Forgetting nothing, learning nothing

Lawrence Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing managed something few thought possible -- to outdo Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in sheer intellectual frivolousness.  Nor was my First Things review of the book by any means the only one to call attention to its painfully evident foibles.  Many commentators with no theological ax to grind -- such as David Albert, Massimo Pigliucci, Brian Leiter, and even New Atheist featherweight Jerry Coyne -- slammed Krauss’s amateurish foray into philosophy.  Here’s some take-to-the-bank advice to would-be atheist provocateurs: When evenJerry Coyne thinks your attempt at atheist apologetics “mediocre,” it’s time to throw in the towel.  Causa finita est.  Game over.  Shut the hell up already. 

But Krauss likes nothing so much as the sound of his own voice, even when he’s got nothing of interest to say.  A friend calls my attention to a recent Australian television appearance in which Krauss, his arrogance as undiminished as his cluelessness, commits the same puerile fallacies friends and enemies alike have been calling him out on for over a year now.  Is there any point in flogging a horse by now so far past dead that even the Brits wouldn’t make a lasagna out of him?  There is, so long as there’s still even one hapless reader who somehow mistakes this wan ghost for Bucephalus.

 
Those looking for an extra Lenten penance might consider watching the whole broadcast.  The rest of us can skip ahead to about 27 minutes in, where a questioner asks Krauss to explain how the universe could arise from nothing.  Krauss answers:

[E]mpty space, which for many people is a good first example of nothing, is actually unstable.  Quantum mechanics will allow particles to suddenly pop out of nothing and it doesn't violate any laws of physics.  Just the known laws of quantum mechanics and relativity can produce 400 billion galaxies each containing 100 billion stars and then beyond that it turns out when you apply quantum mechanics to gravity, space itself can arise from nothing, as can time.  It seems impossible but it’s completely possible and what is amazing to me is to be asked what would be the characteristics of a universe that came from nothing by laws of physics.  It would be precisely the characteristics of the universe we measure.

This is, of course, a summary of the argument of Krauss’s book.   And the problem with it, as everybody on the planet knows except for Krauss himself and the very hackiest of his fellow New Atheist hacks, is that empty space governed by quantum mechanics (or any other laws of physics, or even just the laws of physics by themselves) is not nothing, and not even an “example” of nothing (whatever an “example of nothing” means), but something.  And it remains something rather than nothing even if it is a “good first approximation” to nothing (which is what Krauss presumably meant by “good first example”).  When people ask how something could arise from nothing, they don’t mean “How could something arise from almost nothing?”   They mean “How could something arise from nothing?”  That is to say, from the absence of anything whatsoever -- including the absence of space (empty or otherwise), laws of physics, or anything else.  And Krauss has absolutely nothing to say about that, despite it’s being, you know, the question he was asked, and the question he pretended to be answering in his book.  (Krauss has the brass later in the show to accuse a fellow panelist of a “bait and switch”!)

When another questioner calls Krauss out on this subtle-as-a-sledgehammer sleight of hand, he smugly answers: “Science changes the meaning of things.  It’s called learning.”  Well, no, actually it’s called the fallacy of equivocation, and it isn’t “science” that is committing it, but just some guy who’s written a lame pop science book.  Krauss continues:

[Y]ou may have said that nothing was an infinite empty void like the Bible would have said.  Well, that would be empty space, okay?  We’ve learned that that kind of nothing is much more complicated than you thought.  There’s nothing in it.  There’s no real particles but it actually has properties but the point is that you can go much further and say there’s no space, no time, no universe and not even any fundamental laws and it could all spontaneously arise and it seems to me if you have no laws, no space, no time, no particles, no radiation, it is a pretty good approximation of nothing…

[B]ecause of discovering that empty space has energy, it seems quite plausible that our universe may be just one universe in what could be almost an infinite number of universes and in every universe the laws of physics are different and they come into existence when the universe comes into existence.

End quote.  Now, leave aside the dubious biblical exegesis.  Ignore the questionable multiverse stuff.  Just savor the crystalline purity of Krauss’s irrationality.  In answer to the charge that he has merely changed the subject rather than addressed the question, Krauss’s response is… once again to change the subject (talking about “space,” “properties,” an “approximation of nothing,” “energy,” “infinite number of universes,” etc., which of course are not nothing but something) while continuing to insinuate that he is somehow addressing the original question (which had to do with how something could come from nothing, not from something).   As if repeating the fallacy makes it less of a fallacy.  Again, for over a year now this objection has been raised against Krauss by all and sundry, including by people who know the relevant physics as well as he does and logic and philosophy far betterthan he does.  He’s had ample time to consider the objection and try to formulate a response.  And that’s the best he can do.

