Edward Feser's Blog, page 76

So, what are you doing after your funeral?

There is, among contemporary Thomists, a controversy over the metaphysical status of human beings after death.  Both sides agree that the human soul is the substantial form of the living human body, both sides agree that the human soul subsists after death, and both sides agree that the body is restored to the soul at the resurrection.  But what happens to the human being himself between death and resurrection?  Does a human being in some way continue to exist after death?  Or does he cease to exist until the resurrection?  Which answer do the premises that both sides agreed on support?  And which answer did Aquinas himself support?These last two questions are related, but nevertheless importantly different.  It might be that the right answer to the question about what happens to human beings after death -- the answer that the premises all Thomists agree on actually entails -- is the answer that Aquinas himself gave.  But it might be that Thomistic premises in fact support a different answer than the one Aquinas gave.  (That happens sometimes.  Philosophers don’t always correctly understand all the implications of the premises to which they are committed.)  Or it may be that there is no clear answer to the question about what Aquinas himself thought, even if his premises actually entail one of the two possible positions.

Survivalism is the label that has come to be attached to the view that the human being in some way continues to exist after death.  It is defended by (among others) Thomist philosophers like David Oderberg and Eleonore Stump.  Corruptionismis the label that has come to be attached to the view that the human being ceases to exist after death (but comes back into existence at the resurrection).  It is defended by (among others) Thomist philosophers like Patrick Toner and Brian Davies.  Survivalists tend to attribute their view to Aquinas, and corruptionists also tend to attribute their view to Aquinas.  It is possible, though, to endorse one view while thinking that Aquinas erroneously held the other. 
In his recent American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article “Aquinas on the Death of Christ: A New Argument for Corruptionism,” Turner Nevitt defends the claim that Aquinas was a corruptionist.  (He doesn’t address in any detail the issue of whether the corruptionist position is actually the correct metaphysical view to take; his focus is rather on Aquinas exegesis.)  Along the way he lists some of the Thomists who have defended each view.
Nevitt cites me as a corruptionist, on the basis of some remarks I make in my book Aquinas .  That is not correct.  In fact I don’t actually address the dispute between survivalism and corruptionism in the book, though I can understand why Nevitt would take what I say there to imply a corruptionist position.  In any event, on the substantive metaphysical question about what happens to the human being after death, I am definitely a survivalist.  On the exegetical question about what Aquinas himself thought, I am agnostic.  I think his premises actually imply survivalism, and that he sometimes says things that sound like an endorsement of survivalism.  But I agree that he also sometimes says other things that sound like an endorsement of corruptionism (including the passages cited by Nevitt).  In fact, I don’t think it is clear that Aquinas directly addresses in the first place exactly the question that survivalists and corruptionists are arguing about.  What he does clearly address is the related but different question about whether a human being is, even in the normal case, nothing more than his soul (which is what Platonism seems to imply).  And here his answer is negative.  A human being is not reducible to his soul.  But we survivalists agree with that, and it does not imply corruptionism.
I have a forthcoming article that addresses these issues in a systematic way, so I won’t say here everything that could be said.  Suffice it to make the following points.
First, and again, I think it is at least unclear whether Aquinas himself really addresses the question at hand, or at least that he addresses it in a way that has in view the specific sorts of concerns that motivate contemporary survivalists.  What was fundamentally at issue in Aquinas’s day was whether to think of human beings in an essentially Platonic way, as immaterial souls which are complete substances in their own right, and only contingently related to their bodies.  Aquinas definitely, and rightly, rejects the Platonic view, and when he puts heavy emphasis on the theme that the presence of the body is essential to the integrity of the human being, it is Platonism that he has in his sights.  And both survivalists and corruptionists agree in rejecting the Platonic conception of human nature.  We have to be very cautious, then, not to give the relevant texts from Aquinas an anachronistic reading. 
Second, corruptionists, in my view, in any case put too much emphasis on the exegetical question.  What ultimately matters is not what Aquinas himself actually said in this or that particular text.  Rather, what matters is whether it is corruptionism or survivalism that actually follows from the premises that Aquinas, and us later Thomists, are all committed to.  If survivalism is what actually follows from those premises (as I think it does) then that fact itself is strong evidence that Aquinas himself was actually a survivalist (since philosophers do usually and in general understand the implications of their premises, even if not in every case).  But even if he wasn’t, what ultimately matters is whether he should have beena survivalist.  To hammer on the exegetical question is to risk resting one’s case on a mere argument from authority, which (as Aquinas himself held) is the weakest sort of argument when the authority is a merely human authority.  (And no, in noting that Aquinas said that, I’m not appealingto his authority -- so spare me the cute tu quoque retort, please.)
Third, corruptionism, I think, simply makes no sense metaphysically, for reasons that should be clear from what I have said in earlier posts (e.g. hereand here, though I was not directly addressing the dispute between corruptionism and survivalism in those posts).  Both corruptionists and survivalists agree (contra Platonism and Cartesianism) that a human being is one substance, not two.  Both agree that this one substance has both corporeal powers (our various animal faculties) and incorporeal powers (intellect and will).  As good Aristotelians, both agree that a substantial form only exists when informing the substance of which it is the form; there is no such thing as a substantial form floating free of any concrete individual substance.  Both sides also agree that the human soul just is the human being’s substantial form.  And both sides agree that the soul continues to exist after death.
