Consider the following statement: “My liver believes materialism is true.”
Sheer lunacy, right? But on materialism, there is no fundamental difference between the brain and the liver. They are both just meat. Therefore, for the materialist, the phrase “my brain believes materialism is true” is equivalent to the phrase “my liver believes materialism is true.”
The materialist really is stuck. Objects like the liver do not have belief states. Philosophers say they do not exhibit “intentionality” (the “aboutness” a subject has towards an object). A rock cannot have a belief about the proposition “materialism is true.” Neither can a liver. Neither can a brain. Thus, the very act of affirming materialism denies one of its fundamental tenants because the act of affirming necessarily requires intentionality.
But I can hear the materialist object, the human body is a system which is greater than any of its individual components like the brain and the liver alone. It still does not work, because on materialism, each human is reducible to the chemical components of his body. Therefore, the body is nothing but a complex amalgamation of chemicals, and the statement “complex amalgamation of chemicals believes materialism is true” gets the materialist no further than “my liver believes materialism is true.”
Materialism requires its proponents simultaneously to hold the following contradictory beliefs:
1. A material object cannot have a belief state.
2. A brain has belief states even though it is just another kind of material object.
A metaphysical system that requires its proponents to hold mutually exclusive propositions simultaneously should be rejected. Our materialist friends can have logic and reason or they can have their materialism. They can’t have both.
That this need be explained at all is just another sign of the intellectual degeneracy infecting our culture. But thanks anyway for taking the time.
“Our materialist friends can have logic and reason or they can have their materialism. They can’t have both.”
And with that, the “Black Knight’s” final leg is chopped smoothly off. 🙂
Show us an immaterial or disembodied consciousness and you may have a case, otherwise this is just another example of the “nothing buttery” fallacy.
I wouldn’t bother trotting out NDEs either as there is no more way to verify their claims than there is the contents of ordinary dreams.
Barry’s argument from intentionality (aboutness) is extremely challenging for materialism. The other day PM1 referred me to a paper by C. Sachs that made an attempt to “naturalize” intentionality (teleology). From the abstract:
So, teleology is “naturalized” by identifying it in cybernetics and/or biological organization stuffed with complex functional specified information for which there is no natural explanation … Is that cheating?
Sev @ 3: but for peer reviewed studies on NDEs:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/
There are many more, but you won’t read them because you don’t want it to be true. Sad spending all this time here with your fingers in your ears and your eyes slammed shut while you proclaim the way you want the universe to be, as true.
Seversky,
Wrong. Your materialism fails because it is self-referentially incoherent. You insist that I need to prove something else is true for materialism to be false. That’s just silly. Materialism is false whether or not some other proposition is true.
Nice job trying to change the subject though.
Now pay attention. This is important. Can you refute the logic of the OP without changing the subject? No? OK then. I assume you will give up you incoherent materialism and seek out another way. We can talk about what that way might be if you want.
Animated Dust, you fell for Sev’s “change the subject” trick. Don’t do that.
It’s easy to define a view as being so absurd that no sane person would accept it. Naturalists can do the same for theism just as easily. But no good is served by trading caricatures back and forth.
Naturalists would insist that brains and livers have different biological functions: the function of the liver is to remove toxins from the blood (among other things). The function of the brain is to guide behavior in response to perceptual information (among other things). What matters to the naturalist is not just what something is made of, but what it is for — what the function is. (Structure and function are answerable to each other: structures perform functions, functions are performed on structures.)
It’s a nice question as to how the naturalist can get from biological cognition in the broadest sense (guiding behavior in response to perceptual information) to rational cognition strictly speaking, both theoretical rational cognition (what and how should one believe) and practical rational cognition (what and how should one act). I don’t believe any naturalist, and certainly not myself, has a fully convincing story of how we got from the apes to the Enlightenment.
But any criticism of naturalists needs to begin with what they actually say, and not with what one imagines they say.
Sachs argues that teleology isn’t naturalized by way of cybernetics, though he thinks that biological organization is a promising way forward. I don’t know if he would identify teleology with intentionality, though. Intentionality is usually thought of as the “aboutness” of mental states. It’s different from the purposiveness of teleology. Closely related, yes, but still distinct. Bacteria are teleological systems, but do they have any mental states? It’s hard to imagine how they could.
