Nagel and his critics, Part IV

Continuing our look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos, we turn to philosopher Alva Noë’s very interesting remarks over at NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos & Culture blog.  Noë’s initial comments might seem broadly sympathetic to Nagel’s position.  He writes:

Science has produced no standard account of the origins of life.

We have a superb understanding of how we get biological variety from simple, living starting points. We can thank Darwin for that. And we know that life in its simplest forms is built up out of inorganic stuff. But we don't have any account of how life springs forth from the supposed primordial soup. This is an explanatory gap we have no idea how to bridge.

Science also lacks even a back-of-the-envelop [sic] concept explaining the emergence of consciousness from the behavior of mere matter. We have an elaborate understanding of the ways in which experience depends on neurobiology. But how consciousness arises out of the action of neurons, or how low-level chemical or atomic processes might explain why we are conscious — we haven't a clue.

We aren't even really sure what questions we should be asking.

These two explanatory gaps are strikingly similar… In both cases we have large-scale phenomena in view (life, consciousness) and an exquisitely detailed understanding of the low-level processes that sustain these phenomena (biochemistry, neuroscience, etc). But we lack any way of making sense of the idea that the higher-level phenomena just come down to, or consist of, what is going on at the lower level.

End quote.  Now an Aristotelian would say that this is precisely what we should expect.  What modern biologists and neuroscientists have uncovered in exquisite detail are the material-cum-efficient causes of the phenomena of life and consciousness.  But that is only half the story, for there are also irreducible final and formal causes -- the inherent teleological features natural objects exhibit by virtue of their substantial forms -- and you are never going to capture those features in terms of material and efficient causality.  That is (one reason) why there always seems to be something left out in materialist accounts of life and consciousness.

There is a mystery here only if you suppose that “lower-level” descriptions are somehow more privileged than “higher-level” descriptions.  And that, we old-fashioned Aristotelians would argue, is something there is no good reason to believe in the first place.  It is merely a metaphysical dogma -- as old as Democritus and Leucippus but no more plausible now than it was in their day -- that is read into the scientific facts rather than read out of them.  In the case at hand, what Noë is describing confirms the traditional Aristotelian view that there is a difference in kind and not merely degree between the organic and the inorganic, and between sensory and vegetative forms of life (in the technical Aristotelian sense of “vegetative,” which does not correspond exactly to the colloquial use of that term).

This has nothing to do with vitalism, “Intelligent Design” theory, and other such bogeymen, and one reason Nagel’s inchoate neo-Aristotelianism may be troubling to his more ideological critics is precisely that it undermines the false dilemma that is the naturalist’s main rhetorical weapon: “Either accept some form of naturalism or you’ll be stuck with magic, obscurantism, or a god-of-the-gaps.”  For though Nagel’s own version is inchoate, neo-Aristotelianism cannot be dismissed as philosophically unserious, and has been worked out in more systematic detail by a number of prominent contemporary philosophers.  (I noted several examples in the first post in this series.  For a recent defense of a neo-Aristotelian position in biology, specifically, see David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism.  I’ve criticized biological reductionism from an Aristotelian point of view in several earlier posts, such as this one, this one, and this one; and neuroscientific reductionism in several other posts, such as this one and this one.)

Now, Noë himself is no ideologue.  This is evidenced not only by the comments already cited, but by his recognition of the depth of the difficulties facing materialism, and of their roots in the very nature of the scientific revolution:

The scientific revolution took its impulse from what the philosopher Bernard Williams called the Absolute Conception of Reality. This is a conception of the world as "it really is" entirely apart from how it appears to us: a colorless, odorless value-free domain of particles and complexes moving in accordance with timeless and immutable mathematical laws. The world so conceived has no place for mind in it. No intention. No purpose. If there is mind — and of course the great scientific revolutionaries such as Descartes and Newton would not deny that there is mind — it exists apart from and unconnected to the material world as this was conceived of by the New Science.

If modern science begins by shaping a conception of the cosmos, its subject matter, in such a way as to exclude mind and life, then it shouldn't come as a surprise that we can't seem to find a place for them in the natural order so conceived.

This is why Nagel observes, at the beginning of his book, that the mind-body problem isn't just a local problem concerning brains, behavior and the mind; correctly understood it invades our understanding of the cosmos itself and its history. 

