The name of the entity at this url has changed in order to reflect the altered nature of the site, specifically that of its new mission as the "Journal of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism".
Its mission has become how to discuss the ontology of the definition of "materialism" its connection to "naturalism"; and of the definitions of metaphysical naturalism, ontological naturalism, and philosophical naturalism.
But more than that, it is to foster a discussion of whether "materialism" as it is historically defined has any bearing on naturalism at all, or whether, as John Searle puts it, the traditional vocabulary is "inconsistent with what we know about the world both from our own experiences and from the special sciences."1
For quite some time I have been personally dissatisified with those traditional meanings, which are often as not used or defined differently from one text or author to the next. Sometimes it a matter of semantics.
But overall the problem is greater. It is whether or not the third person objectivity of science which demands evidence based on behavior or physics for proof of "mental states", has any relevance to first person consciousness and "mind" and our very noticeable mental states that no third person examination can uncover. I have found that more often than not they do not reflect my own experiences.
And while the title "Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism" is just a place holder until I can form a proper entity worthy of that name, this new Journal welcomes and invites all serious comments.
Q from a an email I received:"I was wondering if you could help me understand the difference between Realism v. Anti-Realism. I've looked all over the Internet.. I just don't understand it. I'm talking my first PHI class, metaphysics, and really just need some assistance. I'd appreciate any help, it could be your good deed for the day :) thanks, Rachel"
A: Hi. Thanks for looking to me for your answer. In essence, they have to do with "the problem of universals." It's a problem because different philosophies say universals are different things.
To understand universals, understand this: It began, as everything did, with the differences between Aristotle and Plato. Plato proposed almost all the questions that are still asked by philoshers; Aristotle answered most of them, and his answers were very different from Plato's.
"Aristotle is the champion of this world, the champion of nature, as against the supernaturalism of Plato. Denying Plato's World of Forms, Aristotle maintains that there is only one reality: the world of particulars in which we live, the world men perceive by means of their physical senses. Universals, he holds, are merely aspects of existing entities, isolated in thought by a process of selective attention; they have no existence apart from particulars. Reality is comprised, not of Platonic abstractions, but of concrete, individual entities, each with a definite nature, each obeying the laws inherent in its nature. Aristotle's universe is the universe of science. The physical world, in his view, is not a shadowy projection controlled by a divine dimension, but an autonomous, self-sufficient realm. It is an orderly, intelligible, natural realm, open to the mind of man." http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/aristotle.html So, the "problem" is: do universals exist as "Ideas" in nature, forms, which nature then fills will material. Or, does nature create things that are material, from which man finds the common denominators we call universals. I think you can see that universals become definitions in man's mind, rather than "forms" waiting to be filled.
Aristotle's idea is called post res; Plato's is called ante res. http://www.ditext.com/runes/r.html(see Realism. This is my favorite online philosophy dictionary.)
I also like the Catholic Encyclopedia, even though I'm not Catholic. It's quite accurate and much more helpful than many other resources. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11090c.htm But anti-realism is different than Plato's idea in one sense: The basic question is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Here realists say yes, and anti-realists say no.
Ontology has to do with universals this way: "Ontology makes the distinction between entities, the things that exist, and qualities, the attributes that these things have. "What is an entity?" The first corollary of identity: Anything that exists must have some qualities. The second corollary of identity: Anything that exists must be different in some way from everything else that exists and have some quality or combination of qualities no other existent has.The third corollary of identity: Anything that exists must have some relationship to everything else that exists.http://www.geocities.com/rational_argumentator/Stolyarov_RC1.html?200826 So anti-realism says that rational, objective answers to the question of what thing is, and what qualities it has, cannot be nailed down, and any answer is going to depend on the person who is making the examination of the thing, because he comes from a different background, educational experience, etc.
Realists say none of that matters, that universals can be identified objectively, just like the first quote above states. But realists are not realistic about empirical existence enough to be totally objective:
Since we know that universals are not independent of the mind that abstracts them from particulars, Plato must be wrong on both counts."
"[Realism is the] theory of the reality of abstract or general terms, or universals, which are held to have an equal and sometimes a superior reality to actual physical particulars." http://www.ditext.com/runes/r.html[italics added]
Objectively speaking, if universals "are merely aspects of existing entities, isolated in thought by a process of selective attention [having] no existence apart from particulars," then they are not equal and cannot be superior in the realm of existents. To say that mental existents, the isolated identities existing only in the mind, are superior to empirical existents is to say that consciousness has primacy over existence itself.
