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Aurobindo Ghose, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel, intelligent design, John Paul II, Ken Wilber, Michael Behe, Pali suttas, SACP, Śaṅkara, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath, theodicy
T.R. Raghunath, a professor in Nevada, gave an interesting talk at the SACP conference explaining Aurobindo Ghose‘s theory of the development of consciousness. There were a number of intriguing points in Raghunath’s talk, but the one that jumped out at me was a point about evolution. Aurobindo, according to Raghunath, accepts “the fact of evolution,” but not “Darwin’s explanation” of evolution. It is a developmental process that has the goal of growth, unfolding. Biological evolution is itself a developmental process of the spirit, in a way that diverges from a Darwinian materialist explanation.
A bell went off in my head when I heard this. In a later conversation with Raghunath, I asked him whether Aurobindo would support the contemporary idea of intelligent design and related critiques of Darwinian evolution, and he said basically yes: there is a guiding spiritual principle at work in the development of new species, it cannot be merely a matter of natural selection through random beneficial mutation. Throughout Raghunath’s talk I had been noticing Aurobindo’s influence on Ken Wilber, and here I saw a still more direct link.
On page 23 of what probably remains his most-read and best-known work, A Brief History of Everything, Wilber makes this now-infamous claim:
A half-wing is no good as a leg and no good as a wing — you can’t run and you can’t fly. It has no adaptive value whatsoever. In other words, with a half-wing you are dinner. The wing will work only if these hundred mutations happen all at once, in one animal — and also these same mutations must occur simultaneously in another animal of the opposite sex, and then they have to somehow find each other, have dinner, a few drinks, mate, and have offspring with real functional wings. Talk about mind-boggling. This is infinitely, absolutely, utterly mind-boggling. Random mutations cannot even begin to explain this. (emphases in original)
This is exactly the claim of irreducible complexity made by Michael Behe, perhaps the most visible proponent of intelligent design. Certain organs in complex organisms, so the claim goes, are too complex to be explained by random beneficial mutation and natural selection, the centrepieces of evolutionary theory since Darwin. While Wilber has not to my knowledge used the term “intelligent design” itself, he has explicitly admitted the connection of his ideas with Behe’s. In a discussion on his own “Integral Naked” website, now apparently down from that site but reposted on many pages including this one, Wilber told his students: “Instead of a religious preacher like Dawkins, start with something like Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. And then guess what? Neo-Darwinian theory can’t explain shit. Deal with it.”
I am not convinced by intelligent design. Its central idea of irreducible complexity seems to have far more holes in it than Darwinian evolution ever did. This site gives a list of the many possible ways that a half-wing could indeed be useful enough to be an evolutionary adaptation; similar possibilities are out there for the eye, the bacterial flagellum, and pretty much any other examples that design proponents have used. Irreducible complexity turns out to be reducible after all. (It took me a long time to realize that not so long ago God had actually been a legitimate scientific hypothesis.) Nor am I convinced by Wilber’s appeal to (his own) authority:
Folks, give me a break on this one. I have a Master’s degree in biochemistry, and a Ph.D. minus thesis in biochemistry and biophysics, with specialization in the mechanism of the visual process. I did my thesis on the photoisomerization of rhodopsin in bovine rod outer segments. I know evolutionary theory inside out, including the works of Dawkins et al. The material of mine that is being quoted is extremely popularized and simplified material for a lay audience. Publicly, virtually all scientists subscribe to neo-Darwinian theory. Privately, real scientists — that is, those of us with graduate degrees in science who have professionally practiced it — don’t believe hardly any of its crucial tenets.
Until I see actual evidence that “real scientists” believe something more like Behe’s intelligent design than a standard Darwinian account, I’m going to go with the overwhelming consensus of what they actually say in public, as well as the arguments that make sense in my own limited research on the issue. I put a lot more trust in those than in the authoritative “trust me” of a single insightful philosopher-scientist who has nevertheless shown an increasing tendency to the authoritarian qualities of a cult leader. It’s often difficult to follow science as a layperson, but this is one of the cases where it’s likely the easiest.
