The Chinese Nation and the Scattered Brain

(What follows is the text of my midterm for my philosophy of mind class.)

In his article “Troubles with Functionalism”, Ned Block outlines a thought experiment that he takes to be a counterexample to functionalism, the thesis that if two or more beings are identical in how they function they have (or are capable of having) the same mental states. In what follows I’ll argue, using a different thought experiment, that if Block’s argument refutes functionalism it also refutes materialism for precisely the same reasons.

Block invites us to consider the population of China, which has been ordered to simulate a human brain’s “program.” (Philosophy of Mind, p. 96) Granted, this simulation—which we can call the Chinese Nation—consists of people rather than neurons, and they communicate by radio rather than by neurotransmitters, but it is functionally identical to a human brain. Nevertheless, Block thinks that your brain is phenomenally conscious—there’s something it’s like to be it—while the Chinese Nation is not. (Philosophy of Mind, p. 97) Since your brain and the Chinese Nation are functionally the same, and since Block thinks it would be absurd to say that the Chinese Nation has mental states, it cannot be true that functionally identical systems have the same mental states, and so functionalism must be false.

            Suppose, now, that the Chinese government orders the Chinese population to do something different. One by one, they start replacing the Chinese citizens with neurons. The neurons are suspended in nutrient baths, and housed in small containers. For each kind of neuron the containers have a supply of the neurotransmitters that that kind of neuron normally responds to. One part of the container takes in electrical signals and releases the neurotransmitters when it receives the appropriate input. Another part takes in the neurotransmitters released by the neuron’s synaptic vesicles and generates an appropriate electrical signal as output. Suppose further that the electrical input and output signals are coded in such a way that, when connected to the radios being used by the Chinese citizens, the signals are indistinguishable from those generated by the Chinese citizens. As the citizens are gradually replaced by the neurons, there should be no change in the activity of the system. After all, in Block’s original thought experiment we supposed that the citizens mimicked the activity of individual neurons, and collectively the citizens were organized so as to mimic the behavior of the brain as a whole. There is thus no reason for the activity of the system to change in any relevant way as the citizens are replaced by the neurons, and the system should continue to implement the same program throughout the transition

            Once this process is complete, we will have a system which functions in the same way as the Chinese Nation and a normal human brain. Let’s call this system the scattered brain, for the only important difference between it and a normal brain is that its neurons are scattered throughout a larger region of space. Block has no doubt that human brains are phenomenally conscious, but he does doubt that the Chinese Nation is phenomenally conscious. (Philosophy of Mind, p. 97) But what about the scattered brain? Is it phenomenally conscious or not?

            I think Block faces a dilemma. If he says that the scattered brain is phenomenally conscious, he will have to confront the difficult task of explaining why it enjoys this kind of consciousness while the Chinese Nation does not. If the idea is that one can see a priori that an entity of that sort is just the wrong sort of thing to be phenomenally conscious, I would ask those sympathetic to this idea to consider that the Chinese Nation differs by a very small amount from the system that results from replacing one of the citizens with a neuron, which in turn differs by a very small amount from the system that results from replacing another citizen with another neuron, which in turn… until, at long last, we have the scattered brain. Now, if one can see a priori that the Chinese Nation is not phenomenally conscious, one can surely also see a priori that the system that results from replacing one of the citizens with a neuron is also not phenomenally conscious, in which case one can surely also see a priori that the system that results from replacing another citizen with another neuron is also not phenomenally conscious… until, at long last, one can see a priori that the scattered brain is not phenomenally conscious, contra our original supposition

If Block still thinks that the scattered brain enjoys phenomenal consciousness, he must either accept the idea that the Chinese Nation enjoys phenomenal consciousness after all, or else accept that at some point in the series one can suddenly no longer see a priori that the system in question is not phenomenally conscious. I doubt that Block would accept the first alternative. The second alternative would be problematic for any physicalist, for then there would be two like systems that are very different mentally—one system could not  be phenomenally conscious while the other one could—even though the physical difference between them is very slight.

