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“The disenchanted naturalist’s guide to reality” is the précis of a book, and even that book is a much cut down version of my side of an argument with a tradition that has been trying to reconcile science and the manifest image, as Wilfred Sellers called it, at least since John Dewey. No précis, not even of the length of mine, could recapitulate that debate. But I tried to signal that I was at least familiar with most of the moves in the debate when I wrote, “I stand on the shoulders of giants: the many heroic naturalists who have tried vainly, I think, to find a more hopeful version of naturalism than this one.”

In general, my commentators did not give me any credit for being acquainted with those moves. They certainly felt no need to provide anything new by way of argument to show that their more hopeful version of naturalism is not just a combination of attempts to cushion the blow, change the subjects or define the problems away. Kant had a term of abuse for this strategy the first time a naturalist (David Hume) tried it—he called it a “shameless dodge.”

Here is an example of the sort of objection that used to come so easily to opponents of eliminative materialism, and which more than one of my critics helped themselves to, as if I had never heard of the ploy and would be stopped dead in my tracks by it: “If Alex’s metaphysics is true, then we cannot know that, since knowledge is justified true belief; but according to his ontology there are no beliefs (in the full-blooded, intentional sense). Hence the premise of his argument that we know the universe to be materialist in the way he pictures that is moot. Ergo his whole line of argument amounts to the snake swallowing its own tail.”

In brief, “So, you don’t believe that there are any beliefs? Reductio ad absurdum, QED, no more need be said.” Like Dr Johnson, refuting Bishop Berkeley by kicking a stone. If only philosophy were so easy.

Actually, you won’t find the locution “I believe that….”any where in my précis (or for that matter the whole book), just to avoid such puerile objections. More important, careful reading of the précis will find the statement that the brain receives, stores, and conveys information—some of it adaptive, some neutral, and some even maladaptive. It also receives, stores and conveys a good deal of misinformation—much of it adaptive, some of it maladaptive, and most of it neutral. But it does not store this information in the form of propositions or statements, or sentences of any language, including mentalese. It is of course obvious that introspection strongly suggests that the brain does store information propositionally, and that therefore it has beliefs and desire with “aboutness” or intentionality. A thoroughgoing naturalism must deny this, I allege. If beliefs are anything they are brain states—physical configurations of matter. But one configuration of matter cannot, in virtue just of its structure, composition, location, or causal relation, be “about” another configuration of matter in the way original intentionality requires (because it cant pass the referential opacity test). So, there are no beliefs.

One of my commentators writes, “That the brain doesn’t traffic in propositions, and that consciousness isn’t a direct mirroring of the world, doesn’t mean that language-using persons don’t have propositional knowledge or entertain accurate beliefs.” No? How do we do it then, if not with our brains?

This question is not just rhetorical. There is a real problem here for neuroscience and naturalist philosophy. Naturalism—whether disenchanted or not—recognizes the agenda of paradoxes, dilemmas, puzzles and impossibility proofs that clever philosophers have erected for science ever since Zeno. But it treats them as items on the research agenda of science. Today’s budget of clever objections, mainly to naturalism about the mind—what its like to be a bat, why cognition can’t be following a program, where am I?, the hard problem of consciousness—are problems for neuroscience, problems to solve or to dissolve, the way science has dealt with the impossibility of motion, the inconsistency of gravitation with the physics’ denial of action at a distance, or Pasteur’s “spontaneous generation” argument for vitalism.

It is an important item on the research agenda of neuroscience to identify the way in which the brain does store information and to identify the nature of those neural states most closely approximated by terms like ‘belief,’ ‘desire’ and the rest of the intentional apparatus of folk psychology. Don’t ask the philosopher to do this. But don’t suppose you can refute eliminative materialism by so trivial a ploy as the accusation of pragmatic inconsistency. And let’s understand all the rest of the intentional locutions in what follows as approximations for what is really going on when we think, write, talk and behave (i.e. “act”) with apparent purposiveness.

The model here is of course Darwin’s expulsion of purpose from nature.

