- Paul Benacerraf

A few weeks ago, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat debated Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the question “Do we need God?”

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As debates with ambiguous questions go, it was cordial and entertaining. Several people have written about the exchange, but there was one moment in the debate that made me say, “What?!” out loud.

At about the 51-minute mark, Ross Douthat points out the inconsistencies of committing to three things:

1) human consciousness,

2) moral cognitivism (the view that moral claims, like our duties to one another, are true or false, not mere expressions of emotion), and

3) materialism. The thought is that neither consciousness nor morals are material, or physical, but we, and Pinker in particular, assume their existence and their value all the time.

Confronted with this familiar challenge, Pinker gives a response I found absolutely astounding:

Here’s the bomb:

Pinker, to my surprise, explicitly rejects materialism. Not only that, but he gives a specific example of something that he believes exists, yet is not material: information. Information, he says, is a central part of the universe.

But Pinker also advocates for naturalism, roughly the view that only natural things—things that can be discovered by science—exist. So for Pinker, naturalism is compatible with anti-materialism (or anti-physicalism, my preferred term). You can, according to Pinker, consistently be a naturalist anti-physicalist. Anti-physicalism then is not the point of disagreement. Pinker's issue is supernaturalism, but not because he believes only physical things can exist. He doesn't believe that.

So what is his principle issue with supernaturalism? it can't be that supernaturalism affirms non-physical parts of reality, because he affirms the same.

If something like information is not physical, then it is not subject to the laws of physics or chemistry. It (presumably) cannot causally interact with anything, otherwise there would be laws of motion and energy that would apply to information as an object, and that doesn't seem to be the case at all.

I have some obvious, basic questions for Pinker and other naturalists who endorse such a view: if information is the kind of thing that falls outside the realm of physics and its laws, and outside the realm of chemistry and its laws, what natural, scientific fields or methods can we employ to discover and learn about information?

How do we, as (supposedly purely?) physical beings, interact with something non-physical like information?

This question is not new. It's been around forever. In philosophical circles, it's now recognized as "the Benacerraf problem", coined after philosopher Paul Benacerraf gave the question a finer point decades ago. He wanted to show the problem with physical human beings claiming to have knowledge of non-physical things like mathematical truths, numbers, etc.

To me, Pinker's response is so significant because, even from a position of committed, staunch naturalism, it's obvious that physicalism can't be true. Which means there are parts of reality that are non-physical. And if that's the case, either

(1) Natural science cannot discover or interact with the parts of reality that are non-physical, or

(2) Natural science can discover or interact with the parts of reality that are non-physical.

Either way, how exactly do we access non-physical reality? Given the admitted limits of physics and chemistry for discovering non-physical parts of reality like information, what is the unique metaphysical problem with supernatural parts of reality?

Until next time.

Jared

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