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Mechanism is the belief that natural wholes (principally living things) are similar to complicated machines or artifacts, composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other.
The doctrine of mechanism in philosophy comes in two different varieties. They are both doctrines of metaphysics, but they are different in scope and ambitions: the first is a global doctrine about nature; the second is a local doctrine about humans and their minds, which is hotly contested. For clarity, we might distinguish these two doctrines as universal mechanism and anthropic mechanism.
Some intellectual historians and Critical theory argue that early mechanical philosophy was tied to disenchantment and the rejection of the idea of nature as living or animated by spirits or angels. Other scholars, however, have noted that early mechanical philosophers nevertheless believed in magic, Christianity and spiritualism.
Robert Boyle used "mechanical philosophers" to refer both to those with a theory of "corpuscles" or of matter, such as Gassendi and Descartes, and those who did without such a theory. One common factor was the clockwork universe view. His meaning would be problematic in the cases of Hobbes and Galileo Galilei; it would include Nicolas Lemery and Christiaan Huygens, as well as himself. Newton would be a transitional figure. Contemporary usage of "mechanical philosophy" dates back to 1952 and Marie Boas Hall.
In France the mechanical philosophy spread mostly through private academies and salons; in England in the Royal Society. In England it did not have a large initial impact in universities, which were somewhat more receptive in France, the Netherlands and Germany.
Hobbes's major statement of his natural philosophy is in De Corpore (1655). In part II and III of this work he goes a long way towards identifying fundamental physics with geometry; and he freely mixes concepts from the two areas.
His scientific work was based on the traditional mechanistic understanding which maintains that animals and humans are completely mechanistic automaton. Descartes' dualism was motivated by the seeming impossibility that mechanical dynamics could yield mental experiences.
it has not adequately explained the world and its components, and there are weaknesses in its definitions.
Among the criticisms made of this philosophy are:
The French mechanist and determinist Pierre Simon de Laplace formulated the sweeping implications of this thesis by saying:
One of the first and most famous expositions of universal mechanism is found in the opening passages of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651). What is less frequently appreciated is that René Descartes was a staunch mechanist, though today, in the philosophy of mind, he is remembered for introducing the mind–body problem in terms of dualism and physicalism.
Descartes was a substance dualist, and argued that reality was composed of two radically different types of substance: extended matter, on the one hand, and immaterial mind, on the other. Descartes argued that one cannot explain the conscious mind in terms of the spatial dynamics of mechanistic bits of matter cannoning off each other. Nevertheless, his understanding of biology was thoroughly mechanistic in nature:
His scientific work was based on the traditional mechanistic understanding that animals and humans are completely mechanistic automaton. Descartes' dualism was motivated by the seeming impossibility that mechanical dynamics could yield mental experiences.
Isaac Newton ushered in a much weaker acceptation of mechanism that tolerated the antithetical, and as yet inexplicable, action at a distance of gravity. However, his work seemed to successfully predict the motion of both celestial and terrestrial bodies according to that principle, and the generation of philosophers who were inspired by Newton's example carried the mechanist banner nonetheless. Chief among them were French philosophy such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Denis Diderot (see also: French materialism).
One of the chief obstacles that all mechanistic theories have faced is providing a mechanistic explanation of the human mind; Descartes, for one, endorsed dualism in spite of endorsing a completely mechanistic conception of the material world because he argued that mechanism and the notion of a mind are logically incompatible. Hobbes, on the other hand, conceived of the mind and the will as purely mechanistic, completely explicable in terms of the effects of perception and the pursuit of desire, which in turn he held to be completely explicable in terms of the materialistic operations of the nervous system. Following Hobbes, other mechanists argued for a thoroughly mechanistic explanation of the mind, with one of the most influential and controversial expositions of the doctrine being offered by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in his Man a Machine (1748).
The main points of debate between anthropic mechanists and anti-mechanists are mainly occupied with two topics: the mind—consciousness, in particular—and free will. Anti-mechanists argue that anthropic mechanism is incompatible with our commonsense intuitions: in philosophy of mind they argue that if matter is devoid of mental properties, then the phenomenon of consciousness cannot be explained by mechanistic principles acting on matter. In metaphysics, anti-mechanists argue that anthropic mechanism implies determinism about human action, which is incompatible with our experience of free will. Contemporary philosophers who have argued for this position include Norman Malcolm and David Chalmers.
