Nebula
Another argument we get a lot of is the ‘You’re defining religion too narrowly’ one. The ‘Religion is anything and everything that’s not science, not numerical, not proven’ one. Err – that covers a lot of territory! To put it mildly. Let’s see – I like Austen better than Trollope, and I also think Austen is a better writer than Trollope; I think I can offer evidence for the reasonableness of that view, but I certainly can’t prove it, or establish it beyond a reasonable doubt – because it’s not the kind of thing one can prove or establish beyond a reasonable doubt. Just as I can’t prove that I like someone, or that someone is my friend, or that friendship or affection or hatred or enmity exists. I can offer evidence of a kind that they exist, at least I think I can, but the evidence would be far from decisive. The possibility of trickery, self-deception, error would always be there. But does it follow that all those items belong in the category ‘religion’? If my view of what religion generally means is too narrow (which I don’t think it is), isn’t that one quite a lot too broad?
One of our reader-commenters defines religion (somewhat arbitrarily, I can’t help thinking) this way:
Hence I would define religion, in a logically neutral sense, i.e. one that applies to all human beings regardless of their beliefs, religious or otherwise, as the justification of existence: because of the close intrication of agency and human identity and because human existence inn the world is fundamentally exposed to otherness, human beings feel a compulsion to justify themselves in some wise.
Well, I certainly wouldn’t disagree that humans do that. Nor would I disagree with what I take to be the implication: that how humans do that is interesting and important, and that it’s also mostly not the kind of thing one can prove or establish beyond a reasonable doubt, though I would say one can offer evidence of a kind. But what I don’t agree with is that that attribute – the non-susceptibility to mathematical proof – makes it religion. Perhaps it’s some other attribute that makes it religion. But if so, what? What attribute?
I suppose what it boils down to is that most of what humans really care about is subjective rather than objective. Well I don’t dispute that. But what follows from that? People seem to derive several conclusions from that fact which make them resist criticism of the truth-claims of religion: 1) values, judgments, emotions, affections have a different epistemic status from facts about the world, 2) values, judgments, emotions, affections, and ideas of meaning should (because of that epistemic status?) be called religion, and 3) rational inquiry into values, judgments, emotions, affections and religion is mistaken. Well, I think 1 is indisputable, 2 is quite wrong, and 3 just doesn’t follow. If 3 did follow, wouldn’t that mean that we could talk about, say, poetry, art, ethics, psychology, and myriad other subjects only in a carefully irrational way? That if we ever ‘deviated into sense’ we would have to be corrected and steered back to merely making emotional exclamations? But surely we can all think of counter-examples – of discussions of those subjects that were not programmatically irrational, and that nevertheless deepened our understanding of the subject at hand? In short I don’t think it follows from the fact that many subjects are woolly and subjective that there is nothing rational to be said about them. So I just don’t buy the argument that rational discussion of religion is nonsensical or beside the point even if the truth-claims of religion are not part of the discussion.
If I made an ambiguating mistake there, (aside from forgetting to delete the extra n on “inn”, since it was late and I’d just worked a full shift), it was in forgetting to use quotation marks on “religion”,- (but n.b., “in a logically neutral sense”). The point was that such “justification of existence”, as a function of the human need to maintain or sustain a sense of personal identity, (which I specified as a “normative-symbolic construct” and not a physical reality), is universal, at least for denizens of the modern world, and can be pursued by projects in any number of avenues and alleyways, such as science, art, politics, money-making, hedonism, etc., as well as, religious beliefs, whether traditional, conventional or unconventional. These are all “logically” equivalent, if not commensurable, projects and I was attempting to specify the level at which disputes over such matters can reasonably arise, namely, the inter-human, socio-cultural realm, which is not one of natural causality, but generated, with the advent of language, out of the cross-section, interplay, and conflict of mutual recognitions between human beings. If human freedom and identity are at all real, (under the supposition that “reality” can only be conceived as consisting of any number of levels, each real at its own level and in its own way), then a moment’s reflection would “reveal” that this could only be the case because they are causally underdetermined. (Are human actions causally determined? A resonable answer, I think, could only be a split one.) The obverse of this is that human identity is inherently incomplete, possessed of an indeterminate potentiality, and open to various “fulfillments”, which are equally “imaginary”, i.e. not determined by prior evidence. (Arendt called this intrinsic capacity for innovation “natality”.) What is at stake here is one of the fundamental affirmative values of the modern world: the capacity and “right” of human beings “freely” to make fundamental choices in their existence with implications for the formation and development of their identities. (That such choices may be badly botched is part of the deal.) It, by no means, follows that such choices are unconstrained, boundlessly “subjective”, or free of the weight of prior determinations, natural or historical. But the boundaries of such potentials, I think, are well worth defending, even if they draw on the resources of religious traditions.
