Sean Carroll, one of my favorite physicists and armchair philosophers, hosted a fantastic conference on philosophical naturalism and science, and did the world a great favor by recording the whole thing and posting it online. It was a three-day long discussion on topics like the nature of reality, emergence, morality, free will, meaning, and consciousness. Here are the videos for the first two discussion sections, and the rest can be found by following Youtube links.
Having watched through the entire thing, I have updated a few of my beliefs, plan to rework some of my conceptual schema, and am puzzled about a few things.
A few of my reflections and take-aways:
- I am much more convinced than before that there is a good case to be made for compatibilism about free will.
- I think there is a set of interesting and challenging issues around the concept of representation and intentionality (about-ness) that I need to look into.
- I am more comfortable with intense reductionism claims, like “All fact about the macroscopic world are entailed by the fundamental laws of physics.”
- I am really interested in hearing Dan Dennett talk more about grounding morality, because what he said was starting to make a lot of sense to me.
- I am confused about the majority attitude in the room that there’s not any really serious reason to take an eliminativist stance about macroscopic objects.
- I want to find more details about the argument that Simon DeDeo was making for the undecidability of questions about the relationship between macroscopic theories and microscopic theories (!!!).
- There’s a good way to express the distinction between the type of design human architects engage in and the type of design that natural selection produces, which is about foresight and representations of reasons. I’m not going to say more about this, and will just refer you to the videos.
- There are reasons to suspect that animal intelligence and capacity to suffer are inversely correlated (that is, the more intelligent an animal, the less capacity to suffer it likely has). This really flips some of our moral judgements on their head. (You must deliver a painful electric shock to either a human or to a bird. Which one will you choose?)
Let me say a little more about number 5.
I think that questions about whether macroscopic objects like chairs or plants really REALLY exist, or whether there are really only just fermions and bosons are ultimately just questions about how we should use the word “exist.” In the language of our common sense intuitions, obviously chairs exist, and if you claim otherwise, you’re just playing complicated semantic games. I get this argument, and I don’t want to be that person that clings to bizarre philosophical theses that rest on a strange choice of definitions.
But at the same time, I see a deep problem with relying on our commonsense intuitions about the existence of the macro world. This is that as soon as we start optimizing for consistency, even a teeny tiny bit, these macroscopic concepts fall to pieces.
For example, here is a trilemma (three statements that can’t all be correct):
- The thing I am sitting on is a chair.
- If you subtract a single atom from a chair, it is still a chair.
- Empty space is not a chair.
These seem to me to be some of the most obvious things we could say about chairs. And yet they are subtly incoherent!
Number 1 is really shorthand for something like “there are chairs.” And the reason why the second premise is correct is that denying it requires that there be a chair such that if you remove a single atom, it is no longer a chair. I take it to be obvious that such things don’t exist. But accepting the first two requires us to admit that as we keep shedding atoms from a chair, it stays a chair, even down to the very last atom. (By the way, some philosophers do actually deny number 2. They take a stance called epistemicism, which says that concepts like “chair” and “heap” are actually precise and unambiguous, and there exists a precise point at which a chair becomes a non-chair. This is the type of thing that makes me giggle nervously when reflecting on the adequacy of philosophy as a field.)
As I’ve pointed out in the past, these kinds of arguments can be applied to basically everything in the macroscopic world. They wreak havoc on our common sense intuitions and, to my mind, demand rejection of the entire macroscopic world. And of course, they don’t apply to the microscopic world. “If X is an electron, and you change its electric charge a tiny bit, is it still an electron?” No! Electrons are physical substances with precise and well-defined properties, and if something doesn’t have these properties, it is not an electron! So the Standard Model is safe from this class of arguments.
Anyway, this is all just to make the case that upon close examination, our commonsense intuitions about the macroscopic world turn out to be subtly incoherent. What this means is that we can’t make true statements like “There are two cars in the garage”. Why? Just start removing atoms from the cars until you get to a completely empty garage. Since no single-atom change can make the relevant difference to “car-ness”, at each stage, you’ll still have two cars!
As soon as you start taking these macroscopic concepts seriously, you find yourself stuck in a ditch. This, to me, is an incredibly powerful argument for eliminativism, and I was surprised to find that arguments like these weren’t stressed at the conference. This makes me wonder if this argument is as powerful as I think.