate consistancy with and are substantiated by the results of impartial, careful historical enquiry; second, would genuinely be challenged if confronted with such unbiased evidence (or the lack or it) as exists that would divorce their belief from fact. The idea is, that part of faith is a response to a set of facts we are justified in believing.
Of course, everyone knows faith is mere emotion. Of course its just Popular Nonsense. We, who are enlightened and cool and rational and who participate in B & W can see that…
But unless you can offer such evidence, you’re attacking a straw-man. And not being very honest in your attack of faith.
The exchange between Stangroom and Malik highlights issues concerning naturalism, reductionism, and humanism. Stangroom supposes (wrongly, I believe) that reductionist scientific explanations might possibly explain away consciousness and human agency, and suggests that humanists must choose between scientific naturalism and an essentially dualist view of human nature. Malik thinks (also wrongly, I believe) that humans have to transcend, in some respect, “the constraints of nature” to claim their full humanity. But successful science doesn’t depend on being strongly reductionist in its explanations, nor do humans need to escape the scientific explanatory net to remain fully human. Naturalism, however, might change our view of human freedom and responsibility.
Full text of comment:
We are completely biological creatures, but not *merely* biological creatures. That is, being purely physical isn’t a fatal flaw of human nature, since being physical is all we need in order to have the causal powers conferred by rationality (the freedom Dennett champions and explains in his book Freedom Evolves), and to be completely human in all other respects. Contra Malik, science shows that we don’t break, and don’t need to break, the constraints of biological and physical laws in order to be conscious, rational creatures that can control our destinies. There’s no good reason to suppose that consciousness or rationality or the self must depend on non-physical, non-causal processes, i.e., something supernatural or causally disconnected from the natural world. In particular, there’s no conflict between being fully caused creatures and being capable of discovering truths about the world. Our capacity to know, reflect and act rationally to further our agendas doesn’t take us *outside* nature, but is what nature does through us. So there’s no problem for humanism in any of this, since although (as Stangroom says) humanism is committed to naturalism, naturalism doesn’t in the least de-humanize us, it only shows *how* we are human.
Mechanism, as Malik describes it, is “the assumption that a physical description of the brain is a sufficient explanation for the phenomena of consciousness and agency.” But I doubt that many in the scientific community accept this sort of strong reductionism with respect to consciousness and agency, even though many would of course accept the naturalist assumption (derived from a commitment to science as one’s epistemology) that we needn’t appeal to categorically non-physical, supernatural entities in our explanations. For instance, a purely physical description of the brain, without recourse to functional or representational levels of description, won’t take you far in understanding consciousness. But the brain is purely physical, nonetheless. So the sort of reductionism Malik and Stangroom bring up is simply a straw man used (most often by the right) to scare people away from science and naturalism, and therefore is not the “spectre of anti-humanism” as Stangroom puts it. Humanism isn’t special in its antipathy to strong reductionism, since few of any persuasion suppose such reductionism is tenable in the first place. So humanists don’t have to choose between science, as its actually practiced, and a congenial world view. (For more on strong reductionism, see “Reductionism vs. Causal Explanation” at http://www.naturalism.org/neurosci.htm and “Playing God, Carefully” at http://www.naturalism.org/currents.htm)
A monistic naturalism, committed to science as its epistemology, is perforce committed to physicalism (materialism) as the basic ontology of the ultimate constituents of the universe, but not to physicalism as a stand-alone explanatory framework. The social and historical worlds of concern to Malik are included in the physical world, but (as he says) are not explicable by physical laws alone. The same goes for consciousness and human agency. Nevertheless, by virtue of being completely included in the natural world, human beings are not causally privileged in the sense of having an ability to transcend natural causality, even though they exploit their knowledge of causal regularities to promote their various agendas. We don’t need to (and can’t anyway) free ourselves from what Malik calls “the constraints of nature” to be free, responsible, rational, truth-knowing agents; rather, we are such agents *within* the constraints of the natural causal network that science reveals to us in causal explanations at many levels, from physical to computational to neurological to cognitive to economic. That we are sophisticated, purely physical animals doesn’t mean that our inner lives and specifically human capacities for rationality disappear or get *explained away* by scientific explanations as Stangroom seems to think they might. Rather they are, simply, explained.
But as natural, conscious selves, it’s vital to keep in mind that, from a naturalistic perspective, the sort of freedom and responsibility we have is not the supernatural, contra-causal type of free will and ultimately self-originating responsibility traditionally thought necessary to underwrite attributions of credit and blame. If we take seriously a non-reductive but entirely physicalist, scientific naturalism, things do indeed change in our moral universe, since some attitudes and social practices (e.g., retributive justifications for punishment) are very much called into question [note*]. It is here that some secular humanists, committed to a radical individualism in which persons are taken to be essentially self-made and ultimately deserving of their fates, may find a consistent and thorough-going naturalism an affront to some deeply held assumptions. But it’s not the false doctrine of strong reductionism that’s the threat here, rather it’s the basic scientific assumption that human behavior and consciousness, even in their highest reaches, are fully caused that offends such humanists. They may take less offense when it’s seen that being uncaused in any respect would weaken, not strengthen, our capacities for knowledge, rationality, and control.
*Note: I’m joined in this opinion by philosophers Derk Pereboom, Ted Honderich, Tamler Sommers (at Duke) and perhaps to some extent by Galen Strawson and Simon Blackburn. If anyone out there knows of others sympathetic to this view, I would be pleased to hear about them.
I find the whole premise of Jeremy Stanger’s article fallacious. How did Humanism get saddled with free will? As more complex creatures on the evolutionary scale humans have more choices in the activities they engage in. Free will itself implies a belief in a creator god who set beings in motion with options: they could thereby choose good or evil as per their divine test.
