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A Big Picture for Everyone
The Need for Naturalistic Reason
We need shared beliefs and values. There’s no other way to live at peace with one another.
But in America today, shared culture is crumbling. This has not gone unnoticed. Everyone feels it. Things are falling apart. And it is frightening—because the center may not hold.
To cooperate with one another, we need a way to settle disagreements about what to believe and value. I mean a way that doesn’t depend on coercion, be it bullying, deception, threat of violence, or going along with a lynch mob.
That method used to be arguing with one another. People of good will would discuss what to do, give reasons for their views, and find a way to work together in pursuit of common goals.
But disillusionment with Reason is why things are falling apart. Arguments can’t settle disputes about what to do because arguments depend on premises, and even basic premises are in dispute. America is dividing into opposing political tribes, and it’s so complete that even facts about current events are in dispute.
What we need is a Big Picture that we all share. I mean a Big Picture with a place for everything, including values. That would make the significance of everything clear. But for a Big Picture to settle our disagreements, we would have to share it. With everything in perspective, we would argue from the same point of view, and we’d find a way to agree about what’s true and what’s good.
In most of human history, that function was served by religion. In Western civilization, it was provided by knowledge of Absolute Truth, or metaphysics, since religion was metaphysical. But now, everyone knows that it’s foolish to believe there’s any such thing as Absolute Truth. Even theists admit that belief in God depends on faith. Anyone who claims to know the True with a capital T is seen as a potential tyrant.
This predicament is impossible. We need a Big Picture that everyone can share. But to have it, we must either take a leap of faith or submit to totalitarianism.
Science may seem to offer an escape from this dilemma because nearly everyone considers it a reliable source of knowledge. But even science has become suspect. “Follow the science” is now a political rallying cry—making science itself seem partisan. And those who don’t rally to the cry justify their refusal by portraying science as a never-ending inquiry in which the solution to one puzzle always turns up another one.
But there is hope in science. What makes scientific knowledge reliable is the empirical method. That is basically just the method of letting the world itself determine our beliefs about it as much as possible. That’s what we naturally do when we want to know something. We trust perception and infer what else is true as the best explanation of what we perceive. That method could give us what we need.
Suppose we had a science that explained everything? That would be a picture that’s big enough to settle all our disagreements regarding facts and values. We would all accept it because it would be known empirically. And we could be certain about its truth because it would leave no grounds unexplained from which it could be doubted. Such a complete scientific explanation would draw everyone into agreement. No one would have to submit to a dictator.
Clearly, it’s not impossible for science to explain everything. Indeed, that’s what science was expected to do when it began as the Newtonian revolution. But now it sounds too good to be true. Even if it is possible, it’s surely not available now.
It is, however, available now. There’s a discovery that physicists are on the verge of making that will turn science into a Big Picture that everyone accepts. And it will cause a revolution that solves all the puzzles of physics as well as the puzzles confronting other branches of science—and even all the puzzles that have accumulated as philosophy, the so-called dumping ground for unanswerable problems. In fact, disputes of all kinds will be settled—even disputes about values, since this scientific revolution will explain the nature of the good.
Of course, it’s easy to make predictions. It’s usually harder to justify them. And justifying a prediction as unlikely as this one doesn’t even seem possible.
But there is an argument that justifies it. That’s what I’m introducing here. And it is, I believe, a compelling argument.
I realize, however, that it will take courage to consider it. It flies in the face of what everyone knows: there is no such a thing as Absolute Truth—or, at least, not one that’s within reach now.
I intend this presentation of my argument to challenge you to consider it. Sapere aude! Dare to know! That was the motto for the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The completion of the project of science is what my argument predicts. Though that seems unlikely, have the courage to consider my argument. If it is on the right track, it is detailed enough to cause what it predicts.
It begins with a discovery that will solve a problem in physics that is so basic that it is only beginning to bother physicists. It is a problem about the nature of mathematical truth, and I predict that an empirical discovery about how it is true will solve the seemingly intractable puzzles of modern physics. That will enable all the less basic branches of science to solve the intractable puzzles confronting them. And what is more, those discoveries will make it possible to solve all the unsolvable problems dumped in philosophy.
In short, I am predicting a scientific revolution that will cause a revolution in culture that will give us a Big Picture that we can all share. It will settle all our basic disputes. The center will hold. Things will not fall apart.
