I was hired recently to look into the claims of the German philosopher (really, now, theologian) Holm Tetens regarding why Naturalism has to be false because it can’t explain conscious experience. There’s nothing new about the idea. The Argument from Consciousness is old hat, and I’ve long since addressed it. But Tetens seems to approach it from a slightly more obscure angle, and I think it sounds a lot like the old apologetic device of proposing that the mind is more like a radio than a computer, it just sends and receives transmissions to and from the soul, and “that’s” why it’s so complex, and if you break it that’s why it doesn’t work, and so on. It’s an attempt to explain away vast accumulating evidence that the mind is a product of the brain, which bodes ill for belief in God, because theism does a shit job of predicting such a bizarre state of affairs. Whereas naturalism is performing comparatively well.

This “mind as radio” argument is old too (it was famously used by Dinesh D’Souza). But I’ve never specifically addressed it in a blog. And as I read Tetens’ version of it (which avoids the radio analogy, but essentially describes something akin), I realized one interview he did on the subject is an excellent teaching-tool for telling the difference between genuine intellectual inquiry and pseudointellectual bullshit. So I thought I’d use this as an occasion to kill two birds with one stone. Or even three: you may recognize in Tetens’ rhetoric common tropes from other Christian apologists that you might encounter.

A note about translation: when rendering German into English here I used Google Translate, but I verified and edited its results with my own knowledge of German to correct the intended sense as needed, and I include the German where you might most want to check this.

Neo-Thomism: The New Bullshit

It’s important to know (because it will explain a lot as we go) that Tetens is another example of a recent fashionable trend in the philosophy of religion: philosophers (whether atheists, as Tetens professes to have been, or believing Protestants, as Tetens was raised to be) converting to Catholicism, and then re-tooling their apologetics around a vacuous Neo-Thomist rationalism that eschews almost any interest in empirical facts (see Thomism: The Bogus Science for my assessment of the trend; and for an example see: Is Science Impossible without God? The Argument of Tomas Bogardus). Tetens shills across his book, and interview, all sorts of Catholic bullshit (about sin, faith, rationality, contra-causal freewill, hell), and outright says in his interview, “Although I originally come from Protestantism, I am now actually closer to Catholic theology in this respect” (steht mir inzwischen eigentlich die katholische Theologie in dieser Hinsicht näher).

I have encountered half a dozen examples of this phenomenon in the last couple of years, and though I struggle to recall the names now, I want to collect a list, so I will make an appeal to readers at the close of this analysis to build a list of them in comments. For now, just note that Tetens is coming from that camp. Indeed, he is a perfect example of it. And as you’ll see, this is where his entire bankrupt epistemology comes from. This article will thus serve yet another purpose: to catalog yet another instantiation of the species, further proving the point I’ve been making about it for years.

An Educational Fisk of the Tetens Interview

Holm Tetens’ new book is Gott denken: Versuch über rationale Theologie (Reclam 2015), or in English “Thinking God: Essay on Rational Theology.” I render Gott denken this way (instead of “Thinking about God”) to preserve something of the pun intended in the German: the book is, of course, thinking about God; but its argument also concerns how, supposedly, God better explains the existence of thought than modern scientific naturalism. I read the book (it’s short, only ninety pages or so of text), to confirm my impressions of his argument from an interview he did with Eckart Löhr, “Lässt sich Gott denken? Ein Gespräch mit dem Philosophen Holm Tetens,” at Re-Visionen: Beiträge zur Philosophie, Natur und Gesellschaft (7 November 2016). I can confirm that the interview is spot on, to the point that you don’t even need to read his book. His book really just pads all he says in the interview with long rambling pontifications that could have been briefed in a few paragraphs, and quotations and citations of famous people that are rarely relevant to establishing any premise in his argument. I’ll reference the book as we go, but confident now that I can work off his remarks in the interview instead (which are more succinct, yet do not lack any information that you need the book for—an important point I’ll get back to), I’ll just do that. You’ll thank me later.

-:-

Naturalism [Naturalismus] claims that the world of experience [Erfahrungswelt], as successfully described and explained by the sciences [Wissenschaften], constitutes the whole of reality [die ganze Wirklichkeit]. [So] I actually accuse naturalism of two things: First, that it poses as a position that is free of metaphysics [metaphysikfrei]. 

— Holm Tetens

No naturalist poses this. Which means Tetens either has not read any naturalist philosophy or is deliberately misrepresenting it (for reasons you’ll get soon, I suspect it’s the first, in aid of the second). He is confusing naturalists with logical positivists, the only philosophy that actually claims to reject metaphysics. One can level Teten’s accusation at them (their position was famously rebutted with the point that it is not possible to deny metaphysics except by taking, and thus having to defend, a position in metaphysics). But they aren’t who Tetens claims to be addressing. Indeed, I am not sure there even are any logical positivists anymore. Anything useful from their system has been absorbed into other systems (like mine); while strict positivists have faded from the scene.

Naturalists, by contrast, fundamentally embrace metaphysical reasoning: see my Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism, Jaegwon Kim’s Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Andrew Melnyk’s A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism, Jack Ritchie’s Understanding Naturalism—and beyond (see Hilary Kornblith’s summary in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, and the survey of naturalist metaphysics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Those are typical surveys of the subject. If you look at the PhilPapers Survey correlation table for professed naturalists, it’s full of metaphysics (for example, external world skepticism is rejected by over 90% of them; almost 95% reject any form of idealism; and over half are even moral realists).

There are scientists who eschew the term (because they disdain all philosophy), but they just go on making metaphysical statements and philosophizing and just call it something else. Sean Carroll rightly threads the needle by admitting that when scientists do this, they are simply doing a metaphysics of their own kind, in The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe (p. 177). Other scientists will just loathe the terminology, but not deny doing what we know those terms mean (see Is Philosophy Stupid?). They can be accused of being confused. But since they eschew even labels like “naturalist” they can only be a straw man to attack—if Tetens even did that, and he doesn’t. He literally cites no naturalist whatever, anywhere in his interview or his book (yes, even in his book), but for one exception I’ll get to; but even that person he never cites a single argument from, only a couple of conclusions to serve as his foil. But he doesn’t even cite any blasé philosophy-hating scientists who are functionally naturalists. And the one lone naturalist he does cite, he doesn’t cite as denying metaphysics, the point he is obligated to demonstrate here but doesn’t; while the paper he cites from him is all about metaphysics.