The question that interests me most in all this, though, is why Aurobindo and Wilber both felt the need to turn to intelligent design in the first place. Did Wilber’s graduate experiments on cow eyes really convince him, as an experimental hypothesis, that they couldn’t have been evolved by chance? Or was his a system like his mentor’s untenable if the universe was a product of random chance?
I’m not ruling out the former possibility, but I’m interested in the latter one. (Aurobindo, at least, did not himself do any experiments dissecting eyes!) A Darwinian biology seems hard to reconcile with an idealist view that spirit guides the workings of the material universe. It is probably no coincidence that Darwin published On the Origin of Species soon after the deaths of Hegel and Schelling, the last great German systematizers who tried to create a “philosophy of nature,” a philosophical understanding of the natural world that (like Aristotle’s) was not just metaphysics but physics. During their lifetimes, nature could still be viewed the way they viewed it, as the progressive self-unfolding of a self-aware world-spirit. Darwin stands roundly at odds with such a worldview. Although the Hegelian worldview involves the kind of development from simpler to complex systems that characterizes Darwinian evolution, there is a conscious teleology in this movement, a progressive intelligence at work, not the scattershot workings of random chance. Aurobindo and Wilber have both seen themselves as continuing Hegel’s project, and as they have tried to do so they have also placed themselves at odds with the confirmed experimental observations of biologists.
In a way the problem parallels the problem of suffering, where the world around us is too full of misery and evil to be the work of an omniscient and omnipotent God. When we look at the physical world, we find no active, intelligent or benevolent spirit underlying it, but careless, callous random chance. If we are to look for a spirit behind the world, perhaps it is more plausible to see what Śaṅkara saw: the world is an illusion, the spirit misperceiving itself, making a mistake. But then that view poses deep problems of its own. Evolution tempts me more to the account of the Buddhist suttas, where there’s nothing particularly good about the world and its suffering, except for the fact that we have a chance to get out of it.
First, I would like to congratulate Amod for creating this very interesting blog. The range of topics on this blog is impressive. I am reminded of Aurobindo’s remarks on the integral style or approach which seeks to give “…a large and even a vast, complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness.”
Second, although I think Aurobindo espouses a version of “intelligent design” (he affirms that the “Supermind” is the agent which is designing the universe), one must understand that he does not think that the universe has emerged with a complete and perfect design. Design is itself in a process of development everywhere in the universe against tremendous odds.
Further, and crucially, in Aurobindo’s view, as a result of the Supermind’s immanent activity, design is emerging against extreme odds from the womb of creation, the Inconscient, a Void characterized by the apparent absence of existence, consciousness, and bliss, and is instantiating itself in the successive and progressive levels of matter, life, and consciousness. Hence, in terms of Aurobindo’s views, there is no complete and perfect design anywhere in the universe. This is an interesting alternative to the current ID theory.
As I see it, in Aurobindo’s view:
A. There is design in the universe because the Supermind is initiating and organizing its development.
B. The universe did not emerge fully formed ex nihilo. It is emerging or developing from the Inconscient, the Void apparently bereft of Satchidananda or Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.
C. Because the univese and everything in it is developing from the Inconscient, no design is perfect or complete. At this stage, design anywhere in the universe bears the imprint of its womb, the Inconscient.
D. The Supermind brings about, sustains, and develops design in the universe, but does so, not from a perfect extracosmic place free of constraints, but from within the conditions of the Inconscient which oppose existence, consciousness, and bliss and tend toward the disintegration or dissolution of everything back into a state of Void. The Supermind has freely chosen to do so, i.e., work within the opposing conditions of the Inconscient, and does so as form of expression of its inherent Ananda or Bliss.
Pain, suffering, inertia, etc., are all the natural consequences of this evolution or development of the universe from the Inconscient by means of an opposition or conflict between the inherent attributes (existence, consciousness, bliss) of the Supermind working immanently in the Inconscient and the attributes of the latter (emptiness, nescience, etc).
