From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Sat Aug 21 2004 - 18:32:15 BST
Chris,
> Say rather "a world governed by principles." A world where things are
> consistent. Where miracles, in the sense of violations of the governing
> principles, don't happen. And physics is the attempt to learn the
> lowest-level of those principles, so "physical principles" is correct in
> a reductionist sense. But it's usually easier, and close enough to
> correct, to analyze the world in terms of higher-level principles. But
> that leaves room for loopholes--which are not miracles, but are still
> pretty cool.
This is still a physicalist position, which is a metaphysical position. I
realize that there are a lot of people who believe that all of biology can
be explained from physical principles, but this is still a belief, not
something scientifically established. Then there's consciousness, which one
can only think has a physical basis if one doesn't "take it seriously", as
David Chalmers puts it. He is a philosopher who really wanted to be a
physicalist, but decided it can't be done. (He calls his position
"naturalistic dualism", which would be that consciousness is "governed by
non-physical principles", as distinct from, say, orbiting planets, which
are. Myself, I don't see why he doesn't just drop the physicalism. Same
with Colin McGinn, who thinks consciousness is essentially mysterious, but
keeps to materialism. I suspect social motives here.)
>
> To me, metaphysics is at the opposite end of the scale. It's looking
> for the very highest-level "organizing" principles. And it's looking in
> a strange place: symbolic manipulation informed by human experience.
> This means it runs a serious risk of navel-contemplation, of telling
> just-so stories, of supporting preconceived notions--in short, all the
> ills that mind is heir to.
This is certainly true, about the risks. Which is why I think there is a
role for what I like to call ironic metaphysics, one of absolute critique.
What makes it metaphysics, and not nihilism, is accepting the reality of
the critiquing process. It is, more or less, negative theology, updated by
having passed through, and not ignoring the value of, modernism.
So I like to try to compare it to reality,
> or at least constrain it by reality, or at least as much as we know of
> reality. But in the end, metaphysics is probably of value only as an
> inspiration for other thoughts than as a foundation for reason.
Where reality, I presume, is what is observed. If so, then you are ignoring
the observing, and its conditions of possibility.
> What if I believe that it simply doesn't matter whether man is a machine
> or not? What does that make me? What if I believe the question is
> undecidable? What if I say I think it's ill-posed and I'm not curious
> enough to search for the problem?
Then you are deciding that one doesn't survive death. If one does, and if
one's life while alive, so to speak, has bearing on one's afterlife, or
other lives, or whatever, then it does matter. Please note that I am not at
all suggesting that this is relevant to how one comes to a conclusion about
the possibility of non-physical existence, just to point out that one has
made a choice in this regard, and such a choice is metaphysical. So it does
matter whether man is a machine or not. If so, then no afterlife. If not,
then maybe.
Whether it is allowable to be an agnostic in this matter (if one decides it
is undecidable, for example), is another question. One would think so,
except in action, I see no difference between an agnostic and an atheist.
That is, agnostics act like there is no afterlife. (Just to complicate
things, one can, these days, be religious without believing in an
afterlife. Probably more common are those who take the Buddha's advice to
not worry about it.)
For what it is worth, I think it is quite arguable that man is not a
machine, since a machine is spatio-temporal, and so incapable of having
sense perceptions, which transcend space and time (better: which create
spatio-temporal phenomena, perhaps like the move from the quantum world to
the macroscopic).
- Scott
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