Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape"

[spoonless]

via crasch,

In this highly anticipated new book, the bestselling author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation calls for an end to religion’s monopoly on morality and human values.

"In this explosive new book, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values, arguing that most people are simply mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human knowledge. Harris urges us to think about morality in terms of human and animal well-being, viewing the experiences of conscious creatures as peaks and valleys on a “moral landscape.” Because there are definite facts to be known about where we fall on this landscape, Harris foresees a time when science will no longer limit itself to merely describing what people do in the name of “morality”; in principle, science should be able to tell us what we ought to do to live the best lives possible." - The Free Press

"I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me." - Richard Dawkins

Very interesting! This caught my eye because of my recent debate with easwaran over whether science might ever be able to bridge the "is-ought" gap and give moral prescriptions:

http://spoonless.livejournal.com/180836.html?thread=1532772#t1532772

As I argue in the thread with easwaran, I do not think science will ever be able to say anything about fundamental values, and I do not believe there are objectively right or wrong answers to questions like "how many kittens lives is one human life worth?" I've never believed that moral "truths" are the same kinds of truths that we talk about when we talk about facts about the world--rather, I think they are facts about our personal desires and whims, which are inherently subjective. But I have great respect for Richard Dawkins, and if he says this book (which just came out a month ago) has completely changed his mind on such an important issue, then I will surely give it a chance--perhaps it can change my mind too. Somehow I doubt it, but nevertheless I look forward to reading it! While I've never agreed with the idea of objective morality, I have always found the possibility positively tantalizing and have often thought "I'd like nothing more than for that to be true--I wish it was, but I know it couldn't possibly be."

Comments

[essius.livejournal.com]

The reason that modern science will never be able to say anything about fundamental values is not because science gets us truth (which it sometimes does) and ethics is reducible to subjective preferences or societal consensus (which it clearly is not, though I notice you disagree). Rather, the modern sciences are empirical while ethics is part of philosophical or metascientific knowledge. It is from the latter and not the former that we derive transcendental concepts such as being, unity, truth and goodness, and that is true both of ontological goodness generally and moral goodness (the good of the human being qua rational agent) specifically. A failure to properly distinguish science from metascience is one of many significant defects of the New Atheism, and we see this defect in the thinking of Harris, Dawkins and even Dan Dennett (see his Darwin's Dangerous Idea; cf. criticisms in Joyce's Evolution of Morality; Rosenberg and Sommers "Darwin's nihilistic idea: Evolution and the meaninglessness of life," Biology and Philosophy 18: 653-68, et alii). Not all are making this error (cf. Carroll and Meyers (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/05/sam_harris_v_sean_carroll.php?)), but quite many of them indeed are.

Ultimately, Harris is on track when it comes to this notion of well-being. But unfortunately what counts as well-being is not a scientific notion. What is it to flourish in terms of survival of individuals, species, or even culture(s) (whether or not the latter is understood in terms of "memes")? That's a question science can answer. But what is it to flourish as a human being? Is flourishing really reducible to survival, or is it something else? These are metascientific questions, and as such they are not ones that science can answer. Science does not give us an ontological understanding of substance, nor can it divide substances into animate and inanimate or, further, animate substances into rational and irrational. And without this metaphysics of the human person, there is no way to determine what counts as true well-being, or achievement of real eudaimonia or human flourishing. So Harris is on the right track but he diverges too far from Aristotle and fails to keep in mind the differentiation of the sciences into the mathematical, the physical, and the metaphysical. Perhaps he fears that conceding too much to metaphysics will require confronting the First Mover arguments, which no atheist old or new has ever succeeded in defeating.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to Meyers and Carroll's thoughts on the subject, I had not seen them. I've actually met Sean Carroll a couple times, and had dinner with him once... he was in the same fairly close-knit community of physicists I was working in during graduate school. I knew he had made comments in his blog from time to time about stuff like this, but I had no idea people viewed him as a New Atheist! I guess he must be getting a much wider audience these days than when he started his blog on his personal website back in the day.

After reading his thoughts on this subject, I find they are pretty much identical to mine. I wonder if there is something about being trained as a physicist that lends one to thinking about certain issues in certain ways.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I think there may be something to your point about needing philosophy and not just pure science to settle moral questions. I'm definitely a lot more open to (although still skeptical of) the idea that science + philosophy combined can answer moral questions than I am to the idea that science alone can do it, where I'm pretty certain the answer must be no. However, you seem to have a much different view from me of what philosophy is about and can do.

