Book review: The Sciences and Philosophy

The Sciences and Philosophy by JS Haldane is a physically lovely book; the paper - linen-type, perhaps - and the red cloth binding are superior to anything you'll find nowadays. Published in 1929, as the record of the Gifford Lectures of 1927 and 1928, it seems to be to be a memorial of another and in some ways more thoughtful time. Unfortunately, it is also wrong.

JSH seems to have been a decent chap, a good scientist - though likely not the one you're thinking of, that was JBS -, and a benefactor of mankind. But he allows his philosophy to be lead by his conclusions. Those conclusions are - I'm interpolating my own conclusion here of course - that religion and/or spirituality are needed for a healthy moral society, and therefore materialism is false.

Part One, The Sciences, contains some interesting material about his researches on respiration; and on science's gradual discovery of how complex it all is; that breathing is regulated by the pressure of CO2 in the alveoli; where the energy is generated to power the muscles; how blood is regulated; and more. Indeed, he decides that life is so complex and interrelated that it cannot possibly be considered a mechanistic process but needs its own category, Life⁶. This is alas just a failure of imagination on his part. He argues continually against materialism, against a mechanistic Newtonian⁴ viewpoint; but is sensible enough to realise that "vitalism" or "animism" or "souls" is not a viable alternative. That leaves him a bit stuck. Here's a quote  about reproduciton:

Quite clearly, the mechanistic interpretation assumes the fact of hereditary transmission, and apart from hereditary transmission the theory of natural selection or of supernatural creation in the remote past would be meaningless. But what do we assume when we assume hereditary transmission? On the mechanistic interpretation, hereditary transmission means the reproduction in offspring of an enormously complicated physico-chemical structure. We must sweep away the crude idea that what happens is simply the increase and division of an albuminous substance without definite structure, called protoplasm. The substance must, on the mechanistic interpretation, be enormously complex and yet perfectly definite in molecular structure. But if it is so complex, how can we imagine its dividing into two parts, one at least of which must have the capacity of repeating the process indefinitely often?

A mechanist of robust faith would reply that though we do not understand the process, there must be some molecular mechanism by which the reproduction is brought about. In accordance with his robust faith he will also speak of the "mechanism" of reproduction. But the more we ponder over this question the more clearly does it appear that the idea of a complex mechanism which can also reproduce itself or mend itself is not a coherent idea at all. In fact no scholastic absurdity was ever more of an absurdity than a mechanism of heredity. Those who may still have a lingering affection for a mechanistic conception of life, or who imagine that life must be something which had a beginning in time, would do well to ponder further over the nature of hereditary transmission. A mechanism of hereditary transmission is simply a contradiction in terms.

Score one for the mechanist of robust faith and zero for Haldane. We forgive him, of course, for not knowing about DNA. But we cannot forgive him for deciding that some purely physical mechanism like DNA is absurd².

When we come to the philosophy in Part Two, we find him quite taken with Kant, which is forgiveable, but also with Hegel, which isn't; I won't trouble you with the H stuff.

Kant did not infer that mind makes the universe, but only that mind gives to it the form which it takes in our perception of it. Behind the visible and tangible world of our perceptual experience there was for Kant a world of "things-in-themselves," while the visible and tangible Newtonian world of bodies existing in time and space and acting on one another was the form given in perception to the world of things-in-them-selves.

I still think this is gobbledegook or the bleedin' obvious³; and although he generally doesn't go too far into woo, sometimes he oversteps: There is no such thing as a physical world existing apart from consciousness is on p 243. But I think he is attracted to K's stuff because it in some way "devalues" the physical world, and that is the direction he wants to go.

On values and morals:

We make, in practice, a sharp distinction between what we regard as of value from a mere individual standpoint and what has a wider social value. From the individual standpoint what is of value can be exchanged between different individuals, and has thus what is called a market value... If we ask why we should act honestly when if we acted dishonestly in our own individual interest it would almost certainly never be found out, or why we should go out of our way to act courteously to persons who do not know us and whom we shall never see again, the answer is that it is in our own wider and more real interest to act honestly or courteously. This wider interest is just a fact, and a fact which obliterates the mere individual interest which, owing to ill-breeding or defective education, we may have mistaken for a fact and assigned a market value to.