            Could the difference between the scattered brain and the Chinese Nation consist in the fact that the Chinese citizens are conscious while the individual neurons are not? But then why can a phenomenally conscious being be composed of unconscious parts, but not of conscious parts? In fact, we have reason to think that it could, because both the right and the left hemispheres of one’s brain are phenomenally conscious even though one’s whole brain is phenomenally conscious too.  In any case, someone who raises this objection needs to give an account of why this should be a relevant difference. And if anyone is sympathetic to it, I’d ask them to imagine that their brain is the scattered brain, and that the transition process is run in reverse, so that their neurons are gradually replaced by Chinese citizens. How plausible is it that one would gradually lose one’s phenomenal consciousness as this transition proceeds? If one is inclined to think that it’s not very plausible one should also be inclined to think that whether a being has phenomenally conscious parts has no bearing on whether that being is itself phenomenally conscious or not.

            What, though, if Block thinks that the scattered brain is not phenomenally conscious? In that case I would ask what relevant difference there could be between it and a normal brain. The scattered brain is composed of neurons, just like a normal brain. Furthermore, these neurons communicate with each other in a way that is by hypothesis functionally equivalent to the way the neurons of a normal brain communicate. The only real difference seems to be that the neurons of the scattered brain are farther away from each other than those of a normal brain. So if Block wants to raise this objection he owes us an explanation as to why a greater spatial separation should make any difference as far as phenomenal consciousness is concerned

            I think there is one way to avoid the above dilemma, but it comes at a price. The problem is that we have taken it for granted that a normal human brain is phenomenally conscious while either the Chinese Nation or the scattered brain is not, even though all three of them are functionally the same. Something has to give. Block thought it was functionalism, for it seemed to him that the Chinese Nation could not be phenomenally conscious. I hope to have shown that this is untenable, because if the scattered brain is phenomenally conscious, then the Chinese Nation should be too, and if a normal brain is phenomenally conscious, then there is no plausible reason why the scattered brain could not be

The only way out that I can see, then—if one doesn’t want to accept functionalism—is to hold that neither the human brain, nor the Chinese Nation, nor the scattered brain is phenomenally conscious. Instead, one would have to accept some form of dualism and hold that each of these three systems could be said to be phenomenally conscious in the sense that they could be associated with a phenomenally conscious mind, but strictly speaking none of them could be said to be phenomenally conscious in and of itself. So while I do think it is possible to reject functionalism, I think one can only do so plausibly if one is prepared to reject materialism as well. My prediction is that, for many philosophers of mind, that is far too high a price to pay.

References

Block, Ned. “Troubles with Functionalism”. Excerpted from C. W. Savage, ed., Perception and Cognition (University of Minnesota Press, 1978), pp. 261-325. Reprinted in Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, pp. 94-8.

Chalmers, David J. Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.

A new article on Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality" at Scholardarity.com

I've published a new article at Scholardarity.com, Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality”: Exposition and Appraisal.

Quote of the Day: The Real Source of Moral Motivation

Nobody sane generally or standardly acts so as to realise utility, or “on the motive of Duty” (Kant’s own phrase), or “for the sake of virtue itself” (Aristotle’s own phrase). Even people who only act occasionally in these ways can be in danger of looking priggish, and out of touch with what really matters in life, to the rest of us.

            As I hinted in the last section, what really motivates most of us, most of the time, at least if we are moderately good people or better and are not being distracted by false motives like concern about “what others will think”, is love: love for spouses, love for children and parents, love for friends, love for God, love for ideals, love for valued places or artworks or possessions, love for pet projects, love for pets. The centrality of love is a striking feature of any typical credible ethical outlook. The marginality of love in typical moral theories, and more broadly in contemporary philosophical research, is equally striking. Love is at the heart of our ethical outlooks; it is love, and not concern with what is right and wrong, that mostly drives us into action. In that sense love puts us “beyond good and evil”, and beyond morality; while morality is a constraint on what motivates us (and a constraint: there are others), love is the very engine of motivation. 

[footnote omitted]--Timothy Chappell “Ethics beyond moral theory” Philosophical Investigations 32 (3):206-243.

Natural Patterns: The Nonad — A New Book For Sale through Scholardarity.com

In a new book for sale through Scholardarity.com, John Krey, a chemistry instructor with many years of experience, presents a discovery of patterns in nature as well as patterns in the organization of knowledge, which are helpful for the educational purposes. You can check out his book here: Natural Patterns: The Nonad.

