Correspondence Theory implies Dualism

[Leela]

I do identify myself as a materialist, which is a term I understand to mean that all that is real and actual for us is reified in space/time/energy/matter (often referred to as “STEM” in materialist circles). That’s a good nutshell summary right there, but given the exchanges that go on here, typically, it’s worth pre-empting misunderstandings by pointing out that STEM represents the context for all that I can reasonably defend and understand as real and actual, but there is no a priori rule for me or my materialism that something “beyond” in an immaterialist sense cannot obtain, or exist in some coherent way that just remains unknown that this point.

As a matter of reasoning then, I’m open to whatever holds together as the best performative model of reality, including a model that integrates immaterialist elements, if needed. The way the world around us falls out, though, models that integrate immaterialism fail badly in contrast to materialist models.

It’s possible that reality could have been such that immaterialism was coherent and compelling, so far as I know. The actual world isn’t like that, so far as I can see, and the more one looks at the real world, honestly and in a disciplined way, the more the materialist model prevails, and immaterialism fails.

That makes me a “post facto” materialist, then, I guess. I don’t being there, haven’t begun there, or rule the supernatural out. Those notions just don’t cut it, where materialist paradigms, problematic as they are in many respects, fare much, much better.

-TS

I wonder if you could think of your materialism in a way that would distinguish it from scientism. For example, is it enough to say simply that everything can be described in physical terms and avoid saying that everything always should be described in physical terms? Why priveledge any particular mode of description as the essence of what things really are? For example, are the things that a physicist says about tables any more true than the things that a carpenter says about them? We need not argue which one of these sets descriptions is the one true account of The-Way-Things-Really-Are when both sets of descriptions in addition to the one a poet or artist or furniture mover might give can all peacefully coexist and serve different sorts of human purposes. Why should the scientist insist that everyone must participate in her purposes and use her descriptions? Isn’t such insistence exactly what anoys us about theists and their demands that we all serve their God in enacting their religious moral code as law? It’s a rhetorical question. I’m not suggesting that this is what you are insisting. I am just offering a way to avoid reductionism and scientism while keeping the power of material descriptions for controlling and predicting our environment.

 

[tonyrey]

To ask why living organisms have become more complex hardly seems “a completely insane demand for near-infinite knowledge”!

Your superstitions about the magical power of the matter-time-chance combination are indeed more easily maintained and protected if you diminish the likelihood of obtaining knowledge of the origin of life.

This is far beyond the epistemological frontier of humans, and is like to remain so for a long, long time. It’s just nuts to think this is something you or are should know or must be required to know.

How do you determine where epistemological frontier lies? Where materialism fails?

I don’t see why that’s the case. I think as things get more simple, they become harder to explain.

The relative simplicity of things before life emerged is obviously easier to explain than the complexity which ensued - as you have just borne witness.

There’s plenty I don’t know, but I can apply reason and skepticism to distinguish between explanation and superstition.

You apply it selectively. You regard scientific ignorance as a virtue and theistic ignorance as a vice…

There’s nothing to conceal. We understand living organisms – all of them – are made of out base materials that occur in abundance in our environment, and recombine and interact in various ways too manifold and complex to recount here. But we do NOT know the precise chemical pathways from inanimate compounds to rudimentary, reproducing, living organisms.

Not surprisingly because the directiveness of living organisms is alien to chemical compounds as biologists have pointed out…

It’s not a secret, and it’s not a problem in terms of what we would reasonably expect to be available to us. It’s astonishing that we’ve come to know as much as we have about the likely timelines and plausible environments for this process.

Your astonishment stems from the unimaginable complexity of a “simple” cell.
The greater its complexity the more inadequate the hypothesis of its fortuitous origin.

I’ve said at least a dozen times now to you that we have all the evidence we need to understand all of those things – all of them – as completely tangible, thoroughly natural and physical. An “insight” is just as physically real as any rock in your garden.

You have never stated your materialism so explicitly. Why do you differentiate mental activity from brain activity at all? Wouldn’t it be more honest to state that “mental” is a redundant term? That the mind is a synonym for a collection of neuronal impulses?

It’s all tangible. And I know now I will have to repeat this over, and over and over to you. I do so, understanding it’s futile between us, but for the benefit of the odd reader who may be interested. I say it’s tangible, and have a mountain of evidence to cite in support of that. On what grounds do you say it’s intangible? Superstition?

I am delighted you have finally made it clear that your brand of materialism is reductive - apart from such innocuous facts as the wetness of water which remains at the physical level. You equate abstract thoughts, emotions, feelings, perceptions and decisions unequivocally with neural activity.

I haven’t tried to explain anything that’s intangible. I’m just not making the superstitious mistakes you are making in naked assertions like “feelings are intangible”. That’s an ignorant thing to say. Upon looking at the world around us, that’s an unsupportable conclusion. How on earth does looking at the world force one to believe that feelings are intangible?

You obviously have not read about the formidable problem of qualia.

You just need to suspend your superstitions a moment and think about this from outside them, and you will see the coherence and continuity of the model.

The coherence and continuity of a model is compatible with its absurdity if it is based on a false premise. I don’t know if your zeal has made you overstate your case but your view of emergence seems restricted to physical qualities like the wetness of matter. The mind seems to have disappeared altogether…

Nothing intangible here stands to be explained as such, or as transitional from intangible to tangible. Just because you can’t “touch” the electrons in your brain does not mean thoughts are intangible!

Do you have direct experience of electrons when you are thinking? Are they a part of your stream of consciousness? Or do we all imagine we are thinking?

The fact remains that throughout your life you, like everyone else, will remain in your egocentric predicament. The only thing you will ever experience directly and know for certain is your stream of consciousness. It is the “out of one’s mind” mentality that needs to be accounted for! No wonder materialism is a relatively rare phenomenon in the history of thought…

Well, “out of one’s mind” and “mentality” are terms in tension with each other. “Mentality” implies “in mind”.

