The other day, I got a request for an interview: a reporter was writing a story about Ken Miller. I was happy to do so — this was clearly going to be a friendly piece about Miller, and I thought it was good that he get some more press. I talked on the phone with this fellow for 20 minutes or so, and I told him what I thought: Miller is a smart guy, a great speaker, a hardworking asset to the people opposing creationism, and I also said that his efforts to squeeze religion into science were ill-founded and badly argued. I said, “It’s an effort to reconcile a legitimate discipline with foolishness.”
Guess what the only quote to make it into the article was?
Yeah, it turned out to be a crappy atheist-bashing article. It wasn’t enough to talk about Miller’s good work and the respect he gets from others — no, it had to be turned into a fight, with poor Miller unable to win because he’s being “attacked by Darwin-hating fundies and leftie atheists alike,” and the New Atheists are the primary villains of the piece. The more complex story I tried to tell got discarded, and only one short sentence made it to the final result. I must have been a major disappointment to the reporter, since I didn’t give him much in the way of vicious attack-dog quotes.
He also got a little bit from Jerry Coyne. Again, it’s clear but temperate stuff. The story really does not have anything to justify the claim that we’re out to get Miller, or that the New Atheists are somehow in symbiosis with fundagelical loons.
“By discussing science and religion together and asserting that science more or less points you to evidence for God, he blurs the boundaries between science and faith,” says Coyne, “boundaries which I think have to be absolutely maintained if we’re going to have a rational country and we’re going to judge things based on evidence rather than superstition.”
I agree completely with that — Miller does blur the lines in very silly ways. The article even reiterates Miller’s notorious explanation from his book, Finding Darwin’s God, and obliviously confirms Coyne’s point by approvingly citing the way Miller mingles nonsense with science.
But the cell biologist also makes explicitly scientific arguments: maintaining, for instance, that quantum indeterminacy — the ultimately unpredictable outcome of physical events — could allow God to intervene in subtle, undetectable ways.
This sort of sly intervention, he argues, is vital to the Creator’s project: if God were to re-grow limbs for amputees, for instance — if God were to perform the sort of miracles demanded by atheists as proof of his existence — the consequences would be disastrous.
“Suppose that it was common knowledge that if you were a righteous person and of great faith and prayed deeply, all of a sudden, your limb would grow back,” he says. “That would reduce God to a kind of supranatural force . . . and by pushing the button labeled ‘prayer,’ you could accomplish anything you wanted. What would that do to moral independence?”
That is not a scientific argument in any way—I guess the reporter was fooled by the flinging about of “quantum”. All that is is tired old post hoc theological apologetics without a hint of evidence to back it up.
Nowhere anywhere in the article is any reasonable support for the notion of a god, nor especially of any peculiarly Catholic deity. Of course there isn’t, because he doesn’t have any.
What he does do, again, is try to throw atheists under the bus. It’s more bullshit about how science has to compromise with the public’s version of spiritual superstition, rather than remaining true to the evidence.
But Miller rejects any suggestion that the science in his work suffers when he brings in the spiritual. And he argues that the New Atheists, in their forceful rejection of God, are doing damage, in their own right, to a scientific brand already under assault.
…
Indeed, Miller argues that the creationists and New Atheists are in an odd sort of symbiosis — reinforcing each others’ extreme views of the incompatibility of science and religion.
Well, fuck that noise.
The New Atheists are as much a force in opposition to creationism as is Ken Miller; more so, I would argue, because we don’t make fuzzy, muddled compromises with absurd medieval humbug. Even if he disagrees on that last point, his constant efforts to belittle the atheists on his side in this struggle, to repeatedly argue that they are a detriment to science education, is getting tiresome. Miller wants to turn the pro-evolution movement into a stalking horse for Catholicism, while his godless colleagues have repeatedly stated that we want no endorsement of religion or atheism in science education. The only one doing damage to the “brand of science” is the guy with pitiful idea that god is noodling about at the quantum level in ways that are completely undetectable — he wants to claim that he has an invisible dragon in his garage, and what’s more, that that claim is scientific.
Remind me, next time I’m asked about Ken Miller, that I shouldn’t bother to say anything appreciative. It will be ignored and won’t be reciprocated. And I’m not going to endorse his crusade to taint science with supernaturalism.
Wowbagger OM #498
Daniel’s arguments appear to boil down to “There must be a god, therefore God.” Which is begging the question.
This from a Calvinist site:
Catholics do defend “natural theology,” and Daniel’s claim that our position is unreasonable is actually a fair one, because it’s not attacking us, but the line of reasoning. It’s designed to persuade us, through examining, together, the world as our starting point. The fact that Thomists go backwards and look for evidence to support a foregone conclusion isn’t really the same as presuppositionalism. Presupps explicitly start out with God, and say so do we, but we lie.
In my experience, the Calvinists and Catholics both despise each others form of apologetics, thinking it a kind of heresy. Theologically, they don’t really get along.
This argument supports predestination. Some people are predestined to “submit” and others (us) aren’t.
Daniel Smith says, “So says the science of today.”
So science is just a matter of convenience for you, eh? Well, Dan’l, one criterion I have for an acceptable philosophy of life is the ability to accommodate reality as it exists–and you just failed, utterly.
Sastra wrote:
Ah, I see; that is significant – and, now I think about it, that was something facilis alluded to.
I tried, on several occasions, to get heddle and Pilty to have at it, but – sadly – it never happened. I do love a good kook fight, but they don’t happen here anywhere near often enough.
Heddle’s not a presupper, though. People don’t always use the form of apologetics their particular religion is ‘known’ for. Wasn’t Piltdown Man a Catholic who argued against evolution?
In principle, it can. Requires just a bit of nuclear fusion.
No.
Even without quantum uncertainty (radioactive decay is never caused; virtual particles and other vacuum fluctuations… first link in comment 438, two above yours), which poor Aquinas didn’t know about, this still wouldn’t be true.
Microwaves aren’t hot.
Longest argument from ignorance I’ve read in a long time.
Seriously, all of 20th-century physics seems to have passed you by. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Actuality and potentiality aren’t yellow juices that can be mixed. They’re word games that have nothing to do with reality, because reality is simply weirder than the pathetic imaginations of Aristotle and Aquinas.
Your turn to try again.
I’ve always been proud to be a confessing coward.
You, on the other hand, would probably rather commit seppuku in public than be thought a coward, completely regardless of whether you are one.
Idiot.
ROTFL!
This is so stupid.
Human reason, will, intellect, consciousness, and so on are activities of human brains.
Of course it does. It burns very nicely in chlorine trifluoride for instance – no not “very nicely”, but explosively.
But I’m just having fun with your ridiculous application of Aristotelian made-up categories to actual chemistry.
Aaaah, the “science has been wrong before” gambit. Look, wake me up after you’ve disproved Bell’s theorem.
You’re making this up.
Stop stating your imaginations as if they were facts.
And here you’re back at simply denying quantum physics. You don’t even bother trying any mistake in it.
Moron.
It makes sense, but it’s not the case. There’s a finite number of Planck lengths between any two “points”.
Indeed, wetness is just electrostatic attraction.
…to find…
Also failed at inserting a comma elsewhere.
“So says the science of today.”
;)
Sastra wrote:
Oh, I didn’t mean I wanted them to fight because of the contrasting ideological positions of their distinct denominational apologetics – it was for teh lulz…
There, fixed that for you Daniel.
Where have I heard this before:
Oh yeah. It was a bunch of hooey, too.
Daniel Smith,
You seemed to be saying in various comments above that God, a first mover if not the first mover, is not spatially infinite. So what I’m getting now is this vast intelligent blob that is alive (depends on an external energy source that it consumes somehow) sitting off to the “side” of the universe with “infinite unchanging” will (as in it has unlimited degrees of freedom in choosing what it wants to do), and “infinite unchanging” power (as in it can exert as much or as little force as it wants whenever it wants). And you really expect us to believe this tripe?
No, I don’t think that people here are assuming consciousness, will, intellect, and reason must be human-like. I remember reading that Erasmus Darwin speculated about a kind of alien mind that looks down at humans as being incomprehensibly limited just as we humans find ant minds to be. I don’t see why that couldn’t be, but you won’t get any kind of mind without the ability to create and measure differences in some kind of brain. The brain cannot be unchanging or it cannot be a brain, so then your god cannot have a mind or it cannot be perfect. If it doesn’t have a mind, then it is a useless creature to posit. But of course, since your god is most likely sitting outside our universe where our physical laws do not apply, it can do or be whatever you want it to do or be, right? All you end up with is your imagination running rampant without any grounding in reality other than it being drawn from your own memories.
oh, and I so called it when I said he was gonna start arguing against the Periodic table :-)
A block of ice cannot cause a fire because it does not contain that potentiality.
oops:
DS’s general lack of knowledge regarding physics, biology, chemistry, and even philosophy is really hurting his ability to rise beyond his own personal tautologies.
I don’t see how this follows. It would be fair if he had any reason in his arguments, and we did not, but it’s actually the other way around.
I don’t think that there’s any difference between a presupposition and a foregone conclusion.
I mean, what distinguishes them?
That’s what Christian Reconstructionists do, but not all presuppositionalists hold exactly the same presuppositions.
=======
I grant that he doesn’t seem to use the apologetic so much, but he has claimed to be one.
Jason over at Evolutionblog posted a portion of presuppositional argumentation about logic, similar to what facilis was always yammering on about.
Heddle claimed that he does accept presupposition @#64 on that thread, and in comment #97, defined “presuppositionalism” as meaning “Assuming the bible is the word of God” — a far weaker claim in itself than that of the Reconstructionist citation that you quoted.
Although, he links to the Wikipedia page on presuppositional apologetics, which when examined in detail, looks more like what you cited.
I’m not sure heddle’s clear on what presuppositionalism is, but then, I suspect that presuppositionalism is so much of an epistemic denial-of-service attack that it basically means whatever the presuppositionalist wants it to mean.
“Logic belongs to the Christian God as described in the Bible, so you can’t use logic to argue against God. So too with math, science, language, reason, thinking, arguing, opening your mouth, closing your mouth, staring at me in disbelief, snorting, rolling your eyes, and calling me an annoying uncharitable insulting fallacious asshole. Ow. Smacking me in the face also belongs to the Christian God as described in the Bible. Oog. And punching me out. Aaaargh.” (and so on)
(I’m starting to wonder if presuppositionalism is my Berserk Button.)
I tried drawing heddle out on that thread, but sometimes heddle just stops arguing a topic. Possibly because he decides it’s futile to argue with someone without a Christian worldview, possibly because he gets bored.
Also, RD @#56 in the thread posted this analysis of dealing with presupp:
http://gatorfreethought.org/witmer%20talk%201.pdf
Not exactly… he did ask about it, and I think displayed common confusion about evolution, but it wasn’t one of his hot topics. He is more into the social side of things; defending the Church, and attacking those that he perceives as attacking the Church.
And claiming that the Church has the right to kill people who are not Catholic for not being Catholic (never that directly, but by insinuation and implication).
I didn’t realise it was already time for another round of “Science! What has science ever done for us?” while sitting on a computer.
Denying the science that is allowing you to post a denial of the science, now that’s special.
Water ice can also light a fire: Making Fire From Ice.
I wouldn’t mind Daniel being behind on 20th century science if he weren’t also behind on 17th century science.
Owlmirror #516 wrote:
I didn’t mean that his accusation was itself reasonable, ie justified; just that it assumed a common framework of rationality, and granted that we were legitimately involved in the same process of reasoning — in contrast to the DOS form of presuppositionalism you lampoon so brilliantly later in your post. That’s what facilis was using.
Yes, I’d already read that thread, and was actually thinking of it specifically when I said he wasn’t a presupper. He began by rejecting Lisle’s argument with “the existence of logic or mathematics strikes me as neutral with no possibility that it hurts the theist and no possibility that it helps the atheist.” He has also admitted on Pharyngula, that he could consider changing his mind, given empirical evidence — and gave examples. That’s not the pure version of the presup.
I think that when heddle claims to be a presuppositionalist, he’s using a more liberal, flexible interpretation of what that means. Big surprise.
I agree. It seems to be conflated with accepting God/Christianity/Bible on faith (or due to Grace of God Enlightenment) and then looking back to see how it all fits with worldly reality. That’s not really the same thing.
A natural theologist can think that the atheist is wrong, because he or she came to the wrong conclusion. They ignored important evidence, and used fallacious reasoning. There is a case for atheism, but it’s not as good as the case for God. One can weigh them side by side, and then arrive at the truth.
Presuppers can’t grant even that. The atheist is not mistaken: he or she is depraved. Atheists can’t even start to make a case. It’s like someone trying to argue against reason itself: they’re using reason, to do so. It’s absurd.
Thinking about it, I might put heddle into a third category. He would probably agree with the presuppers, that you can’t reason your way to believing in God through empiricism, as with the Thomists. But, he’d disagree with the presuppers on whether this means that atheism is an absurd, self-contradictory position. No, it’s a reasonable one — if you haven’t been touched by the Holy Spirit. However, once you have been so enlightened, then, and only then, can you see how there could be no other reasonable conclusion.
This looks like a form of presuppositionalism with the advantages of fideism. You don’t turn into a loopy scold, and you can grant that the other side is reasonable enough, from their standpoint — and the standpoint of reason itself.
It is precisely because human consciousness IS related to the physical that it DOES change. Anything tied to matter has the potential to change. The consciousness of the unchanging changer on the other hand, does not change because the unchanging changer is not tied to matter but is immaterial.
It is precisely because human consciousness IS related to the physical that it DOES change. Anything tied to matter has the potential to change. The consciousness of the unchanging changer on the other hand, does not change because the unchanging changer is not tied to matter but is immaterial.
Daniel, the unchanging changer is a load of horseshit. Please think a little bit before crapping out words next time.
Daniel Smith:
The first three of Aquinas’s Five Ways are all variants of the “Cosmological Argument” for the existence of God.
The Cosmological Argument used to be called the Cosmological Proof, but since it’s now generally recognized—even by most mainline theologians—not to be an actual proof, it’s generally just called an “argument” now.
Actually, some versions of the cosmological argument are valid logical proofs of something, but never what they’re intended to prove, i.e., the existence of God in any useful sense of the word “God.”
That’s the big problem with the Cosmological Argument—what it proves is that there’s something special that violates our intuitive concepts of normal causation or other dependencies.
What it doesn’t prove is that that special thing is special in any way that would make us think it’s God.
There’s no reason to think that a “first cause” or “unmoved mover” or “ultimate ground of being” is God, or a god, or anything remotely like a god. In fact, there’s excellent reason to think that it isn’t.
The interpretation of such a special thing as God-like depends on common intuitions that are question-begging—and, in light of modern science, apparently false.
Suppose I grant for the sake of argument that there was a first cause and unmoved mover, and/or an ultimate ground of being on which everything else depends for its existence.
Why would you leap to the conclusion that such a thing is God?
Near as I can tell, it wouldn’t be anything like a god.
In particular, it wouldn’t be likely to have a mind. It wouldn’t be somebody you could worship.
In light of science, it seems quite unlikely that such an ultimate thing would be anything like a mind. Minds are complex organized things that arise from the interactions of simpler, prior things. (Both temporally, in terms of evolving from simpler forms and being constructed from simpler constituents parts, and “metaphyscially” in the sense of being built out of simpler things.)
What science has shown, over and over again for hundreds of years, is that complex things like organisms and minds are the relatively rare consequences of interactions of large numbers of simpler things, which are in turn caused by and made out of still more numerous and even simpler things.
If we follow this back in time, we get back to a vast amount of very simple stuff interacting according to very, very simple rules.
If we follow it downward in terms of metaphysical priority, we find that everything interesting is made out of simpler, dumber stuff.
Our minds are the functioning of fancy computational things called brains, which are made out of simpler computational devices, which are made out of still simpler computational devices, down to neurons. Those, in turn, are cells, made out of organelles and whatnot, which are made out of simpler structural units, which are made out of big molecules, which are made out of simpler molecules, down to atoms.
Atoms, in turn, are made out of simpler subatomic particles, down to something extremely small and bizarrely simple, maybe resonant modes vibrating “strings,” or quantum loop thingies, or whatever.
The further you trace the metaphysical priority chain back, the more and simpler things you find.
You don’t find anything remotely like a mind. Quite the opposite. You find vast amounts of very simple stuff, and most of the vast amounts of stuff are only randomly different. What you find is brainbendingly simple stuff and inconceivable amounts of random noise.
That’s just not godlike. It’s quite the opposite.
Why do many people find it so easy to identify a first cause or prime mover or ultimate ground of being with God?
Because they don’t understand minds.
To many people, it seems plausible that minds can do magic.
They think of minds as fairly simple things that are fundamentally different from matter, and able to violate the normal order of causality—to make things happen by force of will, for example.
Looked at the opposite way, magic is generally associated with minds or things with mind-like teleological properties.
Modern science pretty clearly says that’s not true. There is no magic, and minds don’t do that, because they’re just not that kind of thing. They are computational processes physically instantiated in computational machinery, and that’s all. They have no magical properties that can violate the rules that apply to matter.
The appeal of the Cosmological Argument depends on prescientific intuitions about minds and matter—in particular, the profoundly mistaken idea that minds don’t obey the normal rules of matter and could plausibly be uncaused, and cause material things to exist or happen.
Near as we can tell, scientifically that’s the exact opposite of the truth. Minds are caused by matter, and are reducible to the interactions of matter, and in fact minds are the “most caused” things we know of—their existence and functioning is crucially dependent on a vast number of temporally and metaphysically prior events. They simply can’t exist without a huge amount of prior organization.
Given that that organization emerges gradually (and rarely) in a tiny subset of a vast amount of utterly dumb simple stuff, minds are the most contingent things we know of, in Thomistic terms.
In other words, Thomas was certainly right that there’s something special that was/is in some sense prior to all the normal stuff we observe. He was utterly wrong to interpret that “special” prior/underlying stuff as plausibly God.
Daniel Smith #522 wrote:
Awareness, consciousness, focus, decisions, emotions, goals, intentions — all involve changes.
You’re running into two huge problems now. The first is mind-brain dependency. Since mind is an activity of brain, it makes no sense to talk about a disembodied mind. In addition to going against the discoveries of modern science, you’re making a category error. It’s like saying that there’s digestion, but nothing actually doing the digesting. It’s digestion essence.
The other problem is that, even if we grant mind-brain substance duality, the activities of the mind still involves change. God presumably makes choices. Thus, it can’t be completely static. All you’re left with is pointless handwaving about “God still only being God and not something else” — which might be said to be true for everything.
Right, yes, so far, so good.
NO NO NO. This is completely wrong. This is moronic logical fallacy.
Given that all known consciousness is based on change, you are not allowed to simply assert that there can be consciousness in something that you have just argued is inherently absolutely changeless. You have no reasonable basis for doing so.
Will someone, as an act of kindness, please make a time machine. We will be able to send Daniel Smith back a thousand years where he can be with his preferred era of knowledge.
I am not sure why he is using a computer.
Daniel Smith,
You base your argument for god on the premise that all action must have a cause–and then when we point to observations that prove you are wrong, you deny the observations.
If your arguments cannot accommodate reality, they aren’t worth making. Your belief in God is YOUR CHOICE. Neither you nor anyone before you has ever come up with any evidence. Want to believe? Fine, just don’t pretend there’s any objective reason to do so.
Sastra @ #521,
Yes, I think that looks like a good summary of what heddle has argued, and how he’s argued. What I see him doing is not the extreme presupp argument, but rather conceding a particular presupposition (bible is word of God).
I do recall that he’s said that he’s read Aquinas (including the five ways), and didn’t buy the arguments, or words to that effect.
Daniel:
Wow.
You have no idea what consciousness is, right?
It’s not an essence, is not immaterial, and is certainly not unchanging.
Unless you can explain how consciousness could be immaterial and unchanging, stop using that word.
You’re just anthropomorphizing things that are utterly un-mindlike, because you have no idea what a mind or consciousness is.
Read Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis.
The hypothesis of the title is that consciousness is a function of certain intensely organized material systems, and has nothing to do with immaterial souls, certainly not the traditional substance dualist soul of orthodox Theism.
As he says in the intro, the “astonishing” hypothesis is only astonishing to laypeople, who are quite ignorant about minds and brains. Among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, it’s the dominant view.
(And almost none of those people believes in an orthodox immaterial soul—e.g., the philosopher David Chalmers is a property dualist, but that offers no hope for the kind of soul you need for Theistic theology.)
Your scientific ignorance is showing in a big way.
Consciousness is not something that philosophers or theologians get to define. It’s a natural phenomenon, and we have a much clearer idea of what kind of phenomenon it actually is than Aquinas could have dreamed of.
Aquinas was wrong about minds, and about matter, and about the relationship between mind and matter.
He got it almost exactly backwards.
It was forgivable for him to do that, in his time.
It’s not forgivable for you to do that. You really should learn some of the relevant basic science about minds and matter before you spout off about minds and matter.
There’s a reason why cosmologists are overwhelmingly atheists. It’s because the more you understand the earliest and most metaphysically prior stuff, the less it looks like God.
There’s also a reason why cognitive scientist are overwhelmingly atheists. The more you understand about minds, the less they look like magical immaterial souls, or anything that even has one.
Get a clue: you are scientifically wrong to think that a mind can explain the existence of matter or motion.
That isn’t ever going to happen, for a couple of reasons:
1) NOTHING is ever going to explain the causation of existence itself in anything remotely like the intuitive terms we use to explain causation within space and time. It is simply not possible to get an answer to the question “why is there anything rather than nothing at all?” It’s a question that contains its own refutation in its presuppositions.
You are doing the equivalent of asking “which way is up?” in deep space. Dragging God into it doesn’t help, even a little bit, because it’s the wrong question.
2) You are appealing to intuitions about minds and matter that are empirically false, even within space and time. Minds simply don’t and can’t do what you assume God’s mind can do—you are just weaving an incoherent fantasy using words you do not understand.
It doesn’t help to explain something that you’re profoundly confused about in terms of something else that you’re profoundly confused about.
The weirdness of ultimate physics is just not the same weirdness as the weirdness of minds and matter. Using one weirdness to justify the other doesn’t make anything less weird and more believable, except to people who are about as ignorant as you about both.
How can consciousness (in any meaningful sense) be immaterial? You are anthropomorphising reality, taking a physical evolved trait and then saying that it can exist immaterially. You have no grounds for this whatsoever – if its consciousness then its consciousness that is completely alien to us. We couldn’t even begin to speculate on it.
You’re making the bare assertion fallacy. Stop it.
It’s now been 300 posts of back and forth, surely by now Daniel would have come to this conclusion. So much for faith being a virtue, instead he’s trying to make an argument from evidence where he’s ignoring all contrary evidence. “So says the science of today” while sitting on a computer no less.
I’m still unsure as to what his motivation is. Does he think that people here haven’t heard this before? Does he think that Aquinas has proved God exists which has conveniently been forgotten in modern times? Does he think that his bare assertions constitute a proof?
Kel, OM #533 wrote:
We can’t know that he’s ignoring it in RL; at least he has the guts to come into a forum where he knows his argument is going to be challenged. That’s my guess on why he came in; he wants to see if he can be convincing, to himself, if need be. I can respect that.
And at least he has the good grace to try to make an argument, instead of just resting on faith. Not only is it more intellectually honest on his part, but it’s far less insulting to us. As I’ve mentioned before, I really hate the bland little assertion that choosing to believe is a sign of humble, loving, and noble character — which the atheist so sadly lacks, not that they’re judging or anything.
I’m all for that too, though I hesitate when this comes up because it seems that those who make an argument time and time again aren’t typically those who believe said argument. That is to say, they’ve built an intellectual foil for what they hold true on faith alone.
There are plenty of creationists who come on here to make their arguments against evolution too, as soon as those arguments get knocked down they don’t actually change from being creationists. They still hold their position no matter what. If I thought for one second that the reason Daniel Smith believes was because of Aquinas’ proofs, then I’d be with you. But a long line of fruitless discussions has taught me that this isn’t the case, it’s merely an intellectual foil for their faith.
Perhaps, though I think this discourse hasn’t exactly been intellectually honest. When one pulls out “So says the science of today” when making an argument involving the nature of spacetime, it’s pretty hard to see that as being part of any intellectually honest dialogue. Nor lacing his arguments with bare assertions such as the necessity of God for there to be any order at all, or that there’s such thing as an immaterial unchanging consciousness.
Kel, OM #535 wrote:
But if they didn’t already know that their reasons to believe were simply an intellectual foil for their faith, this probably rattles them more than they’d ever be willing to admit to the “opponent.” I’m pessimistic enough to count any movement in a rational direction as victory. Even “this is tougher than I thought it would be” is enough of a win.
The trick is to keep one’s expectations small. Minimal, if possible. And, remember all the atheists who were argued out of belief.
The real argument is going to be internal anyway. We wouldn’t expect to see it.
Compared to Young Earth Creationism, or charges that atheists are possessed by demons? Compared to presuppositionalism? Compared to the refusal to even consider engaging in discourse, because one is just too spiritually centered? Naw. There are worse things, than someone trying to jam-force (or gently wedge) Thomas Aquinas into the modern world.
I hadn’t considered that. I don’t doubt that there are those who think their faith “reasonable”, but like William Lane Craig advocates they abandon reason the moment reason conflicts with their faith.
Yeah, true. Still I think there is some futility in this. When he’s completely ignorant of the basic science at the same time as making an a posteriori conjecture, “so says the science of today” shows a level of gut rejection instead of arguing from reason. Maybe I am expecting too much.
Compared to the morbidly obese, I’m practically anorexic.
Agreed. But someone who is trying to make an argument from evidence with what could be at best described as “intuitive physics” comes off in my mind poorly. If you want to wedge Thomas Aquinas into the modern world, that’s different to trying to push any conflicting knowledge out.
If the mind is entirely explained by the brain, then you have a point. So many here seem convinced that such is the case. But, explaining the mind strictly by material processes strips away the very essence of the phenomenon to be explained: qualia, thought, intentionality, and consciousness get redefined in materialistic terms – leaving us with, what amounts to, a subtle changing of the subject. What needs to be explained, in actuality then, goes unexplained. Just because mental processes are associated with brain activity does not mean that brain activity fully explains mental processes. In fact many philosophers – even materialistic ones – recognize this difficulty.
The Thomist view of God is that God does not make choices. When the bible (which I’m sure someone will bring up) says God “chooses” to do such and such, it is speaking analogously, in human terms. God’s will is perfect and he follows his perfect will always. We may say he “chooses” to do so, but that implies that God could do other than the perfect – which is impossible.
