Month: June 2017

I mentioned Thomas Nagel in my previous post about Dennett, which reminded me that I had published a review of Nagel’s book Mind & Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press 2012) in the Englewood Review of Books a while back.  Here’s my review of Nagel.

It has become fashionable in recent years to assume that all human behaviors, including all concepts of the human “mind,” finally are reducible to biochemistry.  This presents a conundrum for governance, law and policy.  As Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience and Society puts it, “[t]he idea that behaviour is determined by physical causes is hard to reconcile with the intuitive notions of free will and moral agency on which our legal systems are based.”^[2]  Some “neuroLaw” scholars, such as David Eagleman, Director of the Initiative for Neuroscience and the Law at the Baylor College of Medicine, argue that the legal system should abandon concepts of intentionality and fault, and that the justice system should replace traditional punishments with “prefontal workouts” designed to recondition the brains of lawbreakers.[3]  These neuroLaw scholars represent a species of Darwinist / materialist reductionism that seeks to subsume all notions of morality and ethics within an evolutionary paradigm.[4]

Thomas Nagel, Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University, steps boldly into this fray with his book Mind & Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.[5]  Mind & Cosmos is at once a convincing refutation of Darwinian reductionism and a frustrating misstatement of religious / theological alternatives to such reductionism.

On the convincing side, Nagel ably argues that consciousness, cognition and value cannot be adequately accounted for by reductionistic materialism.  Nagel’s basic argument is familiar:  reductive materialism eliminates the epistemic basis for the phenomena of consciousness, cognition and value.  If human beings are nothing but complex gene replicators, there is no reason to think that we possess any capacity to get outside of ourselves and understand the world, beyond what is immediately required for survival.  This would mean, among other things, that the practice of a science that could establish the objective truth of reductive materialism itself would be impossible.[6]  Belief in reductive materialism requires a kind of epistemic realism that, for reductive materialism, must represent merely an epiphenomenal delusion.  And this uncomfortable fact further implies that “[f]rom a Darwinian perspective, our impressions of value, if construed realistically, are completely groundless.”[7]  The “entire elaborate structure of value and morality that is built up … by practical reflection and cultural development” would represent mere adaptations and not necessary truths about the world.[8]

For those versed in the debates between reductive materialists and their interlocutors, these arguments are likely to seem persuasive or unpersuasive depending on prior inclinations.  I find the epistemic argument compelling:  natural selection cares only about survival, not truth.  The retort that an organism with an inaccurate perception of its environment is unlikely to survive is demonstrably false, at least if we understand “accurate” to involve a capacity to see beyond immediate circumstances and to take in the bigger picture.  The fly on my window has no idea that it is sitting on a “window” in a “building” filled with “people” writing “book reviews” and other things on “computers.”  Nor does the fly possess any capacities that would enable it to conduct investigations into these phenomena.  The fly can, of course, sense the surface under its feet, and it can feel the oncoming pressure wave in time to zip off before my copy of Nagel’s book smashes it into mush – that much, and only that much, is required for its survival.  More than that would be inefficient and wasteful, and natural selection abhors wasted energy.  Nevertheless, it is possible to construct just-so stories to explain how perceptual capacities evolved by our hominid predecessors in the crucible of the ancient African savannah have since been exapted for the purpose of higher-order reasoning.  This likely is a debate that can never be resolved without resort to prior assumptions about what is and is not possible – that is, without first assuming the truth or implausibility of materialism.  Still, Nagel does a fine job of presenting the anti-reductionist arguments clearly and concisely.[9]

The most frustrating part of Nagel’s book is his lack of comprehension of traditional theological conceptions of God in relation to creation.  Nagel suggests that “[a]t the outer boundaries of the world, encompassing everything in it, including the law-governed natural order revealed by science, theism places some kind of mind or intention, which is responsible for the physical and the mental character of the universe.”[10]  He argues that for this “theistic” view to work, “the existence and properties of God and therefore of his creation, cannot conceivably be other than they are,” and claims that theists “tend to believe” in this view of God and creation.[11]  Nagel finds this approach unsatisfactory because, among other things, “[i]t amounts to the hypothesis that the highest-order explanation of how things hangs together is of a certain type, namely, intentional or purposive, without having anything more to say about how that intention operates except what is found in the results to be explained.”[12]  Nagel further assumes that theistic accounts of creation must involve Divine “intervention,” for example by “assembling the genetic material that would result eventually in conscious life.”[13]