I'm largely happy with that, except for his snootiness about market value. But asserting that the wider interest is "just a fact" is shallow: he has allowed his inquiry to end too early; he knows that he wants it to be true, but has no real theory to justify it; what he is looking for is of course The Foundations of Morality⁵, which would distress him by being entirely material. 

Reality is not to be found in the ideal world of economics, dealing with market values... Those who keep nothing but their own self-interest before them are very properly treated with contempt in good society. A real State depends on the honesty, loyalty, courage, and mutual charity of its citizens; and true citizenship bears no relationship to the possession of wealth or specialized knowledge. We depend at every turn on the reality of this citizenship, and the general extension of the franchise in civilized States is only an acknowledgment of it.

I quote that to indicate how he is a good person trying to make a good society. Later, we get If once we admit what at the present time is presented to us as mere common sense, namely, that the world as interpreted physically is real, there is no stopping until we have apparently stripped our world of everything to which we can attach objective value. And he is very keen on values. But really, there are no objective values; values are things we humans impose on our view of the world; in that they are shared, they can be called real; and as they guide a flourishing society, they are useful (see-also: The Evolution of Morality). He is guilty of despair leading to him grasping for false solutions, due to lack of imagination.

Towards the end, having for several chapters danced around language of religion, he is obliged to come out as not Christian but Spiritual: The Spiritual Unity which we have found by philosophical analysis to be the Reality manifesting itself in all our experience corresponds to the Reality called, in the language of religion, God...¹ a very large and increasing body of persons who have studied or been influenced by one branch or another of science find themselves unable to belong to any recognized Church, because they cannot accept any form of belief in what is supernatural. It is to this body that I myself belong. And on immortality we get:

The question as to immortality appears now very differently from what it did from the animistic stand-point. In the first place, mere individual personality is unreal. It is only in so far as God is manifested in us that we partake of reality. Just as death of the individual cell or individual compound organism, or even the last of a species, must be regarded as a normal event in a wider life, so death of the individual person must be regarded as only an event in God's manifestation in time-relations. Through faith in God as the only ultimate Reality we must regard death of the individual from this standpoint, and our faith in this regard is just our faith in the self-consistency of our experience. It is God manifested within us, and not the abstraction which we call our individual self, that is immortal and the Creator and Sustainer of time-relations themselves. From this standpoint the immortality of individual persons is only a meaningless conception.

This is all regrettable woo, and usefully reminds us of the dangers of motivated reasonning.

As a sort of postscript, I note his The mathematical sciences deal merely with time-relations (arithmetic and algebra) and space-relations (geometry). This isn't reffed, but the wacky time-is-arithmetic will be recognised by the cognoscenti as the dead hand of Kant fouling his brain.

Notes

1. Caution: this ellipsis elides a large gap. I flow these together for my convenience.

2. We also get It is true that many biologists have expressed belief in an origin of life from purely physical conditions; but, as was pointed out in a previous lecture, such an idea is due to mere confusion in thought, and is on a par with the idea of a creation of life in time.

3. Depending on how you interpret it. If it is saying that we - our consciousness - doesn't directly perceive the real world, but we have sense-impressions mediated by eyes and ears and nerves and brain and so on, then it is just the obvious, badly expressed (see-also: Being You). If it is suggesting that our mind has freedom to impose any kind of order on the outside world and have it make sense, then no, that's nonsense. But I do wonder if JSH's perspective helps in some way to explain what on Earth big K was going on about.

4. He is aware of relativity and QM, and in my reading is eager to find in them support for his ideas, but is wise enough not to pin anything on them.

5. From which we should recall the quote from Mill: whatever may be the practical value of a true philosophy of these matters, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the mischiefs of a false one.

6. Later, he discovers that he needs another for Consciousness.