A physicist friend of mine and I once sat out on the back porch talking as a moth circled the light above us, repeatedly banging into it.  He interrupted our conversation to note that he’d always found this typical bit of moth behavior annoyingly contemptible for its sheer stupidity -- for the stubborn pointlessness of the moth’s behavior, incapable though it was of acting any differently.  When I think of Krauss I think of that moth.

Let’s watch the moth finally crash and burn, shall we?   Krauss doesn’t actually shut up for another half hour or so, and a whole series of posts could be devoted to the various silly and uninformed things he says.  But he reaches something like a crescendo of incoherence a little past halfway through the show.  Here it is:

I would argue that nothing is a physical quantity.  It’s the absence of something.  Okay.  So to understand what nothing is, you have to think carefully about what something is and that's what science tells us.  So we’re trying to - we’re trying to take an empirical approach to try and understand what the absence of something is and I think there are deep philosophical issues that we’re not going to resolve in this program…

So, “nothing,” Krauss finally acknowledges, is “the absence of something.”  So far so good.  He’s acquired some knowledge of English over the last few months.  Unfortunately, he still hasn’t taken that remedial logic course.  For we are also told that nothing is a “physical quantity” which can be studied through “empirical” means.   All of which entails that the absence of something is a physical quantity which can be studied through empirical means.  Wrap your mind around that.  Your couch has length, width, depth, mass, etc. and can be seen and touched.  And it turns out that the absence of your couch has length, width, depth, mass, etc. and can be seen and touched.  Does the absence of a couch look different from the absence of a cat?  Do they weigh the same?  And how many absences can you fit in one room?  Don’t scoff!  It’s sciiieeeeence!

Or maybe it isn’t, since Krauss casually allows that “there are deep philosophical issues” that he doesn’t pretend to have resolved.  And why should he be expected to resolve them?  After all, they’re only what the question he pretends to have answered was always about in the first place.

Wait… what’s that smell?  Oh, right…

[I’ve addressed Krauss-like pseudo-scientific nonsense about something coming from nothing in earlier posts, here, here, here, and here.  For discussion of the larger issues underlying these debates, see the posts collected here.]

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Noë on the origin of life etc.

UC Berkeley philosopher (and atheist) Alva Noë is, as we saw not too long ago, among the more perceptive and interesting critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  In a recent brief follow-up post, Noë revisits the controversy over Nagel’s book, focusing on the question of the origin of life.  Endorsing some remarks made by philosopher of biology Peter Godfrey-Smith, Noë holds that while we have a good idea of how species originate, there is no plausible existing scientific explanation of how life arose in the first place:

This is probably not, I would say, due to the fact that the relevant events happened a long time ago.  Our problem isn't merely historical in nature, that is.  If that were all that was at stake, then we might expect that, now at least, we would be able to make life in a test tube.  But we can't do that.  We don't know how.

But it is worse than that, in Noë’s view.  He holds that we also do not even know whether such an explanation is just around the corner, or instead will require a scientific revolution, or, alternatively, will turn out to be impossible in principle. 

Something similar can be said, in his view, of the question of whether science can explain intelligence:

If we really understood what makes a person intelligent, then it ought to be relatively straight forward, at least in principle, to manufacture intelligence.  Some people believe that this is possible.  Others that we can actually make intelligent machines and robots now.  I do not suppose that they are wrong. But I do take it as manifest that we do not know this to be the case.  Many mainstream scientists and philosophers believe that true artificial intelligence is at best unfinished business.

With respect to both controversies -- the origin of life and the nature of intelligence -- Noë writes:

What kind of disagreement is this?  To my mind it is foolish to cast it as a standoff between those who embrace science and admit its stunning achievements and those who reject the project of natural science itself.  It is not a conflict between those who know and those who are confused.  Some critics of Nagel's book adopt this pose, as if this were some kind of episode in our culture wars…

The issue at stake is internal to science.  We have not yet integrated an account of ourselves into our understanding of nature.  And so our conception of nature itself is, or threatens to be, incomplete.