End quote.  This is a point I’ve emphasized in my own work many times and which (as I’ve emphasized in the earlier posts in this series) has informed Nagel’s own thinking since his article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”  Though materialists sometimes suggest that dualism represents a reluctance consistently to follow out the implications of the scientific revolution, the truth is precisely the reverse -- in fact it was the re-conception of matter put forward by the founders of the scientific revolution that led to (Cartesian forms of) dualism.  

Noë even dismisses as “superficial and unsatisfying” the suggestion of critics like Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg that Nagel’s arguments have little merit given that most philosophers today would probably reject the claim that neuroscience, biology, and chemistry can all be reduced to physics.  For as Noë correctly observes:

[T]here is no stable or deeply understood account of how these autonomous domains fit together. The fact that we are getting along with business as if there were such an account is, well, a political or sociological fact about us that should do little to reassure.

End quote.  As I noted in the two previous posts in this series, the autonomy of these sciences, far from saving naturalism from critiques like Nagel’s, itself only provides further vindication of the holistic Aristotelian account of the natural phenomena studied by these special sciences -- just the sort of position toward which Nagel points, however sketchily.

All the same, Noë resists following Nagel’s call for a radical rethinking of the naturalist consensus.  (And now I get to justify my illustration of Noë as playing Dr. No to Nagel’s James Bond.  All in fun, Prof. Noë!)   Noë proposes instead that:

[T]here is another strategy for responding to the explanatory gaps. This has been one of philosophy's orthodox strategies at least since Kant and it is an approach championed by many of the 20th century's greatest thinkers, from Carnap and the logical positivists down through Wittgenstein and Ryle, to Dennett. According to this strategy, the seeming gaps are, really, a cognitive illusion. We think we can't explain life, but only because we insist on adhering to a conception of life as vaguely spooky, some sort of vital spirit. And likewise, we think we can't explain consciousness, but again this is because we cling to a conception of consciousness as, well, somehow spiritual, and precisely because we insist on thinking of it as something that floats free of its physical substrates ("a ghost in the machine"), as something essentially interior and private. Once we clear away these confusions, so this alternative would have it, we realize that we don't need to solve any special problems about life and mind. There never were any problems.

End quote.  There are several things that can be said in response to this strategy.  For one thing, and as I have already indicated, “vital spirits,” ghosts, and the like are straw men, at least if directed at Aristotelianism.  (Though frankly, they’re not really fair against Cartesianism either, but I’ll let the Cartesians defend themselves.)  It simply is not the case that to reject materialistic naturalism is to opt for magical or otherwise “spooky” forces and entities; it is, rather, simply to opt for an alternative metaphysics (and I have explained the difference between magic and metaphysics elsewhere).  Of course, Noë might not really be suggesting that critics of materialistic naturalism are committed to magic or other pseudo-explanations.  He may merely be suggesting that explanations of a materialistic naturalist sort are preferableto non-materialist explanations, even if the latter are genuine explanations.  But if that is what he means then he is begging the question, since whether materialistic explanations are to be preferred to non-materialist ones is part of what is at issue in the larger debate between Nagel and his critics.  

But put to one side the question of what positive alternatives there might be to the materialistic naturalism that is Nagel’s target -- neo-Aristotelian hylemorphism, Cartesian dualism, vitalism, idealism, panpsychism, neutral monism, or whatever.  Noë’s response would fail even if none of these alternatives was any good.  To see why, suppose that a critic of Gödel's incompleteness theorems suggested that every true arithmetical statement in a formal system capable of expressing arithmetic really is in fact provable within the system, and that the consistency of arithmetic canin fact be proved from within arithmetic itself -- and that Gödel's arguments seem to show otherwise only because of a “cognitive illusion” that makes formal systems seem “vaguely spooky.”

This would not be a serious response to Gödel precisely because it simply does not show that Gödel is wrong but either presupposes or merely asserts that he is wrong.  Gödel purports to demonstrate his claims.  Hence, adequately to answer him would require showing that there is something wrong with his attempted demonstration, not merely staking out a position that assumes that there is something wrong with it.  Similarly, many of the key arguments against materialistic naturalism -- Chalmers’ “zombie argument,” Jackson’s “knowledge argument,” Ross’s argument for the immateriality of thought, etc. -- purport to demonstrate that materialistic naturalism is false.  Adequately to answer them requires showing that there is some error in the attempted demonstrations, and the appeal to an alleged “cognitive illusion” simply assumesthis without showing it.  It merely begs the question.