Do you deny that you are in an egocentric predicament? That only thing you will ever experience directly and know for certain is your stream of consciousness?
My remark about the “out of one’s mind” mentality was simply a response to your “out of the body” mentality. Many a true word is spoken in jest…

 

[Touchstone]

I wonder if you could think of your materialism in a way that would distinguish it from scientism. For example, is it enough to say simply that everything can be described in physical terms and avoid saying that everything always should be described in physical terms?

I’m not convinced everything can be described in physical terms, let alone should be, but maybe that’s just a problem with the term ‘describe’. “Should”, of course, steers the topic in a deontological direction which isn’t a problem per se, but it does modulate things into subjective terms for me.

Why priveledge any particular mode of description as the essence of what things really are?

I don’t recommend doing that. I think the word ‘essence’ in existential questions, as a metaphysical term is a signal the speaker has no clue what they are talking about, and quite possibly is aware of that and says things like that in hopes you don’t, either. If I describe something in a mechanistic way, or a semantically reductive way, or even in holistic terms, I’m still BSing you if I offer any of that as “essence”. A rock would not be what it is without its physical properties, or at least be what it is in the same way, but that it remains a vacuous thought to say that was its “essence”, just as much as it is vacuous to cast it in Aristotelian terms. Essence is a great, useful, load bearing term in all sorts of contexts, but when used as a tool of metaphysics, it’s empty, hogwash, folly.

It signifies nothing discernible or attached to anything else. And yet, metaphysicians love to suppose they’ve said something meaningful when they talk about ‘essence’.

So, I’m all for various modes and levels of description, and there are different uses and benefits for each, none of which nullify the others. But talking about ‘essence’ in terms of metaphysics just renders the discourse inert.

For example, are the things that a physicist says about tables any more true than the things that a carpenter says about them?

No, and that’s a nice example of how different levels of description bring different benefits and utility to us. The physicist doesn’t understand the ‘essence’ of wood at the atomic level any better than the cabinet maker understands the ‘essence’ of wood at the plane-and-shaving level. It’s nonsense to think ‘essence’ is an applicable, or serious concept that spans both levels of description, validating one and not the other.

As a materialist, to apply this a bit, I can see the value of some of Jesus’ parables as profound truths, even knowing that the protagonists in the parable were not real/historical figures. Even if Jesus himself wasn’t a historical figure, the truths about human nature touched on in the story of the Good Samaritan obtain, anyway. To suppose that the truth value of the parable obtains from the historicity of the story character, or the story teller, is to misplace the insight. It obtains not from any of that, but from speaking to broad and deep behaviors and dispositions of humans in ethically challenging situations.

We need not argue which one of these sets descriptions is the one true account of The-Way-Things-Really-Are when both sets of descriptions in addition to the one a poet or artist or furniture mover might give can all peacefully coexist and serve different sorts of human purposes.

Totally, emphatically agree!

Why should the scientist insist that everyone must participate in her purposes and use her descriptions?

She should not!

This is really about honesty and epistemology. Catholicism, for example, often gets way ahead of itself in its claims about reality. Jesus was physically resurrected, in a way that science could and would attest to, if anyone had been paying attention that could apply the method back then. That’s a claim on science’s turf. Jesus isn’t held out to be a parable, an inspiring story, a point on the horizon to shoot for. Jesus was, per their evangelion, a scientific fact, or a fact amenable to scientific validation, passing all tests for falsification.

That’s just a ludicrous claim as THAT KIND OF TRUTH. It’s the carpenter telling the physicist how the atoms in the wood move around, far out of his zone of credibility. Christianity, like much of theism, just pays no heed to these levels of description and these epistemic constraints.

I’m a proponent of open, broad acceptance of these difference spheres of understanding, and levels of description. Science has nothing to say, methodologically, about who made better music to my ears; my wife loves Mozart, I am quite sure Bach was the best, although on odd Sundays, I’m inclined to claim Chopin was the best there ever was. That doesn’t mean science doesn’t have a lot to contribute on that subject too (why does dissonance effect us they way it does, for example?), but to suggest that science even applies to such questions as Mozart vs. Bach to my ears, that is a category error. We might as well ask which smells better, nine or blue.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

leela:

Isn’t such insistence exactly what anoys us about theists and their demands that we all serve their God in enacting their religious moral code as law?

It’s part of it, for sure. The hubris of Christianity is breathtaking, asserting sovereignty over all domains of knowledge, unassailable sovereignty at that. it Christianity had a conscience about its epistemology the way science understands that it has perfectly nothing to say about Mozart vs. Bach and whose best to my ears, the world would be a better place. As it is, it’s institutionally committed to asserting itself in a thousand domains it has perfectly no credibility to speak to. I have no problem with a “carpenter’s view of the wood”, where truth and values and goals are kept coherent with the discipline, applying religious practice the way a luthier applies his knowledge of wood in making a guitar. He’s not a physicist, but he knows wood on his level, and that works. He’s not confused about his knowledge, and his grounding for that knowledge.

It’s a rhetorical question. I’m not suggesting that this is what you are insisting. I am just offering a way to avoid reductionism and scientism while keeping the power of material descriptions for controlling and predicting our environment.

I’ve said elsewhere on this forum, repeatedly now, that I don’t think “reductionism” or “scientism” holds for my views. They both strike me as little more than self-serving strawmen useful for propping up faith through competing against shallow, brittle caricatures. Materialism != reductionism, nor scientism. Your example of the physicist and the carpenter both “knowing wood” and truths about wood captures nicely the diversity (different levels of description/interacion) and at the same time the deep unity (knowledge through experience/interaction) of those “modes of truth”. Neither knows wood better than the other, and it’s an error to think those levels can be assessed as peers.

-TS

 

[tonyrey]

Randomness, for example, produces maximal complexity. By definition, you cannot get more complex than interactions based on random (name removed by moderator)uts (see Kolmogorov info theory, for example). Coordination is not only not required, it reduces the complexity of a system. Structure or anything that enforces patterns reduces system complexity.