I have never claimed that religion can not, nor ought not be rationally criticized, in terms of its truth claims or any other rational criteria. (That quote from Marx about religion being the heart of a heartless, the soul of a soulless, world would be a good place to start. People only seem to remember the “opiate of the masses” part.) At any rate, such criticisms have long since taken place, both within and without religious traditions, and they are especially intensified by the transition to highly-differentiated modern social formations, which require lateral rather than hierarchical forms of social integration and “authority”. My only argument has been that no rational criterion, nor set of rational criteria can be *entirely* dispositive of the matter, and that the way that OB goes about the matter, relying solely on the criterion of naturalistic, scientific truth, is not exactly effective, fair-minded, politically astute, and rationally fruitful. It is true that some naturalistic truths can be applied to criticism of some religious claims. Darwinian evolution, in particular, serves to disable and disspell self-enclosed religious myths of origin. But that just means that henceforth we are consigned irremediably to history and it does not follow thereby that science can, nor should replace such myths with its own terms of reference, nor that the sorts of questions such myths “answered” are dispensed with once and for all, rather than transformed. Similarly, consigning religion to the dust-bin of superstition and magical thinking won’t do. Criticism of such thinking originates in and was carried out by many major religious traditions. (In Dante, sorcerers and fortune-tellers are assigned their own sub-circle in hell. Since the scheme is that sins of fraud are worse than sins of violence and anger, lifted from Cicero, with sins of incontinence, added from Aristotle, being the least offensive and punished outside the City of Dis, such-like are consigned fairly low down in the fiery/frozen pit. IIRC, they are condemned to walk around in their robes endlessly, eternally, in their circle with their heads twisted on backwards.) Nor is religion simply a denial of death. If anything, the obsessive focus on death as the seat of ultimate judgment should be criticized as life-denying and promoting a religious sollipsism. The wishful thinking argument, in the name of “reality”, fails to discriminate between wishes and I would hate to see what entirely wishless human beings are like, (though perhaps we have already seen too many such wishless human beings.) But I reject the distinction between subjective and objective matters that OB wishes to apply. Such a subject/object split is an “archaic” philosophical vestige and should be/has been criticized and replaced. The inter-human realm is neither subjective, nor objective; such a distinction does not serve to describe the processes that actually go on at the level of inter-human recognition. On the other hand, I have always argued for the role of (non-epistemological) criteria in rendering discernable and discussable and therefore subject to reason “non-objective” matters. Such criteria would certainly have a large role to play in the discussion and criticism of religious beliefs, provided that they were deployed at the right level and entailed the due acknowledgement between participants in the discussion. However, I do not see the split between rational and irrational as being entirely aligned with that between religious belief and unbelief. Rather the divide, as far as I am concerned, is between those who acknowledge the finitude of human existence and operate from such an understanding and those who do not. Many religious beliefs could fall to criticism in such terms, but, equally, many secular beliefs, concerning scientific or historical progress, could similarly be drawn into question.
Mr. Beckett, our Episcopalian friend, has attempted to make a couple of points similar to some points I’ve been trying to make.
“If human freedom and identity are at all real, (under the supposition that “reality” can only be conceived as consisting of any number of levels, each real at its own level and in its own way), then a moment’s reflection would “reveal” that this could only be the case because they are causally underdetermined. (Are human actions causally determined? A resonable answer, I think, could only be a split one.)”
I beg to differ. A reasonable answer, I think, could only be yes. Perhaps you would like to suggest a mechanism for causally undetermined human action?
“the way that OB goes about the matter, relying solely on the criterion of naturalistic, scientific truth, is not exactly effective, fair-minded, politically astute, and rationally fruitful.”
