Cartesian long enough

Rene Descartes was, in many senses, the father of modern analytic philosophy.  While very few modern philosophers would imagine that they are dualists, almost all of them have confined themselves within the categories of Cartesian dualism.  Descartes saw the physical world as fundamentally dead: matter in motion.  Thus conscious mind could be accounted for only by supposing that it was ontologically independent of the physical body.  Physicalists and materialists have supposed that the mind was ontologically dependent on the physical body, as red paint is ontologically dependent on the stuff in the paint can.  Yet in doing so they maintain the Cartesian understanding of mind and matter as the phenomena to be explained or, in the former case, explained away.  Descartes’ mind remained something of a scandal for modern physicalist thought. 

This is one reason why Darwinism has been an open wound on the modern soul.  Apart from its supposed challenge to Biblical creation, Darwinism seemed to many to amount to an invasion of the realm of the mind by the physical sciences.  If mind is simply a Darwinian engine for survival and reproduction, then art, literature, music, are only so many scratches and cat calls produced by Cartesian machines.  This is why confirmed evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin went to war against the “ultra-Darwinists” like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.  Gould and Lewontin were trying to save a space for Cartesian mind to do beautiful things and care genuinely about each other.  I believe this is a dilemma easily escaped once one is liberated from the Cartesian dichotomy. 

The philosopher Hans Jonas saw early that Darwinism cuts both ways.  If it means that life is more dependent on physical processes than Descartes had supposed (and it is) it also means that physical processes are less dead than he supposed (and they are).  As mind and information are always embedded in some material, so the physical matter in the kosmos has within it the potential to produce mind.  Were it not for planet Earth, with its astonishing variety of living organisms, some ghostly visitor to this kosmos would never have guessed that stardust and light had such a potential. 

I submit that the thesis that autonomy is an essential element in the phenomenon of life is the means for finally liberating us from the Cartesian trap.  Here is a bit from the conclusion of the Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo and Alvaro Moreno paper I referenced in my last post:

If we understand the phenomenon of life as a complex network of processes that take shape and propagate both at an individual and a historical-collective dimension—in our terms, as the history of the proliferation of various forms of autonomous organization (from chemical to unicellular, multicellular, developmental, cognitive, and, only recently, to rational autonomy)—the radical Cartesian separation between nature and mind simply disappears. The capacity of a system to determine itself, to establish its own rules and norms of behavior, and to create meaningful environments no longer belongs exclusively to the realm of rationality. At the same time, the natural world cannot be regarded as a universe where blind forces, acting without any sense or purpose, operate: the study of the fundamental mechanisms underlying biological organization, with all their intricacies, has clearly refuted that possibility.

Once life begins on this world, it begins exploring.  Lineages extend across time but they also fork.  Organisms push into new niches as they create new niches.  Such niches are defined not only geographically, as creates crawl up the sand of the primordial beach; they are also defined in terms of complexity.  All organisms are autonomous‑resisting what is outside and other in order to preserve what is inside and the self.  As Mirazo and Moreno argue, life jumps to increasingly robust kinds of autonomy.  The eukaryotic cell, possessing a nucleus, can regulate itself in ways that prokaryotic cells cannot.  Multicellular organisms add further levels of self-regulation, including, eventually, conscious awareness. 

Human freedom and nobility are greater, I submit, than anything else in the visible kosmos.  They are greater by many magnitudes than the simple cells from which they arose.  Yet they are expressions of the potential already evident in the Ur organism.  The Cartesian dichotomy has blinded us to this for a long time.  It is time to drop it. 

Three Kinds of Teleology

Whenever the explanation of some process or characteristic involves a goal or purpose at which it aims or which it serves, that explanation involves teleology. 

Teleological explanations fall into three large categories, distinct by their range and principles.  For the moment I will call them theological, evolutionary, and biological.

Theological teleology assumes a Theos or God who designs the universe and all that is in it with some purpose in mind.  God hangs the sun and the moon in the sky in order to provide a guiding light for man and His other creatures, as we read in the book of Genesis. 

Evolutionary teleology does not necessarily depend on any theological assumptions.  It argues that the processes by which the Kosmos and life on earth emerge and develop are goal directed.  Nature as a whole is striving for something.  Any account of life that involves goals on a species level falls into this category. 

Biological teleology simply recognizes that organic processes involve constant correction towards predetermined ends and that many traits of organisms can only be understood by their function. 

Natural theology, such as that presented by Thomas Aquinas, includes all three.  Natural theology is perfectly compatible with mechanical accounts of biological causation.  God does not necessarily have to intervene in the course of ontogeny if He so designed an individual organism to develop in a certain way. 

