Category: Naturalism

Naturalism, Ultimate Explanation, and Brute Facts and Laws

Malcolm Pollack solicited my comments on an article by Tomas Bogardus that appeared in Religious Studies under the title, If naturalism is true, then scientific explanation
is impossible.

Malcolm summarizes:

I’ve just read a brief and remarkably persuasive philosophical paper by Tomas Bogardus, a professor of philosophy at Pepperdine University. In it, he argues that, if we are to have confidence in the explanatory power of science (and he believes we should), then the naturalistic worldview must be false.

Here is the abstract:

I begin by retracing an argument from Aristotle for final causes in science. Then, I advance this ancient thought, and defend an argument for a stronger conclusion: that no scientific explanation can succeed, if Naturalism is true. The argument goes like this: (1) Any scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity. Next, I argue that (2) any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one. From (1) and (2) it follows that (3) a scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity, and this regularity does not call out for explanation while lacking
one. I then argue that (4) if Naturalism is true, then every natural regularity calls out for explanation but lacks one. From (3) and (4) it follows that (5) if Naturalism is true, then no scientific explanation can be successful. If you believe that scientific explanation can be (indeed, often has been) successful, as I do, then this is a reason to reject Naturalism.

Keywords: philosophy of religion; philosophy of science; scientific explanation; naturalism; supernaturalism; theism; atheism

The gist of the argument is that science, which is in the business of explaining observable phenomena, must offer for every explanandum (i.e., that which is to be explained) some explanans (that which explains). But if the explanans itself requires explaining, the explanation is incomplete, and must rest upon some deeper explanans.

Bogardus’s paper explores the varieties of possible explanatory regression. Either a) we bottom out on a “brute fact”, or b) we encounter an infinite stack of explanations (“turtles all the way down”), or c) our explanations loop back on themselves (so that at some point every explanandum also becomes an explanans), or d) we come at last to some explanans that breaks the chain, by requiring no further explanation.

Bogardus argues that of all brute facts, infinite regressions, and circular explanations explain nothing; the only kind of thing that will serve is (d). But the “laws of nature” do not meet this requirement, because they do not (and cannot) explain themselves.

The heart of Bogardus’s argument, then, is that only some sort of necessary truth, some teleological principle that stands outside of the chain of scientific explanation, can serve as the anchor to which that chain must be fastened. And because Naturalism admits of no such entity, then if scientific explanations are to be considered valid, Naturalism must be false.

My Evaluation

It is given that nature is regular. She exhibits all sorts of regularities. Some of them are codified in scientific law statements. Coulomb's Law, for example, states that particles of like charge repel and particles of unlike charge attract. Another regularity we are all familiar with is that if a gas is heated it expands. This is why I do not store my can of WD-40 in the garage in the Arizona summer. The regularity is codified is Gay Lussac's law: the pressure of a given amount of gas held at constant volume is directly proportional to the Kelvin temperature.  Now why should that be the case? What explains the law? The kinetic theory of gases. If you heat a gas you give the molecules more energy so they move faster. This means more impacts on the walls of the container and an increase in the pressure. Conversely if you cool the molecules down they will slow down and the pressure will be decreased. The temperature of the gas varies with the kinetic energy of the gas molecules. 

But invoking the kinetic theory of gases is not an ultimate explanation.  What about those molecules and the laws that govern them?

So here is a question for Malcolm: Is Bogardus assuming that a genuine explanation must be or involve an ultimate explanation? And if he is making that assumption, is the assumption true?

Here is another example. Farmer John's crops have failed. Why? Because of the drought. The drought in turn is explained in terms of atmospheric conditions, which have their explanations, and so on. Question is: have I not explained the crop failure by just saying that that drought caused it?

Must I explain everything to explain anything? Is no proximate explanation a genuine explanation?

