Below are some thoughts I was trying to develop. Everyone is welcome to point out where I'm getting off-base.
1. If determinism is true, there is no modality: everything is necessary. So, if you take modalities like possibility and contingency to be real, determinism is false.
2. If determinism is true, there is no “real” (non-Humean) causality: everything is connected necessarily and symmetrically; the world is fixed forever. Real causality implies modality: things could have happened differently if causation is assumed to involve real “work”. Like modality, real causality is opposed to determinism.
David Lewis would be able to embrace both modality and determinism by postulating concrete possible worlds (which are causally unconnected to ours) as the vehicle for modality. But he is a Humean about causality. There is no real causation in his system.
The only way to embrace modality and real causation is to reject determinism. This implies that the world includes an intrinsic selection or choosing among possibilities within causal events.
An assertion that only objectively random choosing occurs at this point is ad hoc: it has no particular advantage over asserting that choosing is non-random.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Dreyfus-in-the-World
A philosopher I like is Hubert Dreyfus, the existentialism and phenomenology scholar. Years ago I got more out of Heidegger by virtue of reading his commentary volume Being-in-the-World. Dreyfus is famous for his criticism of artificial intelligence, especially in the early days when many thought HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey might soon become a reality! His What Computers Can’t Do from 1972 turned out to be prescient when the early versions of AI (now called “good old-fashioned AI” or GOFAI) started hitting tough obstacles.
I just finished reading Dreyfus’ APA Pacific Division Presidential Address, which was called “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise.”
When working on the foundations of knowledge and many other problems, many assume (explicitly or implicitly) that our conceptual thinking facility is the primary dimension of mind. Dreyfus argues that our capacity for detached conceptual thinking rests on top of (is derived from) our non-conceptual embodied engagement with our environment.
The fundamental core of mind is not detached, deliberate, rational, or conceptual; it is our facility for skillful coping with the world. This is a key insight derived from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. It is also consistent with an evolutionary perspective on the human mind: after all, this core of skillful coping is what we share with animals and infants. What differentiates the mature human mind is that “we can transform our unthinking non-conceptual engagement, and thereby encounter new, thinkable, structures.” Accounting for this transformation is the research project recommended by Dreyfus.
I have liked this line of argument, and think Dreyfus’ perspective can serve to make the problems of perception and knowledge more tractable, reducing a bit the seemingly huge divide between the mental realm and the rest of the world.
I just finished reading Dreyfus’ APA Pacific Division Presidential Address, which was called “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise.”
When working on the foundations of knowledge and many other problems, many assume (explicitly or implicitly) that our conceptual thinking facility is the primary dimension of mind. Dreyfus argues that our capacity for detached conceptual thinking rests on top of (is derived from) our non-conceptual embodied engagement with our environment.
The fundamental core of mind is not detached, deliberate, rational, or conceptual; it is our facility for skillful coping with the world. This is a key insight derived from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. It is also consistent with an evolutionary perspective on the human mind: after all, this core of skillful coping is what we share with animals and infants. What differentiates the mature human mind is that “we can transform our unthinking non-conceptual engagement, and thereby encounter new, thinkable, structures.” Accounting for this transformation is the research project recommended by Dreyfus.
I have liked this line of argument, and think Dreyfus’ perspective can serve to make the problems of perception and knowledge more tractable, reducing a bit the seemingly huge divide between the mental realm and the rest of the world.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Philadelphia-Area Philosophy
Check out the updated website for the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium (GPPC). The GPPC is a cooperative effort including the philosophy departments of 13 area universities which sponsors conferences and other events. The 2005-2006 program is up, and also see the link to the regional calendar which includes talks open to the public at the various schools (although you need to confirm these events with the schools as the dates approach.
Friday, September 09, 2005
Fetal Pain
Recently, JAMA published a survey article on Fetal Pain (the abstract is here, the full text requires a fee). The authors reviewed a large number of research papers relevant to the stage of development at which a human fetus feels pain, and, secondarily, on techniques available for direct fetal anesthesia or analgesia in the case of abortion (or therapeutic interventions). Despite the evidence of reflex responses and hormonal responses by the first and second trimester respectively, the authors conclude that analysis of nervous system development indicates fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester (29 or 30 weeks gestational age). They note that withdrawal reflexes only require peripheral sensory nerves which connect to motor neurons through the spinal column. They assert psychological awareness of pain requires relatively full cortical functioning, which they conclude comes at about 29-30 months.
