NOTES: What Makes Us Think? by Changeux & Ricoeur

What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and… (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000)

p. 5 [Ricoeur {R} describes phenomenology as "reflective, descriptive, interpretive"]

p. 6 Changeux {C}: The brain cannot be viewed as a strictly genetic machine; … it incorporates, within a defined genetic envelope peculiar to the species, a series of nested "epigenetic" imprints that are established by variation and selection. n. 5

p. 12 C: …the Russian prince Peter Kropotkin, remembered chiefly as the theoretician of anarchism, found in nature an objective moral law in the form of mutual aid.

p. 14 R: My initial thesis is that these discourses [viz., the neural and the mental] represent heterogeneous perspectives, which is to say that they cannot be reduced to each other or derived from each other.

p. 16 R: …there is no parallelism between the sentences "I grasp with my hands" and "I think with my brain." … Does the new knowledge that we have about the cortex add to what I already know through direct bodily experience and, in particular, everything that I know about emotions, perception, everything that is genuinely psycho.organic and connected with my possession of my body?

p. 17 C: No neurobiologist would ever say that "language is the posterior part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex." That is meaningless. One says instead that language "makes us of" or, better yet, "mobilizes" particular ares of the brain.
[This sounds strikingly, if unwittingly, like the Aristhomistic theory of how forms dematerialize matter from potency to act, viz, how agents "inform" matter.]

p. 19 R: The way in which you present the research program of the neurosciences, incorporating consciousness in it, makes it clear that you are not a reductionist.

p. 20 R: I, too, a concerned with… a semantic dualism. If I had to claim a philosophical ancestor it would be Spinoza…. … Whence my question: does any knowledge that I may have of the brain add to the knowledge that I have of myself simply through direct acquaintance with my body, without knowing anything about my brain?

p. 21 R: My first problem is therefore epistemological: do the neurosciences allow us to correct the linguistic dualism that I am insisting on?

p. 29 C: …the emendatio intellectus, the discipline of thought…: ?

p. 30 C: Theory assumes the intelligibility of the world in advance of experiment.

p. 32 R: For me, the able man is one who is capable of speaking, acting, talking about himself, subjecting himself to norms, and so on. Certainly the endowment with capacities is deeply rooted in the biological world, but the accession to moral competence supposes language, moral obligation, institutions––a whole normative, juridical, and political world.

p. 35 C: [Descartes, L'Homme:] "…I must show how these two natures would have to be joined and united in order to constitute men who resemble us." n. 1

p. 36 C: …it [i.e., Descartes' Treatise on Man] represents the first attempt to model reciprocal regulation between levels of organization. The point of the Cartesian enterprise as a whole, in my view, is to establish a causal relation between neural structure and sensory-motor––ultimately, cognitive––function at each defined level of hierarchical organization.

p. 40 R: …my brain does not think, but when I am thinking something is always going on in my brain––even when I am thinking of God!

p. 42 C: In Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (1932) [Edward] Tolman introduced the notion of anticipation––intentional behavior. … Our brain is constantly attributing significance.

p. 44 R: A phenomenology of action allows us to give meaning to the notions of anticipation and projection that marked a break with the reactive conception of early behaviorism, which assigned priority to stimuli emitted by the world as it was understood by the scientists, and not as living beings organize it and structure it by choosing meaningful signals. … From the optical [viz., neural ]point of view, light comes into the eye, passing from the outside to the inside. But from the mental point of view, you look out, which to say that your look goes out from your eyes. The two points of view cross each other. You [Changeux| attribute this to the brain's capacity for projection. But what I cal "projection" involves a mental activity that I understand reflectively. …the notion of the neuronal self is itself a mental construction.

p. 46 R: …the uncritical use that you make of the category of causality in passing from the neuronal to the mental. The question is whether it is possible to extend the notion of correlation from the semantic to the ontological plane…. I propose we adopt the term substrate to denote the relation of the body-as-subject to the body as it is experienced, and therefore of the brain to the mental. … I refer to material [i.e., 'substrate'] causality only in a limiting sense, to indicate a cause sine qua non, in order to resist the extrapolations of the Churchlands' brand of eliminitavist monism. … Against the effective [i.e., 'efficient'] causality that you advocate I oppose substrate causality, in the limiting sense I have just indicated. I quite willingly grant that it constitutes nothing more than a sort of cache-misère, a presentable cloak worn to cover up the shabby clothes one wears underneath while traveling…. … [p. 47] …the brain is the substrate of thought….

p. 50 C: The perception of the body therefore assumes the integrity of the somatosensory areas [cf. anosognisic patients who deny various limbs belong to them].
[Changeux's point is that Ricoeur's phenomneological sense of the self as bodily-being-being-lived itself requires sufficient neural integrity, in which case, phenomenology derives from neurology.]

p. 52 C: Consciousness occurs in the brain, but we have no conscious perception of our brain!
[Hmmm…]

p. 53 C: It becomes possible to interpret images of the mental states of another person and also, in the first place, one's own mental states. / R: You assume here a physical notion of an image, for example as the optical projection of one object upon another; but to have an image in the sense of imagining, that is something different––it implies absence, the unreal. … / C: The phrase "medical imagery," I grant you, involves the word image in the sense of a picture book or a graph. / R: Somebody reads the picture book. / C: In this case it is the scientist who reads these images in the brain of another person or possibly in his own. He interprets them as an observer in relation to his own brain. / R: The observer makes a mental operation on a physical object.

p. 62 C: Certain neurons in our brain liberate neurotransmitters that have an excitatory effect, as in the case of glutamate: they trigger or facilitate the production of electric impulses in the target neurons; other neurons liberate a nuerotransmitter such as gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which reduces––indeed eliminates––excitation, on which account they are called inhibitory.

p. 64 R: …I side with Canguilhem, who points out in La Connaisance de la vie that living creatures organize their environment, something physical bodies cannot be said to do. …a link between organization and function. …it is in terms of this organizational hierarchy that neuroscience classifies distinct yet interconnected functions. … [p. 65] Thus organization may be said to be the substrate of function, and function the sign of organization.

p. 66 R: …in a scientific reading [of observation], the subject also becomes one of the objects: he enters into an object-object relation; but in this objectivized situation, you have suspended the subject-object, an intentional relation that does not come within the view of neuroscience.
[cf. D. Melser on the 'asymptotic' nature of scientific objectivity as a human enterprise]

p. 68: R: …no matter how careful an experimenter may be, he will still need to have recourse to other verbal reports to develop his analysis. … Ordinary experience does not exactly coincide with what scientists include under the term introspection.

