An Accidental World The Jefferson Center, August 2006

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An Accidental World The Jefferson Center,
August 2006

• Taner Edis
• Truman State University
• www2.truman.edu/edis

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The work of a skeptic
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Naturalism

• I defend naturalism, or physicalism, or
  scientific materialism, or whatever you want to
  call it. No spiritual realities over and above
  what is realized in the physical world.
• An Accidental World because I present a variety
  of naturalism that emphasizes randomnesshow
  chance and necessity combine to explain our world.

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What about religion?

• Much of religious life and thought not directly
  about the supernatural.
• Morality, meaning.
• But belief in supernatural/spiritual/
  transcendent realities make things hang together.

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Liberal religion

• Respectable, sophisticated, humane. Good for
  science.
• But also depends on gods, souls, transcendent
  forces.
• Frustratingly evasive about science and religion.
  Content with superficial compatibilism.

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Enlightenment rationalism

• I belong to this tradition.
• Yet, too much emphasis on traditional style of
  philosophy, lawful order of nature, and a kind of
  moral universalism.
• Instead, I emphasize randomness, modern science,
  and moral pluralism.

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What about morality etc?

• I hope some of this will come up in QAIm not
  sure myself, and Jefferson Center a good place to
  raise questions.
• Set aside for now draw picture of world as I see
  it

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No gods or ghosts

• Minimal sense of naturalism no gods, souls,
  ghosts. No magic. All persons are embodied.
• Need better sense of supernatural agent

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Supernatural agents

• Gods and ghostsstuff of horror movies and folk
  tales as much as religions.
• Cognitive science category-violating persons.
  Intuitive dualism.

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The paranormal

• Can be true
• Parapsychologyseek support for dualism,
  agent-causation, spirit acting on matter.
  Anti-materialist research program.
• But no reason to believe in supernatural agents
  or paranormal powers.

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Design from above

• Denying ghosts not affirming common sense.
  Naturalism is more counterintuitive.
• Common sense order and functional complexity is
  due to intelligent design by a personal agent.
• In most religions, reality is pictured
  hierarchically. A top-down existence.

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Top-down
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Naturalism Bottom-up

• Complexity, including life and mind, is assembled
  out of the lifeless and mindless substrate of
  mere physics.

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Assembling complexity

• Darwinian evolution best example combine random
  variation with selection chance and necessity.
• Non-directed, non-progressive process. Not just
  common descent.
• Physics of complexity.

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Order and chaos
Example space for order in system driven away
from equilibrium.
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Still top-down?

• Common liberal theistic view evolution Gods
  way of creatingbehind the scenes
• ID-lite God the ultimate source of the novel
  informational patterns available to evolution.
• Need new emphasis.

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Chance and Necessity

• Physics relies on chance and necessity.
• Radioactive decays happen at random.
• H2O structure explained by physical laws QM.
• Combinations of chance and necessity!

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Rules and Dice

• Everything is physically realized Everything
  is due to chance and necessity.
• Chance and necessity inseparablekind of dice.

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Contrast to generic ID
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What do I claim?

• Nothing is irreducibly personalknown agents are
  entirely physical.
• Artificial intelligence is possible.
• Cognitive neuroscience, as well as biology, is
  continuous with physics.

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Chance and disorder

• Disorder vital in classical physics thermal
  physics, boundary conditions, etc.
• Coin flips
• Disorder need not always be due to randomness.
  Dynamical chaos information available.

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Modern physics

• Quantum mechanics introduces fundamental
  randomness, not just disorder.
• Measurement. Radioactive decay. No further
  information
  perfect disorder.
• Quantum coin.
  No way to
  improve.

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Cosmic randomness

• Multiple universes with differing laws natural in
  quantum cosmology.
• Most basic laws very symmetric, with very little
  information.
• Generate complexity by symmetry breaking.

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The world is a dice game

• Elegant fundamental laws say very little about
  our world. That comes through low-energy laws,
  frozen accidents, randomly realized through
  symmetry breaking. The most basic laws only tell
  what sort of dice generated our history.
• Randomness is fundamental. This
  is no accident.

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Hidden causes?

• But is randomness not just a label for ignorance?
• A God directs seeming accidents of evolution
  and cosmology? A hidden, nonphysical causejust
  what we need.
• Wouldnt an accidental world be a formless chaos?

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Can it all be an accident?

• Common sense rebels against the notion that the
  universe is a mere accident. But for
  naturalists, at some level, it must be.
• Is calling something an accident just covering up
  an ignorance of real causes?

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Cause
Effect

• What of the randomness in modern physics?

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What is randomness?

• Mathematically, a random infinite sequence is one
  which lacks any pattern.

. . .
T
H
T
H
T
H
T
H
Alternating pattern of heads and tails
. . .
H
T
H
T
T
T
H
T
Patternless, random sequence
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Where explanation ends

• Cant predict next coin in random sequence.
  Cant find a theory giving the pattern.
• Cant do our usual pattern recognition and find a
  place in a network of causes.
• Something is random if theres no pattern and no
  good prospect of finding one. When we have to
  say its a brute fact.