But we are philosophers in quest of the ultimate. That's just the kind of people we are. So we want ultimate explanations. And let us suppose, with Bogardus, that such explanations cannot be non-terminating, that is, they cannot be infinitely regressive or 'loopy,' i.e. coherentist.  Ultimate explanations must end somewhere.  Bogardus:

. . . I believe many Naturalists subscribe to scientific explanation in the pattern of Brute Foundationalism, either of the Simple or Extended variety, depending on the regularity. Here’s Carroll’s (2012, 193) impression of the state of the field: ‘Granted, it is always nice to be able to provide reasons why something is the case. Most scientists, however, suspect that the search for ultimate explanations eventually terminates in some final theory of the world, along with the phrase “and that’s just how it is”.’31

My question to Malcolm (and anyone): Why can't scientific explanations end with brute laws and brute facts? Has Bogardus given us an argument against brute laws? I don't see that he has. Or did I miss the argument for (2) below in Bogardus's main argument:

 

1) Any scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural
regularity.
2) Any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls
out for explanation but lacks one.
3) So, a scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural
regularity, and this regularity does not call out for explanation while lacking one.

4) If Naturalism is true, then every natural regularity calls out for explanation but
lacks one.
5) So, if Naturalism is true, then no scientific explanation can be successful.

Bogardus tries to argue for (2), but I don't see that he succeeds in giving us a non-question-begging reason to accept (2).

I myself reject naturalism and brute facts. My point is that Bogardus has failed to refute it and them. He has merely opposed it and them.  As I use 'refute,' it is a verb of success.  To oppose me is not to refute me. I will oppose you right back.

There is another question that I will address in a separate post:  Can it be demonstrated that there is a Necessary Explainer? Pace the presuppositionalists, the demonstration cannot be circular. A circular demonstration is no demonstration at all.  You cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. You are of course free to presuppose anything you like. You can even presuppose naturalism and then 'argue': it is true because it is true, and then try to account for everything is naturalistic terms.

On ‘Materialize’ and Materialism

 

Mind no matter

It is interesting that 'materialize' is often used in ordinary English as an intransitive verb to mean: come to be real.  "Rain clouds materialized on the horizon." "The Hezbollah counterattack never materialized." A thing or state of affairs is real if and only if it exists independently of (finite) mind. To be real is to exist outside the mind and outside its causes. The last two sentences may need some tweaking and some commentary, but let's move on to the question of the relation of materiality and existence.  Is the following true?

1) Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff x is a material thing.

(1) formulates a version of materialism: everything that exists is a material thing, and everything that is material exists. If true, (1) necessarily true. We surely don't want to say that (1) just happens to be true. The type of necessity? Not analytic and not narrowly logical. And of course not nomological: (1) is not a law of nature given that the laws of nature are logically contingent.  (1), if true, formulates a law of metaphysics. So I'll say it is metaphysically necessary. 

Are there counterexamples to (1)? Are there existing things that are not material? Are there material things that do not exist?

Wanted are nice clean  counterexamples that are not as questionable as (1) itself. I want to refute (1) if I can. Bear in mind that 'refute' is a verb of success. So angels won't do. How about numbers? Numbers are more credible than angels; numbers presumably exist; numbers are so-called 'abstract' objects outside of space and time and thus not material.  Hartry Field and other nominalists, however, will argue with some plausibility that numbers and other abstracta either do not exist or that there is no good reason to posit them.  Field wrote a book entitled Science Without Numbers.  (And of course he was not proposing that one could do physics without mathematics.) 

What is left by way of counterexamples to (1) if we exclude spiritual substances (God, gods, angels, demons, unembodied and disembodied souls) and so-called abstract objects (numbers, mathematical sets, Fregean-Bolzanian propositions, Chisholmian-Plantingian states of affairs, etc.)? 

Well, consider my present occurrent visual awareness of my lamp.  (Better yet: you consider your present occurrent awareness of anything .) This awareness of the lamp (genitivus obiectivus) is not the lamp; it exists, and it cannot be material in nature. The awareness is not a state of my body or brain, even if correlated with some such state. If it were a state of my body or brain, it would be material which is precisely what it cannot be. Why not? Because the awareness is an intentional or object-directed state and no material/physical state can exhibit intentionality.

This is as clean a counterexample as I can muster.  The awareness of material things is not itself a material thing. Less clean, but still a contender, is the subject of (genitivus subiectivus) the object-directed state , the mind, ego, self that is in the state.  If there is a self along the lines of a Cartesian res cogitans that is aware of a lamp when BV is aware of his lamp, then that self exists but is not material.