 

[Leela]

Hi Touchstone,

No time right now for a more detailed response, but I wanted to say that in posts 80 and 81 I think you did an excellent job defending yourself against the charge that you are guilty of subscribing to a reductionist version of materialism or scientism. Tonyrey’s attempts to paint you as such fall flat for me now that you have explained your relationship to these positions.

Best,
Leela

 

[tonyrey]

It’s part of it, for sure. The hubris of Christianity is breathtaking, asserting sovereignty over all domains of knowledge, unassailable sovereignty at that.

The hubris of the atheist/materialist is unbounded with your assertion that **all **knowledge stems from sense experience and science has the only valid explanations.

If Christianity had a conscience about its epistemology the way science understands that it has perfectly nothing to say about Mozart vs. Bach and whose best to my ears, the world would be a better place.

“conscience” and “better” are only “efficacious concepts” in your predetermined opinion… Efficacious for you perhaps, but for who else?

I’ve said elsewhere on this forum, repeatedly now, that I don’t think “reductionism” or “scientism” holds for my views. They both strike me as little more than self-serving strawmen useful for propping up faith through competing against shallow, brittle caricatures. Materialism != reductionism, nor scientism.

How now? After declaring that correspondence is “a physical isomorphism”, a thought is “completely tangible, thoroughly natural and physical” and an insight is “just as **physically **real as any rock in your garden”.You can’t get to a lower level than that!

 

[Touchstone]

Touchstone;6197663:

It is absurd to suggest that you cannot get more complex than interactions based on random (name removed by moderator)uts. Random (name removed by moderator)uts are at the other extreme from intelligent (name removed by moderator)uts.

Here you have gotten complexity and intelligence confused. Complexity != intelligence.

It is not a question of blind quantitative

complexity. The exquisite designs in nature are examples of organised, purposeful complexity in which each element has a specific function contributing to the success of the whole. That is where the co-ordination and subordination come in. That’s structure. It’s useful and all that, but it’s structure, all the same. A reduction in complexity over a fully randomized phase space. You’re going to have to come to grips with what your terms mean and entail to move forward on this. It doesn’t appear you have a handle on what complexity means, here. I suggest reading up on Weaver’s distinctions of organized complexity vs. disorgnanized complexity for starters.

Improbability does not have to be expressed mathematically for it to be significant. Do you really believe stochastic processes are capable of explaining the abundance and richness of life on earth? The greatest guarantee of survival is simplicity - not complexity.

I can’t think why would say such a thing. All of nature refutes this idea – it is filled with complex organic structures, diverse and diffuse over the various features of our environment. Think about it; if simplicity was the trump card, you wouldn’t be here to discuss this! Your very words discredit your words. Nature is diverse, and a great many of the exploitable strategies for survival are aided by capabilities that require complex structures. Sight, for example, can be a very strong aid to survival – do you agree? – and yet, it is a complex system. A simple amoeba can survive in its niche, but cannot survive in the same context and method that a human with sight can.

It is absurd to suggest that you cannot get more complex than interactions based on random (name removed by moderator)uts.

It’s not absurd. It’s a deductive production of math. The theoretical limits for complexity are only achieved with random (name removed by moderator)uts. See here, for example, to learn more about this. The maximum complexity for a strong of given length is a random string. It’s tautological – we define randomness in terms of the absence of discernible pattern or structure, and this is the definition of maximal complexity… the highest density of internal relationships possible.

Random (name removed by moderator)uts are at the other extreme from intelligent (name removed by moderator)uts. It is not a question of quantitative complexity. The exquisite designs in nature are organised, purposeful systems in which each element has a specific function which contributes to the success of the whole. That is where the co-ordination and subordination come in.

You think improbability has to be expressed mathematically for it to be significant?

Yes. What does “improbability” signify if it does not express a relationship of a (set of) selection(s) over a phase space? Is it that ‘improbable’ might be significant if we just say ‘my intuition suggests its improbable’?

Is that the basis on which you proceed in your daily life?

Yes, of course. I fly 100,000 miles a year. People say that’s risky, and there is risk. But the stats are pretty good, very good considering the benefit I get from flying. The probabiliites of my dying from a commercial air crash are as low or lower than getting killed in my car driving to the airport. That’s real life. When I invest in a company, I classify risks, and estimate probabilities for them, and do the math against the growth probabilities and scales. That’s real life, too. You can’t come up with reasonable estimates of probabilities for everything you’d like, but in that case, you just admit the probabilities are inscrutable. You don’t know. That’s real life, and here, you (specifically) have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what you are talking about in terms of probabilities. You are completely making stuff up in talking about the (im)probabilities you claim knowledge of. If I’m wrong, it’s easy to demonstrate – lay out the phase space and the dynamics that govern the selection of specific choices from the phase space.

Do you really believe stochastic processes are capable of explaining everything - including the increase in purposeful complexity?

The processes don’t explain anything – they are just impersonal processes. And remember that many features of physics are deterministic, it’s the interplay between probabilistic features and deterministic features that makes things interesting and rich.

In any case, humans, who do the explaining, are NOT capable of explaining everything. ‘Everything’ isn’t even a well-defined concept here – how would one know, even in principle that one had explained ‘everything’, even if that was the case. It’s intractable. A nonsensical idea.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

tonyrey:

The devil is not only in the detail but also in the whole! Empirical equity perhaps but epistemological inequity. Natural biological development in an irrational context where the blind lead the blind. The real question is whether reason is the product of chemical reactions…

That’s not a meaningful question for a supernaturalist. For a supernaturalist, superstition can never be defeated or discredited. No matter how detailed or robust the natural explanation and description, the supernaturalist can always say “That’s inadequate, there must be more”. Sound familiar?