I see philosophy as a way of clarifying concepts and sorting out what the best way is to talk about things. You seem to see it as something that goes beyond that and makes inquiries into a whole nother realm that science can't touch. I guess this may be a subtle difference but I think it's important.


Science does not give us an ontological understanding of substance, nor can it divide substances into animate and inanimate or, further, animate substances into rational and irrational. And without this metaphysics of the human person, there is no way to determine what counts as true well-being, or achievement of real eudaimonia or human flourishing.
Harris is on the right track but he diverges too far from Aristotle and fails to keep in mind the differentiation of the sciences into the mathematical, the physical, and the metaphysical. Perhaps he fears that conceding too much to metaphysics will require confronting the First Mover arguments, which no atheist old or new has ever succeeded in defeating.

Science cannot divide substances into animate and inanimate because it has demonstrated--beyond a shadow of a doubt--that Aristotle was completely wrong about there being a dichotemy between the two.

That's the main reason the First Mover argument has no relevance today--there is no such thing as a mover because it was an incoherent concept. It was based on Aristotle's crude 4th-Century BC folk-physics, rather than physics as it's understood today. The idea of a "mover" makes no sense in the modern world, because we know that there isn't any distinction between animate and inanimate things, just a spectrum of complex behavior from crystals to viruses to cells to organisms. We know that when an object is in motion it remains in motion unless a force acts on it, contrary to Aristotle's false belief that objects can only move when animate "movers" act on them, and will come to rest soon after one of these imaginary movers acts on them. We have concrete examples of things like robots that act on their own without anything Aristotle could have mistaken for a mover--things which did not exist in his time and which if did, surely would have enlightened him and changed his mind.

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

What makes you pretty certain that science alone cannot answer moral questions?

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

essius just linked me to great piece written by Sean Carroll on the subject. His views on ethics are pretty much identical to mine, from what I can tell:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/05/03/you-cant-derive-ought-from-is/

I think they also represent the views of most mainstream scientists on the subject.

Of course, after my debates with easwaran, and after watching Sam Harris's TED talk (that Sean links to) I am a little more open to the idea that philosophers may one day work out some kind of sensible objective morality. I don't think it will ever be completely objective, but perhaps there is a way that some of morality could be seen as objective. But if someone comes up with a way to do this, I expect it will take years of detailed complex philosophical arguments, to come up with a consistent way to do it... I don't think it's anything you could just run into the lab and do. I mean, let's say an experimentalist measures some type of brainwave activity, and then publishes a paper claiming that it proves some kind of activity is morally wrong. Why should anyone believe him? We would at least need some philosophers to publish joint papers arguing why what he measured should be connected to morality.

Another example of a similar thing would be interpreting quantum mechanics. I don't think it's an issue that science can settle by itself, you need philosophers to weigh in on it because there are so many things that depend on basic assumptions that need to be sorted out. Of course, in the case of quantum mechanics, I think we are way closer to having an answer than in the case of morality.

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

Interpreting quantum mechanics: what do you see as the role for the philosopher there? What would they be interpreting?

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Ummm... they would be interpreting quantum mechanics? I'm not sure what you're asking here. Wikipedia has a good article on what the issues involved are in interpreting quantum mechanics and why it's one of the largest subfields of Philosophy of Physics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics

The physicists all agree on the math (well, aside from a few nuts), so their work was done a long time ago. But there are still all kinds of unanswered questions about what the best way is to translate the math into English. For example, should we speak about the other branches of the wavefunction as possibilities or actualities? Should you think of the other copies of yourself as "you" or other people? Should you be a realist or an anti-realist about particles, fields, strings, the wavefunction, worlds, etc. (you can answer yes or no to any of those independently). It's a very active an ongoing philosophical debate.

When someone asks me a question like "is quantum mechanics deterministic?" the only answer I can give is that it depends on your interpretation and a whole lot of philosophical assumptions. You can make arguments for or against using the word in different ways, because the word "deterministic" means different things to different people. Only professional philosophers have the time and the perspective to sort through all that and figure out what the best way (or ways) to say it is.