Now, when someone who accepts all of these premises puts them together, then, I maintain, to be consistent he must be a survivalist.  There is no avoiding it.  The human soul exists after death.  But a soul is a substantial form, and a substantial form only exists when informing the substance of which it is the form.  So, the substance of which the human soul is the form must exist after death.  But that substance is a human being, where a human being is a single substance rather than two substances.  So, the human being must exist after death.
But how can a human being exist after death if the body, which is then gone, is integral to the human being?  The answer is: in something like the way a human being can continue to exist after losing his arms, legs, eyes, ears, tongue, etc. (as the unfortunate protagonist of the Dalton Trumbo novel Johnny Got His Gun does).  Arms, legs, eyes, ears, tongue, etc. are integral to us.  Any human being in his mature and normal state has them.  A human being who is missing them persists only in a highly abnormal and greatly diminished state.  But he does persist.  Similarly, a human being who has lost more than that -- namely, all of his corporeal faculties -- but still has his incorporeal faculties, persists in an even more radically diminished state.  But he does persist.  And that is how the soul persists beyond death, despite being a kind of substantial form.  It persists precisely because the substance of which it is the form persists, albeit only in a radically diminished and abnormal state.
To say instead, as corruptionists do, that the soul persists after death but that the human being does not, entails that a substantial form exists even though the substance of which it is the form is gone.  And that simply makes no sense -- certainly not given the background metaphysical premises to which Aquinas, and corruptionists themselves, are committed.
(Side note: Confusion on these issues sometimes arises because people misunderstand what it means to say, as Thomists do, that the soul is the substantial form of the body.  Since the body is, of course, corporeal by definition, they think this entails that the soul is the substantial form of a substance which is entirely corporeal, and are then mystified by the claim that the soul persists when this corporeal thing is gone.  But they thereby misunderstand the claim that the soul is the form of the body.  The claim isn’t: “The soul is the form of a substance which is entirely corporeal,” because Thomists don’t believe in the first place that human beings are entirely corporeal or bodily.  Rather, they have both corporeal and incorporeal powers.  The body is only part of the substance that is a human being, not the whole of it.  Rather, the claim is: “The soul is the substantial form of a substance which has both corporeal and incorporeal powers, and since the corporeal powers are summed up in the expression ‘the body,’ naturally the soul is the form of the body, even if the human being is more than merelythe body.”)
Fourth, corruptionism makes no sense theologicallyeither, at least not given the theological premises that both corruptionists and survivalists accept.  Both sides agree that, after death but before the resurrection, human souls are rewarded or punished, and can be prayed to.  For example, you can pray to St. Peter, who has attained his reward in heaven.  But it only makes sense to reward, punish, or pray to actual persons.  Hence St. Peter can intelligibly be rewarded and prayed to only if he exists as a person.  But what kind of person is St. Peter?  Is he an angel, or a human being?  A human being, of course.  Hence St. Peter can intelligibly be rewarded and prayed to only if he exists as a human being.  To be sure, prior to the resurrection, he does not yet have his body restored to him, and thus exists only as a radically incomplete human being.  (Fortunately, the beatific vision more than makes up for this temporary loss, so overallSt. Peter is of course in a very good state.)  Still, he does exist as a human being.
Corruptionists like Nevitt respond to this problem by saying that talk about praying to or rewarding St. Peter should be interpreted as instances of synecdoche, viz. the use of an expression for a thing to refer to a part of the thing, as when we say “The U.S. government condemned the attacks,” meaning that a certain specific government official condemned the attacks.  The idea is that when we talk about praying to St. Peter, this is merely a roundabout way of talking about praying to the soul of St. Peter, which is only a part of him.  And when we talk about St. Peter being rewarded in heaven, all this means (so it is claimed) is that the soul of St. Peter is being rewarded, where his soul is, again, only a part of him. 
But this doesn’t solve the problem at all.  Suppose that, after his death, St. Peter’s left eyeball or his right lung had been kept alive artificially (perhaps for the purpose of transplantation into someone who needed an eye or a lung).  Would it make sense in that case to pray to St. Peter’s left eye?  Would it make sense to reward St. Peter’s right lung?  Obviously not.  And the reason is also obvious.  An eyeball or a lung all by itself is sub-personal.  Hence, neither one can in any way intercede for us, and neither one can in any way enjoy rewards of the sort the blessed in heaven enjoy.  And yet a separated soul can intercede for us, and canenjoy the rewards of heaven.  Hence a separated soul is a person.  A very radically diminished person, to be sure, but not a non-person.  And what kind of person?  Again, a human one.  Hence, the human being must exist after death.
(Postscript for the New Atheist reader: I am well aware, of course, that skeptics wouldn’t agree in the first place that the soul in any sense survives the death of the body, or that there even is such a thing as the soul.  But that’s not what this post is about.  So, please don’t waste your time or mine with idiotic comments to the effect that this is all superstition, that I haven’t proved that there is a soul, etc.  I have, in many other places, given argumentsfor the claims that the human intellect is incorporeal, that this entails that it can persist beyond the death of the body, etc. -- see e.g. this article, chapter 4 of this book, some of the posts collected here, and so forth.   What I am addressing in the above post is merely a question that arises after one is already convinced of arguments of the sort I’ve defended elsewhere.)

