What is the difference between physicism, naturalism, materialism, and scientific realism?

What is the difference between

physicism, naturalism, materialism

and scientific realism?

REFERENCES

Wikipedia - (the philosophy of) Naturalism

Wikipedia - Metaphysical naturalsim

SEOP - Naturalism

Wikiepedia - (the philosophy of) Materialism

SEOP - Process Theism

Wikipedia - Scientific Realism

Ryan's Outline of Philosophy - Scientific Realism

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WIKIPEDIA

In philosophy, naturalism is the idea that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe.[1] In its primary sense,[2] it is also known as ontological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism, pure naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism. "Ontological" refers to ontology, the philosophical study of what exists. Philosophers often treat naturalism as equivalent to materialism.

For example, philosopher Paul Kurtz argues that nature is best accounted for by reference to material principles. These principles include mass, energy, and other physical and chemical properties accepted by the scientific community. Further, this sense of naturalism holds that spirits, deities, and ghosts are not real and that there is no "purpose" in nature. This stronger formulation of naturalism is commonly referred to as metaphysical naturalism.[3] On the other hand, the more moderate view that naturalism should be assumed in one's working methods as the current paradigm, without any further consideration of whether naturalism is true in the robust metaphysical sense, is called methodological naturalism.[4]

With the exception of pantheists – who believe that nature is identical with divinity while not recognizing a distinct personal anthropomorphic god – theists challenge the idea that nature contains all of reality. According to some theists, natural laws may be viewed as secondary causes of God(s).

In the 20th century, Willard Van Orman Quine, George Santayana, and other philosophers argued that the success of naturalism in science meant that scientific methods should also be used in philosophy. According to this view, science and philosophy are not always distinct from one another, but instead form a continuum.

"Naturalism is not so much a special system as a point of view or tendency common to a number of philosophical and religious systems; not so much a well-defined set of positive and negative doctrines as an attitude or spirit pervading and influencing many doctrines. As the name implies, this tendency consists essentially in looking upon nature as the one original and fundamental source of all that exists, and in attempting to explain everything in terms of nature. Either the limits of nature are also the limits of existing reality, or at least the first cause, if its existence is found necessary, has nothing to do with the working of natural agencies. All events, therefore, find their adequate explanation within nature itself. But, as the terms nature and natural are themselves used in more than one sense, the term naturalism is also far from having one fixed meaning". - Dubray 1911

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WIKIPEDIA

Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions of material things. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are caused by physical processes, such as the neurochemistry of the human brain and nervous system, without which they cannot exist. Materialism directly contrasts with idealism, according to which consciousness is the fundamental substance of nature.

Materialism is closely related to physicalism—the view that all that exists is ultimately physical. Philosophical physicalism has evolved from materialism with the theories of the physical sciences to incorporate more sophisticated notions of physicality than mere ordinary matter (e.g. spacetime, physical energies and forces, and exotic matter). Thus, some prefer the term physicalism to materialism, while others use the terms as if they were synonymous.

Discoveries of neural correlates between consciousness and the brain are taken as empirical support for materialism, but some philosophers of mind find that association fallacious or consider it compatible with non-materialist ideas. Alternative philosophies opposed or alternative to materialism or physicalism include idealism, pluralism, dualism, panpsychism, and other forms of monism. Epicureanism is a philosophy of materialism from classical antiquity that was a major forerunner of modern science. Though ostensibly a deist, Epicurus affirmed the literal existence of the Greek gods in either some type of celestial "heaven" cognate from which they ruled the universe (if not on a literal Mount Olympus), and his philosophy promulgated atomism, while Platonism taught roughly the opposite, despite Plato's teaching of Zeus as God.

Overview

In 1748, French doctor and philosopher La Mettrie espoused a materialistic definition of the human soul in L'Homme Machine.

Materialism belongs to the class of monist ontology, and is thus different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism is in contrast to idealism, neutral monism, and spiritualism. It can also contrast with phenomenalism, vitalism, and dual-aspect monism. Its materiality can, in some ways, be linked to the concept of determinism, as espoused by Enlightenment thinkers.[citation needed]

Despite the large number of philosophical schools and their nuances, all philosophies are said to fall into one of two primary categories, defined in contrast to each other: idealism and materialism.[a] The basic proposition of these two categories pertains to the nature of reality: the primary difference between them is how they answer two fundamental questions—what reality consists of, and how it originated. To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects of mind (ideas) are primary, and matter secondary. To materialists, matter is primary, and mind or spirit or ideas are secondary—the product of matter acting upon matter.

The materialist view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically by René Descartes; by itself, materialism says nothing about how material substance should be characterized. In practice, it is frequently assimilated to one variety of physicalism or another.

Modern philosophical materialists extend the definition of other scientifically observable entities such as energy, forces, and the spacetime continuum; some philosophers, such as Mary Midgley, suggest that the concept of "matter" is elusive and poorly defined.

During the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels extended the concept of materialism to elaborate a materialist conception of history centered on the roughly empirical world of human activity (practice, including labor) and the institutions created, reproduced or destroyed by that activity. They also developed dialectical materialism, by taking Hegelian dialectics, stripping them of their idealist aspects, and fusing them with materialism (see Modern philosophy).

Non-reductive materialism

Materialism is often associated with reductionism, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description—typically, at a more reduced level.

Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, taking the material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with the existence of real objects, properties or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material constituents. Jerry Fodor held this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in "special sciences" like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of basic physics.

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WIKIPEDIA

Scientific Realism

Scientific realism is the view that the universe described by science is real regardless of how it may be interpreted. A believer of scientific realism takes the universe as described by science to be true (or approximately true), because of their assertion that science can be used to find the truth (or approximate truth) about both the physical and metaphysical in the Universe.

Within philosophy of science, this view is often an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The discussion on the success of science in this context centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories. Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make valid claims about unobservables (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as observables, as opposed to instrumentalism.

Main features

Scientific realism involves two basic positions:

• First, it is a set of claims about the features of an ideal scientific theory; an ideal theory is the sort of theory science aims to produce.

• Second, it is the commitment that science will eventually produce theories very much like an ideal theory and that science has done pretty well thus far in some domains. It is important to note that one might be a scientific realist regarding some sciences while not being a realist regarding others.^{[citation needed]}

According to scientific realism, an ideal scientific theory has the following features:

• The claims the theory makes are either true or false, depending on whether the entities talked about by the theory exist and are correctly described by the theory. This is the semantic commitment of scientific realism.
• The entities described by the scientific theory exist objectively and mind-independently. This is the metaphysical commitment of scientific realism.
• There are reasons to believe some significant portion of what the theory says. This is the epistemological commitment.

Combining the first and the second claim entails that an ideal scientific theory says definite things about genuinely existing entities. The third claim says that we have reasons to believe that many scientific claims about these entities are true, but not all.

Scientific realism usually holds that science makes progress, i.e. scientific theories usually get successively better, or, rather, answer more and more questions. For this reason, scientific realists or otherwise, hold that realism should make sense of the progress of science in terms of theories being successively more like the ideal theory that scientific realists describe^{[who said this?]}.

Characteristic claims

The following claims are typical of those held by scientific realists. Due to the wide disagreements over the nature of science's success and the role of realism in its success, a scientific realist would agree with some but not all of the following positions.^[1]

• The best scientific theories are at least partially true.
• The best theories do not employ central terms that are non referring expressions.
• To say that a theory is approximately true is sufficient explanation of the degree of its predictive success.
• The approximate truth of a theory is the only explanation of its predictive success.
• Even if a theory employs expressions that do not have a reference, a scientific theory may be approximately true.
• Scientific theories are in a historical process of progress towards a true account of the physical world.
• Scientific theories make genuine, existential claims.
• Theoretical claims of scientific theories should be read literally and are definitively either true or false.
• The degree of the predictive success of a theory is evidence of the referential success of its central terms.
• The goal of science is an account of the physical world that is literally true. Science has been successful because this is the goal that it has been making progress towards.