Furthermore, there would only be pressure to take the “cognitive illusion” suggestion seriously if we had independent reason to think that materialistic naturalism simply has to be right.  And there is no such reason.  Its defenders often point to the “success” of materialistic explanations as reason to think materialistic naturalism is true, but as I have pointed out many times (e.g. here), this sort of argument, however popular, is blatantly fallacious.  To argue:

1. The predictive power and technological applications of materialistic modes of explanation are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge.

2. Therefore what materialistic explanations reveal to us is all that is real.

is as silly as arguing:

1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has.

2. Therefore what metal detectors reveal to us (coins and other metallic objects) is all that is real.

Metal detectors are keyed to those aspects of the natural world susceptible of detection via electromagnetic means (or whatever).  But however well they perform this task -- indeed, even if they succeeded on every single occasion they were deployed -- it simply wouldn’t follow for a moment that there are no aspects of the natural world other than the ones they are sensitive to.  Similarly, what materialistic explanations do is to capture those aspects of the natural world susceptible of a materialist analysis -- breaking down larger systems into component material parts, mathematically modeling the parts and their combinations, testing the predictions that follow from these models, and so forth.  But here too, it simply doesn’t follow for a moment that there are no other aspects of the natural world. 

Suppose someone beholden to the idea that coins and other metallic objects are all that exist was confronted with all the obvious counterevidence -- trees, rocks, people, animals, glass, plastic, and all the other non-metal objects there are.  And suppose he acknowledged that there is an “explanatory gap” here but that it rested on a “cognitive illusion” that made trees, rocks, etc. seem “vaguely spooky” insofar as they appeared to “float free of their metallic substrates.”  Of course, no one would take such an absurd suggestion seriously for a moment.  But neither is there any non-question-begging reason to take seriously the suggestion that all the counterevidence to materialistic naturalism rests on a “cognitive illusion.”

As E. A. Burtt warned in his classic book The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, those impressed by the methods of modern science are prone to “make a metaphysics out of [that] method,” to judge reality by the method rather than judging the method against reality.  That is in fact the “cognitive illusion” operative in the debate between materialistic naturalism and its critics, and it seems it is an illusion to which even a reasonable man like Noë might be subject.

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Cardinal virtues and counterfeit virtues

The cardinal virtues are wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice.  They are so called because they are traditionally regarded as the “hinge” (cardo) on which the rest of morality turns.  We find them discussed in Plato’s Republicand given a more given systematic exposition in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.  

For Plato, these virtues are related to the three main parts of the soul and the corresponding three main classes in his ideal city.  Wisdom is the characteristic virtue of the highest part of the soul -- the rational part -- and of the highest class within the city, the ruling philosopher-kings.  Courage is the characteristic virtue of the middle, spirited part of the soul, and of the soldiers who constitute the second main class in the city.  Moderation is the characteristic attribute of the lowest, desiring part of the soul and of the lowest, productive class of the city.  Justice in turn is the proper ordering of the three parts of the soul and the city, each doing its part.

  

When reason is in charge and the spirited part of the soul -- the part driven by a sense of honor and shame -- is doing reason’s bidding in keeping down the desiring part of the soul, allowing its appetites to be indulged only when reason dictates, the soul is just.  And when the philosopher-kings -- those motivated by a rational, disinterested pursuit of the good of the city -- are in charge of the city, the soldiers following their lead in governing the city, and the productive class focusing their attention on that to which they are best suited (farming, building, craftsmanship, and the like), the city is just.  Injustice is a deviation from this order -- the spirited part or the desiring part dominating the soul, or the soldiers or productive class dominating the government of the city.  

Plato’s famous analysis of the four main types of unjust regime develops this theme.  A timocracy or honor-oriented society puts the military virtues ahead of reason.  This is disordered, but still the least bad form of unjust city in Plato’s view, since at least it is an objective and non-appetitive standard -- the will to pursue what is honorable and avoid what is shameful -- that is idealized.  An oligarchy or money-oriented society is worse, because it is driven by the appetitive part of the soul, but it is still not the worstkind of regime, since the pursuer of wealth must at least puts chains on his appetites to some extent, respecting bourgeois values like thrift and long-term thinking.  Democracy, as Plato understands it, is worse still, since it effectively puts the lowest appetites in charge.  Like the never-satisfied and competing impulses toward food, sex, and drink that dominate a degenerate individual soul, a democratic society is dominated by the same impulses, and its social life and politics are chaotic, characterized by passing fads and resistant to the idea that there might be any permanent and objective standard against which the fads and impulses might be judged.  Tyranny, the worst kind of regime, is essentially what results when a particular democratic soul, driven by especially strong appetites, imposes its will on the rest.

