Freddie has written a post that forces me into the odd position of defending Sam Harris; the crux of which is the claim that once we accept the human mind as being a contingent accident of evolution, we necessarily must abandon any faith in the intellectual edifices constructed by such minds:
For me, I would merely put it this way: that we do not encounter the physical universe unmediated but through a consciousness mechanism and sensory inputs that seem to be the products of evolution. And the belief (however you want to define a belief) in evolution makes the idea of those consciousness and sensory mechanism being capable, no matter how long the time scale, of perfectly or non-contingently ordering the universe around us seem quite low. Evolution does not produce perfectly fit systems, it only eliminates those systems so unfit that they prevent survival and the propagation of genetic material. A chimpanzee’s intellect is a near-miracle, capable of incredible things, but it will never understand calculus. I could never and would never say this with deductive certainty, but it seems likely to me that our consciousness has similar limitations.
Now, far be it from me to to diss Nietzschean perspectivism (I am, after all, on record as being an intractable opponent of the Invisible Eye), but I think Freddie overplays his hand here. Contingent minds merely undermine the necessity of our being able to comprehend the world (a necessity that the faithful take quite seriously, as an old Dominican friar once explained to me), they leave open, however, the possibility of contingent minds that “just happen” to be of the sort that can make sense of the universe in which they happen to be located. Nevertheless, Freddie is right about one thing: once we eliminate necessity, we need reasons to think that our minds are of the right sort; after all, the humble Giraffe is well adapted to its environment, but will never come to understand particle physics or the workings of its own neurophysiology. How are we to know that we are not like Giraffes, only with considerably wider possible-knowledge horizons?
A simple response is that we haven’t failed yet. The theories we build in order to explain the universe around us are remarkably, even distressingly successful. Even stranger than their success is the methodology with which we go about building them. As Christopher Norris has beautifully documented, the positivist fairy-tale of open-minded scientists accumulating measurable evidence, making conjectures based on that evidence, and then seeking to refute those conjectures does not well describe the actual way that scientists operate. In fact, the process is a good deal more deductive — the vast majority of working scientists begin by assuming scientific realism, then asking what underlying, noumenal features of the world might lead to the kind of evidence that we observe, then building a theory concerning what other kinds of evidence these noumena might produce, then seeking confirmatory and disconfirmatory evidence.
If the world were actually non-objective, or even objectively real but of a kind that was inaccessible to our contingent reason, what would be the odds of this extraordinarily arrogant and presumptive process working — not just once, but over and over again, throughout human history? If mathematics were formalist or something akin to a logical game, then why would it be the case that sets of “toy” axioms rapidly turn out to be trivial or contradictory; while the axioms that seem to best model the world churn out theory after theory of incredible richness, whilst just barely shying away from having sufficient power to prove their own consistency, thereby rendering themselves inconsistent? Finally, why on earth do our mathematical theories and our scientific theories work so eerily well together? Why does Wigner’s “unreasonable effectiveness” exist?
Let us return to the giraffes! There is no evolutionary pressure to having minds that can figure out U(1) x SU(2) x SU(3) symmetry, or why it is that the spin of an electron has to be what it is (also due to symmetry constraints). Freddie might reply that the ability to perform the kind of abstraction and symbolic thinking that is useful when figuring out how to hunt or how migration patterns work leads very naturally to the kind of abstraction required to figure out particle physics, but I think this is missing the point. The question is why fundamental physics is amenable to this kind of abstraction. Why minds of our kind happen to be in a universe of this kind. The alternative is not necessarily chaos.
I’ve occasionally been fond of saying that physics might be hopeless. Recall that a giraffe is well adapted to its environment, but will never figure out the fundamental properties of the universe. Similarly, physics could be trivial — it would be if we were supermen with superbrains.