You keep saying that, or its equivalent. But I don’t know how you know what I’m relying on. I don’t recall talking about “naturalistic, scientific truth.” What I recall is asking a lot of questions about the truth claims of religion. About, for instance, the validity of the factual statements about for instance the will of God that religious believers do in fact make. If religious believers don’t hesitate to make factual statements all the time – and they don’t – then why should non-believers hesitate to ask how they know those statements are true? Have you never wondered of someone’s factual assertion ‘How do you know that?’
And as for fair-minded – well there you are. Drawing a circle around religion, declaring it immune, declaring it off-limits to rational inquiry. That’s exactly my point. If other systems of thought are subject to rational inquiry, why should religion be immune? Because a lot of people find meaning in it? Is that really a good reason, one that outweighs the reasons there are to think no influential system of thought should be exempt from rational inquiry?
Mike Shoemaker:
So you want to take up an epiphenomenalist/reductionist position on the reality of human freedom and thought? You’re welcome to do so, if it suits you. I won’t go into the line of criticism about the performative contradictions one enters into by behaving in accordance with contrary suppositions in one’s actual social interactions, while ostensibly holding such an intellectualized view. Instead I will answer your question as briefly as I can. 1) The root of human freedom is language and the discursive thinking it renders possible. Animals make behavioral selections intervening causally in environmental states of affairs on the basis of their own separately delimited organization of organic causality. But they can only do so in response to immediate events or cycles of events. Only with language is it possible to interpret environmental states of affairs counterfactually and in terms of a range of possible alternatives and to select a causal intervention deliberately to bring about a change to a state that does not priorly exist. That, in simplest terms, is “freedom”, volitional capacity. 2) On the level of neural processing, all that is required for a very rough-sketch account is a degree of causal path-independency. Once one realizes that millions of neuronal events, which have a factorial number of discrete particular combinations, can boil down to a small finite number, dozens, of overall brain states and, further, that several neural subsystems so constituted can interact with each other, then it is possible to see that thought processes can be immanently connected and effectively self-determining, that is, while fully arising from a substrate of causal events, not causally determined by those events. Of course, by “self-determining” I don’t mean anything like the Parmenidean identification of pure thought with being, which is quite useless anyway, nor do I mean to imply that there is a complete absence of other determinants, simply that thoughts can affect and occasion other thoughts, as is commonly experienced. Once again the grasp of symbolic meanings and their rules of combination is crucial here. Also any strict separation between thought as mental and behavior as physical, in the grasp and application of rules, is erroneous; there is no strict dividing line there, but rather a continuous gradient. Beyond that the development of freedom is a matter of the evolution and expansion of culturally structured horizons of meaning-interpretations from archaic beginnings unto modern times.
“On the level of neural processing, all that is required for a very rough-sketch account [of causally undetermined human action] is a degree of causal path-independency. Once one realizes that millions of neuronal events, which have a factorial number of discrete particular combinations, can boil down to a small finite number, dozens, of overall brain states and, further, that several neural subsystems so constituted can interact with each other, then it is possible to see that thought processes can be immanently connected and effectively self-determining, that is, while fully arising from a substrate of causal events, not causally determined by those events.”
I’m sorry but I don’t see how that argument establishes that human action can be causally undetermined. It seems that the argument that you are making is that, to a large part, these actions are determined by the internal states of the neural system – but this is not causally undetermined, nor is it even self determined since the human agent cannot be equated with the whole neural system.
John, thanks for your reply. I am aware of at least some of the performative contradictions. That I think I choose to live as if I had free will does not, of course, make it so. With respect to your first argument, Hume pointed out that the compatibilist position is easily reached by redefining freedom. I have no argument with freedom as volitional capacity. I contend that those volitions are fully determined.
Concerning your second point, I fear that I have failed to comprehend how a degree of causal path independancy leads to thought processes being “effectively self-determining”, unless by this you mean that they are not actually self-determining.