Given that, supernaturalists just have to excused from serious participation so long as they resort to these unfalsifiable explanations. Superstitions kill natural answers every time because they are cheap, easy, unaccountable, and immune to falsification. Natural explanations have a thousand ways to die in discredit. That’s what makes a natural explanation that endures valuable, it’s proven itself. Supernatural ideas have nothing they can demonstrate at all.

It would seem your interpretation of reason is mechanical computation. It is ironic that you claim to uphold reason when you share Hume’s view that thought is a “little agitation of the brain” which has emerged out of the eternal darkness - for no reason whatsoever!

It’s emerged for the most real and natural reasons – this is what nature and the environment supports! Is there a reason water is “wet”?

You use your power of reason to dedicate yourself to the task of disparaging and virtually destroying it. You throw away the ladder once you can survey the landscape. Reason cannot be worth much if it originated as a mechanism for survival and all life is destined for extinction! Camus and Sartre were at least logical in recognising the absurdity of a Godless universe…

You’re confusing your intuition with reason. I know that’s a bit of condition that dates way back, but these are not the same thing. For example, what would be the logic in Sartre’s observation? Tell me how that logic goes, and we can see the quality of you reasoning. I claim this will lead you to naked, brute intution and nothing more. I stand to be corrected, but this is anti-reasoning trying to pilfer the brand equity of reasoning – posing, as it were.

Super-stition is a more adequate explanation than sub-stition, i.e. explaining everything in terms of the lowest aspects of reality rather than the highest. Your notion of causality is backward in more senses than one: it looks only in one direction - to the past - and ignores the future. - eliminating all meaning and purpose. It singles out the beginning of a process as more significant than the end. Back to Lucretius and Democritus: analytic atomism rather than synthetic holism.

You keep saying this, and I keep denying it. You’re not reading what I write, I think. Do you have a quote from me that says that “the beginning of a process is more significant than the end”. That’s a phrase that is incoherent, so I hope I didn’t say something like that. But if you could point something out in support of that, you’d be a lot more credible in this. As it is, it seems you are just determined to ignore what I write and continue on with saying things as you’d like to see them, regardless.

Yet the transition from particles to persons is not so facilely dismissed as a colossal accident.

I don’t think that 's the only way to address it, not hardly. But even if that were the response, why is not so dismissed? What is wrong with that dismissal, specifically?

A comprehensive, balanced explanation takes the entire process into account, with the outcome being of particular importance.

Again with the “outside-in” epistemology! Do you think we are omniscient? How do you suppose humans would achieve a “comprehensive, balanced explanation that takes the entire process into account”? That’s just nuts to use as your demand. Completely unreasonable, and can only be demanded if one thinks humans are gods with cosmic clairvoyance themselves. Humans just put pieces of the puzzle together, what few they can find, as best they can. And many of them can’t be bothered to do even that!

Your “explanation” lowers everything to the same plane. Your “levels of explanation” are really a facade which conceals nothing but permutations of matter, as we discovered with your reduction of truth, goodness, beauty and love to efficacious concepts - and correspondence to physical isomorphisms.

Sigh. Once again, it doesn’t reduce. Any more than “wetness” reduces to hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms. I ask you again: is hydrogen “wet”? If not, where did the wetness go??? If I’m a reductionist, I must find wetness in hydrogen, no? And yet I can find no such attribute, but only an emergent property that obtains in concert with other elements. This is anti-reductionist. It’s all physical yes, and it’s all real, but reality cannot be understood in any robust way at just the (sub) atomic level. We cannot know wetness from hydrogen alone. Yet you continue to insist I hold views contradictory to those I do, telling me I must find wetness in the hydrogen atom.

-TS

 

[tonyrey]

Random (name removed by moderator)uts are at the other extreme from intelligent (name removed by moderator)uts.

You dissociate complexity from intelligence on principle. Do you think the complexity of an aeroplane has nothing to do with intelligence and organization?

It is not a question of blind quantitative complexity. The exquisite designs in nature are examples of organised, purposeful complexity

in which each element has a specific function contributing to the success of the whole.That’s structure. It’s useful and all that, but it’s structure, all the same. A reduction in complexity over a fully randomized phase space.

You have omitted the key word: purposeful. No doubt you prefer “randomized” but you are distorting the meaning of my sentence.

Improbability does not have to be expressed mathematically for it to be significant. Do you really believe stochastic processes are capable of explaining the abundance and richness of life on earth? The greatest guarantee of survival is simplicity - not complexity.

I can’t think why would say such a thing. All of nature refutes this idea – it is filled with complex organic structures, diverse and diffuse over the various features of our environment. Think about it; if simplicity was the trump card, you wouldn’t be here to discuss this!

Exactly! The fact that we exist does not demonstrate that we had to exist. Once again you are confusing fact with necessity. It** is** highly improbable that we are here. That is why the increase in complexity and progressive development are significant…

Your very words discredit your words. A simple amoeba can survive in its niche, but cannot survive in the same context and method that a human with sight can.

Amoeba have outlasted far more complex organisms by billions of years. Why? Because they are smaller, less vulnerable and more abundant. The fewer the parts the less chance there is of failure… Think of how many diseases, disorders and accidents mammals are prey to. Survival value is an inadequate explanation of the development of rational beings from primitive forms of life, no matter how you try to evade the fact.

It is absurd to suggest that you cannot get more complex than interactions based on random (name removed by moderator)uts.

It’s not absurd. It’s a deductive production of math. The theoretical limits for complexity are only achieved with random (name removed by moderator)uts. See here, for example, to learn more about this. The maximum complexity for a strong of given length is a random string. It’s tautological – we define randomness in terms of the absence of discernible pattern or structure, and this is the definition of maximal complexity… the highest density of internal relationships possible.

You are forgetting that this is not the only conceivable physical system and that even within this system we have the power to select and manipulate any given features, including the ability to take randomness into account. You exalt randomness at the cost of intelligence but you depend on the latter rather than the former.

You think improbability has to be expressed mathematically for it to be significant?