No it does not necessarily strip away any essence as some would have you believe. All it does is say that the brain is an entirely evolutionarily created organ, so there is no reason to think that it operates at a quantum level or that it has an incorporeal component. I don’t see how that changes the subject except for dismissing dualism.
Daniel Smith #538 wrote:
The fact that the subjective experience cannot be captured by objective description is not a problem for mind/brain dependency. Your hypothesis still requires an assumption that goes in a direction opposite from our scientific discoveries — though it fits in well with pre-scientific thought. It’s a problem.
God “follows His will” but does not choose one option, over another? Since all our experiences with minds (our own and those of other species) shows mind acting as a dynamic agent, any attempt to define God as a disembodied Mind that isn’t anything like the minds we’re familiar with, is going to fail. It’s “pink,” but not the color pink.
So are you willing to get your brain removed (or parts thereof) to show that it isn’t?
I’m assuming you’re talking about virtual particles?
I was going to give an answer but then came across this from an anonymous poster in another forum that seemed to say it much better than I could:
As I understand it:
Nothing comes from nothing, therefore fluctuating quantum vacuua are not nothing. Quantum vacuua are universal systems with laws. For example, the amplitude of quantum fluctuations is controlled by the amplitude of Planck’s constant. The quantum vacuua microstructure continually forms and dissolves particles which borrow energy from the vacuum for their brief existence.
“The spontaneous appearance of particles in a vacuum is still actualized by something else than the particles themselves. The actualization of particles in a quantum vacuum requires a number of physically necessary conditions that must exist for such an event to occur, however these conditions are not necessarily sufficient to guarantee the occurrence of the event. It is precisely because of the many physically necessary conditions needed (even though not 100% deterministic) for the spontaneous appearance of particles in a vacuum that it cannot be said that the events are uncaused.
In terms of essence and existence, the essence of quantum vacuua is that they are universal systems with laws that spontaneously generate particles. Even if it was proven tomorrow that quantum vacuua do not exist, it is still possible to grasp its essence. In a sense, quantum vacuua can be seen as what Aristotle described as “prime matter”. It is mere potentiality and thus does not exist in reality on its own unless it is actualized, and it is indeed actualized by various necessary conditions. There would be no way to make sense of prime matter if it was not actualized into substances (hylemorphic composites of matter and form) we experience everyday since we are also composites of matter and form.
To put it differently, prime matter exists only in reality together with its substantial form that is able to actualize it, even though it has the potential to undergo limitless as well as spontaneous change. Prime matter or quantum vacuua thus exists as the real principle of change, however exists only in reality as actualized in some determinate substances such as elementary particles.
In terms of the four causes, it is described as follows:
“What is it?” relates to the formal cause of what kind of form it has. A typical answer would be that it prime matter or quantum vacuua has the form of “spontaneity” and “limitless potential” as opposed to “predictability” and “actualized potential”.
“What is it made of?” relates to its material cause and the kind of “stuff” it is made of. A typical answer would be that it is prime matter with limitless potentiality.
“Where does it come from?” relates to its efficient cause and what brought the substance into existence. Prime matter is pure potentiality (not a substance) and pure potentiality cannot exist in reality without being actualized into some substance by a substantial form. Quantum vacuua are thus not brought into existence but merely exists and thus does not have an efficient cause.
“What is it for?” relates to its final cause which is its end, or purpose or goal of a thing. Prime matter or quantum vacuua can be described to be the principle of individuation.
link
Sometimes, I see enough of a shift in the type of arguments being made to get the sense that they are breaking an epistemic sweat, as it were.
But changing arguments isn’t always giving ground. Some, like AC and RS, feel free to recycle the same damn arguments after enough time had passed, and do so repeatedly and obsessively. That’s pretty frustrating, which is why I gave up arguing with them and started translating them.
I do have a faint suspicion that in a very few cases, I managed to get interlocutors from being YECs to being IDists, or from being strong IDists to weaker theistic evolutionists, or from being a strong theist to being more agnostic. That might just be me misinterpreting their mental state when they quit arguing, of course.
Yeah. Especially if they have an emotional investment in their beliefs, which they always do (else why would they argue for them so vehemently?).
What, they’re going to come back and say “Gee, thanks for proving me wrong and showing me how stupid I was being”?
The latter two are often combined.
“Satan is making you hate God and deny that God is the source of all logic… !!!”
I see parallels between that and presuppositionalist arguments, though. They presuppose that they, and their spiritual beliefs and friendly faith are good — so if you disagree in any way, you must be not good.
“Oh, why can’t we all just smile and be polite and get along?
We all believe in different things, so let’s sing a happy song.
If you will let me, I will share my loving faith so strong.
But you’re a bad and evil person if you try to argue that I’m wrong.”
Some people have argued that fundamentalists are in some ways more admirable than the fuzzy-wuzzy “spiritualists”, because the fundamentalists at least care about what is true. I disagree with that — I see the fundamentalists caring about certainty; about maintaining their sense of certainty, and not caring about methods by which truth and falsity are to be determined; indeed, even using denialistic fallacies and sophistries against those methods.
So in contrast with that, the fuzzy-wuzzys aren’t too concerned about certainty, but they’re also unconcerned with epistemic methods.
(Tangentially, I wonder if we should call ourselves something like “Systemists” or “Systematicists” (“Methodists” already being taken). Meaning: “I think that logical and skeptically empirical methods and systems of analyzing premises and coming to conclusions are more important and relevant than any presupposed dogma”. Or something like that. It’s certainly less immediately arrogant than “Bright”, I think.)
I still perceive a subtle and hidden presuppositionalism in his methods and arguments. It’s not quite the radical presuppositional explicit denial-of-service attack — but as with heddle, it involves presuppositions, some explicit, and some less obvious even to him.
Rather than arguing on a blog, why doesn’t he read up on the much deeper and involved philosophical works out there that discuss and dissect Aquinas? It’s certainly looks to me that he’s not arguing from Aquinas directly, but from some other more recent defender or interpreter of Aquinas. So does he really think that there are no more recent refutations of Aquinas?
Owlmirror #543 wrote:
LOL! Very good.
Not cuttlefish good, of course, but I’m copying it down anyway…
Daniel,
No.
Qualia, thought, intentionality, and consciousness (imagination, emotion, etc.) are all properties of mind.
I think it seems like “a subtle changing of the subject” due to your apparently muddled ontology.
Consider an analogy: But, explaining the physical body strictly by material processes strips away the very essence of the phenomena to be explained: hunger, tiredness, pain and ticklishness get redefined in materialistic terms.
#542 = someone thinking that word games can hand-wave away mathematical realities.
face it, the math says virtual particles are uncaused, no matter how many words you can string together to make it kinda sorta sound like maybe they aren’t.
And anyway, that screed starts with a false premise, and then seeks to justify it. That’s not how proper reasoning works.
I’ll continue with my previous comment,
What mental processes being associated with brain activity means is that mental processes are not essentially mysterious nor are they somehow separate from nature. The mystery, or difficulty in explaining mental processes, is most likely simply due to the complexities involved in studying the brain.
This does not mean that a mind cannot exist without an organic brain resembling ours, but it does mean that what makes a mind is not a spirit or an ethereal entity but rather a well structured system. We now recognize that supposing the mind needs something other than a brain (again, not necessarily a brain like ours) is to add superfluity to the mind puzzle.
Daniel,
This is just sad.
Has it never occurred to you that stating one’s conclusion as one’s premise might just be a little, um, iffy?
dude, we can read minds now by reading brain activity. mental processes aren’t “associated” with brain activity, they are pretty well evidenced to be caused by it. Mental processes are what the brain does, no matter how squeamish that thought makes you.
We’re convinced because that’s what evidence and logic demonstrate.
I hope that you are aware that you’re now making an argument from ignorance, which is an unreasonable logical fallacy.
If you’re not, well, here I am to make sure that you do know.
The Thomist view is that God has no free will? Really? Seriously?
In special pleading terms, you mean. Which has not changed from being a logical fallacy from the last time you used it.
“Perfect” means “not free; predetermined”. Interesting.
This is a fascinating argument that God has no free will, but does not help you.
You are defining “will” in contradictory terms, since “will” as used by humans, does include an awareness of the future, and the ability to extrapolate from past to future.
God does not have “perfect will”. The only thing you can argue with any consistency is that God has a predetermined nature.
And you still have not shown that something that cannot change at all can be called “conscious”.
No, these particles do come “from nothing”. You are just assuming something a priori (i.e, nothing comes from nothing) which has been shown empirically to be false. Then when this counter-example is pointed out to you you play word games.
What does this mean?
That’s redefining what “caused” means.
Forget this ancient, pseudo-scientific bullshit and pick up a modern text book on physics.
Yeah, it might be only “what science says today”, but it’s MUCH closer to the truth than anything written by Aristotle or Aquinas (who in their defense were limited by the knowledge of their times).
Your anonymous poster failed to demonstrate how the prime mover/first efficient cause is in any way distinguishable from the basic physically consistent behavior of the universe.
Which is certainly all that I, at least, am conceding with respect to your “prime mover”. You haven’t shown that this is God; you’ve just kept arguing by assuming it as a conclusion, which is — Guess what? — still an unreasonable logical fallacy.
That is all there is, materialism. You haven’t proven otherwise. You still aren’t convincing anybody you know what you are talking about, other than your presuppositions, like the mind isn’t material, or a deity exists.
Your deity doesn’t exist, no physical evidence for one. Which means your babble is fiction/myth, and your whole bit sophist of philosophy is wrong. Evidence and science will always take precedence over sophist philosophy.
I find this whole attempt to logic god into being to be baffling. When I was in high school, I remember reading somewhere a proof that Alexander the Great’s horse was white and had an infinite number of legs. This discussion reminds me of that “proof.” All the logic in the world won’t make something exist that doesn’t if the evidence isn’t there.
Owlmirror, you said
I’ve never been one of the people arguing with you, but certainly your writing (and those of everybody else here) is responsible for converting me from a vague sort of deist into at the least an agnostic, and atheist when the wind blows from the east, or something like that. So no, your work here has not been in vain.
Fixed.
Daniel@542,
What utter crap! Dude, the fact that virtual particles are subject to physical laws DOES NOT in any way imply that they are “caused”. Or are you going to contend now that your “God” is just the laws of physics–’cause if you are, we’re going to start talking about what happens at the event horizon of a black hole and whether your God exists on both sides of it.
Virtual particles appear and annihilite spontaneously–no “cause” at all. They do have an effect though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
And no, there is no underlying “cause” we just don’t know about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_inequality
Face it, Dan’l, Acquinas didn’t know about quantum mechanics. If he had, he probably would have said, “Never mind.”
Trivial as it may be, I note the plural of vacuum is vacua, not vacuua.
To see that repeated 10 times is just painful to my sensibilities.
If it amused, then it did what it was supposed to. I hear it in my mind as being sung in close harmony, which covers its metrical sins.
But now, of course, I’m moved to tweak a bit:
“Why can’t we all just smile, be polite and get along?
We all believe in diff’rent things, so let’s sing a happy song.
Give me a moment of your time to share my loving faith so strong.
But you’re evil, bad, and mean if you argue that I’m wrong.”
Or maybe “But you’re mean and disrespectful if [etc]”
Hm.
========
Which is gratifying. Thanks!
The links between thought, intentionality, and consciousness with physical activity in the brain is well documented.
To give one example of thought being a physcial process. There was a man who was having sexual desires towards teenage girls. When he was examined, it turned out there was a tumor pressing on part of his brain. The tumor was removed and the thoughts went away.
The problem of appealing to the immaterial is there’s no grounds for it. How can the immaterial affect the material and vice versa? Is there even such thing as the immaterial? Descartes recognised this problem and proposed the pineal gland as the interface between mind and body. He was wrong, and science has moved on.
From AC Grayling:
Like I said, you’re welcome to put your money where your mouth is and get parts of your brain removed. I’m betting you won’t, because like those philosophical sceptics who won’t jump off a tall building you don’t have anything more than sophistry.
LOL!
Do qualia even exist?
Daniel Dennett thinks they don’t.
Wrong, see Bell’s theorem.
What?
Also, read The Relativity of Wrong to avoid making yet another “but science has been wrong before” argument.
=8-)
One problem which hasn’t been addressed by the Aquinas argument is that evolution can explain why the brain, and mind, has the properties it does. An organism is trying to manipulate itself through an environment, and achieve goals which then allow it to reproduce. You see brain go from its simplest beginnings through more and more complex forms, each step building on previous steps.
With God, however, you have a disembodied mind which has no needs, and was formed against no environment, existing in Original Complexity, for no reason, in a complete vacuum, all by itself, for all Eternity. And yet this Mind is capable of emotions, and craves relationships. Why?
When you think about this, this is just as perplexing and pointless as making the claim that God is a male, which did not evolve to reproduce with a female. Minds, like sex, only make sense in certain contexts.
Thank you Sastra. That is a major problem for anyone thinking of God as a sentient being in the way we thinking terrestrial creatures experience it. Of course, comment #561 will probably lead to a denial that humans evolved or it might be explained away by saying that God thinks in ways we humans can’t know.
Probably not. He hasn’t denied evolution once, or even argued for a particular religion (but I bet he’s Catholic).
Yes, I can foresee more special pleading, which is still a fallacy.
(in case he forgets)
Why should the consciousness of the prime mover have arisen like human consciousness when it doesn’t work like human consciousness? Blah, blah, blah, etc.
Some questions:
Are virtual particles “something” or are they “nothing”?
Can a robot have a mind?
Daniel Smith #564 wrote:
In theory, yes — but artificial intelligence is still in its early stages, and it’s possible that this problem will just be intractable, given our limitations. The trick isn’t to create a robot that we then think is conscious and self-aware: it’s to trick the robot into thinking it’s conscious and self-aware.
Re: Dan Smith #564,
Could a robot have a mind? I think eventually yes, but it would have to have a functioning brain that is continuously changing to have a mind, and Sastra made the excellent point that the only minds we know of at this time are products of evolution; brains on Earth did not just snap into being. So it would seem unlikely that any brain was extant for the birth of the universe, before evolution could kick in and build a brain somewhere.
Well, first, define what you mean by “robot”.
And I’m more curious about the reason for the question than I am about the actual answer… I have a hunch… but what are you getting at, exactly?
They have an empirically detectable effect. Therefore, they are indeed something.
What Sastra said.
Why would you think that a robot could not ever have a mind?
Daniel Smith,
Do notice that the goalposts are moving quite a bit.
The Five Ways are supposed to be simple logical arguments for the existence of God, using only uncontroversial facts and basic logic.
But they’re nothing of the sort. In light of modern science and philosophy, it’s obvious that the Five Ways depend on intuitive leaps that are at best unjustified, and at worst apparently wrong.
With regard to the first three Ways—variants of the Cosmological Argument, you have to make several unwarranted assumptions.
As far as a literal First Cause or Prime Mover, you assume that there has to be a first, uncaused cause or unmoved mover, rather than an infinite regress.
Either a first cause (or mover) or an infinite regress does violence to our normal intuitions. No matter what answer you choose, you will get a counterintuitive answer.
Logically, there’s nothing wrong with an infinite regress. The idea that something has always been here is no more illogical than the idea that it just started being at some point. (Or at no point, because there was no time prior to that.)
Most philosophers gave up on resolving the first cause vs. infinite regress problem over two hundred years ago, because it became apparent that there can be no good answer to the question in the sense of not doing violence to our normal intuitions.
The actual logical fact is that there’s something profoundly wrong with our intuitions about normal causation, when applied to the existence of stuff in general. You can’t validly apply normal macro-scale intuitions about causation to first causes, infinite regresses, or the existence of everything.
We know that for a logical fact. We know that such arguments depend on pumping certain naive intuitions and downplaying others, to get the preferred answer, and that there is no possible logical resolution of the dilemma, without abandoning at least some of our naive intuitions.
That well-known fact is why even mainline Protestant and Catholic theologians typically do not refer to the Cosmological Argument as the Cosmological Proof anymore. They know that an intuitive argument is being made, not a deductively valid proof.
Do you understand that? Do you understand that your arguments hinge on controversial intuitions, and are not deductively valid proofs from unquestionable axioms?
Another way in which you keep pumping dubious intuitions, rather than relying on facts and logic, is to assume that there is some kind of mind that is or can be prior to matter, temporally and/or metaphysically, and that this kind of mind somehow can violate the same intuitions about causation that you assume apply to everything else.
Everything we know scientifically about minds tells us that’s probably false—minds are complicated things with interacting parts, and we can’t even make sense of the concept of a mind that is not made out of something.
The kind of timeless, changeless, simple thing that you’re calling a mind is apparently not a mind at all, and near as anybody can tell, is not anything remotely like a mind. It could not think, or remember, or represent, or plan, or have emotions.
If you can explain how such a thing could rightly be called a mind, do it. Until then, at least recognize that in scientific terms, you seem to be spewing convenient antiscientific nonsense.
You are quite clearly not not making a straightforward logical argument from unquestioned premises, as you set out to do. You are doing exactly the opposite—you are arguing from intuitive dualistic premises that are apparently false in light of science.
Seriously, do notice that you’ve moved the goalposts a whole hell of a lot. Rather than arguing from stuff we know and accept, you are now trying to shift the burden of proof to us.
To make your argument work, you need to prove some very controversial things:
1. That substance dualism is true, and there can be minds prior to matter, and
2. that this helps your case, because somehow our intuitions about causation don’t apply to immaterial/supernatural things, and such things can simply be without being caused, as material things cannot.
In other words, you’ve lost the original argument.
Your new argument, with the goalposts dramatically moved, amounts to roughly this:
1. IF substance dualism is true
2. AND immaterial things are exempt from our intuitions about causality that apply to material things
3. AND at least one mind is prior to matter
4. AND that mind has the amazing ability to will matter into existence
5. AND it did so, and that was how the universe came into existence
6. THEN that’s God, and it exists.
In otherwords, what you’ve got is not really an argument so much as a string of controversial assertions, and you are doing nothing but begging the question.
I don’t think substance dualism is true. I think it’s a stupid idea.
I don’t think minds can be prior to matter.
I don’t think disembodied minds exist, and even if they did, that wouldn’t give them the ability to will matter into existence.
I don’t think that’s where the universe came from, and even if by some freaky and amazing chance it happened to be true, it still wouldn’t answer the real, basic question we started with—why is there something rather than nothing at all?—it would only put the question off a step. (Why is there Mind?) It is therefore wildly unparsimonious, and likely wrong.
I also don’t think that such an amazing self-existent Mind would be your God. I would think it would be something to be amazed by, but there’s no particular reason to worship it. Maybe it’d just be an alien. (What’s the difference?)
You have proved precisely nothing. You haven’t even made a plausible case for anything interesting. All you’ve done is demonstrate your assumptions, and your ignorance.
While I’m bashing the Five Ways, let me take a shot at the Argument from Contingency:
This is false. Contingency is not something you can actually observe.
For all we know—and a fair fraction of cosmologists believe this—the Universe is entirely deterministic, and every bit of it is equally contingent, or equally necessary, depending on how you look at it.
That may seem odd, given the well-known and fundamental randomness of quantum physics, but it’s not. On the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics, and similar interpretations, the apparent randomness of quantum events is subjective. At each potential quantum event, the universe splits into a universe where it does happen, and one where it doesn’t—and in each universe, the observer (now split into two observers) observes what happened in that universe.
This may seem crazily unparsimonious—a staggering proliferation of an inconceivable number of universes—but it’s not.
Even under the Copenhagen interpretation (and similar interpretations), the universe splits at quantum events, at least locally. (E.g., in the Schrodinger’s cat metaphor, the box and cat split into versions where the cat is alive and dead.) At an observation, the superposed states collapse into a random choice of one state or the other.
The Many Worlds interpretation is actually more parsimonious. In either scheme, the universe splits at quantum events, but in the Copenhagen interpretation, that requires two kinds of universes—the real, main universe, and the temporary, local sorta-universes that exist until the wavefunction collapses randomly.
The Many Worlds interpretation is counterintuitive, but simpler. We just assume that when the universe appears to split, it really freaking does split, and that’s that.
It also gets rid of the annoying randomness of the Copenhagen interpretation—there’s no real randomness there, because all of the quantum possibilities do happen, deterministically, in some universe. It just appears random because you’re looking at it from some particular universe. And in any universe you happen to find yourself in, the law of large numbers ensures that with very, very high probability, you’ll see a distribution of “random” stuff that fits extremely well with the “randomness” of other interpretations.
Weird, huh?
Now think about what that means for Aquinas’s supposedly obvious facts about “contingency” and “necessity.”
If Many Worlds is right, then the entire “multiverse” may be contingent, or may be necessary—we don’t even know what that would mean—-but each individual universe is a necessary (deterministic) consequence of the state of the universe that spawned it.
In other words, contingency is subjective. Given the existence of the multiverse, every quantum physically possible universe is actual, and has to be.
The real question then, is why is the multiverse? Why is there something rather than nothing at all, and why is it like that?
If somehow the whole quantum multiverse had to be then the multiverse is necessary, and every universe is necessary, too.
If somehow the whole quantum multiverse didn’t have to be, but just is anyway, then every universe is contingent. None of it had to be, but given the existence of the basic thing, all the ramifications have to be, too.
The bottom line here is that “contingency” and “necessity” are tricky words.
The only sense we can make of contingency and necessity is relative, not absolute—what is possible given what we know or assume or hold constant, while imagining other things to be different.
So far as we know, there’s no such thing as absolute necessity. Nothing absolutely has to be—we don’t even know what that could possibly mean.
Bringing God into it just doesn’t help. Saying that God is an absolutely “necessary” being makes no more sense than saying that the quantum multiverse is a “necessary” being.
Aquinas intuitively assumed that something had to be, because it seemed to him that if there wasn’t something that had to, nothing would be. You can’t get something from nothing, right?
But clearly, our intuitions about such things—which work fairly well for reasoning about particular things within space and time—are profoundly wrong somewhere.
We can no more understand absolute necessity than we can understand absolute contingency. Something is deeply wrong with our intuitions in either case.
If we do assume that something had to be, whether it was God or an impersonal quantum multiverse—that leaves us with an equally bizarre question of “why did that have to be?” and the even more basic question of “how can anything absolutely have to be?”.
Suppose we accept Aquinas’s supposedly “logical” argument—which we shouldn’t—and assume that the existence of anything at all implies that something absolutely “had to be” in some incomprehensible sense of absolute necessity.
Now what? What does that tell us about God?
Not a damned thing. Nothing.
Like the Ontological Argument—which is also wrong—the Argument from Contingency purports to prove the existence of some necessary being.
To modern ears, that sounds like “God,” because in our vernacular, we use “being” to refer to things with minds.
But neither proof is actually about such a being. All “being” means is a thing that bes, i.e., something that is.
Even if either proof was valid, all it would prove is that some thing somehow had to be in some sense we can’t comprehend.
Perhaps that thing is the quantum multiverse, which appears to be a profoundly simple thing—it may be describable by a very, very simple equation, with all of the apparent complexity and randomness just being the ramifications of simple deterministic relationships.
To me, that sounds much simpler and more plausible than a God who’s a superspecial Mind, which is a far more intrinsically complicated thing, and is harder to for me to imagine it just mysteriously having to be.
But back to the Argument from Contingency:
No. That is not a necessary consequence of any definition of contingency that I buy, and my admittedly quite fallible intuitions run the other way. It’s easier for me to imagine something timelessly just being than things just popping into and out of existence.
Um, no. Everything basic could be contingent and eternal, or necessary and eternal, even if higher-level organizations of that stuff might come and go.
Suppose, for example, that space/time and matter/energy are conserved, forever, although they undergo dynamic reconfiguration into different high-level objects, such as planets and people.
In that situation, high-level objects—i.e., configurations of low -level stuff—may come and go, and that would explain our basic evolved-in intuitions about causation that Aquinas relies so heavily on.
(Evolution explains why we’d have reasonable intuitions about causation of high-level stuff, but not the underlying basic stuff. We evolved to reason fairly well about things like rocks, plants, animals, and people, and relative contingency, in “normal” situations—but not about infinite regresses, multiverses, quantum foam and absolute necessity and so on! We should not assume our usual intuitions are valid when applied to those very different kinds of things. Modern science shows that in fact, reality is really pretty counterintuitive when you start looking at that sort of thing. All of Aquinas’s bets are off.)
No. See above. It could all be contingent, or all be necessary, or some of each. Our usual intuitions are useless when thinking about absolute necessity or contingency, like thinking about “up” in deep space. Like “up,” contingency is always relative, so far as we know; we can’t make sense of absolute contingency or necessity.
No. Aquinas was wrong about infinite regresses, necessary or contingent. His intuitions about this are not valid.
You are right to get lost. Aquinas was spewing intuitive-sounding nonsense about absolute necessity and contingency, as well as the impossibility of infinite regresses.
I wonder if anyone can critique an argument for me. In one version it goes “Everything in the universe has a cause, therefore the universe has a cause”. In another version it goes “Everything in my suitcase is an item of clothing, therefore my suitcase is an item of clothing”. I’m sure there’s some subtlety I’m missing here. Also, the zip really chafes.
Depends. :-)
As long as they’re exist, they’re something, and this something causes the observed Casimir effect. My bolded “nothing” in comment 438 is only true in the longer run.
You also assume deterministic physics – and that’s wrong!
“Resolution”? What is this talk about “resolution”? The dilemma itself is wrong. It is founded on assumptions that look obvious but have turned out to be wrong in 1964 at the latest.
On wrong intuitions.
I’m not sure where you’re going with this. Wavefunction collapse has been observed. For instance, there was an experiment where a beryllium ion was observed in two places and opposite spins at the same time.
Argument from consequences :-)
Very well said.
…and it’s already wrong there. Lots of stuff just happens because it can, at unpredictable moments.
Daniel:
Here’s a simple argument about why anything you’d want to call a mind, much less a God, has to be complicated.
One thing that any mind has to do is know things, or at least believe things.
Believing something is a different state from not believing it, right?
So, for example, if you say that something believes some proposition—say, that Moscow is the capital of Russia—and something else doesn’t believe that, there has to be some difference between them, somehow, or the distinction between believing and not believing is meaningless.
Now take any list of 10 particular independent beliefs, and find something that believes those things and something else that doesn’t. Those two things must differ in at least 10 particular ways, corresponding to those beliefs somehow.
They can’t just differ in one way, for example. That would only give you two possible states of knowing or not knowing different combinations of things, and couldn’t distinguish between knowing or not knowing most combinations of our 10 things.
Now imagine something that knows as much as a human. Humans know millions of things. That requires that humans who know particular combinations of things differ from humans who know different combinations of things in millions of ways.
