Carl Sagan played an important part in my retreat from faith. His book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark was one of the first books of scientific critique of religion and superstition that I read in my years as a priest. Though I had read Bertrand Russell and other freethinkers long before, it was in the context of participating in religion and its practices at a professional level, when I had begun questioning practically everything about the church and its teachings, that Sagan’s work played a central role in slowly turning the mortar of faith into sand, and the whole structure began to totter. Indeed, soon after reading the book Elizabeth designed a book-plate for me (printing it on her press) which included one of the epigraphs from Sagan’s book: Ubi dubium, ibi libertas — “Where (there is) doubt, there (is) liberty.” Other books which played the same role were Darwin’s Origin of Species and Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. By the time that I read these books, I had already moved quite far from the centre of faith as the church understood and taught it. My mentor during this earlier period was Don Cupitt, whose works still are pregnant with meaning for me. Elizabeth and I met him at a Sea of Faith conference at Leicester University, when we were on our honeymoon in the UK in 1990.
Later I read other books by Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions, for one, and Pale Blue Dot, for another. The question of Sagan’s stridency did not occur to me at all until it was mentioned in a guest post on Jerry Coyne’s website, Why Evolution is True, “Was Carl Sagan a Militant Atheist?” by JJE, who was working his way through Sagan’s TV series Cosmos, which is now available on Youtube. The first episode is here:
If you are interested, this will lead you to the rest. The answer to the question that JJE asks is, of course, yes. Carl Sagan was every bit as militant an atheist Richard Dawkins, and yet his militancy and stridency did not cause the kind of emotional response that has been prompted by today’s militant atheists. Indeed, Cosmos was a hit. What explains the difference in the response? After all, the things that Sagan says about god and religion are just as dismissive as anything the new atheists have to say, yet churchmen did not issue their fatwas as readily as the pope and other church leaders now do against the new atheism. What gives?
I took a look at Pale Blue Dot the other day, just to remind myself of what Sagan does say, and it’s pretty bracing stuff! Take this for instance:
What do we really want from philosophy and religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such disappointments into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe — which seems truly pointless — but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science. [48]
Then he quotes a few things from Brian Appleyard’s Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man, who laments that the universe of Catholic orthodoxy is no longer accessible to us. The universe is simply too big and impersonal to think in terms of the whole thing being created for the enactment of the human drama of salvation. Sagan says, what anyone now would take as almost unbelievably strident, that Appleyard’s universe of Catholic orthodoxy is one in which,
despite explicit orders to the contrary, a woman and a man once ate of an apple, and that this act of insubordination transformed the Universe into a contrivance for operant-conditioning their remote descendants. [50]
Not only does Sagan have a way with words, his words are remorselessly cutting.
But Sagan isn’t through with Appleyard. Appleyard complains that
a modern democracy can be expected to include a number of contradictory religious faiths which are obliged to agree on a certain number of general injunctions, but no more. They must not burn each other’s places of worship, but they may deny, even abuse each other’s God. This is the effective, scientific way of proceeding. [quoted 50]
To which Sagan’s reply is decisive:
But what is the alternative? Obdurately to pretend to certainty in an uncertain world? To adopt a comforting belief system, no matter how out of kilter with the facts it is? If we don’t know what’s real, how can we deal with reality? For practical reasons, we cannot live too much in fantasyland. [50]
This is powerful, pungent stuff! It takes no prisoners at all!
So, what is different? Why did Sagan’s books, which were very popular, not arouse the kind of animus generated by Dawkins, Hitchens or Harris? How could Sagan say the following, without being sent packing?
If you lived two or three millennia ago, there was no shame in holding that the Universe was made for us. It was an appealing thesis consistent with everything we knew; it was what the most learned among us taught without qualification. But we have found out much since then. Defending such a position today amounts to a willful disregard of the evidence, and a flight from self-knowledge. [52]
Or, what about this?
The trapdoor beneath our feet sweeps open. We find ourselves in bottomless freefall. We are lost in a great darkness, and there’s no one to send out a search party. Given so harsh a reality, of course we’re tempted to shut our eyes and pretend that we’re safe and snug at home, that the fall is only a bad dream. [53]
These are powerful evocations of disorientation and rootlessness, and it is this quality, I think, that provides a sense of familiarity that is not provided by those who simply ignore the experience of culture-shock that is induced by what we are coming to know.
I believe it is this that the philosopher Philip Kitcher is addressing in his New Republic article ”The Trouble with Scientism.” It’s interesting that one theory of jihadi terrorism thinks of it as the product of the confrontation between rootless Muslims and the apparent emptiness of Western modernity. Many of the 9/11 terrorists were Muslims without deep piety, whose lives in Western Europe and America were empty, rootless, and without personal significance or emotional substance. Unable to express their sense of loss, their emptiness expressed itself in a kind of religious nihilism. For them it is true, just as Nietzsche claimed it was. By living as if there is no god, they had drunk up the sea. And what Kitcher is saying is that this is the trouble with an exclusive emphasis on science. Dawkins may say it: that nature is wonderful and awesome and overpoweringly beautiful in its immensity and order; Sagan lives it in terms that people could understand. He put the expanding universe, and our growing knowledge of it, into the old narrative. Jerry Coyne says that he has watched the Sagan clips which are included with JJE’s guest post, and that “although a bit histrionic for my taste, nevertheless surprised me with the boldness of Sagan’s attack on faith.” I think it is Sagan’s human drama — his histrionics, if you like – that makes the difference. Sagan felt the awesomeness of what we have come to know, but he also understood, and perhaps even himself felt, what people feel they have lost.
Once familiar in church halls and offices was a poster which took various forms, but expressed the same sense of fullness. There would be a picture of a marvel of nature — a rugged mountain, a stormy sea, a heart-rending sunset, a panoply of stars and galaxies. The slogan was a simple “Our God is an Awesome God!” It was at once an expression of religious conviction and fearful uncertainty. You could always hear the question arising, just off the edge of the paper — “Isn’t he?” When the pope rails against the radical relativism of the age, this is what he is struggling with, and yet he cannot ask the question or express any doubt at all, because he is responsible for the faith of millions, and because there are still people who are trying to keep alive the old mysteries, the resolution of the disjunction between myth and reality is postponed yet again. Some people will leach away into a militant unbelief, but many people remain, half in and half outside of faith, because there is a deep sense of something lacking, and they, like Matthew Arnold, are
Wandering between two worlds, one dead
The other powerless to be born.
When Kitcher speaks about the contributions of historians and philosophers, composers and musicians, poets and theologians that went into the remembrance of the horror of war and the need for reconciliation that came together when a new Coventry Cathedral was consecrated, and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was first performed, with an English tenor, a German baritone and a Russian soprano, taking the three solo parts, it is this sense of cultural unity and consensus that he has in mind when he speaks of history and the humanities as ways of knowing. The trouble with scientism, he suggests, is that it does not acknowledge the human dimension and context of science.
Sagan was very aware of the need to acknowledge this cultural dimension of human knowing, and the non-scientific ways of knowing that is recognised within it. He understood the important role that science must play in any understanding of the world and of human life. He understood the urge that people felt to retreat into the garden, and blot out the rapidly increasing knowledge that dwarfed us and rendered us insignificant bits of stuff in a vast impersonal universe. But he also understood the biblical story for what it is, a myth about the reality of being and becoming human, and so he could make use of it to explain how we fit into the fabric of the universe we were coming to know. In the garden, as he says, we were forbidden knowledge. We were forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and yet we were starving for knowledge — “we were created hungry, you might say.” [56] And so we broke out of the confines of the ignorance to which we were born, and in which, according to the story, we were meant to stay.
The consequences have not always been happy ones. There is a price to be paid for knowledge, and sometimes we would like to unknow what we have come to know, and we mourn the lost, storied world in which we felt at home. That, however, says Sagan, is maudlin and sentimental. We can close our eyes, if we wish, to what we know, and to the frightening sense of being dwarfed and marginalised that this knowledge makes us feel; we can even, as so many fundamentalists are telling us, resolutely refuse to recognise as knowledge what scientists have discovered about life and the universe, but it is clear that this does not really satisfy even the people who proclaim their certainty, who seek more and more fervent ways of expressing and displaying their faithfulness as a check against their doubts. It may be, as Jerry Coyne points out in his paper on evolution and America just published and now available online, that it will take a more caring, more egalitarian and more just society to give people the courage and wisdom to find, as Sagan says, the significance of their lives:
We long [he writes] for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance, Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.
If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal. [57]
I think it is Sagan’s inexplicit, but genuine recognition that there is a human knowing that is not scientific that makes the difference between his stridency about the folly of faith more palatable, and saved him from a chorus of condemnation from religious believers. He lived in the same world, in which a comprehensive understanding of being human, and a narrative sense of where we stood in relation to one another and to the vast universe in which we have come to be, were crucial elements of our knowledge. The discoveries of science, for Sagan, were absolutely vital, and represented a human achievement of enormous significance, but he still retained a narrative sense of the universe as a human creation, as part and parcel of our very being, a sense that seems to be deliberately played down in much that represents disbelief today. I think that Sagan might say that some contemporary conceptions of science do not provide a human context in terms of which they can be understood, and that this is an impoverished conception of what we are, and what we really know.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit, since people have been talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s continual attempts to distance himself from being called an ‘atheist’, while at the same time clearly styling himself as the next Carl Sagan. There was something I always found annoying about NdGT, and since he clearly is an atheist as the term is normally understood, but he is afraid of being labeled as such. He lacks the kind of courage that Carl Sagan had to put out such profoundly non-religious sentiments both on TV and in his books, since Sagan obviously didn’t believe that you should ignore religion while dismissing other pseudoscience.
I also think the acceptance of Carl Sagan is a function of the times in which he worked. Apparently there was a bit of a backlash to Cosmos, but religion in the US was less political at the time, perhaps because it felt more secure. Now the non-religious and atheists are fastest growing group, and religions are much more openly political than they were 20 or 30 years ago, with Fox News, countless TV and radio stations, and the Republican party as a whole giving them voice. I also think Carl Sagan really laid the seeds for most of the current crop of New Atheists… most atheists I know I started the path to atheism through his books, and a huge chunk of my friends who are non-religious read them as well. Sagan also really finessed the anti-religious stuff too… it felt like natural conclusions to the statements he made, both about the universe, as in a Pale Blue Dot, and about scientific inquiry and evidence in A Demon Haunted World. Those books were never just about religion, but they didn’t leave religion alone either. Perhaps to an extent, that’s part of their power… you read a book about science, and it takes you all the way to natural conclusions about religion and the universe. And that goes back to my problem with NdGT… he’s happy to lead you most of the way, but balks at making any conclusions about god because he’s ‘agnostic’. It may get him funding, but it doesn’t get him my respect.
A textbook on metaphysics attributes to Carl Sagen the following quote:
I, Carl Sagen, am nothing but a collection of atoms bearing the name, “Carl Sagen.” (The One and the Many, N. Clarke, p. 68)
Sagen just assumed humans are collections of atoms in an effort to comprehend the mysteries of the human mind. He probably did not even grasp the insight that humans are embodied spirits.
Carl Sagan’s lack of faith is a reason to believe in the Bible. If atheists discussed religion intelligently, rationally, and knowledgeably it would be an obstacle to faith.
It is interesting to note that Sagan’s “Cosmos” aired in 1980 and the “Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act” was signed into law in Arkansas in March 1981.
Perhaps I am missing something, but I have always liked beer and wine better than spirits – embodied or not.
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@David Roemer
Where do you find that human spirit? You’d think that centuries of neuroscience would have found some sort of mysterious nonphysical force directing our movements. Its not enough to just posit that there is some sort of spiritual entity pulling levers and pushing buttons in our brain… you have to prove it. Otherwise, your proposition is just on the same level with the people convinced that cold spots are ghosts, or that their dreams are prophetic.
“Sagan was very aware of the need to acknowledge this cultural dimension of human knowing, and the non-scientific ways of knowing that is recognised within it.”
I think that this is incorrect, and it highlights the problem that many of us have with the ‘ways of knowing’ argument.
Of course there is a “cultural dimension of human knowing”, but this does not imply “non-scientific ways of knowing”, regardless of what some might like to believe. There are other ways of feeling, and even perhaps of understanding or of learning, but not (at least so far as we can tell) of ‘knowing’.
I would also suggest that Sagan, also, did not suppose other ‘ways of knowing’. Yes, he recognized the -feeling- of “disorientation and rootlessness”, but these are feelings, not knowledge.
@Sajanas,
You find the human spirit by grasping the difference between scientific questions and questions about the human mind and its functions: paying attention, asking questions, deciding what is true, and deciding what to do with our bodies. Questions about the mind and the body are unanswerable. They are mysteries. Hence, humans are indefinabilities, embodied spirits, or spirited bodies.
@David Roemer
You are correct when you say that intelligence, rationality and knowledge are all obstacles to faith.
I’m sure that Sagan was aware of the popular delusion that humans are embodied spirits but he rejected it out of hand due to lack of evidence.
@David Roemer
Well, for starters, I question that you can sit in a chair and accurately analyze your own mind and perceptions. Have you never looked at an optical illusion or heard the McGurk effect? One’s brain makes a lot of cognitive slights of hand that are not necessarily apparent by questioning what goes on in one’s own mind. And its not like each individual’s mind is even the same. Do you imagine that the same ‘spirit’ inhabits the brain of someone with severe schizophrenia, brain damage, or mental retardation? How do you explain how the very personality of some individuals can change when they’re given psychoactive drugs, or experience brain damage? Careful observation of people who have undergone all of these things can and does answer a lot of questions about emotion, perception, personality, and reasoning. They are not mysteries at all. Surely you don’t argue that brain damage or genetic abnormalities don’t change and alter personality, memory, or reasoning capabilities.
But if they do, what is the soul? I am genuinely interested, what do you think the soul is? Is it just ‘a mystery’? Because that is meaningless…. and when most people speak of the soul, they really mean personality. If that’s not it, what are you really left with?
@Sajanas
The soul (form) is the metaphysical principle that makes humans equal to one another. The body (matter) is the correlative principle that make us different from one another.
Materialists, of course, think body and soul are just ideas. Catholics think the human soul is spiritual because the human mind is a mystery. There is no explanation of how the mind can affect the body (free will), and how the body can affect the mind.
There are four solutions to the mind-body problem. In the order of evidence:
1) dualism (spiritual substances exist)
2) materialism (the mind is an illusion)
3) dualism (the body is an illusion)
4) It is a mystery. Humans are embodied spirits or spirited bodies.
I don’t think it’s true that Carl Sagan was as militant as Richard Dawkins.
Carl Sagan: “People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.”
Richard Dawkins, on dealing with people who claim to be religious: “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!
On atheism, Sagan commented in 1981:
“An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_sagan
In reply to a question in 1996 about his religious beliefs, Sagan answered, “I’m agnostic.”[47] Sagan’s views on religion have been interpreted as a form of pantheism comparable to Einstein’s belief in Spinoza’s God.[48] Sagan maintained that the idea of a creator of the universe was difficult to prove or disprove and that the only conceivable scientific discovery that could challenge it would be an infinitely old universe.[49] According to his last wife, Ann Druyan, he was not a believer:
When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me—it still sometimes happens—and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl.[50]
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But what is the ‘mind-body problem’? Nobody I know has any problem understanding that their brains give them the capacity to think; nobody, for instance, would offer their brain as a transplant organ to an ailing family member because they could get along just as well with only a soul, or expect to be hit hard on the head with no interruption to their stream of consciousness. Let me offer solution 5: the ‘mind-body problem’ is a fictional construct which attempts to leverage our obvious and predictable ignorance about a complex system into some metaphysical failing. The ‘problem’ is we don’t know stuff yet; but after only sixty years or so of neuroscience, who in their right mind would expect us to?
