Montesquieu was a Straussian

Here is something to chew on, from Montesquieu’s My Thoughts [HenryC. Clark, trans.]:

Look at how, in Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, the scientists who explained lunar eclipses by natural causes were suspect to the people.  The called them weather fanatics, convinced that they reduced all of divinity to natural and scientific causes, until Socrates cut to the root of everything by subjecting the necessity of natural causes to a divine and intelligent origin.  The doctrine of an intelligent being was thus discovered by Plato only as an antidote and a defensive weapon against the calumnies of the pagan zealots. 

Wow.  Montesquieu (1689-1755) was a Straussian!  That is to say that he interpreted a very significant element in Platonic/Socratic thought as essentially political in nature.  Plato came up with the idea of an intelligent designer in order to protect philosophy against religious opposition. 

I suspect that Montesquieu is right about that.  Most of the speculation about God in Plato’s dialogues comes in the form of deliberately constructed myths or, what is the same thing, discussions of what teachings are proper to a healthy political community.  It is an open question whether or in what way Plato believed in the divine, though I see no evidence of atheism in his thought. 

Two more things stand out in this passage.  One is that the tension between philosophy and religion has always turned on the problem of reductionism.  It is the fear that, by explaining something, one explains it away.  The second is that Plato was the originator of the doctrine of intelligent design.  Surely that is wrong, one might object.  Didn’t the pagan zealots believe in such a thing?  No.  Their beliefs were grounded in the myths.  Plato’s notion of the intelligent designer begins with the intelligible Kosmos and reasons from that to God.  That kind of thought might well begin with Socrates.  

Nagel's Neoaristotelian Teleology

In Chapter 4, Section 6 of Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel adds a fourth kind of explanation for the existence of organisms, consciousness, reason, and value.  The first three I have considered in previous posts: chance, non-intentional biasing, and intentional biasing. 

Nagel considers all three to be inadequate.  He accepts the apparent consensus that the appearance of the original, proto-biological self-replicators cannot be explained by random processes.  He accepts Robert White’s argument that non-intentional biasing is not indicated because, while it can explain non-random patterns, it cannot explain a bias “towards the marvelous.”  This is to say that non-intentional biasing is no more likely to produce creatures or traits of creatures that look designed than mere chance.  Finally, he rejects intentional biasing in large part because he is an atheist. 

So what is left?  Nagel proposes a naturalistic teleology

that is distinct from all three of the other candidate explanations: chance, creationism, and directionless physical law. 

What does a “naturalistic teleology” mean?  When we try to understand any natural event, we look for ways in which the initial state of the system limits subsequent states.  A beaker of water can be frozen or heated to a boil, but not transformed into gold.  Lava under the earth can produce a volcano, but not Godzilla. 

Given any initial state of a system, some subsequent states are more likely than others.  It is rare, but not unprecedented, for mammalian evolution to move toward the development of wings and flight.  Some mammals returned to the sea and began to look a lot like fish; however, they did not develop gills.  This is what Daniel Dennett meant when he talked about “design space”.  At any point in the history of life on earth, a range of future organisms is possible.  As environments change, evolution will explore the possibilities in design space.  A population of lizards may change color to blend in better with new local vegetation, but the lizards will not acquire the power of genuine invisibility. 

Nagel proposes that the laws of physics underlying the appearance of life are biased towards “the formation of more complex systems”. 

Teleological laws would assign higher probability to steps on paths in state space that have a higher velocity toward certain outcomes. 

In other words, there is something in inorganic matter that is biased toward the development of something like human beings.  It smoothed the path toward the appearance of the Ur-replicators, and then toward the development of genuine organisms.  It has operated in evolution up to the appearance of philosophers. 

All I would add at this point is that Nagel has become an Aristotelian, if not a Platonist.  The Socratics clearly believed in an embedded teleology.  It is not, or not so much, that some God intervenes to govern the course of organic development.  It is that mind is already present in the forces that mold living things. 

That is a shockingly bold proposal.  How it can be maintained and/or squared with a scientific scheme seems to me to be a challenging question.  I don’t know if we can make sense of such an embedded teleology without a divine intention biasing the cosmos; however, if we forget about that question for a moment, this is a plausible picture of the history of life on earth. 

Roger White on Origin of Life Explanations 2

Roger White distinguishes three types of phenomena, illustrated by “pebble patterns.” 

The Chancy Explanation: Pebbles scattered randomly on a sidewalk require no other explanation than chance. 

Unintentional Biasing: Pebbles arranged in order of diminishing size as they a near the shoreline. 

Intentional Biasing: Pebbles arranged in the shape of a fish (without legs). 

I altered the last one in a way that I hope will be amusing.  According to White, all but a few of those who write with expertise on the problem of the origin of life believe this phenomenon must fall into the second category.  Some natural forces must bias the Kosmos toward the emergence of life, just as the tides bias the pebbles toward a coherent pattern. 

The third explanation is ruled out as unscientific.  The first is ruled out because it is wildly implausible that the conditions upon which the emergence of self-replicators depends should have come about, in the time allotted, merely by chance.  Unintentional biasing must therefore be true by default. 

White argues that the reason that the origin of life is not at all like the unintentional biasing of pebbles by size on the beach. 

The numerous steps required for life to exist are quite unlike this. It is not a matter of the same event-type or property being instantiated many times without exception. The conditions required for the emergence of life have little at all in common.

Adding a bit to what White says, the emergence of life on earth seems to have been a single event (however long it took), not a repeated pattern. 

