20
thing “the same thing” as some other thing? But more broadly, they’re ques-
21
tions about ontology, our basic view of what exists in the world. What
22
kinds of things are there at all?
23
When we ask about the identity of the “real” Captain Kirk or Ship of
24
Theseus, a whole bundle of unstated assumptions come along for the ride.
25
We are assuming that there are things called “persons,” and things called
26
“ships,” and that these things have some persistence over time. And every-
27
thing goes swimmingly, until we come up against a puzzle, such as these
28
duplication scenarios, that puts a strain on how we define these kinds of
29
objects.
30
All this matters, not because we’re on the verge of building a working
31
transporter, but because our attempts to make sense of the big picture in-
32
evitably involve different kinds of overlapping ways of talking about the
33
world. We have atoms, and we have biological cells, and we have human
34
beings. Is the notion of “this particular human being” an important one to
35S
how we think about the world? Should categories like “persons” and “ships”
36N
be part of our fundamental ontology at all? We can’t decide whether an
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individual human life actually matters if we don’t know what we mean by
01
“human being.”
02
03
•
04
As knowledge generally, and science in particular, have progressed over the
05
centuries, our corresponding ontologies have evolved from quite rich to
06
relatively sparse. To the ancients, it was reasonable to believe that there were
07
all kinds of fundamentally different things in the world; in modern
08
thought, we try to do more with less.
09
We would now say that Theseus’s ship is made of atoms, all of which are
10
made of protons, neutrons, and electrons— exactly the same kinds of particles
11
that make up every other ship, or for that matter make up you and me. There
12
isn’t some primordial “shipness” of which Theseus’s is one particular exam-
13
ple; there are simply arrangements of atoms, gradually changing over time.
14
That doesn’t mean we can’t talk about ships just because we understand
15
that they are collections of atoms. It would be horrendously inconvenient
16
if, anytime someone asked us a question about something happening in the
17
world, we limited our allowable responses to a listing of a huge set of atoms
18
and how they were arranged. If you listed about one atom per second, it
19
would take more than a trillion times the current age of the universe to
20
describe a ship like Theseus’s. Not really practical.
21
It just means that the notion of a ship is a derived category in our ontol-
22
ogy, not a fundamental one. It is a useful way of talking about certain sub-
23
sets of the basic stuff of the universe. We invent the concept of a ship
24
because it is useful to us, not because it’s already there at the deepest level
25
of reality. Is it the same ship after we’ve gradually replaced every plank? I
26
don’t know. It’s up to us to decide. The very notion of “ship” is something
27
we created for our own convenience.
28
That’s okay. The deepest level of reality is very important; but all the
29
different ways we have of talking about that level are important too.
30
31
•
32
What we’re seeing is the difference between a rich ontology and a sparse
33
one. A rich ontology comes with a large number of different fundamental
34
categories, where by “fundamental” we mean “playing an essential role in
S35
our deepest, most comprehensive picture of reality.”
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01
In a sparse ontology, there are a small number of fundamental categories
02
(maybe only one) describing the world. But there will be very many ways of
03
talking about the world. The notion of a “way of talking” isn’t mere
04
decoration— it’s an absolutely crucial part of how we apprehend reality.
05
06
Love
Books
07
Life
08
Causes
Fire
09
Prime
10
Heaven
Numbers
11
Duty
12
13
Wetness
Earth
Humanity
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God
15
Elephants
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Purpose
Marriage
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20
Flatworms
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22
Energy
Time
Society
23
24
Happiness
25
The
26
Natural
Explanations
World
Color
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28
29
Laws
Virtue
30
Atoms
Chairs
of
31
Nature
32
Cells
33
34
Two different kinds of ontologies, rich and sparse. Boxes are
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fundamental concepts, while circles are derived or emergent
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concepts— ways of talking about the world.
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One benefit of a rich ontology is that it’s easy to say what is “real”— every
01
category describes something real. In a sparse ontology, that’s not so clear.
02
Should we count only the underlying stuff of the world as real, and all the
03
different ways we have of dividing it up and talking about it as merely illu-
04
sions? That’s the most hard-core attitude we could take to reality, sometimes
05
called eliminativism, since its adherents like nothing better t
han to go
06
around eliminating this or that concept from our list of what is real. For an
07
eliminativist, the question “Which Captain Kirk is the real one?” gets an-
08
swered by “Who cares? People are illusions. They’re just fictitious stories we
09
tell about the one true real world.”
10
I’m going to argue for a different view: our fundamental ontology, the
11
best way we have of talking about the world at the deepest level, is extremely
12
sparse. But many concepts that are part of non- fundamental ways we have
13
of talking about the world— useful ideas describing higher- level, macro-
14
scopic reality— deserve to be called “real.”
