Re: Evolutionary Psychology and Free Will

>
> When early scientists thought of origins issues as "beyond
> investigation" -- or more accurately "no investigation needed", a
> later age opens it up to science. Evolutionary science is born.
> Do these issues of freewill and thought constitute another hard-
> shelled egg that is soon to be busted open and added to the domain
> of science? Discussions of evolutionary origins of morality seem
> to be an attempt to bring ethics into scientific domain. My
> scientism friends would be quick to notice a trend here. Science
> conquers -- it may temporarily halt or go wrong directions, but it
> never cedes any ground.

The views of Donald MacKay, the British neuroscientist, are very
helpful here. He used the term "nothingbuttery" to describe a strict
reductionism, in which all phenomena and experience is ultimately
reduced to the interaction of matter and energy (see "The Clockwork
Image"). In such reductionism, an internally complete scientific
description is seen as ultimately complete and comprehensive. MacKay
argued for multiple levels of description of phenomena that are not
reducible to each other. This is how he saw the mind/brain issue. A
given experience or emotional state (including religious experience)
may have an internally complete scientific explanation, but that
experience cannot be seen as reducing to "nothing but" neural
activity. He talked about mind "supervening" on the brain.

In this framework, an internally complete scientific explanation does
not displace or replace an explanation at another level. It also
does not reject the possibility that scientific explanations may be
found for such things as religious experience or moral decision
making. This views bears some similarity to the idea of emergence of
fundamentally new phenomena at different hierachical levels.

Perhaps this perspective might be helpful.

Keith
Received on Wed May 3 21:49:35 2006