I’m very excited about a workshop I’ll be at later this month: Moving Naturalism Forward. By “naturalism” we mean the simple idea that the natural world, obeying natural laws, is all there is. No supernatural realm, spirits, or ineffable dualistic essences affecting what happens in the universe. Clearly the idea is closely related to atheism (I can’t imagine anyone is both a naturalist and a theist), but the focus is on understanding how the world actually does work rather than just rejecting one set of ideas.
Once you accept that we live in a self-contained universe governed by impersonal laws of nature, the hard work has just begun, as we are faced with a daunting list of challenges. The naturalist worldview comes into conflict with our “folk” understanding of human life in multiple ways, and we need to figure out what can be salvaged and what has to go. We’ve identified these particular issues for discussion:
- Free will. If people are collections of atoms obeying the laws of physics, is it sensible to say that they make choices?
- Morality. What is the origin of right and wrong? Are there objective standards?
- Meaning. Why live? Is there a rational justification for finding meaning in human existence?
- Purpose. Do teleological concepts play a useful role in our description of natural phenomena?
- Epistemology. Is science unique as a method for discovering true knowledge?
- Emergence. Does reductionism provide the best path to understanding complex systems, or do different levels of description have autonomous existence?
- Consciousness. How do the phenomena of consciousness arise from the collective behavior of inanimate matter?
- Evolution. Can the ideas of natural selection be usefully extended to areas outside of biology, or can evolution be subsumed within a more general theory of complex systems?
- Determinism. To what extent is the future determined given quantum uncertainty and chaos theory, and does it matter?
(Massimo Pigliucci has already started blogging about some of the questions we’ll be discussing.)
To hash all this out, we’re collecting a small, interdisciplinary group of people to share different perspectives and see whether we can’t agree on some central claims. We have an amazing collection of people — the only regret is that, because we wanted from the start to keep it very small, we had to leave out any number of other potential participants who would have been great to hear from.
- Hilary Bok, Philosophy
- Patricia Churchland, Neuroscience/Philosophy
- Jerry Coyne, Biology
- Richard Dawkins, Biology
- Terrence Deacon, Anthropology
- Simon DeDeo, Complex Systems
- Daniel Dennett, Philosophy
- Owen Flanagan, Philosophy
- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Philosophy/Literature
- Janna Levin, Physics/Literature
- Massimo Pigliucci, Philosophy
- David Poeppel, Neuroscience
- Lisa Randall, Physics
- Alex Rosenberg, Philosophy
- Don Ross, Economics
- Steven Weinberg, Physics
We’re stashing ourselves in an out-of-the-way venue in western Massachusetts, and to facilitate conversations there will be no audience, only participants. But we are making an effort to record all the proceedings, and hope to put the videos online quickly. Hopefully this event will help spark a broader conversation (which is already ongoing, of course) about what it means to be a human being in a natural world.