PM:
I never made any claim about human action being undetermined. Mike mistranscribed my comment that way. I claimed only that, if human freedom, volitional agency, is real, it must be causally *underdetermined*. I am making an “open system” argument, that, through a series of emergent levels, whereby conjunctions of causal events lead to synergistic effects and organization that result in properties and capacities at the emergent level irreducible to their prior causes, but nonetheless real, i.e. efficacious, at their emergent level, the neural processes of the brain can evolve, generate, and sustain the openness required for the properties and capacities of reflexive thought, volitional action and language. (In actual neural research, systems theoretic models would be applied, not just to deal with the complexity of the problems, but to handle the ambiguity between material causes and informational structures.) I am only concerned here with establishing a reasonable basis for the limited reality of thought and agency at its own level, as we factitiously experience it and as we articulate and attribute it in the “grammar” of natural language. And I absolutely do not equate agency with some sort of complete mastery of causes or absence of conditions. I specifically disclaimed any identity between thought and being and thus any notion of a “causa sui”, as operative in classical philosophy; there is a radical non-identity between thought and being. The account I offer could be labelled either “realist” or “non-reductionist materialist”. It involves no dualism of “mind” as somehow a separate reality or substance. To the contrary, I argue that mental properties and capacities are emergent from neural processes and that what we factitiously experience and articulate as “mind” is actually generated by interaction between mental, physical, and behavioral components without any clear demarcation between them, such that without these interactions, such “mind” would never have evolved and would not have the actual complexion and efficacies we rely on and that we somewhat mistakenly attribute to a factitious notion of “mind”. I am rejecting reductionist materialist accounts, whereby only atomic material causes are real and “mind” can only be some sort of epiphenomenal illusion, and mind/brain parallelism, whereby there “must” be some sort of more or less isomorphic correspondance between mental and physical events. And since the original topic was human agency and freedom, I might add that I also reject the traditional modern identification of such with complete autonomy, which I think can only be sustained with some sort of superfluous transcendental conceptual apparatus, and which results in an antinomian paradox that freedom can only be real, if it is also effectively impossible, which I think injurious to freedom. I am only concerned with specifying the limited reality of the phenomenon we experience.
Mike Shoemark:
I don’t think a compatibilist “solution”, simply redefining the problem, would do. Back behind Hume, Spinoza claimed that, if a stone flying through the air could think, it would think that it is free. Such a definition of freedom is not exactly operationally adequate. I think that both of them are stuck in their problem because they are still caught up in the classical identification of thought and being.
I rooted the phenomenon of volitional agency at the level of language and the interactions between language and behavior. In some sense, discussing neural processes was a diversion, brought on by the question of causality. But language is a “public” phenomenon, not simply an intra-cranial one. It arises from the cross-section and interaction of distinct neuro-physiological systems capable of internalizing and processing it. Do those neuro-physiological systems and their interactions thereby cause each other? I would maintain that language and meaning are a non-causal medium, which, once it emerges, yields an openness to the world and an open horizon of recombinant selectivity, over and above causal processes. The traditional sollipsistic identification of “mind” with consciousness misses this level.
By “self-determining”, I already specified that I meant simply that thoughts can effect and interact with one another at their own level. Roughly, thoughts are not “in” the neurons; they are “in” the *pattern* of neuronal firings. And those patterns can interact as such. I did not mean that such thoughts exist independently from a causal substrate, but simply that they are not reducible to such a causal substrate.
JCH:
“I claimed only that, if human freedom, volitional agency, is real, it must be causally *underdetermined*. I am making an “open system” argument, that, through a series of emergent levels, whereby conjunctions of causal events lead to synergistic effects and organization that result in properties and capacities at the emergent level irreducible to their prior causes, but nonetheless real, i.e. efficacious, at their emergent level, the neural processes of the brain can evolve, generate, and sustain the openness required for the properties and capacities of reflexive thought, volitional action and language. (In actual neural research, systems theoretic models would be applied, not just to deal with the complexity of the problems, but to handle the ambiguity between material causes and informational structures.) I am only concerned here with establishing a reasonable basis for the limited reality of thought and agency at its own level, as we factitiously experience it and as we articulate and attribute it in the “grammar” of natural language. And I absolutely do not equate agency with some sort of complete mastery of causes or absence of conditions.”
I don’t understand how emergent properties are in any way underdetermined. Emergence is a phenomenon associated with different levels of explanation but each level is always entirely causally determined by the previous level. Things ’emerge’ when we look at higher levels of aggregation.