Kenan Malik’s response to Jeremy Stangroom’s critique of humanism is the closes I have read to a defense of my own position. On most points, I agree with Malik wholehartedly. Yet, his essay left a feeling of uneasiness.
The problem is that Malik defends humanism against its critics (not just Stangroom, but a host of scientists, “mechanicists,” and postmodernists) by refusing to recognize the philosophical problems at the root of humanist thought. As Stangroom clearly points out, a belief in reason and science, combined with an atheistic worldview leads to the question of the reality of consciousness and free will. If science is an acceptable way of understanding the world, then it must explore the possibility that we are simply a product of forces beyond our control. It does not help for Malik to argue that we are social and historical beings as well as biological creatures; “nature vs. nurture” arguments are essentially the same in that they reduce (or sometimes eliminate) the role of human free action in human activity. Freudian psychology and Marxist analyses of history have been used to defend “mechanistic,” in a psychological or sociological sense, views of human nature. Whether Freud or Marx agreed with this is not the issue here. The important thing is that biological reductionism does not exhaust the possibility of the non-existence of freedom.
Malik argues eloquently that there is no reason to assume that biology or physics can explain consciousness, since consciousness is not a biological process. He mentions Steven Pinker’s discussion of the “ghost in the machine” problem, and subsequently dives into an elaborate “ghost in the machine” argument. If consciousness is not biological (in a God-less world), then it is up to science to ask what it is, what its ontological status is, what is its relationship to biological thought processes, how is it that the brain seems to actually be doing a lot of thinking.
In other words, Malik is faced with the same problems that Descartes and Spinoze faced. He sides with the former, but still cannot explain the relationship between res extensa and res cogitans. Malik’s argument is convincing to me on ideological grounds, since the philosophical question seems art the moment to be insoluble.
Malik’s assertion in the last paragraph that “nor is it ‘political’ to insist that a physical description of the brain is insufficient explanation of consciousness and agency” is astonishingly incorrect. It is an extremely political statement, just as John Gray’s opinion that to try to change the world is “irrational” is a political statment. In my politics, I will side with Malik, although he should be urged to use more philosophical self-criticism.
Science is an endeavour to describe and explain the world, through a method that subdues – to as great extent as is realisable – all that is subjective about the way the couscious mind interacts with the world.
Implicit in the whole endeavour, what it depends necessarily on, are the assumptions that there is a physical reality corresponding to phenomena, and that this physical reality is orderly. These assumptions come naturally, are necessary to know anything at all, are simpler beliefs than any contrary, and are simply impossible completely to reject.
It does follow, though, that the results of scientific enquiry simply can not challenge that which is basis for it: thought. Science is consciousness with a method to try to find the truth of the world.
So science views the person as an object to whom the laws of physics apply. So one’s personality, one’s emotions, thought, and – significantly -agency have determined matter to which they correspond.
It does niether follow that humans cannot change the world, nor that the way in which they change the world is not part of themselves.
The Science and Religion article doesn’t make the assumption that religion is a search for truth – it explicitly states that science makes truth claims, which is a different thing. I don’t think religion is a search for truth; on the contrary; but I do think it makes truth claims. That’s not an assumption, it’s based on evidence. . Saying religion is poetry and story-telling and requires no more in the way of belief than reading a Jane Austen novel does is simply redefining religion, Humpty Dumpty-style. That’s not what the vast majority of religious people mean by it. At a minimum, their religion includes belief in a supernatural deity, and it’s idle to pretend otherwise.
The article didn’t set up a dichotomy between emotion and reason, either. I treated the subject as a cognitive issue, which is what I take it to be. It’s not a matter of emotions about the universe, but claims about how it got here. The subject of the article is evidence for factual claims, not feelings and poetry.
Just one more note to try making you see things in a less black-and-white manner. Calling me a Humpty-Dumptyist doesn’t suggest much hope of dialogue. Nevertheless…
I am not redefining religion, I am talking about the same global set of Jews and Christians and Buddhists and Hindus that you are talking about.
The reason you think that I’m talking about something else is that my description of religion does not agree with the description of many (but by no means all) religious people themselves, who say it is a matter of belief. Those people will also say things that you interpret as “truth-claims.” My claim is that they misunderstand what is essential about their own activity.
It might help to compare religious supernaturalists with metaphysicians of the academic kind. Metaphysicians (like Whitehead, Bradley, Findlay) say that they are formulating theories and solving problems about extremely abstract but nevertheless extremely important entities. Other philosophers (like Wittgenstein, Austin and Goodman) say that this isn’t what they’re really doing at all, that these “entities” are only shadows of their own grammar and conventions of representation. Philosophers of the latter kind say that we must distinguish between the “surface grammar” of abstract language and the deeper meaning found by looking at what it’s like to particpate in the activities in question (with both their linguistic and nonlinguistic components).
What you do is look only at the surface, the “truth-claims” as such, without seeing everything that goes on around and through the utterance of these particular sentences. But even 2300 years ago Aristotle knew that a prayer stands in a different logical space from a proposition. The absurdity of detaching key religious sentences from their context is comparable to reading the words of a pop song aloud, without the music, as if it were serious poetry.
If we had gotten off on a better footing, we might have first agreed on something like the following. We see a person talking to (as he himself describes it) a supernatural entity (let’s say a golden calf in the sky). You and I say, There’s no such calf in the sky! This guy THINKS he’s talking to some fantastic entity, but WE CAN SEE that what he’s REALLY doing is just, I don’t know, making himself feel better somehow, or trying to fit in with his neighbors, or whatever.
