[This was my second post on Preface to Atheism, Aug 23, 2023.]
In my first post I talked about my sudden flip to a natural worldview when I was young. I mentioned that I didn’t call what I believed naturalism at the time because (thanks to the influence of Zeno) I had become completely skeptical about our ability to know the world as it is.
Back then when I read descriptions of naturalism, it was clear that it involved the rejection of skepticism and embrace of something (though I didn’t know it then) called scientific realism1, or the embrace of determinism outright.
But turns out, this is because 20th century advocates of naturalism got distracted from its essential point.
In A Concise Guide to Philosophy, William H. Halverson put his finger on the essential point: “Theism says, “In the beginning, God;” naturalism says, “In the beginning, matter.”2
Notice that when put this way, supernaturalism and naturalism are factual, historical claims about the world. Supernaturalism says that mind (or consciousness or spirit or something non-physical) existed, and then brought the physical world into existence. Naturalism says the opposite. Each, in fact, serves as a kind of scientific meta-hypothesis.
Naturalism, as scientific meta-hypothesis, claims this: the history of the world (where “world” means everything, all universes if there are multiple, and any/all pre-universe, pre-big bang states) is such that at first there existed no consciousness or thoughts. Then, on at least one planet in at least one solar system, living organisms evolved. Then at least one species on that planet evolved brains which produce consciousness including thoughts.
Another way of putting this is that the meta-hypothesis states that consciousness is a biological phenomenon and that this biological phenomenon simply did not exist (and cannot exist) until organisms with bodies and brains capable of producing it evolved into existence.
In other words, naturalism in its essence is not just a scientific/historical claim, it is a biological claim about the nature and origin of mind and consciousness (which broadly I will refer to as mind-stuff). If mind-stuff has a biological origin and nature, then mind-stuff did not exist until at least one planet formed capable of supporting life.
One obvious thing about the meta-hypothesis of naturalism is that it entails atheism. If thoughts and consciousness are biological, then without a body there can be no thoughts, no consciousness, no qualia.3 Such stuff can’t exist until organisms with bodies and brains evolved, therefore we know that disembodied mind or disembodied consciousness cannot be the origin of the world.
If the hypothesis of naturalism is true, atheism follows.
Skeptical Naturalism
An important scientific task becomes identifying the mind-stuff produced by brains and moving it to the biological consciousness side of the ledger—that is, making sure we don’t inadvertently leave mind-stuff on the “physical” side and thus confuse (that is, inadvertently abandon) the naturalistic hypothesis without realizing it.4
As part of this effort, I’m going to focus skeptical naturalism.
The skeptical naturalist hypothesis holds that all elements of knowing are aspects of biological consciousness. This moves a lot more stuff to the “mind” or consciousness side of the ledger than is usually done by advocates of naturalism. I take this position because I believe the biological and neurobiological evidence forces it.
The specific hypothesis is this: animals are unable to perceive the world, so consciousness evolved as a substitute for the world.
For example, vision (everything that we or other animals “see”) is a substitute—not a perception of the world as it is, but a stand-in created by our brains and used to better navigate the world.
I think this becomes obvious when we look at the neuroscience of vision. Whenever we open our eyes, we think we see the world around us, but our bodies and brains actually have no way to do that. Instead, what our retinas do is sample photons. These photons are particles of light which bounced off physical stuff in the world, but they are not the objects and things they bounced off—those things our retinas never see.
Our eyes detect photons, but we see visual scenes.
In short, brains evolved to construct scenes based on hints from photons. I will address this in more detail in the future, showing how optical illusions prove vision is a construction by the brain. But for the moment a few examples may suffice.
The first is a demonstration of the brain modifying color to enhance the usefulness of a visual scene. (It should be noted that photons don’t have colors. Our brains create color to aid in object tracking. The example shows that color is not the perception of wavelength.)
The second is an example of the brain constructing movement where we know there is none. (Optical illusions are situations where the brain’s rules for constructing vision end up not being reliable.5)
Watch this video and see if you can correctly count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball. (This demonstrates that the brain’s purpose when constructing vision depends on the organism’s goal at hand. If you go back and re-experience the identical situation—which, conveniently, videos allow us to do—but with different goals, or after learning from the first experience, your brain constructs a different visual experience.)
So instead of perceiving the world, brains of organisms evolved to create a virtual world—this is what vision and sound and all other senses are: virtual creations by the brain (sensual consciousness) which evolved as a stand-in so that organisms can successfully navigate the world around.
To repeat: the physical world can’t be perceived, but organisms can interact with it. On earth, these interactions led to brains evolving the best possible alternative—a virtual reality composed of sensations which can be perceived and known and employed as an almost real-time substitute.
This is what vision is. This is what hearing is. This is what touching, tasting, smelling are. They are simulacra created on the fly by brains of organisms in order to navigate the world.
Simulacra are so well done that we mistake them for the world.
Getting back to skeptical naturalism, there is an additional hypothesis that if we can’t perceive the world, we can’t know the world.
And that it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter because we have the brain’s simulacra to work with. Best of all, the simulacra have built-in hooks for knowledge—because, meanings and concepts are themselves simulacra.
In humans (and probably most complex organisms) the brain’s various simulacra are integrated into a more or less coherent whole, which I refer to as a simulacrum. In us, the simulacrum includes not just our various senses, but also objectifications (objects and properties) along with our understandings, our knowledge of those objectifications.
Footnotes
You can read about why I reject scientific realism in my article at atheology.com, Skepticism about Scientific Realism.
William H. Halverson, A Concise Guide to Philosophy, Fourth Edition, p 424. Halverson goes on to assert that naturalism also says, “determinism is true.” I believe this is a result of conflating the physical world with our understanding of the physical world; to be consistent with the meta philosophy of naturalism, advocates should diligently avoid conflating mind-independent reality with knowledge (which, to say the least, is not mind-independent).
Because spiritual entities are “non-physical,” under naturalism they are classed as biological phenomenon. This is because the meta-hypothesis is that the entire “consciousness” class of entities are biological experiences produced by brains of organisms. Supernaturalism, of course, sees things differently and makes the entire class primary, not dependent on matter or biology.
Of course, the supernatural meta hypothesis is always an option for scientists. I’m not asserting that naturalism’s meta hypothesis is required to do science, nor that science is committed to methodological naturalism. Rather, I am trying to clarify concepts and align naturalism with 21st century neuroscience to make it as useful as possible.
For more on this I recommend Donald Hoffman’s book, Visual Intelligence. “Hoffman explains that far from being a passive recorder of a preexisting world, the eye actively constructs every aspect of our visual experience.” (Of course it is the brain not the eye which does bulk of the constructing.) I will write more about Hoffman in the future.