A Primer on Logic: Interlude -- A New Scholardarity.com Article

I've published a new article on Scholardarity, A Primer on Logic: Interlude, the latest installment of my introduction to formal logic. In it I explain some of the inadequacies of Aristotelian logic.

Also, in case you missed Parts 1, 2 and 3, which respectively cover logical preliminaries, propositional logic, and Aristotelian logic, you can check them out here:

Part 1


Part 2
 

Part 3

On Searle's Chinese Room Argument -- A New Scholardarity.com Article

I've posted a new article in Scholardarity.com, On Searle's Chinese Room Argument: A Defense of the Systems Reply.

Scholardarity.com is now publishing papers for free!

Scholardarity.com, a new e-publishing website for scholars, is now publishing papers for free!


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A Critique of Alison M. Jaggar on Abortion -- A new Scholardarity Article

I've just posted a new article at Scholardarity.com, A Critique of Alison M. Jaggar on Abortion  .

A Primer on Logic Part 3 (A New Scholardarity.com Article)

I've posted a new article, A Primer on Logic: Part 3, my new Scholardarity piece in which I give a brief introduction to Aristotelian logic. It's the latest entry in my introduction to formal logic.

Also, in case you missed Parts 1 and 2, which respectively cover logical preliminaries and propositional logic, you can check them out here:

Part 1


Part 2


If you have any comments / criticism, by all means share it!

A follow up on "An uncontroversial instance of moral knowledge?"

In this post I’m going to refine the position I advanced in my previous post, “An uncontroversial instance of moral knowledge?”. In that post I said,

No matter what else one may think about which actions—or types of action—are wrong, one must hold that if someone performs any action which they believe to be wrong they have acted wrongly. And if we know that anything is wrong, we know that doing something which one believes to be wrong is wrong.

This passage is ambiguous: It could be read as saying that if one believes some (particular) action A to be wrong but does A anyway, then A itself is a wrong action. But it could also be read as saying that if one believes some (particular) action A to be wrong but does A anyway then one has acted wrongly, even if A itself is not wrong. Since I wrote this passage a while ago I can’t be sure what exactly I had in mind, although I suspect I wasn’t thinking carefully enough to notice the difference. However, I now think that the second reading is more plausible, because of cases like the following.

Suppose Jones has been raised by parents who are ethical egoists, and has been taught that one should never act to help others unless it is one’s own interest to do so, except in a situation where helping someone else and not helping them would have precisely the same consequences for one’s own well being, in which case it is permissible to help that person and also permissible not to do so. Suppose that one day Jones spies a beggar on the street, and that Jones, moved by pity, gives the beggar some money that he would otherwise have used to buy his lunch. Nevertheless, in spite of his feelings, Jones still believed while he was acting that he shouldn’t help the beggar because in doing so he made himself (mildly) worse off by skipping lunch. 

In a case such as this, I find it intuitive to think that Jones’ action of helping the beggar was not wrong, but permissible or perhaps even obligatory. In spite of that, I think it is still at least plausible to hold that Jones did something wrong. For even if an action A is not wrong, it does not follow that in doing A one has not acted wrongly. For instance, by moving one’s finger in a certain way one may thereby also flip a switch and thereby turn the lights on. Similarly,  by doing A  one may also perform another action—call it ‘e’—namely violating one’s conscience, and it might be that e is wrong because it is always wrong to violate one’s conscience. However good it may have been for Jones to give his lunch money to the beggar, it would have been better still if Jones had thought that by giving away his money he was doing the right thing, or a least a permissible thing.

A Primer on Logic: Part 2 (A New Scholardarity.com Article)

Check out "A Primer on Logic: Part 2", my new Scholardarity.com article which is essentially a crash-course in propositional logic. It's the latest entry in my introduction to formal logic. (Also available as a PDF.)

Also, in case you missed Part 1, which covers logical preliminaries and vocabulary, you can check it out here. (Also as a PDF.)

If anyone has any comments / criticism, by all means share it!

Quote of the Day: Brand Blanshard on Linguistic Philosophy

Here is the philosopher Brand Blanshard on "Linguistic Philosophy". Keep in mind that Reason and Analysis, the book this quote was taken from, was first published in 1962.