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What is the difference between

physicism, naturalism, and materialism?

Two Answers from Philosophy's Substack

article link

I

Naturalism in the broad sense is a very loose attitude, far looser than even materialism, let alone physicalism, because the notion of "nature" is left open to interpretation. Defined negatively as "not supernatural" it leaves room say for pantheism a la Spinoza with nature=God="substance of infinite attributes" (Spinoza is even sometimes described as "Epicurean materialist"). In this loose meaning naturalism expresses more a disposition towards a certain approach to intellectual inquiry, philosophical, scientific or even aesthetic, than any particular ontological, epistemological or methodological position, hence the need for those additional epithets to make it more specific. Goethe called himself a naturalist, criticized reductivism about living creatures, and argued for holistic science as "phenomenology of nature". So Chalmers is not off base to claim the mantle of Spinoza and Goethe and call himself a naturalist.

In analytic philosophy naturalism without qualifications usually refers to epistemological naturalism, a.k.a. naturalized epistemology of Quine, which subsumes philosophy, or at least epistemology, under natural science. This variety is closer to historical empiricism (Hume, Kant, Mill) than to any flavor of materialism or physicalism. Even Quine declaring himself a realist is accompanied with a redefinition of "realism" that does Kant proud:" Viewed from within the phenomenalistic conceptual scheme, the ontologies of physical objects and mathematical objects are myths. The quality of myth, however, is relative; relative, in this case, to the epistemological point of view", "The scientific system, ontology and all, is a bridge of our own making... But I also expressed my unswerving belief in external things — people, nerve endings, sticks, stones. This I reaffirm. I believe also, if less firmly, in atoms and electrons and classes."

In other words, epistemological naturalism has an as-if view of material and ideal ontologies (in 1940s Quine was an outright nominalist, but later acknowledged natural numbers as scientifically "indispensable", see Does Quine's dissolution of the Analytic/Synthetic distinction challenge mathematical realism?). In practice, naturalist attitude often predisposes one to accepting materialist (less so physicalist) positions in ontology, but "explaining the world fully with physical laws" refers to the phenomenal world and implies no metaphysical commitment to said ontology.

Answered Jan 28, 2016 at 21:08

by Conifold

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II

Naturalism has a range of meanings, and the equivocation of these various meanings is the source of your apparent contradiction.

In its broadest meaning, naturalism is just a committment to the "explore, speculate, test, revise" methodologies that use empiricism and reasoning, and the premise that either none or only a little of our universe is immune to this methodology. This is methodological naturalism, and it is accompanied by a belief in a continuum approach to science and metaphysics, as metaphysics would be primarily or entirely "natural". The most noteworthy recent advocate of this approach is Karl Popper, and as a "naturalist", and our definer of science, he advocated for a triplest ontology (mind, and ideas are separate planes from matter) all subject to naturalist investigation.

However, many materialists, and many physicalists, assume that only matter is subject to this methodology, and describe themselves as naturalists. This includes an assumption that mind, soul, gods, math, logic or some subset of these are "supernatural", in that they are immune to investigation either empirically or logically.

It is not just materialists who hold this narrow view of naturalism. Stephen J Gould's Non Overlapping Magisteria concept has been adopted by many dualists, who hold that the spiritual realm exists, but is not subject to naturalist evaluation.

Metaphysical naturalism takes this narrow approach to the "natural" and asserts that only those things which fit this narrow "natural" actually exist. However, as I noted, even "naturalists" themselves disagree on how narrow naturalism is. Most physicalists agree that mind and logic exist, but are just causally dervative on matter, rather than the materialist declaration of their non-existence. So even among metaphysical naturalists the definition is variable.

answered Dec 15, 2018 at 18:32

by Dcleve

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reddit comments

Metaphysical naturalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the worldview. For the working assumption without suggesting ultimate truth, see Methodological naturalism.

Metaphysical naturalism (also called ontological naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism) is a philosophical worldview which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences. Methodological naturalism is a philosophical basis for science, for which metaphysical naturalism provides only one possible ontological foundation. Broadly, the corresponding theological perspective is religious naturalism or spiritual naturalism. More specifically, metaphysical naturalism rejects the supernatural concepts and explanations that are part of many religions.

Definition

In Carl Sagan’s words: "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."^[1]

According to Arthur C. Danto, naturalism, in recent usage, is a species of philosophical monism according to which whatever exists or happens is natural in the sense of being susceptible to explanation through methods which, although paradigmatically exemplified in the natural sciences, are continuous from domain to domain of objects and events. Hence, naturalism is polemically defined as repudiating the view that there exists or could exist any entities which lie, in principle, beyond the scope of scientific explanation.^[2]

Regarding the vagueness of the general term "naturalism", David Papineau traces the current usage to philosophers in early 20th century America such as John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook, and Roy Wood Sellars: "So understood, 'naturalism' is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized—that is, they would both reject 'supernatural' entities, and allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths about the 'human spirit'."^[3] Papineau remarks that philosophers widely regard naturalism as a "positive" term, and "few active philosophers nowadays are happy to announce themselves as 'non-naturalists'", while noting that "philosophers concerned with religion tend to be less enthusiastic about 'naturalism'" and that despite an "inevitable" divergence due to its popularity, if more narrowly construed, (to the chagrin of John McDowell, David Chalmers and Jennifer Hornsby, for example), those not so disqualified remain nonetheless content "to set the bar for 'naturalism' higher."^[3]

Philosopher and theologian Alvin Plantinga, a well-known critic of naturalism in general, comments: "Naturalism is presumably not a religion. In one very important respect, however, it resembles religion: it can be said to perform the cognitive function of a religion. There is that range of deep human questions to which a religion typically provides an answer ... Like a typical religion, naturalism gives a set of answers to these and similar questions".^[4]

Science and naturalism

Main article: Uniformitarianism

Metaphysical naturalism is the philosophical basis of science as described by Kate and Vitaly (2000). "There are certain philosophical assumptions made at the base of the scientific method – namely, 1) that reality is objective and consistent, 2) that humans have the capacity to perceive reality accurately, and that 3) rational explanations exist for elements of the real world. These assumptions are the basis of naturalism, the philosophy on which science is grounded. Philosophy is at least implicitly at the core of every decision we make or position we take, it is obvious that correct philosophy is a necessity for scientific inquiry to take place."^[5] Steven Schafersman, agrees that methodological naturalism is "the adoption or assumption of philosophical naturalism within scientific method with or without fully accepting or believing it ... science is not metaphysical and does not depend on the ultimate truth of any metaphysics for its success, but methodological naturalism must be adopted as a strategy or working hypothesis for science to succeed. We may therefore be agnostic about the ultimate truth of naturalism, but must nevertheless adopt it and investigate nature as if nature is all that there is."^[6]

Various associated beliefs

Contemporary naturalists possess a wide diversity of beliefs within metaphysical naturalism. Most metaphysical naturalists have adopted some form of materialism or physicalism.^[7]

Natural sciences

According to metaphysical naturalism, if nature is all there is, just as natural cosmological processes, e.g. quantum fluctuations from a multiverse, led to the Big Bang,^[8] and stellar nucleosynthesis brought upon the earliest chemical elements throughout stellar evolution, the formation of the Solar System and the processes involved in abiogenesis arose from natural causes.^[9][10] Naturalists reason about how, not if evolution happened. They maintain that humanity's existence is not by intelligent design but rather a natural process of emergence. With the protoplanetary disk creating planetary bodies, including the Sun and moon, conditions for life to arise billions of years ago, along with the natural formation of plate tectonics, the atmosphere, land masses, and the origin of oceans would also contribute to the kickstarting of biological evolution to occur after the arrival of the earliest organisms, as evidenced throughout both the fossil record and the geological time scale.

