I have so far not been tempted to read Thomas Nagel’s new book, but I’ve read a couple things about it. Here is H. Allen Orr in the New York Review of Books. I am a fan of Nagel’s famous article, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? which argues that there are holes in materialist explanations of consciousness, and that we don’t really know what sort of thing could go in those holes. In his new book, Mind & Cosmos, Nagel appears to be arguing that this and other holes are so big that the current scientific paradigm is somehow not seaworthy. (Based on what I’ve seen, Nagel’s conclusions in the book seem a little nuts — Orr is very fair I think.)
The holes in the current “materialistic” scientific paradigm are supposed to point the way to a new “teleological” theory or model for scientific theories. Here is Orr, emph. mine:
Natural teleology doesn’t depend on any agent’s intentions; it’s just the way the world is. There are teleological laws of nature that we don’t yet know about and they bias the unfolding of the universe in certain desirable directions, including the formation of complex organisms and consciousness. The existence of teleological laws means that certain physical outcomes “have a significantly higher probability than is entailed by the laws of physics alone—simply because they are on the path toward a certain outcome.”
So, there are some teleological laws, beyond or outside the physical laws (not just the ones we know but all of them), and the teleological laws cause outcomes to differ from what they otherwise would be under the physical laws. The “teleology” at issue has nothing to do with the particular purposes of any person or God; it is distinctively teleological because (supposedly) we empirically see some moves towards “purpose” broadly, divorced from any agent, and physical laws are insufficient.
Apart from whether this account is at all plausible, I want to ask: does it even make sense? Does it describe a worldview that is meaningfully distinct from materialism? I am tempted to answer “no,” based on an argument like the following:
If there is some teleological tendency that exerts a pull on physical outcomes, then that should be conceptualized as a physical law. After all, physical law is just our theory for explaining physical outcomes; if some new tendency is discovered exerting a pull on physical outcomes, then the law that describes that tendency is a physical law, not some new kind of law, even if it is a physical law that would surprise today’s physicists.
(Orr:
Science has, since the seventeenth century, proved remarkably adept at incorporating initially alien ideas (like electromagnetic fields) into its thinking. Yet most people, apparently including Nagel, find the resulting science sufficiently materialist.)
I like this argument but it’s just a little too categorical and tautological to be really satisfying. A reply might say: if the new tendency is strange and different enough, then it could be too strange to assimilate under physical law. For example, we could maybe imagine a teleological tendency that would upset ordinary reductionist assumptions in a disturbing way. Suppose there is somehow a tendency towards the evolution of conscious organisms. That seems like it would constitute a pull on physical outcomes. But we don’t know how to cleanly reduce consciousness to lower-level physics, so we also don’t know how to reduce this tendency to the terms of our physical laws. So we would have something like a teleological law, a tendency in physical outcomes that is easy to state in the language of purpose but can’t be neatly reduced to lower-level physics.
This example probably shouldn’t work, though. Even if there are things about consciousness that are hard to reduce to lower-level physics, anything like a tendency towards the evolution of conscious organisms should be easy to reduce to lower-level physics, because conscious organisms as far as we know are physical things that obey physical laws. If there really was a tendency towards the evolution of conscious life, we would be able to analyze it in terms of all the little things that go together to make a conscious being. (Since conscious life apparently exists, there arguably is a tendency towards the evolution of conscious life. But there is every reason to believe that tendency works on the level of physical law, as in the arguments for fine-tuning.)
There is a parallel here to debates over the definition of magic. If magic is simply something outside of physical laws, then it seems contradictory — in a world that had magic, magic would just be part of the physical laws, wouldn’t it? But magic looks very different from physical law as we know it — in magic, changes at the level of meaning, of human significance, somehow unlock dramatic physical changes, which seemingly can’t be explained in lower-level physics. An incantation works changes in the world by virtue of the meaning of the words; a chemical recipe works the opposite way. A world with magic is a world in which there’s something special and privileged about our semantics (hence “magical thinking”) — the physical world is governed by the categories into which we divide it, rather than vice versa, or rather than solely vice versa.
We can say, then, that a world of Nagel’s teleological laws might look like a world with magic. Unfortunately for Nagel, we’ve been looking for magic for a long time, and it doesn’t seem to be there. (Orr: “Teleological science is, in fact, more than imaginable. It’s actual, at least historically. Aristotelian science, with its concern for final cause, was thoroughly teleological.”) Why should we think the magical worldview is about to rally and reemerge?
If teleological laws don’t depend on an agency’s intentions, then they aren’t teleological.