Kant announced resolutely that there could be no Newton for the blade of grass: beyond the domain of physics, purposes were real and ineliminable. Darwin showed that Kant was wrong: they were all merely apparent, none were real, and he identified the process that produces and maintains the appearance of purpose. Some people—including several of my commentators–think that what Darwin did was “naturalize” purposes, make them safe for a world of purely efficient causation. I am with Huxley here, and there is an obvious reason why he insisted that that Darwin had not legitimated them but expunged them. Random, blind variation, and the purely passive, uncreative environmental filtration in which natural selection consists cant possibly be mistaken for purpose. Of course the impersonation of purpose that adaptation contrives is so uncanny, that it is the greatest hurdle to the acceptance of Darwinian theory. But purpose was ruled out by physics in the 17th century, and explained away by Darwin in the 19th.

Larry Laudan asks, “Why trust the latest version of physics? After all, a pessimistic induction provides evidence that it will not survive much longer.” True enough, but the only two parts of physics that naturalism—disenchanted or otherwise—leans on have been secure since the 17th and the 19th century: Newton’s banishment of purpose, design, teleology—immanent or otherwise, final causes, and future causation from physical nature, and Kelvin’s discovery of the 2d law of thermodynamics—suitably probabilified by Gibbs and Boltzmann.

As for the disenchanted naturalist’s take on ethics, it certainly has no interest in undermining Tamler Sommers’ love for his daughter, Eliza. It’s no part of the disenchanted naturalists agenda to explain away the reality of love or any other emotion. Indeed, emotions are essential to the disenchanted explanation of how norms motivate us.

The problem for naturalism is to explain why a process of blind variation and natural selection landed us with what naturalists think just happens to be the right core morality of mankind. There are two ways to do this, neither of which are satisfactory. There is one way to explain the correlation away, which is perfectly satisfactory. The trouble is it produces nihilism about ethics.

The two unsatisfactory ways: Either, natural selection is so smart (to use a Fodor-like trope) that it was able to filter for the right morality among all the other wrong moralities, the way it was able to filter for the best hereditary system (using DNA) among all the other less reliable ones. Or, by filtering for the one core morality we share most widely around the world, natural selection made that morality the right one. The first alternative is unsatisfactory because the process of natural selection is notoriously unable to deliver true beliefs, only ones that enhance the survival of our genes (and memes, if there are any) in the local environment. The second alternative is unsatisfactory, since a set of norms’ wining the genetic or memetic fitness-race is no reason for it to be certified to be true, right, or correct.

The way to deal with the correlation of putative correctness of our moral core and its winning the Darwinian struggle for survival, is simply to deny it is correct, right, or true. Since we don’t think any of core morality’s incompatible alternatives is true, right or correct, we naturalists are committed to nihilism. Ways to escape nihilism: deny that there is a universal moral core, reject the view that our moral core has far reaching consequences for survival and reproduction, give up naturalism about morality. These alternatives are so implausible, I’d rather be a nihilist—a nice one, since nature has selected for it. Catherine Driscoll seems to me to have got it right, and the other commentators missed the point.

One of my commentators speaks for others when he writes, “There is a credible, naturalist-friendly way to distinguish persons who are able to control their conduct in sophisticated ways as in contrast with persons who cannot. Build a theory of free will by starting there, I say. In my estimation, a similar naturalist treatment is available for a considerable range of the phenomena Professor Rosenberg dismisses.” I dismiss no phenomenon, I dismiss attempts to reconcile naturalism with intentionality, human agency, free will and finally the enduring self. Attempts do so all too often just change the subject. Whether it’s Hume’s shameless compatibilist dodge, or teleosemantics’ inability to account for the opacity of beliefs and desires, or the attempt to substitute for the self some sets, sequences or stages of physical things that do not satisfy Leibniz’ law of numerical identity, they all just define the problem away.

As for Libet, the aim of my appeal to his experiment, and to its vast number of replications, was to undermine our confidence in introspection as a source of reliable information about the mind, or anything else for that matter. I credit Libet with the conclusion that the consciousness of willing is no reason to suppose that willing is a conscious act of the mind. If my précis seemed to say more, that was overhasty of me. The point is when it comes to the nature of the mind and will, “never let your conscious be your guide.”