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

So, as you say, it seems to be a matter of translating the math to English. If, during this translation, you are adding 'explanatory power', by actually tying the equations into some larger framework, I guess I would call that physics still. If it is simply translating a given example/equation set into something more easily understood with common language, which doesn't have any implications elsewhere, is that really philosophy?

This is all food for thought though, I'll need to consider what you've said, but I am at least seeing some things differently now.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

The lines between physics and philosophy are not always clear. Nobody knows for sure to what degree spending more time on cleaning up the interpretation of quantum mechanics will possibly lead to new insights that could spur new physical discoveries, or if it is just something interesting to think about.

Most of the work on interpretation of quantum mechanics these days is done by philosophers, but there are a few physicists who also contribute from time to time (like Tom Banks).

I went to two different philosophy lectures on the interpretation of quantum mechanics while I was at UCSC, and they were both very interesting. Although sadly, I think philosophers could benefit from understanding the physics a bit better, some of them have a somewhat loose grasp on it. Tom also published a paper on his view of how to interpret quantum mechanics while I was there--actually, I guess it wasn't published, he just put it on arxiv.org for people to read.

And of course, Bruce and Fred wrote their book on the subject, unfortunately they are both so ignorant of philosophy they end up saying a lot of silly things about consciousness and free will. I think the best work gets done when physicists and philosophers work together, or when people cross over from one field to the other.

There's a picture I have of Tom standing next to David Albert, one of the foremost philosophers of physics who specializes on interpretations of quantum mechanics. They were at a conference dedicated to understanding the Arrow of Time, something else Tom also wrote a paper on, and that lots of philosophers like to think about too.

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

Sounds good to me.

I should thus mention that when I referred to philosophy as "a human approximation to the truth", I was directing this at the parts of philosophy that deal with figuring out "rules to live by" or "morals" and etc. The type of philosophy above would be separate and necessary, as it is more of a translation interface between the sciences and humans.

(1) Philosophy (natural and metascientific) and modern science—coenoscopy and idioscopy

[essius.livejournal.com]

I see philosophy as a way of clarifying concepts and sorting out what the best way is to talk about things. You seem to see it as something that goes beyond that and makes inquiries into a whole nother realm that science can't touch. I guess this may be a subtle difference but I think it's important.

There's no point in clarifying concepts if that clarity is not aimed at the discovery of truth. Seeking to understand our own views and the views of others is important, but that's not going to be of any ultimate worth if we're not seeking truth because we could be deceiving ourselves (both individually and collectively). Philosophy has, perennially speaking, been in the business of investigating the deep structure of reality to get at the fundamental natures of things (concept-clarification being subordinate to this higher end). These investigations include both natural philosophy (as concerned with changeable being, see (2) below) and metaphysics (as concerned with not only material but also immaterial being, should the latter be proven to exist by natural philosophy). Natural philosophy provides the foundation for all modern natural science, for it provides the general principles (noncontradiction, causality) and theorems (changeableness of material being) presupposed to all the special sciences. Another way of putting this is to say with Peirce, following Bentham's usage, that natural philosophy is coenoscopic whereas the modern sciences are idioscopic. Now metascience is only established if the foundations of natural science prove that there is more to the world than changeable, material being (via the First Mover argument and/or arguments for immateriality of soul). If these arguments fail, then—as Aquinas observes—natural philosophy (rather than metaphysics) would be First Philosophy. But either way, philosophy is coenoscopic and deals with general properties of all being, whereas the special sciences are idioscopic—i.e., they single out certain types of being and abstract from others (e.g. biology looks at living beings).

(2) Vindicating Aristotle

[essius.livejournal.com]

Science cannot divide substances into animate and inanimate because it has demonstrated--beyond a shadow of a doubt--that Aristotle was completely wrong about there being a dichotemy between the two. … [W]e know that there isn't any distinction between animate and inanimate things, just a spectrum of complex behavior from crystals to viruses to cells to organisms.

Either all being is animate (and then you're a panpsychist), or inanimate (and then you're a zombie), or there is indeed a distinction between living and nonliving things (as appears to be the correct, Aristotelian view). We know from simple observation that some things exhibit qualities of vital organization and others do not. Humans and nonhuman animals alike are observed to have sensory faculties. Plants and minerals are not. There is no spectrum of complexity between the animate and the inanimate. There's no halfway point between having powers of external sensation and not having said powers, just as there's also no such intermediate point between having the capacity to merely use sign-relations and having the semiotic capacity to know that there are sign-relations (which are invisible to sense and thus outside the scope of nonhuman knowing). You're either sensory or you're not. You're either semiotic or you're not. (You're either pregnant or you're not. You're either aware of your surroundings or you're not.)

