Artifacts and non-naturalism

One of the reasons to be suspicious of artifacts is that it seems magical to think we have the power to create a new object just by thinking about things a certain way while manipulating stuff. If Bob gets some clay and exercise his fingers by randomly kneading it, he doesn’t make a sculpture or any other new object out of it. But if his identical twin Carl intends to shape the clay into a sculpture, and in doing so moves his fingers in exactly the same way that Bob did, and produces exactly the same shape, then—assuming artifacts exist—he creates a new object, a sculpture. It seems magical that our thoughts should affect what object exists in the world, even when the thoughts make no difference to our manipulation of the world.

When I discussed arguments with this in my Mid-Sized Objects graduate seminar, I found, however, that there was a lot of friendliness towards the view that, yes, we are capable of this magic, though some demurred at the word “magic”. And in particular, a student pointed out that we are in the image of a God who can create.

This has made me think that a non-naturalist can think that our thoughts have effects that are not screened by the movements of our bodies. Thus, it could well be that Carl’s thoughts causes the world to be different. For instance, on a hylomorphic view, Carl could have the power to create a scu;tural form for a piece of clay by his thoughts. Or on a variant of Markosian’s brute composition view, Carl could have the power simply to cause a new object composed of the clay.

In fact, this suggests an interesting new argument against physicalism, where physicalism is understood as the claim that all causal powers reduce to those of physics. Intuitively, the correct ontology includes more things than van Inwagen’s ontology of particles and organisms and but not all the things from the mereological universalist’s bloated ontology. In particular, intuitively, the correct ontology does include Carl’s new sculpture, but Bob hasn’t produced anything new, and hence the correct ontology seems to require a non-natural “magical” power over composition facts to be found in Carl’s (and presumably, albeit in this context unexercised, Bob’s) mind. And if our ontology is to include, as common-sense would suggest, galaxies, planets, mountains and rocks, we need powers in things to produce such objects—i.e., to ensure that their particulate parts do compose something—and these powers are not to be found in physics.

Markosian’s apparently preferred version of the brute composition view can almost accommodate this. On that version, the composition facts supervene on the arrangement of particles: there are infinitely many necessary truths that specify which arrangements of particles compose. But these necessary truths would include lots of arbitrary parameters (e.g., encoding the difference between some stones that are just lying there and a hillock). We don’t want necessary truths with arbitrary parameters. It is much better if any such arbitrary parameters are relocated to the laws of nature or, better, the causal powers of things.

The magical

Magical things happen. The glorious glow of the sunset, the elegant glide of the turkey vulture or the delight of conversation with friends. Such experiences of the magical are what gives life its zest.

To experience these things as magical is to experience the events as going over and beyond the merely natural. Thus, if naturalism is true, such experiences are all deceptive. And that makes naturalism a very dour doctrine indeed.

Yet even if naturalism is false, how can these experiences be of events going beyond the merely natural? A sunset is, after all, just light refracted in the atmosphere as the part of the earth on which one stands turns away from the sun. So there is something more going on than the physics describes. This something more could be intrinsic or relational or both. Perhaps the sunset reflects something much deeper beyond it. Or perhaps there is more in the very sunset than the physics describes.

Magic, science and the supernatural

We take for granted that magic involves the supernatural and science does not. At the same time, we believe that there is no such thing as magic. Hence, we believe that magical claims are somehow different from merely false but scientific claims, such as that phlogiston makes things burnable. I want to argue that this belief is questionable.

Consider three different claims:

1. Dancing a certain kind of dance typically causes rain.
2. Shooting UV light into clouds typically causes rain.
3. Shooting silver iodide into clouds typically causes rain.

Claim (1) certainly seems magical. Claim (3) is not a magical claim, because, I shall assume, it is true, and there is no magic. I shall assume that claims (1) and (2) are false.

But now here is the puzzle. Why is (1) supposed to be a supernatural claim (being on the face of it a claim of magic), while (2) is not?

There is, after all, another way of looking at this. We simply have three cause-and-effect claims, two of them false, and each claim is just as much a "scientific kind of claim" as the others. Observe, for instance, that each of the claims is just as much subject to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation as the others. Each of the claims posits a causal relationship between physical events.

Suggestion 1: Claim (1) is supernatural because it is presumed to be believed on non-scientific grounds, while (2) and (3) are presumed to be believed on scientific grounds.