Scientism is physicalist—the physical facts fix all the facts. But it is not eliminativist about higher-level ontologies, provided that they are compatible with physics and supported by reliable empirical evidence. That means it must be eliminativist about free-floating designs and purposes, original intentionality and ethical values. It accepts higher level ontologies, so long as they play roles in our best (most predictive, transparent and unifying) explanations and theories. If some higher level ontology is incompatible with physics, then it cant do any of these things, since all the evidence for physical theory is evidence against them. Naturalists unwilling to eliminate so much must dispense with physics. And with it, they lose their most compelling argument for the hegemony of the higher-level process they really need—the one Darwin discovered.

Pippin has great rhetoric on his side, and he knows how to hurt a guy: …if Rosenberg believes that “science teaches us” that there is no, can be no, rationally defensible reason to prefer egalitarianism to patriarchy or racism, let him say so and we will know what we are dealing with.” But of course it’s not as though I think there are rationally defensible reasons that support inequalities, gender subordination or apartheid. In fact in the book I argue that natural and cultural selection, plus empirical evidence, does lead to all three of the norms that I share with Pippin. I just think that it’s vain to seek the sort of justification for them that moral philosophers and almost every one else in our civilization has sought since Plato. At least since Dewey naturalists have been insisting that a “rationally defensible reason” for the values we hold doesn’t have to meet that standard. Maybe not, but to be a naturalistic one it will still have to infer an ought from an is—and for us naturalists that “is” will have to be the process of blind variation and natural selection. I don’t think we can do it.

Actually, Pippin agrees with me about the limits to naturalism. He doesn’t think it can provide these “rationally defensible reasons” for the values we cherish either. But he is a little disingenuous. He doesn’t tell us that he has written a Humanitist’s repudiation of the whole project of naturalism, aiming to “mark out the limits (the limits in principle, not limits based on temporary empirical ignorance) of modern scientific understanding in contributing to human self-knowledge, and so to insist on an unusual sort of necessary independence and privileged importance of moral and normative matters. [Daedelus, summer, 2009].

Brian Leiter had almost the last word among the commentators, and they are almost the right ones, except for some minor matters of technical philosophy which it might be worth clarifying.

On the alleged autonomy of the rest of science from physics: Jerry Fodor’s bluster may have convinced lots of people that the proprietary regularities of the “special sciences” are laws despite their gaps, their untestability, their predictive weakness, and their short lives. But I know a lot of philosophers of biology who have not signed on. So far as we are concerned, calling Gresham’s law a “law” is just another case of solving a problem by redefining terms—a sort of vest pocket version of Hume’s shameless dodge.

On my invocation of Gricean speaker meanings: the point was to show that since the brain cannot harbor beliefs and desires, the noises and inscriptions it causes the bodies to produce literally do lack literal meaning. It was my intention to “disallow meaning,” So, it can hardly be an objection to my view that I do so, except on the Dr Johnson model of how to do philosophy.

I grew up philosophically having no time for Friedrich Nietzsche. It was Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that led me to think I had been overhasty for 40 years or so. Now I am prepared to embrace the passage Brian offers us: “Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it” (The Gay Science, sec. 301).” I’ll buy into this view so long as it’s understood that what we have given and bestowed is, like that great prize they give in international cricket, The Ashes, something that doesn’t exist.

Alex Rosenberg

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/12/rosenberg-on-naturalism.html

http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2009/12/rosenberg_on_naturalism.html

What puzzles me about the piece is that Rosenberg grounds his scientism on what can only be regarded as a traditional thesis of ‘folk epistemology’. He is, unabashedly, a scientific realist. That realism rests on the quaint belief that, because scientific theories –at least the best of them– predict and explain a staggering range of phenomena, we do and should suppose that they are true. None of the principal arguments of his essay goes anywhere without this version of Putnam’s so-called miracles argument. Rosenberg makes his core epistemic thesis very explicit: “The reason we trust physics to be scientisms’ metaphysics is its track record of fantastically powerful explanation, prediction and technological application.” Can there be anyone (Rosenberg included) who believes that this core assumption is unproblematic?

