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On the Limits of Naturalism
“Naturalists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of science, as if science in some way supports, endorses, underwrites, implies, or anyway is unusually friendly to naturalism,” Alvin Plantinga writes in the current issue of AntiMatters (2:3, 79–84).
Naturalism is a form of realism, the dubious nature of which was already known in the 6th century BCE, when Xenophanes wrote: “Even if a man were to represent to himself the world exactly as it is, he could not discover that this is the case.” Unfortunately, Western philosophy (including and more so its late offspring, science) has largely ignored this truism, to its own detriment.
Current scientific theories of perception—the direct ones (Michaels & Carello, 1981) as well as the indirect ones—agree that the goal of perception is to approximate or match true properties of an objective physical environment. In spite of significant philosophical scepticism ever since Xenophanes, this assumption is rarely questioned in the scientific study of perception.
In his highly commendable book Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (Norton 1998/2000), the final chapter of which is reproduced in AntiMatters 1:2 (189-201), Donald D. Hoffman argues that our sensory systems are shaped by natural selection to allow homo sapiens to survive within its niche, not to present it with a faithful depiction of its niche. We do not expect the sensory system of a cockroach, a gecko, or a chipmunk to reveal the true nature of reality. We expect it to give simple signals suited for survival in a particular niche. Why should our sensory system be different in this respect? According to Hoffman, the phenomenal world is a species-specific user interface. A user interface, like your computer’s desktop with its icons, is useful precisely because it does not resemble what it represents. A file icon hides the complexity of the hardware and software that makes it so useful as a representation of a file.
The neuropsychological data suggest that vision is a sophisticated process of construction based on sparse sensory cues. While this encourages the notion that the visual world is a construction rather than a reconstruction, the fact that we have learned as much about the process of construction as we did seems to argue that the construction is, nevertheless, a reconstruction.
Or does it? What we have learned is that if a neuropsychologist puts in front of me what looks to her like a square, then I am aware of something that looks to me like a square. If this is a reconstruction, it is my reconstruction of her construction. If she can find in my visual cortex a “square neuron” that fires whenever she puts in front of me what looks to her like a square, this signals to her a correlation between the behaviour of my square neuron and the presence of a square in her phenomenal world. And while she is surely entitled to infer a similar correlation between the behaviour of my square neuron and the presence of a square in my phenomenal world, the inference of a real square over and above our phenomenal squares (and the firing of square neurons) seems unwarranted.
Darwin might have agreed. “With me,” he wrote in a letter to William Graham, “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” The belief in the combination of naturalism and evolution may be true, but it would be irrational to hold it, as Darwin’s “horrid doubt” suggests, and as Plantinga has argued rather convincingly.
According to Plantinga (AntiMatters 2:3, 79–84), Darwin’s doubt does not arise “for those who believe in God,” by which he of course means the Christian version. “If God has created us in his image,” he reasons, “then even if he fashioned us by some evolutionary means, he would presumably want us to resemble him in being able to know; but then most of what we believe might be true even if our minds have developed from those of the lower animals.”
From my Indianized perspective, this notion appears wanting in several respects. As pointed out in my comment (AntiMatters 2:3, 85–86), what evolution has in the works may not be merely an image of God but God himself or herself. The human species is certainly an important step in this direction, but not more. According to Sri Aurobindo, it is “a middle term of the evolution, not its end, crown or consummating masterpiece.” Our species “cannot be the end and highest height of the mysterious upward surge of Nature.... A godhead is imprisoned in our depths, one in its being with a greater godhead ready to descend from superhuman summits. In that descent and awakened joining is the secret of our future. Man's greatness is not in what he is but in what he makes possible.” So we shouldn’t let ourselves be bamboozled into thinking that we are ready to see the world with God’s eyes. According to Sri Aurobindo, our mind is but “a clumsy interlude between Nature’s vast and precise subconscient action and the vaster infallible superconscient action of the Godhead.”
Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning, Washington Square Press, 1984, pp. 140–141) once asked a therapeutic group “whether an ape which was being used to develop poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not.” He then pushed forward with the following question: “And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man's world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?”
There is. At any rate, there will be. This world beyond man’s world is man’s world transformed by the transformation of his consciousness—a topic that was as important to Jean Gebser as it was to Sri Aurobindo. According to Gebser, whose magnum opus The Ever-Present Origin is summarized in AntiMatters 2:3 (51–78), human consciousness has undergone a series of mutations, each of which has enriched our world by a new (qualitative rather than quantitative) dimension. Presently it is undergoing a mutation from its mental or “perspectival” structure to its integral or “aperspectival” one.
The consciousness structure preceding the mental apprehended a world of images. The mental structure was the first that was capable of synthesizing images into a system of self-existent objects. This three-dimensional “coagulation” of two-dimensional images is what we call “matter.” It came into being with the mental structure, and it is bound to be transcended—at any rate, put in its place—with the consolidation of the integral structure. Matter, Gebser predicts, will “open up” and become the transparent “surface” of a four-dimensional reality, and the human self will escape from its perspectively fixed vantage point and discover its identity with the ever-present Origin.
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Anti Matters: an open access e-journal http://anti-matters.org/0/main.htm
Psychoanalysis and CBT
The most vociferous criticism of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in the British media has emerged from psychoanalysts and those sympathetic to psychoanalysis - and none has been more vocal than Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst and literary critic (the two tend to go together these days), who recently came out with a book called The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, which he has been promoting by writing scathing articles about CBT.
Stoicism and Gurdjieff
I've been trying to find a parallel for Stoicism's unusual theory of tonos, or tension. As far as I can understand it, ancient Stoics believed that all beings had the sacred fire of the Logos within them, vibrating at different tensions.
Am I really a Computer?
What is the difference between human beings and computers? Is it only functional complexity? A sufficiently advanced computer program, according to the strong version of Artificial Intelligence theory, can simulate whatever man is capable of. All mental function can be broken down to a set of instructions and implemented in a computer program.
Book Review: Integral Spirituality by Ken Wilber
A New Role for Religions - David Lorimer
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