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The Naturalists’ Conundrum

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Kantian Naturalist writes that almost all naturalists (including, presumably, himself) believe selection tends to favor true beliefs.

I don’t know why he would say this, because Neo-Darwinian Evolution (“NDE”) posits that selection favors characters that increase fitness as measured by relative reproductive fecundity. Per NDE, selection is indifferent the truth. It will select for a false belief if, for whatever reason, that belief increases fitness.

Now the naturalist might say that it is obvious that true belief must increase fitness more than false belief. Is it obvious? Consider the conundrum of religious belief from an NDE perspective:

1. By definition the naturalist believes religious belief is false.

2. The overwhelming majority of people throughout history have held religious belief.

3. Therefore, the naturalist must believe that the overwhelming majority of humans throughout history have held a false belief.

4. It follows that natural selection selected for a belief that the naturalist is convinced is false.

We can set to one side the question of whether a particular religious belief is actually false. The naturalist, by definition, believes they all are, and therefore he must believe that natural selection selected for a belief he thinks is false.

What is the naturalist to do? Indeed, if the naturalist concedes that natural selection at least sometimes selects for false beliefs, how can he have any confidence in his own conviction that naturalism itself is true?

Appeals to “the evidence” won’t save the naturalist here. Both sides of the religion issue appeal to evidence.

Comments
KN:
Yeah, I’m special that way — I have the remarkable ability to amass a huge amount of information without ever drawing a conclusion from it. It’s sometimes valuable, and sometimes harmful.
Well, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that every personality trait can be both a strength and a weakness. I'm very persistent, myself, which also means I can be quite stubborn at times. Thanks for answering my questions. Let us know if and when you actually adopt a metaphysical position.Bruce David
January 1, 2013
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Mung, thanks for the book recommendation at your 474 -- that might be useful when I teach Leibniz in a few months.Kantian Naturalist
January 1, 2013
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The first part of the book develops an original view concerning the epistemology and metaphysics of modality, or truths concerning what is possible or necessary. This framework is then applied to a re-examination of the cosmological argument for theism. O'Connor defends a novel version of the Leibnizian cosmological argument from contingency for the existence of a transcendent necessary being as the source and basis for the ultimate explanation of contingent beings and their interconnected histories.
Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of ContingencyMung
January 1, 2013
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Hume wrote in 1754: “I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause” (The Letters of David Hume, Two Volumes, J. Y. T. Greig, editor: (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1:187; quoted in Craig, Reasonable Faith, Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, revised edition, 1994, p. 93).
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/vilenkins-verdict-all-the-evidence-we-have-says-that-the-universe-had-a-beginning/Mung
January 1, 2013
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Yeah, I'm special that way -- I have the remarkable ability to amass a huge amount of information without ever drawing a conclusion from it. It's sometimes valuable, and sometimes harmful. Very generically, I think that life emerges from matter, and that mind emerges from life. I don't see any way of getting from matter to mind without taking seriously life as its own distinct category. I think that the entire problematic of Western thought ever since Descartes has been radically deformed by its inability to grant life its own distinct status in our ontology, and that most of our perennial problems result from the dichotomies that arise when we ignore life and try to contend solely with mind and matter as our basic categories. I don't think that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain -- that doesn't make sense to me, any more than it makes sense to say that digestion is an emergent property of the stomach. I think that consciousness is a property of the whole animal, and that that property emerges over the course of a very complex history of intra-organismal and organism-environment relationships. One distinction I like making is between "mere animals" and "rational animals." "Mere animals" have consciousness, intentionality, and care. "Rational animals" have those, plus a suite of inferential capacities. So in talking about consciousness, I'm not talking about reasoning, let alone the distinctive kind of higher-order reasoning made possible by language.Kantian Naturalist
January 1, 2013
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KN:
I don’t know how many times I need to say this, but I’m not a materialist. I don’t even know what my metaphysics really is. I’m still working that out.