End quote.  In my earlier post on Noë I noted that he also holds that “we haven't a clue” how “consciousness [emerges] from the behavior of mere matter.”  The issue here, of course, concerns what David Chalmers calls the “hard problem” of consciousness -- the problem of explaining why the neural processes that underlie perception, behavior, etc., are associated with qualia, those aspects of a conscious experience directly knowable only from the subjective or “first person” point of view.

Life, consciousness, intelligence -- is there anything significant about that particular triad?  There is.  It corresponds more or less exactly to the traditional Aristotelian distinction between the three fundamental forms of life: vegetative, sensory, and rational. 

“Vegetative” life as Aristotelians use that term -- and it is a technical, metaphysical usage, which is not meant to correspond exactly to the way the term is used is ordinary language or contemporary biology -- is any sort of life that exhibits the basic functions of life but nothing more.  Those basic functions include nutrition, growth, and reproduction, where these are taken to be “immanent” activities in the sense that they terminate in and promote the flourishing of the whole substance that carries them out.  “Immanent” causation is in this context contrasted by Aristotelians with “transeunt” or “transient” casual processes, which terminate outside the agent.  Digestion would be an example of an immanent causal process; one billiard ball causing another to move would be an example of a transeunt causal process.  For Aristotelians, the essential difference between living and non-living things is that living things are capable of both immanent and transeunt causation, whereas non-living things exhibit only transeunt causation.  And nutrition, growth, and reproduction constitute the basic package of immanent activities.

(I say more about this at pp. 132-138 of Aquinasand in some earlier posts about the nature and origins of life, here, here, and here.  For a lengthier recent defense of the Aristotelian account of the nature of life, see David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism.)

Sensory life is the sort had by living things that not only carry out the activities characteristic of “vegetative” life, but, on top of that, possess sensation, appetite, and locomotion.  Sensation involves the capacity to take in information from the surrounding environment via specialized organs (such as eyes, ears, skin that is sensitive to temperature, and the like).  Appetite involves the formation of inner impulses in response to what is sensed, and locomotion involves self-movement that is prompted by the appetitive impulses so as to take the living thing that has them either toward or away from the sensed objects that generated the appetites in question.  This package of capacities is, on the traditional Aristotelian view, essentially what distinguishes animals from plants, though there could of course be debate over whether some particular living thing is best understood as falling into the “vegetative” or the “sensory” category (see Oderberg for discussion).  But that the distinction between vegetative and sensory forms of life really is a distinction in kind and not degree is evidenced by the persistence of the qualia problem.  For the possession of qualia is an essential part of what it is to have the sensory and appetitive capacities that animals exhibit and plants evidently do not.  (I’ve said more about this distinction hereand here.)

Rational life, as Aristotelians understand it, is the kind had by living things that possess not only the characteristics typical of vegetative and sensory life -- nutrition, growth, reproduction, sensation, appetite, and locomotion -- but, on top of that, intellect and will.  Intellect involves the ability to grasp abstract concepts (such as the concepts man and mortal), to put them together into complete thoughts or judgments (such as the judgment that All men are mortal), and to reason from one judgment to another in accordance with logical principles (as we do when we reason from the premises that All men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal).   Behavior that results from will or free choice is behavior that follows from reason rather than merely from the impulses of appetite.

The Aristotelian holds that, just as sensory life differs in kind and not merely degree from merely vegetative life, so too does truly intellectual activity differ in kind and not merely degree from the sort of which mere sensory forms of life are capable.  Indeed, the divide between the truly rational and the merely sensory forms of life is especially radical insofar as strictly intellectual activity (unlike sensory activity) is essentially incorporeal and cannot in principle be entirely reduced to the activity of any bodily organ.  I’ve discussed the reasons in many places, such as in Aquinas, but the most detailed treatment can be found in my new ACPQ article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”

For the Aristotelian, then, there are three radical “jumps” in nature -- the jump from inorganic phenomena to the basic, “vegetative” forms of life (i.e. the sort that exhibit the basic package of “immanent” as opposed to merely “transeunt” activities); the jump from merely “vegetative” forms of life to sensory forms of life (i.e. the sort that possess qualia); and the jump from merely sensory forms of life to rational forms of life (i.e. those with the strictly intellectual capacities that presuppose the possession of abstract concepts).  When I speak of a “jump,” though, it is important to emphasize that what I primarily have in mind is something ontological rather than temporal.  For the Aristotelian, questions of metaphysics (what a thing is) are more fundamental than, and to be settled prior to, questions of historical origin (where a thing came from).  Indeed, at least where we have no independent evidence of origins, we cannot fruitfully address the question of where a thing came from before settling the question of what it is, since only when we know its nature will we know what its possible sources might be. 