The mind is a natural phenomenon

Metaphysical naturalists do not believe in a soul or spirit, nor in ghosts, and when explaining what constitutes the mind they rarely appeal to substance dualism. If one's mind, or rather one's identity and existence as a person, is entirely the product of natural processes, three conclusions follow according to W. T. Stace. Cognitive sciences are able to provide accounts of how cultural and psychological phenomena, such as religion, morality, language, and more, evolved through natural processes. Consciousness itself would also be susceptible to the same evolutionary principles that select other traits.^[11]

Utility of intelligence and reason

Metaphysical naturalists hold that intelligence is the refinement and improvement of naturally evolved faculties. Naturalists believe anyone who wishes to have more beliefs that are true than are false should seek to perfect and consistently employ their reason in testing and forming beliefs. Empirical methods (especially those of proven use in the sciences) are unsurpassed for discovering the facts of reality, while methods of pure reason alone can securely discover logical errors.^[12]

View on the soul

According to metaphysical naturalism, immateriality being unprocedural and unembodiable, isn't differentiable from nothingness. The immaterial nothingness of the soul, being a non-ontic state, isn't compartmentalizable nor attributable to different persons and different memories, it is non-operational and it (nothingness) cannot be manifested in different states in order it represents information.

Arguments for metaphysical naturalism

Argument from physical minds

In his critique of Mind-body dualism, Paul Churchland writes that it is always the case that the mental substance and/or properties of the person are significantly changed or compromised via brain damage. If the mind were a completely separate substance from the brain, how could it be possible that every single time the brain is injured, the mind is also injured? Indeed, it is very frequently the case that one can even predict and explain the kind of mental or psychological deterioration or change that human beings will undergo when specific parts of their brains are damaged. So the question for the dualist to try to confront is how can all of this be explained if the mind is a separate and immaterial substance from, or if its properties are ontologically independent of, the brain.^[13]

Modern experiments have demonstrated that the relation between brain and mind is much more than simple correlation. By damaging, or manipulating, specific areas of the brain repeatedly under controlled conditions (e.g. in monkeys) and reliably obtaining the same results in measures of mental state and abilities, neuroscientists have shown that the relation between damage to the brain and mental deterioration is likely causal. This conclusion is further supported by data from the effects of neuro-active chemicals (e.g., those affecting neurotransmitters) on mental functions,^[14] but also from research on neurostimulation (direct electrical stimulation of the brain, including transcranial magnetic stimulation).^[15]

Critics such as Edward Feser and Tyler Burge have described these arguments as "neurobabble", and consider them as flawed or as being compatible with other metaphysical ideas like Thomism.^[16][17] According to the philosopher Stephen Evans:

We did not need neurophysiology to come to know that a person whose head is bashed in with a club quickly loses his or her ability to think or have any conscious processes. Why should we not think of neurophysiological findings as giving us detailed, precise knowledge of something that human beings have always known, or at least could have known, which is that the mind (at least in this mortal life) requires and depends on a functioning brain? We now know a lot more than we used to know about precisely how the mind depends on the body. However, that the mind depends on the body, at least prior to death, is surely not something discovered in the 20th century."^[18]

Argument from cognitive biases

In contrast with the argument from reason or evolutionary argument against naturalism, it can be argued that cognitive biases are better explained by natural causes than as the work of God.^[19]

Arguments against

Arguments against metaphysical naturalism include the following examples.

Argument from reason

Main article: Argument from reason

Philosophers and theologians such as Victor Reppert, William Hasker, and Alvin Plantinga have developed an argument for dualism dubbed the "argument from reason". They credit C.S. Lewis with first bringing the argument to light in his book Miracles; Lewis called the argument "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism", which was the title of chapter three of Miracles.^[20]

The argument postulates that if, as naturalism entails, all of our thoughts are the effect of a physical cause, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent of a reasonable ground. However, knowledge is apprehended by reasoning from ground to consequent. Therefore, if naturalism were true, there would be no way of knowing it (or anything else), except by a fluke.^[20]

Through this logic, the statement "I have reason to believe naturalism is valid" is inconsistent in the same manner as "I never tell the truth."^[21] That is, to conclude its truth would eliminate the grounds from which it reaches it. To summarize the argument in the book, Lewis quotes J. B. S. Haldane, who appeals to a similar line of reasoning:^[22]

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

— J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds, page 209

In his essay "Is Theology Poetry?", Lewis himself summarises the argument in a similar fashion when he writes:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

— C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, page 139

But Lewis later agreed with Elizabeth Anscombe's response to his Miracles argument.^[23] She showed that an argument could be valid and ground-consequent even if its propositions were generated via physical cause and effect by non-rational factors.^[24] Similar to Anscombe, Richard Carrier and John Beversluis have written extensive objections to the argument from reason on the untenability of its first postulate.^[25]

Evolutionary argument against naturalism

Main article: Evolutionary argument against naturalism

Notre Dame philosophy of religion professor and Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga argues, in his evolutionary argument against naturalism, that the probability that evolution has produced humans with reliable true beliefs, is low or inscrutable, unless their evolution was guided, for example, by God. According to David Kahan of the University of Glasgow, in order to understand how beliefs are warranted, a justification must be found in the context of supernatural theism, as in Plantinga's epistemology.^[26][27][28] (See also Supernormal stimuli.)

Plantinga argues that together, naturalism and evolution provide an insurmountable "defeater for the belief that our cognitive faculties are reliable", i.e., a skeptical argument along the lines of Descartes' evil demon or brain in a vat.^[29]

Take philosophical naturalism to be the belief that there aren't any supernatural entities—no such person as God, for example, but also no other supernatural entities, and nothing at all like God. My claim was that naturalism and contemporary evolutionary theory are at serious odds with one another—and this despite the fact that the latter is ordinarily thought to be one of the main pillars supporting the edifice of the former. (Of course I am not attacking the theory of evolution, or anything in that neighborhood; I am instead attacking the conjunction of naturalism with the view that human beings have evolved in that way. I see no similar problems with the conjunction of theism and the idea that human beings have evolved in the way contemporary evolutionary science suggests.) More particularly, I argued that the conjunction of naturalism with the belief that we human beings have evolved in conformity with current evolutionary doctrine... is in a certain interesting way self-defeating or self-referentially incoherent.^[29]

— Alvin Plantinga, "Introduction" in Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

Branden Fitelson of the University of California, Berkeley and Elliott Sober of the University of Wisconsin–Madison argue that Plantinga must show that the combination of evolution and naturalism also defeats the more modest claim that "at least a non-negligible minority of our beliefs are true", and that defects such as cognitive bias are nonetheless consistent with being made in the image of a rational God. Whereas evolutionary science already acknowledges that cognitive processes are unreliable, including the fallibility of the scientific enterprise itself, Plantinga's hyperbolic doubt is no more a defeater for naturalism than it is for theistic metaphysics founded upon a non-deceiving God who designed the human mind: "[neither] can construct a non-question-begging argument that refutes global skepticism."^[30] Plantinga's argument has also been criticized by philosopher Daniel Dennett and independent scholar Richard Carrier who argue that a cognitive apparatus for truth-finding can result from natural selection.^[31]