Aristotle recognized the second type of teleology.  He argues, in On the Generation of Animals, that the persistence of each species is the result of a striving toward the divine.  Whereas Divine beings are eternal, organisms admit of being and not being.  Individual organisms cannot escape this limitation, but the species can.  So, human beings cannot be eternal (and hence divine) numerically; however, the human being can be so, in the way that is open to it, genetically. 

Aristotle also recognized biological teleology.  Organisms develop and act toward certain ends and have traits that are explained by their function.  This is the only kind of teleology that is recognized by modern biological science.  While Aristotle’s view of the species/individual dichotomy is largely consistent with modern biology, his evolutionary teleology has no purchase.  Evolution is not a goal directed process, as Darwinian biology understands it. 

Theological teleology is necessarily outside the realm of science.  This is so not because of a lack evidence for God’s designing mind in the work of creation.  One may or may not take seriously such arguments as the appeal to cosmological constants as such evidence.  The problem is that the Theos is too powerful an explanatory factor.  An omnipotent God can do anything and therefore He explains everything.  For that very reason, He explains little or nothing in a scientific sense. 

It is probably a good thing that evolutionary teleology has been dispensed with.  While Aristotle’s version was benign, modern versions have underwritten such deplorable doctrines as Social Darwinism.  Evolutionary teleology has tended to be authoritarian.  Only retrograde people oppose the direction of evolution. 

Biological teleology helps us to understand why we care about what we care about.  It leaves us free to care most about what we should care about: living the best human lives individually and collectively.  If my love for my children is in large part a product of an evolutionary process by which my genes have managed to keep in play, fine.  Rejecting evolutionary teleology, I don’t have to give a rat’s ass about my genes.  I am free to care about my daughter and my son. 

Nagel on Mind & Cosmos

More notes on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  Nagel uses the terms “materialism” and “materialist” where I would use “physicalism” and “physicalist”.  So far I think my usage is vindicated. 

The word materialism is more reductionist in implication that those who use it ordinarily intend.  It focuses the mind on the concept of material at the expense of all the non-material aspects of physical nature such as form and energy.  Nagel uses the term to encompass all physical explanations. 

To take an example, consider a beaker of water sitting over a gas flame.  The beaker is material and the water is material.  But the water is being heated without any change in the molecular constituents of the water and the molecules of glass hold the water in place only because they are in a certain shape.  Shatter the glass and the same material will produce a distinct set of phenomena. 

Again, I prefer physicalism because I think that the physical can be defined (as Nagel neglects to define it) as the measurable.  I am only on Chapter 3, making notes as I go, but it already seems clear that the title of the book is both misleadingly provocative and understated.  Nagel is not arguing that “the materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is false.”  So far, he doesn’t seem to quarrel with any part of the Darwinian synthesis. 

He is claiming that physicalist science is necessarily incomplete and (a more radical claim) that a complete account of nature is possible.  He has made it pretty clear so far that he is not going offer any such account but intends to say what kind of account would meet the purpose. 

Nagel does not flirt with dualism, let alone theism.  He thinks that the brain does produce the conscious mind and that human brains and consciousness are products of evolution.  But he thinks that physical explanations alone cannot for consciousness.

I think that that is clearly correct, at least in the meantime.  He considers various physicalist approaches to the mind/body problem.  Behaviorists attempted to reduce terms for mental states to terms for behavioral states, so that “pain” meant nothing more nor less than saying “ouch!”  That is unsatisfactory, as anyone knows who has heard the one about the two behaviorists who have just finished making love.  “That was good for you,” says the one; “how was it for me?”  Obviously, first person experience is a better guide to one’s own mental states than any behavior one might display. 

Identify theorists argue that mental states are identical with brain states, so that any mental state Ψ is to some physical (brain) state Φ as water is to H2O.  This analogy fails because H2O is a sufficient explanation for water in all its forms whereas there is nothing in a measurable brain state that would lead you to infer the existence of consciousness if you did not already know that the latter was a fact. 

I would add, though Nagel skips past it, that the same is true of functionalist accounts of mind.  Minds are obviously functional.  They process information in ways that allow us to navigate around obstacles and find food and mates.  However, as the infamous zombie problem indicates, there is no obvious reason why a mind has to involve consciousness in order to function properly.  If one of those robot vacuum cleaners can navigate around table legs without being aware of them, what need have I for all my heartbreaks? 

Consciousness seems, at present, radically private.  My body temperature, brain states, and behavior are measureable and therefore physical.  No one can measure the passion that a photo of my infant daughter produces in me every time I look at it.  It seems logically possible that we will someday have a qualiameter that can measure inner experience more or less directly.  Until then, we cannot have a completely physical account of nature. 

Nagel insists rightly that the fact of consciousness has implications beyond biology.  If indeed physical processes produced conscious creatures over the course of evolutionary history, then the potential for consciousness was present in dumb matter from the beginning.  There is more to heaven and earth than could be guessed from all previous physics and chemistry.