Have these considerations refuted (1)?  You tell me. What I will say is that they make the rejection of (1) reasonable.

The other class of putative counterexamples to (1) are items that are material but do not exist.  Unicorns and flying horses come to mind. Suppose that there are four categories of entity  item:  (i) immaterial minds, (ii) occurrent and dispositional states of minds, whether intentional or non-intentional; (iii) so-called 'abstract' objects; (iv) material things.  Where do such Meinongian nonentities as unicorns belong?  Obviously they belong in the fourth category.  They are material things even though they don't exist!

Has this second set of considerations refuted (1)? You tell me. 

J. P. Moreland on Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism

Substack latest.

Apart from what Alvin Plantinga has called creative anti-realism, the two main philosophical options for many of us in the West are some version of naturalism and some version of Judeo-Christian theism. As its title indicates, J. P. Moreland’s The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009) supports the theistic position by way of a penetrating critique of naturalism and such associated doctrines as scientism. Moreland briefly discusses creative anti-realism in the guise of postmodernism on pp. 13-14, but I won’t report on that except to say that his arguments against it, albeit brief, are to my mind decisive. Section One of this review will present in some detail Moreland’s conception of naturalism and what it entails. Sections Two and Three will discuss his argument from consciousness for the existence of God. Section Four will ever so briefly report on the contents of the rest of the book.

Norms in Nature? Some Doubts

Substack latest. It opens like this:

Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following:

Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities:

1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature cannot be such a source, then for such rights to exist in themselves, as opposed to being mere conventions and intuitions, requires the existence of God. They are therefore “natural” rights in virtue of our nature qua creations of a transcendent and normatively authoritative Deity.

2) There is in fact no such authoritative source, and so natural rights are nonsense. (Upon stilts.) It may be in our nature to have the intuitions we do about possessing such rights, but it is a category error to imagine that rights themselves can originate in the material world.

Foot 3In response, I pointed out that this is far too quick inasmuch as there are Aristotelians who seek to ground norms in nature herself. These thinkers do not accept what to Pollack and the modern mind seems self-evident, namely, that there is a gap between the normative and the factual that disallows any derivation of normative claims from factual ones.  One prominent Aristotelian is Philippa Foot. So let's see what she has to say.  

ComBox open.

Debate, Disagreement, and the Limits of Rational Discourse

I wrote a few months back,

. . . the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Generally speaking and admitting exceptions, leftists need to be defeated, not debated. Debate is worthwhile only with open-minded truth seekers. Truth, however, is not a leftist value. At the apex of the leftist's value hierarchy stands POWER. That is not to say that a leftist will never speak the truth; he will sometimes, but only if it serves his agenda. 

Tony Flood replied that the above quotation reminded him "of [Eric] Voegelin's stance on this very issue, about which I blogged a few years ago."  In that post Tony reproduces the first paragraph of Voegelin's Debate and Existence as follows. [note to AGF: your hyperlink is busted: 404 error]  Tony breaks Voegelin's one paragraph into four.

 

Continue reading “Debate, Disagreement, and the Limits of Rational Discourse”

A Sketch of Armstrong’s Naturalism

And some reasons to question it. 

Top of the (Sub)stack.

………………………

Expositing Armstrong, I wrote
 
The exclusion of so-called abstract entities or abstract objects such as mathematical sets, unexemplified universals, and numbers from the roster of the real is because of their lack  of causal power.  What causal role could they play? 
 
And then I quoted Armstrong:  "And if they play no causal role it is hard to see how we can have good reasons for thinking that they exist." (2)

Woland's Cat objects:

This reasoning is missing a step, I think. Abstract entities do exist when they are contemplated by a mind: assuming minds are 'real' (i.e. part of organisms, which are part of the space-time continuum of reality), then mathematical sets etc. become real when represented in the mind. 

How would Armstrong reply?  As follows. To exist is to exist extra-mentally. That is the only way anything can exist. If so, there cannot be two or more ways or modes of existing.   He here follows, as other Australian philosophers do, his and their teacher John Anderson. Hence there is no such way of existing as existing intra-mentally, in the mind. Whatever I do when I think about something, I do not, in thinking about it, or contemplating it, confer upon it existence-in-the mind.  