Anthropic mechanists typically respond in one of two ways. In the first, they agree with anti-mechanists that mechanism conflicts with some of our commonsense intuitions, but go on to argue that said intuitions are simply mistaken and need to be revised. Down this path lies eliminative materialism in philosophy of mind, and hard determinism on the question of free will. This option is accepted by the eliminative materialist philosopher Paul Churchland. Some have questioned how eliminative materialism is compatible with the freedom of will apparently required for anyone (including its adherents) to make truth claims.Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001/1966), p. 175. The second option, common amongst philosophers who adopt anthropic mechanism, is to argue that the given for incompatibility are specious: whatever it is we mean by "consciousness" and "free will" must be fully compatible with a mechanistic understanding of the human mind and will. As a result, they tend to argue for one or another non-eliminativist Physicalism theory of mind, and for compatibilism on the question of free will. Contemporary philosophers who have argued for this sort of account include J. J. C. Smart and Daniel Dennett.
Gödelian arguments claim that a system of human mathematicians (or some idealization of human mathematicians) is both consistent and powerful enough to recognize its own consistency. Since this is impossible for a Turing machine, the Gödelian concludes that human reasoning must be non-mechanical.
However, the modern consensus in the scientific and mathematical community is that actual human reasoning is inconsistent: any consistent "idealized version" H of human reasoning would logically be forced to adopt a healthy but counter-intuitive open-minded skepticism about the consistency of H (otherwise H is provably inconsistent); and that Gödel's theorems do not lead to any valid argument against mechanism.Mark Colyvan. An introduction to the philosophy of mathematics. Cambridge University Press, 2012. From 2.2.2, 'Philosophical significance of Gödel's incompleteness results': "The accepted wisdom (with which I concur) is that the Lucas-Penrose arguments fail." This consensus that Gödelian anti-mechanist arguments are doomed to failure is laid out in Artificial Intelligence: " any attempt to utilize Gödel's to attack the computationalism thesis is bound to be illegitimate, since these results are quite consistent with the computationalist thesis."LaForte, G., Hayes, P. J., Ford, K. M. 1998. Why Gödel's theorem cannot refute computationalism. Artificial Intelligence, 104:265–286, 1998.
In subsequent years, more direct anti-mechanist lines of reasoning were apparently floating around the intellectual atmosphere. In 1960, Hilary Putnam published a paper entitled "Minds and Machines," in which he points out the flaws of a typical anti-mechanist argument.Hilary Putnam, 1960, Minds and Machines in Sidney Hook, ed., Dimensions of Mind: A Symposium. New York University Press. Reprinted in Anderson, A. R., ed., 1964. Minds and Machines. Prentice-Hall: 77. Informally, this is the argument that the (alleged) difference between "what can be mechanically proven" and "what can be seen to be true by humans" shows that human intelligence is not mechanical in nature. Or, as Putnam puts it:
Let T be a Turing machine which "represents" me in the sense that T can prove just the mathematical statements I prove. Then using Gödel's technique I can discover a proposition that T cannot prove, and moreover I can prove this proposition. This refutes the assumption that T "represents" me, hence I am not a Turing machine.
Hilary Putnam objects that this argument ignores the issue of consistency. Gödel's technique can only be applied to consistent systems. It is conceivable, argues Putnam, that the human mind is inconsistent. If one is to use Gödel's technique to prove the proposition that T cannot prove, one must first prove (the mathematical statement representing) the consistency of T, a daunting and perhaps impossible task. Later Putnam suggested that while Gödel's theorems cannot be applied to humans, since they make mistakes and are therefore inconsistent, it may be applied to the human faculty of science or mathematics in general. If we are to believe that it is consistent, then either we cannot prove its consistency, or it cannot be represented by a Turing machine.The Gödel Theorem and Human Nature, a talk given by Hilary Putnam in the Gödel centenary 2006 [1]
J. R. Lucas in Minds, Machines and Gödel (1961), and later in his book The Freedom of the Will (1970), lays out an anti-mechanist argument closely following the one described by Putnam, including reasons for why the human mind can be considered consistent.Lucas, J. R., 1961, " Minds, Machines, and Gödel." Philosophy 36:112-27. Lucas admits that, by Gödel's second theorem, a human mind cannot formally prove its own consistency, and even says (perhaps facetiously) that women and politicians are inconsistent. Nevertheless, he sets out arguments for why a male non-politician can be considered consistent.