Hence Tetens doesn’t build even a straw man, but a man to attack made completely of air.

This is a common behavior among cranks and bullshitters, which I shall here call…

• Rule 1 of Bullshittery: Make false claims about a group and its beliefs, cite no example of anyone in that group expressing that belief, hope instead that your totally confident assertion counts sufficiently to establish it as true, then attack the thing you just made up, and claim victory over the group you are targeting.

No genuine intellectual would do this. Anyone who makes blatantly false claims about a group whose beliefs he intends to critique, and doesn’t cite a single example of anyone in that group making the purported claim, and then attacks that non-existent claim anyway, is full of shit. That’s usually signal enough to toss their work immediately in the trash as useless, and to never listen to any other thing they shall ever say. That most naturalists say the opposite of what Tetens avers destroys his credibility—thoroughly.

More dishonest bullshitters will at least try to find an outlier to straw man the group with, or quote-mine someone out of context, to create the false impression of a position held by the whole group. Which amounts to the same tactic. But Tetens doesn’t even do that. He’s that lazy. And I find this is typical of the new breed of Catholic Neo-Thomists: they eschew citations and evidence. They don’t quote people but rarely, and rarely to any usable purpose—often just as foils or jump-quotes, rather than as evidence for anything. Just note Tetens ultra-brief bibliography (Gott denken, pp. 90–92), and that almost none of the sources listed there contribute anything substantial to his book’s argument. Thomists, instead, mostly just pontificate in the air of an abstract ivory tower of their own construction. In that methodology, “naturalists deny metaphysics.” Because. You know. They just do. If you expected evidence that they do, fuck off, we’re Catholic Neo-Thomists, we don’t do “evidence.” They instead try to minimize any appeal to the empirical (even as to what naturalists actually believe or say), and derive everything from their own imagination. So all they end up producing is mumbo jumbo, reified by abuse of logic.

Empiricism vs. Neo-Thomist Malarkey

Here’s the reality (which this Neo-Thomist is denying; because denying or ignoring reality is a common theme for them): naturalism is itself a metaphysical position, and all self-professed naturalists admit this and even use it as the foundation of their worldview. They do adopt a different epistemology, however. As Carroll puts it, “We can’t be metaphysically certain” of our metaphysical foundations, “it’s not something we can prove mathematically; since science never proves things” in that sense, but rather, “in any good Bayesian accounting, it seems overwhelmingly likely to be true” (Ibid.). In other words, unlike the Neo-Thomist bullshit brigade, we do not start from first principles and magically “deduce” the nature of the world. We start with evidence, use it to learn what is successful epistemologically, and then use that epistemology to build out the nature of the world from the evidence. We thus admit our results are probabilistic and not certain. But that also allows us to base our metaphysics on evidence, rather than armchair deduction (hence Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them). We thus can avoid more traps of delusion; because we accept The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking.

By contrast, a common psychological defect among religious believers is called ambiguity intolerance: they do not like being only probably right; they need certitude, and so they flee in fear to these absurdist anti-empirical methodologies like Thomism. Even when those so afflicted express comfort, finally, with any ambiguity, it always comes from a framework of certainty: that their religion and its solutions to their worries is certainly true and therefore they can only in that context tolerate ambiguity (you can see a lot of this reasoning across Tetens’ book, where he worries about something, solves it with religion, and reacts as though the problem is then actually solved).

Which is an outcome that correlates with authoritarian personality, whereby people trust insider claims and distrust outsider claims, regardless of the empirical merits of either. Hence, the anti-empiricism of Thomism may have psychological roots that underlie the attractions of religious solutions to problems. It is a retreat from the Enlightenment and all it gained us, into the almost unmovable certainty of armchair assertions. That’s why books written by Neo-Thomists tend to have short bibliographies and almost never cite evidence for anything (and when they do, it is almost never relevant to proving any peculiar claim they make), and it’s why they think they can always logic their way out of every conundrum (see, for example, Feser Still Can’t Read, and my other entries on Feser linked there, as typical examples of a Neo-Thomist approach).

It’s also why they like Catholicism. Just listen to Tetens…

But then there remains the problem of physical evils. This is a complicated problem that I’m not sure can be answered by rational theology. If I may mention this, I am currently writing a long essay about the problem of theodicy, in which I deal specifically with physical evils, and I feel the same way as I did with my Reclam book [Thinking God]: the thoughts arise when I write. I don’t see a solution to the problem yet, but I see a direction where a solution could lie.

I believe, and this is already suggested in my book Thinking God, that one must see that God’s creation is not simply good. It cannot be that because we cause moral evil in the world. Rather, the correct position must be: The world can and should become good according to God’s intention, but in its current state it is far from being good in all aspects. In this respect, the problem of theodicy includes an eschatological dimension. We also need to reactivate the doctrine of sin and with it the idea that this creation is a fallen creation.

I’m thinking about how to deal with physical evils in the context of the idea that we are dealing with a fallen creation that itself longs for redemption. I try to bolster this idea. But I don’t know how far you can get with this without accepting the Bible as revealed knowledge. However, revealed knowledge is the beyond rational theology. Rational theology is a branch of philosophy and not a branch of a theology bound to the magisterium. I am not a theologian bound to the magisterium, but always speak as a philosopher.

— Holm Tetens

Notice how Tetens basically fills the leak in the dyke with the Bible and Revelation, and its concomitant bullshit, whereby natural evils are our fault somehow, because Adam (someone we never met and whose decisions we have no responsibility for) was conned by a monster (whom God both made and let talk to Adam, for no explicable reason) into eating the wrong produce (inexplicably the most horrific of all crimes), causing dinosaurs to stop eating coconuts. This is batshit crazy. But notice how Tetens eases his fears by mentioning that that crazytalk can solve his problem and for that reason he is leaning toward it. He couches it in terms as if he is uncertain (he is but a humble philosopher, you see), but you can tell he rests quite certain in this, and that is why he has resorted to it: he doesn’t like the thought of there being no answer, so he has to plug the hole of doubt with nonsense. Fear assuaged.