Yes. What does “improbability” signify if it does not express a relationship of a (set of) selection(s) over a phase space? Is it that ‘improbable’ might be significant if we just say ‘my intuition suggests its improbable’?

Your notion of improbability is too restrictive - as I shall illustrate…

Is that the basis on which you proceed in your daily life?

Yes, of course. That’s real life, and here, you (specifically) have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what you are talking about in terms of probabilities.

Again you are restricting probability unduly. For one thing you assume this is the only possible universe. On what do you base your materialism? On certainty or probability? Can you come up with a reasonable estimate of the probability that materialism is true? Could you have predicted the relative probability that amoeba would outlast dinosaurs? Could you have forecast that amoeba would outlast dinosaurs?

The processes don’t explain anything – they are just impersonal processes.

To be more precise, do you believe everything can be explained in terms of stochastic processes? Including the power of explanation? And the increase in purposeful complexity?

And remember that many features of physics are deterministic, it’s the interplay between probabilistic features and deterministic features that makes things interesting and rich.

Indeed. But our discussion is not restricted to things - unless you reduce persons to things And what about the features of physics? Are they deterministic? Your entire scheme of things is arbitrary - if you confine yourself to mathematical probability.

In any case, humans, who do the explaining, are NOT capable of explaining everything.

I agree but materialism is based on the assumption that everything can in principle be explained in terms of matter. And for you humans are products of stochastic processes - which have somehow happened to manage to explain the stochastic processes of which they are made… Most remarkable!

‘Everything’ isn’t even a well-defined concept here – how would one know, even in principle that one had explained ‘everything’, even if that was the case.

Everything in the context of physical evolution is definable in principle - unless you think it is infinite…

 

[tonyrey]

For a supernaturalist, superstition can never be defeated or discredited.

Theism has been refined and Catholic doctrine has developed in the light of evolution and other scientific discoveries. Creationism is held by a minority because it is recognised as intellectually unsustainable.

Superstitions kill natural answers every time because they are cheap, easy, unaccountable, and immune to falsification.

If theism is unfalsifiable atheists have been wasting their time for centuries! Haven’t you given reasons why you became an atheist? If theism is immune your reasons were invalid!

Natural explanations have a thousand ways to die in discredit. That’s what makes a natural explanation that endures valuable, it’s proven itself.

You have yet to define what is “natural”…
Theism would not have survived if it were as unfalsifiable as you imply. Why did you become an atheist? By chance?

Supernatural ideas have nothing they can demonstrate at all.

Theism has endured precisely because it is the most cogent explanation of the order and beauty of the universe, the existence of persons, rationality, consciousness, free will, purpose, love, inspiration, mysticism, miracles, the power of prayer, the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, the immense value of life and the nobility of the human spirit. Many of the masterpieces of art, architecture, music, poetry and drama have been inspired by religious belief. The great religions of the world established centres of learning which led to the development of science, the humanities and philosophy in particular. It has been faith in the intelligibility of the universe and the power of reason based on theistic belief that has transformed human communities into the cultural and technological society we know today.

It’s emerged for the most real and natural reasons – this is what nature and the environment supports!

You mean thought emerged solely and inexplicably on account of its survival value…

Is there a reason water is “wet”?

Yes! For the same reason that carbon, oxygen and other elements support life… The periodic table reflects the fundamental order and regularity of the universe - which are evidence of Design.

For example, what would be the logic in Sartre’s observation? Tell me how that logic goes, and we can see the quality of your reasoning.

If God does not exist there is no **reason **why the universe or anything in the universe exists. Everything is ultimately irrational, meaningless, valueless and purposeless, i.e. absurd.

Do you have a quote from me that says that “the beginning of a process is more significant than the end”.

You reject teleology in favour of physical causality. Since you believe past events determine the present the beginning of the process must be more significant than the end. For you the existence of human beings throws no light on the nature of reality because we are simply products of that primal event. The outcome is insignificant…

Yet the transition from particles to persons is not so facilely dismissed as a colossal accident.

What is wrong with that dismissal, specifically?

Persons are not self-evidently explicable as collections of particles. We exist as entities at a higher level and have powers which particles lack, notably rationality, consciousness autonomy.

Again with the “outside-in” epistemology!

Better than being inside out! But seriously, you explain yourself away by putting what you perceive before yourself. We are in the world but not known by the world. Epistemology comes from not from without but within… You and I spend much of our time in the realm of thought rather than action.

Do you think we are omniscient? How do you suppose humans would achieve a “comprehensive, balanced explanation that takes the entire process into account”?

Of course not, but those are the criteria by which we determine which explanations are superior to others. Omniscience is not required to obtain insight and understanding. You favour materialism because you believe it is more satisfactory. Why? You must have some criteria by which you reach a conclusion you believe **corresponds **to reality.

Humans just put pieces of the puzzle together, what few they can find, as best they can. And many of them can’t be bothered to do even that!

I agree, but at least we are in a better position to judge which explanations are worthless.
We agree, for example, that solipsism and nihilism can be ignored. We even agree that correspondence implies a relation of similarity!

Your “levels of explanation” are really a facade which conceals nothing but permutations of matter, as we discovered with your reduction of truth, goodness, beauty and love to efficacious concepts - and correspondence to physical isomorphisms.

If I’m a reductionist, I must find wetness in hydrogen, no? It’s all physical yes, and it’s all real, but reality cannot be understood in any robust way at just the (sub) atomic level.

What has happened to the mental? To intangible relations like correspondence? For you they have become tangible isomorphisms. It doesn’t matter how many physical levels they are they are all permutations of matter. Is there anything in your scheme of things that cannot be explained in principle by science? That is the acid test of your reductionism. We already know that persons and all personal activity are depersonalised in your weltanschauung…

 

[antunesaa]

We are finely honed by nature to survive and thrive in our environment. But the faculties and adaptions nature has developed in us, while ever accountable to the hazards and constraints of that environment, do not, and cannot limit those faculties in some directed way – these are just impersonal process working away, as far as we can tell. So when man develops meta-representational cognitive faculties, that is indeed a huge advantage toward survival and fecundity.

