Naturalism and Its Discontents

Denyse O'Leary observes that the effort to keep metaphysical naturalism propped up and viable keeps running into obstacles. The obstacles consist of the empirical discoveries of scientists, many of whom are naturalists themselves.

Sometimes the evidence is negative, that is, discoveries predicted by naturalism or which would support naturalism, just don't seem to be in the offing. Instead, naturalists content each other and the public they wish to persuade with "promissory notes" - assurances that if we just keep looking someday we're bound to find the confirmatory evidence that naturalism predicts.

Meanwhile, there are doubters and heretics afoot who need to be silenced. Here's O'Leary's lede. She links to the sources for her assertions in the original so read that to assess her claims:

The scientific discoveries that might have supported the naturalist view of the universe, life, and the human mind have never actually occurred. Stubborn problems, old and new, make such discoveries less likely than ever. New technology in neuroscience, for example, has enabled unexpected new findings that point unambiguously in a non-naturalist direction, raising the suspicion of more such findings to come.

Naturalists are not taking it well; fighting superstition is easier than fighting magnetic resonance imaging. For some decades, we have simply been informed that “science would find the answer” to stubborn problems. But what happens if “stubborn problems” are signals that our ideas are incomplete and new insights are needed?

Today, “science” means naturalism. Whether current directions are fruitful or not, no non-naturalist approach may be entertained in principle. Karl Popper called this stance promissory materialism. It is the basic editorial position of most popular science magazines. It is less open to doubt than the laws of mathematics. Much popular culture passionately agrees.

In 2005, a Darwin-in-the-schools activist advised her lobbyists to portray ID sympathizers “‘in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc.” The strategy may have backfired in recent years due to a number of conflicts with evidence. But many naturalists seem to see themselves as she did, fighting an existential evil. To entertain doubt about such a cause is a sin.

O'Leary goes on to discuss three endeavors in particular in which confident predictions, based on naturalist assumptions, have failed to be fulfilled: The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the search for extraterrestrial life (ET), and the attempt to prove that humans are little more than hairless apes.

With regard to the difficulties involved in simulating human consciousness in computers she writes that,

A powerful computer cannot have more insight or different intentions from its programmer’s ability for the same reasons as characters in a novel cannot have more insight or different intentions from the author’s conception. And, in the absence of consciousness, why would computers wish for power or anything else? If they lack wishes of their own, massive computers add nothing to the risks already posed by proliferating nuclear weapons.

Rodney Brooks, former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, hints at the confusion:

I am told that I do not understand how powerful AGI [artificial general intelligence] will be. That is not an argument. We have no idea whether it can even exist. I would like it to exist — this has always been my own motivation for working in robotics and AI. But modern-day AGI research is not doing well at all on either being general or supporting an independent entity with an ongoing existence.

It mostly seems stuck on the same issues in reasoning and common sense that AI has had problems with for at least 50 years.

In a recent edition of Technology Review, we hear the worry, “Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony? Just about every AI advance you’ve heard of depends on a breakthrough that’s three decades old. Keeping up the pace of progress will require confronting AI’s serious limitations.”

Some keep the faith and add to it. Dan Brown of Da Vinci Code fame tells audiences that AI-induced collective consciousness will replace God: “Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us…will diminish and eventually disappear.” Given that naturalism considers consciousness an illusion, God will be a collective illusion.

An organized religious enterprise, “Way of the Future” (WOTF), founded by Silicon Valley lightning rod Anthony Levandowski, is currently seeking non-profit status as a religion of technology “to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead [to] contribute to the betterment of society.”

Way of the Future’s site explains, “While biology has evolved one type of intelligence, there is nothing inherently specific about biology that causes intelligence. Eventually, we will be able to recreate it without using biology and its limitations.”

Despite hope that extraterrestrial life will eventually be discovered the number of properties a planet must possess to generate and support living organisms seems to be increasing with each new scientific discovery so that the earth looks more and more like it could well be unique, not only in our galaxy but in the entire universe. O'Leary notes that, "It’s unclear whether popular naturalist culture can grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there, possibly because if he doesn’t exist, it is more difficult to maintain that humans are not special."

She finishes with a withering critique of attempts to convince the public that apes are essentially on the way to being human. The whole essay is worth reading, especially if the reader has an interest in science.