A Natural World

A River Runs Through It

lthough distant ancestors might have spoken of an evil river overflowing its banks, we consider such speech nonsense. The river has no purpose to overflow or refrain from overflowing. The river, itself, isn’t even acting. The water which used to confine itself to the banks of the river is just flowing in a different direction. In fact the force of the river banks confined water that wanted to flow freely all of the time. When too much water tries to go down the channel of a stream, the water level rises and the water seeks to run free of its confinements.

To some people, my personifying language in the previous paragraph is annoying. To others, it is fallacious as well. I am simply visiting the natural course of events in a more colorful language. The water does not seek, or want to flow freely at all. It does not try to do anything.

We moderns must learn to distinguish our subjective judgments and objective facts. If the river floods our home town there may be a tendency to believe that it should not have done so, but we must reject that idea if we are going to speak objectively about the events, anything else, we would regard as emotionalism or superstition.

I cannot help but point out that there are judgments that we should and should not make. Regardless of how these ideas are cloaked or “refined” or modernized. But if I were to make any more out of this, I would just be covering ground that I covered in Intellectual Morality.

A river is also not wrong because it goes where we wish it would not. It is not right when it stays where it is. There is a clear understanding in us moderns that natural processes do not yield right and wrong events or states. They deliver a natural result. That is they deliver a result decided by the greatest natural force or a combination of forces in play.

Brain Power

hy do we exempt the natural processes of the brain?

In a naturalist view, if I say that two plus two equals three, such is a product of the natural processes of my brain. Each individual event results from a chemical or electrical or physical event. When electrical impulses take one path among all the dendrite paths in my brain, they do so dictated by small structures or forces taken from the immediate structure at the time or the signals passing.

The signal has no lasting purpose other than to negotiate the current situation. When it travels down the "wrong" path, it has done no more than the river in overflowing its banks.

3 is not the answer we want. It also does not correspond to other factors that we imagine should impact the result. But it cannot be wrong as it was derived from an impersonal, entirely neutral fact of the natural process.

The result of a river overflowing its banks—especially, where it may have been considered evil by our naive ancestors—is destruction of houses, and crops, and lives. The result of a signal traveling down the wrong pathway is an answer that does not fit with our expectation of what an answer to that question would look like. The macro view of the actions of a river, is that a natural process x has been dictated by its nature plus its environment to produce an outcome y. The same is true with our brain honestly providing what we call a wrong answer.

Is our perception wrong? Will we have to come to grips with the idea that ideas are neither right or wrong, but what they are and indicative of natural process?

Objections

have a number of observations about any resolution to this problem. There would be no need to reform our classifications for mental expressions. Such a suggestion to reform them, would imply that such expressions—although dictated by processes of the brain—should be redirected. However suppression of such expressions is also the result of a naturally derived brain process, and also is what it is. There is no resolution as to what should be done, because we lack either wrong or right answers.

If we accept that the brain follows a natural process, and we insist that right and wrong are subjective judgments. We must relinquish the right to criticize the use of right and wrong, or the statement that 2 + 2 = 3 altogether. I argue that intellect is abolished.

However, if we insist that the brain is a natural process and we insist on classifying brain results as right or wrong, then we must accept that, at base, some natural processes can be classified as wrong or right—that is, these labels fit some natural phenomena.

I am too sophisticated to believe that a river’s flow should be considered to be one of these, but I lack the means to discriminate between processes that can and cannot be labeled as such. Ockham’s Razor suggests that we should clearly establish a difference before proposing it.

The only other alternative is to accept that the brain is not constrained to natural process.

Do I hear any takers?

What’s the Difference?

guess that some readers may accuse me of dishonesty here. How can I disqualify a partition between two types of natural events with Ockham’s Razor, yet suggest that brain processes differ from natural processes?

I do so by the same observable facts. In fact they are two takes on the same information. The entities reference in Ockham’s Razor is perhaps more hostile to the second idea, that they are in fact two entirely different spheres. But we must wonder whether first model creates an explanation or not. Nothing is explained in the resolution toward simplicity. It still is just as inexplicable how thought can exhibit a different trait and yet be the same, as it is that it differs entirely from nature.

Naturalists are left with an entirely different problem than those who suggest the opposite. There is no clear or obvious understanding of how mental processes differ from other natural processes. Therefore, the resolution of naturalism, is perhaps dogmatic-or restates the Naturalistic creed, that everything is Natural. It does not resolve what is the obvious difference that we impose on mental function and events that cannot be right or wrong.

The statement that the two differ is what it is. Therefore, suggesting that the two are dissimilar is not something that needs to backed up with empirical facts, it is entirely empirical. The observation of Man throughout the ages is to separate mental activity from promiscuous happenstance. Therefore, we are on solid ground to say that it has been commonly observed to be this way.

One of the problems of the first point of view is that the difference is only apparent. So, should we go by appearances or not? Theists might say, that there is only an apparent lack of God. However, opponents counter that the apparent lack is sufficient. Should not an apparent difference be regarded as a difference unless evidence is put forth to counteract it?

Besides, we lose some power to explain things if the two are joined. Let’s suppose that there is a set of natural effects which are separated into sets where the river and the brain are in different sets. Many a mantra of the Naturalist then becomes meaningless.

Does nature lack purpose, or is it only the set of entities that are in the river’s set that do so? We cannot gain a perspective of Nature by looking at rivers and trees and rocks and stars, because the real set of Nature consists of properties which are differentiated into the case of rivers and the case of brains. Moderns are so fond of showing that purpose is meaningless, because it does not exist for trees and stars and atoms. Such thinking would make wrong and right answers equally meaningless, as well. It suggests that we cannot only look at natural processes to decide the case for the intellect, in any circumstance.

And we’re right back where we started.…

...Unless...we take another shave with Ockham’s Razor: “Plurality should not be posited without necessity,” it says. To follow this advice, I make it the purpose to which I guide the flow of my brain. The difference of worlds, where something is right or wrong and where something is not, where something has purpose and something else does not, could be seen as our necessity.