In one sense, the discovery that I predict physicists will make is not all that surprising. It does not contradict our ordinary understanding of the natural world, and it can be understood in the faculty of imagination built into our mammalian brains. I call it naturalistic imagination because it enables us to understand the natural world. It enables us to think about the relations of objects in space, including our own bodies, and to predict how motion changes their spatial relations. What physics will discover is just a new fact about space. Looking back, people will wonder why this fact wasn’t recognized earlier.
The discovery is that space is a substance that interacts with matter. That may not seem revolutionary because no one doubts the existence of space, and the belief that space is a substance has had defenders ever since Newton’s time. But this discovery is revolutionary because it recognizes that since space is a substance, it can interact with other substances. In particular, it can inter-act with matter. That is revolutionary because if change is constituted by interactions of space and matter, mathematics is true because it corresponds to the natural world, and that has sweeping consequences.
Physics is the basic branch of science, and ever since Newton, the success of physics has come from discovering laws of nature that are described mathematically. They can be confirmed conclusively by careful measurements of what they predict. Of course, what is found can also disconfirm them. But that just points to a special status that mathematics has in physics. Unlike laws of physics, physicists assume that mathematics can’t be falsified by what they find in the world, and they use it as a language to describe regularities. While the truth of physical laws is known by perception, the truth of mathematics is supposed to be known by a faculty of rational intuition, independently of what is perceived.
That assumption must be given up. If space is a substance interacting with matter, that is what corresponds to mathematics, and the truth of mathematics can depend on its correspondence to the natural world. Space is a container of matter because it acts on matter by giving bits of matter spatial relations to one another. But it is not just a container because matter can also act on parts of space in ways that affect other ways that space acts on matter. That is revolutionary because it means that interactions of space and matter can explain why mathematics is true. All the regularities about change generated by interactions of space and matter are quantitatively precise. This is a consequence of their essential natures, the geometrical structure of space and matter having an inherent quantitative property. The ways that bits of matter and parts of space coincide have geometrical structures because that is the only way that they can change, so the regularities described by laws of physics must be quantitative. If that is how mathematics is true, there is a way to solve the problems of modern physics, and it will trigger a revolution in science.
Physicists have only recently acknowledged the puzzling nature of mathematics. It began in 1959 when Eugene Wigner called attention to the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” As he put it, “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”
The puzzle about the appropriateness of mathematics is solved by recognizing that the natural world is constituted by space and matter. This discovery depends on the assumption that the natural world is constituted by substances, and following the pre-Socratics, I mean entities that are self-subsistent and exist in definite ways as they endure through time. Since they explain what is found in the world by constituting it, they are causes of existence, and since ontology is the study of existence, I call them ontological causes. The discovery that mathematical truth depends on its correspondence to the natural world is an empirical discovery that will be confirmed by discovering how these ontological causes explain the laws of physics and thereby solving the problems in modern physics.
If mathematics is a language used to formulate laws of physics, it is more basic than those laws, and if its truth depends on its correspondence to substances constituting the world, space and matter must have powers that explain the laws. That is, their interactions must generate the regularities described by laws of physics. As it turns out, there are powers of space and matter that are expressed by generating all the regularities described by the laws of modern physics. That is shown in quantitative detail by the argument that predicts this scientific revolution. But when physicists discover this explanation, they will reduce the laws of physics to ontological causes, and ontology will displace physics as the basic branch of empirical science.
This will solve the problems of modern physics because what makes its laws puzzling is that we can’t understand how they are true of the natural world. For example, we can’t understand in naturalistic imagination what corresponds to the probabilistic laws of quantum physics. Nor what corresponds to spacetime or the curved spacetime of gravitational physics. But since naturalistic imagination enables us to understand the geometrical structure of space and how time passes, we can understand how interactions of space and matter generate regularities. So, if we can picture how their interactions generate the regularities described by laws of physics, we can understand all the powers by which they interact, and the problems of modern physics will be solved. The reduction of physics to ontology will solve all the puzzles of modern physics—including what is considered the most pressing theoretical problem, the mathematical disparity between quantum and gravitational physics. It will explain the relation between them ontologically, that is, by how they correspond to interactions of the same two substances.