This analysis and its relevance to modern politics and culture deserve a write-up of their own, but for the moment let’s consider the fate of the cardinal virtues in a modern democratic society.  The words “wisdom,” “courage,” “moderation,” and “justice” are certainly not absent in such societies.  To some extent the content of the traditional virtues is even respected -- democratic citizens will approve of the courage they read about in military history or see portrayed in movies like Saving Private Ryan, will commend moderation where overindulgence might affect bodily health, and so forth.

But much more prominent than the cardinal virtues -- and to a large extent coloring the conception democratic man has of the content of the cardinal virtues -- are certain other character traits, such as open-mindedness, empathy, tolerance, and fairness.  The list will be familiar, since the language of these “virtues” permeates contemporary pop culture and politics, and it can be said to constitute a kind of counterpoint to the traditional cardinal virtues.  And in each case the counter-virtue entails a turn of just the sort one might expect given Plato’s analysis of democracy -- from the objective to the subjective, from a focus on the way things actually are to a focus on the way one believes or desires them to be.

Hence wisdom, as a Plato or Aquinas conceives of it, is outward-oriented, involving a grasp of objective truth in the speculative and practical spheres.  Open-mindedness, by contrast, is oriented inwardly, toward the subjective, concerned not with objective reality itself so much as with a willingness to consider alternative views about objective reality.

Courage has to do with the will to do what one ought to do in the face of danger or difficulty.  The courageous man will do his duty even though he is afraid or feels uncomfortable or put upon, and we praise him precisely for ignoring these subjective feelings.  Empathy, by contrast, involves precisely a focus on such feelings -- indeed, even to the point of sympathizing with the one who has failed to be courageous.  Courage says: “Yes, it was difficult; but you should have done it anyway.”  Empathy says: “I understand why you didn’t do it; it was so difficult!”

Similarly, moderation tells us that we sometimes need to refrain from indulging our appetites, in some cases even when we have an extremely powerful desire to indulge them.  Tolerance, by contrast, refuses to condemn such indulgence.  Toleration works in tandem with empathy, as moderation works together with courage.  Just as courage is reason’s ally in keeping the appetites at bay -- it reminds us that it is weak and shameful to indulge when reason says we shouldn’t -- so too is empathy the ally of the appetitive part of the soul in its war with reason, giving it permission to indulge and to ignore what unkind, unfeeling reason is saying.  Courage and moderation command: “You’re a human being!  Don’t act like animal!”  Empathy and toleration respond: “We understand, go ahead, you’re just an animal anyway!”  

Finally, whereas justice requires us to conform our desires to the order of things, fairness commands the order of things to conform itself to our desires.  Justice says: “John is richer than you are and Paul has more authority.  But that is as it should be, since John worked harder and Paul is wiser.”  Fairness says: “John is richer than you are and Paul has more authority.  That’s not fair!”  Justice treats equals equally and unequals unequally.  Fairness treats everyone equally; or rather, it treats everyone the way the one shouting “Unfairness!” thinks they should be treated.

Now, all of that makes the counter-virtues in question sound pretty bad -- or it should make them sound bad, anyway -- but I hasten to add that none of this entails that there is nothing of value in open-mindedness, empathy, tolerance, and fairness.  Far from it.  The objective truth at which wisdom aims is not all built into us and it is not all obvious; it needs to be acquired through hard work.  Open-mindedness facilitates that.  Realistically inculcating the virtues, including courage, requires an understanding of actual human circumstances, including human weaknesses.  That requires empathy.  The road to virtue is, given human weakness, inevitably paved with repeated failures to live up to it.  Tolerance of these failures (albeit not approval of them) is, accordingly, no less necessary to the realistic inculcation of virtue than empathy is.  And some inequalities really are rightly decried as unfair insofar as they arise from injustice.  (John might be richer than you because he is more hard-working.  But it might instead be because he is a thief or a fraudster or someone who knows how to game the system.)

So, there can be real value in open-mindedness, empathy, tolerance, and fairness, and a wise man will acknowledge this.  But it is crucial to see that their value is instrumental.  They are of secondary value, of significance precisely insofar as they facilitate the acquisition of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice.  A soul which strives primarily to acquire those traditional cardinal virtues, even while acknowledging the value within limits of open-mindedness, empathy, tolerance, and fairness in the process of acquiring them, is rightly ordered.  But a soul which primarily values open-mindedness, empathy, tolerance, and fairness, and either rejects the traditional cardinal virtues or relegates them to second place, is disordered.  Similarly, a rightly ordered society will value the traditional cardinal virtues over open-mindedness, empathy, tolerance, and fairness, whereas a society which celebrates the latter over the former is disordered.  Even if it uses the language of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, it will not respect or promote true virtue, but only its counterfeit.