See also

• Religion portal

• Atheism
• Daoism
• Dysteleology
• Ethical naturalism
• Hylomorphism
• Liberal naturalism
• Materialism Controversy
• Natural Supernaturalism
• Naturalist computationalism
• Naturalistic fallacy
• Naturalistic pantheism
• Platonized naturalism
• Poetic naturalism
• Reductive materialism
• Religious naturalism
• Revisionary materialism
• School of Naturalists
• Scientism
• Scientistic materialism
• Spiritual naturalism
• Supernaturalism
• Transcendental naturalism

Notes

1. ^ Sagan, Carl (2002). Cosmos. Random House. ISBN 9780375508325.
2. ^ Danto, Arthur C. "Naturalism". The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Editor Stone 2008, p. 2 "Personally, I place great emphasis on the phrase "in principle", since there are many things that science does not now explain. And perhaps we need some natural piety concerning the ontological limit question as to why there is anything at all. But the idea that naturalism is a polemical notion is important."
3. ^ Jump up to:^a b Papineau 2007.
4. ^ Karkkainen, Veli-Matti (14 April 2015). Creation and Humanity: A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, Volume 3. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8028-6855-8.
5. ^ (A.Sergei 2000)
6. ^ Schafersman 1996.
7. ^ Schafersman 1996, Section "The Origin of Naturalism and Its Relation to Science": "Certainly most philosophical naturalists today are materialists[...]"
8. ^ Kreidler, Marc (2 March 2007). "Victor Stenger - God: The Failed Hypothesis | Point of Inquiry".
9. ^ Carrier 2005, pp. 166–68
10. ^ Richard Carrier, [The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities Against a Natural Origin of Life], Biology and Philosophy 19.5 (November 2004), pp. 739–64.
11. ^ Stace, W. T., Mysticism and Philosophy. N.Y.: Macmillan, 1960; reprinted, Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1987.
12. ^ Carrier 2005, pp. 53–54
13. ^ Churchland, Paul. 1988. Matter and Consciousness (rev. ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
14. ^ Buchman AL, Sohel M, Brown M, et al. (2001). "Verbal and visual memory improve after choline supplementation in long-term total parenteral nutrition: a pilot study". JPEN J Parenter Enteral Nutr. 25 (1): 30–35. doi:10.1177/014860710102500130. PMID 11190987.
15. ^ Alterations of sociomoral judgement and glucose utilization in the frontomedial cortex induced by electrical stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in Parkinsonian patients (2004): "Alterations of sociomoral judgement and glucose utilization in the frontomedial cortex induced by electrical stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in Parkinsonian patients". Genman Medical Science: DocDI.06.06. 23 April 2004. Archived from the original on 3 September 2004. Retrieved 8 September 2008.
16. ^ "Edward Feser: Against "Neurobabble"".
17. ^ "Tyler Burge, A Real Science of Mind - The New York Times".
18. ^ C. Stephen Evans, "Separable Souls: Dualism, Selfhood, and the Possibility of Life After Death." Christian Scholars Review 34 (2005): 333-34.
19. ^ "The Argument from Cognitive Biases". infidels.org. 31 July 2018.
20. ^ Jump up to:^a b Victor Reppert C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8308-2732-3
21. ^ "A Response to Richard Carrier's Review of C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea". infidels.org. Archived from the original on 20 December 2008.
22. ^ "Philosophy Homepage | Department of Philosophy | UNC Charlotte". philosophy.uncc.edu. Archived from the original on 20 December 2008.
23. ^ Sayer, George (2005). Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Crossway. ISBN 978-1581347395.
24. ^ The Socratic Digest, No. 4 (1948)
25. ^ Beversluis, John (2007). C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Revised and Updated). Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1591025313.
26. ^ "Gifford Lecture Series – Warrant and Proper Function 1987–1988". Archived from the original on 4 January 2012.
27. ^ Plantinga, Alvin (11 April 2010). "Evolution, Shibboleths, and Philosophers – Letters to the Editor". The Chronicle of Higher Education. ...I do indeed think that evolution functions as a contemporary shibboleth by which to distinguish the ignorant fundamentalist goats from the informed and scientifically literate sheep.
    
    According to Richard Dawkins, 'It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).' Daniel Dennett goes Dawkins one (or two) further: 'Anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant.' You wake up in the middle of the night; you think, can that whole Darwinian story really be true? Wham! You are inexcusably ignorant.
    
    I do think that evolution has become a modern idol of the tribe. But of course it doesn't even begin to follow that I think the scientific theory of evolution is false. And I don't.
28. ^ Plantinga, Alvin (1993). Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chap. 11. ISBN 0-19-507863-2.
29. ^ Jump up to:^a b Beilby, J.K. (2002). "Introduction by Alvin Plantinga". Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. pp. 1–2, 10. ISBN 978-0-8014-8763-7. LCCN 2001006111.
30. ^ Fitelson, Branden; Elliott Sober (1998). "Plantinga's Probability Arguments Against Evolutionary Naturalism" (PDF). Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. 79 (2): 115–129. doi:10.1111/1468-0114.00053.
31. ^ Carrier 2005, pp. 181–188

References

Books

• Audi, Robert (1996). "Naturalism". In Borchert, Donald M. (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement. USA: Macmillan Reference. pp. 372–374.
• Carrier, Richard (2005). Sense and Goodness without God: A defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. AuthorHouse. p. 444. ISBN 1-4208-0293-3.
• Gould, Stephen J. (1984). "Toward the vindication of punctuational change in catastrophes and earth history". In Bergren, W. A.; Van Couvering, J. A. (eds.). Catastrophes and Earth History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
• Gould, Stephen J. (1987). Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 119.
• Danto, Arthur C. (1967). "Naturalism". In Edwords, Paul (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: The Macmillan Co. and The Free Press. pp. 448–450.
• Hooykaas, R. (1963). The principle of uniformity in geology, biology, and theology (2nd ed.). London: E.J. Brill.
• Kurtz, Paul (1990). Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism. Prometheus Books.
• Lacey, Alan R. (1995). "Naturalism". In Honderich, Ted (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press. pp. 604–606. ISBN 978-0-19-866132-0.
• Post, John F. (1995). "Naturalism". In Audi, Robert (ed.). The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. pp. 517–518.
• Rea, Michael (2002). World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-924760-9.
• Sagan, Carl (2002). Cosmos. Random House. ISBN 978-0-375-50832-5.
• Simpson, G. G. (1963). "Historical science". In Albritton, C. C. Jr. (ed.). Fabric of geology. Stanford, California: Freeman, Cooper, and Company.
• Strahler, Arthur N. (1992). Understanding Science: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. ISBN 9780879757243.
• Veli-Matti Karkkainen. (2015). Creation and Humanity: A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, Volume 3. Pg 36. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0802868558.
• Stone, J.A. (2008). Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative. G – Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series. State University of New York Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-7914-7537-9. LCCN 2007048682.

Journals

• Gould, Stephen J. (1965). "Is uniformitarianism necessary". American Journal of Science. 263.

Web

• A., Kate; Sergei, Vitaly (2000). "Evolution and Philosophy: Science and Philosophy". Think Quest. Archived from the original on 4 December 2008. Retrieved 19 January 2009.
• Papineau, David (2007). "Naturalism". In Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 ed.).
• Schafersman, Steven D. (1996). https://web.archive.org/web/20190705061915/http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/schafersman_nat.html "Naturalism is Today An Essential Part of Science". Archived from the original on 5 July 2019. Retrieved 3 November 2010. {{cite web}}: Check |archive-url= value (help)

Further reading

Historical overview

• Edward B. Davis and Robin Collins, "Scientific Naturalism". In Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 322–34.

