Why Would God Make Physical Beings?

One objection to theistic arguments from design is that it seems as though God could have achieved most (if not all) of the goods of creating finite beings without bothering to make a physical world, complete with finely-tuned constants, life-permitting laws, and so on. As Neil Manson puts the objection:

The problem here for proponents of the fine-tuning argument is that, if God does exist, then clearly it is possible for there to be a non-physical intelligence. After all, God is supposed to be just such an intelligence. Why think God would prefer to create other intelligent, conscious beings by creating a life-permitting physical universe? God had other, seemingly much more efficient and sensible, options. For example, God could make Berkeley right. So even if they grant that God has a preference function over possible creations, fine-tuning sceptics are going to need to hear a lot more before they agree that that function favours the creation of a life-permitting physical universe – and favours it enough to make the fine-tuning argument persuasive. (2020, 315-316)

It seems that Thomists have available a potential response to this objection. Aquinas argues that only a material being can change its will over time: an immaterial entity (such as an angel) can only make one choice, fixing its will either for good or for ill. If this view of things is true, then we seem to have a good explanation for why God would want to make embodied beings: only they could experience repeated free moral choice, and all of the goods which come along with it (e.g. moral development, soul-building, deliberation, and so on).

Here are some other reasons why God might want to make physical beings. Firstly, the goods of sensory pleasure (including beautiful sights and sounds, gustatory pleasure, and so on) seem to require the existence of bodies. (Perhaps God could simply give disembodied minds the requisite pleasurable mental states without requiring any actual physical experiences. But there seems to be something off-putting about that; it smacks rather too much of a divine experience machine.) Secondly, one might argue that the unique aesthetic value of material beings would give God good reason to create them. (This is distinct from the just-discussed point about pleasure; beings can have objective aesthetic value even if nobody is around to derive sensory pleasure from the sight of them.) Thirdly, one could appeal to the point (made here) about God wanting to make a great variety of beings: it seems plausible that material beings can image the divine goodness in ways that no purely immaterial being could.

Consciousness and Natural Selection

If one is a physicalist, then presumably one thinks that consciousness emerged as a result of naturalistic evolution. From this, it would seem to follow that consciousness was selected for, i.e. that it provided some kind of adaptive advantage, which lead to conscious organisms out-competing non-conscious ones. (If consciousness is a purely physical process, then it would likely depend on rather complex biological systems, and so it is unlikely to be a spandrel that simply piggy-backed on some other adaptive trait.) 

However, this claim seems to be rather suspicious. After all, it is obvious that non-conscious organisms are perfectly capable of doing all the things required for survival, such as finding food and avoiding predators (e.g. about two-thirds of philosophers do not regard flies as conscious, yet they seem to be doing alright for themselves). At the same time, there are a number of behaviors which are highly detrimental from an evolutionary perspective, and which only conscious beings are capable of. Among these would seem to be: committing suicide, developing a mental illness, having an existential crisis, using contraceptives, adopting antinatalism, and committing oneself to celibacy as part of a religious ordination. 

The upshot, then, is this: there seem to no highly adaptive traits that only conscious beings possess, whereas there are numerous non-adaptive traits which only conscious beings possess. It is thus difficult to see why a naturalistic evolutionary process would have selected for consciousness. And of course, this is completely separate from any concerns one might have about emergence (serious though these worries are). I have no idea whether this is a good argument against naturalistic physicalism, but it is interesting to think about.

Michael Huemer and the Eternality of the Past

Michael Huemer is an interesting guy. I don't have hard data on this, but I'm fairly confident that he's the only philosopher working today who simultaneously advocates veganism, anarcho-capitalism, agnosticism, and substance dualism. As such, it was not terribly surprising to find that he also believes in reincarnation, having defended the idea in a (very interesting) 2019 paper in Nous. The gist of Huemer's argument is as follows:

If you were to live at most once in the history of the universe, we cannot justify assigning any probability greater than zero, initially, to your living at the present time, given an infinite number of past centuries in which you could have been born instead. The best explanation for your otherwise surprising present existence is that you are repeatable, so that your living at an earlier time would not have prevented you from living now – in which case, your present life also will not prevent you from living any number of future lives.