p. 69 C: I can never imagine any scientists saying, "I will never succeed in understanding."

p. 71 R: Being in the world is first experienced globally. One then proceeds from the global to the particular, whereas the legitimate scientific approach will always be to pass from the simple to complex: in this respect, there is no isomorphism or toerm-by-term correspondence between the two planes of experience.

p. 72 R: …the psyche you associate with a neuronal world that is legitimately constructed is itself very much a construct…, but the mental world you correlate with the neuronal substrate is very, very simplified….

p. 73 C: The ambition of the neurobiologist is very limited. The object that he studies is much too complex to be grasped in its totality.

p. 82 C: …the tow leading principles of the architecture of the brain, parallelism and hierarchy… on account of which analysis and synthesis occur concomitantly.

p. 83 C: The determination of function by structure can only be usefully done if one aims at a level of organization that is adequate to the function.
[cue the argument for the immateriality of the intellect based on the incommensurability of physical organs and intelligible realities]

p. 85 C: Psychological functions are to cerebral organization what, at a lower level, the catalytic activity of an enzyme is to the sequence of its amino acids.
[What grounds the analogical parallelism of nature? If analogia entis is a reality from lower levels to higher, how high does this analogical hierarchy extend, I wonder?]

p. 86 R: The cognitive sciences do not lead on to the symbolic, lexical, and syntactic activities of language; these activities are their point of departure.

p. 87 C: Our nervous system is now active only when it is stimulated by sensory organs. … [The brain] is the permanent seat of important internal activities… [which elaborate and organize] the representations that will be projected onto the world….
[Unless the brain is constituted by a rational order which itself intelligibly orders natural reality, then what assurance do we have that the brain's projective syntheses are truthful?]

p. 89 R: What the phenomenologist objects to is the primacy assigned to the environment, which the experimentalist considers as a world wholly made up of things from which messages emanate and to which replies are given.

p. 91 C: …we live in an "unlabeled" universe… a world that has neither fate nor meaning. …when our brain interacts with the external world, it fevelops and fucntions according to a model of variation-selection… [in which] variation… precedes the selection of adequate form.

p. 95 C: A mental object is a representation that codes a natural sense––a meaning that "represents" an external or internal state of affairs….

p. 96 R: A code… is inert so long as it is not integreated as part of a speech act that actualizes [!] a capacity of which I have vivid experience, an I can. But there is nothing that corresponds to this I can in a neuronal assembly. … / C: By "code" I mean the maching up of an external state of affairs, an object, a situation, on the one hand, with a neuronal organization and the state of activity that invests it on the other. This term is also used by analogy [!] in the case of geentic information. One says, for example, that the base sequence of a gene's DNA codes codes for the sequence of amino acids that consitutes a proetin possession, for example, an enzymatic function. … I want in any case to find a way to say that this set of neuronal activities, which exhibits a well-defined geogrpahy and is very richly connected with others sets of neurons in our brain, has an indication function––or, better still, that it materially, physically possesses meaning (in Saussurian terms, a signigifed). It would correspond to state C in the schema proposed by Fred Dretske and Joëlle Proust:

indicates\....../causes
F <–––– C ––––> M
\_explains_/

where F is an external state of affairs and M a behavioral outcome.

p. 99 R: …the index is opposed to the icon and the the symbol: the index is a sign that would immediately lose its cahracter if its object were suppressed (the hole of a wound, for example, and a gunshot). Indication, according to semitoic theory, consists in a very strong link founded on a commonality of nature and a causal realtion. It is in a realted sense, and in agreement with Dretske and Proust, that you yourself appeal to the category of indication. But you go further, since for you neuronal reality materially continas the sign. … [p. 100] By contrast it is the semantic heterogeneity between the mental phenomenon and its cortical basis that I stress by making the former the index of the latter….

amphiboly: ?

p. 100 C: The concept of mental object defines a unique entity located where the two discourses meet. To use Spinoza's trms, I wold say that there is a "substance" conceived in two "aspects." … The term mental object therefore links the two [i.e., the mental and neural discourses]. / R: then it's an illegitmate term. / C: Yes, but intentionally illegitmate! It draws attention to itself because it is synthetic. … it's a hybrid that links the two discourses. / R: You are saying, then, that it's necessary to employ a hybrid vocabulary. Once again, this Desacrtes's problem in the sixth Meditation.
[BOOM! Or, why physicalism is just Cartesian dualism in denial.]

p. 102 R: Something happens in my brain, and when you tell me what happens in my brain, you add to my knowledge of the base, the underlying neural reality; but does this knowledge help me in trying to decipher the enigma of a face?

p. 106 C: When the subject listens without understanding, activity is restricted to the auditory system; when he understands, his brain finds itself invaded, as it were, beseiged with activity. … The isomorphism with objects of the external world is progressively lost, giving way to more formal, more abstract representaions. Conversely, these higher, more "abstract" representations projectively mobilize first assocaitive areas, and then motor areas, with a view to [!] acting in a definite way upon the world.
[In other words, as intelligible form rises in nobility, the formal activity of matter increases away from hylic potency, and in accord with final ends, no less.]

p. 111 C: This universe is intrinsically empty of meaning and intention. [Yet, recall Changeux's earlier claim on p. 96 that meaning is inscripted physically-materially.] …knowledge cannot be reduced to recognizing, to "reading" categories already established in nature; it consists first of all in establishing categories. [I consider this one of the most destructive statements Changeux could make for the case of scientific objectivity and epistemological realism.]

p. 113 C: [A sentient organism] proceeds by trial and error, trying to spot, to define, to frame, to categorize … the objects and phenomena of the reality tha surrounds him. The external world then retroacts on the transient mental state that determined the behaviro. Depending onthe signal recieved from the external world, the intial prerepresentation is stabilized or not. … According to Panskepp's theory, the affective system is divided into four great subsystems that mobilize topologically and biologically distinct sets of neurons involved in producing the fundaemtnal emotions: desire/pleasure; distress…; anger/violence; and fear….
[The classical four humors redivivus!?]

p. 115 C: …the return of a positive signal leads to the stabilization of the prepresentation that provoked it, whereas a negative signal leads to the reactiviation of the generator of diversity, the production of new prerepresentations…, and so on.

p. 117 R: …you avail yourself at the outset of a notion of the environment that is that of a world wholly made up of realities that you define in terms of physics, chemistry, and biology––a world that is already scientifiaclly organized. And it is this smae world that you decalre "empty of meaning and intention." But it had previously been emptied of meaning and intention by the Copernican, and then the NEwtonian, revolution, which effectively left us a dead physical, as Hans Jonas emphasizes in his philosophical studies of biology. Yet this doesn't prevent us from seeing it as populated with vegetables and animals, before the human child undertakes to "read" it.