Thank you for the kind words on the blog, and I hope you’ll stick around.
This is an intriguing account. What I wonder is how it squares with modern physics. I have often thought that physics is far more accommodating to a spiritual view of the physical universe than is biology – the Big Bang theory seems to have surprisingly deistic resonances. It is fascinating to note the increasing amounts of order in the systems on earth, even if those do happen by random chance – especially when the second law of thermodynamics tells us that disorder is always increasing, on a molecular level.
I might be making some big mistakes here, as I know relatively little about either biology or physics. My point, I guess, is that to make Aurobindo’s kind of claims, it seems to me like you need to know something about both. And that is something helpful about Wilber – he does know something about biology and physics, certainly more than I do.
You are on the right track in your emphasis on the importance of physics and biology to a defense of Aurobindo’s account. At this stage, however, it is important to understand just what his views are and whether they are coherent.
Just an additional note: Is it logically possible that what is designed can appear as if it were undesigned to certain types of observers given the limitations of their consciousness? If so, it is logically possible that the universe, or any phenomenon in it, could be designed and yet appear to us as if it were undesigned.
In terms of Aurobindo’s views, it is intelligible not only why it would be hard to comprehend or understand that the universe is designed, but also why it has for us the appearance of being undesigned. This is because mind or consciousness which is seeking to understand the universe and the universe which it is seeking to understand are both developing from the Inconscient which is marked, among other things, by the absence of consciousness, intelligence and knowledge. Hence,at this stage, there is only an imperfect and fragmented grasp of what is actually the underlying and developing design of the universe.
No question on that: it is logically possible. I know of Sunday school teachers, not versed in intelligent design, who gave an answer like this when children asked them about the fossil record: “God put those there to trick us.” Probably not a theologically adequate answer for those who believe in an omnibenevolent God, but I don’t think Wilber’s or Aurobindo’s cosmic spirit is that. I do actually find this answer more plausible than intelligent design, because it’s not trying as hard to play with the empirical evidence. Still, it nevertheless raises the question why we should believe it!
Amod: “No question on that: it is logically possible. I know of Sunday school teachers, not versed in intelligent design, who gave an answer like this when children asked them about the fossil record: “God put those there to trick us.”
Thill: Although it is true that the Sunday school teachers’ claim that God (Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to blame it on Satan?) deceives us about design and Aurobindo’s view that limited consciousness does not fully grasp that the universe is developing according to design both presuppose that it is logically possible that the universe has a design which eludes our apprehension, the difference between the two views is great.
There is no deception by either a divine or undivine agency in Aurobindo’s view, at least on this issue of the human mind’s apprehension of the design of the universe. Rather, in accordance with his developmental perspective, our inability to grasp or fully grasp the design of the universe is a function of the stage of development of our consciousness.
What is his argument for his claim that the existence and development of the universe is designed by the Supermind?
I think, given his exegesis on the Veda and his emphasis on the importance of the Vedic concept of Rta or cosmic order, he would or could proffer an argument from Order, or the subjection of phenomena to laws, at various levels of the universe.
We could put the argument in this way:
a. There is a signficant surplus of order over disorder in the universe.
b. This surplus of order in the universe calls for an explanation.
c. The best explanation of this surplus of order in the universe is provided by the hypothesis that its existence and development were designed by the Supermind.
Dawkins Contra Aurobindo!
Richard Dawkins would most certainly unleash his Brahmastra (= Annihilating Missile of Brahma)on Aurobindo’s assertion that the Supermind is designing the universe: Who designed the Supermind? How can such a mind-boggling form of intelligence just exist or come to exist without an explanation?
Is this “Brahmastra” fatal to all attempts to postulate an omniscient and omnipotent designing agency of the universe?
I hadn’t realized that Wilber is so arrogant and foolish as to question Darwinian theory. However, coincidentally, I have been reading recently about Wilber’s close associations with New Age frauds such as Bubba Free John (or whatever name he most recently went by before he died a few years ago) and Andrew Cohen.