“I am rejecting…mind/brain parallelism, whereby there “must” be some sort of more or less isomorphic correspondance between mental and physical events”
“By “self-determining”, I already specified that I meant simply that thoughts can effect and interact with one another at their own level. Roughly, thoughts are not “in” the neurons; they are “in” the *pattern* of neuronal firings. And those patterns can interact as such.”
Aren’t these two statements contradictory? You justify claiming that thoughts interact with one another by an appeal to equivalence between thoughts and neural patterns – some sort of isomorphism argument.
John, thank you for your illuminating reply. I agree with almost everything you say, except for your first and last points. I think that a compatibilist solution will do nicely. I don’t like it much, but what do my prejudices matter? As for your final point:
“I would maintain that language and meaning are a non-causal medium, which, once it emerges, yields an openness to the world and an open horizon of recombinant selectivity, over and above causal processes.”
I must question this. Language and meaning seem to me to be perfectly causal phenomena. Very complex, not to say chaotic, with all the public factors you describe; but each of those factors, no matter how many, is in itself determined and, therefore, so are language and meaning.
You may suppose that I am determined (no pun intended) not to change my stance on this matter. I assure you that few things would give me more pleasure than to be given a convincing argument for truly free human agency.
PM:
Now I’m afraid I just don’t understand your points. I take my notion of emergent evolution from Whitehead; it’s not the first, nor the only such account, but it is the one that is most rationally and scientifically informed, at least before the formation of general systems theory, which he seems to anticipate. Whitehead defines what is “real” as what has efficacy. And the whole point of emergent levels is that the emergent features simply don’t exist at lower levels of causal description, but that they do have real efficacy at the level at which they emerge (and subsequent levels). This is not to say that there are not causal flows between the emergent level and lower levels and that the causality of lower levels ceases to obtain; but it is to say that the type of causality operative at the lower levels do not and can not by themselves bring about the features of the emergent level and that the organization of causal flows that maintain the emergent level are maintained, at least in part, by the efficacies of the features of the emergent level. In other words, those emergent features simply do not reduce. Let’s take consciousness as an example, by which I mean primary perceptual consciousness as an embedded neural system, not human self-consciousness. (I would defer to the account offered by the neuro-physiologist Gerald Edelman.) Such consciousness exists and could only have evolved, if at least some part of the organic behavioral decisions of the organism are passed through and decided by such consciousness, that is, if such consciousness has some real efficacy and is not simply a theater of illusion determined by other, lower levels of organic organization and causality. Hence, consciousness is a real and the behavior of organisms with consciousness is significantly different than those without such a neural system. The only sense I can make of your complaint or criticism is that you are looking at the notion of emergence from a stand-off position of theoretical explanation, in which all the levels are surveillable, as if looking at an ant-farm, without considering the position of participation in really embedded processes.
I also do not get the claim that I have made a logical contradiction in rejecting mind/brain parallelism. Go back to the earlier claim I made about millions of neural events boiling down to dozens of brain states. That would mean that out of the factorial number of events, a fractionally factorial set of events would correspond to the same brain state. Where in that does the alleged isomorphism between physical and mental events lie? I would think of thoughts on analogy with interference patterns between waves; the nodal points of the interference pattern would be like the significant features of a thought. If this is not a stable steady-state system, but rather a dynamic, ever-shifting system, then the various interference patterns would interact and “interfere” with each other. As patterns would generate other patterns, so thoughts would generate thoughts. (It should be pointed out that this is not just an analogy about thought. The brain makes myriad decisions that are not at all mental in nature and, at this rough level of crude analogy, they would not be significantly different from thoughts.) Of course, I’m not pretending to offer any sort of actual scientific explanation here. This is just offered at the rough philosophical level of whether something is at all conceivable. But surely your objection can not be based on having missed the distinction between material causes and informational structures. At any rate, I think the proper criterion of explanation here would be the systems-theoretic one: how to account for the probability of the improbable.