p. 119 R: The notion of mental objects was used by the psychologist before you used it. You have transpalnted in the domain of neurosciences a notion tha is itself a construct of psychology.

p. 118 C: …al-mal-gham or "work of union."

p. 120 R: There is nothing magical about the [Husserlian] idea that the inside is outside. Its pradoxical form only expresses in a critical way the rejection of the dual prejudice that makes consciousness an inside and the world an outisde. … Accordingly, I don't see how one can natualirze this primitve structure, which canbe captured only by suspending the naturalization of he intentional realtion of consciousness to the world implicit in the model of the natural sciences.

p. 137 C: …under many circumstances the signals we recive from the external world acquire meaning only in an intentional framework, internal to our brain, whose structure is derived from our immense repertoire of long-term memories.

p. 147 C: Two psychologists, Hermann Ebbinghaus at the end of the nineteenth centruy and F. C. Bartlett in the 1930s, were the first to quantitatively analyzye the development of memory traces.

p. 162: R: …phenomenology challenges he idea that there exitts a replica, in the mind, of some external reality belonging to a wholyl finished world. …considering mental ideas as actual pictures that are painted in consciousness poses a problem. Here we encunter misleading Cartesian heritage of a soul populated by ideas, which later became representations in Egnlish empiricism and, subsequently, Kantian idealism.

p. 164 R: …what we call representation also involves a power, a capacity, that we experience in the feeling I can. It is this I can that carries the scope of intentonality beyond itself. Through the I can, and perhaps more through the I think, I am over there––I am not in my head, I am next to things outside me.

p. 168 R: Anyone who has read the psychiatric litearture can understand why Patricia and Paul Churchland mockingly ask whether assigning fragmentary perosnalities not only to each of our cerebral hemispheres, but also to groups of mental functions correlated with disjoint neuroanl architectures, doesn't amount to conting how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

p. 177 C: For me, nothing is unknowable––this is a term I excluded from my vocaublary long ago.
[Is ultimate unknowability itself knowable?]

p. 182 R: …it is because man exists, and poses the question of meaning, that the directionalessness of evolution troubles us. Evolution has meaning… because man is capable of inquiringinto nature.

p. 185 FIGURE 5.1: It is remarkable that the topography of the parietal meningeal vessels of Australopithecus robustus (having a cerebral capacity of 520 ml) resembles that of the modern newborn. The distribution f vessels ni the earliest humans, Homo habilis (with a cerbreal capacity of 700 ml), is similar to that of a forty-day-old child and that in Homo paleo-javanicus (1,000 ml) resembles that of a one-year-old child. From R. Saban, "Image of the human fossil brain: Endocranial cast and meningeal vessels in young and adult subjects," in J.-P. Changeux and J. Chavaillon, eds., Origins of tghe Human Brain (Oxofrd: Clarendon Press, 1995).

p. 191 R: …we always interpret animal behaviors from a human perspective.

p. 192 R. One searches for what in biological evolution prepared the way for the golden rule. But this rule had first to be formulated [viz., before we could think to research it], following the example of humanity's greatest sages.

the trompe l'oeil effect: ?

p. 195 R: I don't understand what it can mean to say that a brain evaluates. A person––a someone––evaluates.

p. 200 R: …to understand what is really meant by deferring the satisfaction of a desire…, I have no need to know anything about the brain. Now, must we know our brain in order to better behave? This is an open question.

p. 201 C: "We judge a thing to be good because we endeavor, will, seel after and desire it"; n. 30 [Spinoza]
[Was there nothing good in the cosmos till there evolved beings capable of willing and seeking things that eo ipso constituted those things as good?]

p. 203 R: [re: Hans Jonas, Organismus und Frieheit, autointegration, the notion of an individual] …the price of individuation, then, is the growing awareness of the otherness of the world and the growing solitude of the self.

p. 204 R: "The peculiar characteristic of living beings," Canguilhem insisted [in La Connaissance de la vie], "is that each of us make a milieu for themsleves." n. 32 … To live is to spread otuward.
[bonum sivi diffusum est]

p. 206 C: Jonas goes on to assert that the "concept of 'ends' beyond subjectivity [is] compatible with natural science." n. 37 and that "on the strength of the evidence of life…, we say therefore that purpose in general is indigenous to nature." n. 38

p. 207 C: "I have attempted elsewhere," Jonas says, "to show how already in the 'simplest' true organism––existing by way of metabolism, and thereby self-dependent and other-dependent at once––the horizons of of selfhood, world and time, under the imperious alternative of being or nonbeing, are silhouetted in a prenatal form." n. 39

p. 210 R: Humanity, like language, exists only in the plural. … Plurality thus proves to be inherent in the question of universality.

p. 213 R: …experience… doesn't include only the idea of representation, which has dominated the analysis of perception, memory, image, and concept, but also that of capacity, whose biological equivalent is that of disposition.

p. 215 C: Scientific knowledge needs validation and demonstration rather than justification. Mythic discourse, by contrast, requires an "account of beginnings" as justification of its origins. n. 1

p. 216 R: Here I would like once again to refer to kant, who aregues in Anthropology from a Pragmtic Poine of View n. 4 that man's natural endowment [having-been-giftedness!] is incongruent with his moral and political obligations: although nature has left us unfinished with regard to our faculties and dispositions, nonetheless it falls to us to take responsibility for organizing our experience, which we do through a structuring activity that is normative in character.
[NS says that only those organisms that happened to be disposed to self-propagation in their environments were selected for so that we see them thriving today. But teleology is implicit even in that sheerly negative stipulation, to wit, insofar as those organism were disposed towards anything at all. Further, the structure of selection itself is dynamically teleological in that it is directed towards "culling" those structures and organisms that conform to a pre-given environment. …]

p. 221 R: For normativity to emerge, it must presuppose itself; that is, become a self-referential notion.
[metaphysical irreducibility…]

p. 226 R: ataraxia

p. 228 "Why is there somehting rather than nothing?" Well, Jonas says, the answer is to be found in the affirmaton of life, which unites "is" and "ought." Life prefers itself to nothing; life thinkgs higly of itself; life approves of itself.
[meatphysical irreducibility, a donative diffusion is a sine qua non even of NS]

p. 230 C: …this disposition to cooperation, which after Darwin was noted by Kropotkin (Figure 6.2) in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, based on his own observations in Siberia.