He seems to be very much a media junkie — rather than someone who should be taken very seriously. But I haven’t read and don’t have much interest in his writing.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Wilber has written some very valuable stuff, which has helped me in my thinking: see this older post as well as the more recent ones. As far as I know, Wilber was involved with questionable gurus like Kalu Rinpoche and Da Free John before their unscrupulous activities came to light. His main crime is that he didn’t disavow them once these became known.
I do think he should be taken seriously, partially because he’s one of the very, very few who has even tried to blaze the trail of a genuinely cross-cultural philosophy. In the end I don’t think he has succeeded, but there is so much to learn from his failures that people in the field owe him a debt.
I didn’t know that Kalu Rinpoche’s conduct was in question. Here is what I found on the internet:
“June Campbell, a former Kagyu nun who is an academic feminist, acted as Kalu Rinpoche’s translator for several years. In her book Traveller in Space: Gender, Identity and Tibetan Buddhism[1] she writes that he subjected her to an abusive sexual relationship which he told her was tantric spiritual practice. She raises the same theme in a number of interviews, including one with Tricycle magazine in 1996.[2] As these allegations were raised after Kalu Rinpoche had died, there was no opportunity for him to respond to them.”
The last sentence raises the crucial issues: for someone with her credentials, why didn’t she come forward with her allegations when Kalu Rinpoche was alive?
June Campbell’s interview with Tricycle is available at http://www.anandaawareness.com/tantric_robes.html
She talks about her sexual relationship with Kalu Rinpoche and suggests that she was exploited in the pretext of Tibetan tantric practice. She was in her twenties and Kalu Rinpoche was an old man.
Well, it seems that the old bird “got lucky” several times using Tantra as a pretext.
I am still puzzled as to why June Campbell did not come forward and unmask the Rinpoche when he was alive.
The stupidity (I am assuming that some of these women didn’t feel sexual attraction, normal or twisted, for these cunning, sex-starved old, middle-aged, or young Tibetan lamas.)of any woman submitting herself to sexual exploitation for the sake of “Enlightenment” or getting favored by the so-called “enlightened master” can only be rendered explicable in terms of the inveterate gullibility, irrationality, worship of power in its authoritarian religious forms endemic to the human mind.
Wilber’s defense of Andrew Cohen seems especially egregious. Wilber’s line is more or less that a ‘guru’ like Cohen is out to destroy your ego in order to let the big Self-qua-no-self shine. I don’t buy it. The very fact that I don’t buy it marks me as sadly stuck in the “green” meme, according to Wilber. This sort of ad-hominem defense (“you don’t like the argument because you are threatened by it”) does have a role, in the hands of a really skilled teacher who knows you, but it’s just meaningless in mass media. I am just barely skeptical enough to admit the possibility that Cohen is really an enlightened teacher and not a charismatic con artist (though I suppose these don’t have to exclude each other, given enough tweaking), and since “I only know what I read in the papers,” I can’t make any sure pronouncement, but the charges I have read are persuasive and damning, and Wilber should see it and say so. I’d like to think that he’s at least done so to Cohen’s face, behind closed doors.
Regardless of any paltry and petty “spiritual experience” one may fondly imagine oneself as subject to, it surely takes a monstrous, vicious, conceited, and presumptuous EGO to think that one’s task is to destroy other people’s egos!
Well… the trick here is that a lot of people do need to have their egos broken down from time to time (and I include myself among these). We do, I think, live in an age of narcissism, rewarding the achievements of individuals with the satisfaction of their desires. I don’t think Campbell was necessarily stupid to submit herself. Sometimes that is exactly what we need – it’s just that in some cases, like hers (assuming her story is true), the cure can be worse than the disease.
I doubt you will ever find Wilber repudiating Cohen. He is too attached to defending the “guru principle,” the idea that we need a teacher to get us beyond ourselves. I am sympathetic to this idea, but as with so much else it needs to be taken in moderation, and I have yet to see Wilber expressing even the slightest amount of nuance on the subject. I see this as another example of treating humility as an Aristotelian mean: it is important to take seriously teachers’ advice to get over oneself, but not so much that one forgets how much the teachers need to get over themselves too.