Tetens as Drunk Uncle

You might also side-eye Tetens’ claim that naturalism thinks “the world of experience” constitutes “the whole of reality.” That might sound suspicious and weird to you. And you’d be right. Tetens goes on to claim “the core proposition of naturalism” is “that there is only empirical reality,” in other words, there is just (as he put it) “the world of experience.” This is of course also false. Almost all naturalists—and scientists—consistently agree “the world of experience” is a subjective reconstruction from sensory information of only some of the actual world, and the actual world is quite different from that, but can only be learned about, understood, and explained using that data (often in clever ways). For an example of how far this goes, and how indeed it implicates definite metaphysical conclusions, see my Bayesian Analysis of the Barkasi-Sant’Anna Defense of Naive Memory Realism.

Which is another standard move of pseudo-intellectuals:

• Rule 2 of Bullshittery: Use words weirdly, so you can trade on equivocation fallacies easily.

By saying “Naturalism claims that the world of experience constitutes the whole of reality,” you can simultaneously appear to be saying something innocuous (that we access reality through experience, and what we cannot detect by any device probably doesn’t exist or is not warranted to believe), and something completely bogus (that all we believe in is “the world of experience,” and thus we shouldn’t believe in anything we can’t directly see, like quarks or the Higgs field or the subjective theatre within other minds). Tetens can then trade on your belief in the mundane thing to try and weasel you into thinking you just agreed with the bogus thing. And with that move accomplished, he can create the fake appearance of having proved the second thing.

Needless to say, that’s bullshit. What he claims to be the only true thing, a thing he claims naturalists deny, that “there is the world of experience and this can be described very successfully through the sciences and be explained,” is literally what naturalists affirm. He has thus painted naturalism as exactly the opposite of what it actually is. Everything he then says about naturalism is thus a complete waste of our time. If he believed in evidence instead, and abandoned Thomism for empiricism, he’d have known he needed to get actual, and representative, evidence of what naturalists actually say and believe, and address that. Not make up some complete bullshit and pretend that’s the case instead.

Instead, we get Neo-Thomism, which is, basically, Drunk Uncling.

-:-

And secondly, I think that naturalism has difficulty answering a whole range of fundamental questions that one can reasonably ask. Essentially, it seems to me, it has difficulties in adequately resolving the mind-body problem in its own terms.

— Holm Tetens

Whenever someone says something like this, but never quotes anyone he is supposed to be criticizing who attempts to address these questions (like, say, the mind-body problem), you know you are being conned. This is another example of that first tactic of pseudo-intellectuals:

• Rule 1 of Bullshittery (Coda): Pose a rhetorical question that implies some nebulous opponents have said or failed to say certain things; but never produce an example of anyone actually doing this. That relieves you of the serious work of analyzing what the actual answers to your questions have been in the literature, by instead claiming there aren’t any. Which tells us that you have no interest in being serious. You are just bullshitting us.

So we know Tetens has no interest in being serious here. In his book he never addresses even a single philosopher’s response to the mind-body problem. He names no one. He quotes no one. He describes no theory. He offers no critique of anyone’s theory. And he proposes no testable alternative theory. He just handwaves about how no one can do this, “therefore, God must have done it.” And yes. His argument is that lame: it’s like he’s going back to the naive methods before the Scopes Monkey Trial, when “God of the gaps” arguments hadn’t been as thoroughly exposed as ineffectual and bogus.

In reality (the reality Thomists evidently don’t believe in, and certainly never mention), lots of people have done what Tetens just claimed no one has. But you won’t ever hear from them in his work. Because they don’t exist, apparently. Except, they do. For examples of naturalists who have answered his supposedly unanswered question: Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained and Kinds Of Minds and the new 2nd ed. of Content and Consciousness), Jaegwon Kim (Physicalism, or Something Near Enough), Andrew Melnyk (A Physicalist Manifesto), and beyond—see the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Consciousness and likewise the IEP’s entry on Consciousness; hell, just read the fucking Wikipedia page. Sure, these are all hypothetical; they aren’t established science yet. But the existence of working hypotheses refutes the claim that you can’t have one. As with all three frontiers of science now (biogenesis, cosmogenesis, and cognogenesis), naturalist hypotheses are making progress while supernaturalist hypotheses continue to be stalled or washed out.

You might want to come to his defense and say, “Well, he only says they don’t succeed, so maybe in his book he shows that they don’t.” But that isn’t what he is saying. In his book, he gives no examples, and thus never shows that any of these efforts (or any others) “don’t succeed.” That would be an empirical approach. His argument is not empirical. It is naively rationalistic. His argument is that naturalists can’t do this—and therefore he doesn’t have to consider any of the offered attempts of doing it. This is Thomist methodology: you don’t need facts; evidence; particulars. You can just dismiss things from the armchair, using a contrived theatre of pure rationalism. Which is bogus.

Neo-Thomism: The Science of Ignoring Everything

What is the most appalling here is that there is one naturalist—just one, only one—whom Tetens ever cites in his book: Ansgar Beckermann. And he is well known for his work in the theory of mind. Yet you wouldn’t know that from Tetens, who just quotes Beckermann on generic statements regarding naturalism. He never once cites, describes, quotes (or, obviously, analyzes or rebuts), anything Beckermann argues about the ontology of consciousness. He doesn’t even cite any of Beckermann’s works on the subject. The only thing from Beckermann that Tetens cites is his brief on naturalism, “Naturwissenschaften und manifestes Weltbild,” which does not address the mind-body problem in any detail. Accordingly, all Tetens cites from it are just three quote-mined statements about naturalism generally, and only as a foil to argue against—Tetens never mentions any of the arguments Beckermann gives there for those statements being true, and thus never addresses or rebuts them. Tetens just rebuts those statements (the conclusions) as if Beckermann gave no arguments for them; and in doing so, ignores all of Beckermann’s arguments for them. Instead, Tetens just goes on about how these conclusions don’t address the mind-body problem. As if Beckermann never addressed that.