That's the main reason the First Mover argument has no relevance today--there is no such thing as a mover because it was an incoherent concept.

No, motion or change as the actualization of potentiality is the most evident thing of which animals—including humans—are aware. You have to adopt a pretty counter-intuitive and static ontology to deny the existence of motion.

The idea of a "mover" makes no sense in the modern world, because … [w]e know that when an object is in motion it remains in motion unless a force acts on it, contrary to Aristotle's false belief that objects can only move when animate "movers" act on them, and will come to rest soon after one of these imaginary movers acts on them.

First of all, Aristotelians since the 6th century (starting with John Philoponus) emended (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philoponus/#2.2) Aristotle's mistake—one which, nota bene, does not present a defeater of any of the premises to Aristotle's First Mover argument in the Physics VIII. (You might as well argue that the First Mover argument is flawed because we now know there are no celestial spheres or that the universe is not eternal; the argument can still proceed with proper cosmological emendations.) Second, Aristotle does not require every mover to be animate, unless you're speaking broadly here.

We have concrete examples of things like robots that act on their own without anything Aristotle could have mistaken for a mover--things which did not exist in his time and which if did, surely would have enlightened him and changed his mind.

These robots themselves had efficient causes that gave them any capacity for "self-movement." These robots did not move themselves into existence. Aristotle's argument also accounts for beings (animals) that have power of locomotion and can thus "move themselves," but not whole qua whole. It is a little disingenuous to assume that Aristotle would have simply "changed his mind" upon "enlightenment" by modern science and observation of modern technology. Modern-day Aristotelians have countered many such objections raised by modern science. The First Mover argument is far from obsolete, as is clear from the Aristotelian arguments championed by such followers of Aristotle and Aquinas as philosophers Benedict Ashley (see The Way toward Wisdom; cf. his Aristotle's Sluggish Earth), Charles De Koninck, James Weisheipl, Ralph McInerny, and many others. (There are also those who see Aristotle's First Mover argument as metaphysical rather than part of natural philosophy, but that is an "in-house debate" amongst different brands of Thomists.)

Re: (2) Vindicating Aristotle

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

It is a little disingenuous to assume that Aristotle would have simply "changed his mind" upon "enlightenment" by modern science and observation of modern technology. Modern-day Aristotelians have countered many such objections raised by modern science.

I suspect Aristotle was much brighter than modern day Aristotelians. He had an excuse for believing the quaint things he did--namely, that he didn't have access to a lot of the knowledge discovered after his death. Modern day believers have no such excuse.

Either all being is animate (and then you're a panpsychist), or inanimate (and then you're a zombie), or there is indeed a distinction between living and nonliving things (as appears to be the correct, Aristotelian view). We know from simple observation that some things exhibit qualities of vital organization and others do not. Humans and nonhuman animals alike are observed to have sensory faculties. Plants and minerals are not. There is no spectrum of complexity between the animate and the inanimate. There's no halfway point between having powers of external sensation and not having said powers

I do not deny there is a distinction that can be made between animate things toward one side of the spectrum and inanimate things toward the other side of the spectrum. What I deny is that there is a dichotemy, that there is any one place where you can draw a line. I think you would need that to be the case if you wanted to believe they were really two different kinds of substances rather than just varying levels of complexity.

I see the relationship between atoms and a conscious animate being as the same as the relationship between a brick and a house. If you put enough bricks together you get a house, but there is no magic number of bricks that you stack up and then suddenly it becomes a house... and they are not different kinds of substances.

You claim "there is no spectrum of complexity between animate and inanimate", so it sounds like you must believe there is a gap in the spectrum somewhere between animate and inanimate. But every level of the spectrum has been studied scientifically in great detail, and no gaps have ever been found. Given any two examples, one of which seems "more animate" than the other, there is always some example of something in between. Where do you propose the gap is? Where do you think the line is?

You mention that humans and non-human animals have sensory faculties while plants and minerals do not. So it sounds like you believe the gap is somewhere between a non-human animal and a plant. So would you consider the following two organisms (sponges and corals) animate or inanimate?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral

I start here since it seems to be where you think the gap is. If you think it is somewhere else, then I'll give you another example.

The legacy of Aristotle and the legacy of Thomas Sebeok

[essius.livejournal.com]

I suspect Aristotle was much brighter than modern day Aristotelians. He had an excuse for believing the quaint things he did--namely, that he didn't have access to a lot of the knowledge discovered after his death. Modern day believers have no such excuse.

Aristotle's errors pertained more to idioscopic knowledge. His natural philosophy, on the other hand, as providing the cenoscopic foundations for the special (idioscopic) sciences, remains just as theoretically robust as ever before. (See, e.g., William Wallace's The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis.) Aristotle's modern-day followers are perhaps not as bright as Aristotle, but that isn't necessarily an insult to such followers (given Aristotle's genius). They continue to prove capable of defending and developing the Stagirite's legacy. They also exhibit a clear understanding of what is and what isn't essential to the premises of Aristotle's First Mover Argument—which is more than I can say for most modern minds that approach the argument. (Case in point: note that you yourself have gone on something of a tangent and raised non sequiturs wholly irrelevant to the argument's validity.)

What I deny is that there is a dichotemy, that there is any one place where you can draw a line. I think you would need that to be the case if you wanted to believe they were really two different kinds of substances rather than just varying levels of complexity.

Even if a line could not be drawn, it would not prove that we do not have two different kind of substances; it would show that there can be hybrid substances—or, more modestly, that we do not know how to classify certain substances. As Wallace (ibid., p. 35) puts it in regard to the inorganic and the organic, "admittedly there are natural entities whose kind is difficult to establish and which thus might leave us in doubt whether life can be predicated of them. But most specimens encountered in normal surroundings do not present this difficulty: we classify them as plant or animal if they manifest vital activities at one level or another, and if not, we regard them as inorganic." The same goes for the inanimate and the animate.

I would also submit that there are lines that can be drawn, to which Sebeokan biosemioticians such as Jesper Hoffmeyer point us in his Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. There Hoffmeyer supplements Stuart Kauffman's notion of "autocatalytic closure" (cf. the autopoetics of Maturana and Varela) with "the generation of a closed membrane around such an autocatalytically closed system of chemical components and thereby the creation of a basic asymmetry between an inside and an outside, making the membrane a potential interface structure through which the autocatalytic mix on the inside might learn to adjust cleverly to conditions outside" (p. 34, italics in original). This, however, is only the second step, as Hoffmeyer also suggests that higher-level autocatalysis must emerge through interacting systems of membrane units; that the reactive combinations must be stabilized through reproducible arrangements that count as digitial redescriptions (as in RNA and DNA sequences); and there must be a kind of feedback loop between the membrane system and that system of digital code.

Re: The legacy of Aristotle and the legacy of Thomas Sebeok

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

"we classify them as plant or animal if they manifest vital activities at one level or another, and if not, we regard them as inorganic." The same goes for the inanimate and the animate.

The distinction of organic vs inorganic has nothing to do with different substances or vital signs. Roughly, it's just whether something is made of molecules that contain carbon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_compounds
"The modern meaning of "organic compound" is any one of them that contains a significant amount of carbon - even though many of the "organic compounds" known today have no connection whatsoever with any substance found in living organisms."
...
"There is no official definition of an organic compound. Some text books define an organic compound as one containing one or more C-H bonds; others include C-C bonds in the definition. Others state that if a molecule contains carbon it is organic."

The idea that somehow the presence or absence of carbon atoms could somehow determine whether something has a soul or is a "mover" in any important philosophical sense is patently absurd. Carbon only differs from other atoms by the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons it has.

Of course, as you point out, inorganic vs organic is a different distinction from animate vs inanimate. But my point is that there are lots of different things in the world that have varying levels of complexity. It's useful to organize these by classifying them, but the classifications are all arbitrary, they don't represent any sharp distinction in nature, they just represent convenient labels that we can put on the different stages of complexity. And there are a lot more of these stages than just the transition from inorganic to organic, and the transition from plant to animal. All of the transitions are fuzzy, not sharp, and the categorization of many things (such as the corals I linked to) has changed over the years from one side to the other side of the boundary as we redefine terms. There's nothing different about that than when it was voted on a few years ago to declare Pluto was not a planet. It doesn't mean that suddenly there were 9 of these "planet substances" in the solar system and then after the declaration there were only 8 of them... it just means that the labels we put on different organizations of matter are arbitrary.