Brentano on the mental

What distinguishes the mental from the non-mental?  Franz Brentano (1838-1917), in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint , famously takes intentionality to be the key.  He developed this answer by way of criticism of (what he took to be) the traditional Cartesian criterion.  Descartes held that the essence of matter lies in extension and spatial location.  Whatever lacks these geometrical features is therefore non-material.  Accordingly, it must fall into the second class of substances recognized by Descartes, namely mental substance.  As Brentano reads the Cartesian tradition, then, it holds that the essence of the mental is to be unextended and non-spatial.Brentano argues that this criterion is problematic insofar as there are apparent counterexamples.  For one thing, there are physical phenomena that are arguably neither extended nor spatial.  He notes that sounds and odors are possible examples cited by some of the psychologists of his day.  For another thing, there are mental phenomena that are evidently extended or spatially located.  For example, sense perception is associated with specific bodily organs, and pains and other sensations are located in specific parts of the body.  Brentano doesn’t necessarily endorse all of these examples, but he thinks that the very fact that the criterion of appealing to extension and spatial location (or the lack thereof) is controversial shows that the criterion is inadequate.  Furthermore, he says, it is a purely negative criterion.  A positive characterization of the mental is desirable. 

I’ll get to Brentano’s own proposed criterion in a moment, but let’s pause to evaluate what he says about the purportedly Cartesian criterion.  I’m not a Cartesian, but if I were I’d find Brentano’s remarks pretty annoying, because I don’t think they get Descartes right, and are problematic in other ways too.  First and least importantly (and as Brentano himself might have agreed) the first set of alleged counterexamples is pretty unimpressive.  It’s true that sounds and odors lack the precise spatial locations and boundaries that (say) shapes and color patches have, but they are also clearly locatable and extended in a looser sense.  For example, if someone burns popcorn in the microwave, there is an obvious sense in which the smell of it is located in the kitchen but not in the driveway, and in which the range of the odor might extend to the nearest bedroom but (say) not to the farthest bedroom.  A sound will also be audible only within a certain distance, and its source localizable.  These sorts of facts are enough to make sounds and odors extended and spatially locatable by Descartes’ lights.
A second problem, though, is that Descartes would hold that to say that odors and sounds have extension and spatial location is in any event to speak ambiguously.  For example, he would point out that by “sound,” we might mean compression waves in the air, or we might instead mean the auditory experience these waves cause in us.  If we mean the former, then a sound clearly does have a spatial location.  If we mean the latter, then Descartes would agree that it does not have a spatial location, but would also say that it is not physical in the first place (though note the qualification he would make vis-à-vis sensory experiences that I’ll describe below).
A third and more important problem is that it just isn’t true that Descartes lacks a positive conception of the mental or that he takes the lack of extension and spatial location to be the essence of the mental.  Rather, the essence of the mental is thought-- what remains when you’ve doubted away everything else as a dream, a hallucination caused by an evil spirit, etc., but can still know that cogito, ergo sum.  To be a mind is just to be a thing that thinks, a res cogitans, and there is nothing more to its essence than that.  It is true, of course, that Descartes takes the mind to be unextended and non-spatial, and thus to be immaterial.  But that is not because these features are themselves the essence of the mental.  Rather, he takes them to follow from the essence of the mental, and in particular from the fact (as he sees it) that thought might still exist even if extension and space were fictions.  Of course, we might reasonably go on to ask Descartes what thought is, but the point is that whatever he might say about that, his criterion of what makes something a mind is (i) a positive one, and (ii) not stated in terms of the lack of extension and spatial location. 
A fourth problem is that Descartes would take the other alleged counterexamples cited by Brentano to be characterized in a tendentious way.  For the experiences associated with sensory perception and with pain and other bodily sensations are not, in Descartes’ view, mental full stop.  Again, for Descartes to be a mind is to be a thing that thinks, a res cogitans, and what he primarily associates “thinking” with is intellectual activity, the sort that involves the grasp of concepts which might be expressed in language, etc.  The capacity for sensation (and also for appetite and emotion) he takes to arise only when the res cogitansgets conjoined to the body (the res extensaor extended substance). 
A sensation, then (whether a visual sensation, a sensation of pain, or whatever) is therefore a kind of hybrid attribute in Descartes’ view.  It has both mental and non-mentalor physical aspects.  That a sensation of pain has a conscious feel to it is certainly a mental aspect of it, and is contributed by the res cogitans.  But that it has a location (in the back, say) is a non-mental aspect of the sensation, and is contributed by the res extensa.  Hence to cite sensations as purported examples of mental phenomena having extension and spatial location would in Descartes’ view be conceptually sloppy or at least question-begging.
So, Brentano’s critique of the Cartesian position seems to me weak.  What about his own alternative?  Again, Brentano’s claim is that what truly sets the mental apart from everything else is intentionality -- the way a thought, for example, is directed at, “points” to, or is about something.  For instance, the thought that the cat is on the mat is about the cat and its being on the mat, is directed toward that alleged state of affairs or “points” toward it.  Nothing physical is like that, Brentano thinks.  Hence to be mental is, essentially to be intentional, and to be physical is to be non-intentional.  (Remember that “intentional” here is being used in a technical sense.  Brentano isn’t talking about e.g. whether you did something intentionally or unintentionally.  “Intentions” in that ordinary sense are just one manifestation of intentionality in Brentano’s sense.  To be intentional in the relevant technical sense is to exhibit “aboutness” or “directedness toward” an object, and to be non-intentional in the relevant sense is to lack this directedness or aboutness.)
What should we think of this criterion?  One problem with it is that, at least as Brentano states it, it is no less subject to alleged counterexamples than the pseudo-Cartesian criterion he criticizes.  And ironically (given Brentano’s own use of them against the Cartesian view), some would take pains and certain other bodily sensations to provide such counterexamples.  For example, it is sometimes claimed that a sensation of pain is mental but lacks any intentionality.  Pain is (so the argument goes) just a raw feel that isn’t “about” anything. 
That is controversial -- others (such as Tim Crane) argue that an experience of pain is directed toward the body part in which the pain is felt, and thus does have intentionality -- but Brentano’s criterion faces a more serious problem.  Some contemporary philosophers have argued that purely physical and non-mental phenomena do possess a kind of intentionality.  For example, in his book Powers: A Study in Metaphysics , George Molnar holds that there are four aspects to intentionality -- directedness; the possibility that the object of the intentional state may not actually exist; indeterminacy; and referential opacity -- and he argues that causal powers possess features like all four of these. 
Now, I think Molnar is only half-right here, and in particular that powers only plausibly possess the first two of these.  (See pp. 100-105 of Scholastic Metaphysics for discussion of Molnar’s views and related contemporary arguments.)  But they do indeed possess something like the “directedness” so emphasized by Brentano.  In particular, they possess what Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophers would call finality of a very rudimentary sort (namely the “stripped-down core notion” of final causality or teleology that I referred to in a recent post). 
Of course, most modern philosophers since the time of Descartes would reject the claim that there is anything like Aristotelian finality in the material world.  They would relegate all “directedness toward” an object to the mind, and would say that where it appears to exist in nature, that is only because the mind projects it onto nature, rather than finding it in nature.  (Molnar and like-minded contemporary thinkers are really neo-Aristotelians of a sort, whether they realize it or not.)  Hence if one accepts the modern, post-Cartesian conception of matter as devoid of any inherent finality, teleology, or directedness, and regards all finality, teleology, or directedness as mind-dependent, then one will be hard-pressed to resist Brentano’s criterion -- which is precisely why so many contemporary philosophers have found it plausible.  (It is ironic, given Brentano’s criticism of what he takes to be the Cartesian criterion, that the plausibility of his own proposed criterion itself presupposes a post-Cartesian conception of matter.)
It should also be noted that that is not all Brentano had to say on the subject, though.  He also characterizes the mental as that which we know via a kind of “inner perception.”  Is this a better criterion of what sets the mental apart from the non-mental?
I would answer: It is hard to say, in part because the term “mental” is used so broadly in contemporary philosophy.  Suppose we use the term “mental” narrowly, to refer to what is true of the intellect specifically.  In that case, neither of Brentano’s criteria is quite right, at least from the point of view of the Aristotelian or the Thomist.  The first criterion is not quite right because non-human animals, plants, and indeed inorganic phenomena can all exhibit a kind of “directedness” and yet lack intellects.  The second criterion is inadequate if we suppose that anything that is conscious has at least some kind of “inner perception” (though whether this is the case will depend on how we interpret the notion of inner perception).  For animals are conscious and yet lack intellects.
From an Aristotelian or Thomist point of view, it is not intentionality as such that is the mark of intellectual activity, but rather intentionality that involves the conceptualization of that toward which the mind is directed.  Animal consciousness has a kind of intentionality, but not the grasp or application of true concepts.  Hence conceptualthought is the mark of the mental, if by “mental” we mean strictly intellectual activity. 
If we use “mental” more broadly, though, to include anyconscious phenomena -- including the kind of conscious experiences had by non-human animals, which lack intellects -- then perhaps Brentano’s second criterion (“inner perception”) is defensible.  (In this case, though, the criterion would not support any claim to the effect that the mental, broadly construed, is incorporeal or non-bodily -- at least not for Aristotelians and Thomists, who regard the intellect as incorporeal, but sensory experience as corporeal or bodily.)

Oderberg on final causes

Speaking of teleology: David Oderberg’s article “Finality Revived: Powers and Intentionality” has just appeared in Synthese.  It seems at the moment to be available for free viewing online, so take a look.  Readers interested in final causality and its relationship to the current debate in analytic metaphysics about the purported “physical intentionality” of causal powers will definitely find it of interest.
If you haven’t done so, take a look also at David’s earlier writings on this subject, such as his article “Teleology: Inorganic and Organic.”  (And, of course, he has authored a great many other important articles and books on topics in metaphysics and many other philosophical issues.)

Parsons on Coyne

Readers of my recent First Things review of Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact might find of interest atheist philosopher Keith Parsons’ comments on the review in the Letters pages of the latest issue of First Things.  My reply to Keith can also be found there.
(Related reading: A couple of years ago, Keith and I engaged in a very fruitful series of exchanges, an index to which can be found at The Secular Outpost.)