But, since existence is the source of consciousness, existence has primacy and is superior in this respect: it has always existed and cannot ever go out of existence. Consciousness is dependent on life for its formation, and so while intelligent consciousness can claim to "command nature by obeying nature," it cannot claim to create or control the laws of nature.
Realism, according to Plato, means "the ideas have a status of possibility which makes them independent both of the mind by which they may be known and of the actual world of particulars in which they may take place."Since we know that universals are not independent of the mind that abstracts them from particulars, Plato must be wrong on both counts.
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Yesterday and Monday I quoted the Catholic Encyclopedia (CE) on the subject of soul. Catholics insist the soul is given to man by "Supernatural Order, by God, for the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny."
Today, that same quote can be used as a refutation of the denial that faith negates reason.
"Some have held that there can be no conflict between the two—that reason properly employed and faith properly understood will never produce contradictory or competing claims—whereas others have maintained that faith and reason can (or even must) be in genuine contention over certain propositions or methodologies." http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/faith-re.htm
"In the Old Testament, the Hebrew [word for faith] means essentially steadfastness, [ ] hence it comes to mean faithfulness, whether of God towards man or of man towards God. It would, however, be illogical to conclude that the word cannot, and does not, mean belief or faith in the Old Testament for it is clear that we cannot put trust in a person's promises without previously assenting to or believing in that person's claim to such confidence. Hence even if it could be proved that the Hebrew does not in itself contain the notion of belief, it must necessarily presuppose it." (CE) [italics added]
The 6th century theologian (and government leader) Boethius made the dictum, "Insofar as is possible, join faith to reason." This was because Christianity had been running almost entirely on faith, in the belief in miracles as the basis for their religion. The Virgin Birth and the Ressurection were the two upon which Christianity was built; but there were those from the Old Testament which could not be disbelieved, assented to as in confidence that revealed revelations deserved their faith.
He knew this unconditional faith could not last much longer. Joining them would seem to defy the notion that one negates the other. Modern Christianity is build on that dictum, in the attempt to separate reasoned theology from unsubstantiated faith.
"Logic became important in the Middle Ages because it provided the epistemological foundation of scholasticism: 'Through reason and the powerful tool of Aristotelian logic, men could resolve the seeming contradictions between faith and reason, Christian truth and Greek science, and attain insights into the nature of the world, of man and of God.' (Overfield 1984, p. ix)" http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/westbury/textcol/HAMILTO1.html
But the contrary is true; the unconditional faith, necessarily presupposing unsubstantiated belief, negates the substantiations made by reason. The attempt to join faith to reason is the attempt to short-circuit the faculty of mind that automatically identifies, ontologically, the material provided by man’s senses.
This automatic identification is not fool-proof-perfect. It is, after all, the result of non-omniscient thought. But to the degree that such thought bears the characteristics and integrity of non-contradictory logic, it is substantiated enough to be separable from faith.
Faith in supernatural deities and acts begins as assention to miracles and to the claims of the recipients of such miracles. As assention to these things faith is faith in the superiority of others begining with a God substantiated only by the word of others that miracles have occured.
"Faith and reason cannot be joined in the extreme because they are diametrically antithetical. No form of creationism can argue for faith without using the principles of deductive reasoning. Such reasoning can only go so far in explaining faith and the moral principle of God; then it comes up short because faith and reason can be joined only as far as is possible, and that possibility comes up short. The argument for faith always relies, in the end, on the belief in faith to explain faith." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/09/non-reductive-monism.html
What is "the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny," if not a claim to some form of gaining knowledge that is above reason?
And what is this form of knowledge that is greater than reason, if not the antithesis of reason, i.e., of faith in the reality of omniscient, omnipotent intelligence, for the purpose of somehow being raised above reason, and this in order to submit one's self to the superiority of others.
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Ontology is the science of identifying fundamental principles, the doctrine of making distinctions between: 1) "entities", i.e., existents; 2) the qualitative attributes of entities; and 3) the relationships between 1) and 2).
