The Natural Order Must be Metaphysically Disordered
Why science can’t explain the whole of nature (without positing yet more nature)
As certain as our familiarity with our conscious self is the judgment that a natural order exists.
Even if we accept the most skeptical doubts about the external world and assume with René Descartes that a demon might be feeding our disembodied minds disinformation about stimuli, to trick us into thinking we’re perceiving an independent, material domain, that illusion of matter would be as reliable as the real thing in one sense: both would be ordered. It’s not as though we experience only chaos. In fact, there would be no perception if all things were chaotic.
The very fact that our perceptions are intelligible and that we don’t seem responsible for conjuring nature’s structure or the causal sequence of external events — contrary to solipsism — means we can be sure not just that consciousness exists, but that there’s a nonhuman source of the patterned contents of conscious states.
Yet perhaps just as certain as those two findings is that the attempt to explain the natural order is wrongheaded.