Re: A First Mover

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I must say that I find it sad that you seem to have spent a lot of your time reading about stuff that to me, looks like it was a big waste of time.

I haven't looked into the "First Mover" argument all that much, because it's the kind of thing that just sounds irrelevant and completely unconvincing to me. But since you do seem to have invested a lot of time in it, being well-read and seeming fairly intelligent, I think it's interesting that someone like yourself could take such things seriously. So I'll give you some reasons why I don't think the First Mover argument makes any sense (admittedly given only my very vague understanding of what the argument is).

I think a lot of the argument was motivated by things that seemed important at the time, and may have remained important for many centuries, but which have since fallen out of relevance in light of modern science. The lack of a clear distinction between animate and inanimate is only the first of many of these things, which is why I mentioned it first (even though, as you say, you may be able to formulate versions of the argument without reference to that).

The next two things, after inanimate/animate that I'd mention that are seen much differently today are these concepts of "force" and "motion". In the way in which I understand the physical world, which admittedly is not the way that most people understand the world since it is based on a lot of heavy theoretical physics and mathematics... there is no need for any notion of force or motion to enter the picture. Depending on whether one is more of an eliminativist or more of a reductionist, one could either argue that both of these are illusions, or instead simply say that both of them reduce to other more fundamental concepts.

In the case of motion, Galileo was the first person to begin demonstrating that it's really an illusion. Galileo discovered the principle of relativity, which implies (among other things) that there is no difference between objects at rest and objects in motion--the difference is just a matter of perspective and depends on your reference frame. Now, this doesn't destroy the idea of motion completely, just the notion of absolute motion. You could still believe that relative motion has meaning, that is--the idea that there is some important difference between a case where the distance between two objects is increasing and where it is remaining fixed. However, I think even relative motion has been rendered illusory after Einstein expanded Galileo's notion of relativity to include not just space but time. After the unification of space and time into spacetime, and the realization that time is simply another dimension on the same footing as space, rather than some entirely separate kind of thing, the whole idea of motion can be seen as simply an illusion. The real way to understand the universe is by looking at it in terms of 4-dimensions, where all of history is mapped out ahead of time, and the appearance of motion is only due to us trying to compare different spacelike slices to each other and imagine that they happen in a sequence, one after another, rather than just being all there at once. Granted, that's one way of looking at it, and it is still often useful to see it in the older more outdated 3-dimensional way.

(continued...)

First Mover

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

But it's not just motion that is an illusion, it's also force. Force played a very important role in classical physics and even in Einstein's relativistic physics, but with the advent of quantum mechanics it has basically disappeared from the foundations of physics as playing any important role. When you write down the equations of quantum field theory that govern the behavior of all matter and energy in the universe, there is no reference whatsoever to force. Emmy Noether proved that the so-called "forces" of nature are due instead to symmetries. The symmetries are the more fundamental concept, and they only turn into what looks like forces when you think about large macroscopic objects... or a large collection of certain types of particles like photons that are sometimes called "force carriers". Isaac Newton's concept of force was an illusion in the sense that there is no need for it in a truly fundamental description of the world. However, the idea can be preserved in our language, as long as it is understood that it's just an emergent concept not an important fundamental ingredient.

So, coming from that understanding of forces and motion, I have a hard time taking any argument seriously that tries to ascribe important metaphysical roles for them. But in addition to force and motion being mostly illusions, the idea of cause and effect has also become mostly extinct in modern physics. And I think this is related to the idea of viewing the universe as a static, 4th-dimensional manifold, rather than something 3 dimensional that keeps changing. We write down equations that try to describe the universe, but there's never any clear way of dividing the universe into separate causes and effects. Aside from a slight dependency on how you interpret quantum mechanics, the equations are fully deterministic and reversible. So you could just as easily view something far in the future as a cause of something in the past, or something far in the past as a cause for something in the future. The important thing is describing the *relationship* between them, viewing one things as a cause and another as an effect is an outdated way of thinking. In other branches of science, like biology, I think causes and effects remain more important. For instance, you could ask whether smoking causes cancer. However, even in these less fundamental fields of science, causality plays far less of a role than it did in the past, and most of the focus is on correlation not causation.

(continued...)