Amod said “Well… the trick here is that a lot of people do need to have their egos broken down from time to time (and I include myself among these)… I don’t think Campbell was necessarily stupid to submit herself. Sometimes that is exactly what we need – it’s just that in some cases, like hers (assuming her story is true), the cure can be worse than the disease.”
I can’t understand or relate to this business of needing to have one’s ego or other people’s ego’s “broken down from time to time”. It smacks of masochism or sadism. It is certain that it is either masochism or sadism if the means of this so-called breaking down of one’s ego or other people’s egos is achieved by means of humiliation.
Going by the reports on the doings of con-artists or charlatans masquerading as “enlightened masters”, e.g., Chogyam Trungpa, on this business of breaking down people’s egos, it is clear that humiliation is what they dished out to their gullible and deluded disciples. We are back in the alley of masochism and sadism in deference to authority. The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich sure comes in handy here!
This relates directly to our discussion on the humility post, of course.
I once attended a talk at an evangelical church, given by a woman whose life was a complete mess (addicted to all sorts of hard drugs, had three abortions, more). Her life turned around after attending a faith healing given by Benny Hinn, of all people: dropped the drugs, settled down to the stable family life she wanted. How did Christianity do this for her? Because suddenly her life wasn’t all about her ego and its desires. She had structure, from having something more important in her life than just herself.
Our own behaviours, without guidance, are very typically destructive. That’s why we have psychologists and psychiatrists filling the gap left by religious – Augustine had discovered the unconscious long before Freud. I’ve seen too many times in my relationships how easy it is to think I am being generous and caring when I’m just making excuses to get what I want unfairly. Or the times when I have a paper urgently due and I procrastinate it, wanting to do anything else. Humans aren’t built with reason in charge. Without guidance from others, we remain mired in our own bad habits.
Amod wrote: “Evolution tempts me more to the account of the Buddhist suttas, where there’s nothing particularly good about the world and its suffering, except for the fact that we have a chance to get out of it.”
How can or how does Buddhism explain why evolution should give rise to consciousness?
As commonsense shows, contrary to Buddhism, not all suffering is bad. As commonsense shows, contrary to Christianity, not all suffering is good.
How can Buddhism accommodate this commonsense distinction between good and bad suffering?
And finally the $ 64 trillion question for Buddhism:
Why should the universe be such that consciousness should not only emerge but also develop to a stage in which “the way out of suffering” is discerned? Why isn’t it a universe in which conscious beings do not evolve, or even if they do evolve, just remain completely ignorant of “the way out of suffering”?
Why is it a universe which allows for the development of “Buddhas” rather than just innumerable forms of Sarah Palin? LOL LOL LOL
The Buddhist account of the world’s goodness and badness tends to be: it just is. The Buddha warns us against cosmological questions because they don’t get us out of suffering. That didn’t stop plenty of Buddhists from asking just such questions. The thing is, when they did, what they came up with is a universe that is neither good (and therefore has a hard time explaining the bad) nor bad (and has a hard time explaining the good) but – indifferent. The universe doesn’t particularly care about us, but as it turns out we are constituted in a way as to be able to free our consciousnesses from it and get out of suffering. This idea of an indifferent universe seems much closer to what biology has found than do those views that find the universe’s goodness outweighing its badness.
As for how it is possible: whatever is subject to origination, is subject to cessation. Since it turns out our suffering had a beginning, it turns out it can also have an end. And that’s how there can be buddhas – not so much of a coincidence given the incredibly vast timespan of Buddhist cosmology, just as it’s not so weird that life could have evolved given the infinity of the universe. An infinite number of monkeys and all that.
Amod sums it up well. In understanding Buddhism, though, it is helpful to realize that the teachings can be divided into relative truth (expedient teachings) and absolute truth.
The sutras fall into these two categories. The Buddha either teaches in response to a question or a need from beings who are on the path (such as the teachings on the Four Noble Truths) or the Buddha teaches on absolute truth (often by gesture or affirmation — as represented by the earth touching mudra or as in the Heart Sutra where the Buddha is silent and then affirms a discourse on emptiness by Avalokiteshvara).