At this point we might still have different inclinations. Yours is to try convincing the guy that there is no calf, that he should find other ways of feeling better, fitting in, whatever. (Naturally this has no effect.) Mine is to first find out how deep the guy’s “belief” goes, because he may well say, “I don’t LITERALLY believe in the calf, but the ritual is important to me.” If the literal belief really is important to him (in addition to the other factors), then my inclination is to look for how he could make a transition from this belief to other practices which might satisfy the same needs without involving the belief (or with a poetic interpretation of the sentences formerly treated as truth-claims).
My attitude comes from Wittgenstein:
“We must begin with the mistake and transform it into what is true. That is, we must uncover the source of the error, otherwise hearing what is true won’t help us… To convince someone of what is true, it is not enough to state it; we must find the ROAD from error to truth.”
Note that what he means by “the source of error” is not the inclination to utter a particular sentence (“assert a truth-claim”), but the way of life giving rise to that inclination. It is not simply ignorance of particular facts.
Gabe, okay, but then I still think ‘religion’ is the wrong word for what you’re talking about – that you are in fact talking about something else. Therefore it’s a little odd for you to correct me for talking about religion in its usual meaning. You may be right that many religious people misunderstand what is essential about their own activity, but that’s a separate subject, and not what I’m talking about in the article. As Dawn Powell wittily put it about certain reviewers, it’s like saying that if you had my car you would visit your friends rather than mine. I’m talking about religion as it’s usually understood; that is in fact the whole point.
‘Yours is to try convincing the guy that there is no calf, that he should find other ways of feeling better, fitting in, whatever.’ No it isn’t. Mine is to try to convince the guy to stop lecturing the rest of us – the people who don’t see the calf and so don’t believe it’s there – for not believing what he believes. My quarrel, in this particular article, is with the assumption of religious people that they have the right and the duty to lecture and rebuke skeptics. It’s the religious people who interfere with the non-religious, not the other way around, and that’s what I’m talking about, not something else. You can’t expect me to write the article you would have written, after all!
A wonderful forum – from doubts about science “a history of failed experiments” (my comment is that all science is conducted in an artificial construct in which all relationships which are in the real world are controlled or cancelled, therefore information extracted is only of particular relevance and often damaging to the whole environment/culture of humanity.
As for poetry, I’m
a poet myself who has written in form – 100 pages of terza rima, 50 pages of decima rima, two sets of 49 sonnets – crowns of sonnets, several examples of rhyming couplets, have invented a new form – the Zeus – which has thirteen lines and random rhymes, but rhymes, also have written “free verse” which is impressionistic – the problem with free verse it that it tends to become prose, and finally all effots tend to look like telegraphese, or cut-up prose.
Form does not impose artificial structures, it is in harmony with the ondulations of brain waves, breathing bodies, and beating hearts, and once understood, goes to those deep currents underneath which encompass all meaning.
Rosemarie Rowley
I enjoyed the alternate point of view of the article, “Slums from the Qing Dynasty are Still Slums, ” by David Stanway, regarding the effect of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River area of China.
I think Stanway leans over too far, however, in the direction of supporting any old kind of modern engineering, and he may be in danger of falling into a reservoir of error. He claims the dam will help with flood control, yet he does not support this claim. Perhaps he believes all statements issued by the Chinese government.
When one looks at a similar project, the Aswan Dam in Egypt, problems have appeared; for example, the alluvial soil of the Nile Delta is going away since the annual flood has disappeared. In the Pacific Northwest of the United States, dams, once thought to be a great blessing have become a mixed one, and salmon fisheries are in danger.
The article gives the impression that all environmental concerns must be dismissed simply because they are environmental concerns. Such an attitude shows a starry-eyed idealism in favor of progress, rather similar, in fact, to the starry-eyed idealism of the nature-lover Stanway decries.
Let’s have some balance on an important issue like this and consider culture and the environment as well as short-term economic gain.
On Jeremy Stangroom’s article on Humanism
Once again, the modern “either/or”. The Extremes are usually in error as the ancients well understood. How have we forgotten this simple lesson?
Yes, the physical mind is a “robot” to use this silly term. Yes, our behaviour can be often shown to be unfree (by 300 ms or otherwise). Man is indeed a creature of habit. But it didn’t take a scientific experiment to know this perennial truth. Does knowing this have a bearing on the question? What about deliberate, long-term formation of one’s own habits? What of calm, reflective introspection? Meditation? You know, the states that theists and humanists so vaunt and seek? Does demonstrating the presence of deeply ingrained habits and involuntary behaviours (which many religions and humanist ideologies pit their greatest tools precisely to overcome) throw out any ideology or simply reinforce them?
To implicitly choose science as a higher standard than humanism (an ideology) is commendable and easy in today’s world, especially Britain. Just as proclaiming the authority of the Roman See was commendable and easy in the 14th Century.
Fortunately for humanity, true science is always commendable. But true science, free from ideology, does not presuppose what consciousness is, even its material nature. It doesn’t even presuppose something as simple as the atom. It keeps digging, splitting, and nature opens bigger and more complicated at each turn. Science works to discover, measure, explain, and control its observable subject. To the point : only “ideologized” science assumes that every element of the universe is going to fit into some neat preconceived box, just like religion fixates on the binary destinations of her “souls”.
Sure, neuroscience is rapidly assembling evidence. It is exciting and fascinating. But, this is a far cry from saying it has all the evidence needed to describe something like the nature of consciousness. It is certainly not time to use this statement as a premise of an argument leading somewhere. The last time I checked, people who sold things (yes, even the famously quoted Cardinal Dawkins) before they could deliver the product were at best, overenthusiastic salesmen. Thankfully, scientists and authors don’t have to worry about overvaluing their offerings like Wall-Street stocks these days.