Another work was done by Judson Webb in his 1968 paper "Metamathematics and the Philosophy of Mind".Webb, Judson, 1968, "Metamathematics and the Philosophy of Mind," Philosophy of Science 35: 156–78. Webb claims that previous attempts have glossed over whether one truly can see that the Gödelian statement p pertaining to oneself, is true. Using a different formulation of Gödel's theorems, namely, that of Raymond Smullyan and Emil Post, Webb shows one can derive convincing arguments for oneself of both the truth and falsity of p. He furthermore argues that all arguments about the philosophical implications of Gödel's theorems are really arguments about whether the Church-Turing thesis is true.
In 1975, Lewis White Beck further argued that all attempts which have been made thus far to prove that mankind is merely "a cog in the machinery of the world" are futile at best and fundamentally irrational in nature by citing a reductio ad absurdum argument. In his book The Actor and the Spectator he avoids the temptation to present an alternative rational argument in support of the mechanistic theory. Instead, he argues that the theory by its very nature is "self-stulifying" and should be accompanied by a "self-exemption clause". This is due to the fact that if mechanistic theories are objectively true, mankind could never acquire knowledge of them or even establish their veracity. This is due to the fact that machines lack the capacity of human imagination by their very nature and are, as a consequence, totally incapable of formulating such a theory in the first place. As Beck patiently reminds his readers, "If you believe that you are not a machine, but that I am (then) I do not know why you are reading this book". The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), Vol. 27, No. 107 (Apr., 1977), Oxford University Press for the Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St. Andrews pp. 185-186 The Actor and the Spectator by Lewis White Beck, book reviewed by Mary Midgley on JSTOR.org The Philosophical Review, Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review Jul., 1977, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Jul., 1977), pp. 418-421 The Actor and the Spectator by Lewis Beck, book reviewed by Stephen Griffith on JSTOR.org
Later, Roger Penrose entered the fray, providing somewhat novel anti-mechanist arguments in his books, The Emperor's New Mind (1989) ENM and Shadows of the Mind (1994) SM. These books have proved highly controversial. Martin Davis responded to ENM in his paper "Is Mathematical Insight Algorithmic?" (ps), where he argues that Penrose ignores the issue of consistency. Solomon Feferman gives a critical examination of SM in his paper "Penrose's Gödelian argument."Feferman, S. (1996). "Penrose's Godelian argument", Psyche 2(7). The response of the scientific community to Penrose's arguments has been negative, with one group of scholars calling Penrose's repeated attempts to form a persuasive Gödelian argument "a kind of intellectual shell game, in which a precisely defined notion to which a mathematical result applies ... is switched for a vaguer notion".
A Gödel-based anti-mechanism argument can be found in Douglas Hofstadter's book , though Hofstadter is widely viewed as a known skeptic of such arguments:
Looked at this way, Gödel's proof suggests – though by no means does it prove! – that there could be some high-level way of viewing the mind/brain, involving concepts which do not appear on lower levels, and that this level might have explanatory power that does not exist – not even in principle – on lower levels. It would mean that some facts could be explained on the high level quite easily, but not on lower levels at all. No matter how long and cumbersome a low-level statement were made, it would not explain the phenomena in question. It is analogous to the fact that, if you make derivation after derivation in Peano arithmetic, no matter how long and cumbersome you make them, you will never come up with one for G – despite the fact that on a higher level, you can see that the Gödel sentence is true.What might such high-level concepts be? It has been proposed for eons, by various holistically or "soulistically" inclined scientists and humanists that consciousness is a phenomenon that escapes explanation in terms of brain components; so here is a candidate at least. There is also the ever-puzzling notion of free will. So perhaps these qualities could be "emergent" in the sense of requiring explanations which cannot be furnished by the physiology alone.
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