-TS

Two brief comments on this paragraph. First, you seem to attribute to nature (perhaps you should graph Nature instead) what most theists attribute to God. Second, you also seem to attribute a high purpose to the “survival” and “fecundity” of those lumps of matter we call living beings. Both observations are very difficult to motivate without resorting to something which, for all practical purposes, are postulates, since they cannot be reasonably motivated as likely outcomes of random/deterministic permutations of matter. Most materialists acknowledge that the likelihood (in the statistical sense) that nature randomly produced “things” like intelligent living beings, and laws like the need to survive and replicate, is incredibly small. So your position is also, in this sense, reasonably improbable.

In the other extreme, suppose that such postulates were instead corollaries of the general design of the natural laws. Then you would have stronger predictions about reality as we know it: it was likely after all. The natural question would then be: what is the likelihood that among all possible laws of the nature, the ones that are valid allow me to think clearly about them? Isn’t it wonderful that I can question matter and that it can give me an intelligible answer? In the end, this is still the same question as initially: why is there “thinking” and something to meaningfully think about?

If I were a materialist I would ascribe no meaning to the idea of “thinking” and I would consider my perceptions of reality an illusion, without any obvious isomorphism to reality.

 

[Touchstone]

Two brief comments on this paragraph. First, you seem to attribute to nature (perhaps you should graph Nature instead) what most theists attribute to God. Second, you also seem to attribute a high purpose to the “survival” and “fecundity” of those lumps of matter we call living beings.

“Purpose” is loaded with all the wrong connotations, even if I understand generally what you mean. Purpose is precisely what is NOT supportable from the analysis, at least as ‘purpose of mind’, or in some overtly telic sense.

If you roll a pair of fair dice several hundred times, and graph the totals for each roll of the pair, you get a predictable distribution curve – a lot more ‘7’ than ‘2’ or ‘12’. Is that the “purpose” of the dice? The table you roll them on? How does that curve, that phenomenon happen that way???

This is a product of all the physical factors involved - your hands and arms (and mind), gravity, the shape of each die, the material and friction of the table, etc. My gradeschool son that that was ‘magic’ when he tried that out. But that’s just a lack of imagination and rigorous thinking – he’s young and learning. It’s not magic, and there is no “purpose” to be found. It’s the way the physical dynamics play out for that set of interactions.

Similarly, on materialism, the emergence of life, sentience and even rational thought aren’t ‘purposeful’ in the sense of telos. It’s an emergent property of nature, as best we can tell, which is to say it’s neither telic nor magic, but the production complex second-order (and beyond) interactions of matter and energy.

Which is to say there’s no more purpose there in any theistic sense, based on the evidence, than there is purpose in ‘7’ coming up more often tha ‘2’ or ‘12’ when rolling a pair of dice.

Both observations are very difficult to motivate without resorting to something which, for all practical purposes, are postulates, since they cannot be reasonably motivated as likely outcomes of random/deterministic permutations of matter.

Yeah. That’s how knowledge works. It’s a research program. You come up with a hypothesis, and you test it. You don’t need to justify the hypothesis at all up front, that’s what empirical testing and liability to falsification does – it’s the ultimate justification of an idea. So, worrying about ‘difficulty to motivate’ I think completely misunderstands how science and real world knowledge work. We don’t establish facts based on ‘likely outcomes’ of other observations or ideas. We establish facts through observation, and objective and skeptical analysis of those observations.

Most materialists acknowledge that the likelihood (in the statistical sense) that nature randomly produced “things” like intelligent living beings, and laws like the need to survive and replicate, is incredibly small. So your position is also, in this sense, reasonably improbable.

Well, it’s perfectly foolish for anyone – materialist or no – to claim they can provide any credible framework for the probabilities involved in all that. And you, or anyone else is just that much more foolish to accept such nonsense. Do the math, for example, on the odds of you being you – what are the chances that your parents met as they did to produce you? How about their parents? And their parents? It’s trivial to produce “incredibly small” probabilities for events that you are physically proving in reading this post.

All of that is like a kind of “stupid test”, to be quite frank. Humans, brilliant as they are in so many ways, have a really bad ‘mental blind spot’ in this area of statistics and probabilities. One doesn’t have to be stupid to buy these kinds of shenanigans, but these are shenanigans that if they didn’t occur in a natural intellectual weak area for humans really would be a sign of acute mental weakness.

Anyone who seriously wants you to listen to them on those lines is someone to be suspect about. That is a line of argumentation for fools and weak-minded. Ask yourself, or someone advancing this to you, to sketch out the basic math, and justify the numerators and denominators. Very quickly you will see this is nothing but a superstitious appeal to intuition. The very nemesis of real knowledge.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

antunesaa:

In the other extreme, suppose that such postulates were instead corollaries of the general design of the natural laws.

Sure. This is the most facile reaction we can come up with. A “cosmic designer” explains everything on the cheap. It’s the most intellectually weak response we might offer. And yet, it could be! That’s why we rightly denigrate this reaction, because it could be, but it’s perfectly lazy – it’s not falsifiable, amenable to any kind of objective verification, draws upon intractable, arbitrary will and magic. Worst case scenario for thinking rigorously and courageously about the world.

But yeah, you can cook up any fantasy you like. Fantasies explain anything and everything, easy peasy.

Then you would have stronger predictions about reality as we know it: it was likely after all.

Yes, once one supposes a fantasy that explains everything, trivially, and is perfectly unfalsifiable, perfectly unaccountable to any kind of test or challenge, the rest is a piece of cake. ALL subsequent ideas and paths are “likely after all” once you take that dive.

The natural question would then be: what is the likelihood that among all possible laws of the nature, the ones that are valid allow me to think clearly about them?