I have always thought it wrong to take an area of scientific study and call it “magic” simply to lump it in with something we know isn’t real. I could as easily call electromagnetism “magic” and pretend my word makes it go away.
Rather than using the word “magic”, why not call it what it is: Intelligence, consciousness or free will volition? These things clearly exist, based on overwhelming evidence and direct experience. If magic doesn’t exist, then consciousness isn’t magic, because it does exist.
I agree with the main point here that if intelligence exists, then it is a physical law. Everything we can directly observe, measure, test and demonstrate is physical, and that includes intelligent agency. It isn’t made of materials, but it is as physical as gravity.
I’ve never seen any sanity in the impossible, senseless and unscientific ideas of intelligence-denying materialism. If you chose Orr over Nagel, can you explain why?
Thanks for the reply.
I am not denying the existence of intelligence, here. I am committing to a particular picture of the way that intelligence is instantiated in nature. In particular, intelligence is the overall effect of a large number of physical interactions, all of which are stupid on their own (or anyway: not intelligent). Overall effects that are intelligent arise because of strong selective filters applied to dumb effects over long periods of time. Intelligence is something like the appearance of solutions to problems, and it arises because of (natural) selection on candidate solutions. A good article on this is Dennett, Why the Law of Effect Will Not Go Away.
This view is what I’m calling reductionism. Notice that there are no “holes” in this picture. Nothing more than the interaction of dumb physical effects is needed to explain what we actually see in terms of intelligence. A similar story explains what we call “teleology.”
This explanatory picture has had tremendous success over the history of science, so I think it should be regarded as provisionally correct.
What I’m calling a “magical” worldview is a kind of alternative genealogy of intelligence. Instead of being a product of selective filters on dumb effects, the magical view makes intelligence a basic ingredient that can’t be reduced. It’s a physical law that is about intentions and goals, rather than about the interactions of dumb effects.
So I am not simply equating intelligence with “magic.” Rather, I am distinguishing magical and non-magical sorts of explanations for intelligence. The reductionist program, which I regard as basically successful, is a non-magical explanation. The proposed teleological laws would be a magical explanation. This is not just name-calling, either. As I argue in my post, this sort of thing is exactly what we mean by “magic”. Magic is a sort of phenomena that many great scientists have believed in: Aristotle, Ptolemy, the alchemists, Descartes, Newton, the early vitalists. But they didn’t have the benefit of the history that we do. Someone like Nagel doesn’t have that excuse.
Similarly, I do not endorse the claim that, “if intelligence exists, then it is a physical law.” For intelligence to be a physical law would I think be magic. Intelligence has to be explainable in terms of physical laws — and it is. But everything we have seen suggests that those laws will be dumb, not intelligent or teleological.
Insofar as I am “choosing Orr over Nagel,” I’m doing so because Orr’s position has been vindicated by the progress of science over time. Everything science has discovered that has a claim to being a fundamental law is a law about dumb effects. Occasionally, someone will bring up some phenomenon of nature that challenges this program, but the program always survives the challenge. For example, the adaptive fit of living organisms was once thought to be evidence that design was somehow (magically) built into the universe. But Darwin proposed an agenda to subsume this under the reductionist program, and Darwin’s agenda succeeded. Another example is vitalism and the question of whether life is physically special. It is not — it’s just an interaction of dumb effects. I wrote a long comment about vitalism here.
I appreciate your response, although I can now see that we have strong disagreements on scientific subjects.
The dumb mixture of multitudes of dumb components can only have a dumb result. The idea that random interactions of matter always cause intelligent coherent thought makes absolutely no sense at all.
As I see you citing Dennett, can I infer that you agree with him that consciousness is an “illusion”? I can tell you as strict empiricist, it does not sit well with me when someone tells me evidence is an illusion and I am to believe their personal unsupported beliefs instead.
You are also citing Darwin in your link, despite the fact that Darwin’s luck theories have been debunked and are no longer considered factual by most biologists.
Nothing can be “a product of selective filters” because filters don’t produce… they subtract.
I can agree with one of your statements on your link. It is not fair to condemn Darwinism based on Nazi atrocities or any eugenic cruelties. However, it is perfectly scientific to examine how well Hitler’s attempt at large-scale Darwinism worked or did not work.
Along with non-Aryan races, he killed off anyone with physical handicaps in an attempt to form a superior race, thinking he could cause addition by subtraction, as you seem to believe is possible.
As we all know, it didn’t work, because Darwinism doesn’t work. Death does not cause life.
And random chaos does not cause functional order or intelligence.
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Very descriltive post, I liked that a lot. Will there be a part 2?