It is thus sheer, question-begging dogmatism for naturalists to insist that some phenomenon P -- where P is life, say, or intelligence -- simply “must” be purely material because we “know” P could only have had material origins.  If we have no direct evidence whatsoever of P’s origins (as is the case with life and intelligence, since no one has ever observed living things arising from entirely inorganic causes, or an intelligent creature arising from entirely non-intelligent causes), then we have to look to P’s nature to begin our investigation of what its causes might have been.  And if an investigation of its nature shows that it is not entirely material -- as an investigation of the nature of intelligence shows that it cannot be entirely material even in principle (again, see the ACPQ article referred to above) -- then we know that its causes cannot have been entirely material.

How, then, does the Aristotelian position relate to evolution?  The answer is complicated.  On the one hand, the Aristotelian obviously rejects the materialist conception of matter associated with contemporary naturalism -- a conception on which the material world is devoid of any immanent teleology or immanent natures (i.e. final causes and substantial forms).  On the other hand, nothing that has been said above has anything to do with “specified complexity,” probabilities, “gods of the gaps,” or any of the other themes of “Intelligent Design” theory and William Paley-style design arguments.  On the contrary, Aristotelians and Thomists are often extremely critical of ID and of Paley (as I have been in a series of posts).  And part of the reason is that ID is simply not radical enough in its critique of naturalism, but implicitly buys into the same false conception of nature to which the materialist is committed, and thereby merely muddies the conceptual waters. 

Moreover, modern Aristotelians (such as the Neo-Scholastic writers of the early twentieth century) are not necessarily opposed to evolutionary explanations as such.  They do agree, though, that such explanations have limits, and would by no means give a blank check to Darwinian naturalism.  And those limits are limits in principle (not mere matters of “probability”) because they have to do with metaphysical divisions in nature (not mere differences in the degree of “complexity” of the arrangement of mechanical parts or the like).  I have discussed the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to the origins of life here, and the question of human origins hereand here.

In any event, it is certainly telling that, although it is part of the modern conventional wisdom that the traditional Aristotelian distinction between vegetative, sensory, and rational forms of life is a historical relic, we have a mainstream, atheist philosopher like Alva Noë essentially admitting that the explanation of each of these forms of life in terms of something more basic is, even in AD 2013, still highly problematic.  And as I pointed out in my First Things review of Mind and Cosmos, Nagel -- another mainstream atheist philosopher -- essentially says the same thing about each of these traditional Aristotelian categories.  Various other prominent contemporary atheists and naturalists -- Jerry Fodor, John Searle, David Chalmers, and many others -- have acknowledged that at least one or two of these categories remain problematic.  And of course, as I noted in an earlier post on Nagel, renewed interest in Aristotelian themes can be found in much contemporary mainstream work in other contexts, such as metaphysics, philosophy of science, and ethics.  

Could someone not self-consciously Aristotelian or Thomist sound more Aristotelian than Noë already does?  Turns out he can.  Consider some remarks he made in the interview linked to above:

For a long time now, going back at least to Descartes and Galileo, we’ve liked to be told that things are not what they seem.  When we go to a magic show, there’s a feeling of delicious pleasure when the wool has been pulled over our eyes.  Similarly, to be told that the love you feel is actually just a chemical reaction, or that your depression is just a malfunctioning of your brain, is surprising and in some paradoxical way satisfying. There’s a modern pleasure in the unmasking of our everyday experience.  We feel like we’re seeing behind the curtain, seeing how the trick is done…

Galileo said that the apple in your hand is colorless, odorless and flavorless.  That color and so on are effects that the apple has on you, comparable to the sensation of the prick of a pin.  The flavor of the apple, he said, is no more in the apple than the prickliness is in the pin.  The taste and the prickliness are in you.  Galileo thought we were radically deceived by the world around us.  The contemporary neuroscientists simply extend this even further — this idea that the world is a kind of grand illusion that the brain creates.