As I mentioned, Beckermann not only has addressed that, it’s one of his known professional specialties as a philosopher, or at least twenty years ago; more recently he’s been working in logics—but there is still plenty Tetens could have interacted with. For example, Beckermann’s chapter “Self-Consciousness in Cognitive Systems,” in Persons: An Interdisciplinary Approach: Proceedings of The 25th International Wittgenstein Symposium, eds Kanzian C. H., Quitterer J., Runggaldier E. (Wien: ÖBV & HPT, 2003), which is cited in an actual article on the subject by Musholt, where (in both Beckermann and Musholt) we see actual engagement with the science that never comes up in Tetens. Beckermann also discussed different aspects of the problem in a chapter in Emergence or Reduction (co-edited with Jaegwon Kim), and in “The Perennial Problem of the Reductive Explainability of Phenomenal Consciousness,” in Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and conceptual Questions (Cambridge: MIT-Press, 2000), and in now the 3rd edition of Beckermann’s entire textbook on the subject, Analytische Einführung in Die Philosophie des Geistes (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), a.k.a. Analytical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind.

Tetens also stumbles over the zombie problem, but he never addresses it clearly enough to peg him on it. Because he seems completely oblivious to the entire discussion of zombies in the field, or in fact anything in the field. Even across his book I do not detect him making any effort to interact with contemporary philosophy at all. No discussion of Chalmers, no appearance of the word “qualia,” no analysis of Mary’s Room or responses to it. No mention even of The Chinese Room, or anyone’s replies thereto. It’s as if he was writing this book in 1890. It interacts with nothing (literally nothing) published contrary to his view on the subject for the last hundred years (not even Beckermann—the lone naturalist cited, and Tetens cites none of his work on theory of mind). Teten’s position is even less informed than that of the more infamous nut-job Thomas Nagel (see Plantinga’s Tiger and Other Stupid Shit and my discussion of Timothy Kellar’s similar use of Nagel), whom Tetens does cite, but hardly usefully—and, apparently, only because Nagel agrees with him. We’re not to hear from anyone who disagrees with him. Tish tosh. Neo-Thomists just, like, aren’t into that kind of thing, man.

I recommend catching up on what I’ve said about the Zombie Problem and Mary’s Room because they refute much of Tetens’ entire book already, which makes arguments that those metaphors were invented far more elegantly to convey, yet without any awareness of that, or any of the ensuing debate in the field. Again, like he wrote in 1890, unaware that the study of mind is lifetimes ahead of him.

-:-

Information about what the whole of reality looks like must be compatible with the fact that we ourselves appear in this whole with precisely this particular information about the whole of reality. … I believe that naturalism does not pass this self-application test very well, yet which every metaphysics must pass.

— Holm Tetens

Science has conclusively determined that conscious experience is a simulation generated by a complex physical organ called the brain. See, for example, The Mind Is a Process Not an Object: On Not Understanding Mind-Brain Physicalism and What Does It Mean to Call Consciousness an Illusion?—as well as, again, Bayesian Analysis of the Barkasi-Sant’Anna Defense of Naive Memory Realism, which goes into details that exemplify the point. And yet Tetens is unaware of any of the pertinent science, and never discusses any of it. When he mentions neuroscience at all, it is just an armchair generalization for some nebulous science he never discusses any specific findings of. Like a true Neo-Thomist, evidence, facts, science, particular examples, all irrelevant and a waste of time. Tetens can solve the mysteries of the universe without them. Just from pure reason. Like some Medieval monk who still thinks the Earth is six thousand years old and immobile, and the moon a flat disk built by God to reflect the sun and tell us what day of the week it is.

When I read this line in the interview, I assumed his book, surely, must backfill this statement with an analysis of attempts to resolve the mind-body problem. Because he never elaborates on it in the interview—no specific example of a philosophy of mind anyone actually proposes today, and no explication of how it fails. Well, nope. Nowhere in the book even does he do that. That is another sign of a pseudo-intellectual: he has no serious interest in engaging with the proposals and findings of contemporary philosophy of mind. He wants you to assume none exist, and therefore everything he says on the subject is somehow something no one ever thought of before, nor has any answer to.

Hence…

• Rule 3 of Bullshittery: Never mention any competing theory; make it seem as if none exist, and that you are therefore saying something no one else had even thought of yet, nor has any reply to. Declare victory.

When you see this, you know you are reading a pseudo-intellectual bullshitter and should never waste an ounce of time on their utterances again. Burn their book to heat your home—its only useful application. And move on to someone worth your time.

The Argument from ‘Einstein Agreed with Me’ (Except He Didn’t)

We should distinguish between scientists and naturalists. A scientist can be an excellent scientist without having to be a naturalist. There are famous and very important scientists who were not naturalists: Newton, Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger.

— Holm Tetens

Which reflects another standard oldie…

• Rule 4 of Bullshittery: Believe or repeat any convenient lie, to advance any emotionally manipulative fallacy.

That Einstein and Schrödinger were not naturalists (or were even theists!) is a common myth Christian apologists spread ad nauseum. And it is a myth. Einstein was not a theist but an agnostic. And Schrödinger was an outright atheist. Neither advocated any supernaturalism. Both were functionally naturalists. Anyone using these men as examples otherwise is, again, signaling to us that they are a pseudointellectual. They neither check facts nor care what they are. And they will use emotionally manipulative fallacies like “Einstein agrees with me, therefore so should you,” without any concern for whether even the premise is true, much less the conclusion follows.

Einstein and Schrödinger shared no metaphysical beliefs with Isaac Newton, who was a Christian nutball—and has been dead for three hundred years. Anyone saying Newton’s attitude somehow informs modern science is what I mean by a pseudointellectual, someone who has forgotten or, worse, is hoping you forget how chronology and time work. In reality, how mounting scientific knowledge has changed the philosophical perspective of scientists is reflected exactly in what changed between the superstitious nutballery of Newton to the more standardized atheism (and concomitant assumption of naturalism) of Einstein and Schrödinger (hence now Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them).