It is not possible for human minds, limited as they are, to be simple. There must be facts about each particular mind that correspond to knowing particular things, and which differ from not knowing those things. And there’s a whole lot of them.
Even merely human minds have to have a lot of “parts”—at least one part for each individual thing that the human might know or not know independently of the others it knows or doesn’t know.
I’m using “part” a little bit loosely there. For example, one gear with 8 possible positions or one neuron with 8 possible firing rates might encode three bits of knowledge.
Still, for each thing you might know, independently of the others, there has to be something about you that differs somehow from knowing the other things but not that.
Notice that this argument doesn’t depend on an assumption of materialism, or any particular mechanism.
It works just as well for immaterial souls.
To say that a soul knows something is to say that it’s somehow different than it would be if it didn’t know that thing. A very knowledgeable soul is must be different in many ways from a much less knowledgeable one.
Simple things simply can’t know much. Things that know a lot are necessarily complicated.
Now imagine a superknowledgeable godlike being who may or may not be omniscient, but in any even knows a whole lot more than any particular human.
That’s a very complicated thing indeed. Necessarily. If it wasn’t very complicated, it wouldn’t be different from something simpler that didn’t know that stuff.
No matter how you slice it, something very knowledgeable is going to be very complicated.
If your god is not very complicated, it’s ignorant.
There’s a certain subtlety here, in that there are different senses of knowing things. We may know a bunch of individual facts, or a more general fact that lets us figure out individual facts as needed.
So, for example, I can do simple arithmetic in my head, and figure out that 201 plus 22 is 223. I don’t have to represent that particular fact, and can concisely represent a lot of concrete facts with a relatively few abstract ones.
That only gets you so far, however.
For example, imagine a God who only “knows” the simple fundamental laws of physics and the initial state of the quantum multiverse, and can figure out the particular state of any particle at any time in any universe by applying a simple formula in a horrendously detailed way.
That God would not be much of a mind, and would not be very smart. It might be able to predict the positions of particles by grinding out the low-level physics, but it wouldn’t know the kinds of things we know about things like rocks, plants, animals, and people. It would not be able to see the forest for the trees.
To see the forest for the trees, you have to at least have relevant concepts like forest and tree.
To be as smart as us, you have to know a lot of stuff. To be a lot smarter, you have to know a lot more stuff. And to know a lot of stuff, you necessarily have to be complicated, or you’re not different from something that doesn’t know that stuff.
That is one reason why few cosmologists believe in God. Such a complicated thing just existing seems even weirder than something comparatively simple like a quantum multiverse just existing.
It also seems utterly farfetched and contrived. We know what minds are, in a general way, and we know how they come into existence. They don’t just happen to be. They are complicated things with very complicated histories, both evolutionarily and developmentally, and it’s absurd to think that something so amazingly complex would just happen to exist, without such a history.
The history of modern science has shown that interesting complexity emerges from the interactions of very many simple things interacting in locally simple ways.
Assuming that it all started with something stunningly complex—and of a certain very interesting and improbable sort that just happens to be convenient for salvaging Bronze Age myths—goes against the overall pattern that science has empirically taught us for the last several hundred years.
David Marjanović:
Well, yeah. That’s why I said “without abandoning at least some of our naive intuitions”. My point was that the apparent paradox is (as usual) due to mis-framing the problem with faulty assumptions.
Quote miner. :-)
My impression is that what you’re interpreting as “wavefunction collapse” can be explained equally well in terms of Copenhagenish interpretations or Many Worldsish interpretations, but I am NOT a physicist and would will probably use the wrong terminology, and might simply be wrong.
Nonetheless, I’ll give it a stab and welcome any corrections…
As I understand it, in either kind of interpretation there’s local interference between superposed universes—whether they’re little partial universes a la Copenhagen, or local parts of whole universes a la Many Worlds.
Either way, we know from interference effects the the universes are not independent until an “observation” forces a definitive split.
My impression (but likely wrong) is that the definitive split is called decoherence on either interpretation, and that “wavefunction collapse” is a Copenhagenish interpretation of what’s really going on when decoherence happens—one of the superposed partial universes just disappears at random, and the other one becomes a normal part of the normal universe. On a Many Worldsish interpretation, the same observed decoherence phenomenon is interpreted as a final split between overlapping universes, after which they go their separate ways and don’t interfere with each other anymore.
But as I said, I could have it all wrong, either in some basic sense, or in terms of getting the terminology wrong.
My general impression was that as of several years ago, Many Worldsish interpretations were still a live option, and especially common among quantum cosmologists (like David Deutsch).
Even with the smiley, I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe you consider “parsimony” a consequence of a theoretical choice? :-)
(Disregarding the issue of whether irreducible randomness should be considered unparsimonious, which physicists seem to disagree on. I kinda do, but I admit my intuitions are way, way out of their league when it comes to fundamental physics.)
Daniel Smith asks:
“Are virtual particles “something” or are they “nothing”?”
It turns out that the vacuum is not empty and boring, but rather quite active. Virtual particles can pop into existence and annihiliate spontaneously. Now the heavier the mass of a virtual particle, the shorter its virtual lifetime. And these particles do have some pretty strange kinematics. Nonetheless, they do have observable effects. What is more, for quantum mechanics to be right, Bell’s Theorem precludes any sort of hidden cause–and quantum theory gives us right answers to dozens of significant figures. So, it would appear that you have a dilemma:
1) If virtual particles are “something” then they are uncaused.
2) If they are nothing, then that “nothing” causes observable effects which can have further effects–uncaused causes.
Indeed, there has been some speculation that the entire Universe is simply one big quantum fluctuation.
Can a robot have a mind?
Define “mind” as distinct from “brain”? We can even show you the place in your brain that gives you mystical out-of-body experiences. John von Neumann once said that when people say that a machine is not capable of human thought that they can never quite specify what is lacking. If they could,one could program a computer to do it.
I’m afraid I don’t have much time for the guys who argue for a “many worlds” vs a Copenhagen-type interpretation of quantum mechanics. I have yet to see an experiment where it was clear that they would yield differing results. They are both metaphysics–interpretations of a predictive mathematical formalism involving unobservables.
In my book, the Many-Worlds interpretation doesn’t even resolve the problem of indeterminacy. Yes, individual measurements wind up deterministic, but which result our consciousness registers–which universe it follows–remains random. I really fail to see how it can be more parsimonious to create multiple new universes with every measurement.
It is all just a matter of which box you decide to put the weirdness of the quantum world in.
Paul W. OM #570 wrote:
I will sometimes argue that the Thing that has to be — and cannot, not be — is Reality. Or, given another name, Existence. Even a state of “total nothingness” (assuming the concept is even coherent) would have to be a state of reality, or existence. The non-existence of Existence thus ends up being a self-contradiction. And note how the existence of this “Necessary Being” doesn’t require a complicated medieval argument; it falls out of logical necessity, and ends up being self-evident.
Which I think is just the way something that significant, ought to be. We end up arguing over what exists, or what form reality takes — not over whether reality is real. God requires “proof” because it is a contingent thing that might — or might not — exist. And, as we have all been pointing out to our good Thomistic friend, the baggage which “God” is forced to drag along is going to require a much more complicated explanation, than the explanation for the existence of existence.
So, automobiles coming out of an automobile factory are not observed to be contingent?
Rainfall is not observed to be contingent upon clouds?
Paul W.,
Your criticisms of the five ways are pedestrian misconceptions that have been answered many times over – most by Aquinas himself.
You seem to be unaware of that. Your plead for the possibility of an infinite regress, for instance, even ignores my posts here on the subject of essentially ordered chains of causality vs. accidentally ordered chains.
You make lengthy arguments but there’s not much there.
Pot, Kettle, Black. Look in the mirror.
So what would a robot (or artificial) mind consist of?
What are the necessary ingredients?
Is it just physical parts or is there more involved?
Parsimony isn’t about how many concrete entities there are. It’s about how many kinds of entities there are, and how many principles you need to account for them, and stuff like that.
So, for example, it was not unparsimonious to hypothesize that stars are like the sun but very far away and very numerous, or that those smudgy things out there were galaxies inconceivably far away and inconceivably numerous… In fact it was parsimonious—you don’t need different theoretical constructs for the sun than for stars, or for the milky way and galaxies.
The history of science shows that being parsimonious about the number of concrete entities is a bad idea. There really are a zillion suns in our galaxy, and a zillion galaxies in the universe. (And going the other way, there are zillions of tiny things making up macroscopic things.)
Nature just doesn’t seem averse to large numbers of things. Why should universes be any different, especially since we do have very good evidence that there are other universes—at least little temporary local ones.
All other things being equal, it’s more parsimonious to guess that those other universes are just other universes like this one, rather than a special kind of sub-universe subsidiary to this one. That seems like an unnecessarily complicated and suspiciously anthropocentric hypothesis, like guessing that stars are not vast numbers of suns like our own.
As for why anybody would care about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, it seems to me that the idea that there are vast numbers of universes is just interesting, if true, like the idea that there are vast numbers of suns and worlds in this universe. How could it not be interesting.
It’s also interesting in the sense that there may be vast numbers of you in alternate universes, splitting off of the you now. How could that not be interesting?
Daniel:
If you say that, after all the crap you’ve posted, and after I’ve explained informed views of such things, well…
You’re just a lying asshole.
Please fuck off and die, idiot.
What was necessary for our brains to evolve? Only physical parts. Therefore, a mind only needs physical parts.
Daniel Smith #581 wrote:
Physical parts, organization, and motion, presumably.
What does God consist of? If it’s immaterial, it’s an immaterial what?
Paul W. says, “The history of science shows that being parsimonious about the number of concrete entities is a bad idea.”
I would contend that the history of shience shows unambiguously that it is a good thing to be parsimonious about the number of things that are in principle unobservable.
We can see other stars. We can see the Balmer series spectral lines in them. We can see that their blackbody temperatures are commensurate with those of the Sun.
Other universes…bupkes. In my opinion, nothing that is in-principle unobservable is interesting. So, while it is very interesting to try and come up with a self-consistent description of “measurement”, near-infinite copies of myself that I cannot get to take on some of my work here are not interesting.
a_ray:
I don’t think that’s the right way to put it.
We can observe other universes, via interference. They are not in principle unobservable—they are observable, have been observed already.
We know they’re real, whatever they are. They observably affect stuff in this universe.
It’s unparsimonious to assume that
1. they’re a different kind of universe than this one (e.g., just a weird little local superposition) or that
2. there isn’t a vast number of them that we can only observe a relative few of.
That’s a little like assuming that there’s no space or stars or galaxies beyond our light cone. Those things aren’t observable, even in principle, either, but there’s good reason to think they’re there.
It’s unparsimonious to assume that our universe ends at the places we can’t see past—why should it?
It also seems unparsimonious to think that other universes, which we can observe in part, would end at the points we can’t see past.
a_ray:
Get yourself a quantum computer.
To hear David Deutsch tell it, as I recall it anyhow, that’s exactly what quantum computing is—ganging together a bunch of copies of your computer across many universes and having them cooperate to solve a problem. (E.g., ganging together an exponential number of computers to solve a combinatorially explosive problem in linear time.)
He argues that if quantum computation can do that, we should guess that the universes involved are real—if not, where does all that computation take place?—and there’s no reason to assume they’re not just as real and in just the same way as this one; by default, we should guess that they are.
Besides, as I understand it, it’s nearby and overlapping universes that make your polarized sunglasses work. Gotta give ’em credit for that. :-)
Sastra, is this really someone you think who cares about reason?
Kel, OM #589 wrote:
Short answer: yes.
I’ve dealt with Thomists before, and he’s typical. From what I can tell, Daniel genuinely believes that his belief in God is reason-based, with only a reasonable amount of faith needed on top of that. That’s important to him/them. He would probably be the first to tell you that, if he came to the conclusion that believing in God was irrational, he would no longer believe.
They don’t all say that.
A universe from nothing – well worth the hour of your time.
Unfortunately, he seems to have relapsed to argumnet from authority; he’s not even attempting to refute Paul’s commentary, he’s just asserting that Aquinas dealt with all possible objections by saying something about contingency.
Paul’s piece @574 on the complexity necessary for knowledge is excellent and I’d like to say thanks. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before.
Stephen @571,
Very droll.
You refer to the fallacy of composition, no? :)
Paul W. says, “He argues that if quantum computation can do that, we should guess that the universes involved are real—if not, where does all that computation take place?—and there’s no reason to assume they’re not just as real and in just the same way as this one; by default, we should guess that they are.”
There is no more reason to posit the reality of Everett’s extra universes than there is to attribute reality to Hilbert space or the the Grand Canonical Ensemble in Stat Mech. Quantum computing is just as easy to understand in the path integral formulation as it is in the Many Worlds Interpretation–and at least the Path Integral formulation allows me to calculate things more easily.
There is simply no reason to favor Many Worlds over Copenhagen. They don’t even teach it in physics grad schools, except maybe in passing. I had to read up on it on my own. An intriguing idea, but ultimately science has to deal with observables. The rest is just a conceptual aid. If Many Worlds makes it easier for you to visualize the quantum world, great. Personally, I find the path integral approach yields a quasi-intuitive picture of the collapse of the wave function that is a bit easier for me than the explosion of Universes.
BTW, we’re pretty sure other Universed DO exist–there are probably regions of spacetime that we will never communicate with again due to inflation of the early universe. I don’t think about them much either.
Just what are you asking here? Are you looking to see how artificial intelligence is progressing? Are you asking for the possibility of such a robot? Or are you trying to appeal to our intuition on an as-yet unknown phenomenon to make a point about dualism?
If I were a betting man, I’d take it as trying to make some point about dualism. I don’t actually know just how it is that consciousness emerges so I have no idea if it will ever be possible for artifical intelligence to be replicated. Though I’m quite sure of the link between the physical brain and the mental phenomena we collectively know as a mind. Modify the brain, modify the mind. Injure the brain, injure the mind. Stimulate the brain, stimulate the mind. etc. The empirical evidence is unanimously supportive of the concept of a mind being an emergent property of physical particles interacting.
You’ve had several hundred million years of natural selection organising how your brain cells fire, you carry around a big lump of grey matter with about 1015 synapsids that connect 1011 neurons. This lump of grey matter accounts for 2% of the mass of your body yet uses 20% of the oxygen. Housing this brain in a bipedal ape before modern medicine used to result in the death of about 1 in 5 women giving birth to it. Yet you so readily dismiss that thought or consciousness can be physical phenomena without even so much as wondering why people take that position to begin with.
Kel, I suspect that question about robots and minds relates to the concept of the philosophical zombie (about which, as you know, there’s been much discussion here over a number of threads).
(Heh, the P-Z! ;) )
Yeah, so do I. Then it would just be a false analogy instead of a red herring. I wonder why one would bring up robots instead of asking the direct question of consciousness as Chalmers does. I don’t buy the “hard problem of consciousness”, but then again I’ve become sceptical of the “hard problem” of anything when it comes to evolution.
…
Machinery, maybe? It’s not like we upload human brains into robots, unless reality is turning into a bad Science Fiction drama.
Was that your attempt at being ‘deep’, by the way? Robots are programmed. From quite an old article, I did notice something interesting though:
In the 1960s, Holland created the field of genetic algorithms, a process in which computers solve problems by mimicking biological evolution. By adapting concepts of natural selection and sexual reproduction to computer programming, Holland showed that computers could “evolve” their programming to solve complex problems in ways that even their creators did not fully understand.
Can we start to give robots sentience? Not yet. But I imagine in the future we’ll be able to. Even then though, all of that is still just computer programming.
I’ve been a bit long-winded, but you can hopefully see why discussion of robot ‘brains’ is rather absurd at the moment.
Shala,
Not that absurd.
cf. artificial neural network.
cf. DARPA’s Urban Challenge.
cf. Deep Blue.
I suspect that, at some point in the (indeterminate) future, it will be a philosophical argument only as to how “simulated consciousness” differs from “real consciousness”.
I suspect that, at some point in the (indeterminate) future, it will be a philosophical argument only as to how “simulated consciousness” differs from “real consciousness”.
I must say, I’m hooked. I’m looking forward to the progress of artificial intelligence. Thanks for the articles.
Right next to that argument will be one on whether clones have souls.
I don’t think he’s that honest — or that brave. Or that committed to rationality.
When [purportedly] rationalist believers that have a strong psychological commitment to their beliefs have the essential irrationality of their arguments exposed (or in some cases, when they deduce it themselves), they don’t suddenly become atheists. No, they just shrug and fly the presuppositionalist pirate flag that was formerly hidden by their rationalist colours.
(“Yarrr! All what floats on th’ seven seas belongs to us, and that includes yer ontological ship and yer epistemic booty, and ye already know this, and ye cannot argue against us without sinking… !!“)
They can claim justification from Paul’s frequent presuppositional anti-rationalist exhortations, like 1 Corinthians 1:17-29.
Daniel certainly looks like he is such a pirate believer.
@602: bonus points for use of phrase “epistemic booty”.
I think by the time we have “simulated consciousness”, it will be because we have worked out the algorithms you need for a thing to be conscious, and so the term “simulated consciousness” will already have become nonsensical.
FWIW, I’m more or less with Hofstadter on consciousness being a recursion. It’s what happens when an entity that’s capable of modelling _others_ as entities with internal mental/emotional states begins to recursively model _itself_ as an entity with an internal mental/emotional state.
One thing I don’t get about those who appeal to dualism to explain the mental is that appealing to dualism doesn’t actually explain anything about the mental. It doesn’t explain how consciousness arises, it doesn’t explain how thought works, it doesn’t explain emotions or information processing, etc. How does making it immaterial make it any more or less understood? At least with physical models of the brain then there are means to create a theory of mind that can explain the phenomena as observed / experienced.
Appeals to dualism are the ultimate appeal to ignorance, they don’t actually explain how the proposed phenomena work – it’s just arguing from mystique. It cannot be explained, indeed it doesn’t even desire to be explained. It’s magic in its purest form, which for some reason is preferred to actually figuring it out.
Kel says, “One thing I don’t get about those who appeal to dualism to explain the mental is that appealing to dualism doesn’t actually explain anything about the mental. It doesn’t explain how consciousness arises, it doesn’t explain how thought works, it doesn’t explain emotions or information processing, etc. ”
Exactly. One of the most basic distinctions between science and anti-science is that science explains the unknown in terms of the understood, while anti-science (aka woo) explians the unknown in terms of the even-more unknown.
Incidentally, since Daniel pulled the “so says modern science” card in an attempt to dodge what we now know about causality, virtual particles etc., can we just respond to his claims with “So says medieval theology” or “so says bronze-age mythology”? I mean, his arguments are flawed anyway, but we can just dismiss his premises, if he thinks he can dismiss ours.
My point was you don’t need to get that far and fill another 10 screens. You can just mention that the dilemma is wrong and move on to the next point. :-)
You’re probably right.
This holds for me just as well!
Not sure what you mean. I was trying to ask whether randomness is indeed annoying in a relevant sense and thus something to get rid of.
Interacting physical parts, see comment 585.
BTW, are you still arguing for ex nihilo nihil fit? Or do you now agree it’s false?
Could you explain it a bit more succinctly than the Wikipedia article does? :-)
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Kel, OM #605 wrote:
I think that when you figure out the implications behind either dualism or idealistic monism — mind/consciousness is independent of the brain/physical — you realize that it’s a stealth First Cause argument. Not just the mind of God, but every mind, is an irreducible First Cause which cannot be explained by anything simpler than, or prior to, itself. So there’s no need to describe, explore, or even wonder about the underlying mechanisms or source. We are “in the image” of God (and vice versa): the First Cause of our own thoughts. Selfhood, is fundamental to existence.
This approach is not only satisfyingly lazy, it reassures our egocentric intuitions; hence, its appeal.
Kel:
One explanation of the appeal of such non-explanations is that we didn’t evolve to explain things in a deep sense. We evolved to predict and plan, to get food and fuck and so on.
If you have high-level heuristics (rules of thumb) that work for what you need to do, they don’t need to be deep, and your ideas don’t even need to be true, as long as your predictions are “close enough” and you get appropriately fed and fucked.
For example, even a lot of engineers don’t really need to know about relativity or quantum physics. Newtonian physics is superficial and in a sense deeply wrong, but it works like a charm for most real-world stuff. It’s close enough for inclusive fitness.
Pascal Boyer (in Religion Explained, a wonderful book) says things roughly like this:
1. We’ve evolved (physically and socially) to have different schemas (clusters of concepts and heuristics) for understanding different categories of things, particularly plain dumb matter, tools, living things, animals, and people.
2. We reason intuitively about animals and people using a naive but workable mental model of minds, which deals with things like goals and plans and emotions, in a way pretty much disconnected from the schemas reason about brute matter, which deal with things like mass, inertia, fluid flow, and so on.
3. In effect, this makes us “natural born dualists” (Paul Bloom’s term), because we have two very different ways of thinking about different categories of things, and don’t know that the one can be reduced to the other. (Actually prescientific and unscientific people tend to be at least triplists, because they think that there’s a life essence as well as a mind essence.)
For most purposes, dualism or triplism or whatever makes a lot of sense. There’s usually not much point, when you’re talking to somebody, in thinking about their amygdala and neurons; you have important things to think about, like their state of knowledge, their goals, etc. And to “understand” them usefully, for a particular purpose, you usually don’t have to understand them in detail. You usually have to understand some high-level things like whether their relevant goals are in accord with yours, whether their knowledge of relevant stuff agrees with yours, and whether that’s likely to make them cooperate with you or cheat you.
Ultimate explanations just aren’t on the radar. They’re not what life is mostly about. Life is mostly about explaining and predicting things at a fairly high level well enough to get fed and fucked.
4. Religion is like that too. Religion is not mostly about ultimate explanations or an afterlife or any of that hifalutin’ stuff. It’s about cooperation and exploitation, truth-telling and lying, and especially bargaining—cutting deals with supernatural entities, to get various goods in return, and purportedly supernatural reasons for dealing with other humans in particular ways.
What makes a supernatural entity interesting to anybody is not whether it can solve the deep philosophical problem of why there is something rather than nothing at all.
(Many religions don’t address that issue at all, and the ones that do mostly do in their elite abstract theology, not so much in day-to-day popular religion. It’s just not a problem that many people are often concerned with—and why should they be? Even a_ray_in_dilbert_space doesn’t care if there are other universes constantly coming into existence with other hims in it. :-) )
What makes religion interesting is things like
* prayer, sacrifice, reward or punishment for virtue—i.e., various forms of deal-cutting with the supernatural
* rationalizations for favoring in-groups and exploiting out-groups—we’re the good guys and should be nice to each other so we’ll all prosper, and they’re the bad guys, who maybe we can cheat, or kill and take their stuff—and
* rationalizations for existing social relations (E.g., priests and aristocrats or high-castes have power and wealth because they’re closer to god or blessed by the gods or that’s their karmic reward for past life behavior.)
Religion often purports to be otherworldly and special, but it’s very much about this world, and even to the extent that it’s about another world, it’s mostly about interacting with that other world in this-worldly terms for this-worldly reasons.
And really, folk theory of mind is where it’s at. In this world, especially in a prescientific culture, most of what makes you differentially successful is dealing with other minds—getting respect and admiration and cooperation rather than contempt and abuse and exploitation, etc. It’s pretty nearly a zero-sum game, and you want to play the right game and cut the right deals to come out on top, or avoid ending up at the bottom.
Where the universe came from, or what minds are made out of, is just not nearly as interesting, in normal human terms, as taking care of business.
Paul W., OM #610 wrote:
Excellent post (again). I would modify this point, though, because I think people do care about the ultimate questions, in the sense of “why are we here?” “Where are we going?” Emphasis on the all-important cosmic us.
Religious explanations treat deep questions about the universe, as if they were social questions. “Why is there something rather than nothing” is not asking about physical science and cosmology, but the give-and-take motivations of relationships. There is something rather than nothing because Someone wanted it that way. Oh, okay. And you are here because someone wanted you to be here, and now you owe them something back. Even better.
Astronomy can tell you how the planets move, but only astrology can relate the movements of the planets, to your personal life. The deep meaning of planetary motion. The profound connection. A holistic understanding that doesn’t exclude the all-significant self.
If you look at the high-falutin’ handwaving of the theologians on the issues of deep significance, they do suspiciously seem to reduce to some version of “it all comes down to love.”
With computers, you can take the same physical hardware and load in different software and it will do completely different things. I would say that the software is like the mind and the hardware is like the brain.
As for the criticisms of my responses to Paul W, he keeps bringing up the strawman about the beginning of the universe and how that relates to chains of causality and an infinite regress. I already showed that that argument has nothing to do with the essentially ordered series Aquinas used in his proof of God.
Then he uses the deterministic argument against Aquinas’ proof from contingency. Makes me wonder. Does he really think evolution is predetermined? Or is he just so married to his atheism, he’ll say anything?
In response to the criticism of my “so says the science of today” remark: Is the science of today settled? Is there no more evidence to discover? No more debate? How does anyone here know that future science won’t find that something immaterial is necessary to explain the universe? You can’t know that based on science. Science is never done. It never proves anything. Don’t pretend that my statement somehow showed ignorance of the scientific method. The only ignorance shown in that regard is from the defenders of “absolutist science” – who seem to think the scientific knowledge and theories of today will never be overturned.
To paraphrase a comedian…..science knows it doesn’t know everything otherwise it would stop. There are many people in universities working today because we know that there are things we don’t know.
HOWEVER….you don’t get to fit whatever you fancy into these gaps of ignorance. You would obviously scoff at anyone using the “so says the science of today” argument for invisible pink unicorns or the Greek gods or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Placing all your hopes that the science of today might be overturned AND that the a new theory might validate your beliefs is ridiculous. The rational thing to do is to view the universe under the current framework (which has remarkabley accurate predictions) rather than some unknown theory that you like because it allows for your medieval mythical being.
Also, read the Asimov article that David linked to.
FWIW, the Many World’s interpretation of quantum mechanics is every bit as random as the Copenhagen interpretation. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the eigenstate into which the wave function collapses is random. In the Many Worlds theory, the universe into which our consciousness journeys is random. It is a matter of preference on where you put the randomness.
I should add “or come up with a new theory that makes as accurate (or better) predictions than the current ones”. However, this is beyond the ability of most people and definitely beyond Daniel.
As I understand it, there’s no randomness. When the universe splits, both resulting yous are equally you. There is no separate conscousness thing that could go one way or the other—it goes both ways, and when the resulting you’s observe “random” quantum events, they quite deterministically see different things.
That’s what’s really freaky about it—if it’s true, there are a lot of yous, and they’re all you.
