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Mar. 18th, 2007 03:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionNagel 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.
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looking for complexity
Date: 2007-03-18 03:41 pm (UTC)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
From: