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proximoception) wrote2007-03-18 03:46 am
proximoception) wrote2007-03-18 03:46 am
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Nagel on Dawkins:
All explanations come to an end somewhere. The real opposition between Dawkins's physicalist naturalism and the God hypothesis is a disagreement over whether this end point is physical, extensional, and purposeless, or mental, intentional, and purposive. On either view, the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics.
One of Dawkins' (and of course not just his) objections to the Argument from Design is that, if one argues that sufficiently improbable complexity in something requires its having been designed, then the putative designer must have also been designed, since the ability--combined with desire--to design an improbably complex thing must itelf be improbable and complex. So if the designer is God, He would have had to have been created by God+1 etc., which is theologically irritating to say the least.
Nagel implies that Dawkins' physical reductionism is just as arbitrary as the theists' stopping at God+0. He feels The Argument from Design doesn't point to a greater complexity, but to an aphysical concept of intention, which cannot have the traits of causedness or complexity, or for that matter simplicity. I don't think Dawkins, though, has any trouble with such a concept: he has trouble with elaborations on this hypothetical intention. The elaborations are the God Dawkins is damning, not Husserlian scaffolding. That a consciousness would want to cause complexities, would do it for reasons, have memories or projections or opinions, a nature--that's the complication that snags the conclusion in the premise.
A God who has the purpose of judging our behavior, now that's complex and improbable--presumably requiring His own creators' needing such a God...though their need can be neatly explained by Dawkins' empirical theory of accretive mock-design. Dawkins, after all, does not claim that ultimate explanations themselves need to be explained; his argument is not self-defeating, and thus is not parallel to the theists'. Nagel is in turf-war mode, is I think the issue, and need not be--here anyway. Dawkin's argument attaches to mental complexities, sure, of created and creating man and God, but doesn't care about the physicality of too-pure-to-be-called-pure consciousness and intention. They may be local, they may be foreign. No matter. The devil is in the (presence of) details.
Trying to think of some phrasing that inflicts Nagel's attempted irony back on him but that's not the lesson here. And I barely got out all that stuff.
All explanations come to an end somewhere. The real opposition between Dawkins's physicalist naturalism and the God hypothesis is a disagreement over whether this end point is physical, extensional, and purposeless, or mental, intentional, and purposive. On either view, the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics.
One of Dawkins' (and of course not just his) objections to the Argument from Design is that, if one argues that sufficiently improbable complexity in something requires its having been designed, then the putative designer must have also been designed, since the ability--combined with desire--to design an improbably complex thing must itelf be improbable and complex. So if the designer is God, He would have had to have been created by God+1 etc., which is theologically irritating to say the least.
Nagel implies that Dawkins' physical reductionism is just as arbitrary as the theists' stopping at God+0. He feels The Argument from Design doesn't point to a greater complexity, but to an aphysical concept of intention, which cannot have the traits of causedness or complexity, or for that matter simplicity. I don't think Dawkins, though, has any trouble with such a concept: he has trouble with elaborations on this hypothetical intention. The elaborations are the God Dawkins is damning, not Husserlian scaffolding. That a consciousness would want to cause complexities, would do it for reasons, have memories or projections or opinions, a nature--that's the complication that snags the conclusion in the premise.
A God who has the purpose of judging our behavior, now that's complex and improbable--presumably requiring His own creators' needing such a God...though their need can be neatly explained by Dawkins' empirical theory of accretive mock-design. Dawkins, after all, does not claim that ultimate explanations themselves need to be explained; his argument is not self-defeating, and thus is not parallel to the theists'. Nagel is in turf-war mode, is I think the issue, and need not be--here anyway. Dawkin's argument attaches to mental complexities, sure, of created and creating man and God, but doesn't care about the physicality of too-pure-to-be-called-pure consciousness and intention. They may be local, they may be foreign. No matter. The devil is in the (presence of) details.
Trying to think of some phrasing that inflicts Nagel's attempted irony back on him but that's not the lesson here. And I barely got out all that stuff.
looking for complexity
Last week in Nature there was a short, cogent piece by Deborah Gordon on complexity. I think it's related to this. A lot of it was about her fascinating work on seed-eating ant colonies, but it starts and ends with some great pronouncements about non-hierarchical systems and our anxieties about the differences among them, and between those systems and hierarchical ones.
Here's one paragraph:
Recently, ideas about complexity, self-organization, and emergence — when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — have come into fashion as alternatives for metaphors of control. But such explanations offer only smoke and mirrors, functioning merely to provide names for what we can't explain; they elicit for me the same dissatisfaction I feel when a physicist says that a particle's behaviour is caused by the equivalence of two terms in an equation. Perhaps there can be a general theory of complex systems, but it is clear we don't have one yet.
Here is another later on:
It is difficult to resist the idea that general principles underlie non-hierarchical systems, such as ant colonies and brains. And because organizations without hierarchy are unfamiliar, broad analogies between systems are reassuring. But the hope that general principles will explain the regulation of all the diverse complex dynamical systems that we find in nature, can lead to ignoring anything that doesn't fit a pre-existing model.
Re: looking for complexity
I detested the piece by Eagleton, as I detest Eagleton--disgusting sub-Wildean rhetorician that he is. "Theology" 's number of heads doubles roughly every five years, almost all of which feed on Design. The rest tend to start with some God-is-cause, God-is-love, God-is-consciousness kind of Trojan horse, where they're just relabeling as God some concept that Dawkins et al. wouldn't even have trouble with, then sneaking in superfluous content that they very much would. Modern Theology never reduces religion to metaphor, but step one is to pretend to, to claim you're rephrasing or unpacking the obvious. Dawkins is entirely right to stay clear of it, and to stick with the empirical claims it was originally based on. No one would have come to recent theology on their own, it exists only as a refuge for those driven from more substantial claims. Dawkins digs back to those.
Eagleton's review is astonishingly condescending, appallingly bitchy, deliberately misunderstands, distorts, or flat-out lies about Dawkins at more or less every point (claiming he's some kind of positivist, feels nothing good ever came out of any religion, is untroubled by global capitalism etc.) and does so because Eagleton is afraid this new atheist wave will split a Left that needs solidarity with Christians. This part was my favorite, as a smarm-collector:
Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism.
I.e., Dear London Review of Books Reader: DAWKINS PROBABLY DISAGREES WITH YOU! Neglecting to put together that aesthetes, Foucaultians, Freudians, Marxists, Dadaists, anarchists and feminist separatists are not likely to be fans of one another (how many can you even be at once, three?).
The actual trouble with Dawkins' book, as he'd presumably admit, is that it isn't particularly well-organized. Partly this is because he does get emotional, partly because he wants to come across as a human voice (dispelling the fear that atheists are robots in black sweaters), mostly because the opposition is all over the map and he has to go chasing it. Harris' is tighter, excepting his highly unfortunate digressions toward the end.