p. 231 C: Kropotkin considered the instincetive practice of "mutual sympathy" as the point of dearture for all the "higher feelings"––justice, equity, equality, self-sacrifice––which jointly lead to moral progess. n. 25

p. 233 R: …your main argument, that the norms invented by human beings in the course of their history naturally exploit sympathy abd the inhinbiton of violence, must in my view be reinterpreted in the sense of a subsequet search for a fruldrum in evolution. …the golden rule, it seems to me, is a pointof arrival in evolution because it is a point of departure in moral refleciton.

p. 237 C: Rawls, following Kant, dinstinguishes "reasonable" form "rational," arguing that rational person will act in an intelligent manner but that reasonable person will do more than this. They will take into account the effect of their actions on the well-being of others.

p. 239 C: …I would say once more that the adult human brain may be considered as the result of at least four interlocking evolutions, each one subject to random variability: the evolution of species in paleontoloical time, together with its consequences for the genetic constitution of human beings; individual evolution, the the epigenesis of neural connections, which occurs throughout the individual's development; cultural evolution, likewise epigenetic but extracerebral, which spans not only psycological time but also age-old memories; and finally the evolution of personal thought, which occurs in psychological time and draws upon individual and cultural memories that are both cognitive and emotional. …variation-selection-amplification…

p. 246 R: …it is under the name of phenomenology… that he [Hegel] understakes to examine the sensible history of the mind. This history, attracted by its end, is presented as a progression that moves from threshold to threshold through an increase of meaning: there is more meaning in perception that in sensation, more in the concept than in perception, more in communcal expeience than in individual coonsciousness, and so on. … [p. 247] What Hegel makes us reflect upon is this feeling of degrees––not only of complexity but also of evaluation, through the augmentation of meaning.

p. 252 C: …from Fontenelle to Vico and on through Comte, the progress of human socieites was coneived as a successions of ages––theocratic, heroic, and civilized for Vico––or states––theological (or fictive), metaphysical and positive (or scientific and industrial) for Comte……that corresponded to the deployment of an existing potential [!], analogous to the mental development of a child.
[The crucial clash between materialist NS and classical natural philosophy is not the about the presence and palsticity of potentia, but over the bedrock ability or inability of sheer potentia qua materia prima to actuate itself in a dynamically selective manifold. The more potential the, say, quantum vacuum is for breeding a mateiralist worldview, the less able it is to actuate itself, since, of course, a self-caused cause is impossible. Conversely, the more innate potential prime matter has for generating distinct actualities, including the dynmaic of NS itself, the more it indicates irreuducible metaphysical complexity, or design. If potentia materiae primae is not ordered towards any ends wahtsoever, and by definiton in itself lacks any efficient means to actuate them, then ex nihil nihil fit. But if there is at least some, say, self-diffusive, finality in the basest potentia of matter ab initio, then we have detected the most basic structure of creation.]

p. 254 C: …[there is no reason to advert to] the notion of a "mind" or "spirit" that somehow "attracts" history. To the contrary, it is a matter quite simply of human being trying to [actualizing potency] make better use of [formal hierarchy] in order to [finality] live better [formal hierarchy].

p. 255 R: There has to be a basement in order to be able to build higher, but having an understanding of the basement doesn't give me an understanding of the building.

p. 267 C: Religious life… is a sort of epigenetic intermediary aimed at containing individual self-interest through the establishment of arbitrary social conventions that give rules of moral conduct their force.

p. 268 R: The idea of being preceded in one's capacity for speech by the word of another is for the point of origin, the point of departure, and, in the last resort, the ultimate source of religious authority.

C: …Nouailhat's thesis that a simple and unique beginning was only imagined and defined at the time of the great councils of the fifth century A.D. n. 6

p. 277 C: The extreme intolerance of the Christian doctrine of universal love opened the way to anti-Semitism.

p. 279 R: Still one has to want to control violence. …ne still has to wish to enter into dialogue. … What makes us want to enter into dialogue with others rather than remain in violence?

p. 280 R: For me, evil is the capacity to challenge the value of life.

p. 287 R: The function of myth is entirely different––it consists in coordinating the nature of the world with that of ethical commandment. … How can it be, one wonders, that evil is radical and yet goodness is still more fundamental?

p. 289 C: Spinoza's herem (ban) by Amsterdam Jewry

p. 290 C: Reference to some unnamed "fundamental" seems to me very dangerous.
[Is not sheer matter fundamental in materialism? Is not humanity itself fundamental in humanism?]

Shooting pool…

Understanding and being committed to a woman is like shooting pool with balls made of silly putty. Everything keeps moving but the usual rules don't apply.

Just super! Naturalism!

[I've decided to synthesize what I feel are the best replies by me and others to some of my latest posts on natural selection {NS} and naturalism. I like to do this with comments so as to distill and refocus the discussion on a fresh footing.]

Pointing out that not all traits are truly selected for by NS is well taken. Nonetheless, teleology seeps into (or out of it, as is more likely the case) NS. By highlighting certain features as more or less relevantly selected-and-selectable, we eo ipso arrange organic capacities in a hierarchy relative to their finalized roles in the larger life of the organism (viz., organized-dynamic-being) and, via the organism, in the propagation of the species. This is but Aristotelianism redivivus. Saying that such and such a selection is "better for ____" than some other selection, or "more important to ___" than some other selection, is tantamount to saying that some things in nature indicate a graded value of finality and fittingness.

Further, there are at least three problems with a naturalist saying natural selection "tends to" select for truth. First, if natural selection is lawfully ordered towards truth-production, then it is teleological. Is understanding the proper function of your (and humans') cognitive abilities? Is grasping truth the proper end of your (and humans') mental capacities? If not, what is? If so, how devoid of finality is natural human existence? If we deny the human mind is so ordered, and that truth is just a happy coincidence of blind selection, then the original claim stands: natural selection does not select for truth.

Second, there is numerous cognitive evidence that we misperceive things all the time. (Isn't that one of the chestnut arguments against Creation, after all?) Consequently, naturalistically grounding reliable cognition is not so simple as just asserting, darn it all, we have evolved largely and consistently reliable cognitive abilities. If we're the ones doing the experiments to detect our cognitive faults, then faulty minds are trying to correct faulty minds. The kludge leading the kludge, as it were. It's certainly more reassuring to assert our cognitive apparati are by and large reliable… but it's quite circular to ground that assertion in evidence provided by the very apparati under scrutiny. Everything my cognitive abilities show me about my cognitive abilities reveals to my cognitive abilities that everything my cognitive abilities disclose are fully in accord with what I grasp of the world by way of my cognitive abilities, etc., etc. Hopefully you can see how this breathless myopia can't really get off the ground.