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Nagel and his critics, Part III

In the previous installment in this series of posts on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, I looked at some objections to Nagel raised by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg.  I want now to turn to Elliot Sober’s review in Boston Review.  To his credit, and unlike Leiter and Weisberg, Sober is careful to acknowledge that:

Nagel’s main goal in this book is not to argue against materialistic reductionism, but to explore the consequences of its being false.  He has argued against the -ism elsewhere, and those who know their Nagel will be able to fill in the details.

Sober then goes on to offer a brief summary of the relevant positions Nagel has defended in earlier works like his articles “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and “The Psychophysical Nexus.”  As I emphasized in my previous post, keeping these earlier arguments in mind is crucial to giving the position Nagel develops in Mind and Cosmos a fair reading.  Unfortunately, however, having reminded his readers of these earlier arguments of Nagel’s, Sober immediately goes on to ignore them.

Sober on Nagel and evolution

In the first half of his review, Sober focuses on Nagel’s criticisms of evolutionary theory.  Summarizing the first of these criticisms, Sober writes:

Nagel thinks that adequate explanations of the origins of life, intelligence, and consciousness must show that those events had a “significant likelihood” of occurring: these origins must be shown to be “unsurprising if not inevitable.”  A complete account of consciousness must show that consciousness was “something to be expected.”  Nagel thinks that evolutionary theory as we now have it fails in this regard, so it needs to be supplemented.

Sober then goes on to complain:

Nagel doesn’t impose this condition of adequate explanation on all the events that science might address.  He is prepared to live with the fact that some events are just flukes or accidents or improbable coincidences.  For example, it may just be an improbable coincidence that in the mid-1980s Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice in the span of four months.  But the existence of life, intelligence, and consciousness are not in the same category.  Why do Nagel’s standards go up when he contemplates facts that he deems “remarkable”?  Maybe the answer falls under what Nagel refers to, in a different context, as his “ungrounded intellectual preference.”  It isn’t theistic conviction that is doing the work here, but rather Nagel’s faith that the remarkable facts he mentions must be “intelligible,” where intelligibility requires that these facts had a significant probability of being true.

End quote. The trouble, though, is that Sober is here just making the same mistake which, as we saw in my previous post, Leiter and Weisberg make in their review.  Nagel’s point has nothing to do with “ungrounded intellectual preferences” nor even with mere improbability as such, at least not on a charitable interpretation of his position.  Start with consciousness.  As I noted in response to Leiter and Weisberg:

If the argument of “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” is correct, then it is not merely improbable that what Nagel there calls “objective” facts should by themselves give rise to [the] “subjective” facts [of consciousness], but impossible, for they differ qualitatively rather than merely quantitatively.  To borrow an example used by the Thomist William A. Wallace in another context, a polygon is just a different sort of thing from a circle, no matter how closely you approximate a circle by adding sides to a polygon.  And that a circle might arise from nothing more than the successive addition of sides to a polygon is therefore not merely improbable or unpredictable; it is impossible in principle.  Similarly, given the difference between “objective” and “subjective” facts as Nagel characterizes them, you are simply not going to get the latter from the former alone even in principle.  At any rate, if Nagel is wrong about this, Leiter and Weisberg haven’t done anything to show that he is, but have merely implicitly assumed that he is.

Similarly, Nagel holds that it is in principleimpossible to understand rationality in purely evolutionary terms -- that the reliability of our rational faculties is never going to be entirely explicable merely in terms of the selective advantage they may have conferred on us -- for reasons spelled out in his book The Last Word and sketched out more briefly in the current book.  

Now Sober might respond that this objection of mine presupposes Nagel’s critique of materialistic reductionism and some of his other philosophical arguments, whereas what he (Sober) is concerned to respond to is a separate, distinct criticism of evolutionary theory that does not presuppose these particular philosophical arguments of Nagel’s.  For Sober writes:

Nagel believes that evolutionary biology is in trouble, but what sort of trouble is it in? There are two possibilities. Evolutionary theory could be in trouble just because it is committed to materialistic reductionism; if so, the theory would be perfectly okay if it dropped that commitment.  Understood in this way, it’s the philosophy that has gone wrong, not the biology.  But much of what Nagel says is not in this vein. He thinks that the biology itself is flawed. Even without a commitment to materialistic reductionism, the theory would be in bad shape. For Nagel, the combination of evolutionary theory and materialistic reductionism is false, while evolutionary theory taken on its own (without the philosophical add-on) is incomplete. Incompleteness means that the theory cannot fully explain important biological events.

