Ockham’s Razor is the principle that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity. What that means has various weaker and stronger versions. One on the weaker side merely advises us, when coming up with a theory of the fundamental kinds of things (or stuff or structures) in the universe, or in any smaller domain, to avoid positing any kind of thing that is not needed to explain some aspect of our overall understanding of that domain and the wider universe. This is a weaker version of the Razor, because it does not incorporate any observational constraints on the kind of entities playing an explanatory role in a theory. So, a Platonist could plausibly claim that an empirically inaccessible dimension of universal forms exists as a way of explaining humanity’s rational and representational capacities.
Posthumanism is ultimately motivated by a stronger form of the Razor, which counsels against accepting theories as to the fundamental kinds of things there are that make a causal difference to the domain under consideration unless those kinds of things play an explanatory role in our currently best scientific theories (I will refer to this as the ‘Strong Razor’, though it is by no means the only strong formulation). As our best physics features particles and fields of force, and the like, but not eternal, universal forms or historical structures, it turns out that we must exclude anything that could privilege humanity as the species around which the ongoing development of the universe is organised. We are the product of blind forces and trajectories that might have produced, and will likely yet produce, something else in our place. There is a loophole in this formulation of the Razor in that we can posit such forms or structures without the capacity to make a causal difference to the universe. However, since humans are (at least partly) physical, and a non-physical part making any difference to our physical embodiment is excluded by the Strong Razor, it looks as though exploiting this loophole will end up resulting in the inability of such extra-scientific theoretical entities to play most of the explanatory roles they are supposed to play, and especially ones that ground humanist ideas of our universal pre-eminence.
Why should we believe the Strong Razor? The answer seems to be something like that it has taken over what Charles Taylor has dubbed our ‘imaginary’, i.e. the way we construct the world at large to be in the pre-theoretical assumptions and dispositions for action that actually govern the way we interact with our experiential world. We can develop theories about the way that the world is that diverge from our imaginary, but it takes effort and motivation to maintain belief in such theories, and there is always a lingering question as to whether or not we truly believe something that we must keep convincing ourselves that we believe. And our imaginary tells us that what the scientists need to posit to explain how things work, well, those are the real kinds of causally efficacious things, forces and structures out there in the universe, if we are being completely and maturely honest with ourselves. Admittedly, if this fairly describes our shared imaginary, that alone does not show that the beliefs that cohere effortlessly with it are more likely to be true. However, in the absence of decisive, fundamental criteria as to what we ought to believe in, at a high level of abstraction, such pre-theoretical dispositions that render theories more or less believable, prior to any will to believe, might be invoked fairly as a theoretical constraint.
Okay, so nothing makes a causal difference to anything in the universe unless it is reducible to fundamental kinds needed to play an explanatory role in our currently best theories of the physical sciences. The problem with the kind of posthumanism that this entails is that it does not seem to adequately explain the impressive human capacity for reasoning to and grasping universal laws, which in turn underpins the confidence in our best scientific theories that earned the Strong Razor such dominance in our imaginary. Instead, our processes of reasoning seem capable of being explained exhaustively in terms of local evolutionary and sociological causes. This leads to the kind of global relativism that tends to dominate contemporary humanities and social science disciplines, and which conflicts so patently with the universalising tendencies of scientific and technological success. We might therefore seek an alternative that respects the Strong Razor from which posthumanism derives, and yet which appeals to a supernatural domain in order to alternatively explain the scientific and technological optimism to which many of us still hold.
We have reason to start with God if we are positing supernatural entities, i.e. entities that are in some fundamental way set apart from the causal order of the natural universe. The reason for this is that to do so is not purely speculative. We have a naïve experience of being a mental thing that is not obviously reducible to the material nature of the world with which we nevertheless interact. As much as we may try, we are yet to adequately explain, in physical terms, both the phenomenal what-it-is-like quality of our immediate experience, and our capacity to represent internally ways that the world is, could be or could not be externally. At the same time, though, it seems increasingly as though the content of our mental states can be completely explained by environmental determinants, so that the physical outputs of mental processes are likely to be completely explicable in terms of physical inputs and physical constituents. So, the hard problem of explaining what the mind is, as David Chalmers dubbed it, persists while the relatively easy problem of situating mental functions within a purely physical universe seems increasingly soluble. This tends to leave mental stuff as a causal epiphenomenon, which might possibly be determined by physical causes, but which has no corresponding causal influence on the material universe.