Third, as Alvin Plantinga has argued at length and in many ways, on the one hand, naturalism provides no reason to assume nature yields reliable cognitive apparati, but, on the other hand, the scientific arguments for naturalism are predicated on the truth of our cognitive engagement with the world. There is no obvious selection value for an organism to "grasp" the "truth" about the cosmos. Mosquitoes do just fine without all that. As Nozick, Klee, et al. have noted, there is simply no reason to believe natural selection generates minds that surpass "true enough." For instance, human beings evolved to think in Euclidean and Aristotelian terms, but obviously those cognitive impulses hardly count as proof of the truth of Euclidean or Aristotelian physics. Only if we assume, for no antecedent reason, that we can trust our cognitive heritage can we employ science as proof of the truth of our theories. Empirical underdetermination of theory makes our belief in grasping the *truth* of physical and biological law just that–– a belief. Numerous false theories can and do work. The more pragmatic science is, the less intrinsically true it is. Indeed, while Newtonian physics still "works" in pragmatic terms, we know it is untrue, on two counts: one being that its equations are idealized unlike anything we really find in nature (i.e., perfect curves, frictionless planes, infallible increments, etc.), and the second being that Newtonian mechanics were replaced by Einsteinian relativity. The fact that "science works" does not at all prove "science is the truth."

A related problem for naturalism is that of the will and choice. Even if we can rely on our cognitive equipment, we still have to decide what to do with the sensory data. Libertarianism (i.e., "free-willism") is based on the human ability to deliberate between alternatives according to rational values. Determinism can only code that claim as an organism being triggered to mobilize one course of action based entirely on external causes.

But let us suppose a determinist retorts like so:

"A determinist thinks that thoughts and beliefs are caused. So, a determinist arguing with a non-determinist in order to change his mind is entirely consistent with determinism. My words are the cause, the changes in your brain are the effect.

"What makes no sense at all is for a non-determinist to try to change my mind with an argument. If my thoughts and beliefs are not caused, but are contra-causal free floating wonder-stuff, what effect could your argument possibly have?"

Aside from the gross mishandling of technical terms and a facile disregard for the historical course of this debate, this line of defense for determinism is perilous. To wit, if reasons are just a species of causes, there is nothing that separates a rational from an irrational persuasion. Both are simply variant forms of ineluctable causation impinged upon an 'object' from without. Both are just perfectly deterministic "outcomes" that fall out, rationally or irrationally, from "antecedent conditions." As I made clear in my post a few months ago about the "neurolator", if we cannot but respond in a certain way to certain stimuli, whether they are construed as chemical injections or sound waves "in the shape of" arguments, then there is nothing irrational about responding to irrational arguments qua one more cluster of stimuli among others. Nor, however, is there anything rational about it, either. If we reduce reasons to causes, and deliberation to being-effected-by, then no argument is more rational than any other one, since, metaphysically, they are equivalent qua perfectly determined stimulus-response phenomena. Freedom of the will is rooted in our rational capacities, not in any "free-floating" straw man foisted upon the debate. It is only because certain dimensions of rationality include immaterial objects that we posit (i.e., deduce) an immaterial power in rational creatures.

Again, determinists might claim it is all of a piece for them to employ reasons to convince their opponents… but what if they don't want to? A puff of mustard gas in his face will make my determinist interlocutor do and say all kinds of interesting things, but I have no rational grounds for responding to any of it as a rational basis for action, even though all of the photons and sound waves from his gyrating and howling perfectly impinge on me as deterministic influences. If the next day he feels much better and wants me to see a matinee with him, on what rational grounds ought I heed these new stimuli of his as rationally motivating compared to his stimuli the day before? After all, it might just be the residual mustard gas talking. If by their own admission have no choice in the matter, what enables determinists to deliberate between a range of reasons and options, including the choice to defend determinism or not? A determinist may say he cannot but defend his view, but a non-determinist can just as easily shrug his arguments off by saying, in that case, she cannot but disbelieve them. Neither one of them is being irrational–– since neither is being rational. But at least the libertarian knows she is just playing with the determinist; the determinist doesn't realize he's playing with himself. To put it a bit poetically, the difference between determinism and libertarianism is analogous to the difference between "cannot" and "can not" or "cannot but" and "can not, but…." Insofar as these are meaningfully distinct forms of deliberation and action, and insofar as all have a place in libertarianism but not in determinism, libertarianism maps onto the actual world of lived human existence much better than its rival.

Finally, let us consider naturalism from an ethical perspective. I side with Crude in his dispute with unBeguiled, agreeing that unBe's simultaneous denial that there is something called "THE best thing to do" (i.e., objective morality) and insistence that there is no "BEST thing to do", is basically incoherent. Drawing on B. Lonergan and H. Meynell, I like to describe such cases as unBe's as performatively incoherent, or retorsively self-destructive.

To face moral truth, one need not simply imaginatively suspend his belief in naturalism. Rather, he needs to drop that belief altogether, for two reasons. First, the incoherence of monism itself undermines naturalism as a species of monism. Second, the naturalist needs to face the Sisyphusean performative absurdity of this debate as long as he pushes for naturalism.

In the first case, I take monism to be incoherent simply because it removes the tools we need to mount a defense of it, namely, actual distinctions. If everything really is water, then how could we (being water ourselves) possibly grab two distinct 'pieces' of water and compare them against a distinct non-watery background in order to assert that these two distinct pieces of _____ are water? If the space between them as we observe them is water, we ourselves as observers are water, the background against which we view them is water, and so on, then how could we possibly distinguish anything in the water-world from anything else? A monist may try to blunt the force of this critique by imagining (as unBe did in the comment box) a handful of coins and saying the different kinds of coins are all still just coins, and therefore, by analogy, the different kinds of objects in nature are all still just nature. But notice what the monist has done: he asked me (not a heap of coins) to consider a handful of coins in your hand (not a heap of coins) with enough space (not more coins) between them to distinguish them. In other words, he inadvertently (and illegitimately) used a pluralistic ontology to establish a monist ontology. Otherwise the monist just ends up sayin, "coinscoinscoins, coinscoinscoins, etc." The only way we can specify this or that patch of spacetime is "a handful of coins," is by acknowledging that not every patch is "a handful of coins." Are you a handful of coins as you ponder your own handful of coins? Does your handful of coins behold itself? And if so, against what background? An infinite sea of handfuls of coins? You can't even say anything about the specific contents of the handful of coins–– pennies, nickels, dimes–– without once more pluralizing your ontology.