Conjuring teleology

At The Philosophers’ Magazine online, Massimo Pigliucci discusses teleology and teleonomy.  His position has the virtues of being simple and clear.  Unfortunately, it also has the vices of being simplistic and wrong.  His remarks can be summarized fairly briefly.  Explaining what is wrong with them takes a little more doing.Teleology, as Pigliucci says, is actual purposefulness, whereas teleonomy is the mere appearanceof purposefulness.  The former, he claims, always involves either divine or human agency.  The sciences can in Piglucci’s view be distinguished by their relationships to teleology and teleonomy.  “[P]hysics, chemistry, astronomy and geology,” he says, “are neither teleonomic nor teleologic.”  At the other extreme, with psychology, sociology and economics it is “mandatory” that we understand the phenomena they study in teleological terms.  In the middle stands biology, which he says is not teleological but is teleonomic.  Why is teleonomy “indispensible” to biology?  Because, Pigliucci says, “natural selection… truly does mimic goals and purposes” whereas the phenomena studied by physics, chemistry, etc. do not.  And what accounts for the difference between merely teleonomic phenomena and truly teleological ones?  In Pigliucci’s view it is consciousness, the science of which “is still waiting for its Darwin.”

Pigliucci is a smart and interesting guy, but as we’ve seen before (hereand here), like too many other contemporary philosophers he often seems unable or unwilling to think outside the box of what everyone “knows.”  In this case, like most people who comment on the subject these days (whether naturalists, ID theorists, or whoever), he overlooks several crucial distinctions where teleology is concerned -- distinctions I spelled out in my article “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide” (with further, more recent relevant discussion at pp. 88-105 of Scholastic Metaphysics ).  Though these are distinctions which come naturally to us Thomists, they are also (as I discuss in the writings just referred to and have discussed in many other places as well) distinctions some of which you will find recapitulated by some contemporary non-Thomist and even naturalistic philosophers.
I won’t repeat here everything I’ve said in those earlier writings.  Suffice it to note that there are at least five approaches one could take to the question of whether teleology is (or is not) real, and at least five levels in nature at which one might (or might not) identify a distinct sort of teleology. 
As I’ve noted before, the first set of distinctions roughly corresponds to the five sorts of position one could take on the problem of universals: nominalism, conceptualism, and the three brands of realism (Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic).  Teleological eliminativism (which roughly parallels nominalism) holds that there is no teleology at all in the natural world.  Teleological reductionism holds that there is teleology in the natural world, but that it is entirely reducible to non-teleological phenomena.  Platonic teleological realism holds that teleology is real and irreducible but that it does not exist in natural, non-mental phenomena in any intrinsic way.  Rather, it exists only relative to some mind (say, human or divine) which imparts teleology to otherwise purposeless phenomena.  Aristotelian teleological realismholds that teleology is real and irreducible and that it does exist in natural, non-mental phenomena in an intrinsic way, without having to be derived from any mind.  Scholastic teleological realismis something of a middle ground position between Platonic and Aristotelian teleological realism.  It holds that teleology is real and irreducible, and that it has a proximate ground in the intrinsic natures of things (as the Aristotelian view holds) but that it also has its ultimate source in the divine intellect (as the Platonic view holds).  Platonic teleological realism is the view reflected in arguments like Paley’s design argument and ID theory.  Scholastic teleological realism is the view one finds in Aquinas’s Fifth Way.  (See my article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way.”  Both that article and “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide” are reprinted in Neo-Scholastic Essays .  The distinction between Platonic and Aristotelian teleological realism has been emphasized in recent analytic philosophy by writers like Christopher Shields and Andre Ariew.)
The second set of distinctions, between levels in nature at which teleology may or may not exist, goes as follows.  First, teleology might exist (indeed, as everyone but eliminative materialists agrees, does exist) at the level of human thought and action, where the ends toward which thought and action are directed are grasped conceptually.  Second, teleology exists in non-human animals in a way that does not involve conceptualization, but is still conscious.  Third, teleology exists in merely vegetative forms of life (in the technical, Aristotelian sense of “vegetative”) in a way that is completely unconscious, but still involves processes which are directed toward the flourishing of the whole organism.  (Scholastics call this “immanent causation,” as opposed to the “transeunt causation” to which non-living things are confined.)  Fourth, teleology might be claimed to exist in inorganic phenomena in a way that does not involve the flourishing of a whole substance (as in living things) but still involves complex causal processes.  David Oderberg proposes the rock cycle and the water cycle as examples.  Fifth, teleology might exist at the simplest level in the form of an efficient cause’s mere “directedness” toward its characteristic effect or range of effects.  Contemporary philosopher Paul Hoffman has called this last kind the “stripped-down core notion” of teleology, and it is essentially what contemporary metaphysicians like John Heil, George Molnar, and U.T. Place have in mind when they attribute “physical intentionality” or “natural intentionality” to causal powers. 
Now, the first mistake Pigliucci makes is matter-of-factly to suppose that teleology, if it is real, must “either [be] the result of a supernatural cause (‘god’) or, more obviously, of human activity.”  This essentially assumes that the only options are either teleological eliminativism or Platonic teleological realism.  Yet surely Pigliucci is familiar with versions of teleological reductionism (for example, attempts in the philosophy of biology to analyze the notion of biological function in “naturalistic” terms), which makes it odd that he doesn’t even mention these in passing.  Perhaps he supposes (rightly, in my view) that such reductionism inevitably collapses into some other view about teleology.  But Pigliucci seems completely unaware that there is such a thing as the Aristotelian teleological realist position -- which is also a bit odd, since Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos brought some attention to it recently (nor is Nagel the only naturalist to take such a view).  Naturally, someone unaware of the Aristotelian teleological realist position would also be unfamiliar with the Scholastic teleological realist position (which can really only be understood by contrast to the Aristotelian and Platonist positions).  Perhaps Pigliucci would say that all of these views end up collapsing into the Platonic position.  But justifying such a claim would require argument.  Pigliucci not only gives no argument, he shows no awareness that there is even a dispute here.
Pigliucci’s second mistake is in assimilating all teleology to the sort exhibited (or apparently exhibited) either in human action or in biological phenomena.  This is a very common assimilation, but it is wrong, and manifests Pigliucci’s tendency (which we have seen before) to take the metaphysical conventional wisdom for granted.  Again, teleology of a sort that is much more rudimentary than the sort one finds in biological and specifically human phenomena might arguably be found in inorganic cyclical phenomena (as in Oderberg’s examples) or in basic causal relations (as in the phenomena that writers like Hoffman, Heil, Molnar, Place, et al. have in mind).  And in that case, even if one denies that “physics, chemistry, astronomy and geology” are concerned with truly teleological phenomena, they would still be teleonomic phenomena -- which would undermine Pigliucci’s proposed way of classifying the sciences, and also undermine his claim that it is natural selection that accounts for teleonomy (since natural selection does not exist at the level of the inorganic phenomena in question). 
Pigliucci says: “It makes no sense to ask what is the purpose or goal of an electron, a molecule, a planet or a mountain.”  But the remark is either aimed at a straw man or begs the question.  If by “the purpose of an electron etc.” Pigliucci has in mind something like the kindof purposes that a heart or an eyeball has (which can only be understood by reference to the flourishing of the organism of which these organs are parts), or the kind that an artifact has (which can only be understood by reference to the human purposes for which the artifact was made), then he is of course correct that electrons, molecules, planets and mountains lack such purposes.  But not all teleology need in the first place involve the kinds of purposes we see in bodily organs and artifacts, and those who attribute teleology to inorganic phenomena are not attributing to them those specific kinds of teleology.  What they have in mind instead is mere directedness toward an end. 