Catholics, who believe human life is endowed at conception with a soul say it is the animating cause, the volition, of the zygote, (if not the sperm). The Catholic Encyclopedia (CE) says "'soul' denotes the source of our vegetative activities" [as much as it is the source of our minds]. [click, then scroll The Religious Identity of "Soul"]
The antithetic argument is that human volition begins with the first syllogism. All other determinations of when the soul begins falls between these two extremes.
These two extremes are the basis for this topic of making the identification of the entity we call the soul. This attempt must be made because it is the basis for the debate about abortion and the cloning of stem cells with their subsequent destruction, and whether it is murder to engage in either act.
Kazez wrote: "A 5-day old embryo composed out of undifferentiated, pluripotent cells is not a complete person like you and me. A 2-month-old fetus, even with its complete set of rudimentary organs, is not a complete person like you and me." The soul is the obvious deciding factor in answering what a fetus is, because a fetus without a soul would be the object of many more abortions, and abortion would not be the object of fierce debate.
Yesterday in Ontology of the Soul Part 2, I showed how the Catholic Church defines the animating volition of humans as a principle called the "substantiality of the soul."
I also showed how the Church defines substantiality as "a genus supremum [which]cannot strictly be defined by an analysis into genus and specific difference..." The CE could only define it this way by making the reader draw his/her own inferences in this matter since it gave no definition whatever of substantiality, but rather made it referential to all the other things it did say about soul and substance.
It thus was made clear that the most powerful and ancient Christian Church cannot define "genus supremum". As a matter of fact, that definition is an entry missing from its pages. It is left as a floating abstraction.
The Church obviously prefers not to ontologically identify the entity soul, while at the same time describing its volitional qualites as those which 'animate' even the vegetative parts of the human being. No wonder it defines the soul as a 'principle.'"
Qualities, when identified, will necessarily lead one to an ID of the genus of the entity that possess those qualities, unless the qualities are themselves not concretely identified. The definition given by the CE of soul is not concrete.
In the same sense that the CE says soul is both mind and non-mind (vegetative,) Naturalism.Org, a humanist/naturalist website that says it depends on science to determine the views of its adherents describes it this way:
"[H]uman minds and behavior are indeed explicable as physical, chemical, biological, psychological and social processes subject to law-like cause and effect relationships at various levels. [ ] [T]here’s no scientific evidence that we possess an immaterial soul or mental 'supervisor' that has a contra-causal, libertarian free will, that somehow intervenes in and trumps natural causality." http://www.naturalism.org/misrepresenting.htm
This is a secular view, based on determinism, and the website's contributors are well-known authors, speakers, philosophers, professors, etc. But the site's description of this "immaterial soul" that we do not possess is is defined as "physical, chemical, biological, psychological and social processes subject to law-like cause and effect relationships at various levels."
This sounds as though scientific naturalism is defining as "genus non-supremum" something we might call the "principle of the non-soul". After all, if these processes do not consist of contra-causal libertarian free will, it is certainly not sui-generis, which the religiously defined qualities of the soul would make it. Yet, they would at the same time appear to be made of "substance," made of "physical" processes.
But what if the soul is actually all the processes that scientific naturalism says it is, yet volitional, meaning dependent on one's own mental initiative irrespective of all the physical processes?
To define it as being within the genus of substance does not deny the theory of religious substantiality when the soul is housed in the physical body, that the naturalist description of the processes might actually be the physicalized nature of the soul.
Why should there be an insistence on my part, as a part of the law of Identity, i.e., "the aspect of existing as something in particular, with specific characteristics", that the soul should exist? http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Metaphysics_Identity.html
To repeat from Part 1 of this discussion, something is self-evidential. What is not evidential is that this something is physically material; it takes science to prove that the processes of physiology, body chemistry, and psychology relate to that which is self-evidential.
It is also not self-evidential that this something is transcendental, i.e., extending beyond physiologial life in either direction; nor is it self-evidential that it ought not be given metaphysical value as a "mental supervisor," and as an intimate part of the ego by which we can make sense of our moral abstractions.
Scientific naturalists deny the metaphysical value of what they admit is self-evidential. They does so because scientific naturalism operates on the metaphysical belief in determinism. Since random forces, such as existence itself, intrude into our power to operate willfully, then--say scientific naturalists--we have no libertarian free will. It is true that we do not have libertarian free will, in the sense that they mean it.