Sure, it’s an important fact that the perception of colors depends on the physics of light and the nature of the nervous system.  If our physiology were different, our ability to detect colors would be different.  But none of that speaks to the unreality of color, any more than saying that I can’t see anything in my room if I turn the lights off speaks to the unreality of my desk.  We’ve almost made a fetish of this desire to be told that things are not what they seem.  We get a thrill from the paradox.

End quote.  Noë is particularly critical of reductionist accounts of human nature:

Trying to understand consciousness in neural terms alone is like trying to understand a car driving down the road only in terms of its engine.  It’s bad philosophy masquerading as science…

The brain is necessary for consciousness.  Of course!  Just as an engine is necessary in a car.  But an engine doesn’t “give rise” to driving; driving isn’t something that happens inside the engine.  The engine contributes to the car’s ability to drive.  Consciousness is more like driving than our philosophical tradition leads us to expect.  To be conscious is to have a world.  The fact is, you and I don’t have what it takes to make a world on our own.  We find the world, we don’t make it in our brains.

The brain is essential for our lives, physiology, health and experience.  But the idea that it is the whole story, or even the key to understanding the story, is not a scientific conclusion.  It’s a prejudice.  Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, the body and the world.

End quote.  What Noë is here decrying is, essentially, what I have described elsewhere as scientism’stendency to reify abstractions and to treat parts of substances as if they were substances in their own right, and his examples are more or less the same as the ones I gave there.  From the rich, concrete world of material objects presented to us in experience, which is characterized by colors, sounds, odors, flavors, warmth, coolness, meanings and purposes, causal powers and liabilities, physics abstracts out its mathematical structure.  That is extremely useful for certain purposes and certainly captures aspects of what is really out there in the world.  But scientism treats this abstraction as if it were the concrete reality itself, and the entirety of that reality.  From concrete human beings, neuroscience abstracts out the nervous system and makes of it the focus of study.  This too is useful for certain purposes, and is unproblematic as long as it is kept in mind that neural structures and processes can properly be understood only by reference to the whole organism of which they are a part.  Scientism, however, fallaciously tends to treat such structures and processes as if they were substances in their own right, and attributes to them activities -- “interpreting,” “perceiving,” “deciding,” etc. -- that can intelligibly be attributed only to the human being as a whole and not to any part, not even a neurological part.  (I’ve discussed various “neurofallacies” at greater length hereand here.)

Scientism claims to be “reality based” but that is precisely what it is not.  It recognizes only aspects of reality, and in particular only those susceptible of study via its favored methods.   When those methods fail to capture some aspect of reality -- God, consciousness, intentionality, free will, selfhood, moral value, and so on -- scientism tends to blame reality rather than its methods, and to insist that the reality either be redefined so as to make it compatible with its methods, or eliminated entirely.

The Aristotelian, by contrast, insists upon recognizing the world as it really is, and adjusting method to reality rather than reality to method.  Hence while the methods appropriate to physics -- the construction of mathematical models that capture those aspects of material nature susceptible of strict prediction and control -- are certainly suitable for the study of some phenomena, they are not suitable for biology, psychology, ethics, metaphysics, or what have you.

As we’ve seen, in his most recent post, Noë writes:

The issue at stake is internal to science.  We have not yet integrated an account of ourselves into our understanding of nature.  And so our conception of nature itself is, or threatens to be, incomplete.

But the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition had an account that integrated us into nature.  It is scientism, which abstracts out of nature everything that smacks of the human, that has created the problem of reintegrating us into it.  The solution is not a further application of its methods, which simply compounds the problem, but a realization that those methods are not the only ones available to us, and never were.  The work of Nagel, Noë, and Co. is evidence that that realization is increasingly to be found outside the circle of self-consciously Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophers. 

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Back from Blackfriars

Back from Oxford, and exhausted.  I thank Bill Carroll and the Dominicans at Blackfriars for their warm hospitality.  (And thanks to Brother James of Blackfriars for taking the photo, elsewhere in Oxford.)  Regular blogging will resume ASAP.

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The limits of eliminativism

Eliminativist positions in philosophy are a variety of anti-realism, which is in turn typically contrasted with realistand reductionist positions.  A realist account of some phenomenon takes it to be both real and essentially what it appears to be.  A reductionist account of some phenomenon takes it to be real but not what it appears to be.  An eliminativist view of some phenomenon would take it to be in no way real, and something we ought to eliminate from our account of the world altogether.  Instrumentalism is a milder version of anti-realism, where an instrumentalist view of some phenomenon holds that it is not real but nevertheless a useful or even indispensible fiction.