Pro

• Gary Drescher, Good and Real, The MIT Press, 2006. ISBN 0-262-04233-9
• David Malet Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-521-58064-1
• Mario Bunge, 2006, Chasing Reality: Strife over Realism, University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-9075-3 and 2001, Scientific Realism: Selected Essays of Mario Bunge, Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-892-5
• Richard Carrier, 2005, Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism, AuthorHouse. ISBN 1-4208-0293-3
• Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds), 2004. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01295-X
• Daniel Dennett, 2003, Freedom Evolves, Penguin. ISBN 0-14-200384-0 and 2006
• Andrew Melnyk, 2003, A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82711-6
• Jeffrey Poland, 1994, Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-824980-2

Con

• James Beilby, ed., 2002, Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8763-3
• William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, eds., 2000, Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, Routledge. ISBN 0-415-23524-3
• Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, 2008, Naturalism, Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8028-0768-7
• Phillip E. Johnson, 1998, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education, InterVarsity Press. ISBN 0-8308-1929-0 and 2002, The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism, InterVarsity Press. ISBN 0-8308-2395-6
• C.S. Lewis, ed., 1996, "Miracles", Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-065301-9
• Michael Rea, 2004, World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-924761-7
• Victor Reppert, 2003, C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, InterVarsity Press. ISBN 0-8308-2732-3
• Mark Steiner, 2002, The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem, Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-00970-3

External links

• "Naturalism" in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Naturalism" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Naturalism in Legal Philosophy" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Physicalism" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Naturalism" in the Catholic Encyclopedia
• Center for Naturalism
• Naturalism entry in The Skeptic's Dictionary
• Naturalism Library at the Secular Web
• Naturalism as a Worldview resource page by Richard Carrier
• A Defense of Naturalism by Keith Augustine (2001)

Consciousness between Science and Philosophy

Consciousness between

Science and Philosophy

article link

Response to Philip Goff on panpsychism

by Matthew David Segall

October 30, 2020

in imagination

Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (1920)

If you prefer to listen to me read this blog post:

Alfred North Whitehead

Consciousness Between Science and Philosophy

(response to panpsychist Philip Goff)

by Matthew David Segall, Footnotes to Plato

October 30, 2020  |  12:06

Panpsychism = All is psyche, which is to say human consciousness and visible Nature take place within the World-Soul.

Most moderns have accepted as a matter of course that the best people to speak on behalf of Nature are the scientists. Scientists are the people most ideally positioned to study the special ways matter behaves under the experimental conditions of their theoretical gaze. But what happens when the object of scientific inquiry is not just another thing in Nature, not just another organ of the animal body, whether brain or eyes, but the thinking subject herself, the one who sees through those eyes and supposedly comes to know Nature scientifically, that is, consciously?

When the object of study is the conscious subject, science cannot do without philosophy. This is also true when the object of inquiry is Nature as such, or as a whole, that is, as the cosmogenetic process of Natura naturans. Cosmology will never be a purely positive science. There will always be ample room and need for speculative philosophizing beyond what at present can be measured or mathematized. Thus we can say that science becomes philosophical whenever it asks about its own subjective conditions of possibility (“What is consciousness?”) or about the nature of the cosmic process out of which it has emerged (“What is the cosmos?”).

I’ll borrow a tired Kantian trope because it’s late and why not: Philosophy without science is blind, and science without philosophy is empty. If we allow them to remain divorced and at odds, our human capacity to know the actually existing universe will continue to suffer and degrade.

Card-carrying panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff weighed in earlier today on this theme. Rather than invoking the antipodes of consciousness and cosmos as naturally philosophical arenas off limits to scientific reductionism, Goff emphasizes ethics as being forever beyond natural science’s explanatory prowess. When it comes to consciousness, he grants neuroscience at least part of the solution to the puzzle by way of their pursuit of the famed “neural correlates of consciousness”:

It is commonly assumed that the task of explaining consciousness is scientific rather than philosophical. I think that’s half right. It’s the job of neuroscience (among other things) to establish the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), that is, to work out which physical states of the brain are correlated with which subjective experiences. We have a robust and well-developed experimental approach for answering these questions. - Philip Goff

I have absolutely no doubt that the careful study of electrochemical activity in the human brain has a lot to teach us about the nature of consciousness. But I do not share Goff’s enthusiasm for this particular methodological approach known as “NCC.” There are other neuroscientific and neurophenomenological research programs that I think warrant our philosophical attention. For example the enactive approach to consciousness as articulated by Alva Nöe and Evan Thompson. They co-authored this paper showing how the search for neural correlates is not well-founded epistemologically or phenomenologically. It assumes certain things about experience as representational “content” and brain “states” that turn out to be philosophically incoherent.

Goff goes on to carve out a place for philosophy in the study of consciousness by reminding scientists that theory is underdetermined by data. In other words, there are multiple rational explanations for the available empirical evidence. In the case of consciousness’ place in Nature, Goff offers three possible accounts:

• Naturalistic dualism – A subjective experience is a very different kind of thing from a physical brain state, but the two are bound together by natural law. In addition to the laws of physics, there are fundamental psycho-physical laws of nature which ensure that, in certain physical circumstances, certain experiences emerge.

• Materialism – Each subjective experience has a purely physical nature. Having subjective experiences – feeling pain, seeing red – wholly consists in having certain complex patterns of neuronal firing.

• Panpsychism – Each physical state has a purely experiential nature. Physical science tells us what matter does whilst leaving us in the dark about what it is. Having physical states – being negatively charged, being a certain pattern of neural firing – wholly consists in having certain kinds of subjective experience.

- Philip Goff

I don’t think it is fair for Goff to leave idealism off his map of reasonable philosophical positions. Idealism matters. That said, he is correct that we cannot perform an empirical test to determine which of these four ontologies is true. They are “empirically equivalent” (like Whitehead’s family of alternative bimetric gravitational theories are to Einstein’s Relativity Theory).

Goff goes on to ground his empiricism on a public experiment/private experience bifurcation that I find phenomenologically inaccurate and conceptually confused. If panpsychism is ontologically valid then this Cartesian public/private or res extensa/res cogitans division must be an illusion, no? The need to dissolve the Cartesian split is a consequence not only of panpsychism, but of post-Cartesian phenomenology (especially Merleau-Ponty). Consciousness is not anyone’s private property; rather, consciousness publicly pervades the world. I agree with Nöe: we’ll never understand consciousness until we get out of our heads. Like fish in water, we are swimming in it.

Experience pervades and reverberates through Nature, “inside” and “outside” the mind, and is not bundled up into tiny private particles. The world isn’t that cold. It’s warm and alive, leaving every drop of experience open to be grown into by its internal relations with others. Reality is not fundamentally made of externally related mind dust, each particle watching its own private qualia screen, trapped in its own solipsistic egg shell universe. Rather, reality is made of experiential relations, or prehensions. Whiteheadian prehensions are not just passive feelings: they grow together into subjects who express aims.

Is there aim or value being realized in the non-human cosmos in Goff’s panpsychist vision? The reality of aim is relevant to his defense of ethics from scientific explanation. If there is such a thing as ethics in the universe, it’s because at least some animals have the ability to behave on purpose, that is, to act by launching an intention beyond the immediate moment in the hopes of effecting some ideal change upon the future. If conscious humans are ethical creatures (and ethics is not reducible to Sam Harris’ laboratory experiments), then the universe includes aims, at least in the form of our human actions. Where do these aims come from? I think we are left having to make the same move when it comes to explaining the place of aim in Nature that Goff accepts we had to make to explain consciousness. Aims also go all the way down. They evolve and accrue enhancements upon the way. Humans are just an especially intense expression of something Nature has been doing from the get go.

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.”

