This is the talk I gave to the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle on May 24, 2022. The EPC was a new group at this time, modeling itself after the accomplishments of the famous Vienna Circle. But rather than being inspired by revolutions in physics, as the Vienna Circle was in the 1920s, the EPC is inspired by the latest developments in the science of evolution. This talk was the first in a series organized by the EPC about how evolution can affect all branches of philosophy.
Hi all. I’m going to be talking about evolutionary metaphysics today. A few days ago, I sent out an article from Dan Dennett that will be the center of this talk. But before I get to that, I have a little prologue to give about the topic of metaphysics in general. And then afterwards, I'll dive more into some applications we can derive from Dan Dennett's paper, based on some of the work that I've been doing in philosophy over the last several years.
So, when the Vienna Circle first started meeting, David Edmonds said in his book about them that they spent months going line-by-line through this book by Ludwig Wittgenstein known as the Tractatus. One of our group members shared a really interesting New Yorker piece about Wittgenstein last week that really drove home how kind of mysterious and up and down this book was. Wittgenstein himself disowned many of the ideas in it by the end of his life, and he wrote another book that was published after his death that refuted much of the Tractatus. But the most famous line in the Tractatus is the very last one in the book, which is this: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
This sentence probably best represents the attempts that the Vienna Circle made for metaphysics, knowledge, and epistemology in general. And what they meant by this sort of either obvious or cryptic sentence is that they were aiming to create a perfect language and a perfect knowledge that was based in reality just as much as the physics of their time was. (Or so they thought.) And if you couldn't speak about something that perfectly, well then don’t talk about it at all. It must be passed over in silence. Of course, they ended up failing in that pursuit. And philosophers often talk about all kinds of things that don't meet this criteria of perfect knowledge. You can see several of them here.
This sentence probably best represents the attempts that the Vienna Circle made for metaphysics, knowledge, and epistemology in general. And what they meant by this sort of either obvious or cryptic sentence is that they were aiming to create a perfect language and a perfect knowledge that was based in reality just as much as the physics of their time was. (Or so they thought.) And if you couldn't speak about something that perfectly, well then don’t talk about it at all. It must be passed over in silence. Of course, they ended up failing in that pursuit. And philosophers often talk about all kinds of things that don't meet this criteria of perfect knowledge. You can see several of them here.
This leads me to one of my favorite anecdotes from David Edmonds’ book, which was that this member of the group — Otto Neurath — was really insistent on keeping to this rigorous idea of never discussing things we couldn't see, touch, or taste, or what have you. And any time the group wandered into that territory, he would bang his fist on the table and shout “Metaphysics! Metaphysics!” He would apparently do this so often that they sometimes joked he would be better off shouting when they were not talking about metaphysics. Now, he was kind of a big, loud, and sometimes obnoxious guy who, David Edmonds wrote, wouldn't get invited to others’ houses or out for dinner. So, I'm not planning to do any banging on tables like that. But I have thought about maybe making a sign or something and just kind of holding it up in front of the camera if we ever go down that path. I don't actually think that's going to happen too much in our meetings, but it’s something to think about.
But, of course, you can't just shout down philosophical arguments about metaphysics. You have to argue against them. And there have been loads of attacks on this sort of physicalist metaphysics over the centuries. A couple of years ago, I worked through this book from Julian Baggini which listed 100 philosophical thought experiments. It's called The Pig That Wants to be Eaten, and 19 out of the 100 entries were about metaphysics. These presented lots of different attacks on physicalism or attempts to prove the existence of gods, souls, minds, zombies, what have you — anything kind of immaterial that would show that the universe isn't just a natural, physical place. But going through all of these thought experiments from an evolutionary perspective, I found that none of them were persuasive.
So that led me to the current position that I show on my website, which is: “The hypothesis of a physical universe survives.” This is just a kind of “one-sentence summary” of my position on metaphysics. And the wording using “hypothesis” and “survives” has something to do with my thoughts about epistemology. But we can get into those at some other point.
