Moving Naturalism Forward
December 18, 2012
http://metanexus.net/blog/moving-naturalism-forwardHow many naturalists does it take to change a light bulb? Fifteen, but they disagree about what a light bulb is and how it is used. Such was a remarkable gathering of philosophers, physics, biologists, and others who met in October for a three-day seminar on "Moving Naturalism Forward." The videos from the event are recently available and provide an excellent introduction to some of the great issues in the philosophy of contemporary science. Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, Sean Carroll, Terrence Deacon, and others are much more interesting when not battling supernaturalists, but rather discussing a number of crucial ontological and epistemological issues at the interface of science.
Here are some of the questions they addressed:
• 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?
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