As for ‘different ways of knowing’, the proper way to deal with assertions of that kind is to ask: “Knowing WHAT?” When Eric or anyone else can come up with even one fact, one item of information, one generally-accepted proposition which cannot be verified via the scientific method, then I will welcome the concept with open arms. Till then it remains a vacuous claim.
We’ve gone over this multiple times, but let me try again….
…the answer is nerves.
@David Roemer
Well, as I said, the mind is not a mystery… it clear that there are a variety of mental states that are associated with brain activity (which you can see through fMRI, for instance), and people with traumatic brain injury can lose the ability to experience certain mental states. There is plenty of evidence for the mind, in the sense that it is a state of the brain (as corio37 illustrated, you can change your mind with a hammer).
But still, “The soul (form) is the metaphysical principle that makes humans equal to one another” does not fully make sense to me. All of those principals you put down are pretty easy to look at experimentally… if people had an immaterial soul, you’d see certain immutable things that could not be changed by traumatic brain injury, intoxicants, or psychoactive drugs. I’m pretty confident, however, that this is not the case. And clearly, if this thing is effecting the body, there is some mechanism for it to do so, it must leave some trace in the physical world to affect the physical world. And, I’d also question, where does such a theory even come from, if you have no way of experiencing this nonphysical, nonmaterial, essentially nonprovable thing? Its a supposition, and not a particularly good one, born out of ignorance of the brain, not any real evidence, and trying to place under the title of ‘mystery’ doesn’t make it a real solution to the problem. All it does is try to stop inquiry that might make people uncomfortable. Its a quitters argument, but perhaps that’s the only real way forward if you don’t want to do some actual science.
@corio37
Human beings have a drive to know and understand everything. We ask questions, not only about things that we see and hear, but things we know about from our ability to make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge. All these questions make up the mind-body problem:
1) Consider knowing that this page is white and black. This means more than that light is entering you eye and a signal is going to your brain. It means an awareness of it. What is that awareness?
2) We can create an image of a rose. Does that image have volume? Does it take up space? What is it?
3) What is truth?
4) What is free will?
5) What are concepts, past and future, and other mental constructs?
@Sajanas
Metaphysics is a different method of inquiry than science. Why is science the only method of inquiry? The following are some metaphysical axioms or theorems:
1) Every being has its sufficient reason for existing.
2) Beings that begin to exist at some point in time need a cause.
3) Every being has the transcendental property of being unified. To be is to be one.
4) A finite being is a composition of essence and existence.
5) A being that is a member of a class of beings is a composition of form and matter.
6) A being that changes in time is a composition of substance and accidence.
Stridency amongst atheists is a myth perpetuated by people who wish to silence reality.
And it is a grave error to ignore the significance of the end of the millennium to the growth of religious insanity. When I left the church in 1998, hysteria was growing about the coming End Times and Christians repeatedly denied that we would know the exact time. Sagan was already dead at that time.
Today we are seeing the peak of 2012 hysteria in the churches. They deny every day that anyone will know the exact date as if it is a code expression for saying, we believe this is really going to be the End this time, for real.
I see David has returned to distribute his unthought out drivel.
David, perhaps you could answer the questions I put to you in our previous discussion?
Perhaps you can actually explain and argue for your position instead of asserting things without evidence?
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Carl sagan quotes
@Tige Gibson
It is not only religious people who want to “silence reality.” Atheists are also prone to this. A good example is evolution. The only theory that attempts to explain the complexity of life is intelligent design. Many religious people ignore the fact that there is no evidence for ID. Atheists ignore the fact that natural selection only explains the adaptation of species to their environment. Atheists never admit to themselves or others that ID is the only theory that explains common descent.
@Sajanas (#13)
But, of course, association is not identity, so this really isn’t anwhere near as convincing an argument as some — and seemingly you — think it is.
Well, exhibit that they are experiencing it, certainly, but that doesn’t mean that we actually lose it. Take the known case of locked in minds, where you have a body that cannot react in any way but the mind is still active. At one point, there was an anesthetic that paralyzed the whole body but left the experiences intact, and so during surgery you had patients that could feel every cut but couldn’t react in any way. The link between experience and behaviour is clearly not as tight as we might like it to be.
However, even if that was true interactionist dualist theories are all completely compatible with changes to the brain making changes in the mind. Descartes’ theory was, in fact, an interactionist dualist theory.
Such as? Considering interactionist dualist models, there doesn’t seem to be much that would be completely unaffected, even if we don’t consider that those things might be unchanged while the behaviour is changed.
What do you mean by “some trace”? If it could activate neurons directly at any time, for example, how would you test that?
The claims for dualisms are usually that we do indeed expereince the mind directly, and our direct experience and introspection is what needs to be explained when we explain mind, and those experiences seem inconsistent with materialist theories. No one claims that it, in fact, cannot be experienced. You may not be able to prove it objectively, but as a mind is primarily subjective phenomena that’s only to be expected.
“Atheists never admit to themselves or others that ID is the only theory that explains common descent.”
Likewise biologists – but what would they know?
David:
Since, until very recently, the church argued for human exceptionalism, this makes no sense. Indeed, natural selection and primitive origins comprise the best explanation both for common origin and the vast complexity of llfe forms. On what basis could you possibly argue otherwise?
@Eric
There is no such thing as the “best” explanation. There are only explanations backed by the evidence and judged to be true by rational people. ID is an irrational explanation. While there is no hard line to draw between common descent and adaptation, natural selection explains only adaptation. Evolutionary biologists are constantly improving the theory of natural selection. The new improvements are facilitated variation and genetic engineering. Biologists have a grasp of the complexity of life and the shortness of 3 billion years. No biologist thinks natural selection explains the complexity of life.
@David Roemer: “If atheists discussed religion intelligently, rationally, and knowledgeably it would be an obstacle to faith.” in other words, discussion of religion in an intelligent, rational, and knowledgeable way is an obstacle to faith. Makes sense to me. Also, natural selection, and the evidence supporting it, does indeed support common descent: all cellular organisms use the same biochemical structures, amino acids are all of an L-chiral nature, they all use ATP, both Darwin’s finches and animal breeding show evidence for common descent, A molecular analysis of protein and genetic molecules allows the construction of robustly supported phylogenetic trees. Shall I continue? Your ignorance (either willful or accidental) is woeful. Of course, maybe I’m just feeding the trolls here (in an Internet meme, and not a personal or fableseque way, of course).
Chris Hedges book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning might give us pause for thought. I think intellectual conflict, and some forms of competition can be healthy redirection of our destructive impulses, but I notice the less intellectual and the less ethical, the more nihilistic, cruel and evil those destructive impulses tend to manifest. This is especially true in politics.
Sorry, but nothing is inherently mysterious. “Mystery” is one of those reflecting words, where people who throw it about say more about themselves than the thing that is supposedly “mysterious”. In my experience, people who latch on to the “mystery” escape clause, who seem to be in love with “mystery”, are themselves in love with their own ignorance. They’ll do anything to retain their lack of understanding.
“There is only one good: Knowledge. And there is only one evil: Ignorance.”
The modern synthesis is the best explanation for the diversity of life on this planet. That synthesis is indeed being improved every single day by thousands upon thousands of biologists and other researchers (you wouldn’t believe what’s going on in the field of micro RNA right now).
The intelligent design hypothesis is not an answer to anything. It doesn’t propose a mechanism by which the “intelligent designer” worked. It doesn’t offer a single shred of un-debunked evidence to back up its assertions. It merely appends the phrase “because god said so” to the existing modern synthesis.
Indeed, all of the evidence — every last shred of it — counters the notion that there is an intelligent designer and that designer’s ultimate purpose was us.
Trivially, the vitamin C pseudogene disproves the above hypothesis. If we were the ultimate aim of a “tweaker” of DNA, then the vitamin C gene in apes (including humans) would not be borked in such a simplistic and stupid fashion. It’s there, ready to work. All of it. Why doesn’t it? A single-step substitution. An incompetent designer would work in this way — or a malicious one.
There is no designer, intelligent or otherwise.
Deepity.
@northstar
Human beings want a theory to explain the observed phenomena so that they can understand it. “Explain” and “understand” are similar terms related to “causality” or “mechanism.” A true theory is one supported by the evidence, and judged to be true by rational people.
The evidence you are giving proves that intelligent design is irrational. It does not by any stretch of the imagination bear on my point that natural selection explains only adaptation. It explains why giraffes have long necks, but not how giraffes evolved from bacteria. You are a victim of the scam perpetrated by atheists and advocates of intelligent design.
@David Roemer, the evidence stated above by myself does indeed support common decent, it is the evidence cited and supported by biologists and geneticists. If this does not meet your (exacting?) evidentiary requirements, what alternate theory to explain the diversity of life, the course from bacteria to giraffe, do you propose? Or is that a mystery as well?
Seriously, there are entire books on the subject of evolution that you could read. Because your lack of understanding of modern evolutionary theory seems to be both wide and deep.
Start with “On the Origin of Species” if you want to go back to the beginning, but it’s hardly necessary.
Modern options aimed at the lay audience include “Your Inner Fish”, “Why Evolution is True”, “The Greatest Show on Earth”.
If you’ve read any part of those and still don’t understand, then move on.
Ernst Mayr’s “What Evolution Is” is a more-technical tome, but still reachable for those who haven’t gone through biochemistry, organic chemistry, and the lot.
“Evolution” and “Evolutionary Biology” by Douglas Futuyama are considered excellent undergraduate textbooks. There are scores of others.
And every single one of them explains how you get from bacteria to giraffes. It’s fundamental.
BTW: the answer, in case you’re lazy, is “natural selection.” In other words, differential survival of a genotype/phenotype within an environment leading to the separation of that phenotype from its predecessors.
Please stop using arguments from ignorance when there is a wealth of knowledge available — much of it freely available in just about every public library worth its salt in the country.
@northstar
I’m not a biologist. I go by what biologists say in textbooks, scholarly works, and peer-reviewed articles. There are a number of quotes I can show you, but for the time being I’ll give you one:
“Facilitated variation is not like orthogenesis, a theory championed by the eccentric American paleontologist Henry Osborn (1857–1935), which imbues the organism with an internal preset course of evolution, a program of variations unfolding over time. Natural selection remains a major part of the explanation of how organisms have evolved characters so well adapted to the environment.” (Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, page 247)
If dualism were correct, then we could detect minds without bodies. If we can detect minds when attached to bodies, then if they exist without them, they should be easy to detect. That we can’t is pretty good evidence that dualism is a failed theory.
Religious discussions make the science boring. Who the f*** cares?
Why do people waste so much breath trying to convince each other (or themselves)?
Philosophy is a well established field, with plenty of interesting characters and opinions, and quite enjoyable in itself. That’s where these discussions belong. The moment a “scientist” attempts to convince someone of religious matters, they themselves are no longer scientists, but rather philosophers, which is fine. But call a spade a spade. Do people think these ideas are new or something? Or because they are a scientist that their -opinion- is of more value? Stick to the science, for chr*st’s sake, heh. Then people will listen and be interested. Science/nature speaks for itself. And is beautiful.
@ David Roemer So, how does that quotation show that natural selection cannot account for how giraffes evolved from bacteria?
Oh, and in your list above re the “four” solutions to the mind-body problem, you missed out probably several logical possibilities, but importantly this one:
0) The body exists, and the mind is an emergent property of the body.
(Numbered zero as it is the one most consistent with the evidence, as well as being the most parsimonious.)
/@
Michael Fugate,
Okay, tell me how to detect anyone else’s mind but your own when that mind is in a body, without appealing to presumptions about behaviour or neural activity. I think you’ll find it a monumentally difficult task to detect minds when they are attached to bodies … except for your own. And from there you can probably figure out what you’d need to do to detect your own mind when it isn’t in a body.
So the mind has nothing to do with neural activity? How can that be?
I realize that this is a dilemma for sophisticated theists when you define your god as a disembodied mind in order to make it less subject to refutation and yet all of the evidence from neuroscience points to minds as always embodied. Which is it – does your god have a body or does it lack a mind?
@Ant
Kirshner and Gerhart do not say, “how organisms evolved.” They say how well they have adapted. This is a similar quote from Dawkins:
“All reputable biologists go on to agree that natural selection is one of its most important driving forces, although —as some biologists insist more than others—not the only one. Even if it is not the only one, I have yet to meet a serious biologist who can point to an alternative to natural selection as a driving force of adaptive evolution—evolution towards positive improvement.” (Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, p. 18)
The next quote is from an advocate of intelligent design, but no biologist will contradict the following statement that he makes:
“P. falciparum, HIV, and E. coli are all very, very different from each other. They range from the simple to the complex, have very different life cycles, and represent three different fundamental domains of life: eukaryote, virus, and prokaryote. Yet they all tell the same tale of Darwinian evolution. Single simple changes to old cellular machinery that can help in dire circumstances are easy to come by. This is where Darwin rules, in the land of antibiotic resistance and single tiny steps…There is no evidence that Darwinian process can take the multiple, coherent steps needed to build new molecular machinery, the kind of machinery that fills the cell.” (Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, Free Press, 2007, p. 162)
Your 0 solution is not intelligible because the term “emergent property” is not defined. Are you saying free will is an “emergent property” of the brain? How is this any different from saying free will is a mystery?
@ Michael Fugate
God is an infinite being, and man is a finite being. Humans are embodied spirits, and God is a pure spirit. An infinite being exists because finite beings need a cause.
“Free will is a mystery” = “Shut up and stop asking questions I can’t answer!”
“Free will is an emergent property” = “If we persist in studying neuroscience and related fields we will gradually gain more insight into the operation of the mind.” — which is exactly what we can observe happening right now.
David Roemer says:
‘…no biologist will contradict the following statement that he makes:…
‘ “There is no evidence that Darwinian process can take the multiple, coherent steps needed to build new molecular machinery, the kind of machinery that fills the cell.” (Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, Free Press, 2007, p. 162)’
Wikipedia says:
‘Evolutionary biologists have shown that such systems can evolve,[6] and that Behe’s examples constitute an argument from ignorance.[7] In the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, Behe gave testimony on the subject of irreducible complexity. The court found that “Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large.”[2]‘
Someone is mistaken.
You know, the steps involved in the evolution of the bacterial flagellum were worked out in the early 1960s. Michael Behe got his PhD in the late 1960s.
So, Michael Behe was wrong before he even started.
Here’s what Behe’s own department at Lehigh University has to say about him:
Also, if you don’t know what an emergent property is, then you’re certainly not qualified to be discussing even the grosser details of the sciences.
That’s 8th grade basic science class. Perhaps you should go a bit further back in your quest to understand the sciences and start with a nice middle school primer on the subject. Clearly, you’re lost in trying to understand scientific concepts above that level.
@corio37
What reason is there to think studying the brain will shed light on things we know about because we can make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge? We have a tremendous track record of success with questions about things we know from our senses. But how do we know we can control our bodies? How do we know we can create images and other mental constructs? How do we know we are aware of things we see?
What is the difference in the brain of someone who thinks the Earth is flat and someone who knows the Earth is a sphere? What is the relationship between ourselves and our bodies?
What is an image? Does an image take up space? Does it have mass? What is it? What is your evidence that knowing more about brain cells will shed light on these questions?
@Kiwi Dave
The idea of irreducible complexity is equivalent to intelligent design. Behe is wrong about intelligent design. But, there is no disagreement between Behe and mainstream biologists about evolutionary biology. The both agree that life is too complex to have evolved from natural selection acting on innovations in 3 billion years given our understanding of the source of innovations.