The linguistic philosophers would rather philosophize in their own manner than talk about philosophy, and their programme cannot be fully appreciated without following them into their discussions of the language we use about time and induction and universals and fact and truth. It would be interesting to do this if there were space for it, which there is not. But I cannot think our main conclusions about this way of philosophizing would be greatly affected by such a review. We should find many fine hairs split into still finer hairs. We should find a virtuosity in ferreting out verbal distinctions, particularly in such masters of the craft as Austin, which would fill any unprejudiced reader with admiring astonishment. We should find many curious details in our use of such words as ‘if’ and ‘can’ and ‘seems’ and ‘ought’ lit up sharply by flashes of light. And yet at the end we should feel strangely unilluminated. Such a prodigal expenditure of power, acuteness and ink, adding up to—what? Disappointingly little in view of the powers that went into it

The reason is not far to seek. Words give the philosopher no compass. The interest in usage is centrifugal and dispersive, and unless guided by something other than itself, dissipates among minutiae, some idle, some important; and mere usage cannot tell it which is which. When philosophers in the past asked themselves What is the nature of knowledge? instead of What are the uses of the verb ‘know’?, they usually did so with a conviction, having nothing to do with language, that some types of knowledge, or some claims to it, were of central importance—the insight of the mathematician, the scientific grasp of natural law, the claim of the mystic or the religious authoritarian. These types or claims were then fastened upon for special examination. The inquiries of the linguistic philosophers have, to be sure, thrown light on these claims. But if so, it is because a way of philosophizing different from their own, disruptive of their own, has not been wholly abandoned. A genuine philosopher can draw nourishment even from what W. E. Hocking has called ‘this new method of milking stones’. ‘If’, ‘can’, ‘know’, ‘true’, are after all key words, and one is bound to derive profit from their study. So our complaint is not that these studies are profitless, but that the profit is so meagre in proportion to the price. There are grains of wheat, many of them indeed, and of high quality, among the chaff. But why should one have to hunt for them in these bushels and bushels and bushels of words about words?

--Brand Blanshard, Reason and Analysis, pp. 380-81, Open Court, Paperback (second printing).

A Dilemma for Dialetheism

I've just published a revised version of my article "A Dilemma for Dialetheism" on Scholardarity.com, which was originally published in the Spring 2010 edition of the Stanford undergraduate philosophy journal The Dualist (vol. 15). In the article I argue that dialetheists, who believe that some sentences are both true and false, either cannot express the notion that some sentences are not both true and false, or else that their accounts suffer from "revenge" liar paradoxes that not even they can regard as being both true and false. If you like logic and paradoxes as much as I do, please check it out and let me know what you think.

My Review of "The God Delusion"

Check out my review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion  here on Scholardarity.com .

Launching a new website: Scholardarity.com

 

 

A friend and I are launching a new website Scholardarity.com to help out scholars in the humanities.

 

Our website is still a work in progress and subscriptions are still free. Readers will not need to subscribe. Our motto is “Free to read, but pay to publish!”

Scholardarity, in order to promote solidarity among scholars, is a new site for scholars in the humanities and all students interested in History, Philosophy, and Theology.

It is for all of us who have a degree that hasn’t opened any doors.  But all scholars, even with faculty positions are, of course, welcome. So many teachers, graduates, and academics are having trouble finding work or getting articles published. How could scholarly work bring an online income? We are working on that kind of support.

We want to give scholars access to the cutting edge of research in their fields via peer review and criticism. See our Conferences and Societies and consider presenting papers in your field. We want to find ways to help and support students interested in the humanities. Lately we hear that only science, math, and technology are in demand.

Our goal in Scholardarity is to create a community of scholars who help each other and push ahead the frontiers of knowledge for our readers.

Unlike many academic journals, both online and off, our articles will be available for all, free to read. Scholars will subscribe to have the benefits of having their profiles on the site, communicating on the message board, sharing their writing, e-publishing their manuscripts and books, and being able to advertise and sell their work through this site.

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• Find new faculty position openings
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Causation, God , and the Justification of Induction: Part 2

[Cross-posted at Reflections on Religion]

I think the argument of Part 1 is a good one, but it does not quite establish its conclusion: While it is highly likely, given IBE, that chance is not the true account of the regularity of the universe, metaphysically necessary causal connections are not the only alternative. Indeed, in some cases they are seemingly not even a possible alternative. For quantum mechanics tells us, on most of its interpretations, that many of the most basic regularities in nature are probabilistic. Unless we’re prepared to posit “probabilistic necessities”—i.e., that it could be necessary that something happens only in a certain percentage of cases—many of the regularities described by quantum mechanics cannot be necessary. So how could we explain them?