Now, anything with irreducible causal powers arguably has that sort of mere directedness -- what Hoffman calls the “stripped-down core notion” of teleology -- insofar as it has a typical sort of effect or range of effects.  Contemporary “new essentialist” powers theorists willing to countenance something like “physical intentionality” would attribute this sort of teleology to physical particles.  Planets and mountains (to cite Pigliucci’s other examples) are trickier, since it might be argued that their causal powers are reducible to those of their parts.  If so, then they would have what the Scholastic would call mere “accidental forms” rather than “substantial forms,” and thus not be true substances, and thus not be candidates for the sorts of thing having irreducible teleology in the first place.  I don’t intend to get into all that here.  Suffice it to say that Pigliucci is not only ignoring distinctions between kinds of teleology, but also running together examples of very different sorts which would require careful case-by-case treatment in the application of the relevant metaphysical notions.  (See Scholastic Metaphysics for exposition and defense of all the relevant notions.)
It is also surprising that a philosopher of science like Pigliucci should overlook a famous example of purported teleology within physics, viz. least action principles.  (See Hawthorne and Nolan’s paper “What Would Teleological Causation Be?” for a recent brief discussion by philosophers.)  Of course, whether such principles ought really to be regarded as teleological is a matter of controversy, but that is irrelevant to the present point.  What is relevant is, first, that if they are teleological, they would not have the kind of teleology that bodily organs and artifacts have.  Hence they would be good examples of the more rudimentary, sub-organic kind of purported teleology that Pigliucci entirely overlooks.  Second, the very fact that least action principles at least seem to many people to be teleological is another good illustration of how even physics is arguably teleonomic even if one were to concede to Pigliucci that it is not teleological.  Once again, that would undermine Pigliucci’s attempt to explain teleonomy in terms of natural selection.
A further problem with Pigliucci’s remarks is that he supposes that a reference to natural selection suffices to show that teleology has been banished from biology.  But that is not the case.  As various thinkers with no ID theoretic or otherwise theological ax to grind (e.g. Marjorie Grene, Andre Ariew, J. Scott Turner) have pointed out, natural selection by itself only casts doubt on teleology where questions of adaptationare concerned.  Whether some sort of teleology is necessary to make sense of developmental processes within an organism is another question.  (Keep in mind that whether such teleology would require reference to some sort of designer is, contrary to what Pigliucci seems to suppose, a yet furtherquestion -- and one which would require settling the dispute between Platonic teleological realism, Aristotelian teleological realism, Scholastic teleological realism, and teleological reductionism.)
Finally, Pigliucci overlooks some obvious problems with his remarks about consciousness.  By his own admission, apparently, phenomena that involve consciousness areirreducibly teleological and not merely teleonomic.  So far so good; I think that is certainly true.  But in that case it is quite silly to pretend (as Pigliucci rather glibly does) that explaining consciousness merely requires that cognitive science find its own Darwin.  The way Darwin accounts for adaptation is precisely by arguing that it is notreally teleological at all but merely teleonomic.  Naturally, then, if consciousness is irreducibly teleological, it is not even in principle going to be susceptible of that kind of reductionist or eliminativist explanation. 
Of course, Pigliucci might respond that he didn’t mean to imply that consciousness would ever be explained in exactly the kindof manner Darwin employed, but only that it would require a scientist of Darwin’s stature to account for it.  Fair enough, but even on this interpretation his remark is still much too glib.  Darwin, and the other great names in modern science, are considered great largely because they are thought to have found ways to eliminate teleology from the phenomena they dealt with.  In particular, they’ve treated teleology as a mere projection of the mind rather than a real feature of nature.  Obviously you can’t apply that approach to conscious teleological processes without implicitly denying the existence of the thing you’re supposed to be explaining rather than actually explaining it.  (And into the bargain, taking an incoherent position, since scientific theorizing, weighing evidence, etc. are themselves all teleological conscious processes.)
So, a “Darwin” of the science of consciousness would have to be as unlike Darwin, Newton, and Co. as they were unlike Aristotle.  In particular, he’d have to reverse the anti-teleological trend of modern scientific theorizing.  Or at any rate, he’d have to do so for all Pigliucci has said, or all he plausibly could say given what he’s willing to concede vis-à-vis the centrality of genuine teleology (not just teleonomy) to the understanding of human phenomena.
Hence to write many paragraphs about the scientific banishment of teleology from everywhere else in nature while insisting that teleology is real in the case of human beings, and then casually to insinuate that the history of that banishment gives hope that someday a scientific explanation of the teleology of human consciousness will also be possible… to do that is something of a conjuring trick, a bit of sleight of hand.  To appeal to an analogy I’ve used many times before, it’s like someone who has gotten rid of all the dirt in every room in the house by sweeping it under a particular rug, when asked how he’s now going to get rid of the dirt under the rug, responding: “Why, I’ll get rid of it the same way I got rid of the dirt in all the rooms, of course!  That method worked in all those other cases -- why wouldn’t it work in the one case of the dirt under the rug?”  This only sounds plausible if you don’t think very carefully about what has just been said.  The minute you do think about it, you see that in fact it’s absurd.  Naturally, the past success of the sweep-it-under-the-rug method gives no reason whatsoever to think that that method offers hope of getting rid of the dirt under the rug itself.  And by the same token, the past success of the treat-teleology-as-a-mere-projection-of-consciousness method gives no reason whatsoever to think that people using essentially the same method will succeed in explaining the teleology of consciousness itself.
(For more detailed discussion of these and related issues, see my series of posts on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos and on Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.)

Putting nature on the rack

What was it that distinguished the modern scientific method inaugurated by Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Co. from the science of the medievals?  One common answer is that the moderns required empirical evidence, whereas the medievals contented themselves with appeals to the authority of Aristotle.  The famous story about Galileo’s Scholastic critics’ refusing to look through his telescope is supposed to illustrate this difference in attitudes.
The problem with this answer, of course, is that it is false.  For one thing, the telescope story is (like so many other thingseveryone “knows” about the Scholastics and about the Galileo affair) a legend.  For another, part of the reason Galileo’s position was resisted was precisely because there were a number of respects in which itappeared to conflict with the empirical evidence.  (For example, the Copernican theory predicted that Venus should sometimes appear six times larger than it does at other times, but at first the empirical evidence seemed not to confirm this, until telescopes were developed which could detect the difference; the predicted stellar parallax did not receive empirical confirmation for a long time; and so forth.)Then there is the fact that the medievals were simply by no means hostile to the idea that empirical evidence is the foundation of knowledge; on the contrary, it was a standard Scholastic slogan that “there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses.”  Indeed, Bacon regarded his Scholastic predecessors as if anything too quick to believe the evidence of the senses.  The first of the “Idols of the Mind” that he famously critiques, namely the “Idols of the Tribe,” included a tendency to take the deliverances of sensory experience for granted.  The senses could, in Bacon’s view, too readily be deceived, and needed to be corrected by carefully controlling the conditions of observation and developing scientific instruments.  And in general, the early moderns regarded much of what the senses tell us about the natural world -- such as what they tell us about secondary qualities like color and temperature -- to be false. 