So let us turn that argument around. Suppose that there are evolutionary constraints on the kind of intelligence that can arise, such that in broadest strokes, thinking, abstracting beings that evolve will tend to think like us and not like giraffes or superbrains. I’m still intrigued by why it is that fundamental physics is not amenable to giraffes (and hence trivial for us) and not challenging for superbrains (and hence impossible for us).
In fact, if one were to take my argument further, one could almost turn it into a new fine-tuning argument. It is an observable, contingent, historical fact that our minds are of just the right kind to be able to figure out a great deal about the universe, while keeping the figuring-out process challenging. In the space of possible world with contingent minds, that seems very unlikely. Might we take this as evidence that our minds are, in fact, non-contingent? Might the success of science give us a reason for faith?
I’ll leave Freddie to answer that one. The argument I’ve outlined above is certainly hand-wavy, and needs fleshing out. In fact, I can immediately think of two replies:
1) Fundamental physics may, in fact, turn out to be impossible for us to figure out.
2) The Turing attack: Anything a superbrain can do, we can do too. It’ll just take longer.
I believe I have responses to these replies, but I’ll hold off on employing them until necessary.
Don’t let me give you the impression that epistemic despair is the whole substance of Freddie’s post. There’s a good deal more in there, including a blistering attack on “totalizing” moral realism that seems designed to stir this blog into action. I’ll leave a reply to that thread, however, to James and the others… for now.
March 26th, 2010 | 7:35 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Adam Solomon, Will Wilson. Will Wilson said: Can reason withstand the death of God? Yes. http://bit.ly/9BNfcY [...]
March 26th, 2010 | 8:28 pm
It seems to me that once you have language you can (eventually) have abstract logic. Once you have abstract logic you can pretty well do all physics. So the real question then becomes the evolution of language. There’s no solid answer for that yet, although there are bounds. But it does seem like the evolutionary advantage of language for one primate over others is clear. It allows better group dynamics and thereby increased chance of passing along genes.
March 26th, 2010 | 9:31 pm
How are we to know that we are not like Giraffes, only with considerably wider possible-knowledge horizons?
A simple response is that we haven’t failed yet. The theories we build in order to explain the universe around us are remarkably, even distressingly successful.
I’m not sure you addressed Freddie’s point. The fact that our brains haven’t failed yet is merely evidence that they weren’t created solely by evolution.
March 27th, 2010 | 2:17 am
@Joe But Freddie is beginning from the view that our brains *are* solely products of evolution.
March 27th, 2010 | 6:45 am
So the real issue is whether the death of God can withstand reason.
March 27th, 2010 | 8:45 am
I wonder if one can only experience the “death of God” from within Freddie’s evolutionary ‘system’ in the same manner Voegelin explicates Hegel systemic presumption and Nietzsche’s “murder” of God without “turning into the Ubermensch.”
And, I suspect the possibility that we may be talking about an unrest of thought leading to an “escape” predicated on Hegel’s conclusions re: the “fear of truth” that hides behind the “zeal for truth.”
My concern is that “evolution,” a legitimate science and a potential “reservoir of reality” has been captured by the contemporary ideological climate and and is in part responsible for eclipsing “nous” which answers Dr. Lawler’s question.
March 29th, 2010 | 3:56 am
Perhaps it was the now dominant power and control seeking left brained reason, untempered by the Wisdom of the feeling-Heart that killed God?
William Blake gave us a prophetic criticism of Newtons sleep.
Goya told us that Newtons reason was a form of sleep, that inevitably produces monsters.
Love, not reason, should make decisions. Decisions based on reason and not love only bind you further to suffering.
Therefore, let the heart be your intelligence. The heart is unreasonable. The heart is mad. And the heart is the ground that Reality Itself calls everyone to walk on.
Allow the heart to break, and be that sign. Be a feeling being. Then you cannot be a fool, you cannot be deceived.
Love, not reason, is the victory. Love is life. You simply must become willing to love. Allow God to be.To love is to be truly religious.
