Naturalism Vs Poetic Naturalism | Sean Carroll

Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology. He is a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology Department of Physics. He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope, and New Scientist.

Does Science has anything to say about Morality & ethics ? Do our lives have no meaning or purpose without the aid of religion? Or does the Universe have a purpose? Can Naturalists explain such issues? In this article we will share the perspective of theoretical physicist and best known writer Sean Carroll.

The Article is a bit lengthy. And yet it might be incomplete.

The Case for Naturalism

Sean Carroll explains Naturalism and also describe How value, purpose, love and morality can or cannot be defined from a purely naturalistic perspective. Many people don't like naturalist philosophy for obvious reasons. Naturalism deny the existence of any supernatural entity. And so it has been a target of religious supernaturalism. Some confuse it with materialism. There's a difference between materialism and naturalism, materialism is a belief that nothing exists except matter and its interactions and modifications(the world we can see). Naturalism on the other hand suggests that everything that exists in the natural world, that follows the laws of physics and can be found with empirical/Scientific method is the 'Reality' or at least the reality that we inhabit . The reason why its different from materialism is that in the modern science matter and energy are no longer as intuitive as they were in say 1900s, today we have all sorts of complications from quantum mechanics to singularity to big bang and multiverse. The things that were almost supposed to be empty say Spacetime can carry vast amounts of energy . In Other words the natural world we understand today can almost be called Mystical and full of mysteries even without evoking anything supernatural . The only difference is it can be detectable by empirical methods on the other hand the supernatural entities and powers claimed by religions and mystics are purely metaphorical and cannot be confirmed by any empirical or scientific methods.

Video -

Sean carroll at the great debate by the Skeptic Society 25th March 2012

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. - Muriel Rukeyser

What is poetic Naturalism ?

Sean Carroll distinguish between naturalism and poetic naturalism as follows -

"Naturalism is a philosophy according to which there is only one world -- the natural world, which exhibits unbroken patterns (the laws of nature), and which we can learn about through hypothesis testing and observation. In particular, there is no supernatural world -- no gods, no spirits, no transcendent meanings.

I like to talk about a particular approach to naturalism, which can be thought of as Poetic. By that I mean to emphasize that, while there is only one world, there are many ways of talking about the world. "Ways of talking" shouldn't be underestimated; they can otherwise be labeled "theories" or "models" or "vocabularies" or "stories," and if a particular way of talking turns out to be sufficiently accurate and useful, the elements in its corresponding vocabulary deserve to be called real.

The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." That is absolutely correct. There is more to the world than what happens; there are the ways we make sense of it by telling its story. The vocabulary we use is not handed to us from outside; it’s ultimately a matter of our choice.

A poetic naturalist will deny that notions like "right and wrong," "purpose and duty," or "beauty and ugliness" are part of the fundamental architecture of the world. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. But these moral and ethical and aesthetic vocabularies can be perfectly useful ways of talking about the world. The criteria for choosing the best such ways of talking will necessarily be different that the criteria we use for purely descriptive, scientific vocabularies. There won’t be a single rational way to delineate good from bad, sublime from repulsive. But we can still speak in such terms, and put in the hard work to make our actions live up to our own internal aspirations. We just have to admit that judgments come from within ourselves."

The Question of Identity

"In Science fiction teleportation technology has been popularized specially in Star Trek. (It may be that in the far future we would have something similar to transportation at least for non living objects) But Star Trek never really got clear on was how transporter machines are supposed to work. Do they disassemble you one atom at a time, zip those atoms elsewhere, and then reassemble them? Or do they send only a blueprint of you, the information contained in your arrangement of atoms, and then reconstruct you from existing matter in the environment to which you are traveling? Most often the ship’s crew talks as if your actual atoms travel through space, but then how do we explain “The Enemy Within”? That's the episode, you’ll remember, in which a transporter malfunction causes two copies of Captain Kirk to be beamed aboard the Enterprise. It’s hard to see how two copies of a person could be made out of one person-sized collection of atoms.

Fortunately for viewers of the show, the two copies of Kirk weren’t precisely identical. One copy was the normal (good) Kirk, and the other was evil. Even better, the evil one quickly got scratched on the face by Yeoman Rand, so it wasn’t hard to tell the two apart.