People who buy tired out and decades overdue “still in development” products and ideas is, to me, strikingly similar to those intelligent people who are praying (and waiting) for their afterlife whilst sipping wine that is not quite wine and chewing wafers that are not even food. Perhaps the promised product will be delivered? Until then, I will believe in science that is proven, I will do business with firms that deliver products on time and I will drive a car with a running motor.
When will we moderns stop crashing into the side of the guard-rails? Didn’t the 20th Century warn us? “Either Religion or Determinism” seem as ideological as “either Free-Market or Socialistic” in a modern, regulated economy.
There is Something Wrong With Humanism
By Jeremy Stangroom
“The brain is rapidly giving up its secrets to neuroscientists and there are philosophical theories available – for example, eliminative materialism and epiphenomenalism – which offer a way of dealing with issues of consciousness without denying the explanatory power of a reductive, physicalist approach. To preclude the possibility that science might be successful in this area, on the grounds that it results in theories that are counter-intuitive, is bad science and bad philosophy.”
Whether the brain is giving up its secrets or not is questionable at least- even in principle -because without the 1st person reports of a subject all neuroscience could produce (beyond reflex action correlates) would be pretty scan pictures. The fundamental problem with both epiphenomenalism and elimitivism is that they do not deal with issues of consciousness- they simply deny either that it exists or that it is relevant if it does.
To base a world-view on the possibility that it might be proved true in the future is simple faith and non-science as well as non-philosophy.
“In an endnote in his book, The Selfish Gene (2nd Edition), Richard Dawkins writes: “If…you are not religious, then face up to the following question. What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one?” It may be that complicated robots have consciousness, free will and agency; that is, that they have the things which are important to many humanists. Unfortunately, it may also be that they do not, and to deny this possibility requires a leap of faith. ”
I assume that you are not referring to present robots(though they syntax implies it)? Agency, at least, is pretty easy to deny to any existing robot. Since any potential robots would develop from present programming and design it could be questioned whether they ever could have agency other than that of their programmer/designers. Dawkins is always amusing, if a little incoherent in defense of his religion, but if he asserts that he is a robot (lacking agency, free will,and subjective consciousness-which is the definition of “robot”) I see no reason not to believe him. I do question why I should bother listening to a machine tell me that they are a machine? Since I have the missing qualities(to some limited extent)-listening to Dawkins is a bit like listening to my car discuss my life.
I am not, by the way, endorsing “humanism”- the notion of human exceptionalism is one of the more incoherent(and destructive) notions of the Judeo-Christian mythology.
Kirk Hughey
On the Humanism debate And Thomas’s comment)
Malik’s response sidesteps the basic argument in Strangroom’s article, which is that humanism’s take on the nature of human consciousness is a set of ideological beliefs, and as such might just possibly be wrong, and that in fact some scientific findings seem to entail its being wrong. To answer that science itself requires those beliefs is no more than a petition of principle, and a sophistic device. As Thomas rightly points out, this comes from postulating an either-or dichotomy between materialist determinism of a simplistic kind, and a humanism which is itself a kind of idealism or lay spiritualism.
But Thomas’s apparent reduction of the problem to the time-honored recognition of the role of habits in human decision-making (” Man is indeed a creature of habit. But it didn’t take a scientific experiment to know this perennial truth. Does knowing this have a bearing on the question? What about deliberate, long-term formation of one’s own habits? “) seems itself a bit shallow, and implies a refuge for a transcendent role of the mind. What of the possibility that such deliberate, long-term processes be themselves chains of micro-events surging out of operations in the unconscious brain?
The rest of Thomas’s letter does invite one to defer judgment until more results are in from scientific researches into the nature and function of consciousness, and seems proper and prudent advice. Still, it can be argued that there is some validity, indeed a measure of urgency in facing up to this philosophical challenge to basic notions such as autonomy and responsibility, among others. I would dearly like to know what other readers of this exchange who despair, as Thomas and I do, of all ideological stances how they deal whith the possible loss of such apparently fundamental standards of standards of our traditional thinking on human conduct.
In effect, can there still be reference to such a thing as “conduct” (which implies direction), or is “behavior” the only appropriate concept? My own provisional belief on the matter is that consciousness as a brain function emerged from evolution can hardly be a useless appendage, and plays an important role in determining behavior, even if it is not that of initiator. Perhaps is it more of a monitor… Can this be enough to make sense of our conscious efforts at self-betterment?
How Malik Got It Wrong
“To understand what is wrong with Stangroom?s argument, let us accept for the moment his claim that science will eventually show ?the stuff of the inner life of human beings ? consciousness, agency, will, sensation, etc? to be just physical, so that ?in one way or another, they will disappear completely?.”
when Stangroom actually said:
“Rather, the point is that science is in the business of providing reductive, causal explanations of the phenomena that it investigates. Consequently, when it turns its gaze to the stuff of the inner life of human beings – consciousness, agency, will, sensation, etc. – there is the possibility that these things will turn out just to be physical, or indeed that, in one way or another, they will disappear completely.”
Note well the phrase, “there is the possibility”. Malik’s statement is nothing other than misrepresentation, and I do not give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.
If one’s belief system is not flexible enough to include possibilities and a rigorous attention to searching for and considering all logical possibilities to a situation, one will surely overlook them. Example: my brother, an editor, noticed an error in an article I sent him, and decried its effect on the author’s point. Upon reflection, could not the proofreader or copy editor of the article have introduced the error? Certainly. It’s a possibility my brother did not consider and which led him to belittle the author’s overall point. Ridiculous.