That’s very counterintuitive, but parsimonious.
Are you so married to your imaginary deity you will also say anything and move goalposts at random? YES, you are guilty of that. And that is why you are failing.
So that’s it? That’s all you have to say about it? Why did you ask the question originally?
Daniel, please respond to the issue of Newton’s Third Law; once you grasp that everything is an _interaction_, all of your causal chain argument collapses; it’s a causal net and doesn’t have any end point.
You seem to want us to believe your argument based on a medieval view of causality but you belittle refutations based on a modern view of causality. You’re doing this on a computer. The irony, it burns.
Daniel’s comment 618 implies he hasn’t been understanding anybody’s claims. Apparently he thought people think that the mind is the brain, which would be stupid, when in fact it’s clear that the mind is the activity of the brain.
What a straw-man, I challenge you here to find one person who thinks that science is absolute and cannot be overturned. As David suggested above, read The Relativity Of Wrong.
The problem with the way you used it is that you dismissed science that would destroy your conjecture. But what else do you expect? You’re making an a posteriori argument on the nature of the universe itself. If you don’t have any scientific validity for your argument, then forget about the chance of being wrong – you don’t have a chance of being right. There’s a reason after all that we don’t deal with Laplace’s demon, or that Aristototelian physics seems infantile.
If you want to see where the scientific mind comes from, watch an episode of The Ascent Of Man called Knowledge Or Certainty. Perhaps you can stop with your scientism straw-man and realise that people here fully understand the provisional nature of scientific inquiry and understand the fallibility of the process and of the knowledge itself to be a strength as opposed to an epistemic weakness…
Which is what bothers me about these arguments. Especially too as the ones who make the arguments against materialism / physicialism in terms of the inadequacy to explain particular phenomena to then turn around and say in effect “they just exist”. Achilles and the tortoise all over again…
Which you’ve got to admit is ironic in the context of the arguments made ;)
This really needs to be stressed. For example the current theory of quantum electrodynamics is empirically accurate to such a degree that it’s like measuring the width of North America to the width of a human hair. Quantum effects are not only being measured but are demonstrative, one recent experiment I heard about involved getting a wire to simultaneously be in 2 quantum states at the same time – as the mathematics predicts of course.
I wonder why the likes of Daniel Smith aren’t jumping off tall buildings*, “so says the science of today” could dismiss gravity. After all, there’s a problem with reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics. And even then, this is only Einstein’s theory, which surpassed Newton’s theory, which surpassed pre-Newtonian notions. What’s gravity going to be in the 21st or 22nd century? You can’t can’t trust of the science of today.
*while this wouldn’t prove the existence of gravity, it would get rid of a lot of bad philosophers.
Daniel Smith #612 wrote:
Don’t forget, the software is also physical. That’s not a small point.
Pattern and motion are not themselves physical, but they describe the relationships and states of physical objects. I think you’re still in danger of reifying them.
We don’t know any scientific conclusion; everyone has already dogpiled on their tentative nature. But, consider that this view had been the prevailing assumption, and was rejected for what scientist’s conceded was a better explanation.
Mind/body dualism’s only real scientific hope, at this point, is in parapsychology. This is the same as saying it’s dead in the water. After well over 100 years to find evidence for a hypothesis for something that is supposed to be so common that most people believe in it based on their own experiences, they are still trying to come up with a replicable result which will show that psychic forces of some kind actually exist. Nothing has changed, nothing has been refined, no predictions have been made, and they’re always on the brink of a real breakthrough, any day now, soon. The only real breakthroughs have been in explaining how and why people can come to believe in it, even if it’s not true.
It’s unlikely that great discoveries in physics are going to come out of pseudoscience. One might as well use theology.
To be clear: I am not a dualist.
But you are an evidenceless deist. Without evidence, you are at the wrong blog.
Daniel Smith #625 wrote:
I thought God was supposed to be an immaterial Mind, with no physical body.
Then why are you arguing for an immaterial mind? That’s dualism…
That does not make sense given what you wrote in #538:
Perhaps there is no matter, no physical realm, no material world — it is all illusion, and the only thing that exists are thoughts in the mind of God.
Idealistic monism. Dude.
I am not trying to fit anything into gaps. Metaphysics is the framework within which science works – not the other way around. You all fit scientific findings into a larger metaphysical framework. That’s all I’m doing. I do not reject science – I’m just realistic about its limitations.
There is no solid scientific objection to Aquinas’ proof from causation. Newton’s third law – the law of inertia – does not violate it. The continued motion of a thing in motion is caused by the fact that it is in motion and the fact that nothing opposes that motion. That’s two factors of causation right there that must be accounted for.
As for virtual particles:
So the cause of a virtual particle’s existence is the amplitude of its existence vs. non-existence. This suggests properties of the particles themselves as causation. But something causes the values to fluctuate such that the particles pop in and out of existence. It is still causation through and through. We’re not talking about random matter, but rather about matter governed by form, causation and substance.
To quote a famous philosopher “I don’t think so Tim”. Also, when folks like you, sophist philosophers, mention metaphysics, I hang onto my wallet and mind, as both are about to be picked.
Har, says the 30+ year practicing scientist.
Har. Keep going, nonsense all the way down, Cricket.
Some advice, don’t argue facts with scientists. You will lose. Find a philosophical blog where you can bullshit yourself to your heart content.
Daniel Smith #631 wrote:
Metaphysics deals with questions regarding “the nature of reality,” and it seems to me that this is, even in broad framework, an empirical question. Beliefs about God are conclusions based on evidence and reason; they are not simply plucked out of the air, as a matter of idle whim and speculation. Presumably.
Naturalism and supernaturalism are competing hypotheses. Science does not assume that only the natural world exists as starting point; naturalism is a tentative conclusion, a working theory, capable of being falsified. As you pointed out, there might, in theory, one day be good evidence for immaterial existants.
A question for you: earlier, I had suggested to one of the other commenters that, if asked, you would probably say that your belief in God is based on reason: if you came to the conclusion that believing in God was irrational, you would no longer believe. Since I don’t know you well, I might have been presumptuous.
But was that, basically, correct?
Why?
Because you don’t know better, that’s why. Learning is a change in the brain, in the hardware, in the wiring; and so is forgetting.
Science theory is the framework within which science works. All the rest of metaphysics/philosophy can go cheney itself as far as science is concerned.
No, only one: the lack of acceleration of a thing (in any direction) is caused by the fact that nothing accelerates it.
Unaccelerated motion is relative. There is no difference between motion and standstill as long as you don’t arbitrarily choose a frame of reference. Why are you stuck with Newton?
How? Why can’t pure random do it?
Have you forgotten about Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation?
You haven’t even tried to understand Bell’s theorem.
Shame on you.
Well, let me be clearer: I’m not a Cartesian dualist of the type with which the term has come to be identified today.
I am what is called a “hylemorphic dualist” – one who believes that the human mind is a combination of form and matter as two components of one complete substance.
A Cartesian dualist holds that the mind is immaterial and the body physical, and then struggles to explain how the two interact with each other. The materialist holds that the mind is just brain activity and then struggles to explain how something physical can contain intentionality, abstract universals and determinateness.
Hylemorphism holds that matter takes on certain forms – a table is matter taking the form of a table, a rock is matter in the form of a rock, etc. Living things also have a living form that Aristotle called a “soul” (but not the immaterial ghost-like soul of Cartesian dualism.) It is merely the form of a living thing. The form of a human being is one of a “rational soul”. So there is no “mind/body problem” for the hylemorphic dualist. Of course this all makes perfect sense in light of formal and final causes. The matter within a human being is directed towards taking the form of a rational soul. Scientific evidence poses no threat to this type of dualism. I fully expect the mind and body to be intertwined with each other, for they are two components of one substance.
If you think the human mind is a substance or a form, you’ve already fucked up, so the rest of your thoughts on the matter are worthless.
And for pity’s sake, I told you that Newton 3 is the one about equal and opposite reactions, and what do you do? You say something about inertia. Wrong law, dude- are you incapable of reading for comprehension? The difference between linear causation and symmetric interaction destroys the causal-chain argument; it’s based in a pre-scientific physics which is demonstrably wrong.
Yes, that’s correct.
In other words, Sastra was right in #609:
—
No. No problem at all. Everything you said makes perfect sense…
Oh man, where to even begin.
I’m very tired today, so I’ve probably overlooked more points.
Daniel Smith #635 wrote:
So God has both mind, and body?
That naturalism works is not an underlying assumption, it’s the only methodology that works. The sad reality of the situation is that those who try to diminish science by appealing to philosophical underpinnings often do in order to dismiss particular scientific findings that don’t adhere to their worldview. It’s dimissing what they don’t wish to be true by appealing to what they see as a greater truth, and thus becoming “not even wrong”.
Fundamental problems with hylemorphism (besides the obvious that it is bullshit):
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/suppl1.html
What are you talking about? Read some Dan Dennett on the matter, these ideas have no problems at all being explained in terms of physicialism. Heck, even read a book or three on evolution and see the continuum in nature showing the gradual emergence of such traits. Or even some Bertrand Russell, he goes through abstract universals in The Problems Of Philosophy explaining quite clearly why some knowledge is abstract and some not.
Not really sure where you’re getting your information on physicalism, but if its the same place that you’re getting your information on science you might want to look for a new source.
Daniel Smith says, “Metaphysics is the framework within which science works – not the other way around. You all fit scientific findings into a larger metaphysical framework. That’s all I’m doing. I do not reject science – I’m just realistic about its limitations.”
Oh, dear. Oh, deary me. Just what “scientific finding” would you be trying to fit into what metaphysical framework? Because I’m not seeing anything I would call “empirical”.
Daniel: “So the cause of a virtual particle’s existence is the amplitude of its existence vs. non-existence.”
Uh, no. The wave function exists in Hilbert Space–which is not a physical space–and describes the particle. It’s amplitude is nonzero when the particle exists and zero when it does not. It is not the “cause” of the particle.
Daniel: “This suggests properties of the particles themselves as causation. But something causes the values to fluctuate such that the particles pop in and out of existence. It is still causation through and through. We’re not talking about random matter, but rather about matter governed by form, causation and substance.”
Gee, Daniel, I don’t seem to remember coming across a “form” operator in my quantum mechanics text. Maybe, you’d care to tell us how “form, causation and substance” give rise to the Casimir force?
What? No?
OK, let’s try something simpler. You say everything is caused, right? Well, then it should be trivial for you to come up with a theory that predicts when a particular nucleus will undergo beta decay. And while you are at it, you can explain how your causation mechanism gives rise to a distribution of decays over time that follows a random distribution to arbitrary accuracy. So what “form” is it making the nucleus decay…bringing an electron and anti-neutrino into existence out of nothing. Neat trick, that?
I like how the crazies argue from physical “laws” for a “lawmaker”.
The Laws of Motion pretty much say that objects left alone stay the way they are. The implication at the time was that there are no angels pushing objects along or holding them up, nor demons pushing objects down. In short, all is physical, all is physics.
To go from that to the existence of a god is just lunacy.
And, while we are at it, the universe outside this earth is pretty much empty nothingness. And inside each atom is mostly nothing. To argue that “all this” cannot have come from nothing is lunacy, too. (Just in case that comes up.)
Still no evidence for his imaginary deity. Try physical evidence Daniel. A billion/zillion times better than sophist philosophy, which is all you have to offer.
Paul W., I simply do not see how it can be “parsimonious” to posit an unbounded number of Universes?
And thus the necessity for understanding the science of mind emerges. This “intuitive physics” is naive by todays standards, it has been superseded by its inability to be useful beyond the superficial. And in a deep sense, it is deeply wrong – taking our evolved brain and imposing how our brain works on reality.
Daniel Smith wrote:
Daniel, this is probably the most (unintentionally) hilarious thing I’ve read in this thread so far; while there are many words one may use to describe your arguments, ‘realistic’ isn’t one of them.
All based on the fact that “law” is a misnomer.
The “laws” of physics are descriptive, not prescriptive. They are generalizations across lots of observations.
Daniel Smith #635 wrote:
You know, I tried something interesting here. In place of “form,” I substituted the word “pattern.” I had said earlier that mind was the effect of molecules in a particular pattern and motion.
When I did that, I got something very like what Daniel dismisses as “materialism.” The materialist would hold that intentionality and thought emerge from the pattern (form) of living matter. If you destroy the pattern — smash the brain with a rock, say — the material that’s left won’t be able to think. Mind and body (brain) are thus inseparable — unlike with Cartesian dualism.
This isn’t going to work with “God,” though. Not unless you make some convoluted and implausible argument that the stars and galaxies of the universe itself are arranged in a moving pattern that works just like firing neurons and chemicals reactions, and so the cosmos is really a Brain on a gigantic scale, and the mind that results, is the Mind of God.
Dude.
Except that you argue against science you disagree with, then try to pull a philosophical switch in order to justify it. Why can’t you just admit you are ignorant about the basics of modern science and the application thereof, and instead of trying to justify your ignorance in terms of dismissal use it as an opportunity to learn more about the nature of reality?
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
Parsimony doesn’t have anything to do with bounds on the number of concrete entities.
Parsimony is about the number of types of entities, and in particular the types of entities that don’t follow as ramifications of the basic types.
So, for example, it’s not unparsimonious to hypothesize that that the sun and stars are the same kind of thing—stars, like the sun. It unparsimonious to assume that they’re different types of things, and assume that there are two types of phenomena, when one will do.
The number of particular stars has nothing to do with parsimony.
Likewise, it’s not unparsimonious to guess that the universe-like things that our universe seems to interact with in QM (superposed eigenstates) are in fact just more universes, like this one. It is unparsimonious to assume that they are two different kinds of things—this universe, and those temporary, partial universe-like things that get superposed.
The number of particular universes has nothing to do with parsimony—it’s still only one kind of thing, i.e., universes.
We know that there’s at least one universe. We also know that our universe appears to interact with a number of other universe-like things. The parsimonious explanation is that those other things are just more universes. The unparsimonious thing is to assume that they’re not, and are a whole different type of thing.
After a while it gets tricky remembering whether “universe” is supposed to mean really everything or just the local everything… there’s a line in one of the Discworld novels where one of the Monks of Time is trying to explain multitemporal causality, ending with the line “It’s extraordinarily difficult to do this in a language originally designed for telling other apes where the ripe fruit is.”
Paul W. OM #653 wrote:
My understanding of the principle of parsimony is that it doesn’t have to do with number or types of entities, but whether or not they’re necessary to explain the evidence. Occam’s Razor is not about the way we ought to expect the world to be: it’s an admission of human fallibility. When we invent possibilities which aren’t required, they’re not falsifiable, and we leave ourselves in a position where we can’t be proven wrong. And we must never place ourselves beyond correction.
(The cosmological physics discussion is over my head. This may also be over my head, but I’m not even going to try the other one.)
That’s, frankly, not true.
But it doesn’t mean you can’t give greater weight to the number of types…
Well, we shouldn’t assume more stars than we can see or otherwise detect.
I just wouldn’t put it that way :-)
As long as you are making empirical claims you’re subjected to science. That a being created the universe is such a claim.
No, you’re arrogantly trying to say science is either wrong or incomplete because it doesn’t fit with your particular idea of causation.
We have told you repeatedly that virtual particles invalidate one of the assumptions. The fact that you’re just playing word games to try to dismiss it isn’t our fault.
The law of inertia is Newton’s first law. I’m not sure why you’re bringing it up.
But hey, at least you’ve progressed to the 17th century….
_ _ _ _
Look, we’re not making any headway here. Why don’t you just tell us why the thing you allegedly showed exists can be called God. How can we be certain it has consciousness? Is it omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient? If yes to to any of these please explain how you know. Also, is it the Christian God?
Me,
Ignore that. I just read Stephen Wells’ comment.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo da Vinci.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” — Albert Einstein.
“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.” — Albert Haldemann.
—
DS @625: “To be clear: I am not a dualist.”
DS @635: “Well, let me be clearer: I’m not a Cartesian dualist of the type with which the term has come to be identified today.
I am what is called a “hylemorphic dualist”
<giggle>
PS Dualism.
David Marjanović:
I didn’t put that right.
The number of concrete entities doesn’t matter to parsimony unless there’s reason to think it should.
So, for example, it does matter in the case of a simple paranoid conspiracy theory, in which there are many witting conspirators who all keep the secret. The more conspirators who have to keep the secret, the less plausible it is. If keeping the secret is even a little bit difficult, then the less plausible the conspiracy is, because the law of large numbers says that somebody is likely to blow it and the conspiracy will unravel.
But it doesn’t matter if there’s no applicable logic like that that says it should matter.
For example, supposing you didn’t know how many people there were in the world, even approximately, but you do know that you’ve met a few thousand.
Should you guess that there are only a few thousand people in the world? No. A guess of millions or even billions might seem unparsimonious—what would you need all those people for?—but it isn’t.
You need to justify any claim that there are lots of concrete individuals of a given type, but you also need to justify any seemingly-reasonable bound on the number of concrete individuals.
I don’t know of any reason to think that Many Worlds is unparsimonious in positing a vast number of universes. It’s not like a paranoid conspiracy theory—it’s more like guessing from meeting thousands of people that there are millions or billions of people.
We have some reason to think that there are a number other universes—or at least small alternative partial universes. We have no good reason to think that they aren’t whole universes, or that there’s only a “reasonable” number of them.
The assertion that it’s unreasonable to think that there could be so many universes is itself unreasonable. Without some reason for putting a bound on the number of universes, it’s a parsimonious guess, like guessing that there are vast numbers of people, or atoms, or suns.
That is something that we’ve learned empirically—assuming that the cosmos will limit itself to “reasonable” numbers of concrete entities is a really bad assumption.
Well, we shouldn’t assume more stars than we can see or otherwise detect.
Certainly, we shouldn’t just assume that, but we do freely infer it.
We have reason to infer that there are vast numbers of stars we can’t see or otherwise detect—vastly more than we can see, in fact.
We have no good reason to think that there’s a reasonable bound on the number of stars, i.e., that there aren’t vastly more stars we can’t see.
So we do in fact infer that the stars we can see are only a tiny, tiny fraction of a vastly larger total number of stars. That’s the received scientific view at this point, if I’m not mistaken.
Here’s why: we know that spacetime is very, very gently curved and we have no reason to think it stops anywhere near the limit of what we can see. The limit of what we can see is due to the expansion of the universe—we can’t see more than about 15 billion light years out, because the universe is expanding at a rate that makes things further than that recede from us at the speed of light or more. (Likely much more, for things really far away.)
The current guess, from the extraordinarily slight curvature of spacetime, is that the universe has a very, very large diameter, and we can only see a tiny local patch of it within our 15 billion light year radius. There are apparently vast numbers of such patches of spacetime, separated from each other by the expansion of the universe—we can never see them, because the universe expands them away from us faster than light or any other effect from them can get to us.
The vast majority of stars are apparently unobservable, but that’s not unparsimonious. It would be unparsimonious to guess that there aren’t vastly more stars that we can’t ever see than those we can—we’d have to throw in additional assumptions, e.g., that our visible region of spacetime is unusually flat, and we’d probably be wrong.
If we did find good reason to think that, our best estimate of the number of invisible stars would immediately shift dramatically. (And it could go either way—if we had good reason to think that the rest of the cosmos was even flatter, we’d bump the estimate way up, and if it’s completely flat or curved in a non-closed way, to infinity.)
That demonstrates that the number of concrete entities, by itself, just doesn’t have any significant theoretical weight. Everything depends on whether you have reasonable grounds for guessing what fraction of stuff you’re able to observe. A difference of many orders of magnitude in the number of concrete entities can hinge on a plausible indirect inference from a little bit of available data.
How would you put it?
As I understand it, the interference between superposed eigenstates hinges on those eigenstates having pretty much normal universe-like structure: they’ve got the sort of stuff in them that our universe does, with exactly the same kinds of patterns—spacetime and fields and so on—and it’s exactly those reality-like patterns that interfere in observable ways. It seems odd and unparsimonious to think that those aren’t just the detectable parts of universes that are like this one in other ways, too, e.g., being real and big.
Paul W., There is a HUGE difference between seeing the stars, observing their spectral similarity to Sol and presuming that stars are like the Sun and positing an unbounded number of universes that are in principle unobservable. The former is certainly parsimonious. The latter,…not so much.
In the Copenhagen Interpretation, the wave function is in the main descriptive. There is no more reason to attribute physical existence to it (or the rest of Hilbert space) than there is to assume that the Grand Canonical Ensemble used in Stat Mech is real. If you read Heisenberg and Bohr, they view it as an epistemological device or description rather than a physical or metaphysical entity (although others like Born attributed more physicality to the wave function). Indeed, Bohr is quite explicit that most of the weirdness in the quantum realm is attributable to our inability to portray the process of measurement without making an arbitrary division between observer and observed. Complementarity views this as an incorrect, but inevitable feature of a theory of measurement in a nonlocal theory.
It is likely my philosophical makeup, but I am more comfortable with an epistemological device being unobservable than I am introducing physical entities that are in principle unobservable.
I have also seen the Many Worlds interpretation as an astonishing generator of woo, while the Copenhagen interpretation is more woo free. I am sure Daniel would be much more comfortable with Many Worlds, for instance.
Finally, there is the question of motivation–Everett introduced the Many Worlds idea mainly because he was uncomfortable with the indeterminacy of quantum measurement. I am uncomfortable with the idea that the Universe exists to give us comfort. What is undeniable is that the Universe we experience is not deterministic. I’m a lot more comfortable keeping that weirdness in my own Universe rather than foisting it off on a plethora of tangential universes.
In it’s favor, Many Worlds is more intuitive. It certainly makes it easier to try and explain quantum theory to my parents. And it is certainly fertile ground for science fiction. It is important to remember though that there are other things that make ground fertile, and they are not desirable in concentrated form.
Daniel Smith:
Exactly what is my “strawman”?
You seem to have conveniently missed every point I’ve made.
My discussion of infinite regresses was quite relevant to at least the first two of Aquinas’s Five Ways, in which he denies the possibility of infinite regress, but accepts the equally counterintuitive possibility of an uncaused cause—something that just is, for no reason—or a similarly unmoved mover.
My point through a lot of this is that Aquinas’s intuitions about causation are irrelevant. It’s crystal clear in light of modern science that causation isn’t quite what he thought it was. It’s also crystal clear that all along his assumptions that an infinite regress was impossible was pretty fishy, especially since he so blithely asserted the possibility of an uncaused cause, which to many people all along has been similarly counterintuitive.
Even Aquinas’s contemporaries were not all happy with his first two ways—that’s one reason he had the other three! (“Well, if you don’t by that, how about this? No? Well, how about this?”)
Modern philosophers and many theologians are pretty well agreed that Aquinas’s first two Ways are bogus. People are much more comfortable with the idea of infinity—and less comfortable with the idea of arbitrary beginnings—than they were then.
It might be true that you can’t have an actual infinite regress, for some reason, but if so, nobody knows what that reason actually is—they only fall back on fallible intuitions. It might also be true that you can have an uncaused cause—and in some senses, it’s apparently true—but what you really have in Aquinas is the pumping of unverifiable intuitions, not a real proof from unquestionable premises.
If you’ll concede that, we can move on. If not, not.
As for “accidentally ordered” and such.
I don’t see much point in talking about such things with you, because your concepts of causation, like Aquinas’s, are pretty muddled and apparently false.
If you want to make that argument, you need to ditch the medieval terminology and talk about things like supervienience. Look it up.
It’s not like modern philosophers of science just don’t get what Aquinas and Aristotle got, or don’t realize those guys were smart. Nobody denies that Aristotle was a genius.
That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t wrong about things like formal and final “causes.”
There are no such things, and to the extent that there are similar things, they’re not causation as we talk about it in science, and you should not be using that word.
As I understand it, part of what Aquinas was talking about with “necessarily ordered series” (and Aristotle with “metaphysical priority”) is what we now understand more clearly as supervenience.
For example, consider billiard balls rolling around and colliding on a billiards table. The balls consist of molecules which consist of atoms, which have fields which hold the balls together and which repel other atoms (at a very close range), which is what happens with a collision of balls—some atoms get too close to each other, repel each other without exactly “really” touching, and push balls apart.
The atoms and molecules don’t cause the billiard balls. They are the billiard balls. Similarly, the field interactions and motions of atoms that make the billiard balls bounce off each other don’t cause the bouncing. They are the bouncing, at a lower level of description.
That’s utterly different from causation, and that’s crucial for understanding the invalidity of the Cosmological Argument using a so-called “hierarchy of causes.”
If you keep using medieval terminology you’re just going to keep confusing everyone else—and, evidently, yourself.
Get this straight—it’s important:
Billiard balls are not caused by their constituent atoms and their field interactions. In scientific terms, we say that they reduce to their constituent atoms and field interactions, and the resulting coordinated motion of their parts that makes them seemingly “solid” objects that “collide” and “bounce” at a macro scale.
In modern philosophical terms, we say that the existence of the billiard balls supervenes on the existence and behavior of their constituent atoms.
Likewise, we can say that the collisions and bouncing supervene on the atomic and molecular structure, field interactions, and so on.
Here’s the essential difference between causation and supervenience, and what makes Aquinas’s argument utterly invalid:
Supervenience is not a relationship between physically different things; it is a relationship between views of the same things described at different levels of organization.
The Cosmological Argument requires causes that are distinct from the things being caused. That’s the whole point—we can’t infer that there is something else causing things (e.g., God), if the cause is not something else than the thing being caused.
When you realize that a so-called “hierarchy of causes” is really a set of levels of description, with higher levels supervening on lower levels, the real significance of Aquinas’s argument becomes clear—and it’s not the intended significance; it’s more nearly the opposite. It’s not an argument for Theism or even Deism. It’s an argument for pantheism that’s indistinguishable from atheism.
Think about it. Scientifically, we understand that higher-level phenomena like minds and life supervene on lower-level phenomena like chemistry and basic physics.
You can’t have the higher level phenomena without the lower-level phenomena—or some functionally equivalent set of lower-level phenomena. (The rules of chemistry and physics could be different and life and minds could still exist, but you have to have something to make life and minds out of, and it has to be something with a sufficiently rich set of possible interactions to build complicated stuff from.)
If we look at the so-called “hierarchy of causes” that science has actually illuminated—really a stack of supervienience relationships with complicated things like life and minds at the top and simple things like fields or strings near the bottom—one pattern becomes clear:
The stuff near the bottom is much simpler and dumber than the stuff near the top.
Theologians want you to think of “metaphysically prior” things as “higher,” but that’s a very bad and misleading metaphor. In general, metaphysically prior stuff is simpler and dumber than the interesting stuff it’s prior to. (And generally much more numerous.)