What you have to produce to refute my statement is a quote from a biologist in a peer-reviewed article or scholarly work saying: Advocates of ID say that life is too complex to have evolved in 3 billion years. This isn’t true. Evidence shows that 3 billion years is enough time for this to happen through natural selection.
@ Michael Fugate
God is an infinite being, and man is a finite being. Humans are embodied spirits, and God is a pure spirit. An infinite being exists because finite beings need a cause.
Assertions are useless without evidence – you have none – but it is nice of you to admit your god lacks a mind since it has no body.
@Michael Fugate
According to positivism, there is no evidence that finite beings exist. But why should anyone follow positivism: You exist and I exist, and I an not you and you are not me. We are finite beings.
God has knowledge by analogy. I exist and I know things. Worms exist and worms know things. God exists, so God knows things. We can’t comprehend what knowledge is in an infinite being, but we can assume God has knowledge.
NoThank DigBat22 (#36)…. Thanks for the comment, which is a bit unclear as to reference. I am not at all sure that I understand what you are saying. As to religion and philosophy. It is true that there is a department of philosophy entitled “Philosophy of Religion,” and there is a department of theology entitled “Philosophical Theology” (or Systematic Theology), but they are not the same. Philosophy is at least in part a discipline of conceptual clarification, and, in relation to science is a meta-activity. As such, while not science, it is more than just fun; it actually achieves understanding, and sometimes, I believe, knowledge. But it is not scientific knowledge, and I find it hard to understand why a meta-discipline of this sort is not accorded the respect that it deserves. I have said oftentimes that while Hawking and Mlodinov declare the death of philosophy of the first page of their book The Grand Design, they immediately begin thinking and writing philosophically, as, for example, when they talk about “model-dependent realism.” This claim is not a scientific, but a philosophical one, and worth assessing in its own right, not in independence from science, of course, but it is a view of the conclusions of science which is not itself scientific, or based on scientific evidence. And while I agree that religion as such is irrelevant to science, philosophy is not.
In response to others, whether or not science will achieve the kind of supremacy that some people think (whom Kitcher characterises as devotees of “scientism”), there are lots of other things which provide knowledge, but do not qualify as sciences. Poetry, fiction, drama, even music (although here I am at a distinct disadvantage — in relation to music, I mean) provide ways of coming to understand and to know ourselves better. It is empirical, but by living within the confined world of a novel, for instance, we may come to understand with great subtlety and complexity, something of the nature of being human, and being in relationship. To suppose that there is nothing to know in this general area is to impoverish to too great a degree what it means to be human beings. In this respect, while there are lots of people who deny this, theology, as a human pursuit, can actually serve to enlarge our understanding, as I think theologians like Don Cupitt, Lloyd Geering and Richard Holloway do, even though each of them is, I think, properly speaking, an atheist. I doubt whether science will ever be able to encompass the subtleties of cultural understanding, and the emotional and moral sensitivity and knowledge that it has to provide, but it is a form of simplistic hubris, I think, to suppose that science, however important it is — and it is, of course, vitally important — can ever provide everything we need in order to be fully human. If there is anything about the new atheism that I deplore, it is this sense that we need not attend, not only to cultural products like art and literature as sources of understanding and (personal) knowledge. This is an unnecessary move in the rational language game.
As for DigBat22, science/nature does not speak for itself, but has required an the development of incredibly complex methodologies in order to elicit is there to be discovered in nature, and may not ever achieve the kind of comprehensive understanding of the entire natural world — of which we are a part, consciousness and all. That nature (and science) is beautiful is true, but nature is also cruel and destructive beyond imagination. If the new atheism fails at any point, it is in its failure to take suffering fully into account, and to come to some understanding of what it means to us that we suffer and die, and that the very nature that begets us, and which we may find beautiful, will in the end destroy us, and everything that has been of value to us. The new atheism must learn how to speak intelligently about such things.
@NoThank DigBat22, Eric
Religious enthusiasms prevents people from understanding evolutionary biology. Humans observed fossils, and very bright scientists invented the theory that life evolved over a period of 3 billion years. Rational people judge this theory to be true. This gives rise to the question of what caused evolution.
Intelligent design (ID) and creationism are theories that explain evolution, but there is no evidence supporting these bright ideas. Another theory is natural selection, but this theory explains only the adaptation of species to the environment.
Advocates of ID, in order to promote religious faith, compare ID with natural selection to make ID look more reasonable. Atheists, in order to promote atheism, go along with this pseudoscience. They don’t admit that ID is the only theory that explains the complexity of life.
An egregious example of pseudoscience is an article in the American Journal of Physics titled “Entropy and evolution.” (Nov. 2008). This article has a fake equation showing that evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. I’m trying to get the AJP to retract this worthless article, but so far with no success. If anyone is interested, I’ll send you the article. A link to my correspondence with the AJP is
http://newevangelist.me/2012/02/23/american-association-of-physics-teachers/
David (#50), Let’s start at the end, shall we? There is nothing about evolution that violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, since the 2nd law refers to entropy in closed systems. But the biosphere is not a closed system, because it continues to import energy from the sun, which enables various life forms to survive for a while, anyway.
As to the cause of natural selection. This is a nonsense question. Natural selection does not, as such, have a cause, since natural selection as such is a process of mutation and environmental filtration of reproductively successful mutations. What caused the development of the first forms of mutating molecules is a question to which there is, at present, no satisfactory answer, which is why scientists are still researching the question.
I simply cannot understand why you keep writing such confident claptrap, when there are such simple answers to the issues you think of such importance.
@Eric
I didn’t say natural selection has a cause. I said natural selection causes adaptation, but not common descent. Biologists don’t know enough about the innovations natural selection acts upon to understand how mammals evolved in 3 billion years.
This is a link to the AJP article:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw0xQqr5YbtJMEpvU01nVXNTdXFNTzNMN2FzcUV4Zw/edit?pli=1
That’s nonsense David. Read some biology, and then try to justify your contention on the basis of what is known. Read, for example, Dawkins’ The Ancestors’ Tale, just to get a taste of the connexions that have been shown between different species of animals and different kingdoms of living things. It is patently absurd to go on making claims that elementary biology texts rebut decisively.
Oh, by the way, you do say, with remarkable lucidity:
As for the entropy issue, your quixotic attempt to have the article withdrawn is based on what exactly?
David has never heard of phylogenetic analysis. Or paleontology. Or paleogenetics. Or radiometric dating. Or stratigraphy. Or geology. Or comparative anatomy. Or biological thermodynamics. Or chemistry. Or classical physics. Or quantum mechanics.
The list of things David knows nothing about is apparently endless.
I don’t know if you guys have ever engaged with a creationist, but I’m afraid they really are bonkers and not worth the effort. I know atheists can become addicted to trying to educate/convert them, but it will consume all your time.
I am a Catholic, not a Protestant, and consider the theory of intelligent design to be irrational. There are two pure scientific questions that we disagree about. It is not a disagreement between rational people because one of us is 100% right and the other 100% wrong on each question:
1) The theory of natural selection explains only adaptation, not common descent.
2) The AJP article arguing that evolution does not violate the second law is absurd.
The last time I explained #1 to an atheist with quotes from biology textbooks and scholarly works by mainstream biologists, the atheist said I was taking the quotes out of context and that he couldn’t find refuting quotes because everybody knows natural selection explains the complexity of life. Concerning # 2, you should read my exchange with physicists about it. In addition to the link I already gave you, here are two more links:
http://newevangelist.me/2012/02/02/american-journal-of-physics/
http://newevangelist.me/2012/02/22/physics-department-of-new-york-university/
I am glad you are writing about the humanities and their contributions, Eric, and glad that Kitcher addressed the matter so well in that Atlantic piece. Part of the problem is caused by defining knowledge narrowly as only that which either has been tested or is in principle testable. (Plato)
David R, you can’t claim that no biologist would disagree with a lengthy quotation from Behe and then object that my quoted Wiki article showing that in fact a whole lot of biologists DO disagree with points raised in the quotation is not a peer-reviewed article. IIRC, 57 articles (I don’t know if they were all peer-reviewed) disagreeing with Behe on these points were produced at the trial.
Moreover, as I understand it, Behe’s theory is not that evolution would take longer than the history of life on earth, which seems to be your objection, but that life in all its complexity by natural means alone is impossible.
If the vast majority of biologists are mistaken about the central importance of natural selection in speciation, as your belief requires, then fame, fortune, permanent tenure and a Nobel prize await the person who can show they are mistaken. I predict that in my remaining lifetime, probably about 20 years maximum, this will not happen.
In the meantime, I acknowledge the wisdom of Egbert, #55.
@Kiwi Dave
What all biologists say is that not enough is known about the innovations natural selection acts upon to explain the evolution of bacteria to mammals in 3 billion years. Natural selection only explains the adaptation of species to the environment. These are two quotes that prove this:
“Facilitated variation is not like orthogenesis, a theory championed by the eccentric American paleontologist Henry Osborn (1857–1935), which imbues the organism with an internal preset course of evolution, a program of variations unfolding over time. Natural selection remains a major part of the explanation of how organisms have evolved characters so well adapted to the environment.”(Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, page 247)
“By comparison, if we question how long it would take a high-speed computer to write randomly a specific Shakespearean sonnet, we are asking that all the letters of the words of the sonnet will come up simultaneously in the correct order. It is an impossible task, even if all the computers in the world today had been working from the time of the big bang to the present. Even to compose the phrase, “To be or not to be,” letter by letter, would take a typical computer millions of years.” (Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, The Plausiblity of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, page 32)
The Shakespearean sonnet represents the primary structure of a protein. They modified the “millions of years” computation to a “short time” by taking into consideration natural selection and facilitated variation. They didn’t say how long it would take a computer to generate a sonnet. They didn’t say because nobody cares. The primary structure of a protein doesn’t even begin to describe the complexity of life. There is the higher structures of proteins, molecular machinery, genetic engineering, cell differentiation, and animal instincts.
Good grief, David! You say this:
And you immediately follow this with two quotes which you say, “prove this.” But Kirschner and Gerhart’s book is a popular book for a popular audience, and they do not prove anything. Where on earth did you learn scientific method? Quotes from books don’t prove things, though they may make claims to do so. A brief google search would have taken you to this review: Have We solved Darwin’s Dilemma. This should tell you all you know about the the fact that you don’t know enough to make the claims that you do. And to claim, without the requisite knowledge, that the American Journal of Physics paper is rubbish, you must do better than tell us (in your correspondence) that you don’t fully understand it. Could it be that you want to disprove something which conflicts with your faith, but you don’t have the academic qualificaitons to do so?
Of course, I take Egbert’s point to heart, and this is all probably wasted effort, since no matter what, David, you are not going to accept the science since it conflicts with your faith, but you really, really must try to do better than this!
David doesn’t appear to understand the Thomistic metaphysics he seems to believe. Thomists, both ancient (Thomas himself) and more modern (Feser, Oderberg, etc) do not believe as does David. Even official Catholic Doctrine differs from David’s views.
Yet David continues to claim to be presenting the views of Catholics, and continues to assert his claims with great confidence.
It isn’t surprising that David cannot get his biology straight, nor his physics (even though he claims a PhD in the field) – his mind seems to be a very confused place
.
The review of the Gerhard and Kirshner book by Massimo Pigliucci is a typical example of how biologists mislead laymen about the limited explanatory power of natural selection, given the complexity of life and the shortness of 3 billion years. He criticizes creationism and intelligent design (ID) a number of times, without admitting that it is the only theory that explains common descent. The cogent and direct way of criticizing ID is to point out that there is no evidence for it.
My theory is that advocates of ID compare natural selection with ID, in order to make ID look more reasonable than it is. They do this consciously or subconsciously in order to promote religious faith. Atheists go along with this scam because they don’t want to acknowledge the limitations of natural selection. Pigliucci makes it clear that he agrees with Gerhart and Krishner, Harvard and Berkeley professors with many peer-reviewed articles, that natural selection only explains adaptation:
“The Modern Synthesis itself built on Darwin’s two major realizations: first, that all living organisms are related to one another by common descent; second, that a primary explanation for the pattern of diversity of life—and especially for the obvious ‘fit’ of organisms to their environments—is the process that he called natural selection.”
Notice the relationship between “natural selection” and “adaptation,” not “common descent.”
“The incompleteness of the Synthesis consisted not only in leaving out that entire area of research (which would be bad enough) but also in failing to address (or worse, sweeping under the carpet) important questions, chief among them the problem of the origin of so-called evolutionary novelties.”
Evolutionary novelties include, I suppose, molecular machinery, genetic engineering, cell differentiation, and instincts in animals.
“Not coincidentally, the difficulty of evolving such complex biological structures has also fueled evolution deniers, from the Reverend William Paley (whose ‘watch found on the heath’ argument evoked an extensive response from Darwin) to the modern supporters of so-called ‘intelligent design.’”
Advocates of ID are offering a theory for “evolutionary novelties.” By expressing his contempt for ID advocates he buries and obscures the lack of knowledge and understanding biologists have about the “evolutionary novelties.”
“Science, by its very nature, deals with things for which we lack explanations—things that might otherwise compel us to turn to supernatural notions. By the same token, if evolutionary biologists really had already explained everything, what on earth would justify my job as an active researcher?”
Very well said. I believe in Heaven and Hell and think there are four theories that explain the Big Bang: 1) God did it. 2) An angel did it. There is more evidence for this because an angel would have a motive. 3) The universe is not intelligible. A better theory than # 1 and # 2. 4) Scientists will understand better at some point in the future. This is the solution judged to be true by rational people.
“The Plausibility of Life ends with a brief critique of intelligent design, suggesting that the concept of facilitated variation will provide a solid argument to rebut creationists.”
The work of biologists on facilitated variation, genetic engineering, and the other areas of research the article mentions is a stunning refutation of intelligent design. Why do any research at all if you can answer questions by saying an intelligent designer did it. However, advocates of intelligent design and mainstream biologists are in agreement when they say not enough is known about “evolutionary novelties” to explain common descent. Natural selection only explains adaptation.
Eric, I think that you are conflating two different things, here: 1) whether there is something to know about being human or human relationships, and 2) whether arts actually provide such knowledge. Of course fiction may provide some sort of insight into these areas, but unless we have some way of determining that some belief we arrive at via fiction is or is not true, then it fails to qualify as ‘knowledge’. And, as I think Jerry Coyne has pointed out, it is via the methods of ‘science’ (in the broad sense) that we can discover whether some belief we arrive at through fiction actually is true, and thus that it might qualify as knowledge. Dreams may provide insights into scientific problems, but that does not make dreams a source of knowledge.
Tim Harris states above that
…but this seems to be part of what is required for something to qualify as ‘knowledge’. If there is some belief whose truth value cannot be determined, even in principle, then on what grounds would one establish a claim to knowledge?
Greg, amongst other things, you say:
No, I am not confusing two different things. I think there is a knowledge about being human, about being in relationship, and about the many experiences of being human, which can be conveyed only in artful narrative, figuratively, by means of history and the humanities. I do not think that everything is reducible to scientifically ascertainable facts. Besides, the truth value of things may not be a matter of simple yes/no decision trees, or truth tables. Some things we may know only imperfectly, and yet it may be knowledge just the same.
Take a historian, for example, who has done all the research, and has a good command of all the relevant facts (supposing that to be possible). What is historically true will still be a matter of sensitivity and discrimiination, based on interpretation. To suppose that science alone can provide us with the truth — and generalise science to cover all knowledge based upon empirical findiings — is simply a pious hope. Truth does not always come conveniently wrapped in the kinds of circumscribed and constrained ways that is common in the physical sciences.
David Roemer: Natural selection only explains adaptation.
And speciation due to separation of populations coupled with differential adaptation of each population, and therefore common descent, since the resulting species have a common ancestor.
