Naturalism vs Science

I have recently entered a curious pseudo-argument with some people. The issue has been my contention that science is a subset of religion, to which I got a common reply usually summarised as, "No way!" Well, way.

I would have written this up earlier, except that I was too tired, and fell asleep. Besides, there was the sneaking suspicion that such a simple argument must have been promulgated by some more powerful philosopher than I, and the other sneaking suspicion that I might have read it somewhere else and thus could no longer distinguish between what my formulation was and what someone else's was.

So I did due diligence and came up with a little entry by Plantinga in the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Link to important section here.

Yep, it's as I remembered. "Naturalism is presumably not a religion. In one very important respect, however, it resembles religion: it can be said to perform the cognitive function of a religion."

Science as a cognitive endeavour claims to seek truth, but Darwin's concern (as expressed by Plantinga) goes this way:

What our minds are for (if anything) is not the production of true beliefs, but the production of adaptive behavior: that our species has survived and evolved at most guarantees that our behavior is adaptive; it does not guarantee or even make it likely that our belief-producing processes are for the most part reliable, or that our beliefs are for the most part true. That is because our behavior could perfectly well be adaptive, but our beliefs false as often as true.

Darwin himself apparently worried about this question: "With me," says Darwin, "the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" (Darwin, 1887)

This is the issue of faith that underpins science as a religion. We have to be somewhat Cartesian, without knowing whether this is reliable; it is reliable only because we think it is — it is our thought that assesses our thought.

Naturalism (whether Dawkinsian or any other kind) thus militates against knowing whether science is truth or not. Eventually, scientism is forced to say things like, "Well, your computer works, so we know science is useful." Well, yes. In other words, the issue of faith is lost in works, just as it often is in religion.

Unnatural Things (Part II)

In a previous post, I talked about some ideas of 'natural' and 'unnatural'. It struck me that if you defined 'natural' as 'found in nature', it still isn't a complete definition for some purposes.

For example, if you said, "That's natural behaviour," when watching young people at play, you would actually implicitly be saying, "... for young human beings in that particular cultural context." What's natural in one context is not necessarily natural in another, because it would not normally occur in that context.

Which brings me to the next point. Should we define 'natural' as 'occurs in nature, given a specific context', or as 'is the modal occurrence for that situation', or as 'is within the normal distribution of behaviours, to n standard deviations'? Or should we use yet another definition?

The problem is that etymology's main clue constrains our choice somewhat; 'natural' comes from the Latin and implies 'inborn' — something that proceeds from the course of events in the natural world without human intelligence intervening. It is natural that some people are born with genes which predispose one towards alcoholism; it is not natural that alcoholics should exist, because it is rare to find ethanol in large quantities in nature — there is no common natural process that could create large numbers of alcoholics.

Some might argue (as I have, playfully, in the past) that mankind is a fact of nature, and that therefore everything (cable TV, skyscrapers, space telescopes, iPhones, Gucci handbags etc) that we create is part of nature. Well, in that case, we should throw out the idea of artifice, of organic growth, of natural methods of doing anything and just accept that our sad lot is to defeat the rest of nature before we get round to understanding it.

But that's just dodging the argument. Why shouldn't we think of Man as part of nature? And why shouldn't we then think that any activity we indulge in, for which a sufficiently large number of us exist, is also a natural thing? Take the relatively innocuous cultural behaviour of wearing earrings so large that they distort the earlobes. This can be found in primitive (technology-wise) tribes as well as on the streets of New York or Singapore. Is this therefore a natural thing?

Is it natural to indulge in bodily mutilation by surgical removal of unsightly body parts? We do it with nails and hair, which regenerate; we do it with skin, which sometimes doesn't quite regenerate the same way. We do it with parts that don't regenerate, sometimes out of philanthropy and sometimes as some odd aesthetic or religious practice.

Think about circumcision, for example — some people say it is a healthy thing to do, some people say not, and it's impossible to say under what circumstances it is optimally healthy. Personally, I'd have the shuddering heebie-jeebies if anyone told me they were going to chop off the tip of one of my extremities. My fingers and toes cringe, that is.