If we accept theism, there is a way. God, being all powerful, could surely act in such a manner that certain things happen only with a certain frequency, not all the time. But God, according to theists, is not merely some convenient metaphysical explanatory posit. He is a personal being. While perhaps not having a psychology like ours—God probably doesn’t think discursively, with one thought following after another—He is nevertheless an agent who acts for the sake of ends. Provided that those ends include creating a word that is regular—perhaps  because only such worlds are hospitable to life or sentience—it would be extremely probable, or even certain, that such a world would be actual.

Now, if we consider the matter in terms of “epistemic possibility”, there are many “possible Gods”, or “ways God could be”. A great deal of them would have no desire to create worlds that are regular. I don’t know of any good arguments to the effect that such “Gods” couldn’t have existed, so we can’t rule them out a priori. Instead, I think a theist should insist that given our actual evidence we aren’t justified in believing in them, because it is only if we posit a God who desires to create a world that exhibits regularities, albeit probabilistic ones, that we have reason to suspect such a world to be actual. If there is such a God we certainly have a better account than we would have if we thought such regularities were merely “an outrageous run of luck”. So the observed regularities in nature do cry out for explanation, but on this view their probabilistic nature favors a theistic account. Given the constancy of God’s nature and purposes, we are can confidently expect them to persist in the future. The above account, if true, would not constitute an airtight proof that the inductive schema of Part 1 is reliable, but I think it would give us a good (though defeasible) reason to accept it.

           

But all is not well. In Part 3 I’ll examine a couple objections to this account.

Causation, God , and the Justification of Induction: Part 1

[Cross-posted at Reflections on Religion]

Brand Blanshard (The Nature of Thought, vol. 2 , Ch. XXXII, “Concrete Necessity and Internal Relations”; Reason and Analysis, Ch. XI, “Necessity in Causation”) and A.C. Ewing (Non-Linguistic Philosophy: Ch. VI, “Causation and Induction”) gave similar arguments for the existence of “logical necessity” in causation. (Given that their views of logic are somewhat unorthodox by the standards of analytic philosophers, I think it would be more accurate and less confusing to talk of metaphysical necessity in causation, which I will do in what follows.) A “rational reconstruction” of their arguments goes something like this: If causal connections are not metaphysically necessary, the fact that similar effects follow upon similar causes, or that there are certain, seemingly exceptionless regularities in nature (which can be expressed in laws of nature) is quite remarkable. If “anything can cause anything”, as Humeans sometimes say, we have a tremendous coincidence, “an outrageous run of luck”, as Blanshard puts it (The Nature of Thought, vol. 2, Ch XXXII, “Concrete Necessity and Internal Relations”, p. 505 of the second edition), comparable to rolling a die and getting a 4 a trillion times in a row. But if causal connections are metaphysically necessary, we have a good explanation for the fact that similar effects follow upon similar causes, or that there are exceptionless regularities in nature: they obtain because they must. If events of type B necessarily follow upon events of type A, any token A event will be followed by a token B event. (Not, of course, that we can perceive this necessity: we could only perceive it if we had some kind of direct insight into the natures of type A events and type B events.) Granting that, it follows that we can justify instances of inductive inference that fit the following schema: Events of type A have always been followed by events of type B, hence, events of type A will always be followed by events of type B. 

Our argument for this schema is neither deductive nor inductive: We have not deduced, and neither have we seen through “rational insight”, that it is necessary that type A events will always be followed by type B events based on knowledge of their natures, nor have we concluded that type A events will always be followed by type B events just because they have always been so followed in the past. Our argument is rather this: In certain cases we take ourselves to have established that every observed event of type A has been followed by an observed event of type B. We also note that, since type A events are observed very frequently, it is extremely unlikely (though possible) that their association with type B events is a matter of chance. So there are two alternatives: Either the association is an astronomically improbable coincidence, or there is a necessary connection between them, albeit one that we are not able to discern.  Next we consider the principle of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE): This principle says, very roughly, that if we have multiple hypotheses vying to account for some phenomenon, it is most reasonable to accept the hypothesis which best explains it as being true. And if we think that having any explanation is rationally preferable to having none—assuming we have no evidence which rules out all of the candidate explanations, or which renders them extremely improbable—then IBE tells us that it is always more reasonable to accept an explanatory hypothesis over a non-explanatory one. Since coincidence is no explanation, in the present case IBE counsels us to accept the hypothesis that there is a metaphysically necessary connection between type A events and type B events. Because of this necessary connection, we can conclude that in the future type A events will always be followed by type B events, just as they always have been. So we have justified our inductive schema neither deductively nor inductively, but by IBE.