As to Malik’s supposition of Stangroom’s point, “we are simply physical objects like any other physical object,” out of what wormhole did he pull this? We are not by any means “physical objects like any other physical object.” Nor is a nematode like a brick like a daffodil. This is what happens when you lose a sense of context, which Malik has clearly lost here. It’s also the sign of an inflexible belief system. Because science is the study of the physical world, it boots nothing to attempt to use metaphysics in science. Thus, on that level, science must treat humans as physical objects. Does that mean that scientific — and only scientific — study of humans is valid? Of course not, and no good scientist would say so. that’s where John Gray gets it wrong. Science, afterall, is a human endeavor. Unlike Malik, I do not see this as somehow transcending “our evolutionary heritage,” but rather rising from it. To me, he takes a dim view of Darwinian evolution and humans place within it. Still, there’s the possibility that spirit, along with mentation, is all in the mind ;-)
As to the veracity of scientific research and “truths,” it is again a matter of context. As the late, great David Bohm put it, a scientific truth may well meet its logical limit in light of new evidence (as example he gives Newtonian physics in light of the work of Einstein). This, of course, does not render Newtonian physics moot, invalid, or untrue. It simply puts it in a larger, and thus, more proper context. If scientific “discoveries” are not viewed in this way, they will surely mislead. As to the breaking of physical laws, what can I say, except that Malik has a poor understanding of science.
Malik, throughout his rebuttal, shies away from possibilities, starting with his misrepresentation of Stangroom’s point.
Re:
There is Nothing Wrong With Humanism
By Kenan Malik
“Uniquely among organisms, human beings are both objects of nature and subjects that can, to some extent at least, shape our own fate. We are biological beings, and under the purview of biological and physical laws. But we are also reflexive, rational, social beings, who can design ways of breaking the constraints of biological and physical laws.”
1. I would like one example of how humanity has actually “broken” a constraint of physical law? That we are “reflexive” I wouldn’t deny-but then so is a prokaryote. “Uniqueness”
here seems a odd term; what other creature is not capable of shaping-to some extent-its own fate?
“To study nature scientifically requires us to make a distinction between a humanity that is a thinking subject and a nature that presents itself to thought but is itself incapable of thought. When studying ‘external’ nature the distinction between the thinking subject and the object of study is easy to make. ”
2. I do think the Cartesian notion that only humans can “think” has been effectively laid to rest, along with the rest of his superstition (like that defining all other beings as insensate machines). I also find the distinction of nature as “object” made here is now recognized as not as “easy” as Mr. Malik imagines.
“Our very capacity to reflect upon nature, then, takes us in a certain fashion outside of nature, for if we could not view nature in some sense from the outside we could not reflect upon it objectively.”
3. This, of course, is the foundation of much criticism regarding whether an entirely “objective” view is even possible. It might be-for a machine; but not likely for a human.
“But society has an existence beyond those individuals and families.”
4. I hope the suggestion here is not that society(a structure lacking both boundary and brain)
somehow transcends the individual in value?
“In recent decades, though, there has been redefinition of naturalism which is now widely taken to mean, not simply the rejection of supernatural explanations, but the acceptance of the idea that the explanations of natural science suffice to explain all phenomena, not just the phenomena of nature. Naturalism has been reformulated as an all-embracing physicalism.”
5. But this is exactly the logical consequence following the rejection of any condition other than the natural as physically explicable-excluding any consideration of “mind” as non-physical.
“The alternative to mechanism is not mysticism. The distinction I am drawing is between a mechanistic, a mysterian and a materialist view of the world. A mechanistic view sees human beings largely as objects through which nature acts. A mysterian view suggests that there are aspects of human existence not knowable to mere mortals. A materialist view, on the other hand, understands human beings without resort to mystical explanations. But it also sees humans as exceptional because humans, unlike any other beings, possess consciousness and agency. ”
6.Given that humans are only part of an interconnected reality that includes the universe(and all possible universes?) and all events of its past it would seem that the “mysterian” could claim the rational edge in this comparison.
” There is a widespread feeling that every impression that humans make upon the world is for the worse.”
7.In planetary terms can any other conclusion be valid without denying the most obvious facts?
A prime expression of such pessimism is the denigration of the human subject and of human agency. Historically, humanism – a desire to place human beings at the centre of philosophical debate; a view of human reason as a tool through which to understand both the natural and the social world; a conviction that humankind could achieve freedom, both from the constraints of nature and the tyranny of other humans, through the agency of its own efforts – was the philosophy at the heart of both the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Today, though, such a view is often dismissed as arrogant, naive, even irrational.”
8.In view of the real effect of European actions on nature and other societies in the last 3-400 years it is really difficult to arrive at any other conclusion but that of the “dismissal”.
Kirk Hughey
This conversation suffers from a lack of philosophical clarity about the notion(s) of scientific explanation.
First, serious scientists of the mind and behavior no longer seek for “mechanistic explanations” of mind and behavior.” These are specific kinds of *partitive explanations*, in which the whole is explained exclusively in terms of the interaction of its parts. Neuroscience is strongly non-mechanistic insofar as it makes use of systems-theoretic models of brain activity. The non-mechanistic system of the mind and behavior also encompasses extra-neural structures and processes, such as the body and the environnment — one aspect of which is the social world. And there’s the rub: to explain mind and behavior will require something like a theory which predicts the interactions of social, bodily and neural systems. This is a tall order and probably not attainable.
Second, “reduction” is not identical with “being scientifically explained”. The former term is narrower than the latter, requiring the translation of all of the theoretical terms of one theory (for example, the folk-psychological theory Of the mind) into the terms of another (e.g., neuroscience). This has never been accomplished in any domain involving human behavior. Pace Richard Dawkins, there is nothing resembling a genetic- based reductive explanation of complex human behaviors or mentation. And the idea of reducing social institutions to the deterministic interactions of individual biological systems is even crazier.