This may seem like a theoretical dead end, particularly as it seems as though our thoughts and volitions make a difference to the same universe inhabited by our bodies. Instead, we can see this as the only evidence we have of a kind of entity that exists outside of the natural order. If we want to posit a supernatural entity outside the causal order that the Strong Razor gives wholly over to entities etc. needed in our best scientific theories, in a way that is not purely speculative, then it must be analogous to the human mind. After all, we seem to have direct experience of our mind. The only way that this can work, given the constraints discussed so far, is that our experience of mental events making things happen in the physical world is actually evidence of a sui generis (different in kind) type of agent causation. This would consist in some mental representations rendering the things, facts or events that they represent explicable in a primitive sense of bringing them about that is not analysable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.*** So, this agent-causation excuses minds from the Strong Razor, because minds would then make no causal difference to the natural universe, granting that the causal difference relevant to the Strong Razor is only natural causation, and necessary and sufficient conditions. As a human mind only exerts direct (agent) causation over some of its body’s internal states, and relies on the instrumental employment of natural causal processes in order to manifest distal effects, this is easily confused with minds making a (natural) causal difference.
A bigger problem is the puzzle as to how such sui generis agent causation could be harmonised with physical processes so as to never ground the existence of any kind of thing, event or fact that is not otherwise wholly determined by the closed system of physical causation, so that minds remain causally inefficacious and avoid offending against the Strong Razor. This problem nudges us in the direction of theism, by providing an initial explanatory role for an omnipotent analogue of the human mind in harmonising the separate mental and physical causal orders of a universe divided between natural and supernatural (agent) causation. The Deity uses agent causation omnipotently to ground the existence of everything physical and mental that there is, as well as the coincidental harmony between these causally separate domains. Sure, we land in a strong form of divine determinism, but – in case you hadn’t noticed – the Strong Razor will trap us in some form of physical determinism, anyway, so we might as well embrace it and run with it. If this offends against our apparent experience of free will, in the sense of being the uncaused caused of our mental states and actions, this can now be explained as the experience of being uncaused by natural causation, which does not preclude being determined by a distinct kind of agent causation that brings about all aspects of our being at all times.
Once you have the one divine power grounding the existence of the entire natural universe, as well as supernatural minds, it is a short step to giving this God analogue to the human mind the further explanatory role of reconciling the locally physical causation of human brain states and the otherwise inexplicable capacity of minds that supervene on these brains in a law-like way to grasp the universal logical and physical laws of a vast universe. Thus, given this explanatory role, the existence of such a God is therefore supported by the weaker Razor with which I began this post. In this way, the end of humanism does not need to equate to the end of optimism about humanity’s epistemic capacities and cosmic destiny. The impetus for this is merely re-centred from humanity to the Deity.
***Note: This affords us several additional benefits in cosmogony. Firstly, it allows for God to be the grounds of necessarily existing entities and facts, for those of us with an unrestricted view of divine omnipotence. As such, God’s being is prior to all possibility and necessity, including the necessity of His existence. It also renders God’s omnipotence consistent with His possible use of that omnipotence to create a stone that He cannot lift, because power in the sense of agent causation is conceptually distinct from necessitation. Thus, God’s will grounds all that did, does and will exist, including all possibilities (however they are grounded in existence), even though His will is not done according to some of those possibilities. Secondly, as agent causation does not concern the question of whether or not an entity would exist, or a state of affairs would obtain, without an external impetus, it allows God to reflexively ground His existence by willing Himself to be the first timeless moment preceding the temporal extent of Creation. This is important in view of the above claim that God is prior to modal facts about necessity and possibility, and thus the necessity of His existence is not a sufficient reason for His existence. Furthermore, as this is not natural causation, it avoids the infinite regress problem of positing a first natural cause of the physical universe, which then prompts the question as to what caused the first cause.
Theocentric Posthumanism 