They mean that we cannot cause the sun to stop shining, cannot cause our hunger to go away, cannot cause the cancer in our bones to vanish, and cannot make a pot of gold appear at the end of the rainbow--at will.
The comment about the gold is not meant to be facetious. If contra-causal libertarian free will is the scientific definition of the form of will we are said not to have, then it necessarily follows that if we did have it we could turn anything into gold, cause heaven to come to earth, and do all things that empirical reality will not allow us to do.
This is why the metaphysical emphasis placed on our lack of libertarian free will is of no consequence to the argument of whether man has free will. Free will is in the rationality of man, not the accidental circumstances surrounding his being.
"On the one hand, does man possess genuine moral freedom, power of real choice, true ability to determine the course of his thoughts and volitions, to decide which motives shall prevail within his mind, to modify and mould his own character? Or, on the other, are man's thoughts and volitions, his character and external actions, all merely the inevitable outcome of his circumstances?" CA
Taxonomically, free will is of the genus arbitrium with respect to reason, and of the specie liberum, with respect to the will which can be turned toward either good or bad ends. Peter Lombard, Libri Quattuor Sententiarum, 1150
Free will, then, is the doctrine that human beings are free to control their own actions, actions not determined in advance by God or fate. It is, therefore, tied inexorably to the soul.
The soul, as we have discovered, is at one end of the spectrum considered placed by God in the fertilized egg immediately at conception, thereby releasing the potential human to be free of fate at birth. At the other end of the spectrum volition, the actions of freedom, are declared to begin with the first syllogism.
This second idea is tied to tabula rasa, the idea that nothing exists in the mind apriori, that all knowledge, including knowledge of one's own volition, is born of experience.
This is logical, since a child is most certainly not volitionally free of his empty but growing mind, of his inability to feed and clothe himself, of his lack of language, his environment, and his genes, not to mention his nutruring.
Since free will is Liberum arbitrium, and since that was initially a Catholic concept, then the soul is either the liberator, or freedom from determinism sows the seeds of the soul.
In our last look at this subject tomorrow, we will see how freedom from determinism is the link in our search for the answer to whether or not the fetus has a soul. We can then answer the question: Does the fetus have a soul?
Given the divided nature of the many categories of "Naturalism," which include "strong" to "weak" definitions, it is necessary to state the position of this Academy as "strong."
This is the fourth part of a series in trying to understand the nature of metaphysical naturalism. In Part One it was noted that "not even the naturalists themselves all agree, using different terminology for exactly similar philosophical positions; or using precisely similar terminology for differences that may be subtle, or may be extremely and fundamentally different." What is Metaphysical Naturalism? Part One
"Metaphysical" naturalism is called "ontological" naturalism in some quarters, and those who use the word "ontological" may make some clear distinction between the use of the two words. In the unofficially described "mission" of this blog immediately below the blog title I deliberately use the sentence, "Seeking ontological rationality in every aspect of conscious existence." So this Academy accepts them as identical.
In What is Metaphysical Naturalism? Part Two, ontology was described from Wikipedia as "a branch of metaphysics that studies being, and so this is the view that the supernatural does not exist..." Yet, "scientific" naturalism takes this same view, and those naturalists who use the word scientific also vary in their overall differences with other's who use the word. It may be a small, minor difference; it may be a fundamental difference.
The Academy does not use the word scientific because other, better known naturalists who have fundamental differences with the Academy's definition call themselves scientific. One case in point is the website full of famous names who are asociates or contributors to the site, famous people who go along with the idea that, "...the epistemic theme of the [scientific reductivism, i.e., that scientific naturalism] is to 'drop the soul and free will [in order to be] rid of the fictional supernatural agency that blocks true explanations of phenomena.'" [italics added] What is Metaphysical Naturalism? Part One continued
The Academy is not reductivist, which bring us to the first caveat of its strong [1] definition of naturalism. The caveats are used because I did not wish to disturb the original definition of naturalism accepted by the Academy, written by B.A.G. Fuller. It is true that I did amend Fuller's definition to the degree that I removed what was scientific in it, and replaced it with what is only ontological and acceptable without making it necessary to "drop the soul and free will."