But what if they had been identical? We would then be faced with a puzzle about the nature of personal identity, popularized by philosopher Derek Parfit. Imagine a transporter machine that could disassemble a single individual and reconstruct multiple exact copies of them out of different atoms. Which one, if any, would be the “real” one? If there were just a single copy, most of us would have no trouble accepting them as the original person. (Using different atoms doesn’t really matter; in actual human bodies, our atoms are lost and replaced all the time.) Or what if one copy were made of new atoms, while the original you remained intact—but the original suffered a tragic death a few seconds after the duplicate was made. Would the duplicate count as the same person?

All good philosophical fun and games of course, but without much relevance to the real world, at least not at our current level of technology. Or maybe not. There’s an older thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus that raises some of the same issues. Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens, had an impressive ship in which he had fought numerous battles. To honor him, the citizens of Athens preserved his ship in their port. Occasionally a plank or part of the mast would decay beyond repair, and at some point that piece would have to be replaced to keep the ship in good order. Once again we have a question of identity: is it the same ship after we’ve replaced one of the planks? If you think it is, what about after we’ve replaced all of the planks, one by one? And (as Thomas Hobbes went on to ask), what if we then took all the old planks and built a ship out of them? Would that one then suddenly become the Ship of Theseus?

Narrowly speaking, these are all questions about identity. When is one thing “the same thing” as some other thing? But more broadly, they’re questions about ontology, our basic view of what exists in the world. What kinds of things are there at all? When we ask about the identity of the “real” Captain Kirk or Ship of Theseus, a whole bundle of unstated assumptions come along for the ride. We are assuming that there are things called “persons,” and things called “ships,” and that these things have some persistence over time. And everything goes swimmingly, until we come up against a puzzle, such as these duplication scenarios, that puts a strain on how we define these kinds of objects.

All this matters, not because we’re on the verge of building a working transporter, but because our attempts to make sense of the big picture inevitably involve different kinds of overlapping ways of talking about the world. We have atoms, and we have biological cells, and we have human beings. Is the notion of “this particular human being” an important one to how we think about the world? Should categories like “persons” and “ships” be part of our fundamental ontology at all? We can’t decide whether an individual human life actually matters if we don’t know what we mean by “human being.”

Different Levels of 'Reality'

As knowledge generally, and science in particular, have progressed over the centuries, our corresponding ontologies have evolved from quite rich to relatively sparse. To the ancients, it was reasonable to believe that there were all kinds of fundamentally different things in the world; in modern thought, we try to do more with less.

We would now say that Theseus’s ship is made of atoms, all of which are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons—exactly the same kinds of particles that make up every other ship, or for that matter make up you and me. There isn’t some primordial “shipness” of which Theseus’s is one particular example; there are simply arrangements of atoms, gradually changing over time.

That doesn’t mean we can’t talk about ships just because we understand that they are collections of atoms. It would be horrendously inconvenient if, anytime someone asked us a question about something happening in the world, we limited our allowable responses to a listing of a huge set of atoms and how they were arranged. If you listed about one atom per second, it would take more than a trillion times the current age of the universe to describe a ship like Theseus’s. Not really practical.

It just means that the notion of a ship is a derived category in our ontology, not a fundamental one. It is a useful way of talking about certain subsets of the basic stuff of the universe. We invent the concept of a ship because it is useful to us, not because it’s already there at the deepest level of reality. Is it the same ship after we’ve gradually replaced every plank? I don’t know. It’s up to us to decide. The very notion of “ship” is something we created for our own convenience.

That’s okay. The deepest level of reality is very important; but all the different ways we have of talking about that level are important too.

Ontology :-

Two different kinds of ontologies, rich and sparse. Boxes are fundamental concepts, while circles are derived or emergent concepts—ways of talking about the world.

What we’re seeing is the difference between a rich ontology and a sparse one. A rich ontology comes with a large number of different fundamental categories, where by “fundamental” we mean “playing an essential role in our deepest, most comprehensive picture of reality.”

In a sparse ontology, there are a small number of fundamental categories (maybe only one) describing the world. But there will be very many ways of talking about the world. The notion of a “way of talking” isn’t mere decoration—it’s an absolutely crucial part of how we apprehend reality.

One benefit of a rich ontology is that it’s easy to say what is “real”—every category describes something real. In a sparse ontology, that’s not so clear. Should we count only the underlying stuff of the world as real, and all the different ways we have of dividing it up and talking about it as merely illusions? That’s the most hard-core attitude we could take to reality, sometimes called eliminativism, since its adherents like nothing better than to go around eliminating this or that concept from our list of what is real. For an eliminativist, the question “Which Captain Kirk is the real one?” gets answered by “Who cares? People are illusions. They’re just fictitious stories we tell about the one true real world.”