You are smarter than your constituent brain regions, which are smarter than their constituent neurons, which are complex adaptive things made out of a hierarchy of simpler and dumber things… all the way down to strings or quantum loops or whatever, which are about the simplest and dumbest things anybody can imagine.
Theologians want you to think that following the chain of metaphysical priority gets you closer to God.
Evidently, God is the simplest and dumbest and most numerous thing of all—the Ultimate Ground of Being is a vast collection of the simplest and dumbest things there are, out of which more interesting high-level things are built.
Wow. Apparently God is simple after all—and dumber than dirt—and only able to amount to anything interesting, in places, by being astonishingly numerous.
More importantly, the God of the hierarchy-of-causes version of the Cosmological Argument is not a cause in the modern sense. It’s not distinct from the cosmos—it is identical to the cosmos, at the lowest level of description, where things are very simple, dumb, and numerous.
That’s not a God anybody would recognize as interestingly a god. It’s not a person or anything remotely like a person—it is the furthest possible thing from anything complicated like a person or a mind.
So even if your argument works, what you have proved is not Theism or Deism—it’s pantheism, where God and the cosmos are very the same thing, and it’s indistinguishable from atheism because that thing is just a big collection of extremely simple, stupid, utterly unmindlike, value-free stuff.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
I think you missed the thrust of my analogy to the cosmos beyond our light cone.
Am I mistaken that the current scientific best guess is that the universe is vastly bigger than the part of it we can ever see?
I’m not just talking about stars that are observable—I agree that’s a gimme at this point, given spectra and such.
It wasn’t a gimme when we couldn’t measure much about stars, and they just looked like points of light in the sky. But even then, it was a good, parsimonious hypotheses that the stars were suns pretty much like our own, and very far away. Even if we never got to test that hypothesis, it would have been a good parsimonious hypothesis. Even if we’d found out that for some reason we never could test that hypothesis, it’d still be a good one, and certainly parsimonious. It’s simply more parsimonious to think that the sun and stars are similar luminous objects than that they are very different luminous objects. Without some good reason to think that the universe is small, and/or that there’s only one sun-like object in it, it’s a reasonable guess that the seemingly different luminous objects differ mainly in proximity, not in kind.
When we look at modern cosmology, though, the analogy gets even better. We do in fact think that the stars that we can ever see are a tiny minority of the stars that exist. That hypothesis is not directly testable—by definition, the utterly vast number of “visible universes” and their vastly vastly number of stars are mostly forever beyond observation. (Unless we get very lucky with wormholes or something.)
And yet cosmologists mostly agree it’s the best guess, right? The fact that something is not observable, even in principle doesn’t mean that you can’t make a principle parsimonious guess about it, or that the best, most parsimonious guess doesn’t posit an inconceivably large number of unobservable individual entities.
If that’s right, a valid objection to Many Worlds on the grounds of parsimony can’t simply be that it posits a vast number of unobservable individual entities. There has to be more to it than that—and I think it has to be about something completely different, i.e., whether it’s a good guess in some other sense, irrespective of whether it implies a large or small number of universes.
(In particular, I think it has more to do with whether it’s reasonable to guess that there’s more than one universe, and nothing much to do with whether the number is vast. If there’s good reason to think there’s more than one, it’s unparsimonious to assume that there’s only two, or only ten, or only a hundred… the zero/one/infinity principle applies.)
Paul W., OM #662 wrote:
!
Beautifully stated, this whole post, and I think it gets to the heart of the division between the top-down advocates for religion, and the bottom-up views of science.
I have seen faitheists (atheists who respect faith) try to sneak this non-theistic version of pantheism into play as an acceptable version of their own “spirituality” — and I’ve always thought it misguided. Theism (and supernaturalism) by definition grant mind and its attributes a prime and prior place in reality, with top-down causation descending from a skyhook of prime agency. But if agency itself gets dumber and duller the deeper we get, we’re not discovering a more subtle but better version of God. That’s a not-God version of God.
I think trying to co-opt the fuzzy-wuzzy approval granted to faith, God, and spirituality by labeling this as ‘pantheism’ is walking into a trap. In the long run, it’s only going to lead to confusion, not happy reconciliation. It’s so muddled, I’m rather surprised it hasn’t gotten someone a Templeton Award. But maybe it already has — and neither the Templetonians nor anyone else, has figured that out.
Let me echo Sastra (oh noes!! an echo chamber), #662 was splendidly well done!
That mistaken distinction is similar to the hardware-software conceptual division error Daniel makes in #612:
For our brains, the architecture is the stored program and the engine. No program—no mind—is loaded into the brain. The brain instead undergoes continuous growth and change due to multiple factors, some of which are the brain’s own doing. We don’t have the technology to take a snapshot of a person’s brain, encode it as software, and simulate running it in a type of computer hardware. The way the mind evolved, if you destroy the brain, you destroy the mind. The balls are the molecules. The bouncing is the field interaction. The hardware is the software.
To account for the observed population density.
:-)
True, but that’s again a density argument. It’s unparsimonious to assume that the density suddenly drops to 0 exactly at the boundary of our light cone.
The way I understand (…imagine?) it, every particle assumes all possible states at the same time – within our universe – till it interacts with something that forces it to decide. Superposition is the normal state of affairs for a particle, and the collapse of superposition is the rare, unusual, and (if left alone) unstable event in this view.
For instance, consider polarized light. When you put a horizontal and a vertical polarization filter one behind the other, you get darkness as expected. But if you put a 45° one between the horizontal and the vertical one, 25 % of the light passes through! (This was in a highschool physics textbook of mine, BTW.) Immediately after the light leaves one filter, its polarization plane smears out (again); it does not become uncertain enough* that the next filter could make it decide to settle down on a new plane that’s tilted by 90°, but it does become uncertain enough that the next filter can make 50 % of it decide to settle down on a new plane that’s tilted by 45°, and that twice in a row.
As a_ray_in_dilbert_space says it: “I’m a lot more comfortable keeping that weirdness in my own Universe rather than foisting it off on a plethora of tangential universes.”
* Well, maybe it does over cosmic distances. No idea.
As you correctly imply, there is no such thing as “real touch”. It’s all electrostatic repulsion. (Or weak repulsion in the case of a supernova – “weak” as in “the weak nuclear force”. I suppose strong repulsion also exists.)
Thread won.
Me three.
That’s what I tried to say but didn’t manage to express.
No, scratch that. Software is a state of the hardware; software being executed is thus fairly similar to a mind, in that it consists of change in the state of the hardware. It’s just less radical (transistors don’t actually move around, nerve cell endings do).
Just to make sure…
Passes through all three filters, I mean. More passes through three than through two when these angles are involved. Counterintuitive quantum weirdness FTW.
Also, I finally read comment 296.
In bold the part that is wrong. The universe is awash in uncaused events; maybe even the whole universe is uncaused (by being a quantum fluctuation*).
* The lifetime of a virtual particle(-antiparticle pair, if applicable) is inversely proportional to its energy. It appears that the total energy of the universe, mass and potential energy included, is 0; if so, it could be a quantum fluctuation of infinite lifetime.
(I’ve also tried to edit “movement” out wherever possible. That part fails the theory of relativity, but replacing it by “change” eliminates this problem. That’s where quantum physics comes in.)
Again this completely intuitive and completely wrong assumption that there are no uncaused events. This destroys the whole argument.
(Also, as far as I’ve seen, you didn’t cite any reasons “above” for why there can’t be an infinite regress. But that’s actually beside the point.)
Again in bold the part that is wrong; and again, remarkably, it’s the same part.
In bold the part that… seems completely absurd to me. Could you explain it? Or did Aquinas or his predecessors simply make it up, like Anselm of Canterbury’s word game about “great”?
I note you didn’t bring up the fifth argument. I take this means you agree that it’s wrong from start to end?
David Marjanović (from way back):
That’s a very good question, and as I understand it, physicists are not agreed on the answer.
Actual non-subjective randomness is unparsimonious in a very real and quantifiable sense, but nobody knows if it’s the kind of theoretical unparsimoniousness you should be concerned about.
I think a_ray_in_dilbert_space mentioned Kolmogorov complexity earlier in this thread…
The Kolmogorov complexity of a system is the minimum length of a computer program required to generate a complete description of that system. (Since Turing-complete computers can all simulate each other and do so with programs that differ by only a smallish constant factor, that’s a physically real property, within a smallish constant factor.)
If the deterministic Many Worlds interpretation is right, the whole cosmos could be very, very simple in Kolmogorov terms. It could be describable in complete and exact detail at the very lowest level by a very simple formula, and a very simple computer program could grind out every detailed consequence of that formula.
A complete description of the cosmos—a completely detailed Theory of Everything—might be a line or two of executable computer code.
That would be awesome. It would turn out that the universe is informationally small, and includes a pseudo-random number generator that generates vast amounts of apparent noise.
If all the quantum randomness happing all over the place is real, though, a complete detailed description of the cosmos would be vast—it would be the size of the actual cosmos itself, within a constant factor. It’d be really, really big, and the cosmos itself would be its own smallest description, modulo a constant.
In that case, you might have a program with a very small piece of code, if the fundamental laws of physics are simple but fundamentally probabilistic, but with a list of stored associated constants the size of the cosmos itself, to describe the actual outcome of each quantum event.
That would kinda suck, if you’re looking for a simple theory, and you think information content is a relevant measure of “simplicity”.
One bizarre sidelight on this is that according to current theory of quantum physics and quantum computation, a universe like ours should be able to efficiently simulate other universes like ours, if you could solve the decoherence problem.
That is, the amount of matter required to make a big quantum computer and simulate a universe in complete detail is within a constant factor of the amount of matter in that simulated universe. In principle, you should be able to take a big hunk of universe, turn it into a universal quantum computer, and use it to implement a comparably-sized virtual universe that behaves exactly like a real universe. And in that universe, people could do the same thing, creating virtual universes that nobody could tell weren’t real universes, from the inside.
Nobody really knows what to make of that, but it’s fun to speculate about in an unbridled science-fictional way.
Maybe our universe is a simulation running in a quantum computer in somebody else’s universe, for some reason, maybe to test cosmological theories so they can figure out their universe better… and maybe it’s turtles all the way up. :-)
Or maybe it doesn’t mean much of anything. Computation is easy, once you get the basic idea—you can make a computer out of almost anything, in any universe pretty much any universe that’s at least marginally interesting. (It’s much easier than evolving life.)
So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised if an efficient universal quantum computer is possible, given that computation is easy—you just need a couple of building blocks with state changes, of almost any kind—and we live in a quantum universe… ?
And maybe it’s not possible, because decoherence will always be a bear—maybe you can never really build a really large working quantum computer at all, and maybe there’s some deep physical fact underlying that. So far as I know, nobody knows.
One odd sidelight to this sidelight is that if you can build a large universal quantum computer, and deterministic Many Worlds is right, you should be able to exactly simulate one universe with another universe of the same type, down to the smallest detail, and including it splitting into other universes, and so on.
If quantum physics is really random, then you can’t do that—your computer simulation will make different random choices and quickly diverge from what any particular real universe would do in a vast variety of random little ways, with big downstream effects. (With inconceivably low probability of getting it right by incredible luck, of course. I think you may be able to make your quantum-random computer program deterministic by a simple trick, but that doesn’t help if what you’re simulating is really random.)
One underlying question that speculations like this might possibly clarify is why is it quantum physics so perfectly random? Is that an artifact of some lower-level conservation law or something, somehow equivalent to an inability of an underlying computational system to compute things exactly? Or if quantum physics is actually deterministic and the cosmos is informationally simple, does that come from a different kind of conservation, e.g., of possible histories of universes, such that different but equivalent pathways to the same state actually converge into the same state, rather than just forking off and ramifying infinitely?
As I understand it, most physicists don’t bother thinking about this weird interpretive shit because they think it’s a waste of time—and for most of them, at least, it probably is.
Quantum cosmologists are more likely to bang their heads against it, because they think it may matter to what they do—it’s their job to figure out why quantum physics is the way it is, not just how it observably is in this universe, so it matters to them whether this universe fell out of another universe, or is free-standing with subsidiary eigenstates coming and going, and things like that.
Yes, I think this is only going to be “obvious” to a mind that already thinks of everything in terms of hierarchies and cosmic Great Chains of Being, and takes this framework as just self-evident. Terms like intelligence, goodness, trueness, etc. often have a distinctly fuzzy, subjective component to them, so that talking about maximum states of Goodness or perfect states of Perfection makes no sense, unless you can get universal consensus between every evaluator. Good luck with that.
I think all reasonable people would agree that, in principle, good is always better than bad, and, judged just within their own context, experiencing a happy state of bliss is better than experiencing a miserable state of depression, but, once you start to get into specific details, all bets on agreement are off. And now you’ve lost the ability to just guide the hypothetical Reasonable Person through the simple steps to proving God.
Which is more perfect? A God which transcends human categories of good and evil, encompassing all and existing in an unchanging realm of spirit — or a God which can relate to you like a loving Father and friend, listening to your problems, making suggestions, and smoothing and soothing the hard knocks in your life, because He lives in your heart and can do miracles? If someone strongly supports one option over the other, what could persuade them to renounce it, for the other one? Your view of perfection sucks?
“MY Bliss is more COSMIC than YOUR Bliss!”
Yeah, I was just hearing Sam Harris talking about this the other day. He also added some physicists say that since any universe can host multiple simulated universes and each of these universes can host multiple simulated universes that can host multiple….it’s far, far more likely we are currently living in one of these simulations in a simulations in a simulation in a……
This followed with a remark about physics being in such a state that we can’t whether physicists are joking or not.
Daniel Smith can start arguing about the unsimulated simulator…..
“Shut up and calculate!” – physics proverb
Feynmaniac:
Not only that, but some physicists think that the inside of a black hole is a universe, and that such universes can have black holes in them, which are also universes…
And Lee Smolin (who wrote the awesome The Life of the Universe) thinks that universes evolve by random variation and differential reproduction—some physical “constants” of a universe are determined by the conditions of blackhole formation, and tend to be more or less similar to those in the parent universe, but also to vary somewhat depending on the conditions of formation of that particular universe (e.g., mass and angular momentum of crap falling in…)
If this is true, then in the long run, you’d get a lot of universes finely tuned for the formation of lots of black holes.
Smolin thinks that the properties of carbon, etc., are “finely tuned”—not for producing life, but for producing black holes, i.e., universes. The same properties that make carbon good for making organic chemicals turn out to make it good for promoting star formation. (In particular, you get large clouds of dark interstellar carbon-chain molecules, which block the solar wind from existing stars and keep it from disrupting the formation of new stars, and in particular stars in about the size range you want for maximizing black hole formation.)
Smolin thinks that when you realize that carbon’s properties enable both life and black holes, the latter is a much better guess as to what they’re finely tuned for, cosmologically speaking—it’s where universes come from, and you get life here and there as a side benefit.
If you combine that with quantum computational universes, we could be inside a black hole in a quantum computer in a black hole in two quantum computers in a black hole… whee!
Not to mention that within one space-time continuum you have a bunch of space-light separated “visible universes” (light cones) that are mutually unobservable…
So at last count, there are at least four different ways that at least some physicists seriously think that we could be in one of a vast number of universes, with almost all of them being unobservable to us, ever:
1. many worlds quantum universe splitting,
2. quantum computer simulation,
3. black holes falling out of other universes, and
4. space-light separated universes in spacetime
If there’s a God, he’s clearly fucking with our heads.
It’s interesting how counter-intuitive physics and cosmology can get. It’s weird, but weird in a weird way, meaning it’s not like supernatural beliefs. Pascal Boyer points out how these only tweak our standard experiences just a bit: a tree that can talk, or a mind that can leave the body. It’s just enough difference to get attention, but otherwise perfectly recognizable.
I have heard mystics (or people quoting mystics) ramble on about how all these cutting-edge speculations in physics have already been discovered through meditation or trance, but, unlike real physicists, they don’t seem to have the math to back it up. Instead, they feel as if they’re spread out over the universe, or into millions of universes, or the universe is inside of them, or what have you — and then they claim that this or that theory backs them up.
And, of course, it always turns out that Consciousness or Self or non-Self Awareness or something else unique to the mind is the substrate of reality. So far, none of the strange, bizarre, highly esoteric ideas from actual physicists seem to draw this inference. Superstrings aren’t knit together “by Love,” and quantum universes don’t split into Thee and Thou. For all the insistence that mysticism is sooo “outside the box,” it’s looks to me like just another case of mind reflecting everything in terms of itself.
Spirituality and religion are “the box.” Reality is apparently weirder than we can think.
Well said, for all the claims that science is limiting the universe, it seems that all it means is that science is limiting their ability to make shit up. The “narrative” that has emerged from scientific inquiry is far far far beyond the imagination of humanity, and has the added advantage of empiricism behind it.
Since I grew up around many new agers, I’ve often heard claims similar to this. When they complain about science, they are really complaining about the lack of anthropocentrism. There must be something mystical and magical about the human experience that transcends this reality, there just must be!
Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?
Personally, I find one universe where random things happen more intellectually appealing than an infinite or N (where N is large) number of universes where everything that can happen does happen. It kind of reminds me of Dirac’s infinite sea of particles (such an inelegant interpretation of such an beautiful equation).
But if a single indeterministic universe and the multiverse are mathematically equivalent and there’s no empirical evidence to favor one over the other, then feel free to think in terms of the multiverse.
_ _ _ _
Speaking of infinities, weirdness and the Dirac sea….
There’s always a room available at the Hilbert Hotel!
Alright, so at this hotel there are an infinite number of rooms. Each of them are occupied. A customer comes in and wants a room. Well, just sent the person in room 1 to room 2, the person in rm. 2 to rm. 3, the person in rm. 3 to rm. 4, etc. Well, what if 5 people come in? Set the person in rm. 1 to rm. 6, person in rm. 2 to rm. 7, etc. and the first 5 rooms become available.
Well, then a bus shows up with an infinite number of people. Now, just send rm. 1 to rm. 2, rm. 2 to rm. 4, rm. 3 to rm. 6, etc. Each person gets sent to the room two times their current room number. Thus the infinite odd-numbered rooms become available for the people on the bus. The person in seat 1 on the bus goes to rm. 1, seat 2. goes to rm. 3, seat 3 goes to rm. 5, etc.
Hearing that rooms are available an infinite number of buses show up, each with an infinite number of people. No problem! First free up all the odd-numbered rooms as done in the previous paragraph. Now assign each bus an an odd prime number. The first bus get 3, the second gets 5, etc. The person in seat 1 on the first bus goes to rm. 31=3, seat 2 goes to rm. 32=9, seat 3 goes to rm. 33=27, ……. The person in seat 1 on the second bus goes to rm. 51=5, seat 2 to rm. 52=25……
A ‘No Vacancy’ is thus not needed for this hotel.
Anyway, Dirac’s sea (which was introduced for reasons we don’t need to get into) was an infinite sea of particles, each occupying a unique state. For the same reasons as the Hilbert Hotel in this sea there’s always room for more particles. One of the reasons why this idea was eventually dropped (although we still learned about it and used it in our solid state physics course).
_ _ _ _
I wonder if it would bruise our ego even further to find out that not only was ours not the “real” universe, but that our universe was a laboratory accident. Our universe was created when people in the upper universe were investigating something else. How would we deal with finding out that our universe belongs in the same category as penicillin and healing mice ear wounds?
(No, I’m not currently high.)
If wormholes or “warp” travel are possible that might provide a loop hole (no pun intended). Needless to say that’s pretty big ‘if’.
_ _ _
Usually my thoughts tend to me more mundane, so this wild ass speculation (I realize it’s nothing more than that) is fun. It’s also more likely and interesting than the idea of God.
Although, I don’t think it’s an accident that many people who spend a lot of time studying about these sorts of things are a little crazy. Just to take two examples, Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel. The former studied the infinite and latter the foundations of mathematics. Both were eccentrics and Gödel ended up starving himself to death because he thought his food was being poisoned. Both also incidentally believed in God, but that’s neither he nor there. Whether it’s that thinking about these things drives one mad, or you have to be a crazy to dedicate much effort thinking about them, or a bit of both I don’t know. While this is a nice place to travel I’m not sure I want to live here.
Paul W.:
Let me try to wade through this (this will be a truncated version that hopefully gets the point across)…
I am an individual entity.
I am made up of molecules that are each individual entities.
Those molecules are held together by the various forces of nature – each force being different than the others (though tied together obviously.)
Now, by your argument, I am the same thing as each individual molecule and each molecule individually is me.
I am also the combined forces of nature and they are me.
Each force then is the same as any other force.
In fact (if we follow your argument to its logical conclusion) not one thing is differentiated at all from any other.
This is absurd.
Then later you say:
Hmm… Sound suspiciously like a “cause” to me.
DS,
Sigh. Earlier, the fallacy of composition.
Now, the fallacy of division, in your misapprehension of what Paul has written.
Have you got a list to complete, or something? ;)
Paul W:
DS:
<spoing!>
The car is only possible because of 4 billion years of evolution, it’s taken 4 billion years to go from simplicity to sufficient complexity in order to design and assemble a car.
You just can’t have complexity ex nihilo. Don’t you get it?
Pot, Kettle, Black. Neither do you. You have no evidence, just whacky inane sophistry. That a the price of joe will get you a cup of coffee, but it will not get anybody here believing you. You may as well just stop trying to convince us. You arguments are in tatters, and nothing you can say, without presenting physical evidence, which you don’t have, will convince us otherwise.
Turing-complete computers can all simulate each other and do so with programs that differ by only a smallish constant factor, that’s a physically real property, within a smallish constant factor. – Paul W.
Where do you get that from? Some problems can be efficiently parallelized, which means there is a much greater difference than that between different Turing-complete computers.
Oh, how very nice. Daniel’s back.
Before you and Paul W. start deciding which one of you is having comprehension problems, did you see my brief question at #640?
You say you are not a dualist. So, if mind and body are intertwined — for they are two components of one substance — does God then have both mind, and body?
Well, *I* am not a duelist.
And I was so looking forward to seeing this resolved at dawn, with me as your second.
Paul W. says, “If all the quantum randomness happing all over the place is real, though, a complete detailed description of the cosmos would be vast—it would be the size of the actual cosmos itself, within a constant factor.”
No, it would be probabilistic–inherently so. And the history of the Universe would not be determined until it was completed. Personally, I think that a physical description of this Universe is about all physics is up for. What goes on in other Universes or beyond the event horizon of a black hole doesn’t interest me because it cannot be verified. I’ve always found epistemology more fruitful than metaphysics.
Knockgoats:
I wasn’t talking there about execution efficiency, but about Kolmogorov complexity—the static size of the program itself.
If I recall correctly, Universal Turing Machines programs can be translated into equivalent programs for other UTM programs with only a constant factor blowup/shrinkage, and that’s what makes Kolmogorov complexity an absolute measure, modulo a constant, rather than relative to a particular UTM architecture.
As for the other claim, that a universal quantum computer can efficiently simulate a universe (which can in turn host a universal quantum computer that can do the same thing), that’s a claim I’m taking David Deutsch’s word for, and I would guess it only applies to properly-designed UQM’s—if you design one that a quantum physics simulator doesn’t map onto well, you might get an efficiency loss of more than a constant factor. I’d have to think about that, though.
This thread has turned out to be one of my favorites in recent memory. Thanks to Paul W., David M., Sastra, Feynmaniac, andI others (and you too Daniel Smith – if for no other reason than provoking such outstanding commentary). I’ve been looking for an opportunity to bring something up, if I may. (Not exactly OT, but not too far off…)
I am interested in books, authors, online video lectures, blogs, podcasts, etc. on the subject of physics that could engage and enlighten a curious neophyte like me. I need something that speaks to non-scientists on this topic the way that PZ (or Jerry Coyne, Carl Zimmer, Richard Dawkins, et al) communicate about biology and evolution.
I realize I could pull much of what I’m looking for from the comments on this very thread. Still, any direction would be very much appreciated. (Please don’t direct me to the undead thread – I’ll never find myself there with an iphone!) Many thanks.
To take this further, the 4 billion years on this planet is only part of the story. You have to get the elements in the first place, and for the heavier elements you need nuclear fusion reactors for the lighter elements that were created out of more elementary particles in the early period after the creation of spacetime.
In other words, the universe as we know it started out simple and became more complex. If we’re going to take anything from a teleological argument, then we have to accept that any proposed teleology as we know it cannot be taken as an ultimate cause. For us to make a car has required billions of years of evolution of a neural system, then millions of man-hours of R&D into how nature works. Our ancestors over the last few million years are to thank for our ability to make the car, their work with tools is the foundation we have built on. As such, any arguments involving designers is going to have to concede that we can’t conclude anything about the nature of designers.
Yet this is not something revelatory, David Hume destroyed the argument from design over 250 years ago – and this was long before any scientific knowledge was able to explain how ordered complexity came about. This really shouldn’t be anything new to you, but there’s a reason most theologians and philosophers have long since moved on from Aquinas. It’s not just the science that shows otherwise, the philosophy is unjustified!
While computer science if far from my field of expertise, I know this is right. To verify I looked my information theory text book.
I’m not qualified however to judge your larger point.
I think it was Owlmirror that used the term “collateral knowledge”.
In high school, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat by John Gribbin (which explains the weirdness of the quantum) kept my interest in physics going. I also like Briane Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos, which explains string theory for laypeople. These books are somewhat like the discussion going on here.
There’s also these free video lectures of a MIT introductory physics course:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFall1999/VideoLectures/index.htm
I’ve haven’t seen them, but I’ve heard good things. (And if it’s MIT how bad can it be?) I don’t imagine it’s anything like the discussion here, but it can give you glimpse of how physics is done and how the world works. I’ve heard laypeople saying they started looking at the everyday world in terms of forces, vectors, and energy after watching them and were grateful. Your mileage may vary.
Daniel Smith, I would recommend you watch it!
Appending a bit to @#602…
And an example of this is William of Ockham (also relevant to the discussion of parsimony above):
Or in other words, he presupposes that there is such a thing as revelation, and that the Christian revelation is true, and that the Church’s interpretation of the Christian revelation is correct.
Occam’s presupposition is more restricted than the stronger and more unfair presuppositional apologetics of van Til et al., but it is still presupposition.
It’s not impossible that he was actually atheist/agnostic, and came up with the above line of unreasoning because he was comfortable within the Franciscan order, and being an admitted unbeliever was untenable with such a life (in more than one sense of the word “life”). But there are some highly compartmentalized believers out there, such as Ken Miller and heddle, and perhaps William was also one such as that.