The article includes a paragraph acknowledging the context: proposed federal legislation which would require physicians to inform women seeking abortions at 20 or more weeks that the fetus feels pain and to offer anesthesia for the fetus (evidently statutes like this have been enacted in Georgia and Arkansas).
Given the highly charged politics of abortion, the article caught a good deal of attention in the press, and a number of critics have disputed the conclusions and/or complained about pro-choice bias given some of the authors’ past affiliations (links here and here: William Saletan’s take on Slate here). I argue below that a different conclusion from the authors' can be reached from the same set of facts.
My interest in this was similar to my angle in my Terri Schiavo and animal consciousness posts: we have a tendency to think of conscious experience as an all or nothing thing, and I’m interested in exploring the evidence that there is more of a continuum of first person experience from minimal to full tilt.
Echoing what I’ve read elsewhere, the authors say the seat of awareness is in the thalamocortical circuitry. While they found no studies of such circuits in fetuses as they relate to pain specifically, they (reasonably) infer conclusions from looking at work on other pathways (like visual and auditory). Now, curiously, the specifics of these studies don’t seem to precisely support the survey article’s conclusion, since they show thalamic projections reaching the cortex at 23-27 weeks. A later part of the paper on electrical activity is invoked to buttress the 29-30 week figure in the conclusion, but this seemed to my amateur eyes less compelling (more indirect) evidence on the question.
Importantly, the authors include a paragraph noting that others have proposed that connection to the cortex could be established indirectly if afferents from the thalamus reach a transient cortical subplate which appears earlier while the layers of the mature cortex are still forming. This happens by 20 to 22 weeks. Given the lack of firm evidence that this connection conveys pain information (as we understand it in fully developed context) the authors don’t give it weight in their conclusion.
The authors do not address the broader question of whether something similar to pain (if more primitive in some sense) exists during development absent any pathway to even a primitive cortical subplate. Is there something in-between the reflex arc and the cortical arc which gives rise to pain-like sensation? At this point we probably have no evidence and can only speculate. But I think it is a reasonable intuition that in different stages of development, intermediate stages of experience may exist.
My problem with this article is not with the factual content, but with the way this is parsed to reach a conclusion. In the absence of compelling evidence that fully developed pain awareness exists prior to 29-30 weeks, the authors conclude it doesn’t. I might place the emphasis differently: while we lack definite confirmation, something similar to our pain awareness might exist at 20-22 weeks, and we just don’t know if a neural response worthy of being compared to pain might exist earlier than that.
I continue to support the legality of abortion; however, I also continue to believe relatively more emphasis should be placed on the procedure being done as early as possible.
The article includes a paragraph acknowledging the context: proposed federal legislation which would require physicians to inform women seeking abortions at 20 or more weeks that the fetus feels pain and to offer anesthesia for the fetus (evidently statutes like this have been enacted in Georgia and Arkansas).
Given the highly charged politics of abortion, the article caught a good deal of attention in the press, and a number of critics have disputed the conclusions and/or complained about pro-choice bias given some of the authors’ past affiliations (links here and here: William Saletan’s take on Slate here). I argue below that a different conclusion from the authors' can be reached from the same set of facts.
My interest in this was similar to my angle in my Terri Schiavo and animal consciousness posts: we have a tendency to think of conscious experience as an all or nothing thing, and I’m interested in exploring the evidence that there is more of a continuum of first person experience from minimal to full tilt.
Echoing what I’ve read elsewhere, the authors say the seat of awareness is in the thalamocortical circuitry. While they found no studies of such circuits in fetuses as they relate to pain specifically, they (reasonably) infer conclusions from looking at work on other pathways (like visual and auditory). Now, curiously, the specifics of these studies don’t seem to precisely support the survey article’s conclusion, since they show thalamic projections reaching the cortex at 23-27 weeks. A later part of the paper on electrical activity is invoked to buttress the 29-30 week figure in the conclusion, but this seemed to my amateur eyes less compelling (more indirect) evidence on the question.
Importantly, the authors include a paragraph noting that others have proposed that connection to the cortex could be established indirectly if afferents from the thalamus reach a transient cortical subplate which appears earlier while the layers of the mature cortex are still forming. This happens by 20 to 22 weeks. Given the lack of firm evidence that this connection conveys pain information (as we understand it in fully developed context) the authors don’t give it weight in their conclusion.