Why then are most scientists so reluctant to allow too much chance into their accounts of life’s emergence? I will offer a speculative diagnosis. The conviction that life couldn’t have arisen by chance is typically a gut reaction to the data, not a conclusion arrived at on the basis of a theory about when it is plausible to ascribe something to the work of chance.

What makes this event seem so implausible to so many is that it seems to suggest unmistakable evidence of design. 

Again adding to White, I would contrast the origin of life problem with the problem that Darwin addressed.  Why do so many different organisms exist, all of them more or less well adapted to their respective ecological niches?  That is a pattern that is persistent historically and geographically.  Natural selection then can be seen as the unintentional biasing mechanism analogous to the motion of water acting on the pebbles. 

Interestingly, unintentional biasing would be a much more likely explanation for the origin of self-replicators if Aristotle had been right about spontaneous generation.  If the emergence of living organisms from non-living matter under predictable conditions were a persistent feature of nature, as Aristotle, for understandable reasons, believed that it was, then unintentional biasing toward the emergence of life would be very likely indeed.  Of course, this is not the case. 

White makes a strong case that unintentional biasing in nature is not a well-grounded explanation for the origin of life.  That leaves chance and intentional (or intelligent) design.  I would suggest, however, that his dismissal of the gut reactions of so many scientists is premature.  To use one of his analogies, if a tornado picked up a pile of spare parts and assembled it into a working 747 airliner, no one would interpret this was the work of mere chance.  If even the simplest molecular self-replicators as well-designed as the airplane (which may be the case) and unintentional biasing is not a plausible interpretation of the former, then…

I am not making an argument for intelligent design here.  I am not particularly interested in it only because I don’t know what to do with it when thinking philosophically and scientifically about the phenomenon of life.  I do think that White’s argument could be turned almost as easily (perhaps just as easily) into an argument for intelligent design as for the origin of life by chance.  That fact may tell us something about the phenomenon.  If so, it would be unscientific to ignore it.  

Nagel 4: Reason & A Rational Kosmos

In Chapter 5 of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Thomas Nagel takes a decisive (though unacknowledged) step in the direction of Socratic rationalism. 

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all assumed that the brute fact of logos, the human capacity for rational thought and speech, implied a certain view of the Kosmos.  In the Phaedo, Socrates grounds the fundamental turn in his thought (how Socrates became Socratic) in the insight that if reason is to be reliable, this can only be because K is rational. 

I heard someone reading, as he said, from a book of Anaxagoras, that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was delighted at this notion, which appeared quite admirable, and I said to myself: If mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each particular in the best place; and I argued that if any one desired to find out the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of anything, he must find out what state of being or doing or suffering was best for that thing, and therefore a man had only to consider the best for himself and others, and then he would also know the worse, since the same science comprehended both.

And I rejoiced to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes of existence such as I desired, and I imagined that he would tell me first whether the earth is flat or round; and whichever was true, he would proceed to explain the cause and the necessity of this being so, and then he would teach me the nature of the best and show that this was best; and if he said that the earth was in the centre, he would further explain that this position was the best, and I should be satisfied with the explanation given, and not want any other sort of cause. And I thought that I would then go on and ask him about the sun and moon and stars, and that he would explain to me their comparative swiftness, and their returnings and various states, active and passive, and how all of them were for the best.

 For I could not imagine that when he spoke of mind as the disposer of them, he would give any other account of their being as they are, except that this was best; and I thought that when he had explained to me in detail the cause of each and the cause of all, he would go on to explain to me what was best for each and what was good for all.

Socrates supposed that, if K is rationally comprehensible, then K must involve the rationally good. 

Whether Nagel must move in that direction is not clear to me yet; though I see some signs of it.  He argues in Section 5 of Chapter 4 that the human capacity for rational thought is as big a problem as the big problem of consciousness.  Consciousness that divides the world into self and not-self is one thing.  A grasp of objective reality and objective value, independent of the subjective position, is quite another.  Here is how he lays out the implications.

If there is such a thing as reason, then:

1.       There are objective, mind-independent truths of different kinds;

2.      By starting from the way things initially appear to us, we can use reason collectively to achieve justified beliefs about some of those objective truths;

3.      Those believes in combination can directly influence what we do;

4.      These processes of discovery and motivation, while mental, are inseparable from physical processes in the organism. 

If reason is what it appears to be, then two big consequences about K follow: there are objectives truths about the parts and the whole of K and the history of K includes the appearance of creatures that can discover those truths. 

This was the basic assumption of classical philosophy and perhaps of all possible philosophy: that the human mind and the Kosmos operate according to the same (or mostly the same) basic principles.  Otherwise all rational investigation (including all scientific investigations) would be vain.  That means that mind belongs not only to human beings but to Being itself. 

What this commits us to is not clear.  Do we have to believe, as Socrates clearly does, that any explanation of astronomical phenomena must include the concept of what is best?  That would require a very big leap beyond the boundaries of modern scientific thought. 

It is not altogether out of the question.  The cosmological constants argument for the existence of an intelligent designer rests on the claim that K is fine-tuned for the existence of life on earth.  If gravity were just an infinitesimal bit weaker or stronger (along with a considerable number of other cosmological constants), there would be either no K at all or a K without the possibility of life. 

Apart from the theological implications of this argument, it is conceivable that they prove Socrates right.  Whether or how we conceive of G, it might be the case that we cannot explain K without the concept of what is best.  I’m not buying in just yet, but I think that the possibility is open. 

Without deploying teleology on a cosmic scale, it remains a fact that the universe is rational if indeed it exists as science imagines it.  The fact that such creatures as ourselves exist in it is central to understanding it, as Nagel argues.