Whitehead and the Revival (?) of Panpsychism

Whitehead and the Revival (?) of Panpsychism

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by William Seager

University of Toronto at Scarborough

Whitehead’s philosophy is of perennial scholarly interest as one of the relatively few really serious attempts at a systematic metaphysics. But unlike almost all major ‘philosophical systems’ it is not merely an historical curiosity, but retains contemporary supporters actively deploying Whitehead’s viewpoint in discussion of a variety of live philosophical problems. Furthermore, Whitehead’s metaphysics is the sole example of a comprehensive philosophical system which aims to take into account the radical transformation of science which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century with the development of relativity and quantum mechanics, developments with which Whitehead was, as a first rate mathematician, highly familiar.

On the other hand, there is no denying the daunting character of Whitehead’s writing. Many philosophers steeped in the analytic tradition regard the very idea of systematic philosophy as deeply suspicious and regard the labyrinthine difficulty of Whitehead’s system as evidence of what they see as the empty verbiage and obscurantism of traditional metaphysics. Thus, amongst modern analytic philosophers, Whitehead is little read.

Modern philosophical and scientific sensibility also professes to find some of Whitehead’s core doctrines fundamentally wrong-headed, most especially the panpsychism – the idea that mentality is a fundamental or ‘primitive’ feature of reality of which everything partakes in some measure and in some way. Whitehead himself never used the term ‘panpsychism’ to describe his own views so far as I know (see Hartshorne 1950). Perhaps he did not wish readers to draw conclusions about his own doctrines based upon association with earlier panpsychists, such as Gustav Fechner or Josiah Royce, whose extravagant if poetic discussions of plant and planet consciousness cast a certain shadow of disrepute on the view (see Seager 2001 for a brief discussion of various forms of panpsychism).

It may also be that Whitehead wanted there to be no confusion about his attitude towards consciousness, which he did not think was a ubiquitous feature. When explicating his notion of prehension by appeal to Leibniz’s distinction between perception and apperception Whitehead warns the reader that “these terms are too closely allied to the notion of consciousness which in my doctrine is not a necessary accompaniment” (AI, 234). Whitehead’s reticence about consciousness may come down to little more than a verbal matter. Leibniz’s notion of apperception is a kind of self-consciousness or introspective consciousness: “... it is well to make the distinction between perception which is the internal state of the monad representing external things, and apperception, which is consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this internal state” (1714/1989, p. 208). Perhaps echoing this feature of Leibniz’s conception (while at the same time strongly repudiating the traditional account of perception as a mental act directed at internal representations), Whitehead says that “consciousness concerns the subjective form of a feeling” (PR, 282). This is not an unreasonable interpretation of the term ‘consciousness’, but a more compendious, and perfectly commonplace, definition of consciousness would allow feelings themselves to count as states of consciousness, for they are subjective qualitative states. Such a notion underlies the seemingly undeniable fact that animals are fully conscious beings even though they may entirely lack any form of self-awareness and be utterly oblivious to their own mental states as such (they remain for all of that fully conscious of various aspects of the world, notably including, of course, their own bodies). It makes little difference how we interpret the word ‘consciousness’ so long as we are aware of this distinction (it is perhaps to forestall confusion on this point that David Griffin (1998) advocates use of the term panexperientialism to characterize Whitehead’s, and his own, position).

Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that Whitehead was a panpsychist insofar as he regarded the fundamental ‘units’ of existence as in some way experiential. A vivid example is his remark that “each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope” (PR, 220)). Whitehead is in fact undoubtedly the foremost exponent of panpsychism in the twentieth century.

What is of interest to me here is that one of the core reasons Whitehead had for espousing panpsychism is one that has currently resurfaced within the writing of analytic philosophers of consciousness. I cannot speak as an expert on Whitehead, but I think it is worth briefly exploring the reappearance of this argument along with the somewhat curious absence of any – or at least very little – reference to Whitehead’s own work.

Lately, the problem of consciousness has been exercising analytic philosophers of mind as a special problem deserving of its own treatment in any account of the mind. The sense of ‘consciousness’ which is at issue is that of bare subjective feeling, the second interpretation of the term I offered above. The backdrop of the problem is the philosophical task of naturalizing the mind, which many take to be crucial for the completion of a ‘scientific metaphysics’ and which is supposed to be accomplished via the successful integration of mind into our scientific picture of the world. Philosophers have taken it as given that the scientific picture is fundamentally a materialistic or physicalistic picture and thus the project of naturalization is that of showing how mind and consciousness can be explicated in physicalistic terms.

Over some decades now, a very large number of such approaches have been attempted, far from exhaustively including variant forms of central state identity theory (e.g. Armstrong 1968, Hill 1991), pscyho-functionalism (e.g. Putnam 1967, Lewis 1966, Lycan 1987), anomalous monism (Davidson 1970), eliminative materialism (Churchland 1981), representational theories (e.g. Dretske 1995, Tye 1995). It is fair to say that although all these accounts retain enthusiastic proponents, none of them have succeeded in dispelling the mystery of consciousness. All of these theories go a fair ways – and this is an undeniable accomplishment – towards showing how the complex behavior, including the ‘internal’ behavior of computational processes, characteristic of creatures possessed of minds might fall under a high level theory which is amenable to naturalization, but they all struggle to show that such a system would, necessarily and in virtue of it physical organization, have any feelings or states of consciousness.

This particular puzzle of consciousness per se was eloquently forced upon us by Thomas Nagel’s famous paper ‘What is it Like to be a Bat’ (1974). But in a less well known paper, Nagel rather diffidently ventured a kind of solution to the puzzle – panpsychism (1979). In brief compass (and somewhat modified) the argument goes as follows. Under the constraint of physicalistically acceptable naturalization, there is no form of emergentism which can account for consciousness. For the only sort of naturalistically acceptable emergentism is one in which there are only adventitious epistemological barriers to understanding how the emergent phenomena arise from the interaction of the ultimately purely physical components – whatever physics will finally reveal them to be – of the system under study. It is only to be expected that basic physics will never produce a description of the brain (plus environment) of a thinker which could illuminate, predict or explain that thinker’s mentalistically describable behavior, but this is ‘merely’ a problem of complexity, albeit one that studies in complex systems shows can never be overcome by advances in computational machinery or data measurement. However, Nagel argues that consciousness cannot be thus ‘reduced’ to the complex interaction of a system’s parts and therefore is not a merely epistemologically emergent phenomenon. Now, if consciousness is not something which emerges out of the relations of material structures, it must exist independently of those structures (if it exists at all, but the outright denial that consciousness exists is absurd and not even the so-called eliminative materialists have gone that far). There are many ways to understand such independent existence, but Nagel wishes to retain a connection between and integration with the physical world as revealed by science. This desire rules out views which make the material world a kind of illusion, such as idealism and also forces the rejection of dualism, with its merely contingent, and in itself utterly mysterious, relation between matter and consciousness. The position that remains is panpsychism – mind is a fundamental and primitive feature of the physical building blocks of reality.

Nagel’s is an interesting argument. I do not intend to consider here the plausibility of its premises, which all involve deep, difficult and controversial philosophical questions. But it must be noted that Nagel neglects to even consider the possibility of a more radical, non-epistemological, form of emergentism such as that envisaged by Morgan (1923) or Broad (1925), in which novel existents possessing new and proprietary causal powers emerge out of the simple, and entirely physical, basis of the world. It may be that Nagel could effectively reply that modern physical theory strongly suggests that the world is closed under physical causation because of, for example, fundamental conservation laws which preclude the existence of any novel and independent causal powers. Furthermore, any form of radical emergentism suffers from a problem highlighted by the nature of Nagel’s own argument. For notice that the argument is of an a priori form, and despite purporting to show that panpsychism must be true, it leaves us with no understanding of how panpsychism could be true. Nagel is only too aware of this difficulty, remarking that panpsychism has “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory” (1986, 49). But it seems that a radical emergentism would similarly leave us necessarily bereft of any account of how emergence could work.