Really David, you continue to assert things without actually managing to argue for them. You seem to just expect people to take your word for things, even after your errors and mistakes have bee pointed out.
Yes, Riandouglas, it is strange, isn’t it?! How is it possible that he hasn’t noticed that himself, I wonder?!
Especially considering common descent appears to be officially accepted by the Catholic Church (with “souls” being a divine addition to homo sapiens).
David really should try to get his story straight before trying to convince anyone else
@riandouglas
Body and soul are the metaphysical principles of form and matter applied to humans. The form (soul) is the principle that makes humans equal to one another. The body (matter) is the principle that makes humans different from one another. The human soul is spiritual because free will and conscious knowledge can’t be defined or explicated. The human mind is a mystery.
That the human mind is a mystery is an insight that people have difficulty grasping. It is not the same as dualism. There is no evidence for dualism, the idea that there is a spiritual substance in the human brain. There is also very little evidence for materialism, the idea that only the brain exists.
David, you keep repeating the same things over and over, and never even try to clarify it.
You continue to assert that the mind is a mystery, but don’t interact with responses people give you to this unjustified claim.
You also haven’t grasped the fact that Catholics do not belief as you do – I presented quotes from Aquinas himself, as well as modern Thomists to demonstrate they do indeed hold a dualistic position, contrary to yourself.
You claim that humans are form and matter, but you refuse to clarify what this might mean, or how you might go about finding out whether you were wrong or right. And since your position is not that of ancient and modern Thomists and Catholic Philosophers, I’m not inclined to think that their justifications apply to you.
Why do you refuse to actually clarify your claims?
Why do you continue to present assertions as if they were justified?
Why do you continue claiming that your position is the Catholic position, when it has been shown not to be?
Why do you continue making the same stupid claims about evolution, natural selection and thermodynamics?
Are you so dense that you simply cannot go off script and engage in actual dialogue?
Do you not actually understand what your position is, and therefore you cannot clarify and justify your claims?
Go back to your Catholic books and Catholic professors, figure out what it is you’re actually arguing for, and once you’ve done that and can actually explain it to others, come back and try again.
David: It is not the same as dualism. There is no evidence for dualism, the idea that there is a spiritual substance in the human brain.
This shows a profound lack of understanding of what (Cartesian) Dualism is, David.
You do realise that in Cartesian Dualism, the substance is unextended and immaterial, much like your God is claimed to be, and that it doesn’t exist “in the human brain”?
David: There is also very little evidence for materialism, the idea that only the brain exists.
Of course there is very little evidence left when you ignore everything you find uncomfortable to your beliefs. But since on basically every thread you’ve made these claims, they’ve been met with actual real scientific evidence for the mind being a property of the brain/emerging from the brain/being what the brain does, your continued assertions that there is little evidence for this position is completely irrational, especially since you refuse to actually engage with this evidence.
Do use one of your prefered turns of phrase – you don’t know what you’re talking about and “This is the solution judged to be true by rational people”.
David, I’m not real. You can give up now, they’re right.
Eric, do you really want to say that “[w]hat is historically true will still be a matter of sensitivity and discrimination, based on interpretation”? That is, that (at least in some case) what is true is a matter of interpretation? This seems to me to be an extreme sort of relativism that risks making ‘knowledge’ little different than mere belief. I submit that, while ability to discern truth may be a matter of sensitivity and discrimination, truth itself is not. “What is historically true” is simply what is historically true. It may demand “sensitivity and discrimation” to discover that truth, but the truth itself is not dependent upon that sensitivity, nor upon someone’s interpretation. Further, to restate from earlier, the determination that we might know such a truth will be based upon the methods of ‘science’ (broadly speaking: the evaluation of evidence using reason). After all, absence such things, we can only determine that something “feels right” or is somehow aligned with our intuitions — which experience has taught us is a very poor guage of truth.
Part of the problem is that while the arts can provide “insight”, that insight can as easily be false as true. An “understanding” via a work of fiction can feel right, but have no connection to reality; a historian’s interpretation can be compelling, but utterly mistaken. I submit that, in order for some idea even to be a candidate for ‘knowledge’, we must have some way of objectively evaluating its truth, and this is something that the arts do not provide. The arts may provide ideas, but lack the tools to evaluate claims to knowledge.
Eric, I’m afraid I have to (mostly) agree with greg here. In fact, I think there are multiple levels of conflation.
History is more like science that it is like art. As Jerry has repeatedly said, he considers that history and similar disciplines are “science, broadly defined”. History is a logical, rational, inter-subjective, evidence-based “way of knowing”. Even the findings of science are in principal tentative, and subject to change given new evidence. A scientist can, with a high degree of confidence, claim that a theory is true when there is an overwhelming body of evidence that validates it, and none that falsifies it. Such is the eponymous claim of Jerry’s book regarding evolution. But that still doesn’t mean that all aspects of the theory are certain. Far from it. While the core of Darwin’s ideas haven’t been falsified, the evidence has shown that there are more mechanisms than natural selection at work (such as genetic drift and gene transfer). And there are many aspects of evolution – such as kin selection v. group selection where, like your characterisation of historian, evolutionary biology “will still be a matter of sensitivity and discrimiination, based on interpretation”. The difference between history and science is not one of method but of certitude; that, because of the increasing paucity of evidence as we go back in time, there is more leeway for interpretation. Yet those interpretations are still amenable to revision in light of new evidence (from archæology, &c.), just as scientific hypotheses are.
Over on WEIT, one commenter made the distinction between ”fact-truth” and “art-truth”, that “knowledge” that arises solely from art is of a different kind that that that comes from science (and other logical, rational, inter-subjective, evidence-based disciplines, like history, that are broadly like science). So, there is an equivocation error, calling both kinds of truths “knowledge”. Furthermore, apart from imparting any art-truths, art can communicate fact-truths, in more than one way.
Firstly, there is the trivial and mundane literal communication of scientific, historical, &c. fact-truths, in plain language or imagery.
Secondly, there is a more subtle and sophisticated form of communication, where art uses narrative and emotion, simile and imagery, metaphor and symbolism, and so on, to convey insight into scientific, historical, &c. truth-facts, enabling someone to apprehend, understand and accept these fact-truths where that someone might just not have “got it” from plain language and imagery. (I think that the best science, and other, communicators use these artistic techniques!) Here, I think, there is a significant source of confusion, that such fact-truths communicated in an artistic way, are erroneously regarded as art-truths.
And then there are the veridical art-truths, those insights into “about being human, about being in relationship, and about the many experiences of being human” which are not (yet) provided by any logical, rational, inter-subjective, evidence-based discipline, be it science or history or something else. This view is, I think, rather well established. For example, in Wizardry and Wild Romance, Michael Moorcock asserts: “[Fantasy fiction]’s prime concern is … with the evocation of strong, powerful images; symbols conjuring up a multitude of sensations to be used … as a means of achieving self-awareness.”
However, as greg notes, such insight “via a work of fiction can feel right, but have no connection to reality” and “we must have some way of objectively evaluating its truth, and this is something that the arts do not provide.” To allude to Peter Boghossian, art provides a worse “way of knowing”.
Finally, I have to suggest that the deficiency of art as a “way of knowing” is adduced by the fact that the Bible and other scripture are essentially works of art (literature). Are the Bible’s insights into “about being human, about being in relationship, and about the many experiences of being human” valid and reliable?
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PS. This is an awkward and impertinent question, but asking plainly seems a more reliable way of knowing: Have you and Jerry fallen out over this “scientism” issue? I haven’t seen you post on WEIT recently, nor has Jerry mentioned Choice In Dying, even when you have posted stuff that has been very relevant to Jerry’s posts (e.g., Boghossian on faith).
No, Greg, all I am saying is that the discernment of what is true is not a matter of discrete facts, but something that has to be discerned through a process of interpretation, and that when we say of something that it is historically true, or that we know it historically, it is often a matter of degrees of certainty, not the yes/no answers that we expect to get from science. This does not mean that it is not, at a fundamental level, still a matter of empirical confirmation, but what is being confirmed is not so simply understood as such things are in the sciences.
Ant, just one comment, re Boghossian’s “worse way of knowing.” This suggests that there is a paradigm way of knowing, and other ways of knowing are declensions from that. There are, it seems to me, different ways of knowing, and some of them do not give us the kind of definite answers that the sciences seek. They do not necessarily fail to provide knowledge nonetheless.
You ask the question: “Are the Bible’s insights into “… being human, about being in relationships, and about the many experiences of being human” valid and reliable?” And my answer would be: sometimes. That’s the use of myth, to help us situate ourselves in the context of very complex realities which are much more subtle and deeply interwoven with our experience than are the kinds of things that can be learned by means of theory and confirmation/disconfirmation. They can only be known in the subtlety of art and the interplay of emotion and thought that art and literature, song and story make possible. Why should we deny that these things can be known despite the enormous emotional and intellectual complexity that are involved? Of course, if your question pertains to the supernatural aspects of the biblical narrative, I do not think there is such a dimension, so the Bible or any other work cannot provide information about it, but speaking of that dimension, as in the Greek myths, may be a way of speaking about the Lebenswelt in exalted and mythical terms, and as Freud and Jung have shown, regardless of their standing as scientists, the myths are heavy with human significance, and we would be poorer, and know less about ourselves, if we did not have them.
So far as I know, in answer to your last question, Jerry and I have not fallen out. However, I think there is a sense in which we are going in different directions. I used to think that scientism was just a pejorative way of referring to someone with whom one was in disagreement. I now think that there may be a real movement towards a scientistic view of truth and knowledge with which I am uncomfortable. I also have a sense — not from Jerry in particular — that there is a tendency nowadays to establish orthodoxies in new atheism with which I am very uncomfortable. I am familiar with the feeling of confining orthodoxies, and it is not something to which I am prepared to conform my thought. I think I might be on the same wavelength as Neil de Grasse Tyson, who expressed himself clearly on this recently, not wishing to be cubby-holed by labels.
As for your remarks on history:
Yes, of course, history is evidence based, but it is not science, not even broadly defined, because history is coincident with culture as well, which is why history must be continuously rewritten as time passes. The knowledge we gain from history is not scientific knowledge, but a very different form of knowledge and understanding of ourselves and society. Ranke’s “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist,” while certainly a key to historical understanding, must take that “as it really was” and translate it into terms understandable today, and that is where art comes in. I’ve always wished I had done more philosophy of history, but there are distinct and important differences between history and science, and it is misleading to ignore them. Of course, it is always possible, by reading ‘science’ broadly, to include practically everything under the rubric of science, but why should we want to do this?
As to my not commenting on Why Evolution is True recently, even though I read it regularly. This has nothing to do with my relationship with Jerry, whom I admire greatly, although I think he is wrong at some crucial points. It has to do, if you must know — and why should you and others not know — with the fact that I am in a countdown to the fifth year since Elizabeth died. Last Friday was five years to the day (the very day, this year, since five years ago it fell on a Friday too) that I took Elizabeth’s picture for the last time, two weeks before she died. On Friday the 8th June — and it was a Friday five years ago too — Elizabeth died in Zurich. She was, without question, my one and only love, and I am feeling the shadows falling with more than usual force this year. That’s why my posts have diminished as well. Compare May to other months over the last year and a half. My feelings are very raw, and my sense of loss greater than it has ever been.
Thanks for your frank response, Eric. I’ll have to think about that.
As an adult, I’ve lost my grandfather and my father (in May, 12 years ago). But still I can only imagine what losing my wife would be like. I wish you well.
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I am one of the few commenters here who is young enough to have read Dawkins and Harris before reading Sagan. As such, I suspect I might have some insight into why religious authorities did not attack Sagan as viciously as they did the New Atheists. Although Sagan and the New Atheists criticized all forms of supernatural, anti-scientific thinking, including religion, the new Atheists insisted that among all the bad beliefs one could have (UFOs, astrology, homeopathy, etc.) religion was ESPECIALLY nasty. Although Sagan might have disliked religion as much as as the New Atheists, notice that his critiques rarely single out religion (much less specific religions, like Islam and Catholicism).
Ant,
If you’re defining “science” that broadly, how do you keep religion/theology out while keeping things like philosophy, everyday reasoning, and mathematics in?
Religion, to me, is more of a folk discipline, and as such it works a lot like everyday reasoning, even down to trusting authorities and not caring to examine it in detail or work out inconsistencies. Theology, on the other hand, works a lot more like philosophy in that it works things out in detail, but less empirically and more conceptually. In terms of evidence, everyday reasoning and religion would consider personal experience and claims of personal experiences as being quite valid and useful evidence, while arguments from pure reason like the ontological argument count as evidence in philosophy.
So, what I’ve realized recently is that the job of incompatibilists is to show that religion/theology don’t count as a way of knowing without simply relying on them being wrong while still keeping in the other ways of knowing that we rely on. And this isn’t that easy.
If gods were actually to exist, how could it matter? While we are living, gods explain everything and therefore nothing. If you healthy, it is because the gods love you, if you are ill it is because you have sinned or they are testing you, or they just don’t care. All of it equally meaningless. When we are dead… have you noticed how heaven appears much like just being dead? What is the closest you can imagine – being in a deep dreamless sleep – no pain, no anxiety, no fear…
VS: If you’re defining “science” that broadly, how do you keep religion/theology out while keeping things like philosophy, everyday reasoning, and mathematics in?
It seems pretty easy to me – the reason and evidence claims made by religion and theology are weak and often directly contradicted (at the least, completely unsupported) by more reliable applications of intersubjective empirical investigation (ie. the narrower “science”).
VS: Religion, to me, is more of a folk discipline, and as such it works a lot like everyday reasoning, even down to trusting authorities and not caring to examine it in detail or work out inconsistencies.
Which is fine as far as it goes, except that religion isn’t simply satisfied with being a folk discipline, nor with modifying it’s claims when inconsistencies are pointed out.
If it were merely something akin to the everyday intersubjective empirical “knowledge”, then I’d think it would look vastly different.
VS: Theology, on the other hand, works a lot more like philosophy in that it works things out in detail, but less empirically and more conceptually.
Except that unlike (decent) philsophy, Theology seems to have an unquestioned and unquestionable a priori commitment to the existence of God, which doesn’t seem to be supportable with appeals to intersubjective empirical investigation (including your religious “folk discipline”).
VS: In terms of evidence, everyday reasoning and religion would consider personal experience and claims of personal experiences as being quite valid and useful evidence, while arguments from pure reason like the ontological argument count as evidence in philosophy.
Except we KNOW through reliable means that personal experience is only evidence of that experience, and not something more. We know to confirm anything veridical as having occurred during the experience we require better standards of evidence.
The philosophical arguments for God may well be some sort of evidence – or at least they would be if they were able to actually establish their conclusions as being probably correct.
VS: So, what I’ve realized recently is that the job of incompatibilists is to show that religion/theology don’t count as a way of knowing without simply relying on them being wrong while still keeping in the other ways of knowing that we rely on. And this isn’t that easy.
It doesn’t seem all that difficult to me. Perhaps I’m missing something?
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Of course the subject matter is different, and therefore what is involved in evaluating candidates for historical knowledge is different than in the experimental sciences, but that basic evaluation is not different for history than for archaelogy, for example.
An historian might get an idea from anywhere, but to evaluate whether some historical hypothesis is true is not by nature different than the evaluation of a scientific hypothesis. One considers what evidence might falsify that hypothesis, or what might support it. Certainly there is little opportunity for experiment in history, but the same is true of various fields that are inarguably ‘scientific’.
I would also note that even experimental, physical sciences can involve interpretation and degrees of certainty.
But it is just the matter of reliability that is the hallmark of knowledge rather than mere belief. If I have no reliable way of determining whether some belief is or is not true, then it cannot qualify as ‘knowledge’. It may be that there are insights in the Bible or other works of fiction that qualify as knowledge; the point is that such qualification must rely on external evaluation of their validity, which evaluation will be based upon the methods of science. Which is just a way of pointing out that the Bible’s “insights” (or those of any work of fiction) are unreliable. If I can’t say whether something is reliable or not, then it is not reliable. Fiction may well contain truth, but fiction provides no internal way of determining what is truth and what is falsity, and so we cannot suppose that fiction provides knowledge. Even if fiction might contain truth, our ways of knowing that it is truth are external to fiction, and thus fiction cannot itself be a way of knowing.
riandouglas,
That the claims of one way of knowing aren’t supported by the methodology of a completely different way of knowing (ie methodology) isn’t exactly a problem. Mathematics, for example, is utterly unconcerned about whether the empirical investigations of the world support Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometries; it is never going to conclude that, mathematically, Euclidean is the “right” geometry for mathematics based on what “narrower science” has to say. Additionally, claiming that the claims are “weak” doesn’t mean that the claims wouldn’t fit the broad definition of science, and note that my challenge — that you are claiming to be defeating — is about excluding religious claims from that classification in general, not about making claims that specific religious claims aren’t reasonable. Again, the question is about how you can exclude religion/theology by definition, not about how you can claim that nevertheless their claims are wrong. To even evaluate their claims on that basis requires you to already concede that the claims COULD be part of your broader science, but that they happen to simply not work.
I think I need more details here, because I don’t see the difference. Everyday reasoning, it seems to me, is equally unconcerned with inconsistencies, and folk reasoning is used for a surprisingly large amount of our decisions. So, then, how would it look different … if you exclude theology here, which I address separately.
Philosophy as a whole allows the questioning of everything, but specific systems and specific takes are, in fact, allowed to take certain things as axiomatic. I don’t see theology as being any worse in that regard, but perhaps you have specific examples or arguments for how theologians do that different than, say, Utilitarians. As for appeals to intersubjective empirical investigation, note that philosophy does not, in fact, insist that all claims must be supported by such appeals, which is what I pointed out in my first comment, and so you’d be holding it to, it seems, a “broad view of science” that wouldn’t include philosophy if you applied it strictly, and you will not have something that even remotely looks like philosophy if you try to force it to be empirical.
This is absolutely false for everyday reasoning. Any experience I have is generally trusted without appealing to anything else unless it is so radically out of line with my other experiences so as to be problematic. If I see a deer running through the parking lot at work, I don’t need to collect stool samples or look for tracks or get other witnesses to immediately make a reasonable knowledge claim that there was a deer there, nor do I need to get my eyes checked or head examined. In general, personal experience is a reliable source of knowledge, except under conditions where that experience is unreliable. That is indeed what separates everyday reasoning from “narrower science”.
Again, the question is not about whether the arguments are right or wrong, but about whether or not they are the right sort of thing to count as evidence. Philosophically, they do, and if they did work out they’d give good reason to think that God exists. To philosophy, then, those sorts of things count, at least potentially, as evidence, and so theology cannot be ruled out of the broader definition of science a priori as long as it tends to provide those sorts of philosophically valid arguments.
I think you make the mistake that so many others do of confusing arguing incorrect with arguing “unevidenced” or “unscientific, broadly construed”. The arguments, I argue, are of the proper FORM to count under your broad definition of science, and so be “scientific” under that definition, or else you’d have to exclude other areas as well, but just because an argument ends up being wrong is not, in fact, cause to call it unscientific by your definition.
But why bring gods into it? Everyday reasoning is not enhanced by gods – they are just post-hoc rationalizations. The compatibilists keep trying to claim that theology knows something in a different way, but can never explain that way. If it is just philosophy, or history, or mathematics, or common sense, then it is not another way of knowing, is it?
I am not the original respondent, but I fail to see how your objection is valid. So far as I am aware, no one is particularly interested in “excluding religious claims from that classification [knowledge] in general”. The issue is not one of claims but of whether some claims are legitimately knowledge claims, and whether there is some religious “way of knowing” that is different from the empirical-critical method of science. And, as it happens, revelation turns out not be be a “way of knowing” (or, if you prefer, a failed “way”), for it is not a reliable means of arriving at true beliefs.
Indeed, any attempt to exclude “religious claims” a priori would be a violation of scientific reasoning.
Greg,
Let’s start at the back:
Well, not of any scientific reasoning if “scientific” is interpreted broadly enough to include philosophy, because philosophy would, in fact, argue that you CAN exclude some potential “ways of knowing” a priori, by pointing out that they don’t meet the definition. In fact, philosophy would argue that your claim that “they aren’t reliable” is, in fact, one way to do that. The issue you’d have is validating the claim that religious claims, as I said, in general aren’t reliable as opposed to simply pointing out that some of them turn out to be wrong. Scientific claims turn out to be wrong all the time, but no one claims that that means that science as a whole is not a valid way of knowing.
If incompatibilists aren’t, in fact, trying to do this, then what sort of “incompatibility” are they interested in demonstrating? A big claim of theirs is that religion/theology in general is not a “way of knowing”, not just that, say, Christianity happens to be wrong. That’s what I’m pointing out, that the question is not “Is Christianity wrong?”. It may well be wrong and that would say absolutely nothing about whether religion/theology/revelation count as ways of knowing.
In what sense do you say that it is not reliable enough to count as a way of knowing? In order to do so, you’d have to work out what specifically that methodology is, and then figure out how to test it, and then see if it is reliable enough to count as knowledge. Perfect knowledge doesn’t count; knowledge does not require certainty, or absolute freedom for error, or else science isn’t a way of knowing. Requiring that it produce large quanities of testable or tested outcomes doesn’t count either, or else philosophy isn’t a way of knowing. Requiring that it be contradiction free doesn’t count either, or else everyday reasoning is a way of knowing.
Now, I don’t think that either religion or theology are, in fact, ways of knowing because I don’t consider them to be ways at all; they in fact DON’T have distinct methodologies from the existing ones. But this doesn’t bother me at all, since nothing I claim relies on it. Nor do I think that gets incompatibilists what they want, because I appeal to the methods they do use and find that it’s only the very narrow definition of science that they conflict with beyond “Science claims X and you claim Y”. To the extent that they use everyday reasoning, philosophy or even narrow science, they’d still be able to make knowledge claims without being a way of knowing at all. And note that my claim is, in fact, a priori and would be invalid by your claim above, and yet I fail to see what is wrong with my argument.
(And Michael, there’s your answer as well).
So in your opinion the NAS, AAAS, and NCSE are wrong to say religion is a way of knowing….interesting. And there is no unique way of studying gods, nothing special about the supposed supernatural that we need be concerned about. What again is your basis for thinking the mind is not contingent on the brain?
The conflict of course comes with the role gods are supposed to play in everyday life…. Are they manipulating things behind our backs? Just so it looks like they don’t exist? That we can make sound predictions of phenomena using the assumption that they don’t manipulate things? Is science delusional?
Michael Fugate,
At the risk of dragging that previous discussion here, it’s philosophical; if mind is contingent on brain, then it seems that we are committed to epiphenomenalism, and that so badly contradicts our experiences that I’d need massively overwhelming proof to accept that. Which is how I feel about very strong determinist views as well.
How does it so badly contradict our experiences? What evidence do you have of a mind without a brain?
VS, in so far as religious thinking resembles our everyday “intersubjective empirical investigation”, it appears they are the same thing. In so far as Theology resembles Philosophy, they too are the same.
Where I think the problem lies is in accepting conclusions from our everyday, less rigorous, investigations which have been undermined by more rigorous, and therefore more reliable applications of investigation.
You seem to be claiming that religious claims are on a par with our everyday claims (“I saw a deer”). In so far as they are of the same sort, then they are the same. But religious claims go far beyond this sort of thing, and where those claims depart from what more rigorous investigations have shown we should be very suspect of religious claims indeed.
Regarding Theology and Philosophy, I think you missed my point. Theology is a subject about a fiction. You contrasting it with Utilitarianism is not apte, since Utilitarianism is (in my understanding) concerned with things that exist in reality while Theology is concerned with the what properties a fictional being might have.
Now, Theology can be interesting, but it has, as far as I understand it, no grounding in reality, much like Philosophy of Zeus or Thor – it might be interesting to clarify what attributes Zeus would have if this being were to exist, but Zeus does not exist. The same is true for Yahweh/God as far as we can tell (in fact, most conceptions of God appear to be logically incoherent).
So really, I don’t see where the difficulty lies VS.
Or, possibly more clearly, religion relies (perhaps exclusively) upon unreliable means of gaining information (“revelation”). Everyday “knowledge” doesn’t seem to.
Theology relies upon the claims of religion, and would seem to rise or fall on it’s back
Michael Fugate,
Look up “epiphenomenalism” and get back to me.
VerboseStoic, explain why mind as product of brain is committed to epiphenomenalism, and get back to me
riandouglas,
Well, as Corran Horn might say, I work better with duracrete than with vapour, so perhaps you can give some examples of these sorts of claims, noting that if theology argues that the religous belief and sources do not require that claim then it’s not really a good example.
Also, everyday reasoning very much departs from what “more rigourous investigations have shown”, both narrowly scientific and philosphical. This doesn’t seem to bother everyday reasoning all that much, nor does it necessarily update to include that. And yet it works and is clearly reliable enough that we rely on it, well, every day.
You clearly have a very hard time escaping conflating claims about it being incorrect with claims about it not being a way of knowing. I’d argue that here you’ve made a theological CONCLUSION — ie that particular gods do not exist — and then are using it to simply declare that theology is about fiction and so is different from things like everyday reasoning and philosophy. Even putting aside the fact that people disagree that you can indeed justify such a strong conclusion, why in the world would declaring one theological theory or even a number of them wrong in and of itself invalidate the discipline or field? Need I recount how many scientific theories were just plain wrong to demonstrate how bad an argument that is?
As for Utilitarianism, if one is a Utilitarian and a moral realist they will find that people will claim that Utilitarianism is just as much a fiction or about fictional things as you claim basically all gods are. So the comparison seems to be more apt than you realize.
In order to make this claim, as I told Greg you have to outline exactly what you mean when you say “revelation”, precisely what that methodology is, and then say how to test it and how to determine if it is reliable enough to count as a “way of knowing”. As for everyday reasoning, the main reason formal, narrow science exists is because everyday reasoning does, in fact, rely a lot on less than reliable mechanisms, and we wanted something better.
riandouglas,
Briefly, mind as brain maintains that it would be the neural firings that both produce the phenomenal experiences we have and the behaviour that follows from them. But the only way to eliminate dualism is for the neural patterns to be causally closed in the sense that no matter what if neuron A fires then neuron B fires and so on and so forth (under certain conditions, of course). However, it would be the case, then, that neuron A is also producing the experience at the same time as it causes the next activation in the chain. Which means, then, that it can produce whatever experience it wants — or none at all — and the behaviour will be the same, because the neural pattern will be the same. Thus, it is merely coincidence that our experiences align with our behaviour, but our experiences have no actual causal power beyond that of the neuron firing … which could happen without them.
There are more details on this in the pages on my blog about consciousness. “Nailing the Third-Party Science of Consciousness to the Wall” is probably the better one.
VS: Well, as Corran Horn might say, I work better with duracrete than with vapour, so perhaps you can give some examples of these sorts of claims, noting that if theology argues that the religous belief and sources do not require that claim then it’s not really a good example.
Any claim regarding the existence of the supernatural would seem to be a candidate here.
VS: Also, everyday reasoning very much departs from what “more rigourous investigations have shown”, both narrowly scientific and philosphical.
How so?
VS: And yet it works and is clearly reliable enough that we rely on it, well, every day.
I guess sometimes pragmatism is more important than accuracy.
Still, then everyday reasoning departs from more rigorous knowledge, then we can’t really say that everyday reasoning has provided us with actual knowledge, can we?
VS: I’d argue that here you’ve made a theological CONCLUSION — ie that particular gods do not exist — and then are using it to simply declare that theology is about fiction and so is different from things like everyday reasoning and philosophy.
I don’t think so. Theology is (or at least should be) like good philosophy. it just so happens that there are no good reasons to suspect the subject of theology exists – hence my conclusion that it is a fiction.
VS: Even putting aside the fact that people disagree that you can indeed justify such a strong conclusion, why in the world would declaring one theological theory or even a number of them wrong in and of itself invalidate the discipline or field?
It doesn’t invalidate the “field”, it just means that the object of theology doesn’t actually exist (or at least, has not been shown to exist to any reasonable degree of confidence).
VS: Need I recount how many scientific theories were just plain wrong to demonstrate how bad an argument that is?
If your analogy were apte, you might have a point. However, the subject of science is reality. We have a fairly high degree of confidence that reality exists.
VS: In order to make this claim, as I told Greg you have to outline exactly what you mean when you say “revelation”,
Personal subjective experience claimed to be from an unevidenced source without means of any independant verification, and which could quite easily be the result of simple psychology.
VS: As for everyday reasoning, the main reason formal, narrow science exists is because everyday reasoning does, in fact, rely a lot on less than reliable mechanisms, and we wanted something better.
Which is a problem for me how VS?
VS: Thus, it is merely coincidence that our experiences align with our behaviour, but our experiences have no actual causal power beyond that of the neuron firing … which could happen without them.
It sounds to me like you’re still smuggling dualism into your conceptions there VS.
If, as the evidence seems to indicate, the mind is dependant upon and/or a result of brain activity, then it is no coincidence that firing patterns of neurons correspond to experiences, and that those experiences directly contribute to behaviour – the patterns of neuron firings are the experiences and the pattern of neuron firing is responsible for behaviour.
I’ll track down the blog post your mention, but I really don’t see there being a serious problem here, at least not when you don’t smuggle in dualism.
riandouglas,
I’d argue that I’m not smuggling in dualism, but simply acknowledging that we have subjective phenomenal experiences which need to be explained and which we think have a causal role in determining behaviour. I don’t see any way to get that from materialism by simply saying that that just IS the neural firings as opposed to being the PRODUCT of them, because a personal subjective phenomenal experience is, in fact, in no way and nothing like a neural firing. It may be just a natural component of what neurons do when they fire, but even that causes a split between the experience and the behaviour; again, the neuron in theory could do everything it does causally without producing experiences at all.
That, then, is the question: if mind is the brain is neural firings, what do we need that subjective experience for? What does it do to impact or change the neural firings, so that if I experience X the neurons fire one way or if I experience Y they do the other way? The instant you argue that the neurons fire the way they do because the previous neurons merely fire, you simply — as far as I can see — cannot answer that question since there is nothing left to explain. Utlimately, dualist or not, you get down to arguing that we have the experiences we do because that neuron fires and the behaviour we do because that neuron fires, and so the only relevant causal factor is the neuron firing, not the experiences themselves. And if the experiences themselves don’t have causal power, then that’s epiphenomenal.
And maybe that’s what we have, but you’ll forgive me for being skeptical about that until you can demonstrate it.
riandouglas,
Well, no, because only methologically naturalist fields or ways of knowing reject any possibility of the supernatural existing, and so you’d have to exclude everyday reasoning and philosophy to make the claim that talking about the existence of the supernatural contradicts more rigourous fields. Thus, your claim here is basically saying that you can argue against religion and theology because they aren’t NARROW science. So? We knew that already.
As for how everyday reasoning deviates, folk physics is not physics — but works remarkably well — and folk morality is not philosophical morality. Right there we have cases where everyday reasoning knows that it is not the same as the more rigourous fields and really doesn’t care.
Why not? No way of knowing is perfect, and so everyday reasoning would only have to be reliable enough to count as a way of knowing. We don’t want perfection — and, again, science doesn’t meet that standard anyway — and so it just has to be good enough.
No good reasons by whose standards? Yours? Fair enough, but hardly something that anyone else should care about. Are the reasons better than those for, say, the reality of morals? What standard are you using to make that claim and how do you justify the claim that those standards are reasonable?
But who cares if it hasn’t been shown yet to some degree of confidence that may be completely arbitrary? The whole point of the field is to DETERMINE if the object of theology exists. Again, you cannot claim that because some of the theories are wrong that it says something about theology as a whole or whether it counts as a way of knowing.
And how do you know that science actually gets reality in the first place? You are merely asserting that science is a way of knowing and then excluding the things that you don’t like, but that’s hardly an acceptable argument. You need to give objective standards, not mere repetitions that science tracks reality but religion and theology don’t.
If you believe Bertand Russell, this describes sense experiences in general, and I doubt that’s how the people who claim revelation works would describe it. You essentially here define it as being unevidenced in order to argue that it is unevidenced, which is, of course, not a valid argument.
Well, you were the one who claimed that everyday reasoning didn’t rely on as unreliable mechanisms as religion, and I was pointing that, well, arguably it does.
VS, I did and so?
VS, so it is just god of the gaps because you don’t understand neurobiology?
Michael Fugate,
So do you think that our common experience in any way supports epiphenomenalism, or would you like to take a better shot at arguing that neural theories of mind don’t entail it?
Emergent properties are a feature of all systems – not necessarily predicted by reducing them to their component parts. This is pretty basic biology. Neurons don’t fire in isolation, but are part of a network – not sure why this surprise you. You seem to dismiss the observations on the correlations between brain damage and memory/personality, why?
Michael Fugate,
None of that has anything to do with epiphenomenalism. Whether it is emergent or not or part of a network or not, the result is the same: phenomenal experiences are not in and of themselves neural firings, and it is the neural firings that do all the causal work. By “mind is brain” theories, it is entirely possible for me to have the same behaviour and yet different, or no, phenomenal experiences, which makes them epiphenomenal.
Really? You must have a different definition of epiphenomenon than I do. There is no repeatability in neuroscience, is this your claim? Are you saying that if the same neuron is stimulated multiple times it will elicit different behaviors? Can you give some examples; I can’t fathom why you believe brains don’t give rise to minds.
VS: I’d argue that I’m not smuggling in dualism, but simply acknowledging that we have subjective phenomenal experiences which need to be explained and which we think have a causal role in determining behaviour. I don’t see any way to get that from materialism by simply saying that that just IS the neural firings as opposed to being the PRODUCT of them, because a personal subjective phenomenal experience is, in fact, in no way and nothing like a neural firing.
And it is there that I think you’re smuggling in dualism. I really don’t see why it is so difficult – you are your neuronal firing patterns, and so neuronal firing patterns are subjective experiences. I don’t see that your argument from personal incredulity (that subjective phenomenal experience is nothing like neural firing) works for you.
And lets not forget that the thing you are arguing for has, as far as I can tell, far more problems than it solves – you’ve got all the fun of the two substances interacting, problems with epiphenomenalism yourself, and you still don’t actually provide an explanation for personal subjective experience – it seems that it’s usually just brushed under the carpet.
VS: again, the neuron in theory could do everything it does causally without producing experiences at all.
I don’t think it could, and if the experiences just are the patterns of neuronla firing, then the neuron theory could not do what it does without “producing” subjective experience.
VS: That, then, is the question: if mind is the brain is neural firings, what do we need that subjective experience for? What does it do to impact or change the neural firings, so that if I experience X the neurons fire one way or if I experience Y they do the other way?
I believe there are various people who argue that consciousness is something like a feedback loop, or some kind of “monitor” for the brain. The subjective experiences are what the brain is doing. Your example again is smuggling in dualism – if you experience X, then your neurons just are firing in one way, if you experience Y your neurons just are firing in another – you’re continuing to try to assert the distinct nature of the experience and the neuronal firing patterns, which is not what I’m defending (nor what I think I need to defend).
VS: Utlimately, dualist or not, you get down to arguing that we have the experiences we do because that neuron fires and the behaviour we do because that neuron fires, and so the only relevant causal factor is the neuron firing, not the experiences themselves.
Which seems to disregard the interconnected nature of the brain, the way brains are able to feedback into themselves. Neuronal firing patterns which correspond to subjective experience X can be processed as “sensory” input data, and can thereby effect behaviour.
VS: And if the experiences themselves don’t have causal power, then that’s epiphenomenal.
The experiences themselves are not separate from the neuronal firing patterns – the experiences are just what it is like to be a collections of neurons firing in certain patterns. That doesn’t seem to result in epiphenominalism as far as I can tell.
VS: And maybe that’s what we have, but you’ll forgive me for being skeptical about that until you can demonstrate it.
Think whatever you want, but excuse me for being skeptical of the dualist position which seems far less tenable, far less likely, and far more troublesome than my position
VS: Well, no, because only methologically naturalist fields or ways of knowing reject any possibility of the supernatural existing, and so you’d have to exclude everyday reasoning and philosophy to make the claim that talking about the existence of the supernatural contradicts more rigourous fields. Thus, your claim here is basically saying that you can argue against religion and theology because they aren’t NARROW science. So? We knew that already.
Methodological naturalism isn’t an a priori commitment, neither is the rejection of the supernatural.
Talking about the supernatural as if it were real, when there is no decent evidence for it and some/much which actively contradicts it still leaves the door open to everyday reasoning and philosophy – it just means that talk of the supernatural is “fictional”.
VS: As for how everyday reasoning deviates, folk physics is not physics — but works remarkably well
But we know it’s not physics, and we have a good idea of how it works and where it fails.
Just like Netwonian gravity is not relativity, but Newtonian gravity is still “good enough” for many uses, even though it’s incorrect.
You would be foolish, however, to trust to folk physics where scientific investigation has shown otherwise.
VS: there we have cases where everyday reasoning knows that it is not the same as the more rigourous fields and really doesn’t care.
I think you’re mistaken regarding folk physics, and are probably mistaken regarding folk morality. And I think you’re wrong that findings from more rigorous fields do not fed back into everyday reasoning.
VS: Why not?
Because we would know it was wrong, not just an approximation. For example, the “knowledge” that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter bodies, derived from folk physics, surely doesn’t count as knowledge, since it is false. I’m sure there are other examples.
VS: No way of knowing is perfect, and so everyday reasoning would only have to be reliable enough to count as a way of knowing.
I’m not saying that everyday reasoning doesn’t provide us with “good enough” knowledge in some circumstances.
VS: No good reasons by whose standards? Yours? Fair enough, but hardly something that anyone else should care about.
Nothing quite so arbitrary. Theology makes empirical claims about it’s subject, and those empirical claims have not been born out in reality. When theology doesn’t make empirical claims (Deism), then empirical investigation does not (and likely can not) rule it out, but we are left with little to no reason to actually accept the existence of the subject anyway.
VS: But who cares if it hasn’t been shown yet to some degree of confidence that may be completely arbitrary? The whole point of the field is to DETERMINE if the object of theology exists.
Theology doesn’t try to determine if (a) God exists, else it would be more involved in history, physics, cosmology, etc. Theology seems to, from my perspective, generally assume the subject exists, and seeks to clarify what is meant conceptually.
VS: And how do you know that science actually gets reality in the first place?
I don’t with absolute certainty, but I have confidence due to it’s success in modelling reality (thanks to probability theory and the like). Reality could be completely different to how we find it, but we would need evidence in order to demonstrate that – if the matrix is a perfect simulcrum, then those within it are justified in assuming it is the real world until such time as there is decent evidence to the contrary.
VS: You need to give objective standards, not mere repetitions that science tracks reality but religion and theology don’t.
Reality is the objective standard. Religion gives ground very grudgingly, and the exclusively religious “ways of knowing” (ie. revelation) are notoriously unreliable and can be explained without recourse to the putative source of said “knowledge”.
Theology seems to rely upon those religious ways of knowing in order to justify it’s existence.
VS: If you believe Bertand Russell, this describes sense experiences in general, and I doubt that’s how the people who claim revelation works would describe it.
I don’t really care how people who claim revelation describe it, as far as how they think it works (“God spoke to me”), and this does not describe sense experience in general, since those have existing sources (If I claim to see a tree, then, since we know tree’s exist, we know that my sense experience is at least possible). Given the apparent lack of independant evidence for the putative source of revelation, I don’t think it’s apte to directly compare the two as you are trying to do here.
VS: You essentially here define it as being unevidenced in order to argue that it is unevidenced, which is, of course, not a valid argument.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is, apart from revelation, we have no independant evidence for the existence of any specific source of revelation. We have a multitude of sources posited, mostly in a mutually exclusive fashion, and so we know that at least some of these revelations are false, and we have pyshcological and neurological evidence that the experiences themselves can be induced without the need to the putative source.
So, we have no good evidence for there being a source for revelation other than the person’s brain, and we have good evidence that the persons brain can in fact provide the experience without anything further.
VS, I think your issues arise from expecting a single cause for effects within a complex network – think of other complex systems like a local ecosystem. If it is disturbed by fire, it will clear aboveground vegetation, but the vegetation will return. Will it do so exactly the same every time? No, because fire is not the only cause – there are many, many causes – seed banks, seed pools, surrounding vegetation, temperature, rainfall, time of year, etc.
Brains are like this – multiple causes because of the complex network of neurons, sensory receptors, hormones, body temperature, blood osmolarity, etc.
riandouglas,
Let me start with a thought experiment to hopefully get you past the whole “smuggling in dualism” thing (this one is in that page I mentioned):
If the “mind is brain” theory is true, then it seems to me that if I swap out a neuron or set of neurons with something that takes in the same inputs and produces the same outputs to the downstream neurons, then the behaviour will not change. This is because according to that theory what we have is a chain of neural activations — a complicated one, of course, but one nonetheless — from the sensory organs to the nerves and the like that actually generate all of our behaviour, from movement to speech. Hopefully, we’re on the same page here.
Now, so then in theory I could replace any neuron with a small microprocessor that activates in precisely the same way as that neuron and still get the same behaviour. And then I could repeat that for any set of neurons as long as I map all the activations properly (a complicated job, to be sure, but theoretically possible). Let me further state that these microprocessors DON’T themselves generate phenomenal experiences. I’m not saying that no AI or computer COULD, but just that these don’t, a safe claim to make unless one argues that current processors ALSO produce phenomenal experiences, which, well, is a bit dubious.
In theory, I could replace the entire brain with this, feedback loops and all. And at the end of the day, if the “mind is brain” theory is right, then what I’d end up with is a “brain” where the external behaviour and expression of mental states and all of that causal stuff is unchanged … but there is no phenomenal experience happening.
And that, then, is epiphenomalism, and it works whether the experiences are a product of or identical to neural activations.
Well, I deny that it sweeps it under the rug because it accepts as a premise that personal subjective experience works how it works, and does what it appears to do. And so to investigate it, you look at the experiences and not at something like the brain, and there’s your research project. It’s also not epiphenomenal because if it looks like these experiences have a causal effect they do … and can, because they are caused by something outside of the brain. The interaction between the two substances is a problem, but not one that I’m concerned about because if dualism is true we will merely figure out how that works, a common thing in science. But I am an admitted qualia freak; others find qualia less interesting.
Note that by this things without neurons cannot have these experiences, which means that AIs can’t have them, which implies that AIs can’t be conscious. That’s a pretty strong claim, you realize …
The age old argument from incredulity – I can’t imagine how it works so it can’t. So just how does it work, in your view? What is this mysterious outside force that makes a mind?
riandouglas,
So tell me what the difference would be between the following two statements:
1) You should not believe that gods exist because they are supernatural.
2) You should not believe that gods exist because you don’t have enough evidence.
Philosophy and everyday reasoning do not believe that 1 implies 2, or that 2 implies 1, and so if all you mean by the claim is 2, why not just use that and avoid adding strictures that, again, other ways of knowing don’t accept?
True, but I never claimed that. I only claimed that I can use folk physics despite the fact, let’s say, that I know that it isn’t as accurate as physics, and so not quite as reliable. It’s reliable enough most of the time, and when I need more reliability THEN I will go to physics, just like when I have really tough moral problems I’ll turn to philosophy and not rely on folk morality.
Well, sure, that claim was wrong, but I thought, again, that we were talking in general and not about specific claims. I have never denied that some folk physics claims aren’t knowledge, but that it posseses these does not mean that it does not, in fact, produce knowledge at other times.
Please let us know what people do mean by “revelation” – if it is not a message from the gods, then it is just product of an individual mind. Even though you are unwilling to believe it, minds are reducible to brains (unless of course you are willing to propose an alternative hypothesis that can be tested). If you want to understand mind, you would be better off studying biology than philosophy, scientists are making much greater strides in understanding mind than philosophers are and ever will be. You need to be able to wrap your brain activity around the incredible potential of biological systems before you start hypothesizing gods.
VS: Let me further state that these microprocessors DON’T themselves generate phenomenal experiences. I’m not saying that no AI or computer COULD, but just that these don’t, a safe claim to make unless one argues that current processors ALSO produce phenomenal experiences, which, well, is a bit dubious.
I would argue against this claim VS, and I would still maintain that you’re smuggling in dualism.
Individual neurons don’t “generate phenomenal experience” as far as I’m aware – phenomenal experience seems to be the firing patterns of many neurons.
As far as you’re thought experiment goes, you’d need to demonstrate that the above is not the case. I would think that if you replaced each neuron with a functional clone, you would still have phenomenal experience’s.
VS: In theory, I could replace the entire brain with this, feedback loops and all. And at the end of the day, if the “mind is brain” theory is right, then what I’d end up with is a “brain” where the external behaviour and expression of mental states and all of that causal stuff is unchanged … but there is no phenomenal experience happening.
Actually, if the “mind is brain” hypothesis is right, what you’d end up with is a brain made from interconnected chips, phenomenal experience and all.
VS: And that, then, is epiphenomalism, and it works whether the experiences are a product of or identical to neural activations.
And this conclusion, which doesn’t actually follow as far as I can tell, indicates that you’re still smuggling in dualism. You assume that firing patterns of neurons aren’t what phenomenal experience is. You posit replacing them with work-alikes in all respects apart from phenomenal experience (which doesn’t follow), and then imply phenomenal experience is something “other”, since your thought experiment (to you at least) shows this to be the case.
I don’t buy it.
VS: Well, I deny that it sweeps it under the rug because it accepts as a premise that personal subjective experience works how it works, and does what it appears to do
And how does it work? And what does it do?
This is the sweeping under the rug I mentioned.
VS: It’s also not epiphenomenal because if it looks like these experiences have a causal effect they do … and can, because they are caused by something outside of the brain.
Well, you’d need to establish this surely?
VS: The interaction between the two substances is a problem, but not one that I’m concerned about because if dualism is true we will merely figure out how that works, a common thing in science.
Yet it would overturn a lot of very solidly attested science. Therefore, before we accept that it just is like that, shouldn’t we verify that the science which doesn’t allow this interaction is actually false in a way that would allow it?
VS: Note that by this things without neurons cannot have these experiences, which means that AIs can’t have them, which implies that AIs can’t be conscious. That’s a pretty strong claim, you realize
It’s a good thing that you’re misrepresenting my claim then
In the mind as brain hypothesis, as I understand it, the subjective experiences are due to, for want of a better term, network effects. This would mean that anything which is an adequately connected network of information processing nodes could indeed have first person experiences.
Simple enough?
VS: So tell me what the difference would be between the following two statements:
Statement 1 & 2 are similar. 2 could be rephrased to “You should not believe that gods exist because they are supernatural and there is not enough evidence to support supernatural claims”.
VS: I only claimed that I can use folk physics despite the fact, let’s say, that I know that it isn’t as accurate as physics, and so not quite as reliable.
Which I agree with. The problem is that “religious ways of knowing” don’t seem to do this. There is not sufficient evidence to support a claim regarding the existence of the supernatural (and plenty to undermine such a claim), but religious ways of knowing insist they’re correct anyway. Rigorous investigation undermines the reliability of religious “ways of knowing” like revelation, yet religions continue as if this were not the case, or as if their particular “revelations” are somehow different.
This, as far as I can tell, is special pleading.
VS: But all this says is that some of the claims of theology have been wrong. Some of the claims of science have not been borne out empirically as well. That doesn’t say anything about theology or its subject matter overall.
Theology relies upon the existence of something which has not even been shown to be coherent, let alone actually existent. Theology, at times, attempts to clarify what it is talking about, but thus far it has failed to do so, it seems.
VS: As for the second part, I’d argue that it is doing conceptual analysis to figure out what they are talking about so that they can figure out how to prove if God exists, or if they can.
And yet theology seems to lack a valid reason to even be doing this conceptual analysis. Contrast theology with science and philosophy of science where things like neutrino’s, or even the higgs boson are concerned – as far as I can tell, unlike science and philosophy of science, theology has started out assuming that God exists, and continues to carry on assuming that regardless of what we learn about reality.
VS: You cannot dismiss revelation without knowing what it, in fact, is and separating valid ones from invalid ones (which is NOT the same thing as separating out the ones that work from the ones that don’t).
Oh, I think I have a good understanding of what revelation is claimed to be, VS. What I’m lacking is any good reason to think this is actually the case, and not the far simpler and more parsimonious explanation of revelation being something that occurs in peoples minds, without need to invoke any additional, unevidenced entities.
VS: In order to declare that what I see before me is a table, I need some independent way to validate that my sensory organs hook up to reality.
Which is why all knowledge appears to be provisional, apart from things which appear to be undeniable (which, contra Plantinga, does not include God’s existence, but rather sense experience itself). From here I think you can work up a body of knowledge which we can be confident in, without appealing to any absolute certainty.
VS: All of which is true of sense experiences as well, and yet you don’t even think of questionning them.
Actually, I do. We can be quite easily fooled when it comes to the “mundane”, so surely we should be extra skeptical of “extraordinary” sensory claims?
VS: The “induced without the need to the putative source” is an especially bad argument since we can also induce experiences of trees and the like, but few let that stop them from taking sense impressions seriously, and even as knowledge (not even Russell).
Agreed, but we can take other steps to increase our confidence in the tree, which cannot seem to be done with revelation – we can touch it, we can smell it, we can study the tree in detail, we can check to see if we’re in a lab, etc.
If we’re in such a convincing “matrix” style simulation of reality that we literally cannot tell the difference, then I suggest the rational thing is to accept this simulation as reality, since you would literally have no reason to doubt it’s veracity.
Perhaps you have chased VS away. I find it fascinating that a philosopher can still be clinging to philosophy which only makes sense in a prescientific context. Aquinas got his science from Aristotle who was convinced the heart and not the brain was the organ of thought and the mind was immaterial. 2500 years later, people who should know better are still clinging desperately to this. I am not disparaging Aquinas and Aristotle, but indicating that the world has simply moved on. If philosophers want to take part in the issues of the day, they might want to employ science that is not quite so dated.
riandouglas,
We need to take a step back here, because I don’t think that you’re actually advocating a “mind is brain” theory, which is what I was actually opposing. You seem to have moved to a “mind is a sufficiently connected information network”. So let’s examine that.
You can take two tacks here: hardware and software. The hardware option is where you say that any set of properly connected nodes that form an “information network” — and how we test that is left open — will have a mind and have phenomenal experiences. The big problem with this theory is that it’s totally unevidenced and actuallly quite improbable; the only things that we think actually produce phenomenal experiences when hooked up the right way are neurons. We don’t think that, say, table lamps will produce phenomenal experiences no matter how they are hooked up or what inputs they take or outputs they produce, and it’s certainly not clear that I couldn’t hook up a set of microprocessors in a way that would be an information network but wouldn’t have any phenomenal experiences. So, if you appeal to the hardware, you pretty much run right back into the problem of saying why it is that neurons do it, and even here you’d have to tell me exactly what you mean by an information network here, because surely you’d want to leave out the Internet, say, for now.
Alternatively, you can go to the software model, and argue that the information network is not defined by its hardware or how the hardware is connected, but by the functionality it produces. This would be a functionalist view. The big problem with this is that it doesn’t, in fact, rule out dualism at all; functionalism is so popular in Cognitive Science because it explicitly says that it isn’t ruling on what the implementation of the behaviour is. Thus, if we need a dualist mind to produce that behaviour in humans, that’s perfectly consistent with functionalism … as well as AIs and, well, any implementation of any system. It also has a problem in that the third-party visible behaviour that might reflect phenomenal experiences doesn’t; it is quite possible to have that behaviour and not actually have the requisite phenomenal experiences. Thus, this is an absolute case of sweeping phenomenal experience under the rug, far worse than what you claim I do.
Your comments about the nodes and networks of chips seems to put you in the hardware camp which doesn’t, to my mind, save you from the challenges I raised about neurons, and forces you into defining exactly how it is that you can tell one information network from another wrt phenomenal experience, which is the problem with the functionalist/software view … along with others.
Well, let me correct my statement to “It works like it looks like it works, and does what it looks like it does”. That is in no way sweeping it under the rug, surely. I in no way suggest that we simply stop there.
It would overturn some scientific hypotheses about mind/brain, but to my mind that would be a good thing. Other than that, it wouldn’t affect anything except what to me looks like an overgeneralization. So I need not, say, oppose the scientific generalization of “There are only physical things” to demonstrate that here physical in the scientific sense doesn’t seem to work.
VS: The big problem with this theory is that it’s totally unevidenced and actuallly quite improbable; the only things that we think actually produce phenomenal experiences when hooked up the right way are neurons.
I’m actually ok with that, I’m just not ruling anything out which seems like it might be reasonable.
VS: and it’s certainly not clear that I couldn’t hook up a set of microprocessors in a way that would be an information network but wouldn’t have any phenomenal experiences.
I suspect, though I can’t demonstrate, that if the microprocessors were hooked up with the same level of interconnectedness and feedback, the same level of local and remote connections, and similar capabilities of information processing, such a thing would have phenomenal experiences.
But I don’t think the mind as brain hypothesis requires this to be the case – perhaps the interconnected network needs to be analog rather than digital, continuous rather than discrete.
The question is still open
VS: It also has a problem in that the third-party visible behaviour that might reflect phenomenal experiences doesn’t; it is quite possible to have that behaviour and not actually have the requisite phenomenal experiences.
I think the claim you’re making here (and that you’ve made in the past) is unevidenced. You’re basically claiming that you can simulate a brain without there being any phenomenal experience. I simply don’t see the evidence to support this claim. Yet I think this claim is vital to your position of dualism.
VS: Well, let me correct my statement to “It works like it looks like it works, and does what it looks like it does”. That is in no way sweeping it under the rug, surely. I in no way suggest that we simply stop there.
You may not think it is sweeping things under the rug, but it seems to me to be a statement completely without content “It is what it is and it does what it does” – that is not helpful, and would be true whether or not dualism were the case.
And you still avoid dealing with the issues against dualism – interaction is only one of them. There’s the that we can induce mental states by inducing brain states, drugs, lesions, etc all have effects on the mind, and the brain as mind hypothesis is the most parsimonious explanation for this.
VS: It would overturn some scientific hypotheses about mind/brain, but to my mind that would be a good thing.
It would also overturn things like quantum mechanics, conservations laws, 2nd law of thermodynamics, etc.
These things are rather strongly evidenced, and so I feel that the offhand way in which you dismiss these things is far too flippant.
I also note that you’re happy rendering folk physics and folk morality as being inferior to scientific investigation, but it seems to me that you’re clinging to folk psychology rather strenuously – that seems to me to be somewhat inconsistent of you
riandouglas,
Well, except for the fact that you would be combining two different statements into one, which is generally what “and” does to the English language [grin].
Philosophically, I argued that 1 and 2 are completely different statements, and even here you don’t deny that they are different.
But the whole point of my statements and the discussions of methodological naturalism is that the only reason to separate supernatural statements from non-supernatural ones is a presupposition of naturalism. We can argue over whether one should make that presupposition, but it is clear that the religious reject that presupposition, and everyday reasoning and philosophy do not make that presupposition.
Well, it would only be special pleading if they weren’t, in fact, different. Since by your own admission you ignore what the religious people themselves claim entails revelation, you really don’t have a case for saying that it’s just special pleading, without getting down into the details of it. But that’s theology, the thing that you claims lacks a reason to even do that conceptual analysis, while you completely miss the point that even your claims are theological and rely on theological conceptual analysis.
Theologians would disagree, and theology has changed in response to science and what we have learned about reality. So this claim seems underevidenced and not obvious.
And yet, when I said that the description you gave of it wouldn’t match what people who claim revelation as a way of knowing would claim it is, you said that you didn’t care what they thought it was. That belies in two ways you knowing what it’s claimed to be.
But you’d need to understand the details of the claims and how to determine what is really revealed and what isn’t by the standards of those who think it works. And as far as I can tell you don’t and haven’t, at which point you run a major risk of attacking a strawman.
You miss the point. Russell did not ask for absolute certainty; he asked for independent justification. Which is what you’re asking for revelation. But since you can’t get that for sense experience and yet no one is overly concerned — meaning that we don’t deny that we can get knowledge through sense experiences — it doesn’t seem to be a strong argument against revelation either. How do you know that the things revelation reveals are not simply things that cannot be gotten any other way? How could you get independent justification for those sorts of things?
All of these are through your senses, as I’m sure I already said, and so don’t provide independent justification … which is what you wanted, no?
This is the Kantian move: Whether or not the statements are true about “reality”, they are true of how things seem to us. Fair enough. The problem with this is that if you take that tack you cannot make the strong claims about science giving us “Reality”, since you admit that you don’t know what that is AND you have issues with eliminating ways of knowing because they might be able to get a different view of reality than you can get through scientific or sensory data. And trying to justify something that might actually get reality through something that only works on the apperances will obviously not work.
VS: Philosophically, I argued that 1 and 2 are completely different statements, and even here you don’t deny that they are different.
They’re different, but in practive they amount to the same thing.
VS: But the whole point of my statements and the discussions of methodological naturalism is that the only reason to separate supernatural statements from non-supernatural ones is a presupposition of naturalism.
I disagree. The reason we separate the natural and the supernatural, it seems to me, is that the natural is that which we are able to investigate. The supernatural is that which we are unable to investigate (and for which there is no reason to suspect it has existence). If we were able to investigate things which are claimed to be supernatural, they would become naturalised, surely?
VS: We can argue over whether one should make that presupposition, but it is clear that the religious reject that presupposition, and everyday reasoning and philosophy do not make that presupposition.
I see it more as a conclusion than a presupposition, as I briefly outlined above.
VS: Well, it would only be special pleading if they weren’t, in fact, different.
Please establish that they’re different VS, else my point stands.
VS: Since by your own admission you ignore what the religious people themselves claim entails revelation, you really don’t have a case for saying that it’s just special pleading, without getting down into the details of it.
When I said I don’t care about what the proponents of revelation say, I meant that what they claim doesn’t matter if they’re unable to support those claims somehow. And as far as I can tell, they’re unable to support those claims, so my point stands.
Much like folk physics’ claim that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones – it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
VS: But that’s theology, the thing that you claims lacks a reason to even do that conceptual analysis, while you completely miss the point that even your claims are theological and rely on theological conceptual analysis.
And yet there is still no reason to suspect that the putative object of theological conceptual analysis exists (assuming theologians were able to produce a coherent description of this thing).
VS: Theologians would disagree, and theology has changed in response to science and what we have learned about reality. So this claim seems underevidenced and not obvious.
And yet theologians, in general, seem to continue to assume the existence of God. Sure they cram this concept into smaller gaps as science explains things which were traditionally attributed to god or gods, and the concept becomes more and more nebulous, and less and less subject to any sort of validation, and therefore less and less relevant to reality.
But sure, theologians do try not to contradict reality in too obvious a manner.
VS: And yet, when I said that the description you gave of it wouldn’t match what people who claim revelation as a way of knowing would claim it is, you said that you didn’t care what they thought it was. That belies in two ways you knowing what it’s claimed to be.
As I said, I have some idea of what they claim. It’s just that there’s no reason that I can see, to take those claims as indicative of reality.
VS: But you’d need to understand the details of the claims and how to determine what is really revealed and what isn’t by the standards of those who think it works.
No, I’d need to understand those claims by the standards of objective reality. And when seen in that light, they fail to stack up.
If we assess them by the standards of those who think revelation is a “real” phenomena, we’re left with contradictory “knowledge” – the revelations of Christianity and Islam cannot both be true after all.
VS: But since you can’t get that for sense experience and yet no one is overly concerned — meaning that we don’t deny that we can get knowledge through sense experiences — it doesn’t seem to be a strong argument against revelation either.
Well, revelation would be a sense experience (of an internal, rather than external state I imagine), but since the claim of those who think it works is not parsimonious, and can be explained by more parsimonious means, I see no reason to think that revelation is on a par with other sense experiences.
VS: How do you know that the things revelation reveals are not simply things that cannot be gotten any other way?
What things are gotten from revelation which can’t have been gotten another way, and which aren’t contradictory in nature?
VS: How could you get independent justification for those sorts of things?
Well, if all revelation resulted in compatible information, that would actually be some kind of justification for it. Also, if the information gained which related to reality were not known at the time, and yet were later verified, then this would also lend credence to it.
Neither of these things is in fact the case, however
VS: All of these are through your senses, as I’m sure I already said, and so don’t provide independent justification … which is what you wanted, no?
Instead of independant, how about we go for “verification through an alternate channel”?
Since we both acknowledge that all of our information comes through our senses, including any information relating to our own state of mind,, and you seem fixated on this, then perhaps coneiving it in this way will be helpful.
VS: The problem with this is that if you take that tack you cannot make the strong claims about science giving us “Reality”, since you admit that you don’t know what that is AND you have issues with eliminating ways of knowing because they might be able to get a different view of reality than you can get through scientific or sensory data.
And yet science works, and there is no reason to think that our reality is a simulation, nor that revelation is anything more than a mental event, I don’t see this as a serious problem.
After all, we have to work with what is probable rather than what is simply possible, right?
riandouglas,
The problem is that this is your way around my objections to the “mind is brain” theory that say that it is epiphenomenal and so problematic. It doesn’t do you any good to reply with a completely unevidenced theory if you are going to claim that your theory is supported by the evidence and mine, in theory, isn’t.
Well, you need to define in detail what sort of information network that would be, and how we’d know that it is really processing information in the right way. From the hardware side, that’s highly improbable — and very hard to demonstrate — and from the behaviour/software side we all know that you can do information processing and not have phenomenal experiences. So, again, how would you even go about telling if one of these networks was sufficient to have phenomenal experiences, or is anything that does information processing sufficient?
This is argued better in my “Phenomenal Experience and Cognitive Function” page, but the short version is that I know that I can act as if I’m having phenomenal experiences that I’m not having, and this can vary from my having different experiences to my not having an experience at all. If this is true, then there is no reason to think that acting as if you are having phenomenal experiences means that you are having them, and that’s sufficient to eliminate third-person observable behaviour as a criteria for phenomenal experience.
Well, if you see a car driving down the road, and someone asks you to prove that it was a car, do you feel that it is sweeping things under the rug to say “I presume that it was what it appeared to be — a car — unless you give me strong reasons to think otherwise”? I doubt it. That’s all I’m doing. I’m saying that phenomenal experiences have causal power because they seem to have it when we examine what they seem to be doing. And so on. Surely that’s not out of line?
You can only invoke parsimony if both theories can explain the same things and have roughly the same consequences; that is precisely what I am DENYING here. As for mental states changing through drugs and the like, all interactionist dualist theories — and Cartesian dualism is an interactionist theory — allow for the brain to influence the mind in the same way that the mind influences the brain, and so most of those changes are easily compatible with interactionist dualism. I’m an interactionist dualist. So, no, I don’t avoid it at all; I can indeed answer those challenges.
Why? The only case where these would be overturned MIGHT be in mind/brain interactions, which are not what most science has actually studied … and that’s assuming that it even ends up contradicting them (if energy, for example, can be properly considered to be physical AND non-physical, to exist in all domains, then conservation and the 2nd law are clearly preserved. If you argue that energy itself must be physical, then perhaps we have a physical mind … but it still wouldn’t have to be the brain, and so “mind is brain” would still be refuted.)
First, folk psychology actually works better than psychology, and so the reason for me to call the former inferior doesn’t apply here. Second, I am not applying folk psychology, but philosophy of mind, which is what I’m clinging to, so it’s not the same thing.
riandouglas,
And I deny that. I argue that 1 is itself not a basis for not believing in something, and only when 1 is accompanied by 2 is that even arguable, at least philosophically and from the perspective of everyday reasoning. Scientifically, they may be the same, but that’s because of a naturalist assumption in science that other methodologies do not accept.
Which means that your definition of natural reduces to “That which we can investigate” … but then things like ghosts, telepathy and telekinesis are not supernatural, but are only things we have yet to find sufficient evidence for. As for gods, remember that my contention is that we investigate them through theology; if you allow for that, then they can be investigated and thus are also not supernatural … unless you want to argue that “can be investigated” means “we know they exist” … but, then, you’d be saying that caloric was a supernatural theory and that makes no sense whatsoever. So if we return to 1, we can see that there is no reason to think that something that is CLAIMED to be supernatural ought to be treated differently than something that is claimed to be natural by your definition, and so the distinction you introduce is meaningless if we use your definition.
Since it’s a conclusion that philosophy, everyday reasoning, and religion all deny necessarily follows from your starting point, it’d be a very suspect conclusion indeed.
Since you were the one who made the claim that they were no different, I fail to see why my demand that you support your contention means that I have to prove there is a difference or else you are right. Wouldn’t that be shifting the burden of proof?
But if you want an example, you can check the Catholic definition of revelation here that is explicit that it differs strongly from that of other Christians: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13001a.htm
By what standards do you purport to ask them to “support those claims”? Scientifically? The Catholic definition is explicit, it seems to me, that if a question is scientific then it’s not amenable to revelation. So, again, what independent standards do you propose?
Until we do the conceputal analysis, we won’t know what to look for to see if it does exist.
In your view. They see it as a simple clarification of the concept that still maintains everything important about the concept. How do you propose hammering out the difference in these arguments?
And all that means is that we need to figure out what is right, just like we do for science. So I still fail to see why this is such a big problem.
And that’s not my argument. My argument is that your demand for “independent verification” cannot be met by sense experience and it doesn’t concern you one whit. And yet against revelation it’s not only concerning, but damning. There seems to be an inconsistency there. Even the “parsimony” argument can be levelled against sense experience (see solipsism).
Knowledge of God, as per the Catholic definition. I want to make a post on this sometime, but there is a case to be made that transcendental knowledge couldn’t be achieved by the traditional rational methods, and so if we know it at all it is only through methods like revelation.
But, again, science doesn’t generally achieve that, so why should revelation?
It still doesn’t work for sense experience; all of those “different channels” you talk about are still sense experiences, which is what we were questionning in the first place.
No one is denying that science works, but you gave up the claim that you could know what reality really was using it and then still tried to maintain that you could make an exceptionally strong and confident claim that science gives us reality and revelation doesn’t. You can’t have it both ways.
VS: I argue that 1 is itself not a basis for not believing in something, and only when 1 is accompanied by 2 is that even arguable, at least philosophically and from the perspective of everyday reasoning.
It would come down to how you define terms “natural” & “supernatural”.
VS: Which means that your definition of natural reduces to “That which we can investigate”
Not quite, but close enough. People tend to view as “natural” those things which have a successful explanation, and basically seem to equate “supernatural” with “magic”.
VS: … but then things like ghosts, telepathy and telekinesis are not supernatural, but are only things we have yet to find sufficient evidence for.
Well, they tend to be grouped as “paranormal”, so I don’t see the fuss.
Also, the evidence has basically shown that none of these things actually exists, so it’s not that we’re yet to find sufficient evidence for them, but that they’ve been successfully falsified
VS: As for gods, remember that my contention is that we investigate them through theology;
Yet theology basically assumes God exists, and works from there. It’s not trying to find out if such a being exists, but more how to reconcile what we learn about reality with the assertion that God exists.
VS: So if we return to 1, we can see that there is no reason to think that something that is CLAIMED to be supernatural ought to be treated differently than something that is claimed to be natural by your definition, and so the distinction you introduce is meaningless if we use your definition.
Hey, you introduced the 2 questions VS. The terms are generally far too vague to be of use. I’d rather we work on methodologucal issues, which to me is where “supernatural” claims fall over, while the results of science are able to stand.
VS: Since it’s a conclusion that philosophy, everyday reasoning, and religion all deny necessarily follows from your starting point, it’d be a very suspect conclusion indeed.
As you’ve admitted, everyday reasoning is far less reliable than more formal “scientific” reasoning, so I see no problem there. Philosophy has a lot of trouble ruling things out definitively, at least where they lack any empirical content, and so I see no problem there either. And specifically “religious” ways of knowing are, as best we can figure out, unreliable, so I see no problem there either.
The conclusion of “naturalism” seems to me to be on fairly solid footing (of course, once again, it depends on what you mean by “natural” and “supernatural”)
VS: But if you want an example, you can check the Catholic definition of revelation here that is explicit that it differs strongly from that of other Christians
And which assumes the existence of God, and seems to introduce some fairly arbitrary criteria to judge whether a revelation is “true” or not.
VS: By what standards do you purport to ask them to “support those claims”? Scientifically?
If their claims entail some empirical content, then I see no reason with asking for “intersubjective empirical” support for their clams. And where their claims lack all empirical content, I fail to see any way in which they could really matter, nor any way in which you could know whether the claim was right or wrong, so I see no reason to take such claims seriously.
VS: The Catholic definition is explicit, it seems to me, that if a question is scientific then it’s not amenable to revelation. So, again, what independent standards do you propose?
Actually, it says that “scientific” truths can be conveyed through revelation. AS I mentioned above, their definition assumes God exists, and presents some fairly arbitrary criteria for judging said revelation – this does not seem to be a rigorous and objective method for obtaining knowledge to me.
VS: Until we do the conceputal analysis, we won’t know what to look for to see if it does exist.
Rubbish. Scientists did not need to do conceptual analysis prior to seeing if neutrino’s exist. They got anomalous results, and tried to explain them. The same goes for most every particle, including the Higgs. It’s also how we came by Dark Matter and Dark Energy – we found an explanatory gap, and sought to fill it.
On the other hand, all of this God talk is going in the reverse direction. We try to define into existence this being, without any legitimate explanatory gap, and then we try to see what gaps in knowledge we can insert this concept into.
It seems backwards to me, and rather fallacious.
VS: They see it as a simple clarification of the concept that still maintains everything important about the concept. How do you propose hammering out the difference in these arguments?
How about starting with reality and building from there, just like our best and most successful means of aquiring knowledge does?
Unfortunately for theists, when approached in this way, God doesn’t seem to meet the required standards.
VS: And all that means is that we need to figure out what is right, just like we do for science. So I still fail to see why this is such a big problem.
Fine. Come back to me when you have a non-question begging, non-fallcious, non-biased methodology in which to assess these claims.
Until then you’ll excuse me if I don’t accept any of these claims as “knowledge”.
VS: And that’s not my argument. My argument is that your demand for “independent verification” cannot be met by sense experience and it doesn’t concern you one whit.
It does, and I thought I’d addressed it earlier.
That I am having a sense experience now of tying in front of a computer is undeniable to me – it is certain.
That does not mean I am actually doing so – I have less confidence in that.
Starting from this basic knowledge, it seems to me that I can build up to where I can have reasonable confidence that my sense experience of typing in front of a computer is indicative of some objective reality.
But from this same foundation, the “knowledge” claims of revelation don’t seem to stand up. That people have experiences they claim as revelatory is not in doubt (and likely undeniable to them). But it seems to me that they’re unable to attain any reasonable level of confidence in this experience being something more than a sense experience.
VS: Knowledge of God, as per the Catholic definition.
Which God? The Catholic, The one the YEC’s pray to? The God of liberal Christians? The “Ground of all being”?
All of these things are different, and in some senses mutually exclusive. And the knowledge of them is claimed to be of a similar source. So even from the outset, that source is unreliable.
And then we have the problem of verification – how does one know whether their knowledge of God is accurate? There seems to be no unbiased methodology to even begin answering this question.
VS: But, again, science doesn’t generally achieve that, so why should revelation?
Science appears to converge towards “the truth” about reality, which is not surprising given reality is the arbiter of scientific knowledge.
We appear to have no similar “measuring stick” for claims made through revelation – no valid means of verification, falsification, or whatever.
VS: No one is denying that science works, but you gave up the claim that you could know what reality really was using it and then still tried to maintain that you could make an exceptionally strong and confident claim that science gives us reality and revelation doesn’t. You can’t have it both ways.
You misunderstand. The reality that science shows us could be completely mistaken. But we have no current reason to think this is the case, and so we ought to accept that science does show us something about reality. Perhaps we’ll make a discovery which overturns a lot of science, but even in that situation I suspect we’d have some kind of mapping, by which we can see how and why we were wrong.
VS: The problem is that this is your way around my objections to the “mind is brain” theory that say that it is epiphenomenal and so problematic.
No actually, this is simply a statement of our current state of knowledge.
VS: It doesn’t do you any good to reply with a completely unevidenced theory if you are going to claim that your theory is supported by the evidence and mine, in theory, isn’t.
It’s not completely unevidenced – we seem to have decent reasons to think our minds are what our brains do, and so we have reason to think that phenomenal experience is a part of that.
And as I’ve tried to point out, I don’t buy your thought experiments concerning neurons or other “things” producing the same outputs without phenomenal experience.
VS: Well, you need to define in detail what sort of information network that would be, and how we’d know that it is really processing information in the right way.
Why yes we do, and we are doing so.
VS: From the hardware side, that’s highly improbable — and very hard to demonstrate
I see that it could be very hard to demonstrate, but I don’t see it as being “highly improbable”, at least not more so than your alternative.
VS: and from the behaviour/software side we all know that you can do information processing and not have phenomenal experiences.
We don’t know this when it applies to the sorts of information networks that the neurons in the brain form, which is a point I think I’ve made previously, though it is something you seem to assume.
VS: So, again, how would you even go about telling if one of these networks was sufficient to have phenomenal experiences, or is anything that does information processing sufficient?
I don’t see that I need to have a complete explanation available in order to claim that your alternative is highly improbable. This is something that is being worked on VS.
VS: but the short version is that I know that I can act as if I’m having phenomenal experiences that I’m not having, and this can vary from my having different experiences to my not having an experience at all.
But when you act as if you’re having a phenomenal experience, that is a phenomenal experience – you imagine how you would act, so I don’t see it as a legitimate step to take, to claim you could act as if you were having a phenomenal experience if you had none.
VS: If this is true, then there is no reason to think that acting as if you are having phenomenal experiences means that you are having them, and that’s sufficient to eliminate third-person observable behaviour as a criteria for phenomenal experience.
It’s not since it relies on what I see as being a contentious claim.
VS: I’m saying that phenomenal experiences have causal power because they seem to have it when we examine what they seem to be doing. And so on. Surely that’s not out of line?
Not at all, but when presented like that it is a fairly uninteresting claim (note: You’re the one who is claiming that phenomenal experiences lack causal power if the mind is what the brain does).
VS: You can only invoke parsimony if both theories can explain the same things and have roughly the same consequences; that is precisely what I am DENYING here
And I don’t see a legitimate basis for this denial of yours.
VS: I’m an interactionist dualist. So, no, I don’t avoid it at all; I can indeed answer those challenges.
So please do provide an explanation for not just how brain states can alter mental states, but how brain damage can cause actualy mental damage.
VS: Why? The only case where these would be overturned MIGHT be in mind/brain interactions,
Which is a rather vital component for your position, is it not?
VS: which are not what most science has actually studied
So go ahead and investigate it. Get back to me when you have your answer
VS: and that’s assuming that it even ends up contradicting them
I see no way in which it could not and still have any causal power.
VS: (if energy, for example, can be properly considered to be physical AND non-physical, to exist in all domains, then conservation and the 2nd law are clearly preserved.
We have good reason to think that energy is physical, and so this should be a big concern for you.
VS: If you argue that energy itself must be physical, then perhaps we have a physical mind … but it still wouldn’t have to be the brain, and so “mind is brain” would still be refuted.)
We have no reason to think energy is anything but physical, so this would soundly undermine your own position, would it not? And since I don’t think your claims regarding epiphenomenalism of mins as brain succeed, I don’t see my position as being refuted.
riandouglas,
I think we might have taken up enough space on Eric’s blog with this. You can continue on mine if you want, from the context of the two pages I recommended.
My apologies for followup so late, but I was away from home and computer for a time.
The problem here is that you seem to move between “claims” and their justification without recognizing that they are two different things. A ‘claim’, in itself, can be neither reliable nor unreliable. What is so is the way of arriving at or justifying some given claim; that is, the “way of knowing” something. Certainly some claims arrived at using the scientific “way of knowing” turn out to be false. But it is the scientific way of knowing itself that provides the resources for determining whether some (putative) scientific claim is true or false.
Religion, on the other hand, has no such resources. Certainly theologians debate matters, but the debate is irresolvable (except by diktat) because the supposed “way of knowing” used by religion, having revelation as its foundation, has no resource to evaluate the truth or falsity of religious claims. How would one even begin to evaluate the truth of “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” compared to “There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his prophet”?
Remember that the issue here is not ‘truth’, but ‘knowledge’. For some claim to be a candidate for knowledge is for us to have some good reason to believe that it is true. If some scientific claim should turn out not to be true, then it turns out that it was not actually knowledge. But it was nonetheless a valid candidate. On the other hand, a (purely) religious claim, even it it might happen to be true, is nonetheless not a viable candidate for knowledge, for “religion” can provide no good reason to believe that it might be true.
I add that none of this is a priori, for the question of whether some method is ‘reliable’ can be answered only a posteriori, based on its results.
As noted above, the idea that “they’d still be able to make knowledge claims without being a way of knowing at all” is precisely what is wrong with your argument. It could be that some religious claims might happen to be true, but they still fail even as candidates for knowledge claims, for the minimal requirement for some claim to qualify as ‘knowledge’ is that there is some good reason to believe that it is true; that is, that is is arrived at or justified by some method that reliably (for at least some sense of ‘reliably’) arrives at true conclusions. By your own argument, “religion” has no method, and thus can provide no good reason or justification for believing that any religious claim is true, and thus religious claims fail even as candidates for ‘knowledge’.
Or perhaps you are arguing here that “religious claims” can be knowledge claims only “[t]o the extent that they use everyday reasoning, philosophy or even narrow science,” but this is no support to religion or religious claims, for you are thus arguing that claims coming from out of religion might qualify as knowledge just to the extent that they are something other than “religious”. I suppose that this might be true, in some odd sense, but it seems self-defeating.
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