Thanks for these! Lots of McDowell ahead for me!
That is, indeed, my thinking. I can understand the division between natural and human-made. If we want to call anything unnatural, I can understand putting laptops, space shuttles, and firearms in that category. These are things that would not have come into existence if they had not been first imagined, and then intentionally constructed. Run the laws of physics without imagination and intention forever, and you’re not going to ever see a laptop.
Things that we had no hand in making occurred naturally. Minds and consciousness are among those things.
If our science cannot explain something that occurred naturally, then either our science isn’t completed, or there are things outside of the purview of our science. But to say something is unnatural because it is not explained by our science?
Nor will you get an ant hill, a bee hive, a beaver dam or a cuckoo’s nest.
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First, thanks for the analysis, it is very helpful!
My heuristic is that mind or consciousness is non-objective. It is true that we can ascertain that other beings (including animals) are conscious by examining their behaviour (although it’s also true that there are many organisms including plants which are edge cases.) But, again, if we know ‘consciousness’ at all, it is because we ourselves are conscious, and consciousness knows itself in the immediate sense. As I said above, 'before we know what it’s like to be anything, we know what it is to be.’
That is also the basis of Chalmer’s argument — that no matter how sophisticated the objective tools we have, the felt reality of existence is not something that can be captured by them. But again, that is not a problem in need of a solution, so much as an observation about the limitations of objective analysis.
Here I want to juxtapose two categories: natural v artificial, and natural v supernatural. Obviously we recognise the distinction between artificial and supernatural (although much of the technology we nowadays take for granted would appear supernatural to our forbears). But the point I am trying to make is that we tend to regard the natural as distinct from artificial as a symbol of purity, a ‘natural good’. The environment, wildlife preservation and respect for traditional cultures embody that respect (which is not to deprecate those attitudes in the least, as they’re crucial, wholesome and worthy social functions.) But when secular culture valorises “the natural,” it mirrors (or maybe sublimates) what religious cultures valorise as “the sacred.” Both reach toward something that stands outside the human-constructed, the contingent, the merely conventional. So nature comes to represent “the unconditioned.” The natural, in this symbolic register, isn’t simply “what exists without human intervention” in a neutral sense; it carries the weight of givenness, of something we receive rather than make, something that precedes and exceeds our projects, ‘from which we arise, to which we will return’. You could say that ‘nature is the god of naturalism’ (and the beloved David Attenborough its prophet.)
But — and this is a crucial caveat — every ecosystem, however pristine, is a system of consumption, predation, decay, and regeneration. Nature’s “purity” is the purity of the cycle — which is not the same thing at all as the unconditioned. That is why in the higher religions (and in Greek philosophy) there was still the hint (as a hint is all it can be) of ‘the deathless’, ‘the immortal’.
In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature–even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man–frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy ~ Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, pp. 123-127.
There’s a lot more that could be said but that’s enough for a single post.
Good work!
I still have difficulty imagining any intelligent person espousing the kind of physicalism you are targeting here, though. I guess for me, who cannot find any sense in substance dualism, or substance ontology in general, the salient idea of physicalism is just the idea that it seems the basic constituents of the world are fields, and that whatever fields there might be are either physically detectable or if “non-physical” fields exist, strictly unknowable and hence irrelevant to us in this life.
Good work!
I still have difficulty imagining any intelligent person espousing the kind of physicalism you are targeting here, though. I guess for me, who cannot find any sense in substance dualism, or substance ontology in general, the salient idea of physicalism is just the idea that it seems the basic constituents of the world are fields, and that whatever fields there might be are either physically detectable or if “non-physical” fields exist, strictly unknowable and hence irrelevant to us in this life.
That’s true. What does it mean? Do ants, bees, beavers, and cuckoos imagine and intentionality construct things? Are ant hills, beehives, beaver dams, and cuckoo nests unnatural the way laptops are?
You’d be surprised! I’ve been labouring over some difficult analytical philosophy of late, and behind nearly all of it is a conviction that knowledge is essentially physical in nature, comprising signals, processing by the physical brain, which is a neurochemical process built by physical evolution. Causation is itself a physical process. Which is what Hans Jonas and Evan Thompson are calling into question.
I know you’ve mentioned Michael Levin. See his Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments. Of course it’s not an easy paper, but I think it’s intended for a general audience unlike many of his specialist contributions. Through his work, I’m starting to get a sense of how a kind of Platonist realism can be conceptualised in relation to biology.
I don’t see laptops or any aspect of human culture as being unnatural. For me purpose and intentional action are on a spectrum form very simple to immensely complex.
@Patterner @John The question of teleology was the subject of a related thread On Purpose.
Maybe “unnatural” is not the right words. In a sense, nothing that exists in this reality can be unnatural. But if a probe landed on another planet, and sent back images of buildings with glass windows, or objects grouped into prime numbers, or any number of other things, we would say they were not naturally-occurring.
That depends on the nature of consciousness. If it’s what I think, then there are no edge cases. There are only things that don’t behave in ways that demonstrate consciousness as we traditionally think consciousness must be demonstrated.
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I’m glad. It’s good to have a thoughtful OP to converse about.
@Patterner @Wayfarer @John
Just home after a long travel day. Phil will have to wait, but I look forward to more discussion about what “natural” may be contrasted with. Til tomorrow.
Excellent! This should be the elementary question we should have been asking.
In fact, there shouldn’t be a gap – the gap was broadcasted by a school of thought that opposes physicalism. Logically, there shouldn’t be a gap in their explanation because physicalism includes the subjectivity as part of mind and consciousness process.
Because the mind/consciousness is not a countable entity and it isn’t a finite thing, the connection does not leave for an unexplained separation between brain and mind. The brain is embodied in the mind and vice versa.
Can you explain how this works? Nothing about physical structures or processes suggests, or is remotely like, subjective experience. How does it come about?
Except for that it doesn’t. You’re overlooking something fundamental in the constitution of post-Galilean science, which assumes the separation of subject and object, and endeavours to ‘bracket’ the subjective element as far as possible, so as to arrive at maximally objective result.
And your last paragraph is a non sequitur.
Indeed ! In a certain sense, biology is “deeper” than physics. Perhaps a lust for foundations insists on the most reduced as the most real.
It’s like taking a great painting and putting all of the colors back in their own little tubes to discover the real painting.
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This is a great theme. It occurs to me that precisely this cycle, this wheel, is a tempting reading of the “deathless.” This mortal cycle is not itself mortal. Death does not die, and birth was not born.
Nothing? How do you see colors or smell food?
Sorry. I have to laugh at your “maximally objective result” assumed by post-Galilean science.
So post Galilean science is antagonistic to the mind? I don’t understand your objection to subjective experience.
Please explain.