End quote.  It seems to me, though, that Sober is in this case responding to an argument that Nagel does not in fact give in the first place, at least not with respect to consciousness and rationality.  That is to say, Nagel’s reason for saying that consciousness and rationality cannot be explained in evolutionary terms just is that such an evolutionary explanation (as evolution is typically understood today, anyway) would be a materialistic explanation, and no such explanation can succeed.  Nagel doesn’t have some separate argument to the effect that consciousness and rationality are evolutionarily improbable even apart from their being inexplicable in materialistic terms.  The reason he thinks current evolutionary theory is “incomplete” just is that it limits itself to materialistic explanations; it’s not that there is some other respect in which it is incomplete that makes consciousness and rationality improbable even apart from the issue of materialism.  What would “complete” it is precisely a non-materialistic underlying metaphysics.

Nagel’s views on the origin of life do seem, I acknowledge, to be of a different sort.  Here I think his objections do amount at least in part to the claim that life is improbable for reasons that are not essentially connected to the arguments of earlier works like “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” or The Last Word.  They appear to have instead to do with considerations of the sort that “Intelligent Design” theorists have put forward.  But Sober should not run what Nagel says about consciousness and rationality together with what he says about the origin of life.  In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel explicitly contrasts the kind of difficulty he thinks faces an explanation of the origin of life with the kind he thinks faces an explanation of consciousness, writing: “But to explain consciousness, as well as biological complexity, as a consequence of the natural order adds a whole new dimension of difficulty” that requires that something be “added to the physical story” (pp. 49-50, emphasis added).

But even if Nagel did have a separate, non-philosophical argument against the adequacy of an evolutionary account of consciousness and rationality, it would odd for Sober to put so much emphasis on it, because the philosophical, anti-materialist argument from the inexplicability of “subjective” facts in terms of “objective” facts is (as Sober’s earlier remarks implicitly acknowledge) a distinctively Nagelian sort of argument, and a more philosophically interesting line of argument.  By neglecting to respond to it, Sober is failing to take Nagel on at his strongest point -- never a good thing in philosophy, and especially not when one is purporting to show that “Nagel has not made a convincing case.”

To be sure, Sober himself may be hinting at the way of interpreting Nagel that I have been suggesting when he writes:

What makes more sense than Nagel’s probability requirement is one about possibility—that an adequate theory must allow that the origin of life, mind, and consciousness all were possible, given the initial state of the universe. If this were all that Nagel meant by his claim that “the propensity for the development of organisms with a subjective point of view must have been there from the beginning,” I would have no quarrel.  But then there would be no objection to the sciences we now have.

But it is not clear what Sober intends to concede here.  Is he acknowledging that Nagel is right to hold that you are never going to get what he calls “subjective” facts from “objective” ones alone (in Nagel’s technical senses of those terms), so that physical science should not confine itself to the latter?  If so, then it is hardly plausible to say that that is “no objection to the sciences we now have,” at least given the way philosophical naturalists (including many scientists themselves) typically interpret the sciences.  Or is Sober agreeing with Nagel that these naturalists are just mistaken in thinking that science ought to proceed in a materialist fashion?  If so (though I doubt it), then good for Sober, but this is hardly a minor or non-controversial point!

Sober also takes issue with Nagel’s claim that objective moral value cannot be explained in evolutionary terms.  As with Leiter and Weisberg’s treatment of this subject, I’m going to refrain from commenting since my meta-ethical views differ from Nagel’s to such an extent that saying what I would want to say would require too lengthy a digression into moral theory.

Sober on Nagel on teleology

Even apart from what has already been said, Sober’s point about probabilities is mistaken.  For the example of someone winning the lottery twice is simply not relevantly comparable to the existence of consciousness and rationality.  The former is a one-off event, or at most the sort of thing that happens very sporadically and unpredictably.  But the latter are ordinary features of the biological realm at least at its higher levels, occurring with regularity and predictability. The former would be a paradigm case of what Aristotelians would consider a chance event, whereas the latter would be instances of what Aristotelians would consider paradigmatic regularities.  