So many questions, and so many answers. Sigh.

Unnatural Things (Part I)

Sometimes when you look at the news or read the latest polemics, you hear people talking about things as 'natural' or 'unnatural'. This is something interesting to me. What constitutes 'natural' or 'unnatural'?

To me, 'natural' connotes lack of human artifice. Human technology is somehow less natural than, say, termite archaeology or the coconut tool use of certain octopi. We make tools not only by directed physical action, but by directed chemical action 'with malice aforethought', so to speak.

But there's another way of looking at things that I find fascinating. This is the statistically natural approach — somewhat akin to the rule of the majority or the rule of large numbers. By this approach, if something is a) found to occur in real life, b) found to occur in real life in large numbers (relatively speaking) or c) found to occur in real life in a majority of cases, then that something is considered natural. It's like the way some people look at giraffe behaviour.

For example, male giraffes are known to indulge in blatant, common, and majority homosexual behaviour. This is a point in favour, some say, of such things being natural. Well, they also sleep an average of 1.9 hours a day, have very long necks, and use their heads as flails. Are some behaviours natural and the others not?

The answer is an obvious one. All are natural for giraffes but not necessarily at all for humans. In fact, I suspect none of these things is natural for humans except under unnatural (perhaps giraffe-like?) conditions.

So what is 'natural'? Yes, I'll handle that soon...

Happiness is Blue, Gold is Guilt?

There are two fairly large and overlapping groups of people I know. One group believes that affluence contributes towards happiness, the other group believes that affluence contributes to poverty in the spiritual realm. The overlap causes a genuine disconnect: is spiritual richness then exclusive of material happiness?

Of course, there is a large group where there is no such problem. These believe that richness in the spiritual realm creates wealth in the material realm and therefore nobody needs to be guilty about being materially affluent.

The problem, I think, is that these two realms have often been seen as mutually exclusive, even opposite to each other. What I believe is nothing new: I believe that the material realm is a lower order reflection of the spiritual realm. For those who don't believe in a spiritual realm, it's analogous to using description theory as a higher-level construct that deals with material things when it has to.

It is probably also easier to argue that the material realm proceeds from the immaterial than vice versa. But that's not the point. The point is that seeing things like beauty or niceness or happiness or anything like that requires physical apparatus. If the physical apparatus is functioning better and more healthily, so much the better.

It's not so much the sound mind in sound body thing; I don't think it's possible except in a theoretical sense to separate the two. I think that any analysis or appraisal or evaluation of the material realm is impossible without what some people call the spiritual realm and others call the abstract realm (whether correctly, usefully, consistently or not).

This is why the crest of the College of Wyverns is half in blue, for the spiritual things, and half in gold, for the material things. Yet it's not a clean division, the two are mixed in the chief of the shield, where the wyvern itself is placed as the dominant charge. What holds the two halves together are the blood-red letters, which signify in this plane that all humanity shares a common physical heritage (blood) — and in the teachings of that school, the idea that the blood of the Divine binds heaven and earth as one.

This is why you don't need to be guilty, defensive, offensive, or overly joyful about material pleasures and the material life. All that is merely the lower level output of the higher level structure. That's why some people aren't happy although enormously wealthy, while some people are. Perhaps at the highest possible level of the ineffable hierarchy, we'll finally figure it out.

But I doubt the solution will please those who in this life are purely quantitative or purely qualitative researchers. In fact, I doubt that such a solution will please anyone completely, for this is the nature of our humanity.

Scientia: Acknowledgements of Imperfection

About two and a half years ago, about the length of a conscript service or a part-time MBA, I remember writing about the (unjustified) divide between the humanities and the sciences.

