Material monism, science, mind and God

[Vonsalza]

I would say that if it’s not natural then it’s supernatural. If something interacts with us in a way that we are certain is not natural, then we have a supernatural entity.

Theists would have a hard time splitting the cheese on this one since for many, all actions are in some way via god, both natural and whatever you call supernatural.

In all honesty, when I throw a rock up and it comes back down, I think God owns that too, Bradski.

So for at least MY God, your test doesn’t work because it relies on supernatural and natural being obviously discrete and readily reproducible for testing (another big issue with the supernatural).

And I assume we don’t need to discuss miraculous healings or Mary-on-a-rooftop or dancing suns and prophesies. We can leave those to the less well informed.

All for it.

I’m not going to say those things aren’t real. But I try not to let religious underpinning like that hold much of the weight of my faith.

This has been going on since we came out of the trees. Christianity is one of the more recent organised attempts to make sense of it all. But is entirely natural.

Christianity is somewhat new, but it openly predicates on a religion that has roots in the first religions.

So all religions are a culturally based attempt to find meaning. All of them entirely natural. That none of their various gods actually exist doesn’t matter in the slightest. They don’t need to. As you know, none of the claims that all these other religions made about their gods were true.

*Screaching of Brakes

I’m not going to say “none”.

Now most of the material, determinable claims? Sure. But then again, that’s reading a pre-enlightenment text(s) with a post enlightenment eye. Some would call that anachronistic. And I think that’s something you may be a bit over-quick to dismiss as a matter of habit. Just because a text might not contain fact doesn’t mean it can’t contain truth.

But, again, we have to postulate that the metaphysical exists when we deal with truth as something discrete from fact.

Intimately related is the concept of “meaning”. And as all the “cool kids” in the philosophy department were finding out in the late 19th century, when you kill god, you create a never-ending crisis of meaning.
In that way, your claim that “That none of their various gods actually exist doesn’t matter in the slightest.” is functionally untrue.

It disconnects the driving piston.

 

[benjamin1973]

Returning to the Christian God, it isn’t that we have to accept one single event. We have to accept the whole box and dice. The whole ten yards. The complete story with virgin births and resurrected sons and heaven and hell and the fall and…well, it does go on.

This is part of the reason why I declare as agnostic. There are some things in the Bible I consider irrefutably true, and some things which I consider allegorical stories or cultural remnants which many Christians take literally.

I feel I have a philosophical awareness that would be compatible with faith in general, but things like Noah’s Ark or the story of Adam and Eve I just cannot make myself accept as literal truth.

 

[RandomAlias]

To me, something which is ambiguous, and which is expressible only as a mathematical idea, is most likely exactly that-- an idea. Something which cannot said to be either here or there at a given moment in time cannot, I think, be said to have a material existence, at least as a thing.

You seem to be saying that if an elementary particle does not fit a classical model of wave or particle, it cannot have material existence.

It is more reasonable to assume that it exists and has an objective reality, and that any difficulty that we may have in understanding it is due to our understanding and not its physical reality.

 

[benjamin1973]

In my view, for something in our Universe to be said to have an objective reality, it must have an unambiguous identity observable by more than one individual, and be expressible in 3D space and in time. Subatomic particles do not meet these criteria. It’s not just that we haven’t happened to model them yet-- it’s that we HAVE worked with them, and found them not to meet that definition of material.

The material world view has pretty much evolved by materialists taking whatever new view comes up and co-opting it. “Both a particle and a wave, and also neither, and also either? Yeah, that’s material.” If a soul was discovered to exist for sure, they’d say, “Yeah, the soul-material is interacting with the physical material” and start talking about the space-time-soul continuum as though it had always been obvious.

I do not accept this process of semantic co-option. If something is only expressible in a mathematical wave function, then that is what it is, until someone can pin it under their thumb.

 

[benjamin1973]

You might want to define terms here. What is natural? By what criteria do you establish it to be so?

 

[Bradskii]

You might want to define terms here. What is natural? By what criteria do you establish it to be so?

I’m afraid we can’t get away defining it without using the word ‘nature’. Something is natural if it occurs within nature with no conscious external (name removed by moderator)ut. Something that is not always easy to determine. That a penguin looks like it does is entirely natural. That an alsation looks like it does is not. A pile of leaves could be just a pile of leaves or it could be a nest.

 

[RandomAlias]

It’s not just that we haven’t happened to model them yet-- it’s that we HAVE worked with them, and found them not to meet that definition of material.

It’s your definition of material, and definitions often fall short of reality and sometimes amount to wishful thinking.

it must have an unambiguous identity observable by more than one individual

This for example ignores the well-known effect of observation on the physical state. It’s not mysterious like Schroedinger’s Cat being both alive and dead. It’s simply that observation itself involves a physical action like the application of a force or the impingement of another physical entity (particle, wave, photon, …), and that changes the state of the observed entity.

and be expressible in 3D space and in time

That’s what quantum mechanics does. The wave function is a description of all that is knowable about the object, but the wave function is not the object.

 

[benjamin1973]

You’ll have to get the word to mean a little more than that if we’re going to talk about things being natural or supernatural.

 

[benjamin1973]

This for example ignores the well-known effect of observation on the physical state. It’s not mysterious like Schroedinger’s Cat being both alive and dead. It’s simply that observation itself involves a physical action like the application of a force or the impingement of another physical entity (particle, wave, photon, …), and that changes the state of the observed entity.

I don’t believe that this is the position of modern physics. Can you support this? My understanding is that quantum indeterminacy is intrinsic to the system, and is not due to disturbance, at least not in a classical sense.