I'm far from alone in this position, however. The stoic philosopher and evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci had a really interesting post about this recently trying to sum up his own thoughts about metaphysics. His post was called “Metaphysics dissolved. Because who needs it?” He wrote that piece mostly recounting and affirming what he had read in this book from James Ladyman and Don Ross called Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. I haven't read that book yet but basically what they're claiming, according to Massimo, is that the job of philosophers should be to synthesize all of the natural knowledge we have, rather than spend time speculating about what else might be out there. And since Massimo is not one to pull punches, he wrote this phrase that I've quoted here about how David Chalmers and all of his speculations are, quote, “not even wrong.” In other words, they don't even exist in a plane where we could ever test them. So, that article and book are additional arguments for this naturalized metaphysics, which I think of as an important part of evolutionary philosophy.
When I talked about this to a local group a couple of years ago, I presented it this way — that you could just drop the meta from metaphysics. I thought that was maybe just a simple way to get past some of the jargon for the laypeople in the audience that I was speaking to. But, of course, physicalism (or naturalism as it's also known) is still actually a metaphysical position. It’s not as if metaphysics is gone. We don't want to try to to say that. And I also don't mean to say that physics is all that matters either. We’re influenced by much more than just physics. There’s chemistry, and biology, and (germane to this group) evolution.
And that brings me to the paper from Dan Dennett that I shared, which was drawn from this book: How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations For Naturalism, which was published in 2017. Dan's paper — “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism” — was the first entry in this edited collection from a variety of philosophers, and I thought it was just perfect for setting up evolutionary philosophy. I didn't ask ahead of time how many people have read this, but it doesn't matter if you haven't since I'm going to share nine quotes from it now that help summarize the paper and drive home some of the key parts in it.
First, right at the very beginning of the article, Dan makes the point that ever since Socrates, the idea of clear sharp boundaries has been one of the founding principles of philosophy. But Darwin showed us that the sets of living things were not eternal, hard-edged, in-or-out classes.
Still, Dan notes that philosophers have tried to impose their classical logic on the world as if Darwin never existed.
Now, Dan would acknowledge that this may be a methodological rather than a metaphysical prejudice. He's not claiming that philosophers don't believe in evolution. It's just that they tend to think, “We can go back to business as usual, tolerating Darwinian population thinking among those with a taste for such practices but denying its application to our chosen topics.”
But then Dan pushes back on that and says these undeniable borderline cases that exist in nature are not just a nuisance. They typically disable the arguments altogether.
In another passage, he ropes in the biologist Richard Dawkins to back him up on this. He says Dawkins notes there are good reasons for having tidy, discreet names in our taxonomies but we mustn't mistake our convenient agreements for discoveries. There just aren't real, objective joints in nature, as opposed to what Plato said all those years ago.
And that led to a passage in the middle of the essay that was, for me, a real clarion call for what evolutionary philosophy is and can fight against. This sentence said, “In particular, the demand for essences with sharp boundaries blinds thinkers to the prospect of gradualist theories of complex phenomena, such as life, intentions, natural selection itself, moral responsibility, and consciousness.” So, there's a list of the types of things we can look at as gradualist theories of complex phenomena. And I'll have more to say about some of those topics later.
Next, it’s not just the fact that there are gradualist theories, but this anti-essentialist view gives us the place where we have to start thinking about these things too. In Darwin’s “bubble-up theory of creation,” you have to start at the bottom. Dan has this fantastic quote from a critic of Darwin in the 1800s who said, “Mr. Darwin…by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom.” And as Dan makes clear, this is actually a perfect description of what is going on with evolution in nature. It does start with absolute ignorance, and we should be thinking about philosophy in the same way, starting there, rather than with a priori, perfect concepts from some imaginary higher plane in the universe.
In addition to those two points about gradualism and starting from the bottom, Dan also gives us a kind of operator for how to think non-essentially with this passage on the word ‘sorta’. He asks, why indulge in this sorta talk? Well, the sorta operator is, in cognitive science, the parallel of Darwin's gradualism in evolutionary processes. What he's getting at here is that any time we say something “is” or “was” or “will be”, it becomes much easier to become prone to thinking about things in terms of strong definitions, which are naturally hard edged, in or out things. On the other hand, if you say you know something is sorta intelligent, or sorta conscious, or an idea is sorta knowledge, then you already start to put in a little bit of fuzziness around the edges to help keep that in mind when you're starting to make arguments about these things. Now, obviously, we're not going to talk about sorta all the time, but it's a very helpful label to use occasionally as necessary.