The following are candidate abstract entities: the number 7, the set {7}, the proposition expressed by '7 is prime,' the property of being prime.  To say that they are abstract is to say that they are not in space or in time, and that they are 'causally inert,' which is to say that they do not enter into causal relations with anything: they neither cause nor are caused.  Armstrong rejects the whole lot of them.  Their existence is ruled out by his metaphysical naturalism according to which reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  They don't exist outside the mind and, since that is the only way anything can exist, they don't exist inside the mind either.

So what am I thinking about then I think of {Max the cat, Manny the cat}?  Sets or "classes supervene on their members — that is to say, once you are given the members, their class adds nothing ontologically, is no addition of being." (Sketch, 8)  But then what am I thinking about when I think about the intersection of two disjoint sets? A set theorist will say: the null set, { }!  You will also recall that in set theory, the null set is a subset of every set, and a member of every power set.   Don't confuse subset and member as Armstrong does on p. 8, n. 1.

This presents a bit of a problem for Armstrong. He cannot say that the null set  supervenes on its members since it doesn't have any.  So of course he bites the bullet: he rejects the existence of the null set. "It would be a strange addition to space-time!" (p. 8., n. 1)  The more I think about this, the more problematic it seems. If there is no null set, then there are no power sets.  And if there is no null set, why should we think that there are unit sets or singletons such as {Quine} or {Max}? What is the difference between Max and the set whose sole member is him?  If Max's singleton supervenes on him, then there is no singleton!  If there are no singletons, then there is no intersection of {Max, Manny} and {Max, Maya}!

What would Woland's Cat say about that?

Memo to self: Re-read  the section "Mysterious Singletons" in David Lewis, Parts of Classes. And blog it! You are not spreading yourself thin enough!

Does the Demonic Play a Role in the Politics of the Day?

This just in from Vito Caiati:

Your thought provoking post An Oligarchic Pathocracy and in particular the twenty characteristics of this collective psychological derangement, each of which is an absolute inversion of the natural, the good, and the rational, leads me to consider whether potent demonic (Satanic) forces are at work here and now, either directly or through possessed human agents, forces whose presence is unnoticed, since it falls beyond the scope of the established explanatory frameworks of the social sciences. Although such an account may seem farfetched, I find that I must at least entertain the possibility of its validity, given evilness of the political and social destruction and the moral and cultural darkness propagated by the pathocratic Left:  Evil is instantiated in everything it touches.  Does this seem too farfetched to you?

Too farfetched? Not so farfetched as to be beneath consideration. Of course, proper method requires that we search first for naturalistic explanations.  This methodological principle is accepted not only by naturalists, who will omit the word 'first' in my formulation, but also by those who hold that certain phenomena are explainable only by supernatural agency.  (See for example the criteriology set forth by the great Spanish mystic Theresa of Avila in her Interior Castle for the assessment of the veridicality of certain mystical states, and also the procedures of the Church of Rome for the evaluation of putative miracles of different kinds, the Marian apparitions, stigmata, Therese Neumann, Padre Pio, et al. , and so on.) 

A committed naturalist will of course never accept any supernatural explanation of any occurrence however unusual and apparently inexplicable. He will either proffer a naturalistic explanation or, in the absence of a convincing one, state that there must be one whether or not we ever find it.  The italicized phrase signals the naturalist's a priori and presuppositional commitment to naturalism, to the metaphysical scheme according to which reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents. The naturalist 'knows' a priori and thus in advance of any particular investigation into any putative apparition, etc., that nothing could possibly be evidence of supernatural agency.  Nothing will be allowed by the naturalist to count as evidence against his naturalism.  To misuse, as in common parlance, the word 'theological,' there s something 'theological' about the naturalist's naturalism and his scientism. (Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism.)

Consider the case of the Russian monk, Rasputin. He was a hard man to kill, so hard to kill that some will surmise that he was under demonic protection. But there are naturalistic explanations of his toughness that are implausible, perhaps, but not impossible.  Adolf Hitler was another man who proved hard to kill until he decided to do the job himself.  I myself am open to the possibility that he 'enjoyed' demonic protection, but the evidence of its actuality is far from compelling.

Can we definitively rule out demonic interference in human affairs and thus in our politics? No. There is no proof of naturalism.  

