Sheldrake makes some of the points Nagel makes (discussed over
here). He focuses on ten scientific dogmas, showing evidence against them, and philosophical reasons for why they aren't good assumptions to have (same as Nagel does). He has one chapter for each dogma. So, as a sort of supplement to Nagel's book, I want to include some my notes from the book, and how they might relate to Nagel's arguments.
First, in the Prologue, Sheldrake makes some general points:
Corruption/Role of Science
"In nations both capitalist and Communist, the official academies of science remain the centres of power of the scientific establishment. There is no separation of science and state. Scientists play the role of an established priesthood, influencing government policies on the arts of warfare, industry, agriculture, medicine, education and research." (p. 15) Of course, the implication is that if their assumptions about the nature of the world are wrong, these filter down through all levels of society.
Denial of Free Will
"When the belief in determinism was applied to the activity of the human brain, it resulted in a denial of free will, on the grounds that everything about the molecular and physical activities of the brain was in principle predictable. Yet this conviction rested not on scientific evidence, but simply on the
assumption that everything was fully determined by mathematical laws." (p. 17) But "almost all natural phenomena are probabilistic" and indeterminism is "an essential feature of the physical world." So not even the basis for the assumption was right. But this doesn't necessarily imply free will: "Choices made at random are no freer than if they are fully determined." (p. 18)
So, when Descartes and the gang separated subjective and objective realities, they found that the objective world could be studied and described mathematically. They extrapolated cause-and-effect relationships in the ways matter behaves and interacts. It looked deterministic. The thing is, this was actually a useful conclusion--the world does seem to behave in certain ways according to certain laws or regularities--but the problem comes when they assumed that this applied to everything. Scientists expand it to some universal truth, instead of just a good way of describing and studying a certain part of reality. Because, as it turns out, subatomic events aren't deterministic. And mental causation, or free will, enters the picture as something outside of determinism or indeterminism. It seems to me that free will is something that directs physical cause-and-effect, chooses one option over another, or makes one indeterminate option more likely than another. The "organizing principle" is rooted in consciousness.
Science and Christianity
"The founders of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century [Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Boyle, Newton--all Catholics or Protestants] rejected the animistic view of nature taken for granted in medieval Europe … that the universe was alive …" Instead, they taught that the universe was a soulless machine that was created by God. This mechanistic vision is now the basis of modern science, having rejected the religious vision that gave birth to it. The third option was pretty much eradicated: the idea that the cosmos is like an organism, having mind, body, growth, goals.
Chapter 1
Dogma #1: "Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, "lumbering robots," in Richard Dawkins's vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers." (p. 7)
Chapter Summary: "The mechanistic theory is based on the metaphor or the machine. But it's only a metaphor. Living organisms provide better metaphors for organized systems at all levels of complexity, including molecules, plants and societies of animals, all of which are organized in a series of inclusive levels [holons], in which the whole at each level is more than the sum of the parts, which are themselves wholes at a lower level. Even the most ardent defenders of the mechanistic theory smuggle purposive organizing principles into living organisms in the form of selfish genes or genetic programs. In the light of the Big Bang theory, the entire universe is more like a growing, developing organism than a machine slowly running out of steam." (p. 55)
In other words, reductionism doesn't work. Physics and chemistry can't fully explain what a cell is and all the functions of a cell, or the goals and purposes of a full organism. I can't speak about my drive to understand consciousness in terms of the atoms that make up my body. Sheldrake would say that the reason is not simply because I don't know enough about physics, but because it's actually impossible. The organism needs to be seen in terms of the whole organism, and its various levels of organization.
Soul and Spirit
"For Aquinas, the soul was the form of the body. The soul acted like an invisible mold that shaped the plant or the animal as it grew and attracted it toward its mature form [a telos, as in teleology?]. … In most respects fields [e.g., electromagnetic] have replaced the souls of classical and medieval philosophy. … Bodies and souls were part of nature. Spirits were non-material but interacted with embodied beings through their souls. The human spirit, or "rational soul," according to Christian theology, was potentially open to the Spirit of God." (p. 33)
In his morphic field theory, Sheldrake sees goals and physical forms as telos. An organism's final form is like a non-material template, which DNA/protein/cells "grows into." In other words, it's directed by some process over and above just the laws of physics and chemistry. I like Bryant Shiller's term: directed chemistry. (Question is, what is doing the directing?) So it's actually a non-physical form which acts as an attractor, and gene expression is somehow influenced by this attractor, differentiating cells at the right place in time, expressing genes in certain sequences, until this form is reached. Unlike the physical laws of the universe, this kind of teleological law is historical--it's time-dependent, with changes in both the life of the organism, and of the life system itself.