Third, and more paradoxically, it’s common knowledge in the philosophy of science that explanation is itself a value-loaded term involving various criteria of adequacy (such as simplicity, comprehensiveness, etc.) along with their applications in fallible human judgments. Any total scientific explanation of human behavior would fail to be total unless it explained this (explanining) as well — but this is like the snake swallowing its tail.
I suspect that the scientific project, when understood clearly, itself implies a robust defense of some version of the “humanist ideology.”
The “Science and Religion” article makes the common assumption that religion, like science, is a search for truth.
This assumption is in turn based on the habit of treating all sentences as propositions, rather than as tools for accomplishing a variety of purposes.
If one looks at religion in this way, one sees only the weakest and most counterproductive aspect of religion: namely, the tendency of some religious people to portray religion as a matter of belief in the supernatural. One could also say that it is a tendency to treat mythology and other literary phenomena as if they were factual accounts.
I have no wish to give any support whatsoever to this tendency. Nevertheless it is clear to me that it does not represent the essence of religion, which has much more to do with inculcating certain feelings and general perspectives, and with social activities. I think that the religious people who characterize religion as a matter of belief are wrong; one might even say that they are prone to misinterpret their own experience. They share the tendency to treat all sentences as propositions; consequently they are only encouraged by the kind of polemic found in the article.
The cry for rational dialogue is fine, as long as there are disputed facts in question. But it makes no sense when the differences are at bottom matters of attitude and behavior. And it makes no political sense to seek dialogue with only the most obstinate and wrong-headed element of the group (that is, religious people) one wishes to engage.
Religion indeed inhabits “a separate sphere from that of science;” and it is quite strange for anyone to deny that it is “more like” poetry or story-telling than science – since to a large extent it IS poetry and story-telling (and music and dancing and meditation…). Only fundamentalists and secular polemicists cannot recognize the Bible as literature. Both groups insist that religious literature “makes assertions that we are expected to believe.” But this is only true in a trivial sense that would as well apply to Jane Austen (who also has a point of view, is concerned with morality, etc.).
The author asserts that religion cannot provide a “why” to complement the scientific “how”, because he or she misunderstands the grammatical context of the “why”, which is a context of purpose and dramatic or narrative coherence – not one of truth. Any debate about a person or community’s sense of purpose is not a debate about natural facts, but a conflict of vision or imagination. Literature is its natural expression; and likewise the sense of purposelessness is best expressed artistically, rather than presented as a fact of nature or metaphysics.
As for the expertise of religious people, the author focuses on the most grandiose, politically corrupt or pretetentious candidates, but ignores the real everyday expertise of charity workers, grief counselors, mediators and Masters of Cermonies found in religious ranks. The social expertise associated with religion is not due to its special access to a source of ethical “facts”, but only to its providing a special context for paying attention to moral issues, and a nuanced vocabulary for discussing them.
I have two suggestions.
The first is that you look at religious activity without the language. View the ritual and social behavior as a Martian would, and try deducing the meaning of the utterances from the behavior.
The second is that you consider the political consequences of harping on the “mistaken” character of religious utterances, and whether it would not be better to encourage the more reasonable amongst religious people to overcome their fundamentalist brethren, rather than reducing all religion to matters of belief.
To the editor,
Surprisingly, many Christians I am acquainted with assume first, that the historical claims of the Bible have adequate consistancy with and are substantiated by the results of impartial, careful historical enquiry; second, would genuinely be challenged if confronted with such unbiased evidence (or the lack or it) as exists that would divorce their belief from fact. The idea is, that part of faith is a response to a set of facts we are justified in believing.
Of course, everyone knows faith is mere emotion. Of course its just Popular Nonsense. We, who are enlightened and cool and rational and who participate in B & W can see that…
But unless you can offer such evidence, you’re attacking a straw-man. And not being very honest in your attack of faith.
Cheers
Marco Dees
Summary of comment:
The exchange between Stangroom and Malik highlights issues concerning naturalism, reductionism, and humanism. Stangroom supposes (wrongly, I believe) that reductionist scientific explanations might possibly explain away consciousness and human agency, and suggests that humanists must choose between scientific naturalism and an essentially dualist view of human nature. Malik thinks (also wrongly, I believe) that humans have to transcend, in some respect, “the constraints of nature” to claim their full humanity. But successful science doesn’t depend on being strongly reductionist in its explanations, nor do humans need to escape the scientific explanatory net to remain fully human. Naturalism, however, might change our view of human freedom and responsibility.
Full text of comment:
We are completely biological creatures, but not *merely* biological creatures. That is, being purely physical isn’t a fatal flaw of human nature, since being physical is all we need in order to have the causal powers conferred by rationality (the freedom Dennett champions and explains in his book Freedom Evolves), and to be completely human in all other respects. Contra Malik, science shows that we don’t break, and don’t need to break, the constraints of biological and physical laws in order to be conscious, rational creatures that can control our destinies. There’s no good reason to suppose that consciousness or rationality or the self must depend on non-physical, non-causal processes, i.e., something supernatural or causally disconnected from the natural world. In particular, there’s no conflict between being fully caused creatures and being capable of discovering truths about the world. Our capacity to know, reflect and act rationally to further our agendas doesn’t take us *outside* nature, but is what nature does through us. So there’s no problem for humanism in any of this, since although (as Stangroom says) humanism is committed to naturalism, naturalism doesn’t in the least de-humanize us, it only shows *how* we are human.