But another argument in favor of panpsychism intrudes here which might help with this difficulty, and returns us to Whitehead’s thought. We might call this the ‘intrinsic nature’ argument for panpsychism. It can be approached via some remarks of Whitehead’s outlining the (in his view mistaken) traditional scientific and thence commonsensical understanding of the nature of matter itself. In Modes of Thought (1938, 131 ff.) Whitehead characterizes this “common-sense” notion of matter as “bits” which are “enduring self-identically”. Each such bit “occupies a definite limited region” and possesses its own set of intrinsic properties such as “its mass, its colour” and the “essential relationship between bits of matter is purely spatial” and space is “unchanging, always including in itself this capacity for the relationships of bits of matter”. Whitehead goes on to proclaim that “this is the grand doctrine of nature as a self-sufficient meaningless complex of fact. It is the doctrine of the autonomy of physical science”.

It is evident that this doctrine is precisely that which underlies the project of naturalization outlined above and which Nagel argues founders on the problem of the emergence of consciousness. Whitehead’s description of the doctrine of the autonomy of physical science also suggests that the problem lies with the presumed inert, passive or ‘empty’ nature of matter. On this view, there is nothing about matter which can even begin to explain how anything like a conscious experience could arise out of its interactions, whereas it does seem explicable, at least in principle, how various complex behaviors of systems of material parts could arise. In fact, we might take the opposition between behavior and experience as definitive of the problem here. Behavior generation can be explicated in terms of the merely dispositional properties of matter to react in certain specifiable ways under specifiable conditions.

For example, one apparently basic property of matter recognized by modern science is the so-called spin angular momentum of certain elementary particles. This property has certain functional analogies with the angular momentum we are familiar with in the behavior of macroscopic objects. For example, the spin of a proton explains its magnetic properties and hence the observed fine splitting of certain spectroscopic lines. But in other respects spin is quite unlike ordinary angular momentum. Only certain discrete values are allowed, for instance, and these values appear no matter what ‘spin axis’ we measure. The point here is that ‘spin’ is defined solely in dispositional terms. What ‘spin’ actually is remains quite mysterious (save for the aura of often misleading meaning drawn from the analogy with the everyday world). Whitehead describes this purely dispositional analysis as a matter of regarding the basic elements of material reality “in abstraction from everything except what concerns their mutual interplay in determining each other’s historical routes of life-history”. This picture leaves the laws of physics as exhausted by “the laws declaring how the entities mutually react amongst themselves”, an impoverished outlook resulting from the way “science has abstracted from what the entities are in themselves” (1925, 106).

Such abstraction is problematic because it is arguable that any disposition must be grounded in some intrinsic nature, and our failure to take this into account leaves us in irredeemable ignorance about the most fundamental features of the world. Whitehead described the predicament thus: “all modern ... cosmologies wrestle with this problem. There is, for their doctrine, a mysterious reality in the background, intrinsically unknowable by any direct intercourse” (1933, 133). Whitehead, following Leibniz in certain respects, asserts both that matter must indeed possess an intrinsic nature, and that there is only one such nature with which we are familiar: experience. Whitehead praises Leibniz, in a phrase reminiscent of Nagel’s worry about consciousness, for explaining “what it must be like to be an atom” (1933, 132).

I suppose one might regard the jump from the premise of matter’s requiring an intrinsic nature to the conclusion that some form of mentality provides the requisite intrinsic nature as rather too great a leap. One might instead appeal to Occam’s razor and demand that matter’s intrinsic nature be confined to no more than is required to underwrite the kind of behavioral dispositions which are codified in basic physical law. While possessing the merit of modesty, such a suggestion is somewhat odd. For we have no conception whatsoever of any such ‘minimal’ intrinsic nature after all and this suggestion therefore simply leaves us mired in the same mystery with which we began. Occam’s razor generally applies to competing explanations, so it is a rather unorthodox use of the principle to favor an intentionally contentless and entirely unarticulated conception of matter’s intrinsic nature over Whitehead’s hypothesis.

Furthermore, whatever intrinsic nature we might settle on, one of its explanatory functions is to integrate mentality itself (especially consciousness) into a world of matter. The panpsychist alternative appears to offer some hope of such integration. The defender of the Occamite approach can do no better than offer yet another promissory note here and one that looks particularly difficult to cash. If matter’s intrinsic nature is to be limited to only the capability of producing matter’s behavioral dispositions then we are going to be left with exactly the original mystery of consciousness, with no more prospect of its solution than before.

In any case, from this radical starting point, Whitehead elaborates his full metaphysics, which it is not for me to expound upon. I want rather to note the way that this starting point has once again forced itself upon some recent philosophers of mind (with, it must be said, little or no recognition of Whitehead’s earlier efforts). There is a palpable reluctance among analytic philosophers to give serious attention to panpsychism, doubtless because panpsychism seems radically unscientific – empty of empirical content. The initial hint that a radical transformation in our conception of matter might be required to solve the problem of consciousness thus comes in a more circumspect guise. This is the hypothesis that perhaps what is needed before a scientific account of consciousness might be possible is nothing less than a revolution in basic science.

Such an hypothesis is broached by a number of prominent thinkers. In a recent volume, Noam Chomsky argues that, in general, the vaunted unifying power of modern science has been bought at the cost of radical transformation in science itself (2000, 82 ff.). In an interesting analysis, Chomsky reminds us that it was Newton himself who effectively destroyed the purely mechanical view of the world with his introduction of gravitational forces as products of some intrinsic property of matter, whose nature Newton professed utterly mysterious (and which greatly troubled him with its apparent power to act at a distance). Chomsky takes this to be a general rule of scientific progress, which may be invoked yet once more in the face of the problem of consciousness. Chomsky elsewhere slides closer to Whitehead’s own doctrines where he approvingly quotes Priestley’s remark that matter “ought to rise in our esteem, as making a nearer approach to the nature of spiritual and immaterial beings” (2000, 113). It must be admitted that Chomsky goes on to suggest that ultimately some kind of emergentism is the proper approach to the mind, but as I have tried, in some measure at least, to argue above: what alteration in the notion of matter can we conceive which will explicate the emergence of consciousness save the panpsychist hypothesis? Chomsky does not say. It is simply leaving the mystery untouched to demand a revolution in science after which it will be ‘evident’, ‘obvious’ or merely ‘uncontroversial’ that “... ‘the powers of sensation or perception or thought are’ are properties of ‘a certain organized system of matter’...” (2000, 113).

Another such reluctant thinker is John Searle, long a champion of the professedly straightforward but in truth rather murky idea that ‘consciousness is a biological phenomenon’, who likens our current state of scientific knowledge of mentality to that of physics prior to the nineteenth century introduction of electromagnetic fields (and the idea of fields in general) by Clerk Maxwell. Conscious seems materialistically inexplicable, says Searle, “because we do not know how the system of neurophysiology/consciousness works, and an adequate knowledge of how it works would remove the mystery” (1992, 102). Searle evidently does not regard the puzzle of consciousness as one that can be solved by standard methods in biology (or any other science). What sort of features of neurophysiology, for example, are we ignorant of that go beyond the admittedly vast details of neural signaling and organization? This is not to say that Searle favors the panpsychist option. Far from it. He has heaped scorn on the doctrine as an “absurd view” (1997, 48). But, again as we have seen, the perception that a revolution in science is needed before consciousness can be accommodated within it really stems from the prior perception that the dispositional properties of matter as currently understood are simply inadequate to explain how matter could generate experience. And the nature of the problem leaves it entirely unclear how adding some additional non-mentalistic dispositional powers to matter could transform our understanding enough to make the generation of consciousness from matter explicable.