That analogy should not be argued from too closely, given that brains (and minds) develop and operate following a far more contingent and variable process than computer hardware/software.
Fixed. HTH, HAND !!
God, inside your head, may be “something immaterial”, but it in no way follows that “something immaterial” is God.
It’s a good thing I’m pointing out all these unreasonable fallacies of yours, because you obviously don’t have the reasoning power to figure it out all on your own.
Have you heard of the principle of parsimony?
I realize that you may not have the reasoning power to understand it, but have you at least heard of it?
The scientific method does include the principle of parsimony.
That’s the fallacy of the strawman. Just keeping you informed as you demonstrate continued unreasoning.
=====
How… very Platonic. If a rock is used as a table, does it stop being a rock?
Reasonable minds want to know.
The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.
=====
Weren’t you just distinguishing between accidentally ordered and essentially ordered efficient causes? The “essentially ordered efficient cause” of the car is indeed its “simple atoms” (or rather, whatever the metaphysical substrate of those atoms is); the “accidentally ordered efficient cause” is something completely different — by your own argument.
You can’t change what you mean by “cause” when your entire argument is in fact based on exactly that meaning of “cause”.
To do so is to commit a terribly unreasonable fallacy of equivocation and goalpost-shifting.
It’s painfully obvious that you don’t understand even your own argument.
Not to mention the vicious and shocking murder of a strawman — the fallacy you were accusing everyone of.
If you mean “collateral wisdom”, I was following up on a comment by Celtic_Evolution
Bah.
The excess Comic Sans is due to me not clearing the editor I was using to compose #694.
owlmirror,
since when has parsimony become a scientific principle? I’d always thought of it as an important heuristic, but a principle?
Please explain.
negentropyeater @698, I think you’re technically right, but I suspect Owlmirror was using the term principle in a pragmatic, rather than an epistemological sense (i.e. #2 of my link, not #1).
Clearly, given any two unfalsified yet equally explanatory theories, the simpler one is preferable (cf. the Einstein quote @659).
Daniel Smith:
Only to somebody who doesn’t understand simple part-whole relationships.
What part of “part of” don’t you understand?
Do you understand that it’s different from “all of”?
Do you understand that it’s not the same thing as causation, in the modern sense?
Apparently not.
Why, yes, yes I do.
Apparently you don’t understand your own argument; you don’t even remember your own argument.
Remember a little distinction somebody made between accidentally and essentially ordered efficient causes? Remember that stuff about a “hierarchy of causes” that isn’t about causation in the modern, scientific sense, but about metaphysical priority?
That’s what I was talking about. Explicitly not causation in the modern sense, but metaphysical priority.
Go back and read what I wrote about supervenience.
If you don’t understand the sense in which a billiard ball is the same thing as its constituent atoms, consider this:
What would happen to a billiard ball if you suddenly moved each of its atoms three inches to the left?
Now think about what happens to the designer or manufacturer of the billiard ball, when you move the billiard ball three inches to the left.
It’s really not the same thing, is it?
Remember, in the version of the cosmological argument that we were discussing, we were tracing back the chain of metaphysical priority, not causation in the modern sense.
You brought up a car. A car is made out of things like an engine, a chassis, etc. Those things, in turn, are made out of simpler, dumber things, all the way down to atoms and whatever’s below that.
Where is the designer or manufacturer of the car in that sequence of levels of dependency?
Nowhere, that’s where.
The car is not made out of it designer or manufacturer, so yes, in the peculiar sense of “cause” that’s under discussion, if you trace back the causal chain you don’t get to the designer, you get to something very numerous and utterly dumb.
That’s why I think it’s a bad idea to call it causation. Supervenience is not causation in the modern sense (scientific or vernacular) and as you have once again demonstrated, you just confuse others and yourself.
You switched from an archaic sense of “cause” to a modern one in mid-argument, and created a fallacy of four terms.
Stop that.
Iris@689,
As far as fun physics, you cannot do better than “The Flying Circus of Physics,” by Jearl Walker:
http://www.amazon.com/Flying-Circus-Physics-Jearl-Walker/dp/0471762733/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1269693300&sr=8-1-fkmr1
Basically, when Jearl was studying for his PhD candidacy exam–in which they can ask you absolutely any question they feel like–he decided to turn his notes into a book. The book consists of several chapters–optics, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism–each with short descriptions of a natural phenomenon. For example, you can read about all the interesting tricks of the light in the atmosphere–glories, haloes, sun-dogs, nacreous clouds….
You can read about the swirling patterns milk makes in hot tea or coffee. Geomagnetism, astronomy, and on and on.
The little accounts are short–a couple of paragraphs–and designed to get you thinking about the phenomenon. In the back, you will find the Answers (make sure to get the version “with Answers”), along with references to the literature. This is a wonderful book–especially if you have kids who are curious about the world in your life.
Another one is a book of simple science experiments that I used when I was in the Peace Corps in Africa:
http://www.amazon.com/700-Science-Experiments-Everyone-Unesco/dp/0385052758/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269693898&sr=1-1
This is compiled and published originally by UNESCO. Well worth it.
And of course, if you have questions about specific topics, I’d be happy to try and find good books or articles.
Iris,
Two physics-and-cosmology books I’d recommend:
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin
No, the body is made of matter. God is necessarily immaterial. It all has to do with actuality and potential – matter being pure potential, God being pure actuality.
Sorry, god isn’t necessary for anything. And if it was the deity of the babble, it would have to interact with the real world, which means it is material. Parsimony requires no deity until there is evidence for one. And that evidence will not be found with sophist philosophy, but rather the physical evidence of science.
Ah, yes. No wonder “collateral knowledge” wasn’t showing up on my search.
If you haven’t noticed yet bare assertions aren’t going to get you very far here.
(pick one or more):
actualityenergyPaul W: First, you are right about my use of the car example – it is not consistent with the argument I’ve been using. I withdraw that.
I understand what you’re trying to say. The probelem is that it leads to a supervenience of unintended consequences:
For instance – what happens if you move one of the billiard ball’s constituent atoms three inches to the left? What about two? Three? Three thousand? Three million?
How many atoms can you remove and still have a billiard ball?
At what concentration do the atoms become the billiard ball?
Are all of the atoms required?
The same goes for living organisms. How many cells can you remove from a human before it’s not a human anymore? How about limbs? Organs?
In what sense is each constituent part of something the “same thing” (your words) as the whole?
For your example to negate Aquinas’ principle of causation, it must be true that the constituent parts are in no way different from the whole.
As I’ve already shown – this is ludicrous.
At every moment in time, something different from me is keeping me in existence. I am not keeping myself in existence.
Your refutation fails.
I choose God is necessarily…
D. a duck
I. a brainless mind, and the universe is his mindfart
C. perfect! Yay Jesus!
K. an unknowable known known only to the impenetrably thick
Daniel Smith #703 wrote:
Wouldn’t this make you a Cartesian dualist?
Your definition of Cartesian Dualism (mind/body dualism) in #635 was:
A Cartesian dualist holds that the mind is immaterial and the body physical, and then struggles to explain how the two interact with each other.
You claimed to be a
“hylemorphic dualist” – one who believes that the human mind is a combination of form and matter as two components of one complete substance.
But the mind we are specifically talking about, is the mind of God. It is, in your hypothesis, the Ultimate Mind, the true model of mind. Whether or not “hylemorphic dualism” makes any sense as an explanation of the relationship between the human mind, and the human brain, is therefore beside the point. We don’t have to deal with it.
If God has no body, then you are indeed arguing for Cartesian dualism, and you are a dualist. Scientific discoveries in neurology which point to mind as emergent, or supervenient, to physical matter, undermine Cartesian dualism as an explanation for mind. Any mind. And now there’s the whole problem with the mechanism of interaction between the immaterial and the material.
So this seems to force you to fall back on the same strategy you’ve already used for the Changeless Person claim — God’s mind is nothing at all like any minds we are familiar with. It’s completely inconsistent with not only our experience — it’s inconsistent with itself.
Sort of like the way God is pink, but not the color pink. Well, not the color pink as we understand it. Or even a color at all. But pink, certainly.
The quote Wells had way back is on the money. It’s hard to discuss the finer points of logic, philosophy, physics, etc. in a language that wasn’t designed to do that. This is just the Ship of Theseus “paradox”. Or like the old joke: this is Lincoln’s axe, only the handle has been replaced three times and the head twice. Language is more suited for the practical purposes of humans being than for this stuff. There exists these ambiguities and ill defined terms, however for practical purposes it’s good enough.
The billiard ball can be considered an approximation, a convenient idealization. Tiny chips are coming off all the time, it’s just not really appreciable at our level. Three million atoms removed sounds like a lot, but remember there are ~1024 atoms. In order not to feel daunted by these overwhelming numbers and the complexities of reality we sometimes oversimplify things. These oversimplifications are good approximations.
(This is just my interpretation. I haven’t read anything about supervenience and Paul W.,OM may have a different answer for you.)
Daniel Smith:
You are missing my point by miles.
My point is not that the Cosmological Argument or any particular version of it is logically invalid.
My point is that it doesn’t prove what you think it proves.
The basic Cosmological Argument is to trace a dependency chain backwards, or downwards, and find that somewhere back there or down there is something different from the other things in the chain, and call that God.
The straight First Cause version traces a chain of efficient causation—what we now call causation in scientific terms, back to some strange thing. If we deny the possibility of an infinite regress, we must get to a First Cause—something that causes other things, but isn’t itself caused, or is somehow self-causing.
If we don’t deny the possibility of infinite regress, we trace the efficient causation links backwards and get to either a First Cause (either uncaused or self-causing) or an infinite regress that is equally mysterious, so maybe God did that.
Neither of those versions, even if they work, proves the existence of God. There is simply no reason to think that an uncaused cause or self-causing cause or whatever accounts for an infinite regress is God. You need a whole different argument for that.
Likewise, for the Hierarchy of Causes version—which isn’t about what we now call causation now at all, but something like supervenience—we trace links of “metaphysical priority,” downward to something more basic.
Apologetic theologians play a tricky word game there. They call it a “heirarchy” of causes, and make it sound like the dependent things are lower in a “hierarchy” than the things they depend on—things are supported from above, as though hanging from a mysterious skyhook.
But in scientific terms, that picture is exactly upside down. When we trace links of metaphysical priority backwards, we’re going downward from higher-level phenomena to lower-level phenomena. What’s supposed to get us higher and closer to something we can assume is god actually gets us lower and closer to something that doesn’t much look like God at all—it looks simple, numerous, dumb, and maybe random.
That doesn’t prove that there isn’t a God. (I’m not claiming that, so puhleez stop pretending that I am. That is just not what our disagreement is about and never has been.)
What I’m claiming is that NONE of these versions of the Cosmological Argument proves what you want it to prove—they all prove the existence of something quite different from normal stuff that we observe in our daily lives, but that’s in no way surprising, nor is it a proof of God.
For the sake of argument, at least, I can grant the validity of any of these arguments, and pose this question: OK, assuming you’re right, what makes you think that the thing you’ve proved the existence of is God, or anything like a god?
I’m serious. I actually think that at least one version of the Cosmological Argument is probably about right as far as it goes. If we go backward through chains of efficient causation, or downward through levels of supervenience, we do probably do get to something uncaused, or something that’s not made of something else, or at best an infinite regress which is itself profoundly mysterious and can’t be explained in the normal way.
But none of that makes me think there’s a god. (Rather the reverse, in fact, though I don’t claim to be able to prove it.)
Even if there’s a First Cause, I don’t know why you’d think it’s God, or anything like a god.
Even if there’s an Ultimate Ground of Being at the bottom of the stack of supervenience relationships, I don’t know why you’d think it’s God, or anything like a god.
What you clearly want God to be is an immaterial mind that efficiently causes and/or metaphysically enables the existence of material things.
I don’t think any of your arguments gets you there, or anywhere close, even if I agree with the argument up to the step of calling what you’ve proved the existence of God.
Beyond that, I think there are scientific reasons to guess that the particular things you’ve proved the existence of are probably not what you mean by God, even if something else is a God, and created that.
When we trace efficient causal chains backwards, things look less and less godlike, or like anything we’d attribute to divine agency. Going back through the history of cosmos, we find simpler and dumber stuff, back to the moment of the big bang, which is basically an infinitely dense dot of concentrated stupid.
When we trace the metaphysical dependency chains downward, we get to bizarre stuff like vibrating strings, which is a nearly infinite amount of extraordinarily widespread stupid.
Smart and interesting things like minds only occur after long periods of stupid banging against stupid and being filtered by stupid.
Even then, in the very few places that you get things that aren’t stupid due to lucky conditions, the few smart things are made out of many more less smart things, which are made out of a whole bunch of stupid.
That doesn’t prove that there’s no god. It just means that what your argument(s) seem to demonstrate the existence of is not what you want—if we take earlier or more fundamental things to be godlike, then God is simple and stupid.
You can argue that God is not simple and stupid, but then you need a whole other argument that what came before the very early simple things, or what lies below the very basic simple things, is somehow not like those things.
The Cosmological Argument can’t get you there. None of the versions can get you there. No matter how you slice it, it comes up stupid.
To get the conclusions you really want, you’ve got to show that despite the earliest and most fundamental things we know being simple and stupid, your still-earlier and/or still-more-fundamental God is not.
You’ve got to explain why, if God is so smart and moral, or whatever you make him out to be, he made a universe that is so stupid and amoral to start with, and takes billions of years to develop into something that takes billions of years to evolve smart, moral things in a few places.
You’ve got to explain why God, if he’s a smart and moral thing on which everything else is built, put so many layers of simple stupid in between. Why would you expect, when we go down through layers after layer of amoral and increasingly simple and stupid things, we’d get to things that are utterly simple and stupid like strings or whatever, and then suddenly strike God, which is smart and moral or whatever. Why would the trend reverse right there, where you want it to, at the bottom?
I’m not saying that’s impossible. I do think it’s possible that our universe and its simple dumb rules were created by an intelligent being who want to accomplish something by incredibly wasteful, brute forcing banging together of inconceivable amounts of dumb stuff.
While I do think that’s possible, I don’t see any reason to think it’s true, and even if it is, I don’t see any reason to think of such a universe-creating alien being as a God, as opposed to just some alien who can do things we can’t.
This is for Nerd of Redhead (and anyone else who thinks that I must ‘provide empirical evidence of God or else shut up’):
link
Think about it.
Paul W., OM #711 wrote:
Exactly. It’s wise to remind Daniel S. that the “Argument from Brute Fact” — that at some point down a series of explanations we may finally arrive at some Brute Fact that cannot be explained any further and that’s a valid stopping-place — is an atheological argument. That is, it’s used as a rebuttal to theistic apologetics.
It is up to the theist to demonstrate, from scratch, why the Brute Fact must be God. They cannot just assume that we will heedlessly grant that a Brute Fact is God, and then allow them to smuggle in very un-brutish fancy-work. We won’t.
Daniel Smith: I’m not the brightest nor the most logical person hanging around here, but it seems to me that you’re trying to logic god into existing. But there are web pages and pages of mathematical humor using logic to “prove” all sorts of things: that all horses are white, that horses have an infinite number of legs, and so on. Pure logic alone isn’t proof. There has to be empirical evidence. But it sounds to me like your point @712 is that asking for empirical proof of god is an improper question.
can you explain to me (without fancy logic, please) *why* there can’t be empirical proof that god exists and yet still have god exist?
and, positing that there *is* a god, why only one god? and why the god of the Christians is any more true than any other god?
Daniel Smith #712 wrote:
Well, the first thing I thought is that many of the examples here are ‘arguments’ which have become highly controversial in light of some of the discoveries of modern science.
But the real problem is that you’ve already admitted that God is, to you, a reasonable hypothesis, one arrived at via on a chain of inference starting from the natural evidence of the world, and our experience in the world. You cannot then insist that it’s somehow outside of science, and rather like a math solution. If it were, you would have to be cautious around people with calculators, and wary of a God that turns out to be a number.
Instead, I think you are going to be stuck with a hypothesis which is vulnerable to disproof via an objective analysis of empirical evidence. It is the price you pay, for wanting a reasonable faith.
Okay…You’re wrong.
Proofs about mathematics, logic, abstract systems, etc. can come from pure deductive reasoning. All you really have to worry about in these cases is if your reasoning is valid.
However, when talking about reality you also need empirical evidence. You’re also never going to have absolute certainty like math because even if your argument is logically valid whether your premises hold can never be known for certain. Your analogy is false. The existence of God is a claim about reality (unlike Wiles’ theorem which is a claim about numbers) and thus needs empirical evidence.
Sastra,
Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylemorphic dualism says that intellect is immaterial, but sensation and imagination are not. These things are all tied together in the soul.
A-T holds that the soul, (of which intellect, sensation, and imagination are all considered “powers”), is the form of the body and not a complete substance in and of itself either. So while the intellect is immaterial, sensation and imagination are not, and all three are wrapped up in the soul – which is the form of the body.
To quote Edward Feser again:
So, as I understand it (which I may not – seeing as I’m only just learning it myself), God is pure intellect – he has no soul and no body. So the intellect of God is not tied to material things as ours is.
How all this transletes to the modern concept of “mind”, I’m not sure.
Me,
Looking back I did not articulate myself well. In a system certain premises called axioms are taken as true and everything done afterward is deductive reasoning from these axioms. Mathematics can be thought of as a study of these systems. Arguments are then shown to be true or false based on the axioms. Or they may also be shown to be not applicable (i.e, the truth or falseness of the statement is independent of the axioms). Now, people sometimes say things like “If the Riemann Hypothesis then X”. The reasoning can be valid, but no one takes that as a mathematical theorem. It just serves as motivation for proving/disproving/show independence for certain statements.
Feynmaniac beat me to it, but using mathematical proving as an analogy for the real world is absurd. There’s noisy signals in the real world, confounding data, outliers, error bars, and multiple interpretations (including the deliberately wrong). None of that exists in mathematics.
Mathematics is the only science whose currency is proof. All other sciences use falsifiability and consensus, meaning there is considerable arguments, experiments, refinements, and the abandoning of untenable positions.
Hypothetical things like Magic Sky Faeries will remain just that—hypothetical—without some convincing and falsifiable evidence they did or do exist. And there is no evidence at all: None. Zero. Ziltch. Their existence is an untenable position and should be abandoned.
Daniel Smith #717 wrote:
Again, it is God’s mind that’s relevant here, not human minds. Though it is important to note that, back in the days of Aristotle and Aquinas, the constitution of God’s mind was inferred from what we intuited about the human one. Intuitions, that happened to turn out to be wrong.
Consider this passage from a book written by Ralph Cudworth in 1678:
The True Intellectual System of the Universe: A systematic refutation of rigid mechanism and endorsement of the spiritual as part of the Great Chain of Being or Scale of Nature, Presided over by the Universal Mind.
They assumed that God’s relation to the universe was mirrored in the soul’s relation to the body — and vice versa. But this is not what our study of the brain revealed. We don’t use psychokenesis to move our fingers. And we don’t need to make use of outmoded terms like “animal soul,” or use archaic categories which divide intellect from imagination, as completely different things. Vitalism too, is dead (though still found in so-called “alternative medicine.”)
The existence of “Pure Intellect” is, according to modern neurology and an understanding of the brain’s evolution, a category error. It’s a reified abstraction. It does not apply to human beings — or animals. It is like asking where the “speed” goes, when the car stops.
You seem to accept that it doesn’t apply to human beings, and you’re going for some hybrid combination of modern neurology and medieval vocabulary in order to say you knew this all along. But it doesn’t work on God, because God can’t have a body. Not even a soul.
It’s pink.
And it means you have to defend a dualism, which is also pink.
So you’re a dualist then?
Daniel, it bugs me you keep writing hylemorphic; it’s hylomorphic.
Sheesh, at least get that right, please!
Paul W,
The connection you are asking about – how do we get from smaller, dumber particles to God – stems from the fact that it is one thing to which all these trillions and trillions of smaller things owe their existence to. Everything in the universe, 10 to the whatever power, are dependent upon one thing. Everything, from the largest body to the smallest particle points to that one thing.
That it is one, and not many, is shown (Aquinas argues) from the fact that, if it were many, all of them would have to be in agreement (“move together” – as he put it) in order to cause the larger motions of bodies etc.
That’s my understanding anyway. Aquinas put a lot of effort into showing that the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause, etc., must be God. There are pages and pages in his works devoted to that. Of course there were others as well, Duns Scotus to name one, who also spent considerable time on that very question.
DS @723, god is space-time?
God is the brute fact of reality.
And it’s pink, John … though not as we know it.
Sastra, as the husbeast of an ex-Trekkie, I salute you knowingly. :)
neg @#698 :
What John Morales wrote @#699.
Or in other words: Note that I wrote that it’s a principle of the scientific method, which is, as you wrote, a heuristic; the heuristic does include parsimony as a principle.
Irrelevant, if there is no connection or unmoved mover. Pages by an old philosopher are meaningless in light of new information. Which punts Aquinas to the bone-pile of philosophy.
blf @##719 :
Actually, inasmuch as mathematics can provide simulations of the real world, it can. You need to use something to represent, describe and analyze your noisy data.
The thing is, in mathematics — or rather, algorithmic information theory and/or probabilistic complexity theory — used for such simulations, parsimony provably provides the best (most successful) description of the data.
See Minimum description length and Minimum message length.
I don’t claim to understand the math, but it exists for those that want to tackle it.
Owlmirror, yes, I am aware of that. In fact, I originally had a paragraph about modelling/simulations, but removed it, deciding it confused my main point. The dipshite’s post claimed proofs in mathematics is why it doesn’t need to provide evidence for Magic Sky Faeries. The example used by the dipshite (Fermat’s Last Theorem) doesn’t involve noisy signals, confounding data, et al., so I decided to leave the mathematics of those out.
I think it’s finally time to call this one closed, Daniel Smith has successfully performed a self inflicted Reductio ad absurdum. There’s not really anywhere one can go from here…
…unless Daniel Smith gets his brain removed of course.
You have to differentiate between applied mathematics and pure mathematics. Pure mathematics (which is how many use the term ‘mathematics’) deals with systems. Here you just study the systems and what can be proven in them. Whether the system reflects reality or not doesn’t really matter.
Applied mathematics, as the name implies, applies models to real world situations. Here you do have to worry about whether the system you’re using accurately reflects reality.
Speaking of parsimony, I wanted to tackle the issue of Many Worlds versus Copenhagen interpretation.
#663:
As I understand it…
The problem is not only that the entities are unobservable, but that they’re unnecessary.
In the Copenhagen interpretation, the theory matches observation: quantum interactions are very weird, but they are whatever they are because that’s what experiment demonstrates. There may be some over-arching simplification possible that explains this behavior better as complex behavior of some simpler underlying substrate (grand unified theory w/string theory/loop quantum gravity/whatever), but from a scientific perspective, “they are as they appear to act” is where we are now.
The Many Worlds interpretation does not demonstrate the necessity of its multiple universes because we’re still stuck with quantum particles and interactions behaving as they appear to act in that way, but without explaining how/why multiple universes should exist and yet interact only at the quantum level, and only in the ways demonstrated by quantum interaction. It’s just wild unbounded speculation without a net.
Am I missing something? If so, what?
Kel, OM #731 wrote:
Oh ye of little faith. People who have enthusiastically read great lengths of prose from Saint Thomas of Aquinas, do not know the meaning of “well, that’s that, I guess, it’s gone on long enough, and it’s not making much sense.”
The good Daniel Smith is probably just getting started.
Or, perhaps, he’s trying to talk some of the other guys in the monastery, into have a go at us.
Would one call this the argumentum ad effortum?
But he really shouldn’t have bothered. If he’d been truly intellectually honest he’d simply have admitted that, like all religious people with critical thinking skills, he believed because he wanted to believe – and, deep down, he knew all the sophistry in the world wasn’t going to turn an irrational, emotional attachment to an idea into a logical argument no matter how many pages he churned out.
You should do the same, Daniel. Admit you believe because you want to believe and stop pretending there’s any kind of intellectual defence for it.
ROTFL!
Well, if we’re already making arguments from consequences (“intellectually appealing”), let me mention that, in an infinite multiverse where everything that can happen does happen, every single horror that can happen does happen… infinity times over. Don’t ponder that in too much detail.
“To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first… invent the universe.”
How far backward do we need to go through any particular chain of causation to arrive at a quantum fluctuation?
Into my quote folder.
Also, it strongly reminds me of the Lolcat translation of Ecclesiastes 1. Check it out at http://lolcatbible.org.
<sigh>
Just like perception and imagination, intellect is an interaction of matter. So, you can’t have it without matter (and so far that means a brain).
To claim that neurology doesn’t say anything that contradicts hylomorphic dualism is therefore remarkably short-sighted (if, as you caution, you’re indeed right about what the latter says).
Parsimony, not consensus :-)
It’s a good question whether mathematics (and logic) should be called science at all.
I realize that you still don’t realize that you’re being unreasonable and committing logical fallacies, but begging the question as you do above is an unreasonable logical fallacy.
Astonishing. You’re capable of occasionally being reasonable. So why not simply acknowledge that the other arguments that you’ve been using are not consistent with reason, and withdraw them?
Oh, huzzah. The fundamental forces of the universe continue to exist, and by existing allow you to continue existing.
So what?
Your argument and reason fail.
=======
Right! Exactly what we have been doing! You have been unreasonably failing to acknowledge this, let alone respond to these rather simple demonstrations of false premises and/or non-following conclusions.
Well, you’ve obviously been continually failing to think about it… Or have you been striving to not think about it? Hm.
=======
What a lovely example of a pompous, pretentious, unreasonable and incoherent twaddle.
How can you have intellect without sensation and imagination?
So the “soul” is neither completely immaterial nor immortal? And Thomas of Aquinas agreed with this?
Why then call it “soul” at all?
And therefore no senses and no imagination, according to the above illogic. So “God” cannot know anything, and cannot think of anything.
Lovely.
Why then call this “God” at all?
Hint: Sophistry based on medieval and classical misconceptions does not translate to anything other than unreasonable illogical fallacies. HTH, HAND!
=======
Even if this “one thing” was a valid deduction — so far, you have no evidence and very weak logic indeed — Aquinas did not demonstrate that this “one thing” was God, and neither have you.
This is an incoherent argument, since it does not in any way demonstrate its conclusion.
You mean, he put no effort whatsoever into simply asserting his conclusion and committing an unreasonable logical fallacy multiple times.
My, but you continue to fail to demonstrate any reasonableness whatsoever. Astonishing.
There are no pages at all in his works “devoted” to that — only single lines of unreasonable and unreasoned assertions: “… and this we call God”, etc.