That may be a question that is natural, but is pro-ignorance, anti-knowledge, and the very heart of superstition. This natural question is one of the most egregious mental errors the mind can make. If you think that is a reasonable question to even pose, that you can possibly even approach some answer on that question, your intuitions have already vanquished your ability to think in a disciplined, reasonable way. If you get there, you’re out of luck. It’s only in recognizing the ridiculousness of asking that question as a serious one that one can move toward thinking clearly.

Isn’t it wonderful that I can question matter and that it can give me an intelligible answer?

I think it does give you intelligible answers, but fantasies are like that – we understand them, they occur in familiar language. Fantasies are intelligible, and attractive.

In the end, this is still the same question as initially: why is there “thinking” and something to meaningfully think about?

It’s a good place to start, for sure. But the only answer we have is “it’s a badly formed question, given man’s epistemic status”. It’s the superstitious intuition looking to subdue the rigorous and disciplined parts of your mind.

If I were a materialist I would ascribe no meaning to the idea of “thinking” and I would consider my perceptions of reality an illusion, without any obvious isomorphism to reality.

If they are illusory, then the model break down, badly. It cannot explain biology and natural interactions with the world around us. It’s only by accepting cognition and sentience as (admittedly, often crude) model building of the surrounding world that we can arrive at models that perform at all. The “illusion” idea never gets off the ground, and plunges the thinker irretrievably into nihilism.

-TS

 

[greylorn]

Two brief comments on this paragraph. First, you seem to attribute to nature (perhaps you should graph Nature instead) what most theists attribute to God. Second, you also seem to attribute a high purpose to the “survival” and “fecundity” of those lumps of matter we call living beings. Both observations are very difficult to motivate without resorting to something which, for all practical purposes, are postulates, since they cannot be reasonably motivated as likely outcomes of random/deterministic permutations of matter. Most materialists acknowledge that the likelihood (in the statistical sense) that nature randomly produced “things” like intelligent living beings, and laws like the need to survive and replicate, is incredibly small. So your position is also, in this sense, reasonably improbable.

In the other extreme, suppose that such postulates were instead corollaries of the general design of the natural laws. Then you would have stronger predictions about reality as we know it: it was likely after all. The natural question would then be: what is the likelihood that among all possible laws of the nature, the ones that are valid allow me to think clearly about them? Isn’t it wonderful that I can question matter and that it can give me an intelligible answer? In the end, this is still the same question as initially: why is there “thinking” and something to meaningfully think about?

If I were a materialist I would ascribe no meaning to the idea of “thinking” and I would consider my perceptions of reality an illusion, without any obvious isomorphism to reality.

A,
I’m going to generalize from my interpretations of your positions, and if I’ve misinterpreted them, these comments are irrelevant.

You believe that the organization of miscellaneous molecules into self-reproducing life forms, and for these forms to then become organized into complex critters like yourself who are capable of thinking about how this all happened, is extremely improbable. And, you are absolutely correct. The probability is too absurd to calculate, but certainly ends up looking like 1 in 10 to the nth power, where n is a number with about ten thousand zeros at the end.

But what is the probability that an all-knowing omnipotent entity, capable of bringing all these forms into existence in a few simple, easy-for-Him, acts of will, might actually exist? Since God is infinite, perhaps the odds against His existence should be 1 divided by infinity. This makes the absurd odds against evolution look downright reasonable by comparison.

Secondly, you implicitly believe that your mind, and by inference, all human minds were created by God rather than by random chance. Kindly explain why a God capable of creating a universe, Beethoven, Al Einstein, and other excellent minds, even yours, also created Al Franken and a glut of dreadfully ordinary people with minds as fond of imaginative thought as cats are of water.

While Darwinism is an inadequate theory, how is any known human belief system any better?

 

[antunesaa]

A,
Secondly, you implicitly believe that your mind, and by inference, all human minds were created by God rather than by random chance. Kindly explain why a God capable of creating a universe, Beethoven, Al Einstein, and other excellent minds, even yours, also created Al Franken and a glut of dreadfully ordinary people with minds as fond of imaginative thought as cats are of water.

While Darwinism is an inadequate theory, how is any known human belief system any better?

I believe that the natural laws and all there is were created by God because I think that the alternative - no beginning, no first cause, and no purpose - is unappealing, unintuitive, and unaesthetic. As for the problem of evil, that is too vast for this thread, but, in a nutshell, I would say: if things can only go well, where in the path can you really choose, be free, have responsibility?

As for Darwinism, I have no problem with it but I do not base my belief system on it, nor on Maxwell’s laws, nor on any other natural laws. To me they have no meaning in terms of the nature of man. I prefer to base my belief system on the observation of the behavior of people across generations. And that leads me to common sense, to consuetudinary practices in successful societies, to religious traditions in progressive societies. If these things allowed us to reach this point, they can’t be that bad. You can’t get more Darwinian than this, can you? Moreover, the proposed alternatives are unconvincing because they are unintuitive and rest on the conviction that modern science will eventually solve all the relevant existential problems. I don’t think it will ever do. I’m not even talking about Christianity here.

 

[antunesaa]

Thank you for taking such a long time to answer my admittedly unpretentious post.
As for purpose, you give the dice example, but to me purpose is relevant only in the sense that intelligent creatures like us think about their origins and destiny. Then the question almost suffocates us. I guess we have a high regard of ourselves and therefore we need at least the comfort of being wanted by someone - God. In this sense purpose is a bad motive for believing in God. The alternative, however, is stranger, even a bit comic. We have to accept that a highly complex thing such as our minds came to existence by chance. If we want to accept that we indeed have minds, have responsibility, and are able to decide, we have then to talk of things like “emergence”. But the phenomenon of emergence is, to me, akin to creation by God, except that you really need a lot of little miracles to create a mind, a will, freedom, etc. You have little funny gods that, from a complex structure of matter and energy, create abstract objects which have to be something new under the sun. Any healthy principle of parsimony suggests the inferiority of this solution as opposed to the God solution.
As for the probability thing, of course no one can seriously claim to have calculated the odds that we exist. But this only stresses the point that, using the most rigorous analytic tools that we know (mathematics and probability theory), we go nowhere when addressing the God question.
A final comment. You have a very low opinion of intuition (you prefer to call it “superstition”, which is, sorry, a bit irritating). I know of no scholar that doesn’t rely on intuition to develop and understand theories, and then obtain “real knowledge”. I am a scholar and I do it all the time. I look at an equation and I think: “ok, this means what? Is this what I expected? If not, what is the intuition?” I don’t think there’s a clear line separating intuition and “real knowledge”. I doubt that there is such a thing as “real knowledge”. There you are.
Have a nice weekend!