The authors do not address the broader question of whether something similar to pain (if more primitive in some sense) exists during development absent any pathway to even a primitive cortical subplate. Is there something in-between the reflex arc and the cortical arc which gives rise to pain-like sensation? At this point we probably have no evidence and can only speculate. But I think it is a reasonable intuition that in different stages of development, intermediate stages of experience may exist.
My problem with this article is not with the factual content, but with the way this is parsed to reach a conclusion. In the absence of compelling evidence that fully developed pain awareness exists prior to 29-30 weeks, the authors conclude it doesn’t. I might place the emphasis differently: while we lack definite confirmation, something similar to our pain awareness might exist at 20-22 weeks, and we just don’t know if a neural response worthy of being compared to pain might exist earlier than that.
I continue to support the legality of abortion; however, I also continue to believe relatively more emphasis should be placed on the procedure being done as early as possible.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Desert Phenomenology
{UPDATE 24 March 2008: Please note the 'Desert Landscape' blog is defunct and the links were broken. A shame}
Uriah Kriegel at Desert Landscapes has had a number of interesting recent posts on phenomenological topics. The most recent discusses Alva Noe and Sean Kelly's take on perceptual constancies, which I discussed in previous posts (here and here). He leans toward Kelly's view as I did.
Uriah Kriegel at Desert Landscapes has had a number of interesting recent posts on phenomenological topics. The most recent discusses Alva Noe and Sean Kelly's take on perceptual constancies, which I discussed in previous posts (here and here). He leans toward Kelly's view as I did.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Whole Lotta Worlds
I enjoyed reading David Lewis’ On the Plurality of Worlds. Of course, for me it was like entering a theater in the third act: my eclectic self-education has big holes in it which inhibit my comprehension of such a work.
The usefulness of expressing modal concepts in terms of possible worlds seems clear enough (here’s a blog post which outlines this well – hat tip to the latest philosophy carnival). David Lewis argues that the value and utility of possible worlds in modal thinking points to a metaphysical or ontological argument that the full set of possible worlds exists concretely. In the book he defends this thesis.
Most other philosophers would say possible worlds are abstract, like mathematical objects. Even setting aside that the ontological status of mathematical objects is highly controversial topic, Lewis moves from his usual modest tone toward vehemence in criticizing these views as insufficient in supplying the full structure needed for possible worlds; further the question of how the actual world is selected from the set of abstract possibilities is either inadequate or “magical” in competing accounts.
In other words a sufficient proposal for a modal metaphysics either needs to have Lewis’ ontological panoply of concrete worlds, or else we need a fuller account of the ontological status of the abstract world along with a detailed mechanism for selecting the actual world (in Lewis’ scheme, “actual” just means the world we happen to be in, but there is nothing else special about it relative to the other worlds). Note that this means a system with only one actual concrete world and no ‘abstract realm+selection’ endowment is simply an inadequate metaphysics. While Lewis takes this for granted, I think it's interesting that seemingly only a small subset of philosophers would endorse either the Lewisian system or an abstract alternative with full mechanisms for addressing the Lewisian critique. They are presumably content to deal with modality in epistemological and linguistic arenas unburdened by the metaphysical worries.
While Lewis doesn’t explicitly address it much in this book, the other way to parse the metaphysics is in terms of causality. Lewis’ approach enables him to be a Humean about causality. Everything in the world just happens. If we want to talk about what counterfactual situations could have possibly happened to us, say, then we are talking about things that happen to our counterparts in other worlds. If we want to say there is only one concrete world where things happen and these are caused in a way which could have happened differently (they are contingent things), then we need a model of “real” causation that can handle this selection process. These two alternatives exclude the common assumption many seem to share that there is only one world, but a simple billiard ball notion of causation is all we need. In such a world there is no possibility or contingency at all. Again, this would be an inadequate metaphysics.
So, what do I think of Lewis’ proposal? I don’t like the Humean/fatalistic aspect of it. I would like to think a selection process happens rather than think that every possible world exists in an even-handed way, and we just happen to be in one. But at this point this is a preference on my part, not an argument.
What I get out most out of this is what I’ve been emphasizing in this post: Lewis is an obstacle to those who think they can “get away with” a minimalist metaphysics like single-world physicalism. It’s not enough.