And failed utterly, of course, even if you’re being honest, which given your track record with Aquinas is unlikely.
Besides, pages written and time spent does not equal correct logic and reasonable conclusion, and to claim otherwise is itself an unreasonable logical fallacy.
You can continue to ignore us pointing out your and Aquinas’ unreasonable logical fallacies, but that simply will not make them or you suddenly reasonable.
That’s not what I was trying to say. What I meant was that it intuitively appears more rational to favor interpretations with one universe or many that cannot be observed. Whether this intuition is right or not I’m not sure. At times the ‘shut up and calculate’ interpretation of quantum mechanics seems very appealing.
While we are at it, let’s talk about Computer “Science”…..
[OT]
David,
A Colder War (a novelette by Charles Stross)
Still no evidence for your imaginary deity Daniel. At a certain point, a man of intelligence and reason would acknowledge he can’t prove his deity. What is your excuse?
Hey! that’s just cold…
That wasn’t a slam on the field, just the name. In many ways it’s closer to being a field of mathematics than a science. Hell, some people don’t even like the “Computer” part of the name. “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra
Agreed on that, I look at it mostly as a degree in applied logic and problem solving.
David Marjanović:
I regret to inform you that even if Many Worlds is false, the situation is pretty bad in that regard.
If I recall correctly (and I may not) the overall curvature of spacetime is so incredibly slight, and the diameter of just our spacetime universe is so unimaginably vast, that if you just go out far enough within our spacetime continuum you’ll find another space-light separated “visible universe” just like it down to the smallest detail.
So somewhere out there, every mistake you’re making is being made by somebody just like you, and every indignity you suffer is being suffered by someone just like you… and very similar things are happening to a vast number of people very similar to you.
And some people say there’s no God! Hah!
Owlmirror:
“us”? Have you got a mouse in your pocket?
All you have done so far is say “no” to anything I’ve said. Assertions are not arguments. You have raised no serious objections to Aquinas’ proofs.
You assert that Aquinas “never” tackled the issue of whether the unmoved mover is God when in fact he did exactly that. He systematically built case upon case that – when taken together – shows that the unmoved mover must be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, infinite, immaterial, perfect, and a number of other things. If you want to pretend he didn’t – that’s fine – just don’t expect people who take this stuff seriously to do the same with your arguments.
They are antiquated and wrong, as has been pointed out to you time and time again. You are too stubborn to acknowledge the refutations. You have shown no serious physical evidence for your deity. That is the only thing that will convince us.
Daniel Smith says, “Aquinas put a lot of effort into showing that the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause, etc., must be God.”
Well, given that every atom that decays, every virtual particle that pops into existence or annihilates, every electron that tunnels across a barrier, must be God, since no cause brings about these effects and these effects in turn have other effects.
Congratulations, Daniel, you’ve just rediscovered pantheism!
Believe it or not, Daniel, we’ve learned a lot about the world since Acquinas. He was a smart guy–I rather doubt even he’d be trying to make the same arguments now. Logical guy that he was, he’d probably be an agnostic.
Feynmaniac (et al.):
That’s not what the Many Worlders say they are doing.
They think that many other universes have apparently been observed—they think that’s the best interpretation of well-known quantum phenomena such as interference and decoherence.
If that’s true, and in my current state of knowledge it seems plausible, then the inference that there’s a staggering number of other universes seems reasonable. Putting an intuitively “reasonable bound” on the number of universes is arbitrary and unparsimonious. (It’d be like being willing to believe there could be millions of stars, but not billions or trillions.)
As I understand it, the parsimony issue comes down to whether the “interfering” eigenstates are in fact observable parts of other universes, vs. little transient pockets of universe-like shit hanging off of our universe, or somehow not real at all, and the fundamental physics is about path integrals and random path choice.
Copenhagenish interpretations seem no more parsimonious to me than many worlds, and (at the moment anyway) less. If Copenhagen is right, there are many little pockets of universe-like stuff, and it’s an arbitrary assumption that they’re bounded, and not just the observable parts of other whole universes.
If I understand a_ray_in_dilbert_space correctly, what he’s talking about is neither of those things.
He thinks it’s more parsimonious to guess that neither of those basic interpretative schemas is right, and that you shouldn’t interpret interference and decoherence literally—there’s just a mathematical method that gets the right answers, and it’s equivalent to either of those possibilities, but really just a funny way of figuring out irreducibly weird shit that happens in this universe.
(Going out on a limb here in the hopes of being corrected if I’m wrong…)
If my vague understanding of the path integral method is right, you’re doing the equivalent of essentially calculating all possible paths that a particle could take, then computing an interference thing, and then using the interference to bias a random choice of where the particle would go.
In the Copenhagen interpretation, the different paths are followed in superposed eigenstates, whose wavefunctions actually interfere, and bias the probabilities of which eigenstates will disappear and which one will become part of the normal universe.
That seems unparsimonious to Many Worlders, because it posits two kinds of universe-like things—our actual universe, and the superposed eigenstates, which are like little pockets of universe-like stuff—and you have to have a random selection thing between them.
Compared to that, Many Worlds is simpler in that there’s only one kind of universe, and no random selection. The randomness is only subjective, and is an entirely predictable artifact of the actual proliferation of universes. That proliferation of universes is weird, but isn’t unparsimonious compared to Copenhagen, because Copenhagen already accepts a proliferation of superposed eigenstates that are like partial universes.
(Either of those intepretive frameworks requires accepting most of the same bizarre things—notably that 1) there are many universish things associated with at least partial splitting of the universe at quantum events, 2) they interfere with each other temporarily, and 3) they decohere and stop interfering after an observation, i.e., amplification of quantum effects to a macro scale.)
It sounds to me like a_ray is saying that it’s better not to interpret things either way—you just compute the path integral, which is the sum of all possible paths a particle could follow, and the resulting interference, and accept that the result will be equivalent to the particle having followed one of those paths at random, but with the randomness biased by the interference pattern.
Copenhagenish interpreters would interpret that mathematical technique as reflecting an actual physical fact—that versions of the particle really do take different paths in different eigenstates, which are physically real, but in a different way than our universe; the eigenstates really do interfere, and there really is a random choice of which one gets incorporated into the normal universe.
Many Worldly interpreters would intepret the same mathematical technique as reflecting somewhat different fact—that the “versions” of the particles are just regular particles, and when they appear to follow all possible paths, that’s just because they really do follow all possible paths, in different equally real and normal universes.
Partisans of either of those two camps would agree that we have observed something like the forking/cloning of universes, at least locally and that it’s a real phenomenon—if not, what different wavefunctions are interfering when we observe the results of interference?
Not only that, but in both cases the forking/cloning of universe things is significantly nonlocal in an important sense—it’s not just an individual particle sorta splitting into two versions, but ensembles of particles splitting into configurations that split into more configurations and so on, ramifying until something forces decoherence. And while they do that, they behave like normal universes, or nontrivial hunks of universes, except that they interference/decoherence thing determines which final configuration you’ll observe.
It sounds like a_ray wants to say that those phenomena are only apparent—you can interpret the results of observations either way, but there’s no real ramifying splitting of universes a la Many Worlds, or of sub-universes a la Copenhagen. It’s just a black box, and the math tells you what you’ll get out, but doesn’t really say anything about what happens in between. The fundamental reality is the input-output relation, and the math computes that function, but it’s a mistake to interpret the terms of the math as corresponding to physically real entities.
If I’ve got that right, the rejoinder from either the Copenhagen camp or the Many Worlds camp would be that that’s not generally how science works—we don’t just make mathematical models that predict for observations. We try to explain things, and if you observe something that seems to involve a weird phenomenon, the default guess should be that there really is a weird phenomenon that you’re observing.
Notice that we don’t in general avoid interpreting our observations—for example, we don’t interpret the statistical mechanics of gases as just a model that predicts results as if there was a vast number of tiny particles banging against each other. (And we wouldn’t even if we couldn’t observe those particles more directly in other ways.
We often defeasibly infer the reality of phenomena based on their fitting a model very well, even if we don’t have good collateral corroboration yet.
So, for example, the statistical mechanics of gases would be a fairly compelling reduction of macro to micro even if we didn’t have Brownian motion as a nice corroboration that there really are tiny little particles banging against things. In lieu of something like Brownian motion to make us really sure, we’d still guess that statistical mechanics reflected something real going on, and that gases were made out of vast numbers of particles.
Likewise, both the Many Worlders and Copenhageners would say that we should guess that at least parts of the universe do in fact split—we seem to have observed that via interference effects—and that what we can’t observe is just whether that splitting is somewhat nonlocal (Copenhagen), or not local at all (Many Worlds).
Daniel Smith:
What a load of horseshit.
Sure, Aquinas made a bunch of arguments for all those particular properties of his supposed God.
Of course he did—he was desperately trying to rationalize Christian theology.
Unfortunately, he was wrong on every count.
The first two versions of the Cosmological Argument are invalid because of the controversial denial of the possibility of an actual infinite regress.
Pretty much all philosophers and most theologians get that these days—maybe an actual infinite regress is impossible, but if so, nobody’s proved it.
The “hierarchy of causes” version is better, but like the others even if it’s right, it doesn’t prove the existence of God as I’ve explained to you repeatedly now.
The argument from Contingency is based on the assumption of a medieval concept of absolute necessity that nobody can make sense of. So far as we know, there is no such thing; contingency and necessity are always relative. Things may be necessitated by other things, given certain accepted assumptions, but nothing is necessary in itself.
The argument about perfection depends on a simplistic essentialist concept of perfection that is just false. Perfection is simply not an absolute or objective scale, and the existence of things that are better or worse in one way or another simply does not imply that there is one perfect thing, much less that such a thing actually exists. That’s ridiculous.
The Ontological Argument is just silly. It’s used in philosophy classes as an example of a really, really bad argument. Even in Aquinas’s era, it was soundly refuted by a reductio ad absurdam, showing that if you allow that sort of move, you can prove all sorts of ridiculous things. (E.g., that the “most beautiful possible island” must actually exist, because if it didn’t actually exist, it wouldn’t really be beautiful, would it?)
The obvious failure of the Ontological argument was one of the things that led to the formalizatio of the existential quantifier in symbolic logic. Your bad theological arguments were important in the development of philosophy, but mostly as negative examples—how not to construct a valid argument.
Every one of the arguments you mentioned was refuted hundreds of years ago by Christian philosophers and theologians.
That was one of the big reasons for the shift in mainline theology between thinking that you can prove basic theological points to thinking that you must accept them on faith.
Even in Christian theological terms your philosophy is hundreds of years out of date.
Get with the program.
Where are you getting this shit? Who are you getting it from that’s making it sound like it’s cutting-edge stuff, as opposed to the long-debunked dreck that it is?
I strongly suggest that you go to the library and check out Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism if you’re serious about this sort of argument.
If you’re just going to ignore our refutations, and claim that we’re just ignoring your valid proofs, go the fuck away. You’re not convincing anybody—quite the reverse. You’re making it clear that you have no actual idea what you’re talking about. (And that you won’t engage honestly with people who do.)
You don’t understand causation, supervenience, form and organization, minds, teleology, or perfection.
You’re just doing cargo cult philosophy, without actually understanding the substance of the stuff you’re supposedly “proving” things about.
Learn some science. Learn some basic philosophy.
Daniel Smith #746 wrote:
We’re all mice in Owlmirror’s pocket, and have an advantage over Aquinas, because he is not a mouse in yours. We can squeak up on our own.
It’s not really necessary to consider every part of a multi-step chain of reasoning. I (and others) have tried to pick out what we see as one fatal flaw in your argument, and I don’t think you have adequately dealt with it.
God is a mind-like being with no body (a “Pure Intellect”). This is mind/body dualism, by any name you prefer. Mind-body dualism is a hypothesis about how minds are, and it is a once-popular scientific hypothesis which has slowly been rejected as inadequate through the actual study of the brain. Speculations weren’t — and aren’t — enough. I read somewhere that not a single thing we actually discovered about the brain, was intuitively obvious. (Aristotle, remember, thought that the brain was an organ for cooling the blood — do not derive your understanding of how the mind works from Aristotle.)
In fact, once you understand that mind (and intellect and imagination and emotion and thought) are not distinct things in themselves, but the patterns, activities, and properties of material objects, dualism turns out to be a reification of abstractions. You cannot literally have “an intelligence.”
And, once you consider how minds evolve from things that are not mind-like at all, the idea that the evolutionary process is suddenly going to switch direction from simple to complex and start out with a complicated mind makes no sense. Nor, do our minds — or even the minds of mice — move objects by acts of will alone. The brain is part of the nervous system, and mice and men are on the same continuum. There is no “rational soul” which only humans possess.
Aquinas never dealt with this issue, because Aquinas lived in a time where this issue simply didn’t rear its ugly head. He couldn’t deal with it.
I don’t think you can deal with it, either. Not because you’re not aware of it, but because it just can’t fit into the archaic philosophical model you’re trying to shove it in to.
I wonder if there is a connection between A-T hylemorphic dualism and AT fields:
I finally had time to read most of this thread. Great contributions from Owlmirror, Sastra, aratina cage and others, but I bookmarked Sastra’s @751 because it is so clear, so well-written.
What Sastra said. (And has been saying all along.)
Daniel, it seems to me that almost all of what you’ve been talking about is a school of red herrings.
The real issue is that you want dualism, and that‘s what you need to argue for, to establish the relevance of your Cosmological Argument.
You’ve argued that there’s a first cause, a prime mover, and an ultimate ground of being that are all unique, and arguably the same thing.
Fine. So what?
You have done nothing to establish that such a thing is a God or anything like a god—in particular that it’s a mind or anything mind-like.
Everything we know scientifically says that if there’s a unique first cause/prime mover/ultimate ground of being, the closer we get to it, the dumber and less mind-like things look.
Maybe if we follow the dependency chains back and/or down to really simple dumb mindless stuff and one step further, we’ll run into God, who is complicated and smart.
(Recall that smart entails complicated; you can’t have an intelligence without considerably complexity, even if it’s not made out of matter.)
You have done nothing to substantiate your scientifically implausible assertions that
1. you can have a mind without matter, or
2. that mind is prior in terms of efficient causation to matter, or
3. that mind is prior in terms of metaphysical depency (e.g., supervenience) to matter, or
4. that it’s particularly plausible that such a thing would just exist, or be self-causing, or somehow have always existed without needing a cause, or whatever it takes to solve the still-unsolved problem of why there is something rather than nothing at all.
Everything we know scientifically at least suggests that matter is prior to mind—or if not matter as we know it, something sufficiently resembling matter to be able to be organized into something complex.
If you posit that the big First Thing is a mind, you have a problem we don’t have.
We can’t solve the problem of why there’s something rather than nothing at all, but then, neither can you. That’s simply not the kind of problem that has a solution in the terms you want—naive notions of causation, etc.—for reasons I’ve explained before.
But you have the additional problem of explaining why, if something just happens to exist for some reason we can’t fathom, it just so happens to be something complicated—a superpowerful mind, which is a very peculiar and complicated thing indeed.
However bizarre it is to us that anything would just exist, it’s even more bizarre that it would just happen to be such a peculiarly complex thing.
A quantum universe or multiverse is apparently actually a pretty simple thing, and maybe an astonishingly simple thing at root, describable by a simple formula.
A God of the sort you want is not. It seems to have a number of very convenient properties that there’s no reason to expect something to just have, even if it can somehow just exist.
We assume the existence of the material universe—not that we can explain its brute existence, but we can observe that it does in fact exist, and we can explain how something very, very simple could ramify into something very, very complicated, and why it would in a very, very few places, exhibit interesting order of the kind that allows things like us to evolve.
What you need to explain is why we should believe that whatever just exists would initially be a mind, and a mind capable of magic—using mind power to bring matter into existence and do it in an interesting way to achieve a desired result.
So far as we know, minds can’t do that. We have reason to think that they really can’t, given what minds actually are, and how they actually work—which Aristotle and Aquinas did not know.
To the best of our scientific knowledge, minds are intrinsically unable to exist without something rather like matter for them to be made of and to support their intrinsic complexity.
Likewise, minds are unable to perform magic. They’re informational processes, which can’t do anything without peripherals of some sort to affect the world beyond the mind.
Expecting a mind to perform magic is like expecting a computer to sit there computing, and somehow have the information processing in the computer directly affect the outside world.
Everything we know says it isn’t going to happen. For the computer to affect the outside world in big ways, you need to hook it up to something that amplifies the little differences that count as information processing into big differences. That’s why we put computers inside other machines to make robots. That’s why animals like us have peripheral nerves, and muscles and bones, and so on.
For your story to be even remotely plausible you need a good, plausible theory of magical minds.
I don’t think you have one.
If you do, spit it out.
If you don’t, go away and think about it.
Stop spewing all these red herrings about First Causes and Ultimate Perfection and things like that.
They’re bullshit, but more to the point, they’re small potatoes.
If you can convince us that
1) dualism is true, or even plausible, and
2) that minds are prior to matter, or even plausibly could be, and
3) that minds can magically affect matter in astonishing ways like bringing matter into existence, or even plausibly could, well…
in that case you’ll really have our attention.
Stop pussyfooting around with the small potatoes like the Cosmological Argument, which aren’t very interesting without solving the above 3 big problems with your view.
Paul W.@745 & 749,
I think what you are talking about in 745 is the phenomenon of inflation–the fact that after the Big Bang space expanded in portions of the Universe sufficiently rapidly that they in effect were removed from us superluminally. The fact is that we can say nothing about the physics of these regions–we have no idea how their physics has evolved, just as we can say nothing about the physics inside a black hole.
Now, as to 749, really when physicists think about the metaphysics of the quantum realm at all (which is rare), they realize that the problems all arise in the process of measurement. A wave function evolves deterministically up to the point where a measurement occurs. Even wrt nuclear decay, the system can continue to exist in a superposition of states–some decayed, some not (analogous to Schroedinger’s cat). Now of course, in reality, we have to define what we mean by “measurement”. And in Bohr’s interpretation, that is where the weirdness creeps in–all arising from the fact that we must make an arbitrary distinction between observer and observed. This much is common to all quantum mechanical treatments.
It is in the description of what happens in the process of measurement that the “Many Worlds” and Copenhagen interpretation differ. Many Worlds envisions an explosion of Universes while Copenhagen envisions a collapse of the wave function to an eigenstate. In both interpretations, you start with a superposition of eigenstates of the measurement operator and you end with the system in a single eigenstate of the operator.
I think that most physicists favor the Copenhagen interpretation (it’s still the one taught in quantum mechanics texts; Many Worlds is rarely even mentioned) because it is more similar to the classical theory of measurement and so is more consistent with the Correspondence Principle. The advantage of the Many Worlds theory is, as you say, the determinism. However, by the time Everett proposed Many Worlds, most scientists were used to indeterminism. Originally, Everett had hoped that the Many Worlds interpretation would also do away with the nonlocality of quantum mechanics. It does not. As such, it doesn’t resolve the problems between quantum mechanics and General Relativity.
The thing is, if you look at how the founders of quantum mechanics looked at the theory, it is clear that Bohr and Heisenberg mainly viewed the formalism as descriptive of the underlying physical reality. Born and others tended to view the wave functions as “real”. What is undeniable is that the underlying physical reality has both particle and wave characteristics that are mirrored by the formalism. It is also clear that there is absolutely no reason to favor Copenhagen over Many Worlds or vice versa. It’s purely a heuristic matter. I suspect that physicists will mostly continue to favor the Copenhagen interpretation since is is least dissimilar to the classical measurement theory, while science fiction writers will favor Many Worlds.
Paul W:
OK, so we’ve moved the goalposts. Does that mean you’re conceding the first cause argument?
@ Lynna,
An aside: I am glad to see you have returned from your trip! When I realized awhile back that I hadn’t seen a comment of yours in some time, it took a little digging through Teh Thread to make sure you were alright.
Regarding #753, thank you, but I feel like a flea swiping gleefully at Daniel amongst the intellectual giants battling him here. Still, it is painfully obvious that Mr. Smith has uncritically accepted Aquinas’s logical argument apart from its incongruity with modern scientific knowledge in multiple fields.
@ negentropyeater #708,
:3 I forgot another of the choices:
P. …author and/or editor of the bestselling classical anthology of ALL TIME!
I think Daniel’s post 677 makes it unnecessary to continue. He saw an argument that a human being is all of the molecules in the human being, and read it as an argument that each molecule in a human being is itself a human being. We are arguing with someone who cannot read and comprehend simple English. As above @756, where he misreads Paul’s argument (that things like the cosmological argument are based in a false ontology) as a concession (that the cosmological argument is true- which it isn’t and the only interesting thing about is why anyone would find it convincing at all- the psychological point which Paul is pressing on).
And he is apparently incapable of even reading or grasping the argument that Newton 3 destroys his “causal ordering”, because every causation is actually a two-way interaction; there is no bottom of the ladder because there is no ladder, only a net.
And before I forget… earlier he was talking about how the bricks are the matter of the house in one way, and the clay that made the bricks is the matter of the house some other way… for pity’s sake, it’s like the atomic theory of matter never happened.
No, we’re waiting for you to concede all your arguments, which are in the logical dumpster.
Two can play that game…
Daniel Smith asks, “OK, so we’ve moved the goalposts. Does that mean you’re conceding the first cause argument?”
Does that mean you are conceding that a radioactive atom is your God. After all, both exhibit uncaused cause.
Well, I’m not sure what you mean by “using the interference to bias a random choice of where the particle would go”.
Perhaps a (maded up) story will help. First, remember the double slit experiment. The amplitude of the pattern at a particular point O on the screen is obtained by adding the amplitude of the for the particle going through the first hole, A1, to O and the amplitude of the particle for the particle to go through the second hole, A2, to O (this where you get the interference thingy). A professor is teaching this in a class.
The path integral formulation is mathematically equivalent to the Schrödinger equation. That is, you can get the path integral from the Schrödinger equation and vice versa. The interference from all the paths means that paths which are close to the stationary action make the largest contribution, especially if the action is much greater than ħ. Hence the principle
of stationary action (erroneously called the principle of least action) is recovered in the Newtonian limit.
(Apologies if this was somewhat OT, but I thought it was an amusing story.)
Nerd, not only is the Path Integral approach equivalent to the Schroedinger approach, it’s equivalent toe the LaGrangian approach or the Hamiltonian.
It also lends itself quite nicely to perturbation expansion.
What thread have you been reading? Satra, Paul W., myself, and others have provided counterexamples to your premises.
Project much?
We have. The fact that you’ve ignored it or tried to redefine words, held the counter-example sideways, squint and deluded yourself that the premise still holds isn’t our fault.
Why don’t we move onto that then? Honestly, I think we’ve gotten all we can get from the First Cause argument.
Show that if a First Cause exists it has those properties you listed. Tell us what predications are made from this. If you are able to make accurate predictions based on the First Cause being God then that will lend weight to the idea of a First Cause, even if we don’t buy your particular argument for its existence. Otherwise, stop using the term ‘God’. You have in no way showed the term is justified.
_ _ _ _
We’re you talking to NoR or just calling me a nerd? :)
Also, easy to generalize to special relativity.
However, solving the Coulomb problem with path integrals is ugly.
Daniel Smith:
No, the goalposts are exactly where you put them in your very first comment in this thread, #222.
You said:
You came in here telling us we’re wrong, and that our position is unreasonable. (Later you made it clear that you think you have several proofs we’re wrong.)
That set your goalposts at proving that you have valid arguments, and in particular, the last statement quoted above, lifted from Aquinas: That “something” we call God.
It if you claim to have valid arguments, you’re responsible for every step of them, including that conclusion—that what you claim to have proved is what we call God.
It is not moving the goalposts to get bored showing that your arguments are all invalid at earlier steps, and choose to point out that that a later, more interesting step isn’t valid either.
(And do realize that what I was saying was essentially the same as what Sastra has been saying all along, which you have been so studiously ignoring.)
No goalposts have moved, and you haven’t gotten any closer.
You, on the other hand, have tried to move the goalposts, trying to put the onus on us to prove that such a thing wouldn’t be God, and in particular the specific type God you want it to be.
Instead of seriously attempting to defend the assumptions underlying that final huge leap in your supposedly valid argument, you say that we can’t disprove your made-up antiscientific bullshit about a mind that is simple, a mind that is independent of matter, a mind that is uncaused or self-causing, a mind that can do magic (and can matter into existence), etc.
Sorry Daniel, but when you moved the goalposts that way, you lost bigtime. You initially claimed to have something awesome and impressive, and it turns out you got nothin’. All you have is a whole slew of unsubstantiated assertions and misconceptions, not a valid argument, much less five valid arguments.
Ummm, lemme see… in the comment you responded to I said:
What part of they’re bullshit do you not understand?
In your mind, does bullshit plus small potatoes somehow equal convincing?
At this point, I can’t say I’d be surprised if it did.
Feynmaniac, sorry, your post came right below NOR’s. OTOH, I do consider you a nerd–in the most flattering sense of that word. ;-)
You being blind to the multiplicity of your interlocutors is your problem, not our problem.
First of all, that’s a malicious and mendacious lie.
Secondly — are you really trying to say that you, in all honesty, do not even realize that your logical fallacies are in fact fallacies even when the fallacies are shown to you?
Are you really that stupid?
Or are you really that pathetically ignorant of logic that you neither know nor care what a logical fallacy is?
Ah! So when you, or someone you like, makes an assertion, it is an argument, and when I, or anyone else, points out that the assertion is a fallacy (and therefore not an argument)… suddenly that is an assertion that is not an argument?
Are you really that hypocritical?
PS: Special pleading is still a logical fallacy. So is tu quoque.
Except that he did not.
For pity’s sake, I did read both the “five ways” in Summa and the chapter in Contra Gentiles, which you yourself pointed to and in no place does Aquinas demonstrate that the unmoved mover is God. He simply asserts it, which, if you weren’t a total presuppositional hypocrite, you would realize is an unreasonable logical fallacy.
You mean, you assert that he did — which is not an argument. How do you like that shoved back in your face, you unreasoning lying hypocrite?
You have not shown that he did. In fact, you seem to be more ignorant of Aquinas than I am, which is pretty damned pathetic.
So, you take it so seriously that you will ignore all arguments based on reason and logic against it?
You simply presuppose it to be valid and true, which is unreasonable.
ARIDS, there several reasons I am a chemist, and not a physicist. QM calculations mentioned in #763 is one of them. I leave them to the experts, and listen to the results. Fascinating discussion above.
Yet how could God be omniscient without an infinite number of the equivalent of neurons and synapses?