Ok, fair enough. Re 461: However, you did say, in 13, that you are "committed to the existence of emergent properties", and supplied a link, in the very first paragraph of which one finds the sentence, "For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain." You also characterize yourself as a "naturalist", which to most people means a commitment to the idea that there is a physical universe "out there" which has objective reality separate from our minds. So if you are not a materialist, then what do you mean by the statement that you are committed to the existence of emergent properties? What precisely do you imagine emerges, and from what does it emerge? Just curious. I must say, though, that you are certainly an interesting person. I've never met anyone who has thought as long and deeply about these issues as you have but has yet to come up with a personal metaphysics.Bruce David
January 1, 2013
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1. The argument does NOT rest on the premise that “Everything has a cause.”
What defenders of the cosmological argument do say is that what comes into existence has a cause, or that what is contingent has a cause.
Mung
January 1, 2013
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In re: William J Murray @ 468:
What you are attempting to argue is so obviously and patently untrue according to the most common experience that it is jaw-dropping to watch you continue to try and argue it.
Thanks -- I do try! :)
Then what is the “reality” that we are perceiving when we dream? What is the “reality” that we are experiencing when we are delusional? Or hallucinating? How is our perception of reality not being “interfered with” when we can simply “not see” what is directly in front of our eyes? How are these things “not interfering” with our perception of reality when a series of words or activities after the fact can completely alter our memory of an event?
As I indicated briefly and sketchily above, I would insist on distinguishing between perceiving, dreaming, hallucinating, and remembering. I think of perceiving as "originary", as fundamental -- though, I suppose I should note, I think of "perceiving" here as "being aware of, and oriented with regards to, and deeply interested in, those things we can see and feel." So perception isn't, by my lights, passive, something that just happens to us -- rather, I think that carefully examining 'what it is like to perceive' reveals the role of action in perception. And that makes perceptual phenomena really quite different from what we dream, hallucinate, remember, etc. Indeed, I think that Descartes is able to get the ball rolling here, by "mentalizing" perception, withdrawing perception into "the mind", in part by completely ignoring the role of the body in constituting perceptual phenomena. And of course it's only when we withdraw consciousness and intentionality from the lived body, and enclose them in a separate sphere of being, "the mind," only then does "the mind-body problem" take shape as a problem.Kantian Naturalist
January 1, 2013
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KN said: "Of course it’s perfectly true that what we perceive is influenced by our bodily conditions, and by our conceptual schemata. But I don’t think of these conditions as interfering with our take on reality, or as obstacles between us and reality" Then what is the "reality" that we are perceiving when we dream? What is the "reality" that we are experiencing when we are delusional? Or hallucinating? How is our perception of reality not being "interfered with" when we can simply "not see" what is directly in front of our eyes? How are these things "not interfering" with our perception of reality when a series of words or actvities after the fact can completely alter our memory of an event? What you are attempting to argue is so obviously and patently untrue according to the most common experience that it is jaw-dropping to watch you continue to try and argue it.William J Murray
January 1, 2013
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I don't know how many times I need to say this, but I'm not a materialist. I don't even know what my metaphysics really is. I'm still working that out. "Naturalism," which is a label I've adopted here and elsewhere, isn't one that I'm all that happy with, for a lot of reasons -- some of which we've talked about here. At the emotional level -- which counts for, well, nothing at all -- I'm just as drawn to romantic nature mysticism of Coleridge, Goethe, Emerson, Thoreau, and Gary Snyder as I am to scientific naturalism. Heck, even when I said,
I do not first perceive mental images and then infer material things on their basis; on the contrary, to perceive is to perceive the very things themselves.