Among the many troubles with the thesis that “science works so well that it must be true” is that working well, even working very well, is no guarantee that one has managed to cut the world at its joints or that these currently well-working beliefs won’t become casualties of the next scientific revolution. The history of science is a minefield littered with the remains of theories that once worked very well indeed (yes, even to the point of making surprising, precise predictions successfully) but eventually came unstuck, as they encountered one anomaly after another. Ptolemy’s astronomy, Newton’s physics, stable-continent geology, and classical chemical atomism are only a few examples of empirically theories that were strikingly successful until they eventually stumbled over grave anomalies.

Scientism tends to ignore this inconvenient historical fact. That is scarcely surprising since the success of false theories has to be rather unnerving for any project that is founded on the inference rule “X works so X must be true.” Worse, this particular piece of abductive inference is a prime example of precisely the sort of folk epistemology that a hard-headed skeptic like Rosenberg would ordinarily be scathing about. While he is (properly) keen on stressing how empirical research has established that one premise after another of folk psychology, folk psychology and folk biology is ill-founded, he acts as if our folk beliefs about empirical support (and let there be no mistake that the inference from apparent success to prima facie truth is deeply rooted in human doxastic practices) can be taken as largely if not wholly unproblematic.

There would thus appear to be a disconnect between the skepticism Rosenberg brings to most folk practices and his readiness to ground truth claims for science on what boils down to the fallacy of affirming the consequent.

So, Alex, cheer up; the situation looks as glum as you describe it only because you have made yourself hostage to a highly implausible and incorrigibly folk account of what it takes to establish the truth of a theory.

To conclude, I’m with Alex Rosenberg and Friedrich Nietzsche that, “Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it” (The Gay Science, sec. 301). What I do not see is any objection to embracing the values so projected. To be sure, they involve an error insofar as they purport to be referential. But only a different value—namely, that falsity is an objection to embracing the value of something—could pose an objection here. I’d encourage Alex to take his Nietzscheanism one step further: from the correct observation that most of what we believe is false, to the conclusion that since such beliefs are essential for life, we should not give them up.

My gloss on Jordan’s article: If our thoughts are all predetermined by scientism (physics and biology), then we cannot have justifiable reasons for believing that our thoughts are thus predetermined. But we do have at least pretty good justification for such a belief. Therefore our thoughts are NOT all predetermined, i.e. that belief is false.

But just as Quine tended to be a bad Quinean—letting the behaviorism of the 1930s dictate far too much of his theorizing about meaning and knowledge, and thus ignoring the actual developments in emipircal science which destroyed the behaviorist program, thereby betraying his methodological naturalism—I fear that Rosenberg isn’t wholly loyal to his professed scientism, and that he smuggles in too much controversial metaphysics and other assumptions that have no standing in successful scientific research. Let me present these worries as a series of questions that invite clarification:

1. We are repeatedly told that “the physical facts fix all the facts” and that the physical facts are the deliverances of physics. But what is packed into the metaphor of “fix all the facts”? Perhaps all facts are token-identifcal with physical facts—that is not too controversial these days—but that would not suffice for the arguments Alex makes, since the nomic regularities discovered by physics about the physical facts are notoriously useless with respect to the characteristics of all the other facts that supervene on them. More ambitiously, Alex might mean that all the non-physical facts are type-identical, i.e., reducible, to physical facts. Alas, as Alex well knows, there is no scientific evidence for that proposition. To borrow a page from Jerry Fodor, we may note that the primary thrust of scientific research over the past half-century has not been the reduction of psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, but rather the proliferation of special sciences which generate their own well-confirmed nomic regularities without worrying about how these look from the standpoint of physics. (And what if some of these nomic regularities include beliefs and desires?) Since Alex wants to let in evolution by natural selection, neuroscience, and even Gricean intentions (!) into his explanatory framework, one must wonder how all this squares with the talk about physical facts fixing all the other facts.

2. Any proponent of scientism opens himself to the charge of holding a position that is self-referentially defeating. As Alex says, the reason to take physics seriously with respect to ontology “is its track record of fantastically powerful explanation, prediction and technological application.” But the norms of successful explanation, for example, are not themselves deliverances of physics, so what is their status? If I understand him rightly, Alex endorses Richard Boyd’s old argument for realism based on the need to explain its success as something other than “mystery or coincidence.” But what then is the status of the norm disfavoring “mystery or coincidence”? I know the standard responses to these worries, but I would like to hear Alex’s preferred version.