Perhaps one day I shall be able to incorporate the caveats into Fuller's definition, but I will not do so until I can do it without making it incomprehensible. The caveats allow the Academy's distinct differences to be set apart, rather than lost in their incorporation. Fuller's definition is difficult enough for the beginner.
The libertarian, philosopher, lecturer, professor and contributor to the Cato Institute Tibor Machan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibor_R._Machan, wrote to me asking what Fuller meant by the word "tychistic." Machan said he had looked it up in every source he could think of and could not find the definition. Adding that definition was one of the amendments I made.
Machan also said he disagreed with Fuller's use of the word "deterministic" to describe the affairs of men. I agree with him, but Fuller was talking about the universe, not about men. Men are sui generis and while they must follow the laws of nature that govern material objects such as our bodies are, man's mind has its own laws of nature, those of the nature of life. Man is a creature of volition and of reason; together, these allow our species many exceptions to those laws which rule strictly empirical entities that have no volition, and those creatures with volition but without reason.
That is the reason I have today once again amended the Academy's Description, to include the clause "except in the affairs of mind."
Amended 11.16.08
"Naturalism, challenging the cogency of the cosmological,i mechanical,ii and moral argumentsiii, holds that the universe requires no supernatural cause and government, but is self-existent, self-explanatory, self-operating, and self-directing, that the world-process is neither mechanistic nor anthropocentric, but purposeless, deterministic (except for possible tychistic* events, and) except in the affairs of mind; and is only accidentally productive of man; that human life as physical, mental, moral and spiritual phenomena, are ordinary natural events attributable in all respects to the ordinary operations of the laws of nature; and that man's ethical values, compulsions, activities, and restraints can be justified by non-reductive monism, [http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/09/non-reductive-monism.html] without recourse to supernatural sanctions, and his highest good pursued and attained under natural conditions, without expectation of a supernatural destiny"----(amended from B.A.G.Fuller http://www.ditext.com/runes/n.html see Naturalism)
*(Tychism: any theory which regards chance as an objective reality, operative in the cosmos; [ibid])
First Caveat:
--AND that
this description neither explicitly nor implicitly exlcudes the existence of the human soul, nor of free will, when:"'soul' is a "veridical perception"** of consciousness;" and "free will is the mind’s freedom to think or not;" (Ayn Rand)
With this, we must consider that the better known advocates of scientific naturalism say the "soul" and "free will" are illusions; not that they are not real as either concepts most people accept and act upon, nor as physiological forces that can be ostensibly identified with medical monitoring equipement. What scientific naturalism makes clear is that free will is not "free of the forces of environment, genes, memes, and other influences beyond the control of human to avoid having to deal with."
Epistemologically they are correct. Metaphysically they are wrong. Where they are correct is that all life exists in an environment, not in a vacuum. Within that environment forces exist which cause life to make choices where it can, or to make simple adaptations where it can. No one is denying that if you are driving down the highway and a deer jumps in front of you that you must a quick decision based on the total environment, such as the proximity of other cars, the proximity of the railing on the outside of the highway or of the concrete divider in the middle, whether or not you have passengers to think of, etc, and that all these considerations leave you no choice but to act.
However, scientism in naturalism declares that because you have no choice but to made a decision, your will is not free, when in truth it is free; it is free to hit the deer or not; to hit another car or not; to risk the lives of your passengers and hope they fare better than the deer--or not to risk their lives; to hit the deer--or not.
As Ayn Rand said, free will is the freedom "to think or not." Life does not live in a vacuum. Only in a total conceptual vacuum would life be free of memes, genes, environments, and other life and considerations that impose the absolute need to act when one would care not to act at all.
Scientific naturalism is wrong in declaring that this denies man the right to claim his will is "free." You are always free to answer the phone, or not; to scold your child for wrong doing, or not; to risk the lives of other passengers on the road by swerving to miss the deer and then lying afterward to say it was all you could think to do other than to hit the deer and damage your car. You always have the freedom to do the opposite, or to do something alternative which may be to do nothing at all. An angry man whose wife just asked him for a divorce may care nothing about the life of the deer, hit it, and continue driving; he might even laugh and think such irrational things as "God isn't going to slow me down by putting a frigging deer in my path. I'll show him."