I did not say that the perceived things were material. I actually don't think that perceiving is 'mental', in the sense of something that goes on 'in the mind', cut off from reality. I think of perceiving as the very way in which we are open to reality. There's nothing 'in between' mind and world, standing in the way. And that's what I was trying to get at by saying that we perceive the things themselves. The fact is, I think that both "material" and "mental" are abstractions -- useful ones, no doubt -- and that the reality of what we are is better expressed in terms of what Merleau-Ponty called "the lived body". But I certainly don't want to say either (1) that the things we perceive are "material" things, any more than they are "mental", nor (2) that perception is completely veridical. There's a whole host of fascinating psychological phenomena here that Murray rightly notes I ought to address. What I don't share with Murray is what I might call a "cookie-cutter" picture -- on the cookie-cutter picture, experience is one sheet of undifferentiated cookie dough, and then our concepts cut object-shaped cookies out of it. I think that picture doesn't really capture what it is to sense, to see, to touch, and so on -- and I think that picture raises all sorts of really difficult, maybe even insoluble, problems. Of course it's perfectly true that what we perceive is influenced by our bodily conditions, and by our conceptual schemata. But I don't think of these conditions as interfering with our take on reality, or as obstacles between us and reality. I think of these conditions are just the way in which one is oriented towards, precisely, that which is. And I say that because I don't see any difficulty with rejecting the assumption that to engage with reality is to have an absolute or completely transparent view of things. Our engagement with reality, our encounters with things and with other people, are structured by various conditions -- some biological, some cultural, some psychological, etc. -- and so of course our take on things is relativized -- but -- and this, I believe, is the very heart of the matter -- also objective, in a certain way. There is no contradiction between objectivity and relativism, because the contrary of "objective" is "subjective"; the contrary of "relative" is "absolute". (One metaphor I like to use is that I think of our various epistemic conditions -- bodily, cultural, etc. -- as affecting the size of the aperture, not the thickness of the lens. Not sure how helpful that metaphor is, though.)Kantian Naturalist
January 1, 2013
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KN:
Rather, the view I should adopt is that the universe did not begin to exist, for the following reason. Processes and objects that begin to exist, that come into existence, do so in time. But the universe did not come into existence in time, because the universe is the entire space-time continuum. This is hard to put without inviting paradox, but the beginning of the universe was not an event in time, but the beginning of time.
If the universe did not begin to exist, and the universe has not always existed, how is it that it exists at all? It must have begun to exist, whether in time or not. If time itself did not begin to exist, and time has not always existed, how is it that time exists at all? Time must have begun to exist, whether in time or not.
Processes and objects that begin to exist, that come into existence, do so in time.
The coming of existence of space and time (the universe) appears to falsify that premise. Now, I think I'm saying that you are begging the question. But what I am not sure of is whether you are accusing us of begging the question as well. :)Mung
January 1, 2013
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William J. Murray, You last paragraph in 462 was so well written that I saved it right beneath these quotes from Schroedinger and Planck: “No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” (Max Planck, as cited in de Purucker, Gottfried. 1940. The Esoteric Tradition. California: Theosophical University Press, ch. 13). “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” (Schroedinger, Erwin. 1984. “General Scientific and Popular Papers,” in Collected Papers, Vol. 4. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden. p. 334.)bornagain77
January 1, 2013
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KN said: "Why should someone think that a property is not real just because it is relational? Where is it written that only intrinsic properties can be real properties? I believe it is written in #354 where you said: " I do not first perceive mental images and then infer material things on their basis; on the contrary, to perceive is to perceive the very things themselves. " If our perception of a thing is the thing itself, then is a person with normal vision observing a different material thing than a color blind person? When two people at a crime scene describe the same suspect in diametrically contradictory ways, what happened? It is very obvious, KN, that our perceptions of a thing are not "the thing itself", but rather how our particular physical wiring and mental construct - including such issues as conformity blindness, perceptive blindness, change blindness, and other belief-system oriented prejudices and expectations, and pre- and post- perception psychological factors - identify, categorize and assimilate into, or reject from our mental model of reality what information our perceptions feed to us. The problem here is that even to the most uninformed layman, all of this is obvious. There is no debate possible with those that are intent on denying the obvious.William J Murray