So, for example, a realist account of the mind would hold that it is both real and (just as it appears to be) irreducible to anything material; a reductionist account of the mind would hold that it is real but “really” just “nothing but” something material; and an anti-realist position would be that the mind is not real at all and should either be regarded merely as a useful fiction or eliminated altogether from our account of human beings and replaced by concepts derived entirely from physical science.  A realist account of free will would hold that it is both real and (just as it appears to be) incompatible with causal determinism; a reductionist account would hold that free will is real but compatible with determinism; and an anti-realist position would be that it is in no way real.  And so forth.

Some forms of anti-realism might seem at least coherent, whether or not they are true.  For example, someone who takes an anti-realist position in ethics -- that is, who denies that moral notions like “good” or “right” name any real features of the world -- is, arguably, not taking a self-defeating position, even if he is taking an incorrect position.  The same might seem to be true with respect to anti-realism about the existence of God, i.e. atheism.

In fact, I think, things are not quite that simple.  At least given an Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics of the good, on which the true and the good qua transcendentals are convertible with one another, you cannot coherently affirm that it is truethat there is no such thing as goodness.  (See the relevant sections of chapters 3 and 5 of Aquinas.)  Nor, I would say, can you consistently affirm that the world is intrinsically intelligible while denying that there is something that is actus purus rather than a compound of act and potency, or ipsum esse subsistens rather than having merely derived existence.  And in that case at least certain forms of atheism will ultimately be incoherent.  (I addressed the incoherence of denying that the world is intrinsically intelligible in a couple of earlier posts, hereand here.)  However, it obviously takes a fair bit of work to establish such claims about the good and God.  The incoherence (as opposed to mere incorrectness) of denying their reality is certainly not obvious or blatant. 

Blatant incoherence is more commonly attributed to eliminativist views about consciousness or thought.  Even here there might seem to be wiggle room.  The eliminativist vis-à-vis consciousness can claim that what he denies is not consciousness per se but only the existence of qualia -- those aspects of conscious experience that are accessible only from the first-person point of view of the subject of the experience.  The eliminativist about thought can claim that what he denies are merely propositional attitudes like belief, desire, and the like, but not that there are other information-bearing states in the brain that need to be understood in terms of neuroscience rather than commonsense psychology.

In both these cases I think the incoherence is only disguised rather than avoided.  With respect to qualia, one problem is that it is dubious at best whether there is anything left to consciousness when qualia are entirely subtracted from it; another is that the motivation for denying qualia is often supposed to be scientific, but to deny their existence would be to undermine the evidential base of science itself.  (This is a paradox which, as I’ve pointed out before, has been noted by thinkers like Democritus and Schrödinger, whose respectability from the point of view of scientism can hardly be denied.)

In the case of thought, the trouble is that the motivation for eliminativism here is the difficulty of accounting for the intentionality, “aboutness,” or directedness of thought in terms of a modern, mechanistic, anti-Aristotelian conception of matter, on which matter is inherently devoid of finality, directedness, or teleology of any kind.  Getting rid of beliefs, desires, and the like only eliminates one kind of intentionality.  But some kind of intentionality must be affirmed if notions like theory, concept, model, evidence, inference, truth, and the like -- which are central to the very notion of, and practice of, science itself -- are to be affirmed, or even reconstructed in some more scientistically “respectable” way.  The notion of “information” seems to do the trick only because it is systematically ambiguous.  If meant in something like the technical, Claude Shannon sense, it is itself prima facie compatible with scientism, but irrelevant to reconstructing inherently intentional notions like theory, concept, truth, etc. in materialist-friendly terms.  If meant instead in the ordinary sense, it is relevant, but then smacks of intentionality of just the sort the advocate of scientism was supposed to be explaining away.  (I’ve discussed these sorts of problems with eliminativism about intentionality in several places, such as here.)

