Re: [FairfieldLife] The Most Dangerous Idea Since Darwin Part V
On 10/25/2012 04:30 PM, Robin Carlsen wrote: MIND AND COSMOS: WHY THE MATERIALIST NEO-DARWINIAN CONCEPTION OF NATURE IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE by Thomas Nagel But to explain consciousness, as well as biological complexity, as a consequence of the natural order adds a whole new dimension of difficulty, I am setting aside outright dualism, which would abandon the hope for an integrated explanation. Indeed, substance dualism would imply that biology has no responsibility at all for the existence of minds. What interests me is the alternative hypothesis that biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious mental phenomena, but that since those phenomena are not physically explainable, the usual view of evolution must be revised. It is not just a physical process. If that is so, how much would have to be added to the physical story to produce a genuine explanation of consciousness--one that made the appearance of consciousness, as such, intelligible, as opposed to merely explaining the appearance of certain physical organisms that, as a matter of fact, are conscious? It is not enough simply to add to the physical account of evolution the further observation that different types of animal organisms, depending on their physical constitution, have different forms of conscious life. That would present the consciousness of animals as a mysterious side effect of the physical history of evolution, which explains only the physical and functional character of organisms. . . For a satisfactory explanation of consciousness as such, a general psychophysical theory of consciousness would have to be woven into the evolutionary story, one which makes intelligible both (1) why specific organisms have the conscious life they have, and (2) why conscious organisms arose in the history of life on earth. . . [S]ome kind of psychophysical theory must apply not only nonhistorically, at the end of the process, but also to the evolutionary process itself. That process would have to be not only the physical history of the appearance and development of physical organisms but also a mental history of the appearance and development of conscious beings. And somehow it would have to be one process, making both aspects of the result intelligible. . . This would mean abandoning the standard assumption that evolution is driven by exclusively physical causes. Indeed, it suggests that the explanation may have to be something more than physical all the way down. The rejection of psychophysical reductionism leaves us with the mystery of the most basic kind about the natural order--a mystery whose avoidance is one of the primary motives of reductionism. It is a double mystery: first, about the relation between the physical and the mental in each individual instance, and second, about how the evolutionary explanation of the development of physical organisms can be transformed into a psychophysical explanation of how consciousness developed. The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astonishing things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which things as they are make sense, and that includes the way the physical world is, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind. . . This dissatisfaction with an explanatory stopping place that relates complex structures to complex structures is what underlies the constant push toward reduction in modern science. It is hard to give up the assumption that whatever is true of the complex must be explained by what is true of the elements. That does not mean that new phenomena cannot emerge at higher levels, but the hope is that they can be analyzed through the character and interactions of their more elementary components. Such harmless emergence is standardly illustrated by the example of liquidity, which depends on the interactions of the molecules that compose the liquid. But the emergence of the mental at certain levels of biological complexity is not like this. According to the emergent position now being considered, consciousness is something completely new. Because such emergence, even if systematic, remains fundamentally inexplicable, the ideal of intelligibility demands that we take seriously the alternative of a reductive answer to the constitutive question--an answer that accounts for the relation between mind and brain in terms of something more basic about the natural order. If such an account were possible, it would explain the appearance
Re: [FairfieldLife] The Most Dangerous Idea Since Darwin
Man is rated the highest animal, at least among all the animals that returned the questionnaire. Robert Brault From: Robin Carlsen maskedze...@yahoo.com To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2012 1:44 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] The Most Dangerous Idea Since Darwin MIND AND COSMOS: WHY THE MATERIALIST NEO-DARWINIAN CONCEPTION OF NATURE IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE by Thomas Nagel The argument from the failure of psychophysical reductionism is a philosophical one, but I believe there are independent empirical reasons to be skeptical about the truth of reductionism in biology. Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect. But for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes . . . it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense. I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naive response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set into motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on the earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist? . . . the questions concern highly specific events over a long historical period in the distant past, the available evidence is very indirect, and general assumptions have to play an important part. My skepticism is not based on religious belief, or on a belief in any definite alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense. This is especially true with regard to the origin of life. The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle's day. That it has produced you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it. . . . I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science. . . . certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world . . . As I have said, doubts about the reductionist account of life go against the dogmatic scientific consensus, but that consensus faces problems of probability that I believe are not taken seriously enough, both with respect to the evolution of life forms through accidental mutation and natural selection and with respect to the formation from dead matter of physical systems capable of such evolution. . . . It is no longer legitimate simply to imagine a sequence of gradually evolving phenotypes, as if their appearance through mutations in the DNA were un-problematic--as Richard Dawkins does for the evolution of the eye. With regard to the origin of life, the problem is much harder, since the option of natural selection as an explanation is not available, And the coming into existence of the genetic code--an arbitrary mapping of nucleotide sequences into amino acids, together with mechanisms that can read the code and carry out its instructions--seems particularly resistant to