So, it is simply not the case that the difference between the medievals and the early moderns was that the latter were more inclined to trust empirical evidence.  On the contrary, there is a sense in which that is precisely the reverse of the truth. 
Where empirical evidence is concerned, the real difference might, to oversimplify, be put as follows.  Both the medievals and the early moderns regarded sensory experience as a crucial witness to the truth about the natural world.  But whereas the medievals regarded it as a more or less friendlywitness, the moderns regarded it as a more or less hostile witness.  You can, from both sorts of witness, derive the truth.  But the methods will be different.
Hence, a friendly witness can more or less be asked directly for the information you want.  That doesn’t mean he might not sometimes need to be prodded to answer.  Even if he is honest, he might be shy, or reluctant to divulge something embarrassing, or just not very articulate.  It also doesn’t mean that everything he says can be taken at face value.  He may be forgetful, or confused, or just mistaken now and again.  A hostile witness, by contrast, though he has the information you want, cannot with confidence be asked directly.  Even if he is articulate, has a crystal clear memory, etc., he may simply refuse to answer, or may persistently beat around the bush, or may flat-out lie, seriously and repeatedly.  Thus, he may have to be tricked into giving you the information you want, like the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men.  Or you may be tempted to threaten or beat it out of him, like one of the cops in L.A. Confidential would.  So, you might say that whereas the medieval Aristotelian scientist has a conversation with nature, the early modern Baconian scientist waterboards nature.  Hence the notorious Baconian talk about putting nature to the rack, torturing her for her secrets, etc. 
Of course, this is melodramatic.  And to be fair, Bacon himself seems not to have put things quite the way commonly attributed to him (i.e. the stuff about torture and the rack).  All the same, the medievals and moderns do disagree about the degree to which the world of ordinary experience and the world that science reveals -- what Wilfrid Sellars called “the manifest image” and “the scientific image” -- correspond.  For the Aristotelian, philosophy and science are largely in harmony with common sense and ordinary experience.  To be sure, they get at much deeper levels of reality, and they correct common sense and ordinary experience around the edges, but they don’t overthrow common sense and ordinary experience wholesale.  For the moderns, by contrast, philosophy and science are likely radically to conflict with common sense and ordinary experience, and may indeed end up overthrowing them wholesale. 
(This is not a difference concerning whether to acceptthe results of modern science, by the way.  It is a difference about how to interpretthose results.  For example, it is a difference over whether to regard modern science as giving us a correct but merely partial description of nature -- a description which needs to be supplemented by and embedded within an Aristotelian metaphysicsand philosophy of nature -- or whether to regard modern science instead as an exhaustive description of nature, and a complete metaphysics in its own right.)
The early moderns’ attitude of treating nature as a hostile witness -- of thinking that the truth about nature is largely contrary to what ordinary experience would indicate -- is one of the sources of the modern tendency to suppose that “things are never what they seem,” that traditional ideas are typically mere prejudices, that authorities and official stories of every kind need to be “unmasked,” and so forth.  Michael Levin has called this the “skim milk fallacy,” and I’ve often noted some of its social and moral consequences (e.g. here, hereand here).  But these are merely byproducts of a much deeper metaphysical and epistemological revolution.

Scott Ryan RIP

Longtime readers who frequent the comboxes of this blog will be familiar with Scott Ryan, who for many years was a regular commenter here.  He was also a moderator and regular commenter at the Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion Forum.  I was very sorry to learn that Scott died last week, apparently of a burst stomach ulcer.  I did not know Scott personally, but I always greatly valued his contributions to combox discussions, which consistently manifested Scott’s high intelligence, breadth of knowledge, sense of humor, clarity of expression, and charity toward others.  The exchanges on this blog have been of a consistently high quality in large part because of Scott’s presence.  (My recent book Neo-Scholastic Essays was dedicated to my readers.  Scott had become such a presence in the comboxes that when I wrote that dedication, and when I have thought about it in the months since, Scott’s would be the first name and face that would come to my mind.)
Recently Scott began the process of converting to Catholicism.  While reading through some of his recent posts at the Forum the other day, I came across this exchange.  It is especially poignant in light of Scott’s death, and that, together with the beauty, simplicity, and tranquility of the sentiments Scott expressed, brought tears to my eyes.
Many readers have been making their feelings about Scott known in the combox of an earlier post.  It is clear that they will miss him as much as I will.  Our prayers are with you Scott, and with your family.  RIP. 

Around the web

Busy, busy couple of weeks.  So, I’ll let others do the writing.  Here’s a large load of links:
David Oderberg on the current state of bioethics: Interview at BioEdge (reprinted at MercatorNet).
Neo-Aristotelian meta-metaphysician Tuomas Tahko is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.   He also has recently published An Introduction to Metametaphysics . 
Michael Novak revisits the topic of Catholicism and social justice in a new book co-written with Paul Adams.  Interview at National Review Online , commentary at First Things , the Law and Liberty blog , and The Catholic Thing .At The Imaginative Conservative, Bradley Birzer analyzes Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  (I offered my own analysis here some time back.)

Modern philosophers: Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum are here to tell you that “Causation is Not Your Enemy.”  Paper here, outline here.
Daniel Mahoney on political philosopher Pierre Manent, at City Journal. 
New books: Svein Anders Noer Lie, Philosophy of Nature: Rethinking naturalness ; Ronald Baines and Richard Barcellos, Confessing the Impassible God ; Glenn Siniscalchi, Retrieving Apologetics ; Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith.
And some old books: Henri Grenier’s Thomistic Philosophy manuals are back in print.
The Los Angeles Review of Books on the reissue of Roger Scruton’s Thinkers of the New Left.
William Carroll on mind, brain, and materialism, at First Things; and on science and theology, at Public Discourse.
What influence did H.L.A. Hart have on John Finnis’s “new natural law” theory?  Santiago Legarre investigates. 
At Just Thomism, James Chastek on James Ladyman and scientism. 
Scientific American asks: Is string theory science?   Quanta Magazine addresses the same question.
Fr. James Schall on the goodness of wrath and anger.
Eva Brann revisits Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.
New Statesman on the first atheists.
Christopher Caldwell on Bradley Birzer on Russell Kirk, in The New York Times.
At Crisis, Fr. George Rutler on German episcopal condescension toward Africa. 
Somebody had to say it: The Daily Mail explains why Star Wars sucks. 
Defender of divine simplicity James Dolezal is all over YouTube. 
At Public Discourse, philosopher Rachel Lu on women in the military.
Christopher Malloy at Thomistica.net on “new natural law” theory and practical politics.
The Guardian asks: How close are we to creating real superpowers?  (By the way, since they had to go and use a picture of him: I have always hated the character Deadpool, and, from what I’ve seen of it, the new movie is vile.)
Via YouTube, John Haldane’s lecture on virtue, happiness, and the meaning of life.
Atlas Obscura on Philip K. Dick’s last, unfinished novel.
At the Claremont Review of Books, Douglas Kries comments on J. Budziszewski’s Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law.