The usefulness of expressing modal concepts in terms of possible worlds seems clear enough (here’s a blog post which outlines this well – hat tip to the latest philosophy carnival). David Lewis argues that the value and utility of possible worlds in modal thinking points to a metaphysical or ontological argument that the full set of possible worlds exists concretely. In the book he defends this thesis.
Most other philosophers would say possible worlds are abstract, like mathematical objects. Even setting aside that the ontological status of mathematical objects is highly controversial topic, Lewis moves from his usual modest tone toward vehemence in criticizing these views as insufficient in supplying the full structure needed for possible worlds; further the question of how the actual world is selected from the set of abstract possibilities is either inadequate or “magical” in competing accounts.
In other words a sufficient proposal for a modal metaphysics either needs to have Lewis’ ontological panoply of concrete worlds, or else we need a fuller account of the ontological status of the abstract world along with a detailed mechanism for selecting the actual world (in Lewis’ scheme, “actual” just means the world we happen to be in, but there is nothing else special about it relative to the other worlds). Note that this means a system with only one actual concrete world and no ‘abstract realm+selection’ endowment is simply an inadequate metaphysics. While Lewis takes this for granted, I think it's interesting that seemingly only a small subset of philosophers would endorse either the Lewisian system or an abstract alternative with full mechanisms for addressing the Lewisian critique. They are presumably content to deal with modality in epistemological and linguistic arenas unburdened by the metaphysical worries.
While Lewis doesn’t explicitly address it much in this book, the other way to parse the metaphysics is in terms of causality. Lewis’ approach enables him to be a Humean about causality. Everything in the world just happens. If we want to talk about what counterfactual situations could have possibly happened to us, say, then we are talking about things that happen to our counterparts in other worlds. If we want to say there is only one concrete world where things happen and these are caused in a way which could have happened differently (they are contingent things), then we need a model of “real” causation that can handle this selection process. These two alternatives exclude the common assumption many seem to share that there is only one world, but a simple billiard ball notion of causation is all we need. In such a world there is no possibility or contingency at all. Again, this would be an inadequate metaphysics.
So, what do I think of Lewis’ proposal? I don’t like the Humean/fatalistic aspect of it. I would like to think a selection process happens rather than think that every possible world exists in an even-handed way, and we just happen to be in one. But at this point this is a preference on my part, not an argument.
What I get out most out of this is what I’ve been emphasizing in this post: Lewis is an obstacle to those who think they can “get away with” a minimalist metaphysics like single-world physicalism. It’s not enough.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Summer Break
I'm taking a break from my rigorous once a week (at most) blogging schedule. My beach reading assignment is David Lewis. Here's a naive question: should one's opinion of modal realism be influenced by the fact that physicists for their own reasons are increasingly postulating the existence of multiple worlds?
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Philosophical Physicists
As I’ve written about before (here), theoretical physics has seemed stuck in recent years. Astronomical observations continue to uncover new features of the universe (like dark energy), but these mostly add new mysteries to the list which cannot be explained by current theories. The jury is also definitely still out on older ideas about the early universe (such as the inflationary scenario). Physicists await with great expectations the 2007 debut of the Large Hadron Collider, which offers the possibility of revealing new phenomena at higher energies which may assist theorists. In the meantime, there is plenty of time for physicists and philosophers of science to step back and consider conceptual issues which underlie physical theories. Here are a couple of examples of this I came across recently.
Lee Smolin has a new essay (hat tip to Peter Woit’s blog): “The case for background independence.” The context of the essay is the ongoing difficulty in constructing a theory of quantum gravity. Smolin thinks what has ultimately stymied the most popular quantum gravity research program--string/M theory-- is its use of a space-time backdrop as a “given”, rather than having space-time emerge from relations of variables within the theory. The essay starts with a historical sketch of the absolute and relational views of space-time, then summarizes how this is playing out in the different quantum gravity research programs (Smolin is one of the founders of the approach called loop quantum gravity, which attempts to preserve the background independent flavor of general relativity). Lots of interesting ideas in the essay. Also, for a debate on string theory see this post and comment thread on the excellent new team physics blog, Cosmic Variance.