January 1, 2013
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KN said: "First: if one is to think of God as “self-causing”, as Thomists and Cartesians to, this argument might need some refinement, lest you hoist yourself with your own petard." I don't think anyone claims god is "self-caused" in the sense that god causes itself to exist, but rather that god is the always-existent uncaused cause from which all caused events ultimately spring or trace back to. God is not "caused" by anything; other things are caused by God.William J Murray
January 1, 2013
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KN said: "Here’s one important difference between perceptions and dreams: when I’m perceiving, I can at the same time undertake a phenomenology of perceiving. I cannot undertake a phenomenology of dreaming while dreaming. What I can call a phenomenology of dreaming is really a phenomenology of remembering a dreaming. This calls attention to how the articulate mind is ‘off-line’ during dreams in a way that it is not during ordinary perception." I'm not sure what hair you're attempting to characterize as a "phenomenology of remembering a dreaming". I remember many dreams I had from when I was a child. When I am in a dream, while in the dream I often remember an entire history that is only applicable to that dream. In dreams, I come with a complete understanding of what is going on and nothing in the dream seems odd or strange to me at the time. When lucid dreaming, I can be aware that I'm dreaming and do all sorts of things in the dream I wouldn't otherwise be capable of via my will. Your concept that the mind is "off-line" during a dream is a mental construct that comes from mentally organizing perceptions into patterns with labels - both of which are also mental constructs. Experience comes with no such labels. One experience is not labeled "matter as it is itself" and the other "dream stuff", or another "optical illusion" and another "delusion". Your "phenomenology of perceiving" is nothing more than an elaborate conceptual construct that attempts to differentiate the perceptive experience of dream phenomena from waking phenomena in a way consistent with your desired philosophical conclusion. One finds that the memory in the waking world is quite malleable and changing. Memory fades and vanishes, like with many dreams. Errant perceptions in the waking world can be as stubborn as any delusion, even if one is not delusional. There have been many psychological studies that show that many times people simply cannot see what is right there in front of them - physically - because it is so opposed to their expectations of reality. This is called perceptual blindness, inattentional blindness and change blindness in psychology. We also know that a person's memory can be influenced very easily by many factors, including pressure from authority, peer pressure (conformity), and cognitive dissonance. Loftus and Palmer showed that simply using certain words on a questionnaire when asking people to describe what they saw in an incident affected their memory of what they were describing. There are many famous studies that describe how questions, and how they are worded, can change the memory of what a suspect looks like in a crime investigation. And then we get to delusions, which are persistent and elaborate constructs that the deluded are convinced are entirely real. They can come with entire histories and detailed specificity. Yet your answer to this kind of perceptual dissonance from what is real (which, under the idea that what we perceive is "the thing itself" shouldn't occur at any time), your answer is that the person is a child or crazy, as if that response in any way justifies your obviously errant philosophical claim. Either the thing is as I perceive it, and that is what a "perception" is, or it is not because more often than not, "things" we experience are not "as we perceive them", but rather as we mentally organize and label them in our conceptual construct of reality. In any philosophy of reality that is not ultimately self-defeating or internally contradictory, mind - unlabeled as anything else, matter or spiritual - must be primary. What is "matter" and what is "conceptual" and what is "spiritual" can only be organized from mind. Mind controls what is perceived, how it is perceived, and how those percepts are labeled and organized. Mind must be postulated as the unobserved observer, the uncaused cause simply to avoid a self-negating, self-conflicting worldview. It is the necessary postulate of all necessary postulates, because nothing else can come first. To say anything else comes first requires mind to consider and argue that case and then believe it to be true, demonstrating that without mind, you could not believe that mind is not primary in the first place. Which is the deeply problematical position you - and all materialists - find yourselves in.William J Murray
January 1, 2013
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In re: Bruce David @ 458
How can you make this assertion, given your philosophical position that the material world is the ground of being and that the mind “emerges” from activity in the brain (which you still haven’t explained)?
Did I say that I regarded the material world as the ground of being? Where did I say that? Or, if I didn't say that, where did I say something that committed me to that position? I very much doubt I said that, since I don't believe that for a moment. Did I say that mind emerged from the brain? Where did I say that? Or, if I didn't say that, where did I say something that committed me to that position? I very much doubt I said that, since I don't believe that for a moment.