Response: that a claim is believed on non-scientific grounds does not make it a supernatural claim. If Francine hallucinates Apollo telling her that the structure of benzene is a ring, the object of her belief about benzene is still a quite natural fact. Nor will talking about esoteric traditions be relevant, since purely natural scientific facts can be and in fact are passed through esoteric traditions (think of trade secrets through the ages up to the present). It is a variant of the genetic fallacy to think that a claim has a particular content because it comes from a particular source.

Suggestion 2: The person who believes (1) has a causal story connecting the dance to the rain by means of supernatural entities, while those who believe (2) or (3) either have no story as to the connection between the shooting of UV or silver iodide into clouds (they might simply have noticed, respectively, a spurious or genuine correlation) or else their story involves natural entities.

Response: One problem with this solution is the assumption that the culture that believes in a particular magical action, say a magical dance, needs to have a theory as to how the action produces its effect. But the culture need not have any kind of theory. They may simply believe that dancing a waltz causes rain to come, and that rain causes corn to sprout. We would not say that the second part of this belief involves the supernatural, and why should we say that the first part does? It is not uncommon for scientists to have no explanation for an effect, and so if the culture believes (1) but has no explanation for it, that does not suffice to make the claim supernatural.

Perhaps, though, the difference is that the scientist thinks there is a further explanation, and that this explanation is natural. But this is not characteristic of all science. A scientist may believe that a certain law, such as the law of gravitation, is basic and lacks any further explanation. Or a scientist may be agnostic on whether the law has any further explanation.

If I am right, then either magical claims need not involve the supernatural, or else what seem to be paradigmatic cases of magical claims are not always magical claims (claims such as that a dance causes rain, that a spell causes blindness, etc.).

Let us go a bit further, though, and consider the case where the proponent of (1) does have a further explanation. Do we have to conclude that then the claim is supernatural? Not at all—it surely depends on what that further explanation is. If the further explanation is that the dance stirs up the air, and the stirred up air stirs up the clouds, promoting condensation, then plainly the explanation is not magical. But let us take a more magical explanation. Maybe the idea is that the dance exudes a power that goes upward and pulls the clouds in. Again, though, this need not be a supernatural claim.

What if the claim sounds even more supernatural? Perhaps the people believe that the clouds are intelligent and respond to requests when these requests are made in a particular way. But why should that be a magical claim? Suppose Patrick believes that his goldfish is intelligent and responds to requests when these requests are made in a particular way. He need not thereby be attributing any supernatural qualities to the goldfish. In fact, we can go a bit further. Patrick either believes this of all goldfish or of just some. In the latter case, it may well be that he thinks these goldfish are special, supernaturally gifted, etc. But if he believes all goldfish are intelligent and respond to appropriately made requests, he most likely (though not necessarily) thinks that it is a natural feature of goldfish to be intelligent. Since the members of the culture I described probably believe all clouds, or all clouds of some specific type (maybe they think you need to be more wispy to be intelligent?), to be intelligent, they seem to be ascribing a natural property to the clouds.

But suppose that the folk have a story involving intermediate causes that are powerful beings like demons. Maybe the dance somehow binds demons to do their will, and the demons fly up to the sky and wring rain out of clouds. If that is so, we have more hope of thinking that the explanation involves the supernatural—but only if we have some reason to think that the demons which the folk believe in are supernatural (it would not be a supernatural explanation if the folk falsely believed vultures to be intelligent and to fly up to the clouds and wring rain out of them in response to a dance). If the folk believe they can bind the demons through dances, then they are likely to believe that causes within the realm of nature (a dance) affect the demons. Moreover, it seems likely that they think there are rules that govern demonic behavior, and the magician, by knowing these rules, is able to get the requisite results. But demons like that, manipulable demons, sound like are part of the natural realm, interacting with the natural realm in lawlike ways. What reason do we have for thinking that the laws that are alleged to bind their behavior should be thought of as supernatural laws as opposed to natural laws? Sure, some of these laws apply to the demons but don't affect birds, bees and mountains, and some of the laws that apply to birds, bees and mountains don't apply to demons. But there is nothing absurd about the idea of natural laws that govern only particles of a certain type—e.g., charged particles, or particles of dark matter.

So even fairly elaborate alleged explanations of (1) involving entities like demons or intelligent clouds do not render (1) supernatural.

Suggestion 3: Intelligence is supernatural, and explanations involving intelligent beings like demons are thus supernatural.

Response: If so, then we have to admit that at least one of the sciences—psychology—deals with the supernatural, and the distinction between the supernatural and the scientific falls apart. This suggestion seems a non-starter.

Suggestion 4: It would require a violation of a law of nature for dances to cause rain, and hence the mechanism behind (1) must be taken to be supernatural.