Review of Alexander

My review of David Alexander’s Goodness, God, and Evil appears in the March 2016 issue of Ratio.  It looks like the review is currently available for free online, so take a look (click on the “Get PDF” link).

Aquinas, Vanilla Sky, and Nozick’s experience machine

I’ve been meaning for about fifteen years now to write up something on the movie Vanilla Sky (a remake of Open Your Eyes ).  It’s a better movie than it seems -- which is fitting, since the flick is all about the unseen reality lurking beneath the sea of superficiality (moral and metaphysical) that is the life of the Tom Cruise character.  Alas, this isn’t quite the article I’ve been meaning to write, since it’s not primarily about the movie, though I’ll have reason to say something about it.  Rather, it’s about a famous philosophical thought experiment that might as well have inspired the movie even if (as far as I know) it didn’t -- Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” (from Anarchy, State, and Utopia ).Nozick considers a scenario in which we could be plugged into a machine which would give us any set of experiences we desired for the rest of our lives.  Should you plug in?  Would you?  What reason could there be not to do so, since (Nozick asks rhetorically) “what else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?” (p. 43).

Yet Nozick does not think most people would plug in, and suggests three reasons why they wouldn’t.  First, what we really want is to do certain things, and wanting the experience of doing them is a consequence of wanting to do them, rather than the experience being something we are seeking in itself.  Second, we want to be a certain way, and again, wanting the experience of being that way is a byproduct of wanting to be that way.  Third, we want contact with reality, rather than merely with some man-made simulacrum. 
The message of Vanilla Sky, or one of the messages anyway, seems to be the same (spoilers to follow).  David Aames (Tom Cruise) is about as shallow a man as you can imagine -- a spoiled heir who leaves others to attend to running the company he inherited from his father while he burns through money, parties, and women.  One of these women, Julie (Cameron Diaz), so as to ensure that she can keep his attention, pretends that their relationship is purely sexual and without commitment -- a pretense Aames is happy to go along with -- even though they both know she is deeply in love with him.  Even after Aames himself falls in love with another woman, Sofia (Penelope Cruz), and decides to break things off with Julie for good, he opts for one last hop into bed with her.  That is a mistake he pays dearly for, as the spurned Julie’s invitation was merely a ruse to get him into her car, which she proceeds to drive off a bridge in order to kill the both of them.  He survives but ends up horribly disfigured and in constant pain, his good looks -- and with them his life of superficial pleasure-seeking -- now gone forever, as are his chances with Sofia.
Or so it seems.  But suddenly, Sofia appears interested in renewing things with him after all, he is told by his doctors that his face can be repaired, and it appears that he will live happily ever after.  Yet there’s another twist.  As a series of increasingly surreal events unfold, Aames seems to be losing his sanity.  It is revealed that the life he has thought he was living from the point Sofia returned to him onward has all been a mere virtual reality generated by a computer to which he had voluntarily had himself hooked up, making sure that his memory of having done so was erased.  The aim was to realize artificially the life with Sofia and the restoration of his good looks that he knew would never be achieved in reality.  A breakdown in the program had led to the series of surreal experiences and the need to let him in on what was really going on.  He is told by the company that runs the virtual reality machine that the problem has been fixed, and asked whether he wants to re-start the virtual reality.  But he decides not to: “I don't want to dream anymore.  I want a real life.”  Having, in effect, plugged into Nozick’s experience machine, even a superficial man like Aames decides it wasn’t such a great idea.
So, even in a hedonistic age in which people are addicted to electronic entertainments of various sorts, contemporary philosophy and pop culture alike give expression to the idea that there is something unsatisfying and unworthy about seeking pleasurable experiences as an end in themselves and divorced from the objective actions and circumstances with which they are normally associated.
And yet… there is a reason people often confusehappiness with pleasure.  It would certainly be bizarre to think that if someone had a solid marriage, a good job, good health, well brought up children, many friends, a good moral character, was deeply religious, and so on -- but somehow still generally felt miserable and rarely took pleasure in any of these things -- that he could nevertheless intelligibly be said to be happy.  And most people find off-putting dour moralizers who regard even natural and innocent pleasures with suspicion.  (Recall Mencken’s definition of Puritanism: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”)  Pleasure clearly has something to do with happiness, even if (as those who, in some inchoate way, find the experience machine repellent rightly perceive) it is not identical with happiness.  But what, then?
For Aquinas, happiness is the possession of some good, where the good is to be defined in terms of the realization of a natural end.  For example, the natural end of eyes is seeing, so that it is good for us when the eyes are able to realize this end and bad for us when (as in poor vision or blindness) they are unable to do so.  Hence, insofar as they are able to realize it we will, to that extent and all things being equal, be happy; and insofar as they are unable to do so we will, to that extent and all things being equal, be unhappy.  Of course, seeing is only one part of human life, and there are many other ends that our nature directs us to pursue.  And some of those ends are more important than others.  That is why a blind person can still be happy overall, and a sighted person might still be unhappy overall.  The blind person can still realize many other ends, and higher ends, whereas the sighted person may fail to do so.
But what, specifically, these various natural ends are, how they are ordered in terms of importance, and how they relate to our overall happiness is not to the present point.  (Aquinas considers the issue in some detail, e.g. here.)  What we want to know is how pleasure is related to happiness.  Aquinas answers as follows:
[E]very delight is a proper accident resulting from happiness, or from some part of happiness; since the reason that a man is delighted is that he has some fitting good, either in reality, or in hope, or at least in memory.  Now a fitting good, if indeed it be the perfect good, is precisely man's happiness: and if it is imperfect, it is a share of happiness, either proximate, or remote, or at least apparent.  Therefore it is evident that neither is delight, which results from the perfect good, the very essence of happiness, but something resulting therefrom as its proper accident. (Summa theologiae I-II.2.6)
Pleasure or “delight,” then, is a “proper accident” of happiness.  Now, a “proper accident” or “property” of a thing, in Scholastic jargon, is not the essence of the thing, but rather something which flows or follows from the essence, as a natural consequence.  To take a stock example, the capacity to find things amusing is not the essence of human beings, but it does flow from our essence as rational animals.  Now, this “flow” can be “blocked,” as it were, which is why things don’t always manifest their proper accidents.  But they will be manifest in the normal and healthy instances of a thing of a certain kind.  A normal and healthy dog will have four legs, for example, even if some dogs will, as a result of injury or congenital defect, fail to have four legs.  (See pp. 191-92 and 230-35 of Scholastic Metaphysics for more detailed discussion of properties or proper accidents.)
What Aquinas is saying, then, is that although pleasure or delight is not the essence of happiness, it is nevertheless the natural or proper consequence of happiness, and will in the normal case be associated with it.  In that sense he takes pleasure to be necessary for happiness even if not sufficient for it:
One thing may be necessary for another… as something attendant on it: thus we might say that heat is necessary for fire.  And in this way delight is necessary for happiness.  For it is caused by the appetite being at rest in the good attained.  Wherefore, since happiness is nothing else but the attainment of the Sovereign Good, it cannot be without concomitant delight.  (Summa theologiae I-II.4.1)
Or as Aristotle puts it in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, pleasure “perfects” the activity of our natural faculties and is in that way part of happiness even if it is not itself happiness. 
Now, the distinction between the essence of a thing and its proper accidents has, like so many important distinctions and theses in Aristotelian-Scholastic thought, gone down the memory hole in modern philosophy.  And here we have an excellent example of how an error concerning what might seem to be an abstruse question of metaphysics can have catastrophic moral consequences.  Some people, rightly perceiving that there is some necessary connection between happiness and pleasure, make the mistake of reducinghappiness to pleasure.  That is the error of hedonism.  Others, rightly perceiving that pleasure is not the essence of happiness, make the mistake of separating the two entirely, and thereby suppose that pursuit of the good has nothing at all to do with pleasure.  We might call that the error of puritanism (in Mencken’s sense).  Each error tends to feed off the other, which is why individuals and societies sometimes veer wildly between hedonism and puritanism, falsely supposing that to reject the one requires embracing the other.  The correct, middle ground position is that pleasure is not the essence of happiness and is therefore not that which should be pursued for its own sake, but that it is also nevertheless a natural consequence of happiness and in that way completes or perfects it.
Nozick makes nothing like the Scholastic distinction just summarized -- nor, needless to say, does the Tom Cruise flick -- but I would suggest that both reflect an inchoate recognition that this is the right way to understand the relationship between pleasure and happiness, which is why both are by no means negative toward pleasure and yet at the same time are skeptical of the notion that a series of pleasurable experiences could by itself constitute happiness.  They perceive that the idea that plugging into an “experience machine” could generate happiness reflects the error of hedonism, or reducing happiness to pleasure.
Interestingly, Nozick -- though a libertarian with the usual libertarian position on drug legalization -- sees in the “experience machine” thought experiment a way to understand hostility to drug use:
[P]lugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct.  There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated.  Many persons desire to leave themselves open to such contact and to a plumbing of deeper significance.  This clarifies the intensity of the conflict over psychoactive drugs, which some view as mere local experience machines, and others view as avenues to a deeper reality; what some view as equivalent to surrender to the experience machine, others view as following one of the reasons not to surrender! (pp. 43-44)
Nozick suggests here that some of those who are favorableto psychoactive drug use are motivated by the idea that such use might open the door to perception of otherwise inaccessible aspects of objective reality (where a desire to maintain access to objective reality is precisely why we find plugging into the experience machine repellent).  But Nozick recognizes that someone might draw the opposite conclusion, viz. that such drug use is precisely a way of cutting oneself off from objective reality, and is repellent for precisely the same reason the experience machine is.
I would say that that is indeed exactly why many people find such drug use repellent, even if they cannot articulate their revulsion the way a traditional natural law theorist would.  They have an inchoate grasp that there is something contrary to the realization of what is good for us in separating sensory pleasure from the objective circumstances and actions that are its normal source, and making of it an end in itself.  That such drug use can be so addictive only underlines its “experience machine”-like character.  The user becomes locked into a world of pleasure-seeking and can no longer rightly perceive what is truly good for him.  He has become fixated on what is really only the proper accident of happiness, and loses sight of happiness itself.  This is why addiction is typically frustrating and miserable even apart from the physiological damage it often causes.
Needless to say, this is for the traditional natural law theorist also part of the reason why pornography and masturbation are immoral.  On a traditional natural law analysis, sexual desire is naturally directed outward, toward another human being, and the pleasure associated with its fulfillment is the proper accident of this other-directed end being realized.  Sexual pleasure is thus of its nature something to be shared between the partners; that is its natural teleology, qua the perfection of an act whose natural end is to unite the partners corporeally and psychologically.  The less perfectly the pleasure is a shared one, the less perfect is the act itself. 
Now, pornography and masturbation involve the deliberate seeking of this pleasure in a way that is not directed toward another person.  They are “experience machine”-like in the way psychoactive drug use is.  In fact, at least in one respect, they are worse than that.  The natural teleology of sexual pleasure is interpersonal, so that the pursuit of such pleasure in an “experience machine”-like way is perverse in something like the way that an archer’s directing an arrow back at himself rather than toward the target is perverse.  By contrast, the pleasures the user of psychoactive drugs is seeking might not all be of their nature interpersonal.  (For example, ordinary visual experiences -- seeing the tables, chairs, rocks, trees, etc. around you -- are not interpersonal but have as their end merely the provision of information to the person doing the seeing.  The psychoactive drug user seeking unusual visual hallucinations is thus not perverting his faculties in the specific way that the person seeking sexual pleasure apart from another human being is.)
Just as the drug addict becomes so fixated on what is only the proper accident of happiness that he loses sight of the true nature of happiness itself, so too, from the traditional natural law point of view, does habitual pornography use and masturbation make it more difficult to perceive the true, essentially interpersonal nature of sexual fulfillment.  The quest for gratification becomes so inward-looking that, even in sexual encounters with other actual human beings, the other tends to be reduced to a means to self-gratification, rather than a partner in something shared. 
Naturally, then, whatever is conducive to such self-gratification will come to seem to the self-gratifier to be good at least in principle, and that there is an objective, natural teleology of the sexual act -- and thus objectivelygood and bad kinds of sexual behavior -- will become increasingly difficult to see, and certainly something the person will be very reluctant to see.
Might pornography use be not only an effectbut also a cause where hostility to traditional sexual mores is concerned?  Gee, ya think?  What we have here is a spiral, as the “onanization” of sex makes people more unwilling and unable to see the natural ends of the sexual act, which in turn makes them more inclined to “onanize” it, which in turn makes them even more unwilling and unable to see its natural ends…   And it’s bound only to get worse when virtual reality pornography takes off.  (More on natural law and sexual morality, the effects of sexual vice, the teleology of sexual desire, etc. in the posts collected here.)
As all of that indicates, it may be that the revulsion toward the “experience machine” idea that one finds in Nozick and in Vanilla Sky, though reflective of an inchoate grasp of what is naturally good for us, is a revulsion that might decrease as Western society becomes increasingly “onanized” and otherwise addicted to electronic gadgets and entertainments of every kind.  In a future remake of the remake of Open Your Eyes, Aames might decide to plug back in after all.