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How about order?

• Individual unpredictability ? statistical
  predictability for large numbers.
• Not the same as ignorance!

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Randomness is basic!

• In fundamental theories of physics, we have
  randomness. The laws are random, simple, framing
  accidents. The dynamics are also random.
• Everyday
  cause and effect are not fundamental. They
  emerge from a microscopic substrate where things
  just happen randomly.

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What about persons?

• Very bottom-up picture, suggesting that specially
  spiritual realities are out of place at a
  fundamental level.
• But physical science should be all about mindless
  stuff doable through chance and necessity. What
  about persons, minds?
• Why should a physical style of explanation work
  across the board?

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Generalized ID again
?
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Explaining minds

• Cognitive neuroscience has made good progress in
  explaining minds. Promises a lot more.
• Old-fashioned dualism is far out of
  fashion.
• But can chance and necessity produce
  real intelligencegenuine creativity?

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Computers are not creative

• Programming and input determine the output of a
  computer. No new information added.

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Not bound by rules

• Humans are creativewe are flexible, not bound
  by pre-programmed rules. We always might figure
  out a new way to do things.
• Gödelian critique of AI Any system of rules is
  rigid it has blind spots. ID no mechanism
  (including Darwins) can be creative.
• Humans are nonalgorithmic, beyond computer
  programs. Yes!

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A source of novelty

• In games where the opponent can adapt to a set
  strategy, occasional random behavior can
  be the best strategy.
• Novelty, unpredictability come from randomness.
• Combine chance and necessity for flexibility!

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Beyond rules, without magic

• The most famous nonalgorithmic functions, such as
  Turings halting function, are called oracles.
  Not only computers, but we also cant compute
  them.
• We need flexibility without oracles.
• A machine can use a random function (maximally
  nonalgorithmic) as a source of novelty, to break
  out of ruts.

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Completeness Theorem

• All functions are partly random.
• The only tasks beyond rules and randomness
  (chance and necessity) are oracles, for which
  infinite information must be known.
• Any human output can be produced
  by mechanisms including chance.

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Darwinian creativity

• Intelligence relies on broadly Darwinian
  processes combining chance and necessity.
• Darwinian thinking has become common in in AI,
  and cognitive and brain sciences.

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Implications

• The bottom-up, naturalistic, accidental picture
  of the world is most likely correct.
• Implications for religion, or even for the
  rationality of supernatural belief, are less
  clear.

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Naturalist belief is costly

• Naturalism is counterintuitiveit goes against
  ingrained and socially reinforced habits of
  thinking. Such habits work well enough, most of
  the time, at little cost.
• Naturalism is costlyit requires specialized
  knowledge and training for new habits that go
  against the grain of human nature.
• Wont be widespread, not even in Europe.

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Morality is not as clear-cut

• My naturalism does not fit with hard moral
  objectivism. Tends toward values pluralism, or
  moral ecology.
• There are many viable,
  successfully reproducing
  patterns of interests and ways
  of life. For most people, most of the time,
  these will include supernatural beliefs.

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Back to liberal religion

• Good compromise.
• Maybe evasive, too concerned to protect God
  from scientific criticism. Conservatives are
  wrong liberals are not even wrong.
• But strength of liberal religion vital for
  science etc.

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Lerner accuses

• Michael Lerner in The Nation, 4/24/2006
• The left has been captivated by a belief that
  has been called scientism. the belief that the
  only things are real or can be known are those
  that can be empirically observed and measured.
  As a religious person, I dont rely on science to
  tell me what is right or wrong or what love means
  or why my life is important Claims about God,
  ethics, beauty and any other face of human
  experience that is not subject to empirical
  verificationall these spiritual dimensions of
  lifeare dismissed by the scientistic worldview
  as inherently unknowable and hence meaningless.
  The view that what is real and knowable is
  that which can be empirically verified or
  measured is a view that itself cannot be
  empirically measured or verified and thus by its
  own criterion is unreal or unknowable. It is a
  religious belief system with powerful adherents.

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Naturalism scientism ?

• Lerner is profoundly mistaken. Spiritual
  dimensions do not get a free pass from
  science-based criticism.
• Troubling, since I usually side with Lerner in
  political matters. He thinks some attenuated
  sense of the supernatural is vital, and my views
  are a variety of scientism.
• Science is a much broader enterprise than Lerner
  conceives!

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What is the world like?

• The question of God involves all our
  sciencesthe best of all our knowledge.
• According to the best of our knowledge, we
  inhabit an accidental world.

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In the end

• Our sciences, in a broad sense, are the best
  tools to bring to the debate over
  spiritual/transcendent realities.
• Best view of the world Naturalistic, random in
  the end. It does a much better job explaining
  things.
• Yet thoughtful naturalists perhaps also have to
  be ambivalent.

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To get in touch

• www2.truman.edu/edis
• Contains all sorts of articles, including the
  slides of this talk, and information about my
  books.
• My e-mail is edis_at_truman.edu

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Thanks for listening!

• Any questions?

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