Mechanism, as Malik describes it, is “the assumption that a physical description of the brain is a sufficient explanation for the phenomena of consciousness and agency.” But I doubt that many in the scientific community accept this sort of strong reductionism with respect to consciousness and agency, even though many would of course accept the naturalist assumption (derived from a commitment to science as one’s epistemology) that we needn’t appeal to categorically non-physical, supernatural entities in our explanations. For instance, a purely physical description of the brain, without recourse to functional or representational levels of description, won’t take you far in understanding consciousness. But the brain is purely physical, nonetheless. So the sort of reductionism Malik and Stangroom bring up is simply a straw man used (most often by the right) to scare people away from science and naturalism, and therefore is not the “spectre of anti-humanism” as Stangroom puts it. Humanism isn’t special in its antipathy to strong reductionism, since few of any persuasion suppose such reductionism is tenable in the first place. So humanists don’t have to choose between science, as its actually practiced, and a congenial world view. (For more on strong reductionism, see “Reductionism vs. Causal Explanation” at http://www.naturalism.org/neurosci.htm and “Playing God, Carefully” at http://www.naturalism.org/currents.htm)
A monistic naturalism, committed to science as its epistemology, is perforce committed to physicalism (materialism) as the basic ontology of the ultimate constituents of the universe, but not to physicalism as a stand-alone explanatory framework. The social and historical worlds of concern to Malik are included in the physical world, but (as he says) are not explicable by physical laws alone. The same goes for consciousness and human agency. Nevertheless, by virtue of being completely included in the natural world, human beings are not causally privileged in the sense of having an ability to transcend natural causality, even though they exploit their knowledge of causal regularities to promote their various agendas. We don’t need to (and can’t anyway) free ourselves from what Malik calls “the constraints of nature” to be free, responsible, rational, truth-knowing agents; rather, we are such agents *within* the constraints of the natural causal network that science reveals to us in causal explanations at many levels, from physical to computational to neurological to cognitive to economic. That we are sophisticated, purely physical animals doesn’t mean that our inner lives and specifically human capacities for rationality disappear or get *explained away* by scientific explanations as Stangroom seems to think they might. Rather they are, simply, explained.
But as natural, conscious selves, it’s vital to keep in mind that, from a naturalistic perspective, the sort of freedom and responsibility we have is not the supernatural, contra-causal type of free will and ultimately self-originating responsibility traditionally thought necessary to underwrite attributions of credit and blame. If we take seriously a non-reductive but entirely physicalist, scientific naturalism, things do indeed change in our moral universe, since some attitudes and social practices (e.g., retributive justifications for punishment) are very much called into question [note*]. It is here that some secular humanists, committed to a radical individualism in which persons are taken to be essentially self-made and ultimately deserving of their fates, may find a consistent and thorough-going naturalism an affront to some deeply held assumptions. But it’s not the false doctrine of strong reductionism that’s the threat here, rather it’s the basic scientific assumption that human behavior and consciousness, even in their highest reaches, are fully caused that offends such humanists. They may take less offense when it’s seen that being uncaused in any respect would weaken, not strengthen, our capacities for knowledge, rationality, and control.
Tom Clark
Center for Naturalism
http://www.naturalism.org
http://www.naturalism.org/center_for_naturalism
*Note: I’m joined in this opinion by philosophers Derk Pereboom, Ted Honderich, Tamler Sommers (at Duke) and perhaps to some extent by Galen Strawson and Simon Blackburn. If anyone out there knows of others sympathetic to this view, I would be pleased to hear about them.
I find the whole premise of Jeremy Stanger’s article fallacious. How did Humanism get saddled with free will? As more complex creatures on the evolutionary scale humans have more choices in the activities they engage in. Free will itself implies a belief in a creator god who set beings in motion with options: they could thereby choose good or evil as per their divine test.
Kenan Malik’s response to Jeremy Stangroom’s critique of humanism is the closes I have read to a defense of my own position. On most points, I agree with Malik wholehartedly. Yet, his essay left a feeling of uneasiness.
The problem is that Malik defends humanism against its critics (not just Stangroom, but a host of scientists, “mechanicists,” and postmodernists) by refusing to recognize the philosophical problems at the root of humanist thought. As Stangroom clearly points out, a belief in reason and science, combined with an atheistic worldview leads to the question of the reality of consciousness and free will. If science is an acceptable way of understanding the world, then it must explore the possibility that we are simply a product of forces beyond our control. It does not help for Malik to argue that we are social and historical beings as well as biological creatures; “nature vs. nurture” arguments are essentially the same in that they reduce (or sometimes eliminate) the role of human free action in human activity. Freudian psychology and Marxist analyses of history have been used to defend “mechanistic,” in a psychological or sociological sense, views of human nature. Whether Freud or Marx agreed with this is not the issue here. The important thing is that biological reductionism does not exhaust the possibility of the non-existence of freedom.
Malik argues eloquently that there is no reason to assume that biology or physics can explain consciousness, since consciousness is not a biological process. He mentions Steven Pinker’s discussion of the “ghost in the machine” problem, and subsequently dives into an elaborate “ghost in the machine” argument. If consciousness is not biological (in a God-less world), then it is up to science to ask what it is, what its ontological status is, what is its relationship to biological thought processes, how is it that the brain seems to actually be doing a lot of thinking.
In other words, Malik is faced with the same problems that Descartes and Spinoze faced. He sides with the former, but still cannot explain the relationship between res extensa and res cogitans. Malik’s argument is convincing to me on ideological grounds, since the philosophical question seems art the moment to be insoluble.
Malik’s assertion in the last paragraph that “nor is it ‘political’ to insist that a physical description of the brain is insufficient explanation of consciousness and agency” is astonishingly incorrect. It is an extremely political statement, just as John Gray’s opinion that to try to change the world is “irrational” is a political statment. In my politics, I will side with Malik, although he should be urged to use more philosophical self-criticism.