But I would say that all of this is secondary to what I take to be the two areas in which eliminativism reaches its absolute, undeniable limits in principle: formal or abstract thought; and change.  The first is what James Ross, in an argument I defend at length in an article in the latest ACPQ, notes is essentially determinate in a way material properties and processes cannot be in principle.  As Ross argues, to deny that our thought processes are ever really determinate -- to deny, for example, that there is ever a fact of the matter about whether we add, square, reason in accordance with modus ponens, etc. -- is doubly incoherent.  For one thing, it entails that none of our arguments -- including the arguments that purportedly support the denial that we ever have thoughts of a determinate form -- is valid.  For another, even to deny that we ever really add, reason in accordance with modus ponens, etc. requires that we grasp what it would be to do these things, and that requires having thoughts that are determinate in the ways in question.

That denying change cannot coherently be done has been obvious since Parmenides and Zeno first tried to do it.  Even to entertain their sophistical arguments requires that one work through their premises and, if one is to come around to their view, that one be convinced that their reasoning is sound -- all of which involves change.  Modern, Einstein-inspired attempts to deny the reality of change face a similar incoherence if pushed through consistently, as I argued in my recent paper on motion and inertia. 

Now it is the reality of formal or abstract thought that, in the view of classical philosophers, provides the chief reason why our intellectual faculties cannot possibly be entirely accounted for in material terms.  (See my defense of Ross for the full story.)  And the reality of change is the foundation of the Aristotelian theory of act and potency, which is in turn the key to the chief Aristotelian-Thomistic proofs of the existence of God.  New Atheist types in love with the ad hominem will no doubt be quick to conclude that this must be the reason why some philosophers insist that change and formal thought cannot coherently be eliminated.  But it is rather obvious why someone might agree that there is something fishy in denying the reality of change or formal thought processes even if he is not inclined either to theism or dualism.  What is much harder to see is why anyone would for a moment take seriously eliminativism about change or formal thought unless he was motivated to try to avoidtheism and dualism.  As is so often the case, the person quick to fling an ad hominem will soon find he has thrown a boomerang. 

More interesting, perhaps, is the question why eliminativism about change and formal thought does not these days get the attention that eliminativist views regarding consciousness, intentionality, and the like do -- especially given that, as I would claim, the existence of change and formal thought processes ultimately pose the gravest challenge to naturalism, scientism, and related views.  Part of the answer is the general ignorance of the arguments of classical (Platonic, Aristotelian, Scholastic) natural theology and philosophical psychology that prevails today, and about which I so often complain.  When the modern reader hears talk of arguing from the world to God, he thinks of Paley and Leibniz, of “irreducible complexity,” Sufficient Reason, and the like -- not of the theory of act and potency.  When he hears talk of the immateriality of the mind, he thinks of qualia or perhaps of intentionality understood as mere directedness on to an object -- neither of which have much to do with Aristotelian or Thomistic arguments for the immateriality of thought.

A more remote cause, I would speculate, lies in the two epistemological doctrines that first vied to replace the Aristotelian-Scholastic conception of knowledge -- rationalism and empiricism.  The Scholastics affirmed the principle of causality, according to which any actualized potency must be actualized by something already actual.  This is a claim about objective reality, part of the theory of act and potency, whose foundations lie in the philosophy of nature and the analysis of how change as a feature of the objective world is possible.  The rationalists pushed this aside in favor of the “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” which is a purported “law of thought” rather than a thesis about objective, empirically knowable reality.  Change per se as the starting point for arguments in natural theology dropped off the “mainstream” radar screen, and failed to return even after the desiccated rationalist versions of the old proofs were dealt their supposed death blows by Hume and Kant.

Meanwhile, the empiricists crudely conflated conceptual thought with mental imagery, thereby obscuring that aspect of the mind that the Scholastics regarded as truly distinctive of human beings and the obvious mark of immateriality.  Even though later philosophers would see through the empiricists’ sophistries on this particular score, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume had succeeded in kicking up enough dust that the debate over materialism would no longer focus primarily on conceptual thought but instead on secondary issues (again, qualia and intentionality understood as mere directedness on to an object -- neither of which are essentially incorporeal on an Aristotelian-Scholastic view).

(I said more about the role modern rationalism and empiricism have played in obscuring the arguments of classical and Scholastic writers in a post on the philosophy of nature some months back.)

In any event, a failure to see their theistic and dualistic implications is surely at least one reason why change and formal thought do not show up in the contemporary eliminativist’s crosshairs as frequently as (say) intentionality or consciousness do.  One way to avoid seeing the obvious is to try to convince yourself that your eyes are lying to you.  Another is just to look in the wrong direction.

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