In fact, Searle’s infamous Chinese Room thought experiment (1980) can be regarded as, or adapted into, a kind of refutation of the idea that any purely dispositional analysis of matter could explain consciousness. For such an analysis is perfectly analogous to the computer program model of the mind insofar as the latter analyses mind as merely a set of dispositions to produce certain behavior in certain circumstances. If Searle’s thought experiment is effective against traditional computationalist theories of mind, than a computer program written to simulate the basic dispositions of matter would seem no more capable of explaining how mind emerges. Searle in fact comes very close to making this very point in his discussion of the so-called brain simulation reply to the thought experiment. I am suggesting that we can understand Searle’s appeal to the ‘causal powers’ of neurophysiology as not simply an appeal to the laws of neural operation which are entirely dispositional in nature, but rather as an appeal to the nature of neurons, or ultimately the matter which forms them, which underlies these laws.

Yet another ‘revolutionist’ is the famous mathematician and physicist, Roger Penrose, who expects that some heretofore undiscovered interaction of gravitational and quantum physics will permit the brain to exceed the computational boundaries of standard mathematics, and standard computers, (see Penrose 1989, 1994) and thus account for certain otherwise inexplicable aspects of mentality, especially of mathematical thought (the relation to consciousness in Penrose’s thought is not altogether clear). I will not attempt either to describe or criticize Penrose’s ideas here, but will note that he, along with his sometime collaborator Stuart Hameroff, have at least sometimes given interpretations of their views that suggest a panpsychist view of nature (see Hameroff and Penrose 1996).

Beyond the revolutionists, there are philosophers who have come at least very close to positively endorsing some kind of panpsychist alternative and have done so, at least in part, because of the difficulty about matter’s intrinsic nature which I have outlined. Two prominent examples are Michael Lockwood (1991) and Galen Strawson (1994, 1997/1999). As is entirely typical, neither makes any reference to Whitehead, while coming to conclusions that are very similar to certain basic aspects of some of Whitehead’s core doctrines. Lockwood appeals to Russell’s notion of the ‘inscrutability of matter’ as one ground for a reworked conception of matter which is at bottom panpsychist, where the inscrutability at issue is our familiar idea that the scientific conception of matter reveals nothing of its intrinsic nature. Lockwood proposes instead that “the physical world must have an intrinsic nature ... [and], in consciousness, that intrinsic nature makes itself manifest” (1991, 238). Lockwood’s completed scheme then takes reality as, in total, a “sum of perspectives” (1991, 177).

Strawson’s approach is broadly similar to Lockwood’s, including the nod towards Russell’s work. Strawson regards his view as a form of physicalism, in the sense that matter’s nature is to be revealed as, in part, essentially mentalistic. As he puts it: “the experiential considered specifically as such – the portion of reality we have to do with when we consider experiences specifically and solely in respect of the experiential character they have for those who have them as they have them – that ‘just is’ physical” (1997/1999, p. 7). Strawson also suspects that the integration of such a view of physical reality will require a revolutionary transformation of physics, and thus he joins the ranks of the revolutionists discussed above, with the crucial difference that he comes much closer to embracing the conclusion that only allowing matter itself to have a mentalistic intrinsic nature will provide a potential solution to the problem of consciousness. Nonetheless, and despite accepting panpsychism as a genuine option, Strawson also expresses the usual reluctance to endorse it, preferring to maintain that his view is suggestive of and compatible with panpsychism but not equivalent to it (see 1994, pp. 75-77). That is, Strawson accepts without reservation that the mental is a fundamental feature of the world, but withholds judgment about whether it is ubiquitous. It is difficult to see, however, how Strawson’s remarks about the nature of the physical could underwrite an account of consciousness unless some kind of panpsychism is adopted; otherwise the problem of emergence remains untouched. And note that if this problem can be solved so as to provide an acceptable explanation of the emergence of the experiential from the non-experiential, then why not let that account stand for the whole story about the emergence of mind from a ‘radically non-experiential’ physical world; that is, why not adopt a standard form of materialism? Perhaps Strawson would be willing to regard the fact that certain physical structures possess consciousness even though their components are entirely non-experiential as itself a fundamental feature of reality, or a basic natural law. The matter-consciousness link would then be a brute fact, inexplicable despite the rich set of correlations between material structures and states of consciousness which are becoming so evident in neurophysiological studies. Panpsychism seems to offer some advantage here. While it does of course assert that mentality is fundamental, the fact that it is ubiquitous offers the chance to explain how complex minds arise out of material interactions insofar as those interactions partake themselves of some form of mentality. This option puts the brute facts at the right level, so to speak, which is down among the most basic features of reality.

This same reluctance to endorse panpsychism is found in the final philosopher I shall exhibit here. David Chalmers is largely responsible for the most recent rekindling of interest in the search for a scientific account of consciousness and is well known for coining the catch phrase ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ to refer to the specific problem we have been discussing. Of all the writes considered here, Chalmers is the most willing to consider panpsychism a serious option, and offers several arguments that lend some support to the doctrine. His principal argument is not the intrinsic property argument that has concerned us here, but rather an argument from the fundamentalness of information in the world, and our basic theories of it, allied with the somewhat tentative additional premise that information is, at bottom, tied to mentality, to the conclusion that mind is a basic feature of reality (see Chalmers 1996, ch. 8; for another information based argument explicitly in support of panpsychism see Seager 1995). But Chalmers also considers the intrinsic property argument and notes that it presents the “threat of panpsychism” (1996, 154). He immediately adds that perhaps this ‘threat’ is not “such a bad prospect”. Like Strawson, Chalmers asserts that while his view requires that mentality (at least consciousness) be a fundamental feature, it does not have to be ‘spread out’ in the world in the way panpsychism envisions. He says that an alternative to a panpsychist account of mind would be such that “the relevant properties [i.e. the properties which account for the generation of phenomenal consciousness] are protophenomenal properties”, but then naturally has to admit that these protophenomenal “intrinsic properties are quite foreign to our conception” and must perform a task beyond the capabilities of “standard physical properties” (1996, 154). Once again, we can see that the basic problem – attributing any entirely non-mentalistic intrinsic nature to matter – seems simply to leave us facing the original problem of consciousness, since we neither have any idea of what such an intrinsic property might be, nor, if it is non-mentalistic, how it could underlie more than the physical dispositional properties of matter evinced in the ordinary laws of physics (save by the unhelpful stipulation that this mysterious intrinsic property is sufficient to generate experience).

These examples suggest something of a trend. The problem of the ultimate nature of matter is inextricably linked to the problem of consciousness. All the thinkers canvassed above agree on some version of this thesis. It is also one of Whitehead’s core insights. Whitehead took the next step of embracing a panpsychist conception of matter as necessary for an explanation of mind which could be integrated with, and indeed, help make sense of, the expanding scientific account of the world. Most modern thinkers, save for his own followers, are reluctant to follow Whitehead this far, but therefore find themselves mired in a problem of consciousness which seems utterly intractable. Furthermore, these thinkers also pay little or no attention to Whitehead’s own writings. It is hard to say whether analytic philosophers could, after so many years of neglect, find anything in Whitehead they could adopt or adapt to their style of philosophizing, but I would suggest that in the face of the evident difficulty of the problem of consciousness and the apparent convergence of several lines of argument towards some of Whitehead’s most fundamental ideas, that it is time to have a serious look at Whitehead’s approach to the mind-matter problem.

William Seager

University of Toronto at Scarborough

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