The Humanist debate.
Science is an endeavour to describe and explain the world, through a method that subdues – to as great extent as is realisable – all that is subjective about the way the couscious mind interacts with the world.
Implicit in the whole endeavour, what it depends necessarily on, are the assumptions that there is a physical reality corresponding to phenomena, and that this physical reality is orderly. These assumptions come naturally, are necessary to know anything at all, are simpler beliefs than any contrary, and are simply impossible completely to reject.
It does follow, though, that the results of scientific enquiry simply can not challenge that which is basis for it: thought. Science is consciousness with a method to try to find the truth of the world.
So science views the person as an object to whom the laws of physics apply. So one’s personality, one’s emotions, thought, and – significantly -agency have determined matter to which they correspond.
It does niether follow that humans cannot change the world, nor that the way in which they change the world is not part of themselves.
The Science and Religion article doesn’t make the assumption that religion is a search for truth – it explicitly states that science makes truth claims, which is a different thing. I don’t think religion is a search for truth; on the contrary; but I do think it makes truth claims. That’s not an assumption, it’s based on evidence. . Saying religion is poetry and story-telling and requires no more in the way of belief than reading a Jane Austen novel does is simply redefining religion, Humpty Dumpty-style. That’s not what the vast majority of religious people mean by it. At a minimum, their religion includes belief in a supernatural deity, and it’s idle to pretend otherwise.
The article didn’t set up a dichotomy between emotion and reason, either. I treated the subject as a cognitive issue, which is what I take it to be. It’s not a matter of emotions about the universe, but claims about how it got here. The subject of the article is evidence for factual claims, not feelings and poetry.
Science and Religion and HumptyDumptyism.
Just one more note to try making you see things in a less black-and-white manner. Calling me a Humpty-Dumptyist doesn’t suggest much hope of dialogue. Nevertheless…
I am not redefining religion, I am talking about the same global set of Jews and Christians and Buddhists and Hindus that you are talking about.
The reason you think that I’m talking about something else is that my description of religion does not agree with the description of many (but by no means all) religious people themselves, who say it is a matter of belief. Those people will also say things that you interpret as “truth-claims.” My claim is that they misunderstand what is essential about their own activity.
It might help to compare religious supernaturalists with metaphysicians of the academic kind. Metaphysicians (like Whitehead, Bradley, Findlay) say that they are formulating theories and solving problems about extremely abstract but nevertheless extremely important entities. Other philosophers (like Wittgenstein, Austin and Goodman) say that this isn’t what they’re really doing at all, that these “entities” are only shadows of their own grammar and conventions of representation. Philosophers of the latter kind say that we must distinguish between the “surface grammar” of abstract language and the deeper meaning found by looking at what it’s like to particpate in the activities in question (with both their linguistic and nonlinguistic components).
What you do is look only at the surface, the “truth-claims” as such, without seeing everything that goes on around and through the utterance of these particular sentences. But even 2300 years ago Aristotle knew that a prayer stands in a different logical space from a proposition. The absurdity of detaching key religious sentences from their context is comparable to reading the words of a pop song aloud, without the music, as if it were serious poetry.
If we had gotten off on a better footing, we might have first agreed on something like the following. We see a person talking to (as he himself describes it) a supernatural entity (let’s say a golden calf in the sky). You and I say, There’s no such calf in the sky! This guy THINKS he’s talking to some fantastic entity, but WE CAN SEE that what he’s REALLY doing is just, I don’t know, making himself feel better somehow, or trying to fit in with his neighbors, or whatever.
At this point we might still have different inclinations. Yours is to try convincing the guy that there is no calf, that he should find other ways of feeling better, fitting in, whatever. (Naturally this has no effect.) Mine is to first find out how deep the guy’s “belief” goes, because he may well say, “I don’t LITERALLY believe in the calf, but the ritual is important to me.” If the literal belief really is important to him (in addition to the other factors), then my inclination is to look for how he could make a transition from this belief to other practices which might satisfy the same needs without involving the belief (or with a poetic interpretation of the sentences formerly treated as truth-claims).
My attitude comes from Wittgenstein:
“We must begin with the mistake and transform it into what is true. That is, we must uncover the source of the error, otherwise hearing what is true won’t help us… To convince someone of what is true, it is not enough to state it; we must find the ROAD from error to truth.”
Note that what he means by “the source of error” is not the inclination to utter a particular sentence (“assert a truth-claim”), but the way of life giving rise to that inclination. It is not simply ignorance of particular facts.
Gabe, okay, but then I still think ‘religion’ is the wrong word for what you’re talking about – that you are in fact talking about something else. Therefore it’s a little odd for you to correct me for talking about religion in its usual meaning. You may be right that many religious people misunderstand what is essential about their own activity, but that’s a separate subject, and not what I’m talking about in the article. As Dawn Powell wittily put it about certain reviewers, it’s like saying that if you had my car you would visit your friends rather than mine. I’m talking about religion as it’s usually understood; that is in fact the whole point.
‘Yours is to try convincing the guy that there is no calf, that he should find other ways of feeling better, fitting in, whatever.’ No it isn’t. Mine is to try to convince the guy to stop lecturing the rest of us – the people who don’t see the calf and so don’t believe it’s there – for not believing what he believes. My quarrel, in this particular article, is with the assumption of religious people that they have the right and the duty to lecture and rebuke skeptics. It’s the religious people who interfere with the non-religious, not the other way around, and that’s what I’m talking about, not something else. You can’t expect me to write the article you would have written, after all!