05.17
Afraid of Gaps and Dustbins
Modern science and philosophy in the current era is going through a phase where it believes it has outgrown the need of a god. Acedemicians have a fear of attributing anything they can’t explain to something else they can’t explain. In a way I’m sympathetic. Sweeping all the unexplainables into a collective supernatural dustbin or attributing them to some sort of gap theory is usually not the best answer. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t at all legitimate though. Some of the most intelligent people throughout history have attributed certain events to the supernatural. A perfect example of this is Leibniz and Descartes attribution of certain soulish activities to a non-corporeal self:
“One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception.”
–Leibniz, Monadology (1714)
Now, Leibniz’s(or Leibnizzle if you like the picture) argument has at it’s conclusion an attribution of mental processes to a soulish substance that makes up who each of us is. His is a very rational argument, and one that I believe is almost impossible to adequately refute. But in essence it’s a dustbin/gaps argument. Seeing as how there is no hard science of metaphysics, then we can’t know exactly what we are dealing with when it comes to souls. We must glean all our knowledge of them from argumentation and inference. Thus it’s possible to have a very sound argument that ends up in a dustbin. Wait. That didn’t come out right. :)