Nagel’s description of “theism” might apply to some contemporary analytic philosophers and “intelligent design” advocates who try to defend an abstract, deracinated, generic “Designer” apart from the particulars of a Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other traditioned understanding of “God.”  It is not, however, a description of what “God” means in any of the great theological traditions.  God is not the “mind” or “intelligence” at the end of a long string of temporal / physical causes, for God is neither temporal nor physical.  By definition, God is transcendent of creation, not merely another being-in-creation.  To render God as if Godself were just a “first cause” within creation, in fact, would constitute heresy.  Nor does the traditional doctrine of creation require Divine “intervention” to “assemble” the building blocks of life.[14]

It is true that the Abrahamic faiths traditionally understand God to have created the universe ex nihilo.  But it is not as though God were floating in outer space and suddenly decided to flick the pre-big-bang singularity with a finger in order to get things rolling.  Properly understood, creation ex nihilo means that at every moment, the universe’s existence is contingent on God’s loving power and will – it does not even, technically, require a temporal “beginning.”  When classical theologians such as Thomas Aquinas speak of a “first mover,” they mean an a-temporal, eternal source towards which the universe is drawn, not a force in the temporal past that overcame the inertia of static matter.  In fact, the notion of pre-existing static matter contradicts creation ex nihilo.  “The love that fires the Sun,” for Augustine, was a love that ever draws creation into God.[15]

Nor would the Abrahamic faith traditions conceive of God as having “properties” that are concomitant with properties of the physical universe, as Nagel suggests.  In classical Christian theology, God is “simple,” meaning without parts or divisions.  God does not “have” goodness; He is good.  God does not “have” love; He is love.  God does not “have” intelligence and wisdom; He is the Logos.  And God’s goodness, love, wisdom, and will are inseparable and unbreakable.  “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,” says the shema.[16]  It is therefore improper to speak of the “properties” of God.  It is because God is one and because God transcends all physical “properties” that He can be the creator-God of the Bible and the Qur’an, and not just the Very Powerful Designer of Enlightenment Deism.[17]

Finally, Nagel is only partly correct when he claims that there is “nothing more to say” about God’s intentions for creation except by observing what creation is.  For Christians, Jews and Muslims, observation of creation does tell us some things about God, in particular that He is creative, beautiful, powerful and glorious.[18]  But all of the Abrahamic faiths rely on revelation – on their scriptures, and on God’s actions through his messengers and prophets (and for Christians, in the incarnate Jesus) – to discern more fully God’s purposes for His creation.  The possibility of “revelation,” of course, is one of the big sticking points between materialism and these religious views.

Nagel’s personal preference, as an atheist, is for a sort of process theology of human emergence.  He suggests that human cognition “was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well.  Each of our lives is part of a lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”[19]  This is also a familiar refrain in debates about theology, science, and transcendence, which in contemporary discourse are often heavily influenced by process thought and process theology.[20]  “God” no longer is the transcendent creator of the universe, but rather Godself or God-consciousness or human consciousness is an emergent property within the universe.[21]  Perhaps process thought and process theology represent improvements over the sort of God-of-the-gaps interventionism that Nagel thinks represents the only option for “theists.”  It is less clear, however, whether process models offer a better account than an option that Nagel ignores:  the traditional theological belief that God is the eternal transcendent source and goal of a creation graced with its own integrity – an integrity that makes scientific investigation possible – as a gift of Divine love.

[1] Cf. my article The Problem With NeuroLaw, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2214601.

[2]Martha Farah, “Responsibility and Brain Function,” available at  http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/penn-neuroethics-briefing/responsibility-a-brain-function

[3] See Daivd Eagleman, Incognito:  The Secret Lives of the Brain (Pantheon 2011).

[4] See, e.g., David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone:  How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Ourselves (Delacorte Press 2007); Michael Graziano, God Soul Mind Brain:  A Scientist’s Reflections on the Spirit World (Leapfrog Press 2010); Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape:  How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press 2010).

[5] Thomas Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press 2012).

[6] Id., Chapters 3 and 4.

[7] Id. at 109.

[8] Id.

[9] Even this presentation, however, is marred by Nagel’s sympathy for “intelligent design” theories that posit gaps in natural processes represented by “irreducible complexity” in certain chemical pathways or physical systems.  See id. at 10.  The epistemic argument against reductionist materialism does not require any such Design-in-the-gaps claims, since “consciousness” might transcend the physical without gaps in the physical.

[10] Mind & Cosmos, at 21.

[11] Id. at 21-22.

[12] Id. at 25.

[13] Id. at 59; see also id. at 94 (“for theists there is the intentional alternative:  divine intervention to create life out of the basic material of the world, and perhaps also to guide the process of evolution by natural selection, through the intentional production and preservation of some of the mutations on which natural selection operates along the way.”).