While I cannot prove that there is demonic involvement in our affairs, it is reasonable to believe that there is. Here I argue that there is no plausible naturalistic explanation of  the ubiquity, magnitude, and horrific depth of moral evil. Fidel Castro, for example, that hero of the Left, did not merely imprison his political opponents for their dissent; he had them tortured in unspeakable ways.

Would Naturalism Make Life Easier?

Substack latest, for popular consumption, sans technical minutiae.

Do I imagine that what I serve up at Substack will improve the world? I am none too sanguine about that, but if it brings a bit of light into a few heads, then it is worth doing. Perhaps it will distract you from your silly distractions and ignite a few questions. It is never too late to get serious. But it is later than you think, and the Reaper Man is sharpening his scythe as we speak. 

Catholicism as a Literary Affair?

William Giraldi in Commonweal:

Because I want nothing to do with hocus-pocus, because dogma and decrees are closed to real contest, and because corporations make me glum (the Vatican is, among other things, a corporation), Catholicism is for me a literary affair: drama, poetry, myth, tradition. Homilies and hymnals, liturgies and sermons done right, the Benedictus, the Magnificat, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo: these are literature no less than The Iliad is.

One problem with cleaving to the aesthetics of Catholicism while dumping the metaphysics is that, post-Vatican II, there is not much to cleave to: the pageantry and liturgy have devolved in the direction of the insipid and ugly. There is no need to rehearse the litany of complaints.  But that is not the main problem.  

Even as a boy, I never believed in an Iron Age Hebrew deity who gives a damn about our mammalian plight. When Orwell, writing about Waugh, remarked that one really can’t be Catholic and grown-up at the same time, he was getting at the wild implausibility at the hub of Christianity. But “God” and “Christ” are, above all, terms of poetry, of allegory and metaphor and myth. Flannery O’Connor once famously snapped at Mary McCarthy when McCarthy said that the Eucharist is only a symbol: “Well, if it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.” Reluctant as I normally am to dissent from O’Connor, I have to side with McCarthy there. Religion not only traffics in symbols, it survives by them, and to mistake the figurative for the factual or allegory for history is to mistake much indeed. But mouthy unbelievers who find, say, Original Sin barbaric and absurd are missing the point on purpose: whatever else it is, Original Sin is most potently a metaphor for the inherent psychological wackiness of our kind, all those pesky hormonal urges that make us batty. Of course we are born blighted: evolution by natural selection is a malfunctioning process. Never mind your soul: just look at all those problems with your teeth, your back, your knees.

Giraldi makes it clear that he is an atheist. In this respect he is on the side of the "mouthy unbelievers." But he thinks that the latter deliberately (!?) miss the point of the doctrine of Original Sin.  But how could that doctrine have any point if there is no God? Sin, by definition, is an offense against God; if there is no God, then there is no sin either, and, a fortiori, no Original Sin.  The Doctrine has a point only if man, a creature made in the image and likeness of God, offended God and lost his prelapsarian right relation to God. Otherwise the Doctrine refers to nothing real.  The Doctrine refers to something real only if (i) God exists as the supreme moral authority of the universe, (ii) man exists as a spiritual being possessing free will and thus not as a mere animal, and (iii) man freely rejects divine moral authority in a doomed quest to become like God.

It is difficult to see how 'Original Sin' could be plausibly taken to be a metaphor for a blighted human condition brought about by evolution gone wrong.  The blight Giraldi mentions consists in factual defects in our mammalian constitution: teeth subject to rot, hormones prone to run riot, etc.  Now while the Doctrine as interpreted by many theologians does imply a certain fallenness in nature herself, the main point of it is moral and thus normative, not factual.   Man is morally messed up, not merely messed up in his empirical psychology and in his knees and joints. He is intellectually defective to boot, living as he does in deep ignorance of God, himself, and the ultimate why and wherefore.  This deep ignorance is a spiritual condition, not one explainable in terms of neurons and hormones.

Note also that it make no sense to speak of evolution by natural selection as MALfunctioning, when interpreted in the light of metaphysical naturalism, to which mast Girladi nails his colors. Evolution is just a natural process driven by natural selection operating upon random variations. No providential Intelligence directs it, and no internal teleology animates it.  To say that evolution malfunctioned in the case of h. sapiens presupposes a normative point of view external to it which is incompatible with a hard-nosed naturalism.