It is a metaphysical difference between the Academy and scientific naturalism. "From a naturalistic perspective," states one scientific wesite, "there are no causally privileged agents, nothing that causes without being caused in turn. Human beings act the way they do because of the various influences that shape them, whether these be biological or social, genetic or environmental. We do not have the capacity to act outside the causal connections that link us in every respect to the rest of the world. This means we do not have what many people think of as free will, being able to cause our behavior without our being fully caused in turn." [italics added] http://www.naturalism.org/tenetsof.htm
The metaphysics of that website are those of determinists, believing in the doctrine that every fact in the universe is guided entirely by law, the law of the impenetrability, translation and impact of matter, allowing only for mechanical causation.
The Academy holds that man is not deterministic, is not therefor mechanical, meaning he is able to make choices even if the need is for choices he would rather not make. If a billiard ball strikes another ball at a certain speed and angle and with a certain amount of backward or forward spin or with no spin at all, each of those scenarios is mechanical and is predictable. But striking ball has no choices; the struck ball has no choices. But scientific naturalists wish to put man in this same basket of eggs.
"By understanding ourselves as fully caused, and by seeing just how we are caused (by our genetic endowment, upbringing, and social environments), we dramatically enhance our powers of prediction and control, [over ourselves,] reduc[ing] unwarranted self-righteousness, moral superiority, pride, shame, and guilt. People don't create themselves, so responsibility for their character and behavior isn't ultimately theirs, but is distributed over the many factors that created them. And after all, were we given their environmental and genetic conditions, we would have become what they are, and acted just as they did: there but for circumstances go I." [italics added]
Determinism means the doctrine that all the facts in the physical universe, and hence also in human history, are absolutely dependent upon and conditioned by their causes. In psychology, it means the doctrine that the will is not free but is determined by psychical or physical conditions. Determinism is synonomous with fatalism, necessitarianism, destiny. [Dictionary of Phil; Runes] "There but for the circumstances go I."
I know a woman who became a nurse, worked at a hospital long enough to gain her early retirement, then left for another job in the pharmacutical industry, where again she worked long enough to gain early retirement, and now is earning her Doctorate in Nursing. She has had her share of life-changing moments. Her husband has an incurable, debilitating disease which eventuall kills everyone who has it. Don't tell me people don't make themselves.
I took up a relationship with someone who had an infant and a toddler. I didn't have to do this. I could have chosen otherwise. I now have the infant and the toddler as two sons in their thirties, and I am very proud to have done the things that helped make them the men they are today. I didn't have to do everything I did. I did less than some parents do; much more than other parents would have done. I made myself into a proud father. Don't tell me I didn't create myself into that role.
My father was raised in a family with a background that might have caused others to lose hope in becoming better. There was depression, alcoholism, spousal abuse, horribly angry family arguments that included my mother, yet my father lifted himself out of that, built a home and raised three children very comfortably; managed his money well enough to be more than comfortable in retirement; and became known by many people around the world who shared his hobby of antique cars, which included his writing of the manual for judging certain model years at public showings where trophies and ribbons are awarded.
He married a woman with a severe medical condition that many in her generation experienced. But in my experience growing up with her, I don't remember seeing anyone as bad off as her who was not in a wheelchair. This did not hold her back from accompanying my father in his travels around the country with his cars, nor from giving her children all the attention, care and love they needed. Her condition could have held the entire family back as she had several major corrective surgeries while I was growing up. But I don't remember missing out on anything that I ever wanted, or ever wanted to do.
Don't tell me my parents did not "make themselves." Absolutely they had all the genetic, familial, memetic, medical and environmental situations to deal with that scientism says causes us to be "fully caused" in our beings, and which prevent us from being "the ultimate originators of ourselves or our behavior, [and whereby] we can’t take ultimate credit or blame for what we do."
But Free Will is Not All; There's the Soul
Don't forget, free will is not the only concern of the first caveat. The other concern is the soul when soul is a "veridical perception" of consciousness;" and where veridical perception is "a direct relation of awareness between a conscious subject and an object of empirical or abstract content."
This means that the soul, being either of empirical or abstract content, is simply an object of cognition. It is the meaning of that "direct relation of awareness" where the ideas of scientism differ from those of metaphysical naturalism. And this difference is metaphysical. They do not deny the relationship of your consciousness to your soul; they deny that the soul is anything more than physiological reactions that are measurable and which have nothing to do with our deepest emotional resources.