-:-

A scientist can quite legitimately ask what in reality can be reduced to what. For example, can thermal processes be reduced to mechanical processes? That is a sensible question and the answer that physics has given is: Yes! In this sense, reduction questions are legitimate scientific questions that often have very interesting and surprising answers. The naturalist’s thesis is different. He says from the outset that everything must be explained and described by the sciences. And in particular, everything spiritual must be explained and described by the sciences.

— Holm Tetens

This is another fiction, invented by anti-naturalists, to straw-man naturalism. First, we do not “say from the outset” that everything is anything—we say everything is natural because that is the conclusion that follows from all the findings of all the sciences to date. It is a conclusion. It is not a first principle. Second, we do not say anything “must be explained and described by the sciences.” Plenty of things evade scientific inquiry, like the daily experience of our own lives, all the factual output of journalism, even philosophy, which we use to fill in the gaps using the findings of the sciences as a probabilistic trendline (just as Carroll explained).

To be fair, Tetens is speaking German, and in that language “sciences” (Wissenschaften) includes the humanities; it means all empirical knowledge-fields. So he does mean to include, at least, history as a science. Maybe even knowledge in the arts. But naturalists don’t limit knowledge that way. The naturalist position (and it was also Einstein’s and Schrödinger’s position) is that all knowledge—all beliefs and conclusions about the world and our existence—must be compatible with, and supported by, the findings of the sciences. That’s not the same thing. To get the two positions confused looks like another instance of bullshittery of the first kind. Tetens confirms this take by citing…no one at all. He quotes no one saying what he claims. In fact he quotes no naturalist at all on this question in any way at all—the actual epistemology held by any actual naturalists is of no interest to him.

Which means he is not taking this seriously. So we can stop taking him seriously.

-:-

And since the naturalist assumes that the primary reality lies in the material events of the world, he is forced to make the very far-reaching reductionist claim that we humans, as spiritual beings, are nothing more than a complicated piece of highly organized matter. And, in my opinion, naturalism fails to provide this proof; yet the naturalist is forced into this reductionist view.

— Holm Tetens

Notice the disingenuous rhetorical framing: the naturalist, he now fabricates, is “forced” to “claim” this about the mind, when in fact the causal direction was the other way around. Once again, bullshittery of the first kind. Or even second kind, if he is hoping to trade on an equivocation here between “forced by the evidence” and “forced by presuppositions,” and “claim” as in assume and “claim” as in conclude. Modern naturalists are naturalists because they have absorbed all the scientific findings proving all mental phenomena are the products of “a complicated piece of highly organized matter.” And that is why they are naturalists now. So naturalism didn’t “force” them to invent this finding. This finding forced them to be naturalists (see my previously linked articles, and others’ linked books and resources, on modern naturalist philosophy of mind).

Hence when Tetens says “naturalism fails to provide this proof,” he betrays his ignorance of a vast swath of data and results in cognitive science and neuroscience. He is again like someone writing in 1890. He doesn’t even know what was discovered since then! Or at least, he conceals all of it from his readers, and pretends none of it exists. This is Neo-Thomism at its purest: a complete and utter disinterest in empirical facts—at all, much less as something you have to discuss if you want to argue against them. He can just solve the mystery of consciousness from the armchair. Except, he doesn’t even do that. His entire book is all about how facts can’t explain the mind, therefore “God did it.” No actual testable theory of why the mind works at all, why it works specifically the way it does, or anything at all. Just a handwave. One purported mystery explained by simply declaring an even bigger mystery. How and why did God build the mind in this particular way? I guess it’s a mystery.

Indeed, even when Tetens tries something close to answering the question, he doesn’t. Hence…

• Rule 5 of Bullshittery: When you can’t answer a difficult question, change the question into something else, answer that instead, and claim to have answered the original question.

For example, in the book, all Tetens does answer (or try to) is the question of why God bothered with all the physical machinery of the brain at all. Which is itself a good question, but not the one he is supposed to be answering, which is why the brain that works in the particular and weird ways ours does, all the ways confirming mind-brain physicalism, and thus cited by mind-brain physicalists against him. Which we will never learn about, because none of them exist in his Neo-Thomist imagination, so he never has to respond to them. Or mention them. In short, Tetens only answers the question of why brains exist—period. Not how they work, or why they work that way. And his only answer is that God needed to give us bodies so we could interact with each other. Which doesn’t even answer the question. God didn’t need brains to do that. He could have just tethered souls to our bodies like puppets or power suits. What’s the brain for? Tetens has no answer.

So, really, this is bullshit of the fifth kind twice over. Not only did Tetens dodge the actual question (e.g., why does removing the part of the brain that stores recorded faces eliminate your ability to tell people’s faces apart from each other?), by resorting to a different, possibly easier question (e.g., why do we even have brains in the first place?), and, instead, answers yet another, even less pertinent question (why do we have bodies?), and pretends to have thereby answered the second question, and thereby pretends to have answered the first. So much bullshittery. I’m literally dizzy now. Needless to say, his entire methodology here is fucked. You can never understand reality by reasoning the way Tetens does.

D’Souza’s Mind Radio

Tetens’ book has a few small side-arguments that are wildly ridiculous (like the Argument from Hope), but even those stem from the core argument: that naturalists can’t explain human experience, like existential hope, or even the experience of free will, or anything else. Hence, overall, in both the interview and his book, Tetens advances really only one argument against naturalism: that science cannot account for “the world of experience” (or subjective consciousness—what real intellectuals call qualia, though he is oblivious to the actual terminology and never uses it anywhere in his book); therefore we need God to explain why that exists (or, in other words, why we are not what real intellectuals today identify as philosophical zombies, a la Chalmers, who is also never mentioned in his book). While Tetens fails to even address this question (confusing three different questions, as I just noted) and fails to establish even his premise (he never addresses any specific neuroscientific evidence, or evidence from cognitive science, so as to demonstrate science “cannot” explain subjective phenomenology), I got the impression he was aiming for something like Dinesh D’Souza’s “mind radio” argument. And if I were to steel-man Tetens’ crappy book, that’s the best I could do that would be in line with his argument at all. So let’s get into that.