Our perceptions are the end of a chain of events that begins with matter/energy impinging on our sense organs, continues with nerve impulses travelling to the brain, where they are processed, resulting in our perceptions “emerging” from that activity. Our perceptions are many steps removed from the things perceived. In what sense are we perceiving the very things themselves, given your metaphysics?
Causal intermediaries are not epistemic intermediaries.
Furthermore, our perceptions actually contain elements that are not present in the thing perceived (again, given your philosophy). There is no color in objects, only the emission of photons of varying frequencies. Color is created in the brain/mind; it doesn’t exist in the object. Likewise, events produce no sound, only vibrations in a medium, usually the air. It is the action of our brain/mind that produces what we hear, the actual sounds themselves. They are not present in the originating events. I could obviously continue in this vein through the other senses. I’m sure you get the picture.
Why should someone think that a property is not real just because it is relational? Where is it written that only intrinsic properties can be real properties?Kantian Naturalist
December 31, 2012
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In re: William J. Murray @ 457
KN asks: “Are you really sure about this?
You’re right. People are capable of all sorts of self deceit. I should have said that since I’ve had dreams, I know that what you said is untrue.
Here's one important difference between perceptions and dreams: when I'm perceiving, I can at the same time undertake a phenomenology of perceiving. I cannot undertake a phenomenology of dreaming while dreaming. What I can call a phenomenology of dreaming is really a phenomenology of remembering a dreaming. This calls attention to how the articulate mind is 'off-line' during dreams in a way that it is not during ordinary perception. With that crucial caveat in mind, dreams are "weird": people change identities, time and space are plastic, someone can be both your mother and not your mother, or someone can be both alive and dead. The "weirdness" of dreams, or what seems to us their weirdness when we recall them while awake, is due to the presupposition that perception is what is ordinary. Put slightly otherwise, someone who can't distinguish between dreams and perceptions is, very likely, either insane or a child. (As an aside: I have a false memory of being abducted as a very young child. I know the memory is false because I've asked my mother about it. I've come to believe that it's a dream I had when I was very young. But yet the memory still feels to me, even as an adult, as if it were something that had happened.) I've been thinking a great deal about the phenomenology of perception lately, and would happily continue in this vein if there's interest. It's really quite fascinating.Kantian Naturalist
December 31, 2012
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Perhaps:
(1) Every effect must have a cause. (1a) Every event is an effect. (2) Every event must have a cause.
Also KN:
But the universe did not come into existence in time, because the universe is the entire space-time continuum. This is hard to put without inviting paradox, but the beginning of the universe was not an event in time, but the beginning of time.
Could it be the case that someone using the word "begin" with respect to the universe might be doing so simply because there is not an easier way to express the notion, even if ambiguous interpretations are likely to ensue? I have caught myself using words such as "begin", "prior" and "before" to express relative "sequencing" of both logically-causal and temporal-space-time-matter-energy-mechanical events. I wonder if the condensing mass of a stellar object serves as a prior cause to some other matter being sucked into the subsequent black hole, inside which the matter is no longer subject to the same experiences of time that it was prior.MrMosis
December 31, 2012
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KN re 452:
I do not first perceive mental images and then infer material things on their basis; on the contrary, to perceive is to perceive the very things themselves.