The upshot is this: Only because nature is radically and actually distinct from God is there any metaphysical grounds for distinguishing the myriad contents of nature. As Jacques Maritain puts it on page ix in his masterwork, The Degrees of Knowledge (Fr. Distinguir pour unir), "Every attempt at metaphysical synthesis, especially when it deals with the complex riches of knowledge and of the mind, must distinguish in order to unite." In theism, everything is from God, but not all things are God. All beings participate in God's Being per se, but not everything "be's" in the same way. Existence is not a univocal concept in theism, though it must be in monism. As James Chastek put it so well [I can't find the post so I'm paraphrasing], "We tend to think of existence as univocal, like a light switch being on or off, but Thomism sees existence as analogical, graded, like a dimmer switch."

In any case, the second reason one should drop naturalism, namely, that a moralizing naturalist is seeking a standard for moral discourse while at the same time renouncing the supremacy of standards over human interactions themselves. To quote Crude:

"You don't need my agreement to build a meta-ethic. Hell, you don't need other people at all. You don't even need to make it consistent. Just build it, declare yourself done when it pleases you, and you've succeeded, or at least as close as you can get to "success" in naturalism. You'll have made a meta-ethical system that's just as objectively "good" as any other system proposed. Not bad for what could be five minutes' work.

"So what you're asking me here isn't to give you something "better" in an objective sense. Insofar as you embrace naturalism, you rule that out to begin with. You can't be asking me to get you to renounce naturalism - that would be a completely different ballgame than discussing ethics. What you can be asking me to do is persuade you about subjective standards using subjective criteria. But why in the world would I want to? Under naturalism, you may as well be asking me to persuade you that vanilla tastes better than chocolate."

Is courtesy, for example, really a natural norm that must (or perhaps just 'ought') govern every intersubjective discourse? Says who? Your little discourse over there? Is parsimony really a natural standard by which we must (or ought) judge all intersubjective claims? Who says so? That little discourse-clique over yonder? And so on. Even if we could settle on one moral discourse as "the best for us to adopt," we would eo ipso negate intersubjective autonomy by basing our choice of intersubjective norms on some reified "best way," and thus find ourselves back in the objectivist camp.

At one point, unBe said, "On naturalism, I think that 'objective' morality in a strict sense is unintelligible. But . . . a robust secular ethic can be constructed. We can figure out how best to behave. We can figure out what we ought to do."

The obvious, and perhaps by now predictable, rejoinder is to ask on what grounds 'ought' we, rather than simply do we, as a matter of custom and conditioning, construct an ethical system at all, much less a robust one? Naturalistic evolution can account for why we have certain moral impulses and aversions, but it cannot assess whether we ought have them and, ultimately, what we ought do with them; it can only sketch what we have done and might do with them.

Having said all that, I suggest that the objective-subjective distinction (ach, zat vord again!) is highly ambiguous in trinitarian Christian orthodoxy (TCO), precisely because TCO posits intersubjective communion as the eternally objective basis for all things! Objective morality just means the intersubjective concerns that "umbrella" the common, fundamental experience of human beings. TCO actually results in an apophatic morality, since every moral "system" must be relativized against the transcendent, objective "backdrop" of God Himself. There is, thus, not only room for a kind of pluralist ethics in TCO, but also a basis for pluralistic ethics. No moral "system" is 'perfect' since only God is perfect. But insofar as our moral aims are aimed at God in His self-revelation in Christ, our moral systems are perfected. This is but the act-potency distinction (!) applied to ethics. It is also why God is not properly called a "moral being," but is instead perfectly free being-in-communion.

The oft-repeated claim that, even if there is some objective moral standard, we cannot know it, works just as well against science. Indeed, there is a long philosophical pedigree for citing ultimate uncertainty as evidence against truth claims. What such an ultimate skepticism is to morality, however, antirealism is to the objectivity of science. Even if there is an independently existent world of theoretical entities, antirealists argue, we could never know it for sure; therefore, there are effectively no independently existent theoretical realities. For pragmatists and instrumentalists, science, like morality, is purely a contingent intersubjective discourse, one of man's many finite (or infinite) games. The ultimate skeptic seems to be looking for some meta-standard by which we could assess objective moral claims as, perhaps, objectively objective (!), but doing so not only begs the question against moral truth qua that very standard in the first place, but also confuses "objective" with "ultimate." In a realist philosophy, morality is objective in the same way science is: both seek to discover, engage, and be-informed-by genuine fixtures of the world. Moral truth, like certain thereotical entities, are "shot from" (ob-jectus) reality to us "below" them (sub-jectus, under-standing). Grasping objective moral and scientific truth does not mean grasping ultimate or total moral and scientific knowledge, since, obviously, new data can disconfirm a current scientific theory, new facts can dissolve past moral issues. A better, broader–– that is, more objective–– theory can 'sublimate' a lesser one, in the sense of negating it by integrating its truth in a higher schema of reality; the truth of the inferior model remains objectively intact, but only as far as reality shows it extends.

Interestingly, in the same way that religion is accused of fostering (or feeding on) confirmation bias (i.e., religionists are predisposed to remember "when faith works" but downplay or block out when it fails), much of science merits the same criticism. If you compare the hours and hours and hours of effort put into science with the minute, incremental gains it makes (compared, again, to the countless failed experiments and totally erroneous hypotheses), it becomes evident that science itself is vaunted only for when it works. Scientific failures and fraud are just as much a part of the scientific enterprise as its breakthroughs and victories. As for the rejoinder, "Yeah, but when science works, it really works," or, "Yeah, but science works over and over again in many people's lives," this is no more compelling than saying, "When miracles happen, they really happen," or, "Faith works in people's lives over and over again in countless situations." Using a microwave is a humdrum benefit of science, but then again, finding the strength to forgive our enemies, love our spouses better, etc., are also daily, humdrum benefits of religious faith.

Careful with that razor!

It is not an uncommon argument against teleology that the appearance of design and finalized function is but a cognitive illusion generated by our brains for survival value. The first thing that strikes me about this claim is how seriously it complicates the attendant claim that our cognitive capacities are merely and wholly evolved by natural selection (NS). If we are so abysmally wrong about purpose and finality, which we see everywhere, how reliable are our cognitive apparati? Are our brains really so poorly adapted to reality that we consistently and automatically ascribe purposive behavior to observed phenomena? If so, how much confidence can we have in the idea that NS has molded our brains to perceive the truth about the world?