The argument wasn’t invented by D’Souza, but he’s the best known deployer of it, most famously in his debate with Michael Shermer, as noted shortly after by Shripathi Kamath (who amusingly refuted it with the example of split-brain patients) and later addressed by Steven Novella. The idea is this: the brain receives consciousness from an external soul and simply transmits its signals, like a radio. So, the eyes and ears and nerves receive data, the “radio” transmits that data to “the soul,” the soul processes and experiences the results and makes a decision, and then transmits the decision back to the brain, which sends the requisite signals to the body (so you can walk around, talk, etc.). That supposedly can explain all the evidence of neurophysics. For example, when a circuit in a radio fails to function properly, no sound is produced; so, similarly, when the neural circuits or cells in the brain fail to function or become injured, the brain cannot function properly. Tada! Everything’s explained.

Tetens comes up with nothing so detailed. He doesn’t even propose a theory at all. It’s just “God makes it happen.” How? Why? Who cares. As long as we have God sorting it out, we can discard naturalism, and thus get to believe in hell and eternal life and dinosaurs eating coconuts and whatnot. D’Souza at least comprehends the fact that you need an explanation, not a handwave; and that your explanation has to explain the evidence, not ignore it. Tetens isn’t even that on the ball. His epistemology is the armchair-imagination rigmarole of Neo-Thomism. Evidence be damned. But if we steel-manned Tetens’ position, then he has to be adopting something like D’Souza’s radio theory (as one can infer from Tetens, Gott denken, pp. 29–31 and 45–46). And so we can finally frame the question in a testable way: which theory explains the evidence better—as in, which theory makes the evidence very probably what we would be observing—and which theory doesn’t—as in, which theory does not make the evidence very probable; and which theory is supported by all our background knowledge—as in, the consistent past trend of scientific outcomes—and which is not—as in, doesn’t gel with any prior established groundwork at all, or is even too convolutedly bizarre to count as likely.

Needless to say, “Mind Radio Theory” fails on prior probability. Because it evokes entities and forces for which there is no prior evidence, despite centuries of looking; and those entities and forces are dependent on a cause that has infinite specified complexity and thus infinitesimal existential probability. Whereas “Mind-Brain Theory” relies on established principles only, with relatively known causes: brains are some manner of computer running a simulation; and the self is just a simulation of a self; and phenomenology is simply the unavoidable outcome of what it is like to be that process. And it requires no infinite specified complexity but is fully in accord with the evidence of the evolution of consciousness over millions of years.

So “Mind Radio Theory” needs to score super big on likelihood: it has to far better predict the evidence of neuroscience than “Mind-Brain Theory” does. And it could have. The world could have been such that it would conclusively prove something sufficiently like D’Souza’s theory (for example, if the body-as-soul-puppet theory turned out to be true instead), which would prove naturalism false, and maybe even be enough to prove God did it (though that might require more evidence besides consciousness, which could have other supernatural explanations). It just didn’t turn out that way. So Radio theory is an attempt to explain away evidence, rather than explain it. It is a failed theory looking for an apologetic.

But it’s worse than that, because Radio theory actually fails to explain the evidence at all. It makes observations so unlikely as to be incredible—until we replace it with Mind-Brain theory, and then all that inexplicable evidence becomes entirely expected, even predictable. So, yes, one can point out that it violates Ockham’s Razor by multiplying entities beyond necessity. It’s like saying to Isaac Newton, “What if angels also push the planets?” Sure. Maybe. But there is no reason to believe that. Gravity already fully accounts for their motion. So there is no evidence for those additional entities; and besides, they have nothing to do. So why posit them at all? Likewise the brain: “all that evidence is caused by the brain generating the mind” is a far simpler explanation, based in immediate data; why do we need an extra layer of explanation on top of that? What does the soul even do? Why do we need it? The planets don’t need the angels; so our brains don’t need the souls.

But Radio theory is worse than that: because it predicts things we don’t see, as if the Angels theory predicted we should even see the angels, and we don’t. That’s what we call a falsified theory. It’s even worse because it is designed to prove God; but adding God to the theory makes it even less probable, not only in terms of prior probability (adding God is like adding an infinite number of epicyles), but also in terms of evidential prediction. Because…why would God build such a shitty and convoluted instrument? If God exists, we don’t need the radio—any more than God himself needs one. Our bodies could simply be directed by the signals from the ghost-mind, like a drone. We should observe Puppet theory in that case, not Radio theory. What use is there for this convoluted, delicate, breakable, energy-hogging intermediary “radio” called the brain? So, just like for any Argument from Shitty Design, you have to invent even more convoluted apologetics to get God to fit the theory; when if God actually made us, we wouldn’t need that. We’d be seeing Puppet theory vindicated, not Radio theory.

To illustrate what I mean, consider just one example from current neuroscience: how we see the color yellow (the same thing as the more commonly-encountered color brown, which is just dark yellow). The eyes only have cones for red, green, and blue, so only signals for those colors (or, to be more precise, for those frequencies of photon vibration) enter the brain from the eyes. So how is it that we see yellow? Well, the brain invents it by comparing green-red signals in the Primary Visual Cortex. When the math works out, it processes the output from the red and green signals into yellow, and that becomes the color we see—because “what we see” is in the holistic virtual model built further downstream from the PVC. In essence, the PVC “guesses” when yellow-frequency photons are present (510–530 Terraherz), by examining the way signals come in from the green (540–600 Terraherz) and red sensors (400–484 Terraherz), and rebuilds the color.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to just install a yellow-detecting cone in the eye? Yes. But we were built by blind natural selection, not an intelligent engineer. We slowly, randomly, built a compensating system in the brain to get at that color using the limited tools at hand. And here lies the clue. That this is the physical machinery behind why our primary color system is red, green, blue, and yellow. Which makes sense on a physicalist explanation, color being a product of selective computation. But this makes no sense at all on D’Souza’s “Radio” explanation. Why do we need the brain to calculate the presence of yellow, but not red, blue, and green? On Radio theory, none of this should be the responsibility of the brain. The raw signals should just go to the soul, and the soul calculate the colors from the data, and thus produce a color experience to react to, sending signals back to the radio to direct how the body should react. Only mind-brain theory explains why we need a physical circuit in the brain to produce yellow. Radio theory makes no sense of this. It is not predicted by the theory, but counter-predicted by it.