How can you make this assertion, given your philosophical position that the material world is the ground of being and that the mind "emerges" from activity in the brain (which you still haven't explained)? Our perceptions are the end of a chain of events that begins with matter/energy impinging on our sense organs, continues with nerve impulses travelling to the brain, where they are processed, resulting in our perceptions "emerging" from that activity. Our perceptions are many steps removed from the things perceived. In what sense are we perceiving the very things themselves, given your metaphysics? Furthermore, our perceptions actually contain elements that are not present in the thing perceived (again, given your philosophy). There is no color in objects, only the emission of photons of varying frequencies. Color is created in the brain/mind; it doesn't exist in the object. Likewise, events produce no sound, only vibrations in a medium, usually the air. It is the action of our brain/mind that produces what we hear, the actual sounds themselves. They are not present in the originating events. I could obviously continue in this vein through the other senses. I'm sure you get the picture. One does not have to invoke dreams to see that your statement is clearly not true in the context of any philosophy that includes an objectively existing material universe. So what haven't I understood about what you mean by that statement?Bruce David
December 31, 2012
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KN asks: "Are you really sure about this?. You're right. People are capable of all sorts of self deceit. I should have said that since I've had dreams, I know that what you said is untrue.William J Murray
December 31, 2012
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On reflection, I should retract part of my 455. It's now quite clear to me that the question, "could the universe have begun to exist, without there being anything that caused it to begin to exist?" has only one answer: "no." (So to that extent, the kalam argument is correct.) Rather, the view I should adopt is that the universe did not begin to exist, for the following reason. Processes and objects that begin to exist, that come into existence, do so in time. But the universe did not come into existence in time, because the universe is the entire space-time continuum. This is hard to put without inviting paradox, but the beginning of the universe was not an event in time, but the beginning of time.Kantian Naturalist
December 31, 2012
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In re: StephenB @ 454:
In order for a thing to cause itself to come into being, it must both pre-exist itself and not pre-exist itself, violating the Law of Identity. It must pre-exist itself in order to bring itself into being, but if it does pre-exist itself then it did not come into being since it already existed.
Ah-ha! Now we're getting somewhere! Nice! First: if one is to think of God as "self-causing", as Thomists and Cartesians to, this argument might need some refinement, lest you hoist yourself with your own petard. :) Second: my speculation wasn't that the universe was the cause of itself, but that it began to exist without having any cause at all. Could the universe have begun to exist, without there being anything that caused it to begin to exist? That is the possibility I'm trying to raise here.Kantian Naturalist
December 31, 2012
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In order for a thing to cause itself to come into being, it must both pre-exist itself and not pre-exist itself, violating the Law of Identity. It must pre-exist itself in order to bring itself into being, but if it does pre-exist itself then it did not come into being since it already existed.StephenB
December 31, 2012
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In re: StephenB @ 364
Mung @359, quoting R.C. Sproul “The law of causality, so defined, is merely a logical extension of the law of non-contradiction.”
This is absolutely and profoundly true– and easy to prove. The one Law cannot be separated from the other. To deny one is to deny the other. To qualify one is to qualify the other. All of Kantian Naturalist’s errors stem from the fact that he either does not understand or refuses to accept that fact.
Except that it is not, to my knowledge, easy to prove, or even possible to prove. An entire generation of German philosophers, between Leibniz and Kant, attempted to derive the principle of sufficient reason from the principle of non-contradiction. None of them succeeded. If someone has succeeded in the meantime, I should very much like a citation. Here's the key difference (in partial response, too, to a point raised above by nullasalus) between strictly logical principles and the GCP (general causal principle). Logical statements are purely formal; they tell us nothing about what is in the case in any particular world, since they hold for all possible worlds, if they are true, and for no possible worlds, if they are false. They have no content. However, the GCP must have some content, however minimal, in order to guide inquiry into nature. Since it must have a minimal content, it cannot be purely formal, hence it cannot be a strictly logical statement. One nice point that Kant makes here is that the GCP is "synthetic a priori". Now, what's the difference between analytic a priori statements and synthetic a priori statements? The former are merely conceptual truths -- they are true because of the concepts involved. There are no possible worlds in which there are married bachelors or square circles. The latter are not true by virtue of meaning alone; the truth of a synthetic a priori statement requires non-conceptual content. (In Kant's own terms, an "intuition" is needed to go from one concept to another concept, to bring them together.) Let me explain a bit further. It is, of course, analytic (and so a priori) that
(1) Every effect must have a cause.
But it is not analytically true that
(2) Every event must have a cause.