3. In section 5, Alex appears to assume that adaptationist explanations of human behaviors that we ordinarily deem moral (e.g., altruism) are well-confirmed, but he surely knows that, beyond Hamilton’s kin-selectionism, they are all extremely controversial hypotheses. Am I wrong? And if I’m right, does it matter for the argument?

4. I was surprised by the invocation of Grice in section 7. “Intentions” are mental states with semantic content, so how can Alex’s kind of austere naturalist countenance these?

To conclude, I’m with Alex Rosenberg and Friedrich Nietzsche that, “Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it” (The Gay Science, sec. 301). What I do not see is any objection to giving up the values so projected. To be sure, they involve an error insofar as they purport to be referential. But only a different value—namely, that falsity is an objection to embracing the value of something—could pose an objection here. I’d encourage Alex to take his Nietzscheanism one step further: from the correct observation that most of what we believe is false, to the conclusion that we ought, for that reason, stop believing it.

Please be aware that it is on my blog that I present the evidence and arguments demonstrating all that I claim here (and in even more detail, with biographies, in my book). Here I merely state the results.

(Objection 1) I disagree that there are no meanings or purposes. Human brains evolved to be meaning and purpose generators. And as a result, we have generated many significant meanings and purposes, even a meaning of life and a purpose for living. These just aren’t “cosmic” meanings and purposes. They’re just the meanings and purposes we evolved (largely by accident) to want. But we still want them, and enjoy fulfilling them. It doesn’t matter how we came to be that way. And when we are sane and rational, we all agree the most desirable purpose of life, the “meaning” of life, is to live it, live it well, and pass it on to the next guy, preferably in better shape than you found it. Alex concludes his essay by claiming “purposes are ruled out of nature–biological, social, psychological,” but he never proves the latter, nor can he appeal to any science that has done so. Social purposes are simply a collection of psychological purposes. And psychological purposes are simply aims and goals, which are the consequence of motives, which are the consequence of desires, which science has actually confirmed are real and do exist, and actually have the effects we believe they do. More on that to come. But in short, to claim I have no motive for taking time out to write this, no purpose in mind in doing it, is simply retarded.

(Objection 2) I disagree that science “has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.” Science factually demonstrates the truth of “ought” statements all the time (in medicine, surgery, engineering, car repair, what have you). Thus it is not a fallacy to derive an ought from an is. It’s a fallacy to think you can’t derive an ought from an is–or to think you can get an ought any other way. Obviously if we can derive an ought from an is in every other sphere of human life, we can do it in morality. And several scientists are doing exactly that. More and more we are accumulating evidence that living by the Golden Rule is essential to our happiness. Once we realize that “is” we derive the consequent “ought”: if we want to be the happiest we can be in the circumstances we are actually in, we ought to live by the Golden Rule. It could have been otherwise, had we evolved differently. But if we want to discover the best way to live, we have to attend to the way things actually are. If we can apply science to progress in the best way to cure disease, we can apply science to progress in the best way to live. And we ought. Because there is nothing we all want more than to know the best way to live.

(Objection 3) I disagree that morality is just “a convenience for our genes.” It is a convenience also for our memes, and our cognitive experience of life itself. Thus, we have been molding our morality memetically (not genetically) the past few thousand years as a tool for enhancing human happiness. Alex confuses evolved moral sentiments, with morality itself. Our capacity for compassion and integrity and reasonableness are genetically evolved traits that, like pain or laughter, had their uses in improving the differential reproductive success of human populations. But that doesn’t tell us how we ought to behave. Merely knowing that our bodies are susceptible to disease does not tell us how to minimize the risk of infection. What a surgeon ought to do, took a long time to figure out, even though the evolved facts had never changed. So, too, morality. Merely knowing we have certain dispositions (which includes, by the way, lust and bloodlust, and a strong sense of vengeance and an ability to be dispassionate when we need to be, which are also useful and have thus served to improve our differential reproductive success) does not tell us how to optimize our personal happiness within the social environment we inevitably must live in. Thus, just as we had to figure out the best way to combat disease, so we have to figure out the best way to live. Our evolved dispositions constitute the toolkit we have at hand for doing that, but like any toolkit, we have to learn how to rationally use it, using the right tools at the right times, and not using the wrong tools at the wrong times. It is figuring out the latter that leads us to the moral ought.