Both scientific and metaphysical naturalism deny that the soul is transcendental, from the supernatural god-realm, into the empirical world where it resides in our physical beings, and then back into the supernatural realm of the afterlife.
But scientism, regarding the soul as supernatural because people take it be of supernatural origin, makes no sense.
It is a cognoscentum, meaning it has validity as something of which we are conscious, and that as a veridical perception of consciousness it is something perceived which exists--as the next caveat states:
AND that
"consciousness" is "the faculty of awareness—the faculty of [veridically] perceiving that which exists;"(Ayn Rand)
AND that
"that which exists" is "an 'existent' be it a thing, an attribute or an action;" (AR)
AND FURTHER
that "an existent" is "veridical perception and memory, or abstract and ideal e.g. in conception and valuation;" (ibid Runes)
Naturalism, by its epistemology, presumes that humans have made a mistake by defining supernaturalism as that which has existence in the god-realm; that it is misidentified as belonging to a realm that is not of human, organic origins; and further, that accepting this misidentification is the negation of reason where reason is the opposite of the faith associated with the belief in the god-realm.
But scientism goes much further, turning it into a mechanical element of our existence. The website I have been quoting specifically states that they are not making it mechanical, that to the contrary, "the physical universe has produced, in us, marvelously complex and adaptive organisms, with the capacity for self-reflection, wonder, suffering, and joy. Far from mechanizing humanity, naturalism re-enchants the physical world by showing how consciousness and choice don’t involve supernatural processes."
Well, that's nice, but they can't have their cake and eat it, too. Either our "adaptiveness" gives us freedom of choice or it doesn't; either we have free will, or we don't. If we don't, we are not adaptive. If we don't have free will, nor the soul to be the mirror and the conscience of our consciousness existence, then it is true what the scientific naturalists say:
"Instead of supposing people can simply will themselves to be otherwise, we can no longer take or assign ultimate credit or blame for what we do; [and so] we see that there but for circumstances go I, the homeless person in front of us, the convict, or the addict, had we been given their genetic and environmental lot in life."
Accepting scientific naturalism means giving up the "freedom to think or not," because genes, memes, and environment, etc, cause us to be "fully caused," and "fully caused" allows for no free will.
[1] and just as necessary to add the caveats at the end in order to distinguish this Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism from other metaphysical schools and schools of naturalism. But I would add that the terms "strong" and "weak" are unnecessarily vague, and that the categorical names are better, names such as metaphysical; teleonatural; ontological; Christian; humanist; deterministic; non-deterministic; reductive; non-reductive; etc. However, as I have demonstrated, these categories are no more apt to be difinitive than are the words "strong" and "weak."
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Conventional Wisdom v. Ontological Wisdom in Naturalism In the sense of conventional wisdom, naturalism is the metaphysical position that "nature is all there is and all basic truths are truths of nature." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#cite_note-0
But it also involves reducing life to "strictly physical beings [who] don’t exist as [ ] either mental or spiritual," [and where,] "Thought, desires, intentions, feelings, and actions all arise on their own without the benefit of a supervisory self, and [ ] are all the products of a physical system, the brain and the body." [italics added] Naturalism.Org
This reductive monism is an ontological nightmare, and a contradiction.
"Ontology is the theory of objects and their ties. Ontology provides criteria for distinguishing various types of objects (concrete and abstract, existent and non-existent, real and ideal, independent and dependent) and their ties (relations, dependences and predication)." Raul Corazzonhttp://www.formalontology.it/ For an introduction to ontology see: http://www.formalontology.it/
The very nature of distinguishing one thing from another under the same genus, e.g., life, presupposes either a dualism of one sort of another, or non-reductive monism whereby the genus is monistic, and the differentia do not imply dualism, but instead support the axiomatic concept of "Being," i.e., identification of a primary fact of reality, namely that, "You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness." [italics added] Ayn Rand; "Atlas Shrugged"
Under this theory of non-reductive monism we discard "irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought versus action, reality versus desire, the practical versus the moral. [You] will know that the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology—the volitional level of reason and thought—is the basic necessity of man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue." [italics added] "Galt’s Speech", For the New Intellectual; Ayn Rand
In the "strong" sense, dualism or "the idea [ ] that, for some particular domain, there are two fundamental kinds or categories of things or principles," [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP)] has given empirical science the permission it needed to create the dualism of the soul/body dichotomy, of the dichotomy of matter/spirit; and then to divide the material of cognizant life into brain versus body and conclude that what the mind is made of is chemical and electrical signals that cause us to believe we have souls (spirits).