I also have to wonder what survival advantage there is in generating consistently misperceptive cognitive faculties vis-à-vis objects and organisms. I mean, surely an organism does not need an elaborate cognitive apparatus for ascribing intentionality to lifeless, non-teleological phenomena to propagate its genes. Presumably, mind evolved to "pick out" purposeful behavior among evolving fellow anthropoids… but in that case, where did all that purposive mindedness come from in the first place? If there is no mindedness and finality "there" in nature, how can sentient organisms evolve to "pick it out"? (Very Zen-esque: what is the selective advantage of one mind thinking?) What selective pressure was subcognitive perception responding to in order that it evolved to teleologized cognition? The theory of NS stipulates that heritable features can only adapt to and flourish in niches that "pre–support", as it were, those functions. For example, to borrow from Fr. Edward Oakes's point in a lecture he gave about five years ago, wings can only evolve in an environment that displays precise atmospheric and gravitational parameters. Moreover, Oakes notes, following Daniel Dennett, we can extrapolate from evolved artifacts back to the environment in which they evolved. Imagine a bunch of futuristic Martians, who know nothing about Earth's atmosphere, one day found a heap of wing fossils and bird skeletons drifting in space. By examining the artifacts, they could extrapolate not only the existence of a suitable "flightable" environment (i.e., one that was pre-supportive of flighted creatures), but also discern many features of that environment (viz., based on the size of the skeletons, the angulation of the joints, bone density, etc.). To adapt a point from the Dao De Jing, although a window is technically a void, a non-entity, a pure lack, yet its "ontic potentiation" generates a genuine structure around it in the ordered context of a larger "ontic habitat" (i.e., a window in a wall in a house). To quote from Hagakure (chapter 2):

Our bodies are given life from the midst of nothingness
Existing where there is nothing
is the meaning of the phrase:
Form is emptiness.
That all things are provided for by nothingness
is the meaning of the phrase:
Emptiness is form
One should not think that these are two separate things.

What the foregoing indicates is that nature can only evolve according to niches supportive of certain functions and structures. We live in a world full of minds ordered towards purposes (namely, our own minds). Is there, then, a pre-supportive niche for mind and teleological cognition in nature? If not, how could such cognition adapt into a nonexistent niche in the natural order? If there is intrinsically no "design space" for teleological cognition, how could it evolve? If, by contrast, there is a pre-established niche (or potential) for rational cognition inherent in nature, then just how "natural" is nature? (For more along these lines, see the latter half or so of my post, "And your punt, exactly?")

In any case, for the purposes (yuk yuk yuk) of this post, my main worry about the illusion of teleology is a pari passu (or a "critical parsimony", goose-and-gander) argument.

The thrust of arguments against teleology based on NS, and in favor of purely naturalized selection (PNS), is twofold. First, NS can explain, or account for, the appearance of "finalized structures" (i.e., entelechies) without positing purposiveness and, second, by doing so NS is metaphysically less extravagant, which, by most accounts, avoids the pain of "Ockham's" Razor. According to that axiom, We should avoid needlessly positing entities (Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). In other words, the more we can explain with less, the better. Positing a metaphysical somesuch called "teleology" seems needlessly to clutter our ontology. Naturalistic mechanism, by way of good old NS, can account for the appearance of that metaphysical fiction as an illusory consequence of our higher cognitive functions; as such, naturalism is ontologically less bloated and therefore a better theory than, say, Aristotelianism.

Here is my "critically parsimonious" worry, though: how does the concept of "causation" fare under the same treatment? As Hume argued so mercilessly, "causation" is neither an obvious principle of reason nor an empirically observable reality. It is merely a cognitive illusion which we cast over otherwise metaphysically discrete phenomena. Rationally, we lose nothing by denying there is a metaphysical "principle" of causation that "acts on" spatiotemporally contiguous phenomena. Our ability to imagine two conjoined events occurring just as we perceive they do, yet without superimposing a metaphysical cloak of "causation" over them, indicates that causation per se is not a rational necessity (such as the principles of identity and noncontradiction). Empirically, moreover, we lose nothing of observational value if we strip away the "spooky," "invisible" so-called "power of causation," and instead simply record what happens in conjunction with what else. Malebranche and Leibniz have amply demonstrated the rational coherence of (parallel) occasionalism, even if occasionalism strikes us as highly counter-intuitive. (Anti-teleological NS, general relativity, and quantum mechanics all strike us as highly counter-intuitive, but that doesn't mean their lesser, older substitutes has any place in mature metaphysics, right?) If certain laws of nature are just brute givens, then why is not the 'occasional' order of serial events also not just a given ab initio? Moreover, aren't we being better philosophers by stripping our ontology down to the bare minimum of entities to account for our experience, and isn't "causation" just a clunky metaphysical dangler on a potentially more austere ontology? Causation per se adds nothing conceptually to metaphysics, but does draw the wrath of Ockham's razor by adding a gratuitous, quasi-mystical entity to it.

The point is, of course, that if we can dispense with teleology by saying not only that it is a cognitive illusion but also that another ontology can explain everything that a causal metaphysic does, but more economically, then why can't we likewise dispense with causation on the same grounds? Hell, I can think up an account of the evolution of "causal cognition" in terms of NS just as easily as anti-teleologists "explain away" final causation in terms of NS. To wit: Minds that tended to "ascribe" "causal power" to some phenomena and to "regard" other conjoined phenomena as "effects" of prior phenomena, also tended to pay more attention to phenomena in general. As a result of greater attention to passing phenomena, such "causalized" minds were better able to survive and propagate their genes. If the mind is a pattern-making machine (regardless how illusory our sense of order and beauty is in hardcore naturalistic terms), then those minds which more successfully and frequently imposed a pattern of cause-effect on otherwise incoherent phenomena were selected for as better manipulators of those phenomena. The eye that "expects" these and those phenomena to follow such and such phenomena, will be that much more disposed to react to subsequent phenomena. All the while, however, the truth is that there is no metaphysical, "immaterial" force at work between phenomena. If believing in such a "force" sharpens the mind over generations, so much the better.