(Objection 4) When it comes to cognitive science (as some have noted here already) Alex succumbs to a common error: trusting scientists to be good philosophers. Alex mistakenly follows the error of Libet in confusing our perception of ourselves, with our actual selves. Just because it takes your brain about a fifth of a second to generate a model of what you just did (and thus represent it as a coherent conscious experience), doesn’t mean it wasn’t you who just made that decision. Once you abandon the fallacy of conflating the two, Alex’s conclusions from Libet’s experiment no longer follow. Philosophers long ago settled this issue: even if determinism prevails, free will exists in the compatibilist sense, which is the only kind of free will anyone would ever really want. Science has never proved otherwise.

(Objection 5) Alex commits a similar fallacy when he says blindsight suggests we might have to reject the conclusion “that when you see a color you have a color experience.” To cut right to the chase: since neither he nor any scientist has ever had a conversation with the part of the brain cut off from the cerebral cortex in blindsight cases, neither he nor any scientist can claim to know whether that part of the brain does or does not experience color qualia. The evidence of split-brain patients, however, should lead us to predict that it does. Which puts Alex’s inference to the contrary back into the circular file. Nevertheless, apart from this objection and the last, all Alex says about the errors of folk psychology is quite correct. The actual facts are quite different in cognitive science (such folk notions often being as wrong as the facts have turned out to be in cosmology and biology and everything else we’ve thought about for the last few thousand years). He just draws the wrong conclusions from those facts.

(Objection 6) Alex does this again when concluding that because folk notions of belief and sensation and desires are incorrect (which is a fact), therefore our brain “doesn’t operate on beliefs and wants, thoughts and hopes, fears and expectations” (which is a non sequitur). Once you define those terms with the correct cognitive science, the conclusion becomes false. I say a great deal more about this in my Critique of Victor Reppert’s Argument from Reason, particularly in respect to the Churchlands and Eliminativism (I recommend skipping directly to the latter). But the bottom line is, Alex is like someone who discovers the moon is actually made of iron instead of rock, and then runs around insisting that therefore the moon doesn’t exist. Just because beliefs and desires are in actual physical fact different things than some folk conceptions imagine them, doesn’t warrant the conclusion that they don’t exist. They obviously do. We just have to understand them correctly.

(Objection 7) Similarly, Alex errs in claiming “there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us” based solely on the premise (and this much is entirely true) “this self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time.” Because what is essentially a person is the pattern of arrangement of the brain that causes us to exist and be as we are, and that pattern can persist even as its underlying material is constantly replaced, it follows that persons do endure as first-person agents. And, in point of fact, they are located behind their eyes and in between their ears. Their memories and personalities and skills and perceptual apparatus certainly doesn’t reside in their toes or their spleen. Destroy the brain, and you destroy the person. Sustain the brain, and you sustain the person. This brain, consisting of real data (real desires, memories, beliefs, personality traits, skills and reasoning abilities, etc.), generates a real model of that data (conscious experience), but the model is not us (for example, we don’t cease to exist when we sleep, all that data remains physically intact, we just stop building models of it for a while). The “subject of the first-person pronoun” is that arrangement of data in the brain. Thus, Alex is wrong to claim no such subject exists. He is also wrong to claim the brain doesn’t track what this arrangement does over time. And though we do change as persons, we share a causal history, and memories and other persisting features, with our past selves, and it is in that sense that we are the same person as before, not in the sense of being exactly identical (which you don’t have to be a naturalist to see is obviously never the case). Science has not undermined any of these conclusions. To the contrary, it continues to reinforce them.