Mike Shoemark:
I’m not in the business of conversion. I’m simply offering reasonable accounts where I think I can, that make some sense to me. (That others think I’m speaking Urdu, I well know.) And they are offered free of charge, since they don’t pay me enough elsewhere anyway. So it goes. But I don’t think that, if you were possessed of the “correct” account of human freedom, you would be any better or worse off than you already are. My own account of human freedom concludes that it is a real phenomenon, but also quite limited: it is a “pessimistic” conclusion. (And yet I am an unrepentant leftie; I’m just distrustful and skeptical of claims to instantaneous “liberation”. Go figure.)
I’m not sure your conception of causality takes in the distinction between deterministic and stochastic processes. But that does not directly effect the question about language. Language for me falls under the concept of rule-governed behavior or activity, though, in fact, it involves a complex interaction between many different sets of rules. But it belongs to the concept of a rule that rules do not apply themselves, (on pain of infinite regress). A rule or its interpretation can just as well be followed or not. That rules or sets of rules interact and thereby constrain each other refines, but does not fundamentally alter this fact. In other words, rules do not determine themselves: rules are not causes. And I think that the rules of language “must” ultimately derive from the interaction between language-capable organisms and the need for communication between them. Whatever the organic drives that determine their behavior, they are altered by the occurence of communication. And that, in turn, is mapped out across the world that is transacted between them. Such happenings are language and meaning and I don’t see how they could be said to be causally determined. In effect, the development of rule-governed behavior is the fore-court of human freedom.
I can help but wonder whether you aren’t holding to a hyperbolic conception of causality. From the logical notion that effects must follow from causes, it “follows” that causes must apply everywhere. Whatever its accidents and emergences and the enjoyments they allow, the great god of causality envelops all, ensuring that tiny sparrows don’t fall from the sky and that, though the lilies-of-the-valley do not weave, they produce garments finer than those of Solomon. But I think that such an all-encompassing notion of causality misses both the distinction between “inner” organically self-organized and self-delimiting causality and the causal nexuses of the external environment and the contingency of freedom and its effects.
I thank you for your contribution to my thinking, inconsistent though that is with my hyperbolic conception of causality. I hope ‘they’ pay you enough to enable you to continue to contribute to our common understanding at a rate which I can afford!
“I also do not get the claim that I have made a logical contradiction in rejecting mind/brain parallelism. Go back to the earlier claim I made about millions of neural events boiling down to dozens of brain states. That would mean that out of the factorial number of events, a fractionally factorial set of events would correspond to the same brain state. Where in that does the alleged isomorphism between physical and mental events lie?”
Well not here clearly. But you move straight from discussing brain states in the quote above to thoughts in the quote below – is this an analogy between thoughts and brain states or an implied isomorphism?
“I would think of thoughts on analogy with interference patterns between waves; the nodal points of the interference pattern would be like the significant features of a thought. If this is not a stable steady-state system, but rather a dynamic, ever-shifting system, then the various interference patterns would interact and “interfere” with each other. As patterns would generate other patterns, so thoughts would generate thoughts. (It should be pointed out that this is not just an analogy about thought. The brain makes myriad decisions that are not at all mental in nature and, at this rough level of crude analogy, they would not be significantly different from thoughts.) Of course, I’m not pretending to offer any sort of actual scientific explanation here. This is just offered at the rough philosophical level of whether something is at all conceivable. But surely your objection can not be based on having missed the distinction between material causes and informational structures. At any rate, I think the proper criterion of explanation here would be the systems-theoretic one: how to account for the probability of the improbable.
“And the whole point of emergent levels is that the emergent features simply don’t exist at lower levels of causal description, but that they do have real efficacy at the level at which they emerge (and subsequent levels). This is not to say that there are not causal flows between the emergent level and lower levels and that the causality of lower levels ceases to obtain; but it is to say that the type of causality operative at the lower levels do not and can not by themselves bring about the features of the emergent level and that the organization of causal flows that maintain the emergent level are maintained, at least in part, by the efficacies of the features of the emergent level. In other words, those emergent features simply do not reduce.”
I think you’re talking about what I referred to as levels of aggregation – so while causally speaking the mental is the result of neural systems interacting with the world it must be understood at that level rather than at a lower level of aggregation (e.g. individual neurons). I’m not sure I’d like to refer to it as underdetermined though, but then I’ve never really got what is supposed to be at stake in the free will debate.