The ontological reduction of physics will cause revolutions in other branches of science because interactions of space and matter also generate regularities not recognized by physics that explain the regularities that they study. When the pre-Socratic philosophers set out in ancient Greece to discover a naturalistic explanation of what they found in the world, they called what they were seeking the first cause because they expected it to explain everything, and since the first cause included all the substances constituting the natural world, they assumed that ontological causes explain all the causes responsible for what happens, called efficient causes. And since the reduction of physics to ontology will reveal a kind of efficient cause not recognized by physics, specialized sciences will be able to solve all the problems confronting them. Indeed, ontological causes will reveal a unique kind of efficient cause that enables science to explain the history of philosophy and cut the Gordian knot of philosophical problems.
Events are explained by efficient causes, and the original goal of science at the Enlightenment was to explain every kind of event in the natural world. Efficient causes depend on regularities about change, and specialized sciences study regularities about change that are less general than physics. Puzzles confront them because the regularities described by laws of physics do not entail all the kinds of efficient causes needed to explain what happens in their fields. All the explanations given in specialized sciences are incomplete.
These puzzles will be solved by ontological causes because they reveal a kind of efficient cause not recognized by physics. Since substances endure through time, they generate the regularities that justify efficient causes, and the reduction of physics to spatio-materialism will reveal that there is a kind of efficient cause at work in nature that physics does not recognize. Interactions of space and matter explain physical causes because they depend on the regularities described by laws of physics. But interactions of space and matter generate other regularities as well, including one in which unchanging geometrical structures of matter constrain what happens by physical causes. The combination of geometrical and physical efficient causes fills all the explanatory gaps in science. It entails a regularity that includes the origin of life, and since it reveals the essential nature of life, it even explains the nature of the good. It turns out that evolution is progressive, and a science based on ontology will discover a series of inevitable evolutionary stages that lead to the existence of beings like us, that is, language-using mammals with a faculty of naturalistic imagination that enables them to understand all these explanations.
These explanations illustrate how the discovery of the nature of mathematical truth has sweeping consequences. Explanations depend on determinism. That is, every event must have a cause. But that does not mean that every event is determined by physical causes. Since a science based on physics tries to explain everything by laws of physics, it seems that every event can be explained by deriving a prediction of it from earlier conditions and mathematically formulated laws of nature. But that is not how events are explained by a science based on ontology. What happens almost always depends on how geometrical causes constrain physical causes. That’s something that we can understand in naturalistic imagination, the faculty built into our mammalian brains. But it can’t be understood by carrying out mathematical derivations from laws of physics, as scientists recognize when they use information to explain the regularities they study. What will enable specialized sciences to explain the kinds of events they study is the kind of determinism revealed by ontological causes that explain the truth of mathematics.
The goal of science when it was spawned by the Enlightenment was to explain all the regularities in the natural world, and though it was out of reach for physical science, it will be accomplished by ontological science. It will explain the existence of language-using mammals and the societies in which they live. But at the beginning of science, there was one thing in the natural world that did not seem to need an explanation. I mean what is called philosophy in Western civilization. It calls for an explanation because it is the origin of a science that can explain everything.
The goal of philosophy was to find a perfect kind of knowledge, called wisdom. But there were two ways of pursuing it in ancient Greece. One was the pre-Socratic attempt to discover the first cause. The other began with Plato, who thought there was a shortcut to perfect knowledge, called metaphysics, that would vindicate Socrates, his teacher, who believed that to know the good is to do the good. Plato believed that Reason was a faculty of rational intuition that enabled us to know Reality behind Appearance, and since Reality would explain everything in Appearance, metaphysics would discover the nature of the good in which Socrates believed.
Western metaphysicians all explained Reason as a faculty of intuition. In the modern era, they saw Reason as a faculty in the mind, so mind seemed to be a substance with a basically different nature from body and the natural world. Thus, modern metaphysicians confronted an ontological problem called mind-body dualism, which doomed modern metaphysics and baffles philosophers to this day. But the mind-body problem is caused by a false belief about the nature of knowledge, and ontological science will solve that problem by correcting that error. It is the belief that Reason is a faculty of rational intuition, the same error that allows physicists to believe that they know the truth of mathematics independently of perception. So the ontological solution to the mind-body problem shows how a false metaphysical belief enabled physics to be so successful. And the explanation of how it could seem that mathematics is known by rational intuition is another consequence of the discovery that space is a substance that interacts with matter.