Another reason why Original-Sin-as-metaphor is at best a very bad metaphor is that the Fall stands at the beginning of human history or at a time just before human history.  Our mammalian miseries, however, come not at the start of evolution but near the end.

Catholicism as a literary affair? Why bother? 

In any case, what seems really to interest Giraldi judging by the Commonweal piece are not so much the aesthetics of the rites, rituals, prayers and such of Catholicism, watered-down as they have become, but the aesthetic values of the products of Catholic writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O'Connor. 

The Paradox of the Misanthropic Naturalist Animal Lover

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, man and man alone among living things has a higher origin and a higher destiny. Made in the image and likeness of God, and the only creature so made, he comes from God and is called to return to God for his ultimate felicity and fulfillment. He is, to be sure, an animal, but one called to theosis and thus an animal qualitatively different from every other type of animal. 

In that now languishing tradition, man had a calling, a vocation.

But God is dead, culturally speaking, at least among the the elites of the West, and since 1859 the qualitative superiority of the human animal is no longer much believed in. Man is back among the animals, 'in series' with them, just another product of evolution, whose origin is measly and whose destiny is extinction.  Man on a naturalist construal is at best quantitatively superior to his non-human progenitors.

Now consider a naturalist about the human species who is also a misanthrope and an animal lover. He hates man while loving animals even though he holds that man is just an animal. He hates man because he is destroying the earth and the flora and fauna upon it.

There is something paradoxically selective about our naturalist's misanthropic love of animals. He is out to save the whales but doesn't give a rat's ass about prenatal human animals . . . . He loves animals except for the species of animal of which he is a specimen.

The misanthropy goes together with nature idolatry.

Unable to worship God, and unable to appreciate man's greatness, he makes a god of nature and its irrational beasts.

You may recall the case of  Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. 

In an Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the unmistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or  some other 'icon.'

Deny God, devalue man, and end up bear shit. Way to go 'man.' 

Strawson’s Vacuous Materialism

Jacques and Malcolm are currently fired up and doing battle over qualia. To stoke the fire further, here is post from a couple of years ago, from 15 September 2015, to be exact.  It strikes me as beautifully written, rigorous, and true.  (Surprise!)

……………….

In Does Matter Think? I wrote:

. . . I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers.  Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think.  But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand.  And that is my point.  You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations . . . .

I now add that I am using 'thinking' in the broad Cartesian sense that covers all intentional or object-directed experiences; but I also hold that non-intentional experiences are unintelligible to us on the basis of current physics.  My thesis is that, given what we know about the physical world from current physics, it it unintelligible that the phenomena of mind, whether intentional or non-intentional, be wholly material in nature.

I grant that what is unintelligible to us might nevertheless be the case.  But if such-and-such is unintelligible to us, then that is a fairly good reason to believe that it is not possibly the case.  A theological example may help clarify the dialectical situation.  Christians believe that God became man.  Some will say that this is impossible in the strongest possible sense: logically impossible, i.e., in contravention of the Law of Non-Contradiction.  For what the doctrine implies is that one person has both human and divine attributes, that one person is both passible and impassible, omniscient and non-omnisicent, etc.  One response, a mysterian response, is to say that the doctrine of the Incarnation is true, and that therefore it is logically possible.  The fact, if it is fact, that the Incarnation is unintelligible to us — where 'unintelligible' means: not understandable as possibly true in a broadly logical sense –  does not show that the doctrine is impossible, but that it is a mystery: a true proposition that we, due to our limitations, cannot understand.

A materialist can make the same sort of move in one of two ways.  He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, or he can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential.  The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

In the Comments, Vlastimil V. asked:

But, what exactly, according to you, is matter in the sense we currently understand? And does matter so conceived really exclude, a priori, that it thinks? About this the physicalist would love to hear more details.

It is matter as understood by current physics.  And yes, one can know a priori that matter so conceived cannot think or feel. Note that I am not saying that matter anyhow conceived can be known a priori to be such that it cannot think or feel.  I admit the very vague, very abstract, epistemic  (and perhaps only epistemic) possibility that God or some super-intelligent extraterrestrial or even human being far in the future could get to the point of understanding how an experiential item like a twinge of pain could be purely material or purely physical.  But this is really nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms.  It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving. 