Imagine if someone asks us to grab the yellow but not the red ball in front of us. On D’Souza’s model, there should be only one thing happening in the brain: besides a signal sender to the ghost mind (never discovered), and a signal receiver from the ghost mind (never discovered), all the brain should be doing is directing our bodies to grab the yellow ball. Which ball is yellow is determined entirely by the ghost mind, not the brain. But if which ball is yellow is being determined by the brain, then that means the ghost mind can’t do what the brain does. And then D’Souza’s theory is wrong. Since we observe that it is the brain doing it, we know D’Souza’s theory is wrong.

And that’s just one of literally thousands of cases of our advanced understanding of how the brain produces different elements of consciousness. It’s all like the production of yellow: the brain is doing all the work. It can’t therefore be merely receiving information from some other processor somewhere. “But maybe the Primary Visual Cortex receives the yellow data from the Mind-Soul, but not the red, green, or blue data, which are already received from the eye” is a bizarre epicycle to propose. Why do we need a special receiver in the brain just for a color, and indeed just the one color and not the others? And why is that receiver so complicated and energy-consuming, if all it’s doing is receiving data and not processing it? And if God doesn’t need a PVC to “see” yellow, then why do we? And so on.

The examples just get more devastating as you go through them. Here is Kamath’s:

Let’s take an extreme case of the split-brain patient that V.S. Ramachandran describes [in whom one half of their brain reported being an atheist; and the other half reported being a theist]. If there really were some “mind waves” that correspond to the actual consciousness of an individual, which half of the split brain does the “mind wave” actually attach to? Is the person “really” an atheist, or “really” a theist? Is the “mind wave” actually able to pick whether it is an atheist or a theist in this “mind wave space” without it manifesting in reality? Would D’Souza’s benevolent deity then judge the poor soul based on the “mind wave’s decision” to decide whether or not s/he should spend eternity in a burning lake of fire? Or is this person both in heaven and in eternal torture? Maybe a timeshare?

Joking aside, notice the empirical point: how can one half of the brain be doing all the intellectual and phenomenal consciousness production differently than the right half of the brain on D’Souza’s theory? Note Kamath picked a particularly worrying example for theists like D’Souza. But the examples proliferate: split-brain patients can think differently and experience things differently. You can speak into one ear, and that half of the brain will hear you (and take into account the data you provided), while the other half will not. You can cover one eye and show them an image, and the remaining half of the brain will see it (and take into account the data you provided), while the other won’t. And vice versa. They can thus reach different conclusions (because they get different data); and they can have completely different sensory experiences—even completely different memories.

Yet on Radio theory, only two things are possible: the soul communicates with both halves of their brain; or the soul communicates with only one. But because the soul is not split, none of the split-brain phenomenology should occur. If the soul is connected to both, they should both have the same information, memories, and experiences. But they don’t. So it can only be communicating with one half of the brain. Apart from the alarming problem of then determining which half is actually communicating with the person’s soul, there is a more pressing empirical problem here: the fact that the other half keeps working refutes D’Souza’s theory. The half not linked to the soul keeps having phenomenological experience, keeps thinking, keeps making rational decisions, keeps recalling memories, and so on—in short, it remains entirely as conscious as the other half. Which means the physical brain can do everything on its own, even when completely disconnected from the Soul-Mind. But then you have no reason to believe either side of their brain is talking to the soul—if the brain can do it all without the soul, we no longer need it. It becomes just another angel pushing the planets.

That alone pretty well proves mind-brain physicalism. Of course, apologists will add an epicycle and claim splitting a portion of the brain creates two souls. But that still ignores the data: not everything in split brain patients is split; so there cannot be two entirely distinct souls; and when allowed to interact with each other (for example, by speaking, one half can hear the other), the two halves can produce a unified (singular) consciousness. Moreover, to argue the two souls thing, you have to “offload” most of the processing from those souls back to the brain; but what then is even left for the soul to do? Everything the brain does is in the brain. That’s why split-brain patients lose skills from one side to the other. For example:

[T]he left hemisphere [of the brain] houses most language capabilities. So, when something is presented in the right visual field (to the left hemisphere) patients are able to respond verbally; however, when an image is presented in the left visual field, though the patient may not be able to respond verbally, they are able to non-verbally. For example, participants can use their left hands (controlled by the right hemisphere) to point out what was seen from a group of objects

That loss of verbal skills is not total, but it is significant. Why would splitting the brain cause the new second soul to lose a large portion of its knowledge of language? And if the brain is thus causing the abilities of each soul to be what they are, what, again, do we need that soul to explain?

So apologetics doesn’t get you a plausible theory. It just evades following where the evidence points. And like this you could go through a thousand more examples. Novella’s point is that we keep pressing the Brain-Mind model, and it keeps being confirmed; whereas if the Radio model were true, the mind-brain model should break down at some point. “We would run into anomalies we could not explain,” and “it would seem as if the brain does not have the physical complexity to account for the observed mental complexity.” But that isn’t what happens. More complex processing always correlates with more complex circuits, even when the outcome is far simpler. And every phenomenon has a circuit, like the most unintelligently designed radio in the universe. Imagine building a radio that had a completely different circuit for literally every word in the English language, and organized by subject, so one radio handles receiving words for tools, and another words for people’s names, and another completely different circuit handles the color yellow, and yet another handles spatial location, and yet another receives and reports one emotion, while another receives another, and so on.

That makes no sense. A radio should just receive the information and distribute it. It shouldn’t be tasked with first figuring out what information it is, and re-routing that information through an overly-complicated circuit devoted just to that one kind of information, before even generating the outcome needed. Hence all the evidence is accumulating toward the physical mind-brain computation model and away from anything like Radio theory. Empiricists follow the trend. Especially when it is so overwhelming. But Neo-Thomists reject evidence as irrelevant to their armchair solving of the world’s questions. They have no interest where the evidence points. They just need a particular result, even if they have to ignore all the evidence to get there.