This brings us to Sober’s remarks on teleology.  For the Aristotelian, chance presupposes regularity.  To take a stock example, when a farmer plows his field and comes across buried treasure, that is a chance event.  But it occurred only because of two non-chance events -- someone deciding to bury treasure at that spot, and the farmer deciding to plow the field on that day.  In general, chance occurrences involve the convergence of causal factors that are instances of regularity rather than chance, as when a piece of toast burns in such a way that it looks vaguely as if there is a face on it (chance) but only because someone had put the toast in the toaster, the toaster was operating as it always does, etc. (regularity).  

Now as the Aristotelian conception of causality was developed within the Scholastic tradition, all efficient-causal regularities presuppose final causality or teleology in the sense that unless an efficient cause A were inherently or of its nature “directed toward” the generation of some effect or range of effects B, specifically, there would be no reason why it does in fact generate B specifically rather than some random effect or no effect at all.  (Whether this final causality or teleology in turn requires a divine cause is a separate question, which need not be settled for the purposes at hand; and of course, Nagel wants to affirm teleology without a divine source.)  So, for the Aristotelian, chance presupposes regularity, and regularity in turn presupposes teleology.  Hence even chance occurrences like winning the lottery twice ultimately presuppose teleology.  Hence they can hardly coherently be appealed to in an argument against an Aristotelian teleological conception of the world.

Now Sober writes:

According to Nagel a teleological theory says that things tend to change in the direction of certain types of outcome. This is right, but, as Nagel realizes, it isn’t sufficient for a theory to be teleological. 

But for the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosopher, “that things tend to change in the direction of certain types of outcome” isindeed “sufficient for… teleolog[y],” at least a very simple kind of teleology.  It might be that Sober does not see the possibility of such a view because, like so many contemporary philosophers, he may be thinking of teleology in essentially biological and/or artifactual terms, and thus assumes that to attribute teleology to something necessarily involves attributing to it something like a function of the kind served by a bodily organ or the component of a mechanical device.  But for the Scholastic tradition, that is only one kind of teleology among others.  Mere directedness to a certain outcome of the sort manifest in even the simplest inorganic causal processes involves a very rudimentary sort of finality or teleology.  And one needn’t be a Scholastic to take such a view; as I have noted many times, contemporary “new essentialist” and “dispositional essentialist” metaphysicians and philosophers of science (George Molnar, C. B. Martin, John Heil, et al.) are committed to something like it insofar as they regard the directedness of causal powers toward their effects or the directedness of dispositions toward their manifestations as instances of “physical intentionality” or “natural intentionality.”  

Hence, while Sober says that he “do[es] not reject teleology wholesale” as long as there are “causal underpinnings for… teleological statements” -- that is to say, as long as claims about teleology or final causality can be cashed out in terms of claims about patterns of efficient causation -- what he does not see is that the whole point, from the Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view, is that the latter sort of claim, claims about efficient causation, themselves presuppose finality or teleology.  For without finality or teleology there is no way for there to be efficient causal regularitiesin the first place.  Reducing some instance of teleology to efficient causality, then, merely puts off the inevitable, because the efficient causality will itself have to be explained in teleological terms.

In fairness to Sober, Nagel himself does not say all this; his own appeal to Aristotelian teleology is very sketchy, and (as I complained in an earlier post) he does not make use of or even refer to the work of “new essentialist” and other contemporary neo-Aristotelian writers -- many of whom are, like Nagel, writing from a secular point of view -- who have developed the relevant ideas in more systematic detail.

Still, the existence of this body of largely secular neo-Aristotelian work within contemporary mainstream academic philosophy only reinforces Nagel’s main point that philosophers in general need to take non-materialist views more seriously than they do.  And that Sober does not consider these existing alternative views only reinforces Nagel’s complaint about the narrowness of the “right-thinking consensus” within academic philosophy that he is trying to challenge.  Even the difficulties with the consensus tend to get interpreted a way that is claimed somehow to favor the consensus.  So beholden are so many philosophers to it that they cannot even see when their position has essentially been undermined.  Hence Sober writes:

Nagel is hardly unique in being an anti-reductionist. Most philosophers nowadays would probably say that they are against reductionism.

What sets Nagel apart is his idea that current biological and physical theories need to be fundamentally overhauled. Why do other anti-reductionists decline to take this radical step? It is not that they are faint of heart. Mostly they decline because they endorse the following picture. When an organism has a new visual experience, the physical state of the organism has changed. And when an economy goes into recession, the physical state of that social object also has changed. These examples obey the slogan I mentioned before: no difference without a physical difference. 

