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| Samuel Butler |
(Note: This essay was originally published three days ago on theAtlantic.com. Thanks to Alexis Madrigal and Rebecca Rosen for opening the door.)
We live in an era of scientific triumphalism, when leading researchers in
any number of fields claim they are supremely qualified to explain not only how
the universe works, but also what it means. Metaphysics, they tell us, can now
be considered a subset of physics.
Thus it's not surprising that distinguished hackles would be raised when a
spirited counter-attack is launched by a well-known philosopher who contends
that scientists
a) have conveniently ignored gaping holes in their understanding of how
evolution has shaped the world and
b) might learn something from the evangelical Christians who promote
Intelligent Design.
The philosopher in question is Thomas Nagel, who years ago attracted more
than the usual attention accorded philosophy professors with his essay,
"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Nagel's new book,
Mind and Cosmos,
comes with a subtitle that succinctly describes the epistemological chip he's
placed on his shoulder, daring scientists to knock it off:
Why the
Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
Nagel's argument is that the mechanics of natural selection can't answer one
of the most crucial questions of our existence: how living, reasoning creatures
emerged from insensate matter. Although he himself is an atheist, Nagel says he
shares the theists' conviction that the appearance of such creatures strongly
suggests that the universe has, from the beginning, evolved teleologically,
meaning it's moving purposively, toward ever-higher levels of consciousness.
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| Thomas Nagel |
"Each of our lives," he writes, "is a part of the lengthy
process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself."
In the present intellectual climate, Nagel hastens to add, "such a
possibility is unlikely to be taken seriously."
He got that right.
Mind and Cosmos has been the subject of a number
of high-profile takedowns, earning it top honors in the
Guardian's list
of
Most Despised Science Books of 2012. So vitriolic has been the response that, as
Jennifer Schuessler
pointed out in the
New York Times, even a relatively sympathetic review ran
under the headline, "Thomas Nagel is Not Crazy."
My purpose here is not to review the controversy (the
Times
article includes a generous sampling of links for those interested in such a
review), but rather to add some historical context by pointing out the striking
parallels between Nagel's arguments and those made more than a century ago by one
of my heroes, the great Samuel Butler.
Butler is best known as the author of the fantasy novel
Erewhon,
published in 1872.
Erewhon, in turn, is best known for its extended
meditation on the possibility that machines might one day attain consciousness
and take over human beings.
The central character in
Erewhon, unnamed in the original novel but
identified in the sequel as Higgs, is a hiker who becomes lost in the mountains
and stumbles upon an isolated civilization called Erewhon ("nowhere"
spelled backward, sort of). Higgs learns that, five hundred years before his
arrival, the citizens of Erewhon were alerted to the danger of technological
revolt and banned the use of anything but the most primitive machines. The
rationale behind this decision is spelled out in a manifesto called The Book of
the Machines, which serves as a vehicle for Butler's musings on the
implications of Darwinism.
The basic argument in The Book of the Machines is that technology is just as
subject to the laws of evolution as plants and animals. There had to have been
a moment in biological history when matter made the leap from inert to alive.
Who's to say that at some point machines won't make the same leap? The speed of
technological progress suggests they're already half way there.
The playful, almost absurdist tone of the Book of the Machines made it easy
to conclude that Butler was making fun of Darwin -
On The Origin of Species
had been published 13 years earlier, and remained hugely controversial. Butler
denied it. He told Darwin in a letter that he'd intended only to demonstrate,
for purposes of his own amusement and that of others, how easily a scientific
concept could be distorted by exaggerated analogy.
Those feelings soon changed. Not long after
Erewhon appeared Butler
began to see what he considered the dark side of Darwin's theory: it portrayed
evolution as a wholly mechanical process that removed any spark of creative
vitality from the universe. This was directly counter to the views expressed,
supposedly as a joke, in The Book of the Machines, which argued that willful
intention can be discerned on far lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder than
those occupied by human beings.
"Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him
which serves him in excellent stead," the Book of Machines says.
He knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get it. He sees the light
coming from the cellar window and sends his shoots crawling straight thereto;
they will crawl along the floor and up the wall and out at the cellar window;
if there be a little earth anywhere on the journey he will find it and use it
for his own ends.
Thomas Nagel makes the same point in
Mind and Cosmos when he contends
that "intelligibility" is "latent in the nature of things."
The difference is that Nagel means his argument to be taken seriously, whereas
Butler, initially at least, did not.
Early in his writing career Butler considered himself a devotee of Darwin;
letters he'd written to newspapers defending natural selection were favorably
noted by Darwin himself. Apparently, playing with the ideas implicit in
Darwin's theory sowed seeds of doubt in Butler's mind that grew into
full-fledged dissent. As Butler's biographer, Clara Stillman, put it, "One
of the most interesting things about Butler's reaction to Darwinism is the fact
that he was already criticizing it subconsciously before he had any conscious
quarrel with it."
That quarrel would come to dominate the remainder of Butler's life. A series
of books followed in which he relentlessly attacked not only the limitations of
Darwinism, but the integrity of Darwin himself. The great man was guilty,
Butler believed, of consistently failing to acknowledge the superior
contributions to evolutionary theory of his predecessors, among them Buffon,
Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin, all of whom perceived signs of teleology in
evolution.
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| Charles Darwin |
Butler repeatedly argued that Darwinism explained the mechanics of evolution
but overlooked its impetus, a point echoed by Nagel. "The appearance of
animal consciousness," Nagel writes, "is evidently the result of
biological evolution, but this well-supported empirical fact is not yet an
explanation
—it does not provide understanding, or enable us to see why the
result was to be expected or how it came about."
Like Nagel, Butler believed purposefulness imbues all of creation. He was
not an avowed atheist, as Nagel is, but he did eschew and dismiss conventional
notions of deity in favor of what can be described as a scientifically-informed
pantheism. There's no need, he wrote, to posit some "quasi-anthropomorphic
being who schemed everything out much as a man would do, but on an infinitely
vaster scale." Rather, he said,
The proper inference is that there is a low livingness in every atom of
matter...It should not be doubted that wherever there is vibration and motion
there is life and memory, and that there is vibration and motion at all times
in all things.
Clara Stillman points out how neatly these ideas anticipate quantum physics,
as well as the physics-inspired philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and
others.
Nagel does not extend his musings in
Mind and Cosmos to technology.
Those issues became less a focus for Butler as well, once he began to take his
objections to the biological problems in Darwinism seriously. He would,
however, continue to use technological analogies.
Teleology doesn't suggest
that the amoeba knew it was going to evolve into a fish, Butler said, any more
than the first person who used a tea kettle necessarily envisioned a steam
engine. We get from amoeba to fish, or from tea kettle to steam engine,
incrementally. Change is driven by an inclination to adapt at each step along
the way. "The manufacture of the tool and the manufacture of the living
organ prove therefore to be but two species of the same genus, which, though
widely differentiated, have descended as it were from one common filament of
desire and inventive faculty."
This is another point Nagel precisely shares. "My guiding
conviction," he says, "is that mind is not just an afterthought or an
accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature...I believe that the role
of consciousness in the survival of organisms is inseparable from
intentionality: inseparable from perception, belief, desire, and action, and
finally from reason."
Yet another parallel between Nagel and Butler is that both challenged the
scientific orthodoxy of their day from positions outside the scientific
establishment, and both were considered by members of that establishment
unqualified to render an opinion. It may be that the distance between educated
amateur and scientific expert has widened since the nineteenth century, but the
religious sensitivities Darwinism inflames seem to have remained fairly
consistent.
Perhaps the most dramatic shift since Butler wrote has to do with the
evolution of technology. If the transhumanists are right, the uprising of the
machines is almost upon us. There's still time to ban them, I suppose, although
in Erewhon a civil war was necessary to enforce that course of action.
©Doug Hill, 2013