Now, it occurs to me that this argument could be used, not only to argue for reincarnation, but also to argue against the eternality of the past. Indeed, one might think that it is a somewhat stronger argument for the latter, seeing as most people will find reincarnation extraordinarily counter-intuitive, whereas the idea that the universe had a beginning is vastly less so. This is especially true seeing as many philosophers have a view of personal identity on which reincarnation is metaphysically impossible, whereas almost nobody is committed to any theses requiring the eternality of the past. As such, when confronted with an argument which says that either the past is finite, or reincarnation is actual, it is plausible that most philosophers will opt for the former.

The Feser-Ross Argument for the Immateriality of the Mind

In a lecture given for the Society of Catholic Scientists, Ed Feser lays out his argument for the immateriality of thought in simple, syllogistic form. Since he does not provide the actual syllogism in his (very good) paper on the topic, I thought I would jot it down here for future reference:

1. Nothing material can have an exact or unambiguous conceptual content.
2. Formal thought processes can have an exact or unambiguous conceptual content.
3. Therefore, formal thought processes are not material.

I think this is one of the more interesting arguments for dualism out there today; I wish it received more of the attention so often devoted to (for example) the Zombie argument.

Materialism, Open Individualism, and Eliminativism

I recently came across a weird argument for open individualism, i.e. the view that there is only one subject of experience. It goes basically like this: suppose my DNA were to be altered bit-by-bit, in such a way as to increase my fondness for Greek yogurt, or change the color of my eyes. Surely I would not think of this as my ceasing to exist; rather, it would simply be me who now had a greater fondness for Greek yogurt, or differently colored eyes. But if I do not expect that I would cease to exist in light of these minor changes, on what basis can I say that I would cease to exist given larger ones? Indeed, it seems that we can construct a Ship of Theseus dilemma for personal identity, where it is impossible to draw a principled line designating when exactly "I" would cease to exist. 

Now, suppose we infer from this that I would continue to exist no matter what changes occurred to my physical makeup. Even if my body were to be altered bit-by-bit until it was identical (right down to the brain chemistry) with that of Joe Biden, "I" would still be fully present. This fact must surely sever the link between my personal identity on the one hand, and any particular body and brain on the other. After all, if I would still be fully present in the experience of a future version of myself who had been rendered identical to Joe Biden, then on what basis can I say that I am not fully present in the experiences of Joe Biden right now? It seems, therefore, that I am already fully-present in the experiences of all conscious beings, and that therefore, there is only one subject of experience. This argument (or a very similar one) has also been made in print by Arnold Zuboff (1990).

It seems that there are only two ways to avoid the open individualist conclusion: (1) Deny that "I" would still be fully present in the Biden-shaped version of myself, or 2) Accept a further-fact view of personal identity, on which "I" am distinct from any particular facts about my biology and/or psychology. The first option would require us to draw some kind of principled line, i.e. a specific point in the DNA-swapping process at which "I" would cease to exist. However, this threatens to be tremendously arbitrary; is it really possible to find a point at which exactly one DNA base pair is what distinguishes whether or not "I" exist? What if the DNA were to be changed, and then changed back afterwards? Would "I" suddenly pop back into existence?

A less arbitrary route to (1) is to deny that "I" would be present in my Biden-form, because "I" am not present now. That is to say, we can read the above as an argument for eliminativism. I think eliminativism, as unintuitive as it is, is certainly more intuitive than the idea that there is only one self. I would find it easier to accept that the self is an illusion, rather than accept than Joe Biden and I are actually one self experiencing itself from two different perspectives in time and space. This seems to me to be incoherent; after all, what is the word "self," if not the thing that is supposed to distinguish me from others? It seems like a massive contortion of language to insist that two organisms, with no obvious way of accessing each other's experiences, can actually be one "self."

The other way out of the problem is (2). That is, we can accept a further fact view, on which there is something about me that does not change (and so would be unaffected by the DNA-swapping process) and maintains my identity through time. The obvious candidate here is an immaterial soul. The upshot, then, is this: either "I" have an immaterial soul, or "I" do not exist. I should note that similar arguments have been made by others in the past; for instance, Perry Hendricks (2016) has argued that substance dualism and eliminativism are our only real options. In light of the above, I think I am inclined to agree.