An Example of How Naturalists Actually Explain Consciousness

In his book, Tetens uses an argument derived from Thomas Nagel, that objective third party descriptions of the world cannot explain subjective first person knowledge (direct experience). But it simply ignores all evidence like we just touched on, and replaces empirical reasoning with fallacious armchair reasoning instead. For example, “The mental is only understood naturalistically if it is possible to logically-conceptually infer from physical statements to statements about the mental,” but “it is not possible to logically-conceptually infer from physical statements to statements about the mental” (Tetens, Gott denken, p. 24). This is both false and irrelevant.

First, we actually can “infer from physical statements to statements about the mental.” For example, with adequate brain scan resolution, we could predict what color a patient would report seeing, what face they would report remembering, whether they were thinking about a tool or a place, even whether they were telling the truth or lying, because all of these things use specific processing centers of the brain. So, for example, lying requires calling up certain processes of thinking (to construct and confabulate and sell the lie), while telling the truth calls up others entirely (for example, reporting a memory of your uncle will light up centers of your brain already keyed with data about your uncle, rather than centers of your brain tasked with inventing such details on the spot). Nagel, like Tetens, is simply a shit philosopher who didn’t keep up even with neuroscience of his own decade; and we’ve advanced immensely in the decades since, completely destroying his every argument.

Second, we don’t need a complete accounting of propositional knowledge to also contain experiential knowledge. This is the Mary’s Room mistake: the Tetens of the world try to show that “knowing what the color red looks like” is not contained in a complete list of true propositions about color processing in the brain, therefore physicalism can’t account for it; but that’s like saying that a complete set of true propositions about the heart won’t pump blood, therefore physicalism can’t account for how hearts do that. That would be a nonsensical (and, frankly, stupid) thing to conclude. Obviously you can use those propositions about hearts to build one that will pump blood, and you can entirely predict that’s what it will do. But you still have to have the heart to get the blood pumped. Likewise, phenomenology. Knowing what it is like to be a process is only accessible from being the process (just as being an organ that moves blood is the only accessible way to produce blood flow). But propositions can contain all we need to know to build and run any process, and we can even predict what (if anything) that process will experience (whether colors or not, which colors, and so on). But we still have to run the process to ask it what it is like. Just as we still have to build and operate a heart to move blood. Physicalism in no way entails that can’t be the case.

It is at this point that the Tetens of the world will retreat from Mary’s Room to Chalmers’ Zombies, and claim there still has to be an extra something to get from information processing to actual qualia—the actual redness of red, the actual feeling of ennui, the actual smell and taste of camembert. And so on. But that collapses on the same ground: it is not logically possible for a machine to physically process information a certain way and there be nothing “it is like” for that machine—experience is impossible to prevent as an output, just as a correctly installed and pumping heart will always move blood. For example, using our neurophysical maps of the brain’s circuitry, we could objectively determine whether a first-person experiencer is lying or not, simply by observing which physical components of their brain are being used when they utter an answer to our question. So, what happens when we ask them whether they are experiencing the actual redness of red, or the actual feeling of ennui, or the actual smell and taste of camembert?

The Chalmers argument hinges on zombies being physically identical to real people—because they have to be, in order to establish that qualia are some extra thing being added in from outside (as by Mind Radio, say). But if a zombie lies about experiencing qualia, its physical circuitry will be different (the cascade causing the lie; and the different activity of the lying circuit itself). So to get a zombie to say that and tell the truth, qualia must be a product of the physical changes you have to make to get that result. Therefore we need no extra anything. And maybe at this point you’d punt in desperation and say, “But maybe the zombie is lying but doesn’t know it; maybe it truly believes it is experiencing qualia?” Okay. What would be the difference, then, between that and experiencing qualia? That’s Dennett’s entire point: that’s what experiencing qualia literally is. It’s a machine that believes it is experiencing qualia. Believing you are seeing something is seeing it. They are logically inseparable. You could say that by “it” there is still a difference between a dream and reality, but that isn’t the question we are asking. Even in a dream, when you see something, you are seeing something. That something’s ontology will be different than a real thing; but the ontology producing your experience will be exactly the same. So Chalmers’ zombies are impossible. And that means physicalists have nothing to explain. Qualia are a logically necessary outcome of physics.

See my discussion of these kinds of questions in On Hosing Thought Experiments (and specifically regarding Mary and Zombies).

Conclusion

Tetens is really just attempting a garbled Argument from Consciousness against naturalism. Without ever using the phrase “Argument from Consciousness” or exhibiting any knowledge whatever of the naturalist side of that debate in the last hundred years. He is more explicit about this in the book than the interview, but the book literally adds no new information—he doesn’t cite or address any philosophers there, either, nor any specific actual science of consciousness, nor does he use any recognized terms in the field, like “Argument from Consciousness” (or qualia, or anything else).

Nevertheless, his argument is that a complete objective accounting of the data of the world won’t include subjective first-person experience, therefore naturalism cannot be correct, therefore we need God to provide subjective first-person experience (by magic; since Tetens has no theory of how God does this or how it could be tested scientifically whether he does). His error is an equivocation fallacy: he equivocates between “accounting for” as in “causally explains” and “accounting for” as in “produces,” which is the error in the Mary’s Room scenario. Mary can explain every aspect of her experience (nothing is left out); the mere fact that the explanation itself does not cause the experience is because an explanation is just a list of descriptive propositions, not the actual machine itself that is being described. It’s the same error as saying “God must cause hearts to pump blood, because no complete description of a heart pumps blood.”

This kind of mistake is typical of Neo-Thomists however. So, Dr. Tetens, welcome to that club, I guess?

A Request from My Readers

I’ll close by reiterating my call for examples of this new trend. So, dear readers, please check the comments below, and add in a comment any names, that aren’t already there, of published philosophers (atheists or not) who have recently “converted to Catholicism,” or, perhaps like Tetens, have adopted its theology even if not its churchgoing. Please link to a source, too, so readers can verify it. I appreciate it!