Suffering is neither good nor bad, from an absolute perspective. From a relative perspective, beings desire freedom from suffering — and so the teachings offer that as an expression of the compassion that is intrinsic to awakened mind. However, from the absolute perspective, the path is confusion and expedient teachings are used and then abandoned or transcended (just as you would leave a boat behind after the river has been crossed and not carry it with you).
The difficulty is that the absolute perspective is beyond both speech and thought. This is why the Buddha teaches through gestures and environment — and why Zen teachers have their koans and sticks. And this is why from the absolute point of view there is no evolution of consciousness at all (and if you want to be precise about it, no lack of evolution of consciousness).
I wouldn’t dignify the view that suffering “just is” or that the world “just is” with the appellation “account”. If I say, bugs just are or that they just exist in the world, am I saying anything significant? Not unless someone was asserting the opposite and denying that bugs are really out there!
It is a bit more expansive than that. The Buddha’s account of suffering is that it arises from such-&-such conditions, and these conditions occur thus, and there’s a way to end these conditions for oneself. What the Buddha does not offer is a theory of why this happens at all. One can say this is a lacuna, but it is not quite like saying that insects “just are.” It’s more like saying that matter and energy and logical entailment “just are.” Every account starts somewhere. Buddhism starts with “Life is dukkha.”
“Life is Dukkha.” is a basic claim? I think it is an incoherent identity claim, but assuming that it is intelligible, it is far from clear that it states a basic or groundless fact. In fact, Buddhism offers an explanation of suffering in terms of Trishna or “craving”. Hence, the existence of suffering cannot be an irreducible fact according to Buddhism.
Sorry, I had conflated two senses of “basic” or “starts from.” You are right that the analysis of suffering in terms of craving does form a sort of explanation of the former. But the whole damn cycle of craving-suffering-etc is not accounted for, but just posited. I believe there are moments (though I cannot cite you chapter & verse) where the Buddha actually declines to discuss the “source” or “origin” of this whole scenario.
It’s the gap between cosmic soup irradiated by lightening and consciousness that stuns the mind. Though Sankara had no idea about Darwinian evolution, the Sankhya concept of the non-difference of cause and effect (satkaryavada)which he espoused can be a metaphysical spoon to stir the soup withal. Potency is the bridge of being that keeps Parmenidean fear at bay. Potency however complex the initial state has a limited range until ‘suffering’ comes into the picture. Things break down, they are altered, they mutate and are discarded onto the midden of the botched. The occasional advantage that ‘suffering’ brings can be built on. Read the manual.
Is the bug a feature? If in panpsychist terms it’s all information can there really be ultimately, in metaphysical terms, deformed information? Being is not a design but if a thing just is then it’s all there limitless so limitless that the body must be discarded to attain satyam (truth), jnamam (knowledge), anantam (boundless) Brahman (It). Read the manual. (Taittiriya Upanisad II.vi.1)
I’ve also been intrigued by the similarity between satkāryavāda and the first law of thermodynamics – the latter seeming like a much less Buddhist view of the universe, in that in one respect at least things are not subject to origination or cessation.
Amod,
I am slightly more friendly to Behe’s arguments than you, probably as a result of what may just be a personality flaw: I like minority positions. I do agree that Wilber’s recourse to the rhetoric of expertise (“I’ve got a masters and almost a doctorate”) is not sufficient. I have an open mind with regards to irreducible complexity, which to may lay perspective looks persuasive enough, and often seems “explained away,” rather than explained, by a scientific community that often seems as though it would rather submerge itself in acid than consider a non-natural explanation. And why, after all, should it do the latter? I agree with those who argue that science per se is committed to methodological naturalism; nor do I think this a bad thing; I just think that confessing it frankly helps me understand where my own following of science involves a leap of faith.