As an aside, the debate between absolute and relational theories of space-time was most clearly personified in the personal rivalry between Newton and Leibniz. A fun coincidence is that I’m now working my way through the second installment (The Confusion) of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which features this rivalry as a minor subplot. The Confusion has a nice scene where Leibniz explains the relational view to a colleague.
On a related topic, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, I enjoyed this paper revisiting the philosophical conflict between Bohr and Einstein by N.P. Landsman (from PhilSci archive, via Brian Weatherson’s invaluable papers blog).
Einstein was famously frustrated by quantum mechanics, despite being one of the founders of the theory. Landsman summarizes his view as one where physical thought and physical laws require (classical) separability and locality (which QM doesn’t provide). Bohr accepted that while classical (objective) thinking was indeed necessary for science, the classical world in which physicists work incontrovertibly sits next to a quantum realm which has a nature which will not reduced to the classical. Landsman importantly also brings out the interesting “flip side” to Bohr’s thought, which is that it is equally true that a full quantum description of the world which leaves out the classical is impossible (many physicists and philosophers seem to miss this point). The implication is that there are necessarily two modes of reality: the quantum realm of spread-out potentials and the classical world of interactions/measurements.
Lee Smolin has a new essay (hat tip to Peter Woit’s blog): “The case for background independence.” The context of the essay is the ongoing difficulty in constructing a theory of quantum gravity. Smolin thinks what has ultimately stymied the most popular quantum gravity research program--string/M theory-- is its use of a space-time backdrop as a “given”, rather than having space-time emerge from relations of variables within the theory. The essay starts with a historical sketch of the absolute and relational views of space-time, then summarizes how this is playing out in the different quantum gravity research programs (Smolin is one of the founders of the approach called loop quantum gravity, which attempts to preserve the background independent flavor of general relativity). Lots of interesting ideas in the essay. Also, for a debate on string theory see this post and comment thread on the excellent new team physics blog, Cosmic Variance.
As an aside, the debate between absolute and relational theories of space-time was most clearly personified in the personal rivalry between Newton and Leibniz. A fun coincidence is that I’m now working my way through the second installment (The Confusion) of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which features this rivalry as a minor subplot. The Confusion has a nice scene where Leibniz explains the relational view to a colleague.
On a related topic, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, I enjoyed this paper revisiting the philosophical conflict between Bohr and Einstein by N.P. Landsman (from PhilSci archive, via Brian Weatherson’s invaluable papers blog).
Einstein was famously frustrated by quantum mechanics, despite being one of the founders of the theory. Landsman summarizes his view as one where physical thought and physical laws require (classical) separability and locality (which QM doesn’t provide). Bohr accepted that while classical (objective) thinking was indeed necessary for science, the classical world in which physicists work incontrovertibly sits next to a quantum realm which has a nature which will not reduced to the classical. Landsman importantly also brings out the interesting “flip side” to Bohr’s thought, which is that it is equally true that a full quantum description of the world which leaves out the classical is impossible (many physicists and philosophers seem to miss this point). The implication is that there are necessarily two modes of reality: the quantum realm of spread-out potentials and the classical world of interactions/measurements.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
A Look at Pantheism
Why not split the difference between the traditional forms of theism and atheism? By traditional theism I mean the worldview featuring the personal, transcendent, benevolent “omni-everything” deity. By traditional atheism I mean the materialist/physicalist worldview (essentially “billiard balls all the way down”).
I make the following two observations:
1. The most compelling arguments atheists make against traditional theism have little or no force against a deity which lacks some of the usual attributes of being, say, personal, transcendent, and omnipotent. I’m thinking of the argument from evil as well as the general argument from the absence of evidence for ad hoc supernatural interventions.
2. The most compelling arguments made against materialist atheism point to a need for “something more” but they don’t require a deity with all those classic attributes. Here I have in mind the arguments from the irreducibility of first-person experience and intentionality and a modified version of the Thomist cosmological argument (the existence of things requires a unifying ground or force).
I’d also note that, in my opinion, religious experiences provide authentic evidence which points toward theism, but they don’t provide much support for specific religions (I’m skeptical that a person who never heard of Jesus would ever have an explicitly Christian religious vision).
So, what about pantheism? Pantheism is the idea that God is identical with nature or the universe, or alternatively God is a ubiquitous force or presence uniting entities in the universe. What God is not is a person or being distinct from the world. I thought this SEP article on pantheism by Michael Levine provided a fine, sympathetic summary.