(NB: Since I am dealing here with Kant, and he's responding to Hume, I'm treating causation as concerned with events. One might pose the question whether the same Kantian point holds if causation concerns objects or things. I believe it does, but I'll let others take up that thread.) (2) does not logically follow from (1) because "effect" is not synonymous with "event." (1) is true by virtue of the meaning of "cause" and "effect"; that's what makes it analytic. (2) is not true by virtue of meaning alone. However, it is also not true by virtue of experience. The "every-must" structure of the claim cannot be grounded in experience alone, because experience alone gives us robust generalizations generated through induction, but cannot establish that every event must have a cause. So the GCP is not true by virtue of logic alone, and it's not true by virtue of experience. It's neither analytic a priori nor synthetic a posteriori. That's what makes it synthetic a priori. Now, it is a separate question as to the source of synthetic a priority, and here one might follow Kant some of the way without following him all of the way. Kant famously held that all synthetic a priori claims arise from nothing other than the structure of the human mind. My own approach is inspired by Kant but not strictly Kantian. Rather, I think that there are two different kinds of synthetic a priori, a non-conceptual (or more precisely, non-discursive) a priori of the body, of the most general structure of bodily experience-in-the-world, and a discursive a priori, which is linguistic. Analytic a priori claims are purely linguistic, or as Robert Brandom puts it, "logic is our semantic self-consciousness". Synthetic a priori claims arise from the interaction of the discursive a priori and the bodily a priori, and this limits their purview.Kantian Naturalist
December 31, 2012
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In re: William J Murray @ 361
KN said: “I do not first perceive mental images and then infer material things on their basis; on the contrary, to perceive is to perceive the very things themselves.
Anyone that has had a dream knows the statement above to be false.
Are you really sure about this? I think that we should extraordinarily hesitant to endorse the Cartesian conception of sensation. On the contrary, there is a "perceptual faith" (as Merleau-Ponty nicely puts it) on the basis of which we have no difficulty distinguishing between perceptions, dreams, hallucinations, illusions, and so on. That perceptual faith might be called into question by reading Descartes, but that doesn't mean that Descartes is correct; it means that the perceptual faith requires a philosophical elucidation or articulation of its own, which is concealed by Descartes' metaphysics of mind. Descartes is not elucidating perceptual faith, describing just what it is to see or touch; his agenda is to undermine the Aristotelian hylomorphic theory of perception, because it conflicts with a realist interpretation of mathematical physics qua matter-in-motion. Since that theory is the only version of direct realism in the early modern period, Descartes' criticism of hylomorphism undermines direct realism and ushers in the rise of representationalism. But I think that we today can and should take a more distanced view of Descartes, and not share his prejudices.Kantian Naturalist
December 31, 2012
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CS:
Nobody is going to convince anyone of anything about this subject matter around here.
Perhaps not, but I for one have found that my thinking has clarified in these debates. Your question, for example, caused me to realize that I really don't understand how God could know without experiencing that He is magnificent, and that I have to take that part on faith. Also, I still cling to the hope that some people, who might not even be participating in the discussion, will have their interest piqued enough to follow up on some of the sources I list and do their own exploration of the possibilities that they present.Bruce David
December 30, 2012
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Barry, Maybe I do and maybe I don't, but A. I got a rise out of you, which is worth a little :), and B. Nobody is going to convince anyone of anything about this subject matter around here. It just HAD to be said. Or not.CentralScrutinizer
December 30, 2012
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CentralScrutinizer writes, “All this religio-spiritual stuff is crapola anyway.” CR, thank you for your scintillating addition to the conversation. As the man in black said to Vizzini, truly you have a dizzying intellect.Barry Arrington
December 29, 2012
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All this religio-spiritual stuff is crapola anyway. Fighting about it? Really?CentralScrutinizer
December 29, 2012
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BA:
Whose complaining?,, only pure motives enlightened one???
I don't know. What do you mean by a "pure" motive? I believe that what I said in 443 & 445 is accurate, if that's what you mean.Bruce David
December 28, 2012
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