Finally, on the last page of the article, there was this passage that was another real clarion call to me for evolutionary philosophy and what we're doing here. Dan said in the very last paragraph, “There are other philosophical puzzles that can benefit, I suspect, from exploring the no-longer-forbidden territory opened up by Darwin's critique of essentialism. … We can perhaps begin to reconstruct the most elevated philosophical concepts from more modest ingredients.” I think this is really key for us. When I first read this, I was like “Yes!”, this is what I've been trying to do all this time. But now it was clearer to me how we could explore this no-longer-forbidden territory and reconstruct the most elevated philosophical concepts into something better.
With that, I want to turn now to how I have worked on applying some of these ideas in the past. Hopefully this will help drive these points home and make this all a little more real and tangible.
I thought I'd start with something simple like the meaning of life. There's a BBC radio program called the Moral Maze where they usually have a panel of people discussing moral issues of the times. Generally, it's infuriating and I'm constantly shouting at the radio when I hear them discuss these things. But back at Christmastime, just this last year, they had a special panel to discuss the meaning of life. Amongst the panel members was the Archbishop of Canterbury (who, if you don’t know, is like the Pope for the Church of England), and they had the president of Humanists UK, Alice Roberts. They also had a writer who was a nihilist, and I believe a Muslim scholar as well.
As they all went through this topic, they had the typical kinds of dogmatic, nihilistic, or relativistic presentations of what they thought the meaning of life was. Alice, in particular, speaking for Humanists UK, presented the view that everyone has their own meaning for life and we’re not against any of them. That can sound fine and non-threatening to outsiders, so I get why she speaks this way, but it spurred me to write something for our local humanist group in our monthly newsletter. I started with the idea from Dan Dennett's paper about Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning, and I said, “In exactly the same way, there is no singular, top-down ‘Meaning of Life’ that comes booming down to us from on high.” As much as we joke about 42 being the answer, something specific like that is just not going to be the solution. Instead, meanings are built up through trials and errors. But only some of these meanings lead towards more survival and flourishing for life on this planet.
So, that's one simple way of looking at a concept in a gradualist manner and coming to a different kind of answer for how you might approach it rather than what is typically presented. And that last sentence in my approach is a reference to the evolutionary ethics that I've worked on, which is the next topic I'll talk about.
As they all went through this topic, they had the typical kinds of dogmatic, nihilistic, or relativistic presentations of what they thought the meaning of life was. Alice, in particular, speaking for Humanists UK, presented the view that everyone has their own meaning for life and we’re not against any of them. That can sound fine and non-threatening to outsiders, so I get why she speaks this way, but it spurred me to write something for our local humanist group in our monthly newsletter. I started with the idea from Dan Dennett's paper about Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning, and I said, “In exactly the same way, there is no singular, top-down ‘Meaning of Life’ that comes booming down to us from on high.” As much as we joke about 42 being the answer, something specific like that is just not going to be the solution. Instead, meanings are built up through trials and errors. But only some of these meanings lead towards more survival and flourishing for life on this planet.
So, that's one simple way of looking at a concept in a gradualist manner and coming to a different kind of answer for how you might approach it rather than what is typically presented. And that last sentence in my approach is a reference to the evolutionary ethics that I've worked on, which is the next topic I'll talk about.
So, there's a picture of my very first academic paper, which was about ethics and where I tried to use an evolutionary lens to bridge David Hume’s famous is-ought divide. We can talk about that when we talk about ethics some other time, so I won't go into any details on that, but the conclusion of the paper was that life ought to act to remain alive, that our morals ought to be driving us towards survival. If not, well then the group that's acting on those morals won't survive, and then neither will the morals. That's just a cold hard fact of evolution.
I got a lot of pushback on this article, as you would expect, but one of the common threads that is relevant for today was that a lot of people looked at this bottom line and said morals can't just be about remaining alive. That's too simple. It's got to be about much more than that. It's about well-being, and eudaimonia, and other highfalutin things. And to me, this was a classic example of having an essentialist concept of the word surviving.