However, when it comes to understanding visual perception and economic change, the best explanations are not to be found in relativity theory or quantum mechanics. Sciences outside of physics can explain things that physics is not equipped to explain. But this doesn’t mean that physics needs to be revised. The philosophers and scientists I am describing disagree with Nagel’s claim that evolution is more than a physical process, though they agree that physics is not the best tool to use in understanding evolution.

End quote.  What Sober does not see is that the picture of the natural world implicit in these remarks is itself an essentially anti-materialist one insofar as it acknowledges that there are higher-level features of material objects that cannot be captured entirely by a description of their micro-level parts.  It constitutes an implicit abandonment of the mechanistic conception of matter we’ve inherited from Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Co., which was inherited by them in turn from the ancient atomists, and which has always been implicit in the materialist tradition.  To be sure, one could take this anti-reductionism in one of two directions -- either in the direction of post-Cartesian forms of dualism, whether substance dualism or property dualism (which more or less preserves the mechanistic conception but adds a further layer of reality to it), or in the direction of hylemorphism (which abandons the mechanistic conception altogether in favor of a conception of material substances as composites of substantial form and prime matter).  

The first option is the one taken by Cartesian dualists and by “naturalistic” property dualists like David Chalmers; the second option is the one taken by neo-Aristotelians.  Either one involves just the sort of radical overhaul of the naturalistic conception of the world that Nagel is calling for, but which Sober, like Leiter and Weisberg, think is unnecessary.  They think this in part because they do not see that an “anti-reductionistic materialism” is indeterminate, and when made more precise either collapses back into reductionistic materialism or amounts to property dualism or hylemorphism rather than materialism; and in part because (as Sober’s remarks indicate) they suppose that the supervenience thesis that there is “no difference without a physical difference” somehow entails an essentially materialist position.  But it does not.  For that there is no difference without a physical difference would show only that the micro-level physical facts are necessary for the higher-level facts, not that they are sufficient.  And that is something either a property dualist or an Aristotelian could accept.  The Aristotelian, after all, regards a natural substance’s material cause as no less an irreducible constituent of it as its formal cause.  

(To be sure, a qualification to the supervenience thesis would be required in the case of strictly intellectual activity, which -- unlike sensation, imagination, digestion, locomotion, etc. -- is, for the Aristotelian, a partially immaterial operation of the human organism.  But that is irrelevant to the point at hand, which is that even in the case of entirely material substances and operations, supervenience does not entail materialism.)

But I don’t mean to be too hard on Sober, who is a serious thinker and who, both in the present review and elsewhere, has shown himself to be fair-minded.  Indeed, at the end of his review of Nagel, he writes:

I realize that Nagel is trying to point the way to a scientific revolution and that my reactions may be mired in presuppositions that Nagel is trying to transcend. If Nagel is right, our descendants will look back on him as a prophet—a prophet whom naysayers such as me were unable to recognize.

That, I think, is precisely what is going on -- the “presuppositions that Nagel is trying to transcend” run so deep in contemporary academic philosophical culture that it is difficult for most philosophers to get any critical distance on them.  They lack, as Nietzsche might have said, the courage for an attack on their own convictions.  And yet the evidence that there is something deeply wrong with the naturalistic consensus is all around them even in “mainstream” academic philosophy -- in the work of renegade naturalists like Nagel, Searle, Fodor, McGinn, et al.; dualists like Chalmers, Brie Gertler, Howard Robinson, John Foster, et al.; and neo-Aristotelians like the “new essentialist” metaphysicians and philosophers of science (Cartwright, Ellis, Martin, Heil, Mumford, et al.) and the analytical Thomists (Oderberg, Klima, Haldane, et al.).  It’s psychologically easy (even if philosophically sleazy) to dismiss one or two of these thinkers as outliers who needn’t be taken seriously.  But as their ranks slowly grow, it will be, and ought to be, harder both psychologically and philosophically to dismiss them.

Which is no doubt why the more ideological naturalists would very dearly like to strangle this growing challenge to the consensus while it is still in its crib -- hence the un-philosophical nastiness with which Nagel’s views have been greeted in some quarters.  But Sober, to his credit, is not an ideologue, and is sober enough to acknowledge at least the possibility that Nagel is on to something.  As I have tried to show, his reasons for demurring fail to get to the heart of Nagel’s critique.

So, Nagel passes this particular “sober test.”  Good thing he didn’t get the one Steve Martin got in The Man With Two Brains! 

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