I’m going to argue for a different view: our fundamental ontology, the best way we have of talking about the world at the deepest level, is extremely sparse. But many concepts that are part of non-fundamental ways we have of talking about the world—useful ideas describing higher-level, macroscopic reality—deserve to be called “real.”

The key word there is “useful.” There are certainly non-useful ways of talking about the world. In scientific contexts, we refer to such non-useful ways as “wrong” or "false". A way of talking isn’t just a list of concepts; it will generally include a set of rules for using them, and relationships among them. Every scientific theory is a way of talking about the world, according to which we can say things like “There are things called planets, and something called the sun, all of which move through something called space, and planets do something called orbiting the sun, and those orbits describe a particular shape in space called an ellipse.” That’s basically Johannes Kepler’s theory of planetary motion, developed after Copernicus argued for the sun being at the center of the solar system but before Isaac Newton explained it all in terms of the force of gravity. Today, we would say that Kepler’s theory is fairly useful in certain circumstances, but it’s not as useful as Newton’s, which in turn isn’t as broadly useful as Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

A Universe made of Stories

The world is what exists and what happens, but we gain enormous insight by talking about it—telling its story—in different ways.

Naturalism comes down to three things:

1. There is only one world, the natural world.

2. The world evolves according to unbroken patterns, the laws of nature.

3. The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing it.

Essentially, naturalism is the idea that the world revealed to us by scientific investigation is the one true world. The poetic aspect comes to the fore when we start talking about that world. It can also be summarized in three points:

1. There are many ways of talking about the world.

2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world.

3. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking.

A poetic naturalist will agree that both Captain Kirk and the Ship of Theseus are simply ways of talking about certain collections of atoms stretching through space and time. The difference is that an eliminativist will say “and therefore they are just illusions,” while the poetic naturalist says “but they are no less real for all of that.”

Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars coined the term manifest image to refer to the folk ontology suggested by our everyday experience, and scientific image for the new, unified view of the world established by science. The manifest image and the scientific image use different concepts and vocabularies, but ultimately they should fit together as compatible ways of talking about the world. Poetic naturalism accepts the usefulness of each way of talking in its appropriate circumstances, and works to show how they can be reconciled with one another.

Within poetic naturalism we can distinguish among three different kinds of stories we can tell about the world. There is the deepest, most fundamental description we can imagine—the whole universe, exactly described in every microscopic detail. Modern science doesn’t know what that description actually is right now, but we presume that there at least is such an underlying reality. Then there are “emergent” or “effective” descriptions, valid within some limited domain. That’s where we talk about ships and people, macroscopic collections of stuff that we group into individual entities as part of this higher-level vocabulary. Finally, there are values: concepts of right and wrong, purpose and duty, or beauty and ugliness. Unlike higher-level scientific descriptions, these are not determined by the scientific goal of fitting the data. We have other goals: we want to be good people, get along with others, and find meaning in our lives. Figuring out the best way to talk about the world is an important part of working toward those goals.

Poetic naturalism is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility. The raw materials of life are given to us by the natural world, and we must work to understand them and accept the consequences.

The move from description to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what should happen, is a creative one, a fundamentally human act. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.

Poetic naturalism may seem like an appealing idea—or it may seem like an absurd bunch of hooey—but it certainly leaves us with a lot of questions. Most obviously, what is the unified natural world that underlies everything? We’ve been bandying about words like “atoms” and “particles,” but we know from discussions of quantum mechanics that the truth is a bit more slippery than that. And we certainly don’t claim to know the ultimate final Theory of Everything—so how much do we actually know? And what makes us think that it’s enough to justify the dreams of naturalism?

There are equally many, if not more, questions about connecting that underlying physical world to our everyday reality. There are “Why?” questions: Why this particular universe, with these particular laws of nature? Why does the universe exist at all? There are also “Are you sure?” questions: Are we sure that a unified physical reality could naturally give rise to life as we know it? Are we sure it is sufficient to describe consciousness, perhaps the most perplexing aspect of our manifest world? And then there are the “How?” questions: How do we decide what ways of talking are the best? How do we agree on judgmental questions about right and wrong? How do we find meaning and purpose in a world that is purely natural? Above all, how do we know any of this?

Our task is to put together a rich, nuanced picture that reconciles all the different aspects of our experience."

Sean Carroll