I got a lot of pushback on this article, as you would expect, but one of the common threads that is relevant for today was that a lot of people looked at this bottom line and said morals can't just be about remaining alive. That's too simple. It's got to be about much more than that. It's about well-being, and eudaimonia, and other highfalutin things. And to me, this was a classic example of having an essentialist concept of the word surviving.
This cartoon sort of captures that perfectly. It shows thinking of surviving as considering only the most basic things — eat, survive, reproduce; eat, survive, reproduce. And all of the the lower, non-human animals only ever think this way until suddenly humans stand up and say, “Oh what's it all about?” There must be so much more above that. Well, that’s a clear example of having an essentialist concept of what surviving is all about. You're thinking it's not changing at all throughout the entire history of evolution. And that, of course, isn't true. Non-human animals also have an emerging, gradualist view of all of their needs and what gives them well-being in their own conception. Not that they have words for this or think about it that way, but it's much more than just the most basic things. And that really takes off with humans and culture and what we've developed over the last few hundred-thousand years or so.
So, if that was an essentialist concept of surviving, what I really wanted to illustrate was some kind of gradualist concept of surviving. I wanted to be able to display the slowly growing list of needs that we all have. And so I wrote this paper called “Replacing Maslow with an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs.” It was originally published on patheos.com with the help of two professors of evolutionary psychology, but patheos has since taken down all of the work on their atheist channel so I've had to recreate it on my own website if you want to read the paper in full.
I started with the classic gradual presentation of well-being, which is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. That starts at the bottom with physiological needs, and then goes up through the different levels of safety and security, love and belonging, and self-esteem, before arriving at self-actualization at the top. And just as I said before about morals, if these levels at the top aren’t also driving towards survival, then they're probably not the right needs to be fulfilling. And eventually, they will be deselected.
Now, Maslow never actually presented his hierarchy as a pyramid. And if you read his work, or if you've ever had these moments of self-actualization where you feel alive with meaning and purpose, this is what it actually feels like. The top kind of takes over and the physiological needs at the bottom sort of fall away.
But upside-down pyramids aren’t very stable, so I worked on finding a new, better image. I eventually settled on the typical tree that evolutionary thinkers like to use, where the bottom is a strong trunk that's bringing up nutrients from the bottom. The next level of ‘safety and security’ provides a kind of canopy under which people could be protected. In the two ‘love and belonging’ and ‘self-esteem’ levels in the middle of the tree are the tangled and interwoven branches. And the ‘self-actualization’ at the top pulls us towards something bigger than ourselves, in a way that is similar to the way that the top of a tree is being pulled towards sunlight, gaining energy and strength from the things that are above it.
So, that is a nice way of looking at the gradualist view of survival. But it’s still only one slice of what we want to concern ourselves with. It's only considering the needs of individuals. And only human individuals at that too.
So, that is a nice way of looking at the gradualist view of survival. But it’s still only one slice of what we want to concern ourselves with. It's only considering the needs of individuals. And only human individuals at that too.
What we really want to concern ourselves with is not just human individuals, but with all of life. And in E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience, he gave us these seven concentric circles that he put together to try to unite all of the fields of biology using the concepts of space and time to grow outwards as you go through the different sub-disciplines. What he ended up doing was presenting a picture of all of biology, which is also essentially a picture of all of life — all of the life that has ever been or ever will be. And so, if we want to concern ourselves with the well-being of life, we should try to work on some kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs for all of these circles.
So, that's what I worked on for the rest of my article. The first thing I had to do was generalize Maslow's levels to make them less about human things and more universal so that they can apply to any form of life.
And, to make a long story short, I sketched out a set of Maslow's hierarchies for all of the different levels of biology. What emerges from this view, is a picture of just how fragile survival would look if you only really focus on the basic needs of individuals, which is kind of the case we are in now with many governments, for example, just looking at GDP and a couple of health indicators and not much else.