Re: The legacy of Aristotle and the legacy of Thomas Sebeok

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

So for the most part, I'd say that cause and effect is an illusion, force is an illusion, and motion is an illusion. So trying to construct an argument out of illusions isn't going to get you very far.

But just for entertainment, let me try to take Aristotle's argument seriously... and let's imagine for the moment that the universe really was a network of causes and effects. There are three possibilities. First, you could have no first causes (where the universe is infinite and time stretches all the way back into the past and all the way in the future). Second, you could have a single first cause. And third, you could have many first causes. All of these are logical possibilities, and there is no way to use reason to distinguish between them. The only way is to go out and do experiments and find out whether there were 0, 1, or many (or perhaps an infinite number) of first causes. No philosophical argument can favor one scenario of the rest.

The first view, where there are no first causes, was the view of people like Fred Hoyle (and much of the scientific community) before Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding. After Hubble's discovery, the scientific consensus shifted to there being a beginning of time in our universe, rather than time stretching back infinitely into the past as it was generally assumed before then. Many religious people took the Big Bang as confirmation that the old religious myths were true, and that there really was indeed a first cause, a moment in time where it all began. But today the question is still actively being investigated, because it is not known whether the Big Bang was indeed the first moment in time or if our universe was just a bubble that expanded out of a larger background universe. I did a little bit of work on this subject during grad school, but never got any conclusive results on it that I could publish. The point is, you cannot settle these questions through abstract reasoning, you have to do the experiments and look at the data to find out.

The third possibility, where there are lots of first causes rather than a single first cause, is something that is also still a serious possibility. (I'm saying this of course with the understanding that the whole idea of cause and effect doesn't really make too much sense any more, but to the extent that it can be well defined I think this is true.) This depends on how you interpret quantum mechanics, but at least in some interpretations the equations are non-deterministic and there are random events (first causes) that happen at every moment. So in those interpretations, there is nothing special at all about the Big Bang as being a "first cause" since there are literally new first causes going on every moment as these random events are happening. The events can cause other events to happen, but they have no cause themselves and are purely statistical in nature.

(continued...)

First Mover

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

So there are all lots of possibilities for how many first causes there are. But let's say for the sake of argument again, that it turned out there was only a single first cause, rather than none or many... a single moment in time where everything began, and you could deterministically evolve the universe from that point onward, predicting every future event from that first event.

Even if that is the case, there's absolutely no reason why that first cause would have to be an intelligent being--it could simply be a singularity of spacetime, a big explosion of zero entropy from which everything else came out of, and after which entropy started increasing and things started getting more disorganized.

Indeed, I find that a far more deeply satisfying and elegant explanation for how things began than that there was some anthropomorphic intelligence that waved his hand and said "let there be light". Adding an extra first cause before the real first cause, with the stipulation that the extra first cause be an intelligent creature... is adding an unnecessary and ugly extra feature to an otherwise beautiful theory.

The reason why I initially mentioned the lack of a distinction between inanimate and animate things is because one of the strangest parts of Aristotle's argument to me... is that he would assume that whatever the first cause was, it had to be animate. It could have just as well been inanimate, in fact that would make a great deal more sense.

Addendum

[essius.livejournal.com]

I see the relationship between atoms and a conscious animate being as the same as the relationship between a brick and a house. If you put enough bricks together you get a house, but there is no magic number of bricks that you stack up and then suddenly it becomes a house... and they are not different kinds of substances.

I think you are missing that for Aristotle formal causes, substantial form, etc. are notions that already entail organization and information. It is an open question as to what level of organization is required for a being to be this or that. Even among contemporary Aristotelian-Thomists, for example, there are debates as to when "hominization" occurs (some think at conception, some think later). Just because we cannot pinpoint the precise moment does not mean there isn't one. Either a being has a certain substantial form, or it doesn't.

Given any two examples, one of which seems "more animate" than the other, there is always some example of something in between. … You mention that humans and non-human animals have sensory faculties while plants and minerals do not. So it sounds like you believe the gap is somewhere between a non-human animal and a plant. So would you consider the following two organisms (sponges and corals) animate or inanimate?

Although these are difficult cases, it seems most scientists consider these to be animals because of their cell membranes. I don't know enough about them to know whether they would fit all the components of Hoffmeyer's above analysis, but both they seem to have some inchoate interface with their surrounding environment.