The people doing the biological organization stuff tend to not write about “information”, though they tend to talk more in terms of systems that can maintain themselves far from thermodynamic with their environments. It’s a nice question whether those are two different ways of talking about the same thing.
Is complex functional specified information something that has to be added to a system in order for it to maintain itself at far from thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment? Or is having complex functional specified information just the same thing as being able to maintain itself at far from thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment?
Tgpeeler at 1,
Intellectual degeneracy does not appear everywhere in the culture. If it did then nothing would get done.
PM1 at 8,
Complex functional specified information is a description not an addition. The question is: How did that information get there?
BA @7: Good advice. And he does it all the time.
PM1 @8
Water can have the function to irrigate farmland. However, that function cannot be explained by water, because in the water there is no intention to irrigate farmland. And that is what this OP is about.
So, if the function of the liver is to remove toxins from the blood, the OP argues that the matter that makes up the liver is not involved on its own accord. The naturalist claims that from matter function comes. In the OP it is pointed out that matter has no inclination to perform such a function. The fermions and bosons that make up the liver perform a function without even knowing it. The function is the result of FSCO/I that cannot be explained from matter precisely because matter lacks intentionality.
Similarly, the matter that makes up the brain is not interested in beliefs. The functional complex specified organization of the brain forces brain matter to act in accord with reasoning, but like the water that irrigates farmland, the brain matter does not act from intention, instead, its activity is derived from immaterial FSCO/I. Brain matter and organization taken together, like water and farmland and its channels taken together, do not act with intention. Only an intelligent person acts with intention. In the case of the irrigated farmland, the farmer.
Sev, you tried the “change the subject” trick. But the catastrophic epistemological failure inherent in your materialism, which Barry highlighted,
But the catastrophic epistemological failure inherent in your materialism, which Barry highlighted, extends even to your ‘belief’ that NDEs are merely dreams.
You see Sev, in order to even be able to differentiate beliefs that are real from beliefs that are illusory, you must first have a mind that is itself NOT a neuronal illusion of the material brain.
The materialistic claim that our sense of self, that is to say, our conscious experience, is merely a neuronal illusion of the material brain is, in a word, insane. As David Bentley Hart states in the following article, “Simply enough, you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. This is so incandescently obvious that it is almost embarrassing to have to state it.”
In short Seversky, you attempt at evasion fails since for us to even be able to form beliefs in the first place, the immaterial mind must be held to be real.
Of supplemental note to Sev’s claim that NDEs are merely dreams. The following study found, ‘memories of near-death experiences are recalled as ‘‘realer” than real events or imagined events.’
Moreover, We have far more observational evidence for the reality of immaterial minds/souls than we do for the Darwinian claim that unguided material processes can generate functional information.
Ba77,
“You see Sev, in order to differentiate beliefs that are real from beliefs that are illusory, you must first have a mind that is itself NOT a neuronal illusion of the material brain.”
“Moreover, We have far more observational evidence for the reality of immaterial minds/souls than we do for the Darwinian claim that unguided material processes can generate functional information.”
Meanwhile, Seversky and Chuck will continue to post as if you never wrote that. Hopefully, scientists will begin studying that… uh… problem.
Bornagain77: You see Sev, in order to even be able to differentiate beliefs that are real from beliefs that are illusory, you must first have a mind that is itself NOT a neuronal illusion of the material brain.
I might buy that IF there was only one mind that counted (WJM’s assertion). Because I think there are actually other conscious beings that I interact with (you, for example) then I accept input from others to be reflective of their, idiosyncratic experience and that the underlying reality lies somewhere or partially in the overlap. When we take the experiences of lots and lots of people AND take them as true and honest experiences then we can arrive at a rough, consensus view of reality.
In other words, I think we can get at the physical truth because of sharing our experiences. Plus there are those annoying stones I keep stubbing my toe on.
BA/6
However, at some point you will have to come up with a testable alternative model to explain behavior, including “beliefs.”