Whereas you can imagine a world, instead, where there's robust survival, where we’re trying to fill in and meet the needs of all of life as much as possible. We're starting to see inklings of this with things like the UN Sustainability Goals, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, or the Planetary Boundaries, but those are all kind of just pieces and parts of what I consider to be this comprehensive map of how we could look at the welfare all of life.
So, back to the question at hand from my evolutionary ethics that ended with “Life ought to act to remain alive.” If you take a simplistic, essentialist view of ‘survival’ and ‘acting to remain alive’, as I laid out in that cartoon, then this is a problem. But hopefully, once you have this greater concept of how survival, and meaning, and well-being can grow and grow and continue to expand across all of life, then I think you can have a much bigger notion of what it is for life to act to remain alive. And then my ethics conclusion maybe becomes more acceptable.
Next, once I had something done for evolutionary ethics, I turned to evolutionary politics for my next paper. I wrote this one with my wife, Tanya Wyatt, who is a criminologist. In that discipline, she spends a lot of time reading, writing, and thinking about justice, and how justice systems in liberal democracies are based largely on the work of the utilitarians and John Stuart Mill’s harm principle. This idea of the harm principle originally sounded great. It says you can do whatever you want in society as long as you don't harm others. But without a really good definition of harm, you're not actually helping all that much. Pretty much everyone can claim to be harmed by most actions in one way or another. Even donating to charity might be considered money taken away from someone else in need. And this is how the harm principle has eroded over the next hundred years or so, as more and more people tried to build democracies around this far too simple of an idea. In the late 1990s, a legal scholar named Bernard Harcourt published a seminal paper about this called “The Collapse of the Harm Principle” that noted how, without a good definition of harm, you have no way of trading off one harm for another, or understanding which harm is more important than another one. And so, in the end, you just end up going back to might makes right. Whoever is in power at the time gets to decide which harms matter more than others.
So, my wife and I wrote this paper to try and address this problem. The paper is called “Rebuilding the Harm Principle: Using an Evolutionary Perspective to Provide a New Foundation for Justice.” We took the definition of good that I had written in my previous paper, where good was about making the survival of life more and more robust, and we argued that harm is just going to be the opposite of that. Harm is that which makes the survival of life more fragile. Again, this is a topic for another day to get into all the details here. But once again this is another kind of gradualist view — in this case for harm — that helps us understand the problems that are involved in politics much better than some kind of essentialist definition of harm could ever hope to to provide.
So, my wife and I wrote this paper to try and address this problem. The paper is called “Rebuilding the Harm Principle: Using an Evolutionary Perspective to Provide a New Foundation for Justice.” We took the definition of good that I had written in my previous paper, where good was about making the survival of life more and more robust, and we argued that harm is just going to be the opposite of that. Harm is that which makes the survival of life more fragile. Again, this is a topic for another day to get into all the details here. But once again this is another kind of gradualist view — in this case for harm — that helps us understand the problems that are involved in politics much better than some kind of essentialist definition of harm could ever hope to to provide.
So far, I've only been talking about gradualism in one dimension for these theoretical concepts of good, harm, survival, and the meaning of life. But there's another tool in the evolutionary toolkit that I find really useful for metaphysics. And this helps make gradualism multi-dimensional. That tool is Tinbergen’s four questions. Tinbergen was an ethologist who put these together to help really understand the biological world in depth. His claim is that to understand anything in biology you have to understand these four different parts of the thing being considered. This is a classic two-by-two matrix where one axis maps the difference between ultimate and proximate causes, and the other axis looks at things in a current time frame versus an historic time frame.
So, you end up with these four questions around ‘mechanisms’ (what are the underlying bits and bobs that are chugging away inside of the organism to cause something to happen); what is the evolutionary ‘function’ (what is the long-term purpose that will lead some things to happen); or you can look at the personal development of an entity (that's the ‘ontogeny’) so you know its singular life history; or you can look at the ‘phylogeny’, the evolutionary history that led up to that individual item. Again, to really understand anything in the biological world, you need to look at all four of these pieces. For any of you who have read or listened to David Sloan Wilson at length, this concept comes up pretty quickly. But there are very few philosophers that I've heard who ever talk about Tinbergen, even though philosophers talk about biological phenomena all the time!