[14] For good discussions of these distinctions, see, e.g., David Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Univ. Notre Dame Press 1993); David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:  The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdman’s 2004); Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea:  Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong (Eerdman’s 2010);

[15] See Augustine, Confessions (Oxford Univ. Press 2009); see also Bruce Cockburn, “Lord of the Starfields,” on In the Falling Dark (Remastered, Rounder Records 2009).

[16] Deut. 3:23.

[17] See supra Note 13.

[18] See Psalm 19 (“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”).

[19] Id. at 85.

[20] See, e.g., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy, “Process Thought,” available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ (last visited February 12, 2013) and “Process Theism,” available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-theism/ (last visited February 12, 2013); The Center for Process Studies website, available at http://www.ctr4process.org/ (last visited February 12, 2013).

[21] See id.

I’ve been reading Daniel Dennett’s latest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back:  The Evolution of Minds.  At the start of the book, Dennett acknowledges that some of his ideas about the mind — in particular, that consciousness is an illusion — are disturbing.  He seeks to disarm what he calls a “bristling” response to these threatening ideas.  A bristling response, he suggests, is a conditioned response rooted in evolution that produces cognitive distortions.  He implies that we should recognize and defuse the bristling response so that we can calmly and rationally evaluate his ideas.

There’s no doubt that immediate emotional reactions such as “bristling” in response to threats are rooted in our evolutionary history.  There’s also no doubt that Dennett’s strategy of pointing out this response among readers who feel threatened by the notion that human consciousness is an illusion reflects a powerful rhetorical strategy.  But Dennett’s suggestion that a person interested in the truth ought to recognize this response and set it aside makes no sense within the framework of his overarching claims.

“Bristling” is pervasive in nature because it works.  Creatures in nature face real threats every day.  A response that puts an organism on high alert and that deters the threat helps the organism survive.  Far from always representing a cognitive distortion, in nature, bristling often is a truthful, adaptive response to real threats.

The notion that consciousness is an illusion —  including, for Dennett, all of our sense of will, intentionality, and moral reasoning — seems like a real threat to human existence.  If everyone truly believed and acted on the belief that there is no truth content to consciousness nothing would prevent power and violence from having the final say.  Basic structures of law and society might fall away.  Bristling here seems like an appropriate response.

But Dennett seems to imply that “bristling” presents cognitive distortions because the response is overdetermined to real threats.  That is certainly correct.  This overdetermination itself likely is adaptive.  Let’s say, for example, that for every twenty “knee-jerk” reactions you have, only one of them responds to a danger of serious injury to your knee.  It seems like you’ve expended wasted energy on nineteen useless knee-jerks.  But the injury to your knee on that one occasion would have been serious, meaning that the injury would have cost you as much or more, perhaps far more, than the energy you spent on the nineteen “false positive” knee-jerks.  On balance, the overdetermination of knee-jerks was relatively efficient because the abundance of caution avoided a serious injury.

No doubt, then, that “bristling” behavior is overdetermined to threats.  The next step in Dennett’s rhetorical move is a suggestion that we sometimes need to exercise a higher level of control over our immediate threat reaction in order to assess the situation rationally.  This kind of rational control allows us to calibrate our knee-jerks and move to a higher level of efficiency.  If we can recognize and avoid the bristling response, we can use our calm, scientific rationality to acknowledge that, in fact, consciousness is an illusion.  Further, if we use that same calm, scientific reasoning, we can show why basic structures of law and society that limit power and violence need not fall away and might even be improved.

The obvious problem here is that Dennett’s metaphysical project precludes any such higher level of rational control.  Rationality is part of consciousness, so in Dennett’s universe “rationality” cannot exist.  You might think you’re exercising rational control over your bristling response, but that, too, is an illusion.  Indeed, your “rational” response to your bristling reaction is merely another adaptive response.  And Dennett’s own rhetorical move of seeking to appease the bristling response through a “friendly” gesture of appealing to reason likewise is yet another merely adaptive response.  It’s either “nothing buttery” all the way down, or something else is going on.

As Thomas Nagel suggests in his review of Dennett’s book,

[t]here is no reason to go through such mental contortions in the name of science. . . . To say that there is more to reality than physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it is an acknowledgment that we are nowhere near a theory of everything, and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain.

I’d go further than Nagel here and suggest that there are plenty of truths that science simply cannot explain because the natural sciences are not the only, nor even the most basic, way of understanding truth.  Understanding truth always, necessarily, begins with metaphysics — and, therefore, with theology — whether acknowledged or not.  Dennett assumes a materialist metaphysic with a corresponding (though ultimately incoherent) epistemology and an attendant a-theology, and that, finally, is the rub.

IMG SRC = National Geographic Video; NY Times