(Objection 8 ) Ironically, Alex then errs the other way around, coming to the correct conclusion (”there is no point asking for the real, the true, the actual meaning of a work of art, or the meaning of an agent’s act, still less the meaning of a historical event or epoch”) from an incorrect premise: “there literally are no beliefs and desires, because the brain can’t encode information in the form of sentences” so “there literally is no such thing as linguistic meaning.” In my external commentary I note several fallacies here, but the most insidious is his inexplicable, and quite unjustified equation of “beliefs and desires” with “sentences.” On the one hand, Already Alex is wrong to say “the brain can’t encode information in the form of sentences.” Were that true, we could never memorize speeches, nor retain understanding of the meaning of the words we then recited. Obviously the brain can encode information in the form of sentences. It does it all the time. But worse is the mistake of thinking that beliefs and desires are sentences. Sentences are just ways of communicating what beliefs and desires are. They are not the beliefs and desires themselves. A desire is a feeling of discontent alleviated by the effects desired, and the feeling and its cause (and the cause of its abatement) are all physical facts of the brain. We can speak or write sentences about those physical facts, even sum them up with the word “desire,” but let’s not confuse the thing itself with the means of its description. Likewise, a belief is a feeling of confidence in a predictive model of the world (or, just as often, of ourselves). Varying degrees of confidence can be felt, hence beliefs exist in varying strengths. But the feeling, and the model causing that feeling, are physical facts of the brain. We can put into words what that model is, and how confident we are in it, but again, let’s not confuse the thing itself with the means of its description. It is thus simply false to say, as Alex did, that “there literally are no beliefs and desires.”

(Objection 9) As a historian myself, I find Alex’s view of history simply bizarre. It’s self-contradictory. He purports to defend the view that history is fiction, by referring to historical facts as demonstration, thus covertly assuming history is not fiction in the very effort to prove that it is, a nice bit of circular logic that has the rest of us scratching our heads. And it’s self-defeating. He elevates science as the source of all true facts, and reduces history to mere fiction, yet doesn’t seem to realize that doing science is doing history: all data is historical. All past proofs and observations and experiments confirming all past theories, are matters of history. So you have to take history seriously to be a scientist–you have to not only believe that Einstein’s theory of relativity was proved long ago by certain specific historical observations, but your belief in that fact has to be correct. There is no place for fiction here. If history is fiction, then so is science. Alex seems to err in assuming that the human innate tendency to make stories of everything (an entirely apt and correct observation) means there are no actual stories, just the ones we make up. That’s certainly untrue. We have evolved the drive to find the story in everything precisely because there often is a story, and it benefits us to know what it is. The only question is: how much can we know, and how?

I have an image imprinted in my mind (or what I thought was my mind, until I read Rosenberg’s essay) that formed when I was nine years old: a cover of Newsweek with the words “Fusion in a Bottle” printed across the top. This was a report on the infamous claim of physicists Fleischmann and Pons to have produced nuclear fusion at room temperature – “cold fusion.” But the idea of cold fusion was so radically counter-intuitive that the overwhelming majority of scienists were resolute in their opinion that whatever beliefs lead Fleischmann and Pons to infer the occurrence of cold fusion would have to be mistaken. That was good thinking.

Let modus tollens be the recipe for re-enchantment. Rosenberg has presented us with the highly counter-intuitive claims that there is nothing in reality corresponding to our notion of a self, nor to our notion of morality, with the assurance that the truth of these dim propositions are ensured by the best scientific research. It seems, however, that we’re epistemically entitled to view these claims as probably false, which in turn presents us with (1) the view that science has not shown them to be true, and (2) the job of explaining how cherished entities like selves and morality are unscathed by some current lines of research. Given what Rosenberg as defended, (2) may require significant reconceptualizations of those entities, some of which have been suggested in the replies already posted.

Is this simply a childish refusal to accept the conclusions of science? I would urge against this position, since a large part of science itself involves refusing to accept the claims of scientists. One reason is that these claims are often mutually inconsistent; we can’t rationally accept all of them. There is the sort of reason that got cold fusion in hot water – when claims are highly counter-intuitive given our current commitments. Yet another is what a wise old philosopher once called “vaulting ambition”: an explanatory framework is often extended leagues beyond its evidentiary purview. Each reason by itself is sufficient to warrant skepticism. A combination of two or more is more than sufficient.

So, go punch a baby if you must, but don’t blame science (or philosophy).