So, you end up with these four questions around ‘mechanisms’ (what are the underlying bits and bobs that are chugging away inside of the organism to cause something to happen); what is the evolutionary ‘function’ (what is the long-term purpose that will lead some things to happen); or you can look at the personal development of an entity (that's the ‘ontogeny’) so you know its singular life history; or you can look at the ‘phylogeny’, the evolutionary history that led up to that individual item. Again, to really understand anything in the biological world, you need to look at all four of these pieces. For any of you who have read or listened to David Sloan Wilson at length, this concept comes up pretty quickly. But there are very few philosophers that I've heard who ever talk about Tinbergen, even though philosophers talk about biological phenomena all the time!
As an example of how this can help, I tried to use Tinbergen’s four questions to look at consciousness and free will — two concepts that have long bedeviled philosophers and which are patently biological phenomena. I did this during lockdown over the last year and a half as I was looking for something to do since I couldn't travel anymore. I thought this wouldn’t take me too long, but it ended up being a huge project. This was really fruitful for me, though, as I didn't find anybody else doing anything like this, and there was just so much research to be done. I ended up putting together about 260 pages worth of material, which I collected into this little pdf booklet. This whole project is still in its early stages as only a handful of good readers on my blog have reviewed it, but I'd eventually like to push this out some more and try to get pieces of it published in academic, peer-reviewed journals to see if it continues to hold up.
But regardless of whether my own theories turn out to be useful, this subject is still a good example of using Tinbergen for philosophy questions. So, that's what I wanted to to share here. One of the chapters that I wrote looked at the history of definitions of consciousness and you can see the Dennett operator in the title. The sorta was obviously a nod to Dan, but it's also there because this was not actually a brief history at all. It ended up being 5600 words, which is about ten pages of just definitions. It had 28 different entries from philosophers, 25 entries from scientists, and six entries from different dictionary definitions.
Almost all of these definitions were incompatible or disagreed with one another in some way. As the Wikipedia entry on consciousness notes, this level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to different people, or else it encompasses a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common. Now, considering what we've been talking about today, it's clear that most of these definitions of consciousness have been looking for an essentialist, in-or-out box that just isn't going to be there. Consciousness is clearly another one of these complex phenomena in the biological world that is much better handled with a gradualist perspective on it (especially one that Tinbergen can give us).
Almost all of these definitions were incompatible or disagreed with one another in some way. As the Wikipedia entry on consciousness notes, this level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to different people, or else it encompasses a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common. Now, considering what we've been talking about today, it's clear that most of these definitions of consciousness have been looking for an essentialist, in-or-out box that just isn't going to be there. Consciousness is clearly another one of these complex phenomena in the biological world that is much better handled with a gradualist perspective on it (especially one that Tinbergen can give us).
So, to make a very long story short, I tried to work through all of that. I went through the steps of a Tinbergen analysis and came up with a hierarchy of consciousness as it emerges from the origins of life and gradually builds up to the highest levels that are currently attainable in nature. I developed this hierarchy using each of the four questions and that proved to be one of the beauties of using Tinbergen. This four-pronged process ends up providing independent lines of research that you can check against one another. So, if you have a theory of how consciousness emerges according to the mechanisms or the functions, but that doesn't map with how it emerges in the life of a single human or over the evolutionary history of life, then you have to tinker and play around with your theory.
And that's what I was able to do until all of these hierarchies aligned and ended up describing the emergence of all of the different properties that are generally considered within the various definitions of consciousness. Taken altogether, I believe they end up merging and presenting a multifaceted view of a gradualist approach to this extremely complex phenomenon.
And that's what I was able to do until all of these hierarchies aligned and ended up describing the emergence of all of the different properties that are generally considered within the various definitions of consciousness. Taken altogether, I believe they end up merging and presenting a multifaceted view of a gradualist approach to this extremely complex phenomenon.
The same thing applies for free will as well, since the two concepts are very tightly related. Many others have said you really can't deal with one without dealing with the other. And so I ended up putting together a chart for the emergence of free will through the same gradualist hierarchy.