Response: I think something like this suggestion may be what is going on in our minds when we assume that (1) involves the supernatural. But I think here we have a serious confusion. Claim (1) is in fact false. Now if we found out that (1) is true, we might be tempted to posit a supernatural explanation for it. But that is beside the point. Consider claim (2) which is just as much contrary to the laws of nature as (1) is (I assume). We do not consider (2) to be supernatural because it is contrary to the laws of nature. Rather, we consider it to be false.

Final comments: I think (and this is by no means original) that one of the characteristics of magic is a lawlikeness. You do this, and that results. This lawlikeness of magic makes for a prima facie claim that claims of magic are not at all supernaturalistic. We read them as supernaturalistic simply because they violate the laws of nature we believe in, but they need not violate the laws of nature that the believers in magic believe in.

This shows a crucial difference between magic and monotheistic beliefs in miracles, creation, answers to prayer, etc. The monotheist (typically—there are some unfortunate exceptions) believes God acts freely. He creates as he chooses, not because he is bound to by some necessitating law. He is supernatural because he has a freedom to act that transcends nature. At the same time, the miracles are not forced on him by anything like a law of nature, in the way that someone might believe a dance forces a demon to cause rain. The more personal freedom, including freedom to act not in accord with the laws of nature, we attribute to the deity, the less magical the belief becomes.

Granted, on traditional monotheistic views, God must keep his promises. Thus, there is a kind of law that is binding on him. But it is a moral law, binding on him because of his perfect goodness, and in light of promises freely and knowingly undertaken.

If anything, then, typical magical beliefs are closer to scientific beliefs about nature than to monotheistic beliefs about divine action.

Magic and Humean theories of causation

Humean theories of causation make causal facts supervene on facts about correlations between events. The simplest theory was Hume's: A causes B if and only if A type events always cause B type events. Perhaps the best contemporary version is Lewis's: (1) the laws of nature are true propositions which optimize a balance of brevity and informativeness; (2) similarity of worlds is defined in large part by local sameness of law; (3) counterfactuals are defined in terms of similarity of worlds; and (4) causation is defined in terms of counterfactuals.

I claim that if Humean theories of causation are true, then I have a magical power—the power of causing events in another galaxy just by muttering incantations. Let's suppose that the Andromeda Galaxy contains a billions of intelligent aliens, whom I shall call Andromedans, who are going to have a long and exceedingly complex political future, but a finite future with a finite description of it being possible. The events I can magically cause are the political activities of the Andromedans. (If Andromeda has no intelligent life, I can modify the example.) I now claim that if Humean theories of causation are true, there is a long incantation that has the following two properties: (a) it is physically possible for me to chant it, and (b) if I chanted it, the chant would be the cause of every major political event among the Andromedans from now until the end of Andromedan history. If that's not enough to establish I have a magical power, I don't know what is.

Now my argument. There are infinitely many incantations that it is possible for an analog being like me to chant. Fine details of the tone, timbre, etc., of an incantation can be used to encode information. It is easy to come up with very simple ways of encoding information in a chanted incantation, and still keep the incantation within my physical powers. Let Q be a detailed and correct description of the political future of the Andromedans in a simple and straightforward language L. Then, Q is a very, very long but finite text. However long Q is, we can encode it with a simple encoding scheme into an incantation I that it is physically possible for me to chant. (I don't mean I know how to intentionally chant it; but it is possible for me to chant it, perhaps by accident.)

Let w be a world as much like ours as we can make it but where I chant I. What would w be like? Well, presumably, all the Andromedan events described in Q would still happen in w. However, in I, these events would be foreshadowed by being encoded in I. If there are enough of these events (that's why I assumed that the Andromedans will have a long and exceedingly complex political future; moreover, to ensure that there are enough events, I need only be sufficiently detailed in Q), then this correlation will be one that the Humean will have to take cognizance of and make be a part of the laws—making it be a part of the laws does increase the complexity of the laws, but the gain in informativeness is worth it. So, in w, there will be a Humean law about the correlation between aspects of I and aspects of the Andromedan political future. Moreover, on Humean views, this law will support counterfactuals (laws do, of course) and will (on Lewis's view we can insert "therefore" here) be such as to ensure causation between the aspects of I and the Andromedan political events therein described. Hence, in w, I cause the Andromedan events if Humeanism is correct.

Thus, it is physically possible for me to do something, viz., chant I, which is such that were I to do it, I would be causing all Andromedan political events.

And this is absurd. So Humean theories of causation are false.