Note that in the above we have not invoked the principle of sufficient reason or the idea that every event must have a cause; we are only saying that it is more reasonable to believe in a necessary connection than an astronomical coincidence. Thus the objections that can be raised against them cannot be raised against the present argument.

At this point you might be wondering about IBE. What justifies us in accepting it? Why should we believe that the hypothesis which best explains a phenomenon is the most rationally acceptable one? I think it can be justified, although it can neither be justified deductively, nor inductively, nor by IBE. It cannot be justified deductively because IBE is clearly not a truth of logic or mathematics. It also cannot be justified inductively, at least not by the kind of inductive inference being considered on the present account, because we are trying to use IBE to justify those inductive inferences, and to use them to justify IBE would be circular. Finally, to use IBE to justify itself would also be circular. Instead, I think IBE can be justified “transcendentally”. It is essentially a case of “this or nothing”. If we did not regard better explanations as more rationally acceptable, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to justify anything that goes beyond our beliefs about elementary logic and our immediate perceptual experiences. (For one instance of this problem, see my post on Bertrand Russell's Five Minute hypothesis, God, and abduction. ) This does not refute skepticism, but it does show that anyone who rejects skepticism is entitled to use IBE; or, at the very least, that they cannot consistently criticize those who do use it.

“But how does God figure into all this?”, you might ask. If you want to know, stay tuned for Part 2!

Testing the limits of your imagination...

…literally.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes distinguished between imagination and conception, or between mental images and concepts. Thus he supposed that one can conceive of a chiliagon, a polygon of a thousand sides, although one cannot form a mental image that represents it—none, at any rate, that wouldn’t represent a circle equally well. This shows that imagination has its limits, and that one can conceive of things that one cannot (adequately) imagine.

In order to discern what these limits are, I invite my readers to test the limits of their own imaginations in an experiment based on Descartes’ example. Since it concerns only what you can imagine, you don’t have to resort to a lab—in this case a “thought experiment” and a real experiment coincide!

Now, I’m sure you can imagine a polygon with the least possible number of sides—a triangle. I’d wager that you can also imagine a square, a pentagon, a hexagon… but not a chiliagon. It would thus seem that there is some number n such that you can imagine an n-sided polygon but not an n+1-sided polygon. (Note: For the purposes of this experiment you only count as imagining a polygon if you can imagine the whole thing at once.) Let’s call this n-sided polygon your limit polygon. I have two questions: First, what is the number of sides of your limit polygon? Second, do you notice anything about the phenomenology of your limit polygon? If so, what?

Published!

One of my papers, "A Dilemma for Dialetheism", has been published in the latest issue of Stanford's undergraduate philosophy journal The Dualist! The paper is a critique of dialetheism, the view that some statements are both true and false; so if you're interested in that sort of thing, by all means go check it out. The published version developed out of a final paper I wrote for a logic course I took at San Francisco State University taught by Bas van Fraassen. Several people helped me out with the paper, but I'd like to thank Bas especially for his help, his time, his many useful comments, and for encouraging me to try to publish it. Thanks also to Kris Kemtrup, Ben Burgis, Justin Tiwald, Alex Hyun, Miguel Balboa, Tyrus Fisher, Asta Sveinsdottir, Graham Priest, J.C. Beall, and to anyone who I may have forgotten. I must apologize to many of them because, although I continued to work on the paper after it was accepted, I did not have the opportunity to submit any revisions before it was published, and so was not able to incorporate many of their suggestions into the published version. Finally, thanks to everyone at The Dualist.

Check out my new blog, Reflections on Religion

I've decided to start another blog, where I will discuss both religion and the philosophy of religion. Check it out here.