Non-reductive monism is the principle that consciousness as an attribute of biological entities is the means by which they acquire awareness of a reality that exists outside their consciousness and is not dependent on their consciousness for its existence. This monism puts both consciousness and all that is independent of consciousness in the same genus called "Being," or existence; and futher, that existence is the given, is primary, and is not contradictory to a non-material differentia called consciousness that is yet predicated of material. This monism does not admit of such consciousness transcending or succeeding the existence of the life form in which it resides; in other words, 1. it is caused by material actions; 2. it is itself non-material but dependent on matter for its existence; 3. cannot by definition exist without the matter which created it.
It is, therefore, not a belief that souls exist, but instead it is the given that we can be conscious of something that Man calls soul whatever it may be, and that as we are conscious of pleasure and pain in wherever is the seat of our physical emotions, so Man is conscious of something which he calls soul.
Naturalism, done correctly, is not reductive monism. It is the power to overcome this reductionism, as well as the cosmological, mechanical, and moral arguments generally associated with creationism or its equivalent. Non-reductive Naturalism overcomes these, wherein 1.cosmology is taken to mean that which treats of the origin and structure of the universe; [see below] 2.mechanical is taken to mean the explanation of the present and the future in terms of the past; 3. and the moral argument is taken to mean an argument for God based on man's moral nature. This is an objective nature recognized by non-reductive monism, and that it gives Man cause to make moral assertions about existence, but has no basis for conclusions of the supernatural.
Reductive naturalism does not overcome creation theories, but dismisses them as invalid, thereby giving creationism room to argue for validity. Non-reductive naturalism proves the soundness of it's own position, leaving no room for creationism to argue except to do so either by getting off theme or off subject. Reductionists will argue with creationists about creation; non-reductionists will argue only about the ontology of its arguments, placing creationism in the position of being less than the skeptical position of Naturalism. Creationism cannot argue with non-reductive monism because it assumes the moral argument, which requires the extreme position of the defence of faith, which requires relinquishing reason.
"Insofar as is possible," wrote Boethius, "join faith to reason." But they cannot be joined in the extreme because they are diametrically antithetical. No form of creationism can argue for faith without using the principles of deductive reasoning. Such reasoning can only go so far in explaining faith and the moral principle of God; then it comes up short because faith and reason can be joined only as far as is possible, and that possibility comes up short. The argument for faith always relies, in the end, on the belief in faith to explain faith.
1. Cosmology also refers to the structural view that is the world view of physics. However, as to cosmological origin, let me be clear: there is no origin. If existence itself had an origin, then the pre-existing condition of existence would be non-existence, which by definition can have no existence and therefore cannot have been a state of being prior to existence. It is a contradiction of an axiomatic concept.
2.The opposite of mechanical is teleological, i.e., the explanation of the past and the present in terms of the future, i.e., "Becoming." [see above for comparison]
3. The only moral argument acceptable is teleological, meaning it must be the answer to the question of whether--not why--Man needs ethics; and what those ethics must be in terms of the objective nature of Man himself as "that, of which Man is all there is," in terms of deducing the natural, not the super-natural, existence of existence.
Now In Politics Why have SMS (texting) rates doubled since 2005? That is what Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the Senate's antitrust panel, is asking.
"'Maybe because mergers and acquisitions—witness Sprint-Nextel, Verizon-Alltel, and AT&T-BellSouth—have led to less and less competition,' Kohl said. "'I am concerned with whether this consolidation and increased market power by the major carriers has contributed to this doubling of text-messaging rates over the last three years,' wrote Kohl, who gave the carriers a month to justify their higher SMS rates." Yahoo! Tech http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/26695
Government interference in the marketplace is not political naturalism. Naturalism is freedom, the freedom that man started with before thoughts of political power and its coercive corrosion of that freedom became the antithesis of protecting it--in the name of protecting it for the common good.
The common good is the good of the individual, first.