His article shows that a difficulty with pantheism is that (not surprisingly) there are many versions, and it appears that few have been fleshed out in detail. There doesn’t seem to have been a leading figure in Western thought who was a pantheist since Spinoza (Levine lists some figures who are “possible” pantheists). So there is no metaphysical program to sign on to. On the other hand it seems pantheism is an idea which is all too easy to invoke in a fuzzy new-age way.
Actually, I would highlight two issues which need to be addressed. First, and to me most important, what problems does pantheism help us solve? Specifically, what are the metaphysical features which improve on the perceived limitations of atheism without broaching the problems of classical theism? The second issue is a question about why the worldview entails invoking something divine. What makes it a religious as well as a philosophical worldview?
To bring out the issues, let’s look at a particular simplified version of pantheism which identifies God with the natural world (with no further detail). On the first issue, one would have to say this worldview adds no “metaphysical value” to a naturalist philosophy which lacks God. On the second issue, it begs the question of why it would make sense to treat the natural world as something divine. What type of religious practice (worship or prayer) makes sense if there really is nothing supernatural? Traditional theists have understandably criticized this sort of pantheism as atheism with window dressing.
It seems to me it may be possible to form a more successful version of pantheism to address these issues. In the article, Levine highlights the concept of unity as something important to pantheism. Let me sketch something building on this concept. Perhaps God/World has two modes of presentation. The entities and properties studied through third-person investigations are one mode. The second mode is a unifying force which binds and connects individuals in the world-network and also endows them with the gift of first-person experience (minimal for simple entities, robust for humans). So, we’ve given the God/World some features beyond the usual worldview of naturalism, and also have a mode of existence (a uniting “world-mind”) which may be worthy of religious feeling. Obviously this sketch leaves many unanswered questions. What accounts for the dual modes? Is it a monistic system or really a dualism? Is the ontology one of substance, like Spinoza’s, or not? What are the implications for ethics, etc.?
Given the deficiencies in both poles of the traditional theism-atheism debate, these seem to be ideas and questions worth exploring.
One last note on a variation of pantheism: that is, panentheism. This is the idea that while our world is part of God, it does not exhaust God. God extends beyond our world. Given that even physicists speak more and more about multiple universes and/or dimensions, it seems reasonable to think that God could be a repository of many real or possible worlds, of which ours is a particular manifestation.
I make the following two observations:
1. The most compelling arguments atheists make against traditional theism have little or no force against a deity which lacks some of the usual attributes of being, say, personal, transcendent, and omnipotent. I’m thinking of the argument from evil as well as the general argument from the absence of evidence for ad hoc supernatural interventions.
2. The most compelling arguments made against materialist atheism point to a need for “something more” but they don’t require a deity with all those classic attributes. Here I have in mind the arguments from the irreducibility of first-person experience and intentionality and a modified version of the Thomist cosmological argument (the existence of things requires a unifying ground or force).
I’d also note that, in my opinion, religious experiences provide authentic evidence which points toward theism, but they don’t provide much support for specific religions (I’m skeptical that a person who never heard of Jesus would ever have an explicitly Christian religious vision).
So, what about pantheism? Pantheism is the idea that God is identical with nature or the universe, or alternatively God is a ubiquitous force or presence uniting entities in the universe. What God is not is a person or being distinct from the world. I thought this SEP article on pantheism by Michael Levine provided a fine, sympathetic summary.
His article shows that a difficulty with pantheism is that (not surprisingly) there are many versions, and it appears that few have been fleshed out in detail. There doesn’t seem to have been a leading figure in Western thought who was a pantheist since Spinoza (Levine lists some figures who are “possible” pantheists). So there is no metaphysical program to sign on to. On the other hand it seems pantheism is an idea which is all too easy to invoke in a fuzzy new-age way.
Actually, I would highlight two issues which need to be addressed. First, and to me most important, what problems does pantheism help us solve? Specifically, what are the metaphysical features which improve on the perceived limitations of atheism without broaching the problems of classical theism? The second issue is a question about why the worldview entails invoking something divine. What makes it a religious as well as a philosophical worldview?