It is too little recognized that "causation" is, arguably, no less anthropomorphic than teleology. As Derek Melser notes in his florilegium–essay, "Where Our Notion of 'Causation' Comes From": "…the concept of causation, of events ‘causing’ other events, thought by some philosophers to be the concept that natural science is founded on, is actually an anthropomorphic metaphor derived from certain features of personal action." Melser quotes R. G. Collingwood's An Essay on Metaphyics (pp. 334–336): "The natural scientist is trying to construct a science of nature in terms of analogies drawn from the conscious life of man. It is only through such analogies that nature becomes intelligible to man; a science of nature which renounced their use would accordingly be no science at all." If we relinquish the notion of causation, we lose the right to practice exact science. Exact science aims to explain the causal links that generate phenomena. If, however, there is no such thing as causation per se, then there are no causal links per se, and therefore nothing for science to discover. This in no way diminishes the instrumental robustness of science, since, as long as we plan and predict based on the phenomenal conjunction we have theretofore observed, we will be able to manipulate the world quite successfully. If our efforts along a certain line of "natural causation" hit a dead end and start not to work, it just indicates the prior pattern of occasional phenomena has veered into a new direction and we need to adapt to a new pattern, ready at any moment to relinquish our latest theory at the altar of falsification. If new data upset our habitual sense of the world, we need only pick up the thread, jettison our outmoded "theory," adjust to the current array of serial phenomena, and go on our merry way as scientific pragmatists (or, pragmatic scientists). Never need we posit some abstruse immaterial principle of causation to help us observe what happens over time.

Perhaps you noticed a crucial inconsistency in my just-so story about the evolution of causal cognition. To wit, I said that enhanced attentiveness was a result of the inherited disposition to ascribe causation to phenomena. In other words, I appealed to causation in my argument against the reality of causation. My argument might be called "causal eliminativism" à la the Churchlands. By their lights, while they formally deny the reality of "minds," they admit to using "mental talk" but only do so in order to move us along to a physicalist "theory of 'mind'," which will, in a completed science, eliminate, and not merely reduce, the concept of "mind" itself This technique is reminiscent of Wittgenstein's ladder in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (English):

Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie - auf ihnen - über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)

Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

(In passing let me note that, to the same extent that "causal eliminativism" seems highly wonky and implausible, physicalist eliminativism should be repudiated for being just as wonky and implausible.)

The reason we cannot escape from natural-causal talk––even though it clutters our ontology, is not rationally necessary, adds nothing to our empirical gains, and is an anthropomorphic confabulation––is closely related to the reason why biologists cannot dispense with teleological talk. Analytically, both teleology and causation are useful fictions–– or are they? What if they are but two sides of the same real coin? Indeed, what if causation itself is but a fundamental species of natural teleology? In other words, the reason causation is theoretically irreducible in "explaining" nature, is because natural entities themselves are ordered toward certain effects and not toward others. If, as Hume argued in masterly anti-teleological form, it is no more (or less) rational to suppose rolling one billiard ball into another will result in the second ball rolling as it is to suppose the second ball will crack open to hatch a chick–– if in other words, there is no intrinsic causal finality of "rolling a ball into another ball," then we are well within our rights to say there is nothing to causation as a normative principle. Unless natural phenomena are ordered towards specific effects proper to their formal and material constitution, then there is no reason to expect such and such effects nomologically to follow such and such causes. It may be the case that attentive minds were able to evolve into causal-cognizers, but that does not ground the metaphysical principle of causation as producing those cognizers. All it means is that the prior string of contiguous phenomena have not killed the descendants of deluded causal-cognizers (i.e., us). We are, as NS theorists would have it, all just the offspring of the lucky ones that didn't die. Who knows why? Who cares? The more we cling to our inherited advantages the harder sudden environmental changes in selection pressure will hit us. There is no inherent reason we should preserve or prefer one set of human attributes to another, since, in time, "human nature" could become wildly foreign to what it is now. There is, in other words, no intrinsic causal link between what we've become (causes), what we are (mode), and what we can become (effects).

Unless we deploy a metaphysics that posits causes as actually and specifically generative of their proper effects, we can only agree with Hume that causes are only potentially and contingently generative of their observed effects. By using the words "actually" and "potentially" I intend to remind the reader of a metaphysic that posits causes and effects in just this way, namely, Aristotelianism, in which causes are but the active mode of an entity as its interacts with the potentiality of other objects in spacetime. Insofar as causation is a form of actus, and insofar as actus is the common, integrating dynamic of fourfold causation (material, efficient, formal, & final) as it "ripples through" the potentia of materia quantitate signata (i.e., matter quantitatively individuated), actus efficiently yields formally proper effects as potential final ends of matter. Only if objects are integrally ordered to produce certain effects can we extrapolate from the effects back to the causes as true nomological explanations of the world's basic metaphysical structure.

If ____, then…?

If Heaven is just an illusory way to assuage the fear of mortality, then is the assertion of nonexistence upon death a way to assuage the fear of eternal retribution?

* * *

If euthanasia is so good, why do we try talking people down from suicide?

* * *

If scientific theories do not simply "fall out" from natural sensation and perception, are they purely natural?

If medicine is intended to redress the errors of natural biology, and if medical equipment is an artificial appendage to natural organisms, then is everything even possible wholly natural?

If even one thing is artificial as distinct from natural, can everything be subsumed under nature?

If everything is lumped together ontologically as one whole "sheer Nature," then is it even coherent to make distinctions? (If everything is the same, then nothing is different, and therefore it makes no sense to ascribe common properties to different objects. If every thing, in other words, is everything, then no thing exists. If I say everything is water, with reference to what do I contrast 'this' and 'that' as exhibits of water? Insofar as all assertions presuppose distinctions, how we can assert ontological uniformity without presupposing ontological diversity? Is monism, of which naturalism is a type, even coherent?)

Natural selection doesn't mean truth-selection…

"Biologists discover the evolutionary roots of religion!"

"Biologists discover the evolutionary roots of food!"

In the second case, we uncontroversially see that food meets a need integral to vital human nature. In the first case, we see a similar instance of integral satisfaction. If God is an illusion generated by natural selection, then so is caloric consumption. In the order of analogy, God meets a need integral to human nature, just as everyday food does. Just as the need for food is integral to grasping the evolution of humans up to this point as metabolizers, so the need for God is integral to grasping the emergence of human beings as worshipers.

+ + +

Only brains that responded to the objective fact that 2 objects combined with 2 objects make 4 objects were selected for by prior selection pressures and reproductive opportunities. It takes special effort to overcome that mathematical illusion with the advanced powers of abstraction. We all 'know' that 2 things placed adjacent to 2 other things still only make for a pair of two arbitrarily juxtaposed objects.

Only brains that responded to the objective fact that God exists were selected for by prior selection pressures and reproductive opportunity. It takes special effort to overcome that illusion with the advanced powers of abstraction. We all 'know' that theology is just a hyped-up version of the natural cognitive assumption that agents lie behind motion and order.

If natural selection doesn't consistently and profoundly yield truth-bearing cognitive apparati, why look to it for a consistent and fundamental explanation of truth as we perceive it?