In my examination of the sciences and my personal experience as a scientist, I always keep in mind the memory of Johannes Diderik van der Waals (1837-1923). In 1873, his doctoral thesis asserted the non-ideality of real gases in a time when even the molecular theory of matter was in dispute. Up to then, the ideal gas law (often expressed in the form of the equation PV=nRT) had been taken to be the underlying truth of things, made weak only by the limits of experimentation.

Van der Waals won the 1910 Nobel Prize for his admission that the real world was not ideal, and that the universe was in fact definitely to be treated as if ideality was unattainable in its reality. His work led to invaluable techniques in the compression and liquefaction of gases.

But the key point is this: with the physical thesis of van der Waals came the final disenchantment of the alchemists, a tradition which ended at Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Newton's assertion of the ideal, almost Platonic, nature of the world was in line with his beliefs as an alchemist. Those who worked with him and followed after him assumed the truth of the alchemical assertion, "As above, so below," which related earthly science with heavenly truths. Few now realise that Newton wrote more on alchemy, sorcery, religion and Biblical hermeneutics than on the science for which we inescapably remember him.

The line from van der Waals to Einstein is a short one: in fact, Einstein's 'miracle year', in which four of his most influential papers were published, was 1905. In slightly over 30 years from van der Waals' doctoral thesis to Einstein's annus mirabilis, we humans had come to discover just how uncertain and provisional our ideas about the universe could be.

Modern science is a striving after a perfection we know we cannot attain, unlike the natural philosophy or scientia of Newton and his age. It is a very human story of the attempt to control what we know we cannot but we dream we can. That dream goes back to the Promethean flame, the story of liberating fire, and the difficulties thereafter.

Mastery & Alchemy

The Academy, the Association, the Society, the Institute – what a list! I've just found a stack of memberships, and I'm idly leafing through them. I'm wasting time doing this because I think I'm trying to put off what I said I'd do, and have for some time wanted to do: writing about my fellow journeymen and masters.

In my discipline alone, at least five have reached the position of Master in the College of Alchemy. Only one can hold the title at a given time, and the incumbent is a potent magician who has been through many trials with great success. I myself held the seat for seven years; as in all things magical, seven is a good number and eight is an abundance. My predecessor was also my successor, with some reluctance. But to have five Masters in one College is a surfeit of talent, and I suspect that this is one of the highest proportions in all the Colleges of Natural Philosophy. The others (besides our current Master and the Second Master) are of course Bass-Clef Holysong and Farmer Dumpling. The former was a Master of the Gnostic Arts as well as a Master of Natural Philosophy in colleges elsewhere; the latter was Master Alchemist at the Aerie.

There are no longer Masters of Natural Philosophy at the House of the Wyvern. Rather, the old College has been broken into smaller colleges, each with its own Master. It reflects the state of our world, that complexity and chaos have overwhelmed order, and no one person can hold the centre (although some have tried to their everlasting regret and continuing torment).

Of course, in the final analysis, we all trace our philosophical ancestry to the archmage who first enunciated the Principia Mathematica; it was he who denounced hypothesis as unnecessary, but to this day it is hard to wean the apprentices off it. That famed alchemist was devout and modest, although his claims were grandiose and his intellectual pride dangerous. It seems a paradox, but that is the nature of philosophical truth: if you are right by every test, you cannot be falsely humble and pretend a modest lack of knowledge that is not the case. The correct placement of humility here is to acknowledge, as this one did, that foresight comes from standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before.

It has been a hard journey for my people. It has been difficult for many to accept that Natural Philosophy is not a key, but a fetter – non clavis, sed vincula. The disciplines of the unseen, whether of life, or force, or the elements, do not frame the entirety of our existence. And yet, as the imprudent astromancer once said, "E pur si muove." We should not claim mastery unless we are prepared to admit mystery.

And so, as I look back on the recent history of the College and its heirs, I am led to feel both regret and accomplishment. I was the last to try to hold the centre; that the world defeated me is not to my shame, nor to my glory. It is the way of the world, and the honours if any are not mine. Rather, they belong to the Creator of this bright world that is not infinite, and yet able to defeat all who live on it and will not acknowledge Him.