March 29th, 2010 | 1:27 pm
This comment may not be pertinent; I feel like maybe I’m not getting your point sufficiently. But, here’s an example of two things we know very intimately, but really don’t begin to understand, and haven’t shown much progress in understanding despite millennia of trying: first, the asymmetry of time; second, why do people laugh.
I’m pessimistic we’ll ever figure these two out, not to mention lots of other things.
March 29th, 2010 | 10:55 pm
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March 29th, 2010 | 11:05 pm
sorry for my late response, my RSS reader aggregates nothing but CFPs now. I don’t have much in the way of a response, sorry to say. So here’s the question, though: how long does a particular (and particularly large) physics problem have to persist before the unreasonable effectiveness of science and math is questionable?
Also– isn’t it weird to have a consequentialist vision of truth that seems to lead to some sort of science realism? Just asking. (Not in the Mickey Kaus way.)
April 1st, 2010 | 7:05 pm
Evolution does not produce perfectly fit systems, it only eliminates those systems so unfit that they prevent survival and the propagation of genetic material.
There is a problem in both parts of this idea:
(1) What is a perfectly fit system? – it is a meaningless concept.
(2) Evolution not only weeds out systems that are so unfit as not to survive (e.g., various genetic defects) but also systems that may be fit enough to survive under many circumstances, but are unfortunate to be in competition with even fitter systems.
If the ability to comprehend the universe provides a competitive advantage to its possessors, evolution will likely improve this ability, until the ability to comprehend the universe reaches a point where no further advantage can be derived.
April 1st, 2010 | 8:16 pm
A simple response is that we haven’t failed yet.
This is a good partial response to Freddie’s argument but it is only a partial response. It is hard to deny that human minds have proven to be very effective at arriving at consistent and effective answers to many, albeit not all, questions human minds have generated. There are still questions about consciousness and questions at the margins of the physical sciences for which there aren’t (yet?) effective and satisfying answers. One could argue that it’s just a matter of time before those questions are answered. That could well be true but is not necessarily true. And the answers to those questions could provide information that requires us to re-think other questions we thought we had anwers but which answers turn out to be wrong or merely approximations (e.g., Newtonian physics). In other words, there’s always the possibility of a new paradigm shift.
More fundamental than the answers to questions humans have asked is the possibility that there are important questions that humans have not yet asked (the answers to which could require re-evaluation of what we think we know) and, indeed, questions that the humans are not equipped to ask. Taking Freddie’s chimp, not only is it unlikely that the chimp will ever understand calculus, it is unlikely that it would ever occur to a chimp that there’s something like calculus that it should try to figure out. The concept of calculas is alien to the way in which the chimp experiences the world. It seems incredibly arrogant to assume that humans are not limited in the way we experience the world in the same way the chimp is limited. Different limitations, to be sure, but then again the chimp’s limitations are different of those of a giraffe or a fish because they (and we) all experience the world differently because they (and we) have all evolved with different brains, nervous systems, sensory organs, etc.
April 1st, 2010 | 8:53 pm
At the end of the day, this whole line of argument seems tautological to me: it boils down to the observation that our minds are well suited to do the things that our minds are well suited to do.
April 2nd, 2010 | 10:04 am
Well said Egypt Steve:
In response to Bob Cheeks claim that “evolution,” is a legitimate science. One must realize that in reality it is only the combination of our conceptions and misconceptions of creation. As to it’s being “” a potential “reservoir of reality” has been captured by the contemporary ideological climate and and is in part responsible for eclipsing “nous” “” Rather than it’s capture by contemporary ideological climate. It has captured contemporary ideology and has eclipsed far more than just nous. Causing the real question to be. Can God withstand the death of reason?
April 3rd, 2010 | 10:29 am
I believe the fundamental problem at stake is Harris’s misunderstanding of what science and morality are. Because I believe that science is a process for maintaining an appropriate balance between rationality and intuition, with the ultimate goal of explaining phenomena, and morality is a process for maintaining an appropriate balance between action and inaction, with the ultimate goal of minimizing harm, I think it is doubtful that science or morality will ever be more than imperfect approximations designed specifically in utilitarian terms.
http://www.theinductive.com/articles/2010/3/30/an-uncertain-defense-of-deboer.html
April 3rd, 2010 | 2:13 pm
[...] delighted to see that Freddie deBoer and Led-the-commenter have delivered excellent pushback on a weak point of my previous post. Their point in brief is that [...]
April 3rd, 2010 | 3:58 pm
Hi. this is kind of an “unconventional” question , but have other visitors asked you how get the menu bar to look like you’ve got it? I also have a blog and am really looking to alter around the theme, however am scared to death to mess with it for fear of the search engines punishing me. I am very new to all of this …so i am just not positive exactly how to try to to it all yet. I’ll just keep working on it one day at a time Thanks for any help you can offer here.
April 3rd, 2010 | 9:20 pm
In response to USASteve, I’m not sure I understand the critique, but I do know God can withstand anything.
April 5th, 2010 | 3:01 pm
“A simple response is that we haven’t failed yet. ”
Ha. We know nothing of the origins of consciousness, or to what degree other animals are conscious. We know nothing about whether there is any part of our consciousness that continues after death.
Physics can fill in some entries in a group table, but has hardly explained everything in the world. Its most recent predictions, via string theory, have all been unfulfilled.
And you really have to be a strict reductionist to believe that understanding physics will be enough to let us understand the rest of the universe.
April 5th, 2010 | 8:38 pm
Rene Descartes, in the seventeeth century, postulated the existence of a perfect, non-decieving God, to justify, ultimately, our belief that our minds are reliable. That is, how can we be certain that whenever we deduce a mathematical solution, or trust our senses, that we’re not being decieved by an ”evil demon”. the perfect God takes care of this, for Descartes. Maybe now the ”evil demon” is evolutionary contingencies.
April 6th, 2010 | 10:18 am
There are all sorts of things the human mind can never know (the number of neutrons in the sun and 9:15 October 12th, 1914, for example). for similar reasons, there are all sorts of patterns the human mind will never be able to conceptualize or recognize (they are simply too complex or have “too many parts” for the mind to get around.) We do physics, and other hard science, by “grand simplifications,” and the predicitions we make based upon our physics are never, at any level of complexity, exactly right. There are also predictions and patterns in which we are totally disinterested, and always will be. The hope of physics as that the patterns which interest us are, in some interesting sense, simple. Or at least virtually anything of interest to us can be approximately explained by relatively simple laws. If God does play with dice, at least we hope they have only six surfaces.
April 6th, 2010 | 2:58 pm
[...] DeBoer deflects Will Wilson’s post: [N]ot only does the giraffe not know how to understand electron spin; it does not know that there [...]
April 7th, 2010 | 4:57 pm
[...] Will Wilson at Postmodern Conservative: Now, far be it from me to to diss Nietzschean perspectivism (I am, after all, on record as being an intractable opponent of the Invisible Eye), but I think Freddie overplays his hand here. Contingent minds merely undermine the necessity of our being able to comprehend the world (a necessity that the faithful take quite seriously, as an old Dominican friar once explained to me), they leave open, however, the possibility of contingent minds that “just happen” to be of the sort that can make sense of the universe in which they happen to be located. Nevertheless, Freddie is right about one thing: once we eliminate necessity, we need reasons to think that our minds are of the right sort; after all, the humble Giraffe is well adapted to its environment, but will never come to understand particle physics or the workings of its own neurophysiology. How are we to know that we are not like Giraffes, only with considerably wider possible-knowledge horizons? [...]
April 7th, 2010 | 10:01 pm
[...] Andrew Sullivan’s blog has engaged in an interesting debate on atheists and God: [...]
April 12th, 2010 | 4:26 pm
You’re right on the money with this post, keep it up!
January 23rd, 2011 | 6:39 am
Mat is a fantastic bloke I just love his attitude
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