Alvin Plantinga’s essay “Materialism and Christian Belief”¹ argues for dualism by attempting to show that a material thing can’t think. He writes: “The difficulty for materialism is this: how does it happen, how can it be, that an assemblage of neurons, a group of material objects firing away has content?” Plantinga, in part through Leibniz, shows that even if we zoom all the way down to protons and quarks we find nothing that would allow consciousness.
I wonder if this kind of reductionism is useful here. At the proton level, it’s hard to see how life is possible, much less consciousness. But we know that a proper organization of protons into atoms into molecules, et cetera, does lead to life. The mystery is resolved, not by looking ever more narrowly, but by looking more broadly and holistically. Couldn’t mind and consciousness also be a function of this same kind of complex organization of (relatively) simple parts? I wonder if we couldn’t use his argument to locate history and economics outside of the material world also.
But this isn’t my main problem with Plantinga. Early in the paper he makes a backhanded comment about “the appalling arguments against [dualism] produced by certain materialists.” The accompanying footnote references two of Daniel Dennett’s books², and provides neat syllogisms in his stead.
One such argument, for example, apparently has the following form: (a) Many people who advocate p, do so in the service of a hope that science will never be able to explain p; therefore (b) not-p.
Another seems to have the form (a) If you believe p, prestigious people will laugh at you; therefore (b) not-p. (or perhaps (b*) don’t believe p?)
Well, it certainly is fun to make people look silly. But neither of these reductions fairly represent Dennett. In the first case, Dennett simply wishes to show that some proofs in the past seemed incontrovertible only because a more primitive understanding of the world did not allow for greater imagination for what science could explain or achieve. This does express a certain ‘faith’ in the ability of science, but it is not unfounded: we’ve seen the success of science, and have good reason to think it can explain even more than it already has. In any case, I truly can’t see why Plantinga would interpret him so atrociously, or why this particular page in Dennett’s book seemed so appalling to him.
In the second argument Plantinga ‘condenses’, Dennett again does not aim to provide some deductive argument against dualism. As he says,
It is not that I think I can give a knock-down proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way dualism wallows in misery, accepting dualism is giving up. [italics his]
Dumbfounded again. These lines of argument clearly should be taken as cumulative, not absolute; and they are fair arguments to make. Jaded reductions do not do them justice. If I may speak for him, Dennett finds science’s track-record compelling, and sees its explanation of consciousness and mind incomplete but promising. Plantinga of all people should know proper warrant when he sees it.
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[1] “Materialism and Christian Belief” Persons: Human and Divine, ed. van Inwagen and Zimmerman, 104
[2] Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995, 27; Consciousness Explained, 1991, 37 (Plantinga’s text mistakenly has it as Explaining Consciousness)
Given that emergence is usually due to the existence of space for arranging events, I wonder if “complex organisation” is the key to consciousness or whether it is due to the existence of unexpected directions for arranging things?
Dualism and materialism can be viewed as two sides of the same coin, see: Materialists should read this first
I don’t know what “unexpected directions for arranging things” means, but thank you for your comment and the link.