Sheldrake identifies the self-contradiction inherent in mechanistic thinking. When someone argues that mechanism is real, they're making exceptions of themselves. They actually believe their theories are true, "not just doing what his brain makes him do." (p. 36) In other words, they're acting AS IF they weren't mechanistic machines, but beings capable of reason and coming to grips with the world.
A Third Option
"Yet we are not forced to choose between chance and an external intelligence [to account for life]. There is another possibility. Living organisms may have an internal creativity, as we do ourselves. When we have a new idea or find a new way of doing something, we do not design the idea first, and then put it into our own minds. New ideas just happen, and no one knows how or why." (pp. 37-8) Maybe this creativity is inherent in the universe, as in teleology? "Creativity is inherent in living organisms, or works through them. (p. 44)
Vitalism
The vitalists saw life as truly alive; organizing principles, over and above physics and chemistry, "shaped the forms of living organisms, gave them their purposive behaviour, and underlay the instincts and intelligence of animals." German embryologist Hans Driesch (1867-1941) called this principle
entelechy (
en-telos, in purpose). Aristotle had used this word for the soul. "[Embryos'] entelechy attracted the developing embryos--and even separated parts of embryos--toward the form of the adult." (p. 44-5) Now genes are used to describe and explain everything. But evolutionists still use vitalist metaphors (because they're so difficult to escape).
"The most popular use of a vitalistic metaphor in the name of mechanism is the "genetic program." Genetic programs are explicitly analogous to computer programs, which are intelligently designed by human minds to achieve particular purposes. Programs are purposive, intelligent and goal-directed. They are more like entelechies than mechanisms. The "genetic program" implies that plants and animals are organized by purposive principles that are mind-like, or designed by minds. This is another way of smuggling intelligent design into chemical genes.
"If challenged, most biologists will admit that genes merely specify the sequence of amino acids in proteins, or are involved in the control of protein synthesis. They are not really programs; they are not selfish, they do not mold matter, or shape form, or aspire to immortality. A gene is not "for" a characteristic like a fish's fin or the nest-building behaviour of a weaver bird. But molecular vitalism soon creeps back again. The mechanistic theory of life has degenerated into misleading metaphors and rhetoric." (p. 48)
Holism
Rather than seeing organisms in terms of their parts, holism sees them in terms of their wholes. Jan Smuts saw holism as "the ultimate synthetic, ordering, organizing, regulative activity in the universe, which accounts for all the structural groupings and syntheses in it, from the atom and the physicochemical structures, through the cell and organisms, through Mind in animals to Personality in man. The all-pervading and ever-increasing character of synthetic unity or wholeness in these structures leads to the concept of Holism as the fundamental activity underlying and co-ordinating all others, and to the view of the universe as a Holistic Universe." (p. 49)
Form is an important part of a teleological universe: there need to be tendencies for certain forms to develop, forms capable of consciousness and reason. This is true from the lowest level of matter: "structures of activity, patterns of energetic vibration within fields." What determines the structures and patterns, from the lowest level to the highest, that allow for conscious beings? And the way they all interact and build on top of each other, like "nested hierarchies"?
"In the course of evolution, new holons [wholes made up of parts, a term proposed by Arthur Koestler] arise that did not exist before; for example, the first amino acid molecules, the first living cells, or the first flowers, or the first termite colonies. Since holons are wholes, they must arise by sudden jumps. New levels of organization 'emerge' and their 'emergent properties' go beyond those of the parts that were there before." (p. 51-2) I see a hint of this in Nagel's argument. We have physics and chemistry, acting as a substrate for the world, then the appearance of life on top of that (cells). The organism is a quantum leap away from basic physics and chemistry, and it has new features: consciousness. Then, on top of that, add the reason and personality of human individuals. Each one seems like a sudden jump to new levels of organization.