Metaphysicians were intuitionists. They assumed that all knowledge depends on faculties of intuition. There is no such thing as a faculty of intuition in the spatio-material world, thus their attempts to show how Reason knows Reality behind Appearance were all bound to fail. But intuition seems to be what causes knowledge because of an illusion inherent in consciousness, and the illusion is exposed when ontological scientists explain how consciousness is part of the natural world.
By consciousness, I mean the phenomenal character of experience, by contrast to reflection, the power of language-using mammals to describe the psychological states causing their behavior as part of the process of causing it. For example, when we perceive the world, sensory qualia, such as colors and sounds, are immediately present. In a world constituted by space and matter, such phenomenal properties can be part of the natural world. Matter can have a phenomenal way of existing in itself, and since bits of matter have spatiotemporal structures when they coincide with parts of space, the phenomenal way that a single bit of matter exists in itself can be complex enough to explain the configurations of qualia in phenomenal space that are immediately present when mammals perceive the natural world. Since ontological scientists will have discovered that the basic structure of the mammalian brain serves as a faculty of naturalistic imagination, they will be able to explain consciousness as what it is like to be a particular bit of matter that helps constitute the mammalian brain.
This explanation of how consciousness is part of the natural world poses a problem about how we know that we are conscious because the immediate presence of phenomenal properties is not an efficient cause. It does not determine anything that happens in the world. What happens depends on efficient causes, and it merely helps constitute what happens. But that’s enough for ontologists to explain metaphysics because there is an illusion inherent in consciousness. Since mammals are inside consciousness, it seems to them that phenomenal properties are known because they are immediately present. But since that is just what it is like to be a mammal, I call it the illusion of intuitionism, and that illusion makes it possible for language-using mammals to argue about metaphysics. When metaphysicians can assume falsely that knowledge depends on intuition, ontological scientists can use their explanation of the cause of evolution to show how the exchange of metaphysical arguments causes a stage of evolution, called the metaphysical stage, that follows the stage represented by other civilizations on Earth.
Though consciousness itself is not an efficient cause, the illusion inherent in consciousness makes it a pseudo-efficient cause, and so the ontological explanation of the truth of mathematics explains how a false belief about knowledge derived from metaphysics could make physics so successful for centuries before running into trouble. Philosophers believed that knowledge of mathematics comes from a faculty of rational intuition because they could formulate axioms of arithmetic and geometry that seemed to be self-evident. But that is just what it is like to be a mammal using its faculty of naturalistic imagination to describe the structure of space and the rules of counting. By recognizing that consciousness is a pseudo-efficient cause, therefore, ontological science will explain how metaphysics enabled physics to be so successful with the empirical method that it inspired others to use the empirical method in the study of less general regularities and eventually led to ontological science.
The discovery that space is a substance that interacts with matter could, therefore, cause a scientific revolution in which everything in the world is explained. That’s possible because it would explain all the kinds of causes at work in the natural world and serve as the foundation of every possible kind of explanation.
What replaces laws of physics at the bottom are ontological causes. They entail efficient causes, and since one is not recognized by physics, they explain all the regularities studied by specialized sciences. And since ontological causes reveal that consciousness is a pseudo-efficient cause, they solve the mind-body problem and cut the Gordian knot of philosophy.
That is how the discovery about space predicted here could give us the Big Picture we need. It leads to a scientific explanation of everything that would resolve all our disagreements. Regardless where we may start, it would draw us all to the same conclusions. We would even agree about values, since the nature of life would reveal the nature of the good. And it would be a Big Picture that everyone could accept because all the discoveries are empirical. They are all based on letting the world itself determine our beliefs about the world as much as possible.
This is a bold claim. And in the current cultural climate, it may be the most unbelievable prediction that anyone could make. But if you’ve followed me this far, you can see that it’s not impossible. It comes down to a discovery about the nature of space, since that’s what triggers this revolution. Space is a basic aspect of the natural world, and it would hardly be surprising if an empirical discovery that explained the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in physics solved its puzzles and revealed the causes of all possible kinds of explanations. The unity and completeness of that Big Picture is itself a reason for believing it.