 

[Touchstone]

Thank you for taking such a long time to answer my admittedly unpretentious post.
As for purpose, you give the dice example, but to me purpose is relevant only in the sense that intelligent creatures like us think about their origins and destiny. Then the question almost suffocates us. I guess we have a high regard of ourselves and therefore we need at least the comfort of being wanted by someone - God. In this sense purpose is a bad motive for believing in God. The alternative, however, is stranger, even a bit comic. We have to accept that a highly complex thing such as our minds came to existence by chance. If we want to accept that we indeed have minds, have responsibility, and are able to decide, we have then to talk of things like “emergence”. But the phenomenon of emergence is, to me, akin to creation by God, except that you really need a lot of little miracles to create a mind, a will, freedom, etc. You have little funny gods that, from a complex structure of matter and energy, create abstract objects which have to be something new under the sun. Any healthy principle of parsimony suggests the inferiority of this solution as opposed to the God solution.
As for the probability thing, of course no one can seriously claim to have calculated the odds that we exist. But this only stresses the point that, using the most rigorous analytic tools that we know (mathematics and probability theory), we go nowhere when addressing the God question.

Well, let the record show from this response from a Catholic then that such credulity toward big numbers and small probabilities DOES indeed go nowhere on this question. That’s useful, as the “it’s improbable, therefore God” argument is nearly pandemic here on this forum, at points. I happily affirm that our analytic tools utterly fail to make any headway on this question, but I suggest that indicts the question as inchoate, rather than reflecting poorly on our tools. Our tools are limited, to be sure, but nature of the question itself is intractable; the only way to answer such a question to be of such an epistemic position where it would never be a question in the first place.

In any case, religious people here regularly seriously claim that the odds for existence/natural development are somehow calculable… by the magic of intuition, of course.

A final comment. You have a very low opinion of intuition (you prefer to call it “superstition”, which is, sorry, a bit irritating).

I the “low” view of intuition is only obtained when intuition is confused for knowledge. Intuition is an essential part of human cognition, and a key catalyst and (name removed by moderator)ut toward knowledge. That’s a high view of intuition as intuition. Let’s just not try to pass off our intuitions as counterfeit knowledge and hope no one notices, OK?

I know of no scholar that doesn’t rely on intuition to develop and understand theories, and then obtain “real knowledge”.

Neither do I. As above, intuition is a catalyst and driver for knowledge. But it is not knowledge itself.

I am a scholar and I do it all the time. I look at an equation and I think: “ok, this means what? Is this what I expected? If not, what is the intuition?”

I think intuition is at least then, and more. But that, again, should not be confused with knowledge. The problem is NOT that people have and use their intuitions; that’s a good thing. The problem is that many are deeply confused – and this confusion is promoted and conditioned by many religions and primitive philosophies – about the distinction between intuition and knowledge.

I don’t think there’s a clear line separating intuition and “real knowledge”. I doubt that there is such a thing as “real knowledge”. There you are.
Have a nice weekend!

Well, if all you have to go on is intuition, you’ll never know either way. Real knowledge is statements and propositions that perform empirically, and are liable to falsification. Many intuitions point the way to that kind of validation – many intuitions are confirmed as knowledge by being subjected to these verifications and falsification tests. But many are not, and that is where knowledge is distinguished from intuition.

-TS

 

[HelenaMT]

. …Any more than “wetness” reduces to hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms. I ask you again: is hydrogen “wet”? If not, where did the wetness go??? If I’m a reductionist, I must find wetness in hydrogen, no? And yet I can find no such attribute, but only an emergent property that obtains in concert with other elements. This is anti-reductionist. It’s all physical yes, and it’s all real, but reality cannot be understood in any robust way at just the (sub) atomic level. We cannot know wetness from hydrogen alone.

The emergence of a mind from the processes of the brain doesn’t seem fundamentally different to me than the emergence of water from oxygen and hydrogen. It seems like you can use emergence to describe everything that exists as a combination of other parts. Is this a correct understanding or am I off?

What do you say about the perception that our minds, even if we accept that they are products of emergence, can also act on the brain that produced them? Is that perception necessarily a false one in this context? Or can the mind actually act on the brain within this view? Just curious what you make of that.

 

[tonyrey]

The emergence of a mind from the processes of the brain doesn’t seem fundamentally different to me than the emergence of water from oxygen and hydrogen. It seems like you can use emergence to describe everything that exists as a combination of other parts. Is this a correct understanding or am I off?

What do you say about the perception that our minds, even if we accept that they are products of emergence, can also act on the brain that produced them? Is that perception necessarily a false one in this context? Or can the mind actually act on the brain within this view? Just curious what you make of that.

Helena, according to the materialist the mind has been programmed by physical events but that is no reason why it cannot be programmed to act on the brain. The problem is that it remains a cog in the machine of nature. Its activity is still caused by its physical environment.

Nor does subatomic indeterminacy provide a loophole because mere divergence from a biological programme is not a basis for belief in responsibility. Random mutations remain purposeless even though they lead to development. All our thoughts and decisions are still the result of events beyond our control, determined or otherwise. It is absurd to believe self-control can emerge somewhere in the middle of a causal chain. Even purpose remains an insurmountable difficulty for the materialist, let alone rationality and responsibility!