15
The key word there is “useful.” There are certainly non- useful ways of
16
talking about the world. In scientific contexts, we refer to such non- useful
17
ways as “wrong” or “false.” A way of talking isn’t just a list of concepts; it
18
will generally include a set of rules for using them, and relationships among
19
them. Every scientific theory is a way of talking about the world, according
20
to which we can say things like “There are things called planets, and some-
21
thing called the sun, all of which move through something called space,
22
and planets do something called orbiting the sun, and those orbits describe
23
a particular shape in space called an ellipse.” That’s basically Johannes Kep-
24
ler’s theory of planetary motion, developed after Copernicus argued for
25
the sun being at the center of the solar system but before Isaac Newton
26
explained it all in terms of the force of gravity. Today, we would say that
27
Kepler’s theory is fairly useful in certain circumstances, but it’s not as useful
28
as Newton’s, which in turn isn’t as broadly useful as Einstein’s general the-
29
ory of relativity.
30
31
•
32
The strategy I’m advocating here can be called poetic naturalism. The poet
33
Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not of at-
34
oms.” The world is what exists and what happens, but we gain enormous
S35
insight by talking about it— telling its story— in different ways.
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01
Naturalism comes down to three things:
02
03
1. There is only one world, the natural world.
04
2. The world evolves according to unbroken patterns, the laws
05
of nature.
06
3. The only reliable way of learning about the world is by ob-
07
serving it.
08
09
Essentially, naturalism is the idea that the world revealed to us by scien-
10
tific investigation is the one true world. The poetic aspect comes to the fore
11
when we start talking about that world. It can also be summarized in three
12
points:
13
14
1. There are many ways of talking about the world.
15
2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one an-
16
other and with the world.
17
3. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of
18
talking.
19
20
A poetic naturalist will agree that both Captain Kirk and the Ship of
21
Theseus are simply ways of talking about certain collections of atoms
22
stretching through space and time. The difference is that an eliminativist
23
will say “and therefore they are just illusions,” while the poetic naturalist
24
says “but they are no less real for all of that.”
25
Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars coined the term manifest image to refer to
26
the folk ontology suggested by our everyday experience, and scientific image
27
for the new, unified view of the world established by science. The manifest
28
image and the scientific image use different concepts and vocabularies, but
29
ultimately they should fit together as compatible ways of talking about the
30
world. Poetic naturalism accepts the usefulness of each way of talking in its
31
appropriate circumstances, and works to show how they can be reconciled
32
with one another.
33
Within poetic naturalism we can distinguish among three different
34
kinds of stories we can tell about the world. There is the deepest, most fun-
35S
damental description we can imagine— the whole universe, exactly de-
36N
scribed in every microscopic detail. Modern science doesn’t know what that
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description actually is right now, but we presume that there at least is such
01
an underlying reality. Then there are “emergent” or “effective” descriptions,
02
valid within some limited domain. That’s where we talk about ships and
03
people, macroscopic collections of stuff that we group into individual enti-
04
ties as part of this higher- level vocabulary. Finally, there are values: concepts
05
of right and wrong, purpose and duty, or beauty and ugliness. Unlike
06
higher- level scientific descriptions, these are not determined by the scien-
07
tific goal of fitting the data. We have other goals: we want to be good peo-
08
ple, get along with others, and find meaning in our lives. Figuring out the
09
best way to talk about the world is an important part of working toward
10
those goals.
11
Poetic naturalism is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility. The raw
12
materials of life are given to us by the natural world, and we must work to
13
understand them and accept the consequences. The move from description
14
to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what
15
should happen, is a creative one, a fundamentally human act. The world is
16
just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any
17
judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things
18
that we bring to it.
19
20
•
21
Poetic naturalism may seem like an appealing idea— or it may seem like an
22
absurd bunch of hooey— but it certainly leaves us with a lot of questions.
23
Most obviously, what is the unified natural world that underlies every-
24
thing? We’ve been bandying about words like “atoms” and “particles,” but
25
we know from discussions of quantum mechanics that the truth is a bit
26
more slippery than that. And we certainly don’t claim to know the ultimate
27
final Theory of Everything— so how much do we actually know? And what
28
makes us think that it’s enough to justify the dreams of naturalism?
29
There are equally many, if not more, questions about connecting that
30
underlying physical world to our everyday reality. There are “Why?” ques-
31
tions: Why this particular universe, with these particular laws of nature?
32
Why does the universe exist at all? There are also “Are you sure?” questions:
33
Are we sure that a unified physical reality could naturally give rise to life as
34
we know it? Are we sure it is sufficient to describe consciousness, perhaps
S35
the most perplexing aspect of our manifest world? And then there are the
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“How?” questions: How do we decide what ways of talking are the best?
02
How do we agree on judgmental questions about right and wrong? How do
03
we find meaning and purpose in a world that is purely natural? Above all,
04
how do we know any of this?
05
Our task is to put together a rich, nuanced picture that reconciles all the
06
different aspects of our experience. To put ourselves in the right frame of
07
mind, in the next few chapters we’ll survey some of the ideas that helped
08
set humanity on the road to naturalism.
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15
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The World Moves by Itself
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The Big Picture Page 4