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the irreducibly mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is irreducibly mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the mind-body problem is insoluble.

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Thinking Meat?

Question: Is it my brain that feels and thinks when I feel and think? 

Argument A.  Meat can't think.  My brain is meat.  Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.

A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain.  My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can think.

The proponent of A needn't deny that we are meatheads.  Of course we are.  We are literally meat (and bone) all the way through. His point is that the res cogitans, that in us which thinks, cannot be a hunk of meat. 

Both arguments are valid, but only one is sound.  The decision comes down to the initial premises of the two arguments. Is there a rational way of deciding between these premises? 

A materialist might argue as follows.  Although we cannot at present understand how a hunk of living meat could feel and think, what is actual is possible regardless of our ability or inability to explain how it is possible.  The powers of certain configurations of matter could remain hidden for a long time from our best science, or even remain hidden forever.  What else would be doing the thinking and feeling in us if not our brains?  What else could the mind be but the living and functioning brain well-supplied with oxygen-rich blood?  The fact that we cannot understand how the brain could be a semantic engine, an engine productive of and sensitive to meanings, is not a conclusive reason for thinking that it is not a semantic engine.

It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states.  For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity could trigger a metabasis eis allo genos.  Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat?  You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle.  Some speak of 'emergence.'  But that word merely papers over the difficulty, labeling the problem without solving it.  You may as well say, as in the cartoon, "And then a miracle occurs."  But then it's Game Over for the materialist.

Miracle

Our materialist would do better to insist that unintelligibility to us does not entail impossibility.  Our inability to explain how X is possible does not entail that X is not possible.

My response would be that while unintelligibility does not entail impossibility, it is excellent evidence of it.  If you tell me that a certain configuration of neurons is intrinsically object-directed, directed to an object that may or may not exist without prejudice to the object-directedness, then you are saying something unintelligible.  It is as if you said that .5 volts intrinsically represents 1 and .7 volts intrinsically represents 0.  That's nonsense.  Or it as if you said that a pile of rocks intrinsically indicates the direction of the trial.  (See The Philosophizing Hiker: The Derivative Intentionality of Trail Markers.)

No rock pile has intrinsic meaning or intrinsic representational power.   And the same goes for any material item or configuration of material items no matter how complex. No such system has intrinsic meaning; any meaning it has is derived. The meaning is derived either from an intelligent being who ascribes meaning to the material system, or from an intelligent being whose purposes are embodied in the material system, or both.

Thus I am rejecting the view that meaning could inhere in material systems apart from relations to minds that are intrinsically intentional, minds who are original Sinn-ers, if you will, original mean-ers. We are all of us Sinn-ers, every man Jack of us, original Sinn-ers,  but our Sinn-ing is not mortal or venial but vital.  Intrinsic, underived intentionality is our very lifeblood as spiritual beings.

So if the materialist says that the brain means, intends, represents, thinks, etc., then I say that makes no sense given what we understand the brain to be.  The brain is a material system and the physical, chemical, electrical, and biological properties it and its parts have  cannot be meaningfully predicated of mental states.  One cannot speak intelligibly  of a voltage drop across a mental state any more than can one speak intelligibly of the intentionality of synapses or of their point of view or of what it is like to be one.

Of course, the materialist can pin his hope on a future science that understands the brain in different terms, terms that could be sensibly attached to mental phenomena.  But this is nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms.  It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving.

There is also the dogmatism of the materialist who insists that the subject of thinking must be the functioning brain.  How does he know that?  He doesn't.  He believes it strongly is all. 

So I give the palm to Argument A: Meat can't think.  My brain is meat.  Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.

I do not absolutely foreclose on the abstract possibility that there be thinking meat.  For I grant that unintelligibility to us is not invincible proof of impossibility.  But when I compare that vaguely described abstract possibility with the present certainty that matter as we know it cannot think due to the very unintelligibility of the idea, then the present certainty wins over the abstract possibility and over the faith and hope of the materialist. 

If you need to pin your hopes on something, pin them on the possibility that you are more than meat. 

Cf. They're Made Out of Meat