If you are not yet familiar with the Quantum Eraser effect, then have a look at the video, and then tell me in what sense a particle can be said to have a unique identity when it’s in a state of superposition?

 

[benjamin1973]

What is the object, exactly? How would you represent a photon or an electron in 3D space? Care to link a picture?

 

[RandomAlias]

Here are two graphical depictions of one of the possible stationary states of an electron in a hydrogen atom. If an electron finds itself in this state, it will stay there as long as it is undisturbed.

It makes no sense to ask “Is the electron in the upper lobe?” It is not even strictly accurate to say that it is in all the lobes. It is all the lobes.

If we shoot a high-energy particle through the midplane, there is a low probability that it will interact with the electron. If we shoot the particle through the upper lobe, there is a high probability that it will interact with the electron, but that doesn’t mean the electron happened to be in the upper lobe. The electron was present in the entire lobe configuration and just happened to interact with the particle that was shot through the upper lobe.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[Bradskii]

You’ll have to get the word to mean a little more than that if we’re going to talk about things being natural or supernatural.

How about if I expand that definition.

Natural: An event ocurring with no conscious (name removed by moderator)ut and with no intent but within the bounds of natural laws. A pile of leaves.
Unnatural (for want of a better word): An event ocurring with conscious (name removed by moderator)ut but with some intent and within the bounds of natural laws. A nest.
Supernatural: An event ocurring via a conscious (name removed by moderator)ut with intent but outside the bounds of natural laws. Levitation.

 

[Kei]

To me, sense doesn’t make sense without a mind. In several meanings of the term.

 

[benjamin1973]

Yeah, I’ve seen these before. What these are, essentially, are probability fields, rather than images of the “things” themselves. You might as well draw the orbit of the Earth for a billion years as a big band around the sun.

Now let’s have a little fun. Draw a photon.

Let me save a lot of time and possible embarrassment by asking-- do you have some Physics credentials, and you’re feeding me stuff, or are you googling things and coming back with answers to specific questions?

Either way, I’m going to look at the Quantum Eraser and the observer effect as highly suspicious, but in the former case, you can feel free to get a little heavier a little faster if you like.

 

[benjamin1973]

I think that’s a false trilemma. You’ve not defined a fourth possibility: an event occurring via a non-conscious (name removed by moderator)ut but outside the bounds of natural laws.

For example, while it doesn’t solve the problem of infinite regress, once speculative “hypothesis” over the multiverse theory is that our Universe may be one bubble in a kind of super foam. In that case, the whole Universe is an expression of metaphysical laws in a super-system, but not necessarily requiring a conscious Creator God.

 

[IWantGod]

a nest.

What is a nest?

 

[IWantGod]

I think that’s a false trilemma. You’ve not defined a fourth possibility: an event occurring via a non-conscious (name removed by moderator)ut but outside the bounds of natural laws.

For example, while it doesn’t solve the problem of infinite regress, once speculative “hypothesis” over the multiverse theory is that our Universe may be one bubble in a kind of super foam. In that case, the whole Universe is an expression of metaphysical laws in a super-system, but not necessarily requiring a conscious Creator God.

I would just like to point out that a first cause argument in the metaphysical sense is not intended to be a solution to an infinite regress. The point of the argument is to provide an ontological solution to the existence of anything that is changing or existentially unnecessary. Change is the reason one is looking for a cause because, like Aquinas said, anything that is changing or becoming does not necessarily exist. That applies to any physical state that does not necessarily exist, not just events in this particular universe. It really does not matter whether or not there are many universes or an infinite regress of physical states. The point is that actual existence and it’s power does not originate with any potential physical state or potential being. Only something that necessarily exists can be considered the source of being, and by source i do not mean that all existing things have a beginning, but rather that a necessary reality is required in-order to explain why there is something rather than nothing and why unnecessary things exist.

The theist has reasons for thinking that this necessary or ultimate reality is intelligent. One of the basic arguments is that potential reality cannot create it’s own laws or nature, and potential nature cannot be something intrinsic to the nature of what is necessary (physical or potential reality cannot be considered an essential part of a larger ontological whole like in pantheism). Thus only an intelligent cause can begin to explain the existence of unnecessary physical laws and physical nature. Otherwise, if the cause is not intelligent, then there is no intelligible logical reason why anything unnecessary would exist or behave in the way it does. Only necessary reality should exist.

The cause cannot be a natural unconscious event.

 

[RandomAlias]

do you have some Physics credentials

Yes.

 

[Bradskii]

I think that’s a false trilemma. You’ve not defined a fourth possibility: an event occurring via a non-conscious (name removed by moderator)ut but outside the bounds of natural laws.

For example, while it doesn’t solve the problem of infinite regress, once speculative “hypothesis” over the multiverse theory is that our Universe may be one bubble in a kind of super foam. In that case, the whole Universe is an expression of metaphysical laws in a super-system, but not necessarily requiring a conscious Creator God.

I’m not sure what you mean by metaphysical laws. It seems a contradiction in terms. If they are laws and they relate to the natural world then that would make them natural laws.

And we could keep adding more possibilities such as an event caused by a conscious mind but which was not sentient (a wierd concept admittedly but I did once read an excellent sci fi story that was based on that concept - the title escapes me).

We have to stop somewhere and that somewhere should correspond to what we know to exist and its causes.

 

[IWantGod]

We have to stop somewhere and that somewhere should correspond to what we know to exist and its causes.

You mean the buck should stop with physical causes because that’s all we know a-prior. What is your justification for that?