Chuck.
Nope. If my goal is to refute materialism on its own terms all I have to do is show that materialism is self-referentially incoherent pursuant to its own terms.
I understand that you and Sev are desperate to change the subject. “Don’t look at that man behind the curtain!”
Chuck, consciously absent from your post was any attempt to refute the OP. I get it. You’ve got nothing to say on that subject so change the subject.
Not gonna let ya off the hook that easy.
PyrrhoManiac1 @ 8
Nope. You evaded the OP. Not surprising. The OP asserts that materialism cannot account for intentionality. You skated right by the whole point of the OP and talked about something else. You didn’t think we would notice? If so, you were wrong.
Nope. Materialism asserts that the liver is nothing but an amalgamation of chemicals and that amalgamation of chemicals is incapable of exhibiting intentionality. Materialism asserts that the brain, like the liver, is nothing but an amalgamation of chemicals. Yet, materialists insist that the brain exhibits intentionality by holding belief states about propositions.
Pyrrho, you can’t have it both ways. And stamping your feet and insisting I just don’t understand what materialism posits gets you exactly nowhere.
The “nothing but” is your interpretation of materialism. It has nothing to do with the real McCoy.
If you want to foist this absurd caricature onto materialists, you deprive yourself of a response to atheists who insist on portraying the God of Abrahamic religion as being no different in kind from the gods of Greek or Norse mythology.
Either you refuse to accept their caricature of your views, or you refrain from caricaturing their views. You can’t have it both ways.
JVL: “Plus there are those annoying stones I keep stubbing my toe on.”
That subjective conscious experience of pain, i.e. qualia, of you stubbing your toe on a rock sure is very real for you isn’t it JVL? Yet qualia is the exactly the main and primary thing that materialism CANNOT EVER give us a coherent explanation of. i.e. the ‘hard problem of consciousness’.
This just in:
Journal of Reproducible Results, Vol. XVII, No. 2
The Seversky and Chuck Problem
– skipping to the conclusion –
Careful study has concluded that The Seversky and Chuck Problem on Uncommon Descent involves standard propaganda techniques, including obfuscation, misdirection and repetition of claims regardless of evidence to the contrary. However, we recommend further study. A monograph is being prepared by the University of Cambridge titled: “The Seversky and Chuck Problem. A new category of propaganda.”
Barry should read this paper, in its entirety, to give him some idea of serious attempts to deal with the issue, not strawmen like “the brain and the liver are both just meat.” link
to BA: the other half of the hard problem of consciousness is how an immaterial something can interface and interact with the material world. I’m a non-materialist, but I don’t think non-materialists have any more idea of the solution to that half of the problem than materialists have to the first half.
VL at 22,
The human brain has a direct link to the quantum world. And that links directly to an intelligence beyond space-time.
“the brain and the liver are both just meat.” That is a true statement. The liver’s function and design cannot be explained by the arrangement of atoms it contains. The same with the brain. However, in the case of the brain, once it decides to measure something in the quantum world, the quantum world has awareness of this intention and reacts to an attempt to measure instantly. This is the Brain-Quantum interface.
BA/17
I don’t believe I was trying to “refute” the OP. I’m simply looking to see what you and your ID compatriots are offering up in materialism’s stead. Thus far I see nothing….
Barry Arrington @OP,
Ah, but the brain is thinking meat, which MUSTA EMERGED from what MIGHTA been a useful electrical anomaly from a bundle of nerve tissue that centralized evolving sensory input. LOL See, I used all three secular gods-of-the-gaps devices in a single sentence!
Excellent, but I’d say that this is exactly why some aging scientists drift toward Cosmic Consciousness as a fundamental property of matter and energy. They would argue that this property, when collected into a specific arrangement magnifies the property into first self-awareness and, eventually into (drum roll) Cosmic Enlightenment! 😉
-Q
PyrrhoManiac1 @8,
I’d bet it’s even more convincing to use Darwinism to explain how apes evolved from the enlightenment.