I don't have much time left so let me just say very quickly that while I was doing all this research, I got the opportunity to publish a book review of Dan Dennett's book with Greg Caruso on free will called Just Deserts: Debating Free Will. That’s ‘deserts’ as in determining whether we deserve to be blamed or punished. This isn’t a book about strawberry shortcake or other types of lovely desserts. Dan and Gregg went back and forth a lot in this book with over 100 exchanges between them. Gregg is one of these classic essentialists. He draws beautiful boxes around all of his very precise definitions and he comes to the conclusion that there is no free will, there is no moral responsibility, you have to get rid of all prisons, and we have to use a public quarantine health model for our justice system. Dan looks at this and says, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's way too much to throw out for this kind of essentialist approach. That's not the way we should be thinking about free will. Dan has his gradualist approach that he defines as achieving a ‘free will worth wanting’. To him, we don't have perfect free will. But we do have something here. Some sorta free will.
Now, Dan holds his own very well against Gregg in my view. But he has never once referenced Tinbergen as far as I know. So, I used my review as an opportunity to introduce that concept into the discussion, which ended with that rhetorical question you can see at the end of this paragraph — is free will more like a geometry proof or a frog? To me, it's pretty obvious that it's more of a complex biological phenomenon like a frog, and it should therefore be treated as such like we've done with other Tinbergen analyses.
Now, Dan holds his own very well against Gregg in my view. But he has never once referenced Tinbergen as far as I know. So, I used my review as an opportunity to introduce that concept into the discussion, which ended with that rhetorical question you can see at the end of this paragraph — is free will more like a geometry proof or a frog? To me, it's pretty obvious that it's more of a complex biological phenomenon like a frog, and it should therefore be treated as such like we've done with other Tinbergen analyses.
I have one last slide here, and this is a work in progress so don't look at this too closely. I'm currently working on a paper on evolutionary epistemology where I’m writing about the evolution of knowledge. This is another classic philosophical problem of essentialism where Plato tried to define it two thousand years ago as “justified, true, beliefs”. Philosophers have been trying for thousands of years to find ideas and beliefs that are able to fit that bill and meet all those essential qualities, but they have ultimately failed to do so and we're still stuck dealing with this problem.
My contention in this paper will be that once again we need to start with Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning and start at the bottom where we have absolute ignorance. Then, I’ll trace the evolutionary history of knowledge mechanisms as we have learned to learn, and developed new ways to learn, until we gradually built more and more robust knowledge. Even after all this evolution, we never quite reach the level of certain truths and falsehoods. We know this from some classic skeptical arguments, which show that we can't ever claim to know truth (so far) because we just can't know the future. Since we can't know what the future will bring, maybe the ideas we have today will some day be overturned. But that's okay! This sort of gradual, evolutionary understanding would give us a much clearer way to talk about knowledge and how strong it is or how fragile it is and why. And I think that conversation could do a lot to overturn all the nonsense we see about fake news and truthiness and the like. At least, that's my hope.
My contention in this paper will be that once again we need to start with Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning and start at the bottom where we have absolute ignorance. Then, I’ll trace the evolutionary history of knowledge mechanisms as we have learned to learn, and developed new ways to learn, until we gradually built more and more robust knowledge. Even after all this evolution, we never quite reach the level of certain truths and falsehoods. We know this from some classic skeptical arguments, which show that we can't ever claim to know truth (so far) because we just can't know the future. Since we can't know what the future will bring, maybe the ideas we have today will some day be overturned. But that's okay! This sort of gradual, evolutionary understanding would give us a much clearer way to talk about knowledge and how strong it is or how fragile it is and why. And I think that conversation could do a lot to overturn all the nonsense we see about fake news and truthiness and the like. At least, that's my hope.
So, that’s the end of my talk. I tried to present why I think evolutionary metaphysics is really inspiring to me, and why it can be really useful for this group in particular. It opens up so many different places that we can take this evolutionary worldview that we've been given, and we can really try to make significant changes to the way philosophy works because of this. I’ll be happy to take your questions now.
What do you think? One of the philosophers in this meeting said immediately after I was done that this could be a clear manifesto for what could be done in evolutionary philosophy. Let me know if you agree or disagree in the comments below.