As to whether God could have “made the universe look old,” or some such (the ‘omphalos’ argument, from P.H. Gosse’s book, I am reminded of some arguments made by Hans Moravec and by Nick Bostrom to the effect that the universe we live in is a “simulation.” The bare bones of the argument goes: Assume that extremely convincing virtual reality is a possibility. Then, since there is only one real world but a nigh-infinite number of virtual worlds, the probability of our immediate environment being the ‘real’ one is virtually nil. Where the omfallacy comes in is with “extremely convincing.” This need not mean 100% glitch-free, but the simulation needs to be complex and rich and consistent enough to not raise frequent suspicions on the part of its inhabitants that it is a simulation. On this hypothesis, one might argue that the Buddha had seen a kind of glitch in the Matrix. Or, again, that a supreme watchmaker needed to cover his or her divine tracks. (As I recall, Wilber is one of the philosophers whose take on the Matrix movies is included in the DVD set. I don’t know what he says about it because I haven’t watched it).
I tend not to like such “everything-you-know-is-wrong,” ideas-you-get-smoking-pot-at-3-a.m., undergrad philosophy hypotheses, but for some reason this one doesn’t make me so impatient. Maybe it’s the recourse to probability that appeals to me.
Skholiast, did you ever see my old post on certain knowledge? It touches on some of the issues you mention here, including the Matrix – and never rules out the possibility that this world could be such a simulation. I guess I’m not particularly taken by the importance of virtual reality per se in this respect, though. It’s a magnificent way to get the importance of Cartesian doubt across to beginning undergraduates, but I’m not sure how many issues are raised by it that aren’t already raised by dreams.
On this particular argument, there seems to be a lot of intellectual fast-talking going on, though maybe that’s just because I’m getting the capsule version rather than the original. How do we know that there would be nigh-infinite virtual worlds? That extremely convincing virtual reality is a possibility does not imply that infinite virtual worlds actually exist. We do not know whether such reality actually has been created, nor whether, once the first one was created, multiple ones would be applied. Whether that happens depends on the nature of the real world, which this argument concludes we can’t know.
It’s possible that VR is just the best mnemonic for the skeptical argument today, and that dreams really do the same work. But VR adds a dimension that dreams do not: it is (per hypothesis) possible to intentionally create a VR to any specifications, down to particular limits which may be coterminous with the constraints of physical reality itself. All of this looms large in David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality, in which by the way he is explicit that virtuality in the basic sense is fundamental to life itself; it is not a particular technological configuration that is important.
The argument from possibility of virtual worlds to actuality is not as stark in Bostrum as my very brief synopsis. (Tipler’s rather strange argument suggests that elaborate VR simulation will be engineered in the far future out of necessity.) But my impression of various Indian cosmologies, for instance, is that the step from “could be” to “is” is pretty quickly taken– as if possibilities expand into the space of actuality by a natural law, avoiding a vacuum. (All those myriads of myriad worlds–why are they there?) I’m open to correction here.
This intelligent design argument is an analogy that has gotten away and become understood literally. If you have an intelligent design you must have an intelligent designer is a simplification of the analogy of proportionality. As within the world if we came across something that we had never encountered before that was complex and clearly made by a human hand we might make the intelligent assumption that it was designed to be fit for some purpose or other. Similarly as with an object within the world so too the cosmos as a whole. Paley and others have forgotten that this removal of the analogy from its matrix compromises the intelligibility of the analogy. We cannot take it in its root sense. That area that we want to point to by means of the analogy is a mystery that we can only vaguely indicate.
Shankara when impugning the Sankhya materialist account of primal matter/pradhana as the source of creation said that this could not be true as what is patent is that creation shows structure and order which could not emerge from the purely inert pradhana. This is an intelligent observation that does not rule out panpsychist type ontology, emergentism, conatus, elan vital, or something of that sort.
The more I learn about Wilbur the less I like him. His appeal to his own authority on his impressive (LOL) education in the sciences just goes to show how long one can study something and learn nothing about it. Alas, many of us just study for the test.
Amod states: “the Big Bang theory seems to have surprisingly deistic resonances”.