-Q
Realtd writes, “However, in the case of the brain, once it decides to measure something in the quantum world, the quantum world has awareness of this intention and reacts to an attempt to measure instantly. This is the Brain-Quantum interface.”
And is there any evidence for this, or is this just a speculative hypothesis? I too think that consciousness is most likely associated with some aspects of quantum reality, but I don’t think anyone has any idea how or if this is true.
Staying on the topic of the OP! 🙂 The subject is not how humans got to be. The question is whether materialism is self-refuting.
Consciousness existing because of quantum effects, if it does, is not evidence against materialism.
That is true. Modern concepts of materialism (or other variations of the idea) accept that the quantum world is part of the physical world, and if consciousness is a different manifestation of the quantum world, then it is also part of the physical world.
Barry writes in the OP, “ On materialism, each human is reducible to the chemical components of his body. Therefore, the body is nothing but a complex amalgamation of chemicals,…”
But if you want to be reductionistic about it, each human being is reducible to quantum events, and consciousness and and its associated parts (beliefs, intentions, etc) might therefore be just as much “us” as our liver.
“what you and your ID compatriots are offering up in materialism’s stead. Thus far I see nothing….”
In the meantime, CD is going to pretend to believe in something that he knows is wrong, indefinitely, rejecting all other answers that he doesn’t like, which is all the rest of those that will ever be presented to him. How scientific is that?
Andrew
VL at 23 claims, “the other half of the hard problem of consciousness is how an immaterial something can interface and interact with the material world. I’m a non-materialist, but I don’t think non-materialists have any more idea of the solution to that half of the problem than materialists have to the first half.”
Well actually, whilst the Darwinian materialist has no earthy clue as to how unconscious material particles may ever give rise to subjective conscious experience, the Christian Theist does have a fairly good ‘scientific’ clue, via advances in quantum biology, as to how God might go about connecting the soul/mind to the material body.
Well, I certainly hope that I am more than my liver. Especially after the 50 years of abuse I have put it through.
VL, what is a non-materialist? What is your non-materialistic, non-theistic account of origins?
Viola Lee @22
You link to a paper with “Naturalising Agent Causation” as its title. In post #4 I discuss a similar paper.
In both papers, “naturalization” means identifying teleology in organisms/biological organization. However, we all know that the FSCO/I we encounter in organisms has no natural explanation. For one thing, look at the sorry state of origin of life research.
So, that is just cheating, wouldn’t you agree?
AD, see 29.
Origenes, your remark is all over the place. The article I linked to does not mention teleology. It is about how an organism can be considered a causal agent. I have no idea what “However, we all know that the FSCO/I has no natural explanation” means. And origin of life research has nothing to do with the topic.
I’ll point back to 29, and have no desire to Gish Gallop over every single possible related topic.
Materialism is a philosophy not subordinate to scientific methods; Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner argues that, while some philosophical concepts may be logically consistent with present-day quantum mechanics, materialism is not one of them. It is a philosophy and suffers, as most philosophies do, with the definitions curse.
Recently on this site, and here today, there were, and are, lengthy useful serious exegeses on such issues as old concepts of materialism compared with modern concepts, which opened the question of whether BA was trailing his coat by using the expression “only another kind” thus busting open comment and inviting materialists into the ring to debate consciousness.
At an individual level this is very helpful if one accepts that there will be no knockout punch because the problem of consciousness has given rise to Panpsychism and Hylozoism, each predicated on the evidence-bare philosophic speculation that there is no difference between living and non-living in respect of consciousness; in other words, ALL matter is endowed with a form of consciousness even electrons. This appears to entail that when a person dies the corpse is still sort-of-conscious and the individual bones are now conscious of their altered state.
At first read, Panpsychism encounters the hitch is that there is not a single scrap of evidence in support, and no testable hypotheses; it appears to rise no higher than day-dreaming. Nevertheless, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy confidently assures readers that, “Panpsychism, strange as it may sound on first hearing, promises a satisfying account of the human mind within a unified conception of nature.”
It is nothing of the sort, it is a redoubt of the old materialism and the old/new evolution, a temporary fix while shape-shifting definitions go on. The dispute is as old as Aristotle.