To bring out the issues, let’s look at a particular simplified version of pantheism which identifies God with the natural world (with no further detail). On the first issue, one would have to say this worldview adds no “metaphysical value” to a naturalist philosophy which lacks God. On the second issue, it begs the question of why it would make sense to treat the natural world as something divine. What type of religious practice (worship or prayer) makes sense if there really is nothing supernatural? Traditional theists have understandably criticized this sort of pantheism as atheism with window dressing.
It seems to me it may be possible to form a more successful version of pantheism to address these issues. In the article, Levine highlights the concept of unity as something important to pantheism. Let me sketch something building on this concept. Perhaps God/World has two modes of presentation. The entities and properties studied through third-person investigations are one mode. The second mode is a unifying force which binds and connects individuals in the world-network and also endows them with the gift of first-person experience (minimal for simple entities, robust for humans). So, we’ve given the God/World some features beyond the usual worldview of naturalism, and also have a mode of existence (a uniting “world-mind”) which may be worthy of religious feeling. Obviously this sketch leaves many unanswered questions. What accounts for the dual modes? Is it a monistic system or really a dualism? Is the ontology one of substance, like Spinoza’s, or not? What are the implications for ethics, etc.?
Given the deficiencies in both poles of the traditional theism-atheism debate, these seem to be ideas and questions worth exploring.
One last note on a variation of pantheism: that is, panentheism. This is the idea that while our world is part of God, it does not exhaust God. God extends beyond our world. Given that even physicists speak more and more about multiple universes and/or dimensions, it seems reasonable to think that God could be a repository of many real or possible worlds, of which ours is a particular manifestation.
Monday, July 25, 2005
The Realm of the Possible
I imagine many who hold to physicalism or materialism do so at least partly out of respect for Occam’s razor: a reluctance to add substantial new metaphysical entities or processes. And indeed, two of my favorite proposals for improving on physicalism posit not only new processes which enable consciousness, causation and the existence of individuals but they also require an additional realm of being beyond our concrete world: a realm of possibility.
In Whitehead’s process theory, each individual (an “actual occasion”) has two poles. It has a physical pole which contains the objective input from antecedent occasions but it also has a mental pole which is able to draw upon a realm of possibility to finalize its becoming. It subsequently becomes part of the objective input for new occasions. The realm of possibility (which Whitehead considered to be God) is the source of true creativity in the system.
In Gregg Rosenberg’s theory, receptive properties unify and connect effective properties (the ones physics explicates are the effective ones) to create real individuals linked in a causal mesh. Receptive properties have an intrinsically experiential aspect which accounts for the origin of consciousness. Rosenberg also says that the fact that effective properties have many potential values implies a metaphysical realm of possibility existing along with the concrete world. The structure of receptive properties in essence chooses among the possibilities.
The existence of a realm of possibility is what makes something like free will possible in these systems, which is another benefit. But the cost is high. In addition to our concrete world, whose individuals require at a minimum a dual-aspect nature to fully explain, we also need in additional world which underlies ours: the realm of the possible.
One thing I always fall back on when I worry that this is too extravagant is the fact that physics itself appears to include a realm of possibility. Today's concrete (classical-looking) state of affairs can be seen as arising from a combination of the concrete past plus "choosing" from the realm of (quantum) possibility.
In Whitehead’s process theory, each individual (an “actual occasion”) has two poles. It has a physical pole which contains the objective input from antecedent occasions but it also has a mental pole which is able to draw upon a realm of possibility to finalize its becoming. It subsequently becomes part of the objective input for new occasions. The realm of possibility (which Whitehead considered to be God) is the source of true creativity in the system.
In Gregg Rosenberg’s theory, receptive properties unify and connect effective properties (the ones physics explicates are the effective ones) to create real individuals linked in a causal mesh. Receptive properties have an intrinsically experiential aspect which accounts for the origin of consciousness. Rosenberg also says that the fact that effective properties have many potential values implies a metaphysical realm of possibility existing along with the concrete world. The structure of receptive properties in essence chooses among the possibilities.
The existence of a realm of possibility is what makes something like free will possible in these systems, which is another benefit. But the cost is high. In addition to our concrete world, whose individuals require at a minimum a dual-aspect nature to fully explain, we also need in additional world which underlies ours: the realm of the possible.
One thing I always fall back on when I worry that this is too extravagant is the fact that physics itself appears to include a realm of possibility. Today's concrete (classical-looking) state of affairs can be seen as arising from a combination of the concrete past plus "choosing" from the realm of (quantum) possibility.
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