I think you can interpret Darwinism the same way. Basically Darwinism describes a method by which one can discover local maxima and minima through random permutations. So powerful is this method that it is now being used to DESIGN all sorts of things like rocket shapes and computer software. If you’ve got a complex multi-factorial analysis to do, say a couple hundred discrete variables, you can’t just do simple derivations to find your maxima or minima. You’ve got to do all sorts of simplifications and approximations first. Instead, one can just describe the variables, define what a good result is, and get your computer to start trying possible solutions while you go for a hike. One could easily imagine a creator (I don’t do this but I’m just showing that it can be done) who has decided what the lay out of the universe is, has created laws that might, say, favor altruism slightly more than selfishness, and walked away why the whole thing runs its course. This sort of deity might not have decided that his created beings will have two legs and like to sing but he may have favored ones that could accurately perceive a real world and make general statements about it.
I was reading about squirrels yesterday. They really are amazing creatures who have developed very similar social patterns to primates: They live in multi-generational dens, greet each other with something like a kiss, and actively try to deceive each other. This convergence between primates and squirrels is not being directed by a creator–it just reflects relative advantages for certain behaviors in the mammalian milieu.
I’m not going to say more about the half a wing argument than to say that canard has been so thoroughly treated in evolutionary theory that anyone seriously putting it forth is guilty of willful ignorance or intentional deception. I don’t think anyone thinks the first birds evolved in the presence of kitty cats.
Ones reaction to Darwinism can be a good gauge of one’s level of Cartesian hypocrisy. If you’ve got some deep assumption that you pretend to hold in abeyance while you “think rationally” Darwinism is likely to not sit well with you.
Amod said: “How did Christianity do this for her? Because suddenly her life wasn’t all about her ego and its desires. She had structure, from having something more important in her life than just herself.”
I would be cautious in accepting these emotive-persuasive conversion stories at face value. In any case, Christianity didn’t do anything for her. (Take a look at the sexual abuse rampant among those right in the middle of it and up to their necks in it!)The impetus to change her life came from WITHIN her. It was always within her, which is not at all surprising for self-conscious beings, and the silly faith healing session was simply an external trigger. If Bankei could get a kensho experience on the “Unborn Buddha Mind” staring at the dripping black phlegm, caused by tuberculosis, he spat out on the wall in front of him, surely a faith healing session can act as a trigger, especially if one already brings a substantial religious baggage to the session, for the impetus to go in a different direction in one’s life.
Amod said: “Our own behaviours, without guidance, are very typically destructive. That’s why we have psychologists and psychiatrists filling the gap left by religious – Augustine had discovered the unconscious long before Freud. I’ve seen too many times in my relationships how easy it is to think I am being generous and caring when I’m just making excuses to get what I want unfairly. Or the times when I have a paper urgently due and I procrastinate it, wanting to do anything else. Humans aren’t built with reason in charge. Without guidance from others, we remain mired in our own bad habits.”
There is no such thing as being “generous and caring” 24/7! That’s part of the con game of the peddlers of religious values. So, the problem is why you can’t accept that “selfishness” is an aspect of your nature in just the way generosity or love is. The trouble is not with the “selfishness”. Rather, it is with the inner conflict produced by the internalization of the silly religious ideal of “generosity and caring” 24/7 and the reality of your transitory “selfishness”.
“Humans aren’t built with reason in charge. Without guidance from others, we remain mired in our own bad habits.”
Yes, one has only to take a look at the politics of philosophy and religion departments in this country to be convinced of the probable truth of the first claim!
If humans are not built with reason in charge, on what basis do you accept guidance from others? If they are subject to the same irrationality as you are, then it makes no sense to accept their “guidance”. That’s the blind accepting the guidance of the blind.
So, to avoid this problem, you must grant that some humans are capable of being or becoming progressively rational in contrast to others. We can then reasonably turn to these humans for “guidance”, bearing firmly in mind that this “guidance” is not infallible, and, more importantly, that this “guidance” can work only if one brings to bear on it whatever meagre resources one’s own reason can provide.