VL non-responsive, your honor. Thanks for nothing.
VL @
I hate to break it to you but the broad umbrella term teleology covers “agent causation” very well.
Yes I know.
For some reason, you quote me incorrectly. I wrote: “However, we all know that the FSCO/I we encounter in organisms has no natural explanation.”
Anyway, you must be joking. No one who frequents this forum can write such nonsense with a straight face.
Again, you must be joking. The method in the paper is to use something (life) for which there is no natural explanation (e.g. see the failure of origin of life research) in order to “naturalize” agent causality. You cannot miss my point, about how this is cheating. Right?
If one can’t try to discuss a naturalistic explanation of how people might have causation and intentionality without immediately also being expected to describe how life came about, then any reasonable conversation is hopeless. Bye all, again. Maybe my resolve to stay away will last this time.
VL
A paranormal explanation of communication does not count as “paranormal” when the explanation rests on the use of mobile phones.
Bye.
I don’t want to leave being inaccurately accused of selective quoting.
At 38 I wrote, “I have no idea what “However, we all know that the FSCO/I has no natural explanation” means, which I am virtually certain was a direct copy-and paste.
At 41, Origenes wrote, “For some reason, you quote me incorrectly. I wrote: “However, we all know that the FSCO/I [b]we encounter in organisms [b] has no natural explanation.” [His bold]
I think Origenes added that bolded phrase after I had started working on my reply in my text editor. Perhaps he remembers. Since I copy-and-pasted his quote, there is no way I would have left part of what I read out.
Now, really good-bye.
Ford Prefect @30 and Viola Lee @31,
Is constructive interference between probability waves material or immaterial?
-Q
Well, bye.
*sigh*
I came back after a few hours hoping (I know, the triumph of hope over experience again) that our materialist friends would have something to say other than “Oh yeah, but what about . . .”
At least Chuck is honest enough to admit that he has nothing. That’s progress of a sort I suppose.
The best the others could do is to try to sneak dualism in through the back door. I suppose that too is progress of a sort. They know that monism is incoherent. When I think about it, I suppose that is just a backdoor way of admitting that the OP is spot on. Thanks for that.
Querius writes:
If it can be measured or observed then it is material. If it can’t, then it is immaterial. But, then again, if it can’t be measured or observed then it can’t be said to exist.
You are equating unknown cause with supernatural. Gravity has an unknown cause. Is it supernatural?
FP, interference and superposition are well known wave phenomena. Such are manifest with particles at molecular level, but — as particle double slit exercises show — cannot be directly observed as the behaviour at once collapses into particle behaviour instead. Put something next to a slit to see where the particles go and they obligingly behave as particles, sneak and switch off the observing device and they revert to wave behaviour. Worse, it occurs when the beam is at a rate implying one particle at a time as a video in a parallel thread shows. It is inferred from its effects and despite many worlds views [which gets into non observables on steroids] the still mainstream Copenhagen interpretation boils down to probability waves doing the interfering and superposition. As for measurability and observability as criteria of existence, logical positivism and its verificationism collapsed due to irretrievable self referential incoherence 50+ years ago. Try, is the criterion of reality you proposed itself observable and/or measurable, as opposed to text carrying the assertion. That extends to your self aware consciousness. KF
VL, try, quantum influences, as we know is a very real phenomenon from the particle beam double slit exercise. Thence, ponder Derek Smith’s two tier controller cybernetic loop as a point of departure. KF
Ford Prefect @48,
The wave function is a mathematical probability for a particle such as an electron or even a molecule of over 2,000 atoms to spontaneously appear that a specific location in space and in time.
The molecule is certainly material, but the fluctuating probability waves (i.e. wavefunctions) have never been claimed by physicists as “material.”
One can compute the mathematical probability of a particle appearing at a point in space and time, but one cannot directly measure the probability with something like a “probability thermometer.” So by your definition, the wavefunctions that determine the likelihood of a particle don’t exist. Right?
No, I’m not. Quantum probabilities are not supernatural, but they are, however, immaterial and they nevertheless do exist.
-Q
FP: “If it can be measured or observed then it is material. If