Much ado about Nothing: Robert Spitzer vs. Stephen Hawking on the creation of the Universe

Edit: Please excuse the weird formatting, I've tried as hard as I can to fix it and nothing seems to work.

(A caveat: I have not read either of Hawking’s or Spitzer’s recent books, so my critique of Spitzer’s argument is based only on his blog post.)

In his blog post “The curious metaphysics of Dr. Stephen Hawking”, Fr. Robert Spitzer offers some criticisms of Stephen Hawking’s recent book The Grand Design. I agree with some of his criticisms, but not with others. First, a point of agreement. Fr. Spitzer addresses the following quote from Hawking’s book:

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

Fr. Spitzer points out—rightly, in my view—that if the law of gravity is to account for the creation of the universe, it must exist, and hence the creation of the universe is not really “from nothing”. Furthermore, I agree with him when he says,

“[…] these thinkers [i.e., Parmenides and Plato] use the term “nothing” to mean “nothing” (i.e. “that which there is no such thing as”). Nothing should not be thought to be a vacuum or a void (which is dimensional and orientable – where you can have more or less space); and it is certainly not a physical law.”

If we understand the term ‘universe’ broadly, as including physical laws, then indeed we cannot explain why the universe exists by reference to such laws, nor can we use physical laws to explain why there is something rather than nothing, for they must exist in order to explain, and so we would only have explained the existence of “something” by the existence of “something else”.

However, Fr. Spitzer does not merely criticize Hawking’s claim. He also makes the following argument for the thesis that “only nothing can come from nothing”, which he hopes will show that the physical universe must have a transcendent cause:

“But let’s go back to Dr. Hawking’s underlying assumption, namely that there are reasons to think that something came from nothing – namely, reasons for a beginning. How have philosophers and metaphysicians traditionally responded to this question? With what many term the first principle of metaphysics, “From nothing only nothing comes.” If you take nothing literally – that is if one acknowledges that there is no such thing as nothing, then one cannot attribute anything to nothing. One cannot attribute characteristics, actions, powers and so forth to nothing. In this absence of everything, one can only conclude that “only nothing can come from nothing.” What does this mean?

It means that if the physical universe had a beginning (a point at which it came into existence” then prior to that point it was nothing. And if it was nothing then it could not have created itself (because only nothing can come from nothing). So what does that imply? The very reality that Dr. Hawking wants to avoid, namely, a transcendent power which can cause the universe to come into existence.”

Now we have come to the point where I must disagree. If one is committed to the thesis that there is no such thing as nothing, it is of course true that one cannot attribute anything to “it.” But that is not to say that there is some mysterious metaphysical somewhat which we have decided to call ‘nothing’, and which somehow “is” without being a “thing” or without having any attributes. Instead, to say that there is no such thing as nothing is just to say that there is no object which is not the same thing as some object, and/or that there is no object which does not have attributes, where the word ‘object’ applies not only to physical objects, but to everything that exists.

While I doubt that Fr. Spitzer holds the view that “nothing” is a mysterious metaphysical somewhat, the phrasing of the passage I quoted above does suggest it. For he says, “if the physical universe had a beginning (a point at which it came into existence” then prior to that point it was nothing. And if it was nothing then it could not have created itself (because only nothing can come from nothing).” That suggests that there is something that the universe was prior to its beginning—namely “nothing”! But if one rejects the “metaphysical somewhat” conception of “nothing”, one should say, more perspicuously, that prior to the beginning of the universe it was not the case that anything existed. Furthermore, if it was not the case that anything existed, it also was not the case that anything existed which could have created the universe. That being so, it follows straightaway that the universe could not have created itself, there being no universe around to do the creating. If this is what Fr. Spitzer means, then I think he is surely right. But then he has not really shown that “only nothing can come from nothing”, only that the universe could not have created itself from nothing. There remains another possibility which he has not yet foreclosed, which is that the universe had a beginning without being created by anything. We may say that nothing caused the universe to come into existence, not in the sense that its coming-into-existence was caused by a mysterious metaphysical somewhat called ‘nothing’, but rather in the sense that it came into existence without having any cause at all. Fr. Spitzer may have other arguments to show why the universe must have a transcendent cause, and for all I know he may be right that it has one. I only take myself to have shown that the thesis that “only nothing can come from nothing” isn’t going to do the trick.