I call my argument naturalistic Reason because when ontological scientists explain Western civilization as the metaphysical stage of evolution, they will have to discount the illusion of intuitionism in themselves in order to explain how intuitionistic metaphysical arguments cause the stage, so they will find themselves knowing Reality behind Appearance. But since ontological scientists use the empirical method, they will insist that the cognitive power by which they have perfect knowledge be called naturalistic Reason. I use that as the title of a trilogy in which all these arguments are presented in detail. This diagram represents the relations of the arguments of the three volumes as parts of the Big Picture. The triangle labelled Ontology stands for Volume I: Unification of Physics. The arrow from Ontology to Science represents Volume II: Unification of Science. And Volume III: Unification of Science and Philosophy, is represented by two arrows pointing at the circle named Philosophy, one from Ontology and the other from Science. I call it natReason for short, and additional information is available here at natReason.com.
I am also publishing a shorter work, an executive summary of the entire argument, called Sapere Aude, using the motto of the First Enlightenment to promote the Second Enlightenment. At approximately 150 pages, it is a high-altitude view of the Big Picture that shows the unity and completeness of all the main steps in the trilogy. It is meant for those who want to read about it but are daunted by the prospect of reading three volumes.
But even the trilogy is not necessarily as long as it seems because there are two pathways through it. One lets general readers travel from the top of one mountain over a bridge to the top of the next on a superhighway. The other pathway is for technical readers in relevant fields. Where each bridge begins, there’s a road that splits off and leads down through the valley to the next mountain, answering the questions and countering the doubts that will occur to those who are more familiar with technical issues. (Preview the Table of Contents for each book and read the Trilogy Introduction. And all four books—the three volumes of Naturalistic Reason and Sapere Aude—are available at the Bookstore.)
What I am promising is so improbable that you deserve an account of where it comes from. It is the conclusion of a project I have pursued for over 45 years as a philosopher, 25 years while teaching the history of philosophy and philosophy of science, and 20 years in retirement from teaching.
Ever since I was a teenager, I had the hunch that space played a role that was overlooked. I began in the 1970s by writing a book I would now describe as an explanation of the function of the mammalian brain as a faculty of naturalistic imagination. My goal was to distinguish social science from natural science as having a different way of understanding that comes from using language to reflect on psychological states. Those discoveries suggested an explanation of phenomenal properties that led to another book defending an early form of the interpretation of the history of philosophy presented in Volume III. That’s where I was 40 years ago, and knowing that my solution to the mind-body problem depended on my hunch about space, I set out to show how its recognition would solve puzzles in physics, evolution, thermodynamics, biology, and neuroscience. I was working my way down from my conclusion about mind though all the sciences to the theory of causation presented here.
I didn’t feel much urgency about publishing what I discovered along the way because I thought I would be finished in a decade—or at most two. But only now, as I turn 83, have I completed the defense of my solution to the problem of mind in the way that I had expected all along was possible. This is my publication of it.
I have tried numerous times to publish what I had written, but without much success. My discoveries are heresies in relevant fields, and in the academic world generally, even the claim to solve a basic puzzle is a heresy. But having discovered a way of making progress on my own, I plugged away, and this Big Picture for Everyone is the argument showing how my discoveries all fit together.
I don’t know what to expect from publishing it in this way. I’m pretty confident about my prediction of a scientific revolution. It is inevitable, if space is a substance that interacts with matter, because the mystery about the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics will eventually lead physicists to consider this possibility. But my argument for this prediction is so complete that I even hold out hope that its publication will cause that scientific revolution.
So, I leave it up to you. Though endarkenment is setting in, I hope that some of you will have the courage to consider my argument. If you hold out any hope of the rational pursuit of truth settling disagreements peacefully, you know that it’s your duty to follow this argument far enough to refute it. If my prediction is false, it should be easy to show where I have gone wrong. There must be something I say that is contradicted by what perception finds in the natural world. Or else there must be something wrong with the logic of my argument. All you have to do is point out where that occurs. And if anyone does that, I will have to apologize for having wasted your time.
Of course, I don’t claim that every conclusion I defend is exactly correct. I’d be surprised if there weren’t some conclusions that need revision. And the trilogy itself leaves some technical issues to be resolved by research projects. But I am confident that this way of explaining all the kinds of causes at work in the natural world is correct, and the unity of that argument convinces me that I will be defending it until my faculties fail me. (About the Author.)