The problem with your argument, which you repeatedly ignore to address, is that the qualities you present are emergent physical properties – you’re anthropomorphising reality and then engaging in special pleading in order to justify that somehow these physical traits can be immaterial in an infinite being. You can’t have your metaphysical cake and eat it too. If you’re going to talk in familiarity in regards to anything you know from the physical world then you can’t have God exhibit those qualities as an immaterial entity. If you’re going to take God as immaterial, then any trait you give God is nothing more than personal preference – you are talking about the unknowable by definition.
Are you conceding that you are so full of bullshit that you are not capable of refuting the counterarguments against the first cause argument?
Stephen Pinker once defined “intelligence” as “the ability to achieve goals despite obstacles.” He thought it a rather nice, simple definition, because it was flexible and comprehensive enough to be used in discussing everything from bacteria, to primates, to computers. Once you have something with some vague sort of “goal,” obstacles in the environment which impede success, and a system which changes in order to manipulate around those impediments, complexity naturally evolves.
What I don’t see it applying to is something that is supposed to be unchanging, timeless, omnipotent, perfect, unique, and both omnipresent and transcendent. God has “goals?” “Obstacles?” An environment it adapted to, and adapts? The concept is gibberish in context of those attributes.
This, of course, is a different problem than the one where God doesn’t just have an ability — it is an “ability.”
Indeed, so please stop doing that. Either demonstrate all your assertions, or stop projecting what you do. You have made plenty of assertions, assertions that are a posteriori in nature. You’re using experiential observation and personal intuition – both of which are subject to the problem of induction.
Epicurus claimed that the soul (psyche) consisted of atoms, “the lightest and most volatile atoms”, that dispersed at death, making reconstruction and thus any afterlife impossible.
Paul the Apostle accepted this – and then added the entirely new concept of the spirit, pneuma, which was supposed to be immaterial and immortal. That’s where “body, soul and spirit” comes from.
I haven’t read anything by Aquinas except for short quotes, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he accepted all this.
(BTW, “of Aquinas” is double; “Aquinas” or “of Aquino”.)
And indeed, in German it’s called Informatik.
For crying out loud.
How much longer will you continue to deny all the uncaused events in and around you? How much longer will you continue to deny Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Relation? How much longer will you continue to deny the entire Casimir effect? It has been observed and measured, you know. Experiments have been done with it. Did you even know that alpha- and beta-particles lack the energy necessary to leave a nucleus? Do you know how they do get out?
Sort of like the “Rio Grande River”* or “East Timor”, Timor coming from the Indonesian and Malay Timur, meaning ‘East’ [Source]. Do you know if there is a technical linguistic term for these sorts of things?
* That’s how it’s spelled in the US, no accent over the ‘i’. I read a while back that newspaper editors in the US frequently don’t bother to include accents, tildes, etc. in Spanish words or even names. Yet for words of French origin often the accents (and other diacritical marks) are kept e.g, fiancée, touché, coup d’état, naïve, etc. This can cause some unintentional humor e.g, “Cien años de soledad” vs. “Cien anos de soledad” (hopefully you know enough Spanish to get that).
Still an amazing thread. I stand bloodied with the shrapnel of collateral wisdom.
Just want to say thanks to Feynmaniac, a_ray and Paul W. for the recommendations upthread.
Carry on…please!
Paul “added the entirely new concept of the spirit”?
Huh?
That “entirely new concept” was introduced in Genesis 2.7: “And God formed man of the dust of the ground (body) and breathed into his nostrils the breath (Hebrew “neshamah” translated elsewhere as “spirit”) of life; and man became a living soul.”
Body, soul and spirit right there – in the beginning.
Sorry Daniel. Until you have at least made the effort to show that your ‘First Cause’ is a being that is omniscient, omnipotent, etc. you don’t get to use the term ‘God’ or quote the Bible, even if it’s for something unrelated.
Daniel, you have show your imaginary deity separately from the holy babble. The babble starts circular reasoning, where the babble shows god, and god shows the babble. A logical fallacy. Each must be proven separately. And starting with your imaginary deity is the right place to convince folks. If you can’t prove that, forget the babble. If you were fully trained, you would know that.
So God breathes the breath of life in through the nostrils–the customary breathing orifice–and that somehow becomes the spirit that transcends the soul?
For the love of Christ, man. The word “spirit” is directly related to the word “respire” in English. Similar cases hold in many other languages. The whole concept of spirits and ghosts likely arose from breathing.
And, if there is at lowest my body, then my soul, then a spirit, and only my spirit is getting into Heaven, then I really say “forget it”. My spirit is gonna be nothing like me at all.
And what does this lunatic argument do to the concept of an immortal soul? Will my soul live forever separate from my spirit?
The classic argument for an immaterial mind focuses on things that are said to exist only in the mind – abstract concepts, ideas, imaginations, mathematics, etc.
The consensus view here seems to be that it has already been demonstrated that those things have been inexorably linked to physical phenomena. First, I don’t think anything like that has been demonstrated conclusively. Second, the argument is circular: it assumes that – since brains are the product of evolution, minds must be too – thus assuming the conclusion that the mind is a product of the brain.
Daniel, define an abstract concept. It has been demonstrated that many animals, including elephants and crows have a concept of self and that elephants understand death.
Likewise, computers can now passably perform such diverse activities as writing poetry or fiction–not great, but better than most produced in freshman English. Again, as von Neumann said, if you can define precisely what a human mind can do that a machine cannot, you can program a machine to do it. You are merely repeating the mistake of the god of the gaps.
We know with a high degree of certainty that minds can be altered by changes to (evolved) brains. Studies of people with brain tumors, accident victims, stroke and Alzheimers patients, etc. show that anything that can reasonably called a “mind” can be altered, quite dramatically, when the physical brain is changed. This is pretty solid evidence that “minds” are in fact emergent properties of brains.
Physical changes to brains impact the mind’s experience of many phenomena, including abstract concepts, ideas, imaginations, mathematics, etc. (to say nothing of memory, sensual experience and personality). To suggest that these things have not been inexorably linked to physical phenomena is to show an astounding ignorance of literally volumes of well-documented evidence in the field of neuroscience. With the advent and availability of more and more advanced technology such as fMRI, our knowledge of very specific physical connections between brain and mind is increasing exponentially, and with greater specificity, to the level of individual neurons, molecules, and atoms.
In fact, I’d wager that there are more volumes of such evidence than there are volumes written by Aquinas.
I’d also wager that no matter how rock solid and voluminous the evidence is linking the phenomena of mind to the physical matter of the brain, Daniel Smith will claim that it has not been demonstrated conclusively.
DS:
That’d be because we’re somewhat informed about science, and its history. There was a time when the existence of non-physical phenomena was a reasonable conjecture, but that was centuries ago.
That you ignore or discard the knowledge accrued in those centuries since to try to rationalise your intuitions is perverse and intellectually cowardly.
PS You appear to misunderstand much of the philosophical/scientific nomenclature you employ: phenomena is the plural of phenomenon.
As, indeed, nothing in science can be.
Note, however, that it’s explained in terms of known entities, and unfalsified.
Without denying your evident expertise at circular argumentation, I inform you that this is not the case.
The origin of brains is irrelevant to the argument; no phenomena uniquely ascribable to minds have been observed without their being dependent on a brain, and we know brains are physical.
Are you willing to actually demonstrate this position, or are you happy to keep your brain protected while advocating otherwise? How about this, you get some of your brain removed proportional to your disbelief in thought being a physical phenomena. The more you believe in the immaterial nature of the mind, the more brain that is removed.
I’m willing to bet you won’t do this, because like every dualist all you have is sophistry. Meanwhile neuroscience is probing the brain more and more, able to induce emotional states, patternicity, OBEs and NDEs, observed brain patterns for particular stimuli, see the effects of mental disintergration, etc.
Of course it hasn’t been “demonstrated conclusively”, just to a sufficient level where denial is for ideological as opposed to empirical reasons.
Nope, there are plenty of mind creationists out there who accept that evolution happened for the body but that there was something different for the mind. The link between mental phenomena and physical activity in the brain is an empirical fact, do you think fMRI machines exist for hospitals to charge more for patients? How do you think drugs affect mental function? How do you think brain injury affects mental phenomena?
It’s not circular, you’re just assuming that the only reason people make the connection is because of evolution. Not that there’s plenty of empirical evidence supporting it, but that evolution tells us it is.
I infer from Daniel’s silence on the subject of Aquinas and his first cause argument, and his changing to different subjects, that he is indeed conceding that Aquinas and his first cause arguments were fallacious.
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None of which supports immateriality or immortality, I note. Are you conceding that the meanings of “spirit” and “soul” in the beginning were material and mortal?
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This is equivocation around the word “immaterial”. Is the software that is running the computer you’re using “immaterial” just because it’s shifting electrical charges and magnetic fields?
The opposite has not been demonstrated despite extensive analysis and investigation into neurology and neuropsychology, and I once again repeat: Have you even heard of the principle of parsimony?
Evolution is not a prerequisite for the argument, but does support the argument, and certainly does not contradict it.
Minds arise from the operation of the brain, which is entirely physical in its substance, following continuous empirical analysis of the brain. The conclusion is a valid parsimonious inference, not a circular argument.
Are you willing to attempt a direct refutation of this inference by having your brain extracted, as Kel suggested?
If parapsychology had succeeded in demonstrating the existence of ESP, psychokensis, Out-of-Body experiences, reincarnation, remote viewing, energy healing, ghosts, precognition, and/or a host of other similar phenomena, then the case for mind being something separable from the physical brain would have been considerably strengthened. In fact, it would today be the scientific consensus. Mind could not be the product of the brain, and explain the evidence.
Its failure, then, is significant. It leaves you with an Argument From Maybe. It appears that mind is the product of the brain. But maybe it isn’t. Therefore, maybe it isn’t.
And you can shove God in the gap of uncertainty, and worship it as Pure Potentiality.
Which is a different matter, I think, than pure actuality.
Wrong, proving it is the product of the brain. You presume fallaciously otherwise.
Sastra:
Oh, SNAP!
@#653:
Wait. Why are they “universe-like”? Where does this adjective come from?
Owlmirror:
As I understand it, they have space and time and particles/waves in them, with stuff going on.
Metaphorically, while Schrodinger’s cat is superposed, the live version of it is breathing and looking around or snoozing, and the dead version is doing the sorts of things dead ones do, with its tissues dying and disintegrating, and so on—stuff is happening in the eigenstates, with things interacting, just as though they were parts of a normal spacetime universe.
We can’t generally actually set up a superposition of things that big and maintain it that long, but as far as I know, the basic principle applies—superposed eigenstates are hunks of spacetime that can have pretty complicated stuff going on until them, like anywhere else.
Penrose has suggested a “”one-graviton” limit for superposition; systems can remain superposed so long as the distribution of mass in the superposition isn’t seriously distinguishable by gravity. I think the argument comes from the Planck mass being quite large, about 21 micrograms- hence we can see quantum effects in quite large systems. From this point of view, the cat-in-the-box would not remain in a superposition of alive and dead states- too big – and it would suggest a reason why macroscopic observers collapse quantum superpositions; it’s not because we have minds, it’s just because we have mass. I don’t, however, know of any mechanistic reasoning about how or why gravitation would actually cause the collapse.
I see that Daniel has conceded all of the Cause arguments, and decided to talk about Genesis instead. Tres logique.
Newton’s third law:
For every action (cause), there is an equal and opposite reaction (effect).
Okay…
No one said causation made a neat ordered “ladder”. That is your characterization of it.
In fact, all of the so-called “uncaused” events brought up here can be explained in terms of causation – as I showed with virtual particles. Rebranding them does not change that fact.
Daniel, you’ve still failed to grasp the point: you _cannot_ distinguish cause from effect in an interaction. That’s the point of Newton 3: it eliminates the idea of “A acting on B” in the _unidirectional_ causal fashion that the medieval arguments about causation require.
You claimed that you could order causal events and at one end of the ordering you inserted your god. This fails.
Not even one.
In fact the discussion about the mind of God brings us to, what I consider the most intuitive of the five ways (and my personal favorite): the fifth way:
I left off the ending (“and this being we call God”) because it throws owlmirror off and is not a necessary part of the argument.
But the fifth way establishes (if correct) that mind comes before matter.
That argument fails at the start. It is not the case that unintelligent things “act for an end”. Since the premise is false, the conclusions do not follow. If that’s your favourite argument and you find it remotely convincing, I think you’re a halfwit.
Are you seriously advocating the Theory of Intelligent Falling? Because that’s what the argument boils down to. If I drop rocks they reliably fall to the ground; therefore God is pushing the rocks towards the ground. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
Daniel, if you simply cannot conceive that your arguments are wrong, you aren’t doing honest philosophy. You are doing presupposition, where you determine the answer before looking at the argument and evidence. All presup arguments are false. I would guess that is where you are at the moment. You can’t show you are right, but you can’t admit you might be wrong, as if doing so would destroy your self image and/or deity. Neither will occur. Time to grow up and acknowledge you could be wrong.
I guess it’s progress that he put “if correct”; it’s at least a formal note that the fifth way is not an argument. It’s an assertion. I don’t think Daniel has really grokked the distinction yet, but who knows what might follow?
Daniel Smith:
Except that it’s not true.
A falling rock simply doesn’t act “so as to obtain the best result.”
Aristotle thought that teleology (goal-seeking) was a fundamental kind of causation, not reducible to any of the others.
He thought that a rock’s natural place was low down, and it “wanted” to go lower, so it did if it could. (If nothing was in the way.)
But rocks don’t want to go down. They don’t know if they’re higher or lower. They have no goals, and no ability to assess their situations in terms of whether they’re near their goals, or in which direction a goal lies, or what to do to get closer to their goal states.
Intelligent things do have goals, and an ability to assess their current state and find a way to get closer to their goal states.
That is intrinsically complicated. As I showed earlier, simple things can’t know things—each thing you know requires that you be different in some way from however you’d be if you didn’t know that. Similarly, being smart requires being complicated—everything that distinguishes a smart thing from a dumb thing requires a difference from a dumb thing.
A goal-seeking designer who can know enough to understand things, want things, and design things to satisfy thoses wants is a complicated thing.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s made out of matter—whatever it’s made out of, it’s not going to be simple. The smarter it is, the more complicated it has to be.
Explaining simple things like brute material bodies and simple natural regularities in terms of an intelligent designer is explaining simple things in terms of complicated things.
It’s getting things exactly backwards.
Simple things are prior to complicated things.
The Fifth Way is the opposite of an explanation—it’s an obfuscation that makes things much, much worse.
If you explain something simple like a falling rock in terms of something extraordinarily complicated like a superintelligent designer, you then need to turn around and explain that superintelligent designer in terms of simpler things.
That’s not progress.
Daniel Smith says, “Newton’s third law:
For every action (cause), there is an equal and opposite reaction (effect).”
WRONG!! WRONG!! WRONG!! WRONG!! WRONG!!
The action is the force of body 1 on body 2, the reaction is the force of body 2 on body 1. Newton’s 3rd law of motion says these two must be equal.
Daniel, I’m beginning to think you might be one of the great minds of the 8th century!
If you are wondering how Daniel Smith acquired such confused ideas, it is because he is a sycophant of Catholic apologist Edward Feser, who has been a subject of ridicule here in the past. That’s appropriate, as Feser’s ideas are ridiculous. He recently wrote another whiny article about PZ et al.
http://www.american.com/archive/2010/march/the-new-philistinism
That is precisely the point of the fifth way Paul. No, rocks don’t want to go downhill, enzymes don’t intend to convert a substrate to a product, planets don’t know to orbit the Sun. Matter has no goals, no intentions, no knowledge.
BUT, these things act as if they do have desires: Rocks act as if they want to go downhill, enzymes act as if they intend to convert a substrate to a product, planets act as if they know to orbit the Sun.
Thank you. That is also what Aquinas says: Intelligent things do have goals, desires, intentions.
It is because things that cannot possibly be intelligent act as if they are that Aquinas argues that “some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end”.
Daniel Smith says, “Matter has no goals, no intentions, no knowledge.
BUT, these things act as if they do have desires…”
Oh dear…
Uh, no Daniel. Rocks and all other masses follow geodesics in the curved space-time caused by other masses. And enzymes behave accoding to electrochemical potentials. Laws of physics, Daniel. We don’t have to assume that everything follows the whim of a “creator” whose motives we cannot comprehend.
Instead, we can predict how matter will behave–even matter at 4 trillion degrees–a temperature that hasn’t been seen since microseconds after the Big Bang. Those gaps are getting awfully tiny for your deity.
This, in a nutshell, is one of your big problems. You are trying to rationalize your anthropomorphizing of nature. Granted it’s more sophisticated than the ideas of volcano gods and sun gods, but it’s still shows a lack of understanding of reality really works. There’s a reason science dropped this archaic ideas a long time ago. I urge you to take some science courses, or even listen to these first year physics lectures I linked to earlier ( honestly, a first year MIT course, people pay ridiculous amounts of money for that privilege and you can listen to it for free!).
holy fuck. worst case of anthropomorphism and teleology EVAR.
You really are completely ignorant even of Newtonian physics, aren’t you? The whole point of Newtonian laws of nature was that things happen in deterministic ways that don’t actually look like intention at all, which is more whimsical. The whole point was that there in no intent behind any physical events, because the things that happen are perfectly understandable and explainable without intent.
Daniel Smith:
One of those things is not like the others, and either way, you’re wrong to interpret it the way you do.
Rocks only act as if they want to go downhill, or if something wants them to go downhill, because all particles with mass gravitate, mutually. And around here, there’s a big lump of massy particles called the Earth, and smaller lumps of massy particles called rocks, and simple, utterly dumb gravitation takes care of it, entirely in terms of normal (efficient) causation. There is no reason to assume teleology.
Inertia and gravitation take care of it just fine, without any teleology.
Let me elaborate on that a bit. Aristotle assumed that there was an irreducibly teleological kind of causation that did not reduce to efficient causation, and that different kinds of things had different levels of teleology—simple directedness, like rocks going down, vs. certain kinds of self-regulation and adaptation, like plants do, vs. much more sophisticated goal-seeking, like animals do, vs. much more intelligent stuff that “rational” animals like us do.
He was wrong. Those things all reduce to efficient causation. There is no magical teleology involved. There is no life force or vital essence that doesn’t reduce to dumb mechanical interactions. Plants and animals are machines. And there is apparently no soul that doesn’t reduce to information processing in a machine of sorts. We are machines too. It all reduces to the one kind of causation that appears to be real: efficient causation.
(As usual in science, we can’t definitively rule out the possiblity that there’s some irreducible teleology. We just don’t find evidence for it where we’d expect to, and it seems wildly unparsimonious, so in lieu of such evidence, we guess that it’s false.)
That’s important. Aristotle and Aquinas were smart guys, but they couldn’t imagine the success of science over the last 500 years in explaining everything that they attributed teleology to in terms of efficient causation happening among a whole shitload of utterly dumb little things.
They did not realize that teleology is naturally emergent from, and scientifically reducible to efficient causation.
They understood the world in terms of a great chain of being between the very low level dumb stuff, with a rudimentary innate teleology, and the high level smart stuff, with a “higher” but still innate teleology, and God at the top, being Mr. Teleology, above mere material efficient causation.
Everything science has taught us over the last 500 years says they were wrong as can be. You don’t need all those levels of teleology, souls and whatnot. You don’t need formal or final causation. Efficient causation among dumb things takes care of it all just fine, if you understand supervenience.
The example you gave that didn’t fit with the other two was enzymes.
Enzymes do indeed behave as if they want to produce products, in a much stronger (but still misleading) sense than rocks behave as if they want to go down and planets behave “as if” they want to go around things. They show a much stronger
That’s why plants, animals, and people were crucial motivating examples for Aristotle and Aquinas. Rocks weren’t what drove them to believe in formal and final causes—plants, animals, and people were. They saw the obvious design-like and even designing properties of those things, and found it inconceivable that efficient causation was sufficient to explain them.
That is why Darwin is so important to the modern, scientific worldview—not just scientifically, but philosophically. He showed that Aristotle, brilliant as he unquestionably was, was naive and ignorant, and misinterpreted what he saw. Darwin was the most important philosopher of the last two thousand years, because he showed that basic metaphysical distinctions people are prone to making are superficial and wrong.
That’s why I asked repeatedly if you’ve ever read a book on evolution by a scientist or philosopher who believes in it. You appear not to understand what’s so philosophically important about evolution by random variation and differential reproductive success. You are missing the forest for the trees.
(I highly recommend Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea because he’s a philosopher and makes that very explicit; that’s the main point of the book. You could probably get by with reading half of it.)
Darwin demolished Aristotle’s only good motivating examples of formal and final causation. Species are not what they are because they are approximations of ideal types. They emerge naturally from the interaction of utterly dumb stuff behaving in dumbly regular and irregular ways. They are fundamentally historical as well—you might say contingent—because what makes a species the particular species that it is not how it approximates some Platonic Ideal, but a historical artifact of which of its relatives died off, leaving a surviving cluster of more closely related things. Aristotle’s best examples of forms dissolve in light of Darwinism, along with final causation.
Once you realize that all the good examples of teleology reduce to dumb old efficient causation, you’re left with simple, dumb stuff like rocks and planets, doing the dumb things they do like falling down and going around. That in turn reduces to really dumb, really simple stuff like interacting fields.
That’s where a different argument comes in, and I want to keep those separate.
The strong appearance of design that you get from plants animals and people is clearly illusory, in scientific terms. Once you understand the incredible success of science in explaining how high-level things supervene on low-level things, your only motivating examples for teleology are the really dumb, low-level things.
That’s when people shift gears and start talking about simple, dumb natural “laws” implying a “lawgiver.”
That’s based on a profound misunderstanding of natural “laws.” We have no reason to think that natural laws were laid down like human laws, by a lawgiver with a mind, and good reason to think they weren’t.
A natural “law” is just a description of a regularity in nature.
Take inertia, for example. When particles move through space, singly or in huge groups, they tend to just keep going. That does not even appear goal oriented even in the sense that plants, animals and people exhibit goal-orientedness. Not even close, and not even on the scale.
A particle, rock, or planet does not even appear to want to go anywhere in particular. It just keeps going, with no right direction or wrong direction. It doesn’t care, and nobody else seems to care, either—particles, rocks, and planets are about as good an example of non-teleological behavior as you could hope for. They are utterly indifferent to where they’re going, and if you change their direction by giving them a shove, they’ll indifferently travel in some other direction instead.
You could try the tack of saying that inertia reveals that somebody somehow wants stuff to keep traveling in straight lines, by default, for some obscure reason, but if you do, keep in mind that you’re moving the goalposts in a bizarre way. The main motivating examples for formal and final causes was complicated stuff doing apparently goal-directed things, which change their behavior in appropriate ways for their circumstances.
Now, if not changing direction or speed would count—the perfect example of a lack of goal-directed behavior—then anything would. If you can argue out of both sides of your mouth that way, it indicates that your conclusion is not based on evidence—you’re willing to interpret anything as supporting your foregone conclusion, and you’re not really making an argument from evidence; you’re just revealing your convenient assumptions, to which actual evidence is irrelevant.
BUT, these things act as if they do have desires: Rocks act as if they want to go downhill, enzymes act as if they intend to convert a substrate to a product, planets act as if they know to orbit the Sun. – Daniel Smith
By the cringe, this is really plumbing the depths of stupid! Daniel, can you describe how rocks would have to behave for you to think they were not acting as if they had intentions?
You guys that are arguing with Daniel are missing something. The Aristotelian-Thomistic view that Daniel is defending is a dogma of the Catholic church. As such, on Daniel’s world view, it cannot be wrong. Citing evidence that contradicts his archaic A-T non-sense is ineffective. He is not persuaded by evidence, but only listens to what is handed down from the Magisterium. Or more specifically in Daniel’s case, what is fed to him by Catholic apologist and pseudo-philosopher Edward Feser.
oops, edit-o in my last post:
That last sentence fragment was supposed to be:
(But of course that function is the result of evolution, not actual intelligent design.)
R. David Dawson:
I think most of us inferred long ago that Daniel was infected with dogmatism.
The question is whether he knows that, and in what sense.
As Sastra pointed out earlier, many Thomists are Thomists because they like to think that their faith is consistent with rationality—even supported by it. Pointing out that it’s not true is occasionally somewhat effective. They may just acknowledge that their leap of faith is bigger than they thought, and do it anyway, or they may find it disturbing and corrosive to their faith.
There’s a reason why a lot of people who go into seminary and serioiusly study this stuff come out atheists, or at least start being much more skeptical of a lot of dogma.
I suspect that Daniel is not a seminarian, though. He seems more like an utter noob without any real background or intellectual support structure, who’s ignorantly latched onto that Edward Feser crank because he doesn’t know any better.
I once watched a guy like him become gradually less dogmatic over the course of about two years, and end up an atheist. It does happen sometimes.
I dunno if Daniel has that guy’s potential, but it’s often hard to tell.
Besides, we haven’t been getting a lot of good trolls lately, so we make do, if only to amuse ourselves and keep our chops up. (And maybe to inflict a little collateral knowledge on innocent bystanders.)
By the way, I’ve known a couple of “Thomists” who weren’t Catholic, or even Christian, but Deists. (They fell for the Five Ways, more or less, but not the further-out stuff about the Trinity and such.) It happens.
I think it mostly happens because the Catholics keep Thomism alive, but they do manage to infect some other people with that brand of pseudo-rationality. The Aristotle connection makes it sound all seriously philosophical and timelessly respectable.
*barfs*
Good question. While you’re at it, how would things look like if the “everything has a cause” rule did not hold?
It seems PZ may close this thread because it’s getting too long and Daniel bears too close a resemblence to a brick wall.
Before that happens, I’d like to recommend a short reading list for Daniel:
1. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
2. How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
3. Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer.
If you read those books—or just half of each, you will know way, way more about things you desperately need to know about, if you’re really interested in the stuff we’ve been discussing—teleology, whether minds are prior to matter, and why the Aristotelian ideas you rely on are so intuitively appealing despite being profoundly wrong.
If you just get the most basic few ideas of those three books, you will be competent to at least ask the kinds of questions you ask, and have a real hope of understanding the answers, rather than being the kind of brick wall you seem to be now.
They are very good, well-written, and really very interesting books that I recommend to anybody and everybody, but you need them really, really badly if you don’t want to embarrass yourself in discussions like this.
Reading even the first half of any one of them would dramatically improve your knowledge relevant to at least some of the arguments you’re making.
Any good public library should have at least two of those books, so you probably wouldn’t need to spend any money.
This drain unable to handle flow: further volumes will be redirect to the emergency catch-basin of the endless thread.