Thursday, May 24, 2007
(4:44 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Encore un effort, if you want to be materialists...
A couple more "pingpong in Adam's basement"-style remarks to follow up on my post "Underdeveloped". First, does it seem to anyone else that when people say "materialism," they basically mean "Newtonian mechanics"? I find that to be extremely counterproductive -- it leads to an artificial and unhelpful reductionism, and frankly, it's not even up-to-date scientifically.I object to reductionism in general because it seems to be so counterproductive intellectually -- we almost always have to "give up" some element of our experience (free will is impossible, etc.). We don't seem to think that it's intellectually productive to "reduce" an animal's organs to a series of chemical reactions and leave that as the "truer" explanation -- the biological level has a certain autonomy. But we're supposed to leave this behind when it comes to consciousness, or morality, or whatever -- it's "truer" to say that our experience is "really" all a bunch of neurons firing, or a reaction to evolutionary pressures. (Not that positing some transcendent "other scene" of "the soul," etc., is any better -- that's obviously reductionist in its own way as well.)
That's also partly what's annoying about the "doctrinaire atheist" literature that's been springing up lately -- all of a sudden, we have to rehash the debates of the 19th century. Could we please at least put some effort into a disproof of the existence of God that relies on quantum mechanics and relativity theory? Here, I'll help -- go through Anselm's Monologion and note all the places where he says that mutual causality and infinite regress are impossible. His "ontological proof" depends heavily on these presuppositions! Get to work!
And another thing: one of the great tragedies in the history of philosophy is the fate of Whitehead. The guy was offering a genuine philosophical revolution, from the very heart of the empiricist tradition. But he shot himself in the foot by bringing in the word "God" -- which doesn't even seem to me to be very appropriate to the underlying concept that he's using. And then of course his most prominent follower (Hartshorne) had to develop precisely the "God" stuff. Process theology is the dirt piled onto the grave of Whitehead's most important contributions.
