Autor: Feser, Edward

Buch: Scholastic Metaphysics

Titel: Scholastic Metaphysics

Stichwort: Szientismus 2b; Bewusstsein: Unmöglichkeit der Reduktion von Qualität auf Quantität (Russel); Probleme d. S. sind philosophischer Natur

Kurzinhalt: ... physics gives us the abstract structure of the material world but does not tell us the intrinsic nature of that which has that structure ... then, physics implies that there is more to reality than that structure itself ...

Textausschnitt: 16a Nor will it do to suggest that further application of the method in question is bound eventually to explain conscious experience in the way it has explained everything else. This is like saying that since we have been able to get rid of the dirt everywhere else in the house by sweeping it under a certain rug, we can surely get rid of the dirt under the rug by applying the same method. That is, of course, the one method that cannot in principle work. And by the same token, stripping away the qualitative features of a phenomenon and redefining it in purely quantitative terms is the one method that cannot in principle work when seeking to explain conscious experience. For conscious experience, the method itself tells us, just is the “rug” under which all qualitative features have been swept. Applying the same method to the explanation of qualitative features of conscious experience is thus simply incoherent, and in practice either changes the subject or amounts to a disguised eliminativism. Nagel pointed this problem out long ago (l979), and Schrödinger saw it too:

Scientific theories serve to facilitate the survey of our observations and experimental findings. Every scientist knows how difficult it is to remember a moderately extended group of facts, before at least some primitive theoretical picture about them has been shaped. It is therefore small wonder, and by no means to be blamed on the authors of original papers or of textbooks, that after a reasonably coherent theory has been formed, they do not describe the bare facts they have found or wish to convey to the reader, but clothe them in the terminology of that theory or theories. This procedure, while very useful for our remembering the facts in a well-ordered pattern, tends to obliterate the distinction between the actual observations and the theory arisen from them. And since the former always are of some sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual qualities; which, of course, they never do. (1992, pp. 163-64)

17a The reason that “of course, they never do” is that the scientist’s working notion of matter is one that has, by definition, extruded the qualitative from it. Hence when the scientist identifies some physical property or process he finds correlated with the qualitative features of conscious experience — this or that property of external objects, or this or that process in the brain — and supposes that in doing so he has explained the qualitative, he is in thrall to an illusion. He is mistaking the theoretical, quantitative re-description of matter he has replaced the qualitative with for the qualitative itself. He may accuse his critic of dualist obscurantism when the critic points out that all the scientist has identified are physical features that are correlated with the qualitative, rather than the qualitative itself. But such accusations merely blame the messenger, for it is the scientist’s own method that has guaranteed that dualist correlation is all that he will ever discover. (Fs) (notabene)

17b So, the qualitative features of the world cannot in principle be explained scientifically nor coherently eliminated, and a Cartesian account of their relation to matter is, the Scholastic agrees (Feser 2008, Chapter 5), unacceptable. But a purely quantitative conception of matter is problematic even apart from these considerations. Bertrand Russell (yet another hero of contemporary naturalists who saw things more clearly than they do) indicates how:

It is not always realised how exceedingly abstract is the information that theoretical physics has to give. It lays down certain fundamental equations which enable it to deal with the logical structure of events, while leaving it completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the structure ... All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to - as to this, physics is silent. (1985, p. 13)

17c Now if, as Russell emphasized, physics gives us the abstract structure of the material world but does not tell us the intrinsic nature of that which has that structure, then not only does physics not tell us everything about physical reality, but it tells us that there must be something more to physical reality than what it has to say. For there is no such thing as a structure all by itself; there must be something that has the structure. By the very fact that physics tells us that an abstract structure of such-and-such a mathematically describable character exists, then, physics implies that there is more to reality than that structure itself, and thus more to reality than what physics can reveal. (Fs)

18a Russell’s own position tried to kill two birds with one stone, solving both the problem of fitting qualitative features into nature and the problem of finding the intrinsic properties of matter by identifying the qualitative features themselves as the intrinsic properties of matter. There are serious problems with this sort of view (Feser 1998, 2006b), and as we will see, the Scholastic’s own approach to understanding the nature of material substances is in any event simply incommensurable with the entire post-Cartesian framework within which Russell, Schrödinger, and most other modern commentators on these matters are working. The point to emphasize for present purposes is that, however one solves them, the problems described are philosophical rather than scientific, and they show that science is nowhere close to giving us an exhaustive description of reality. On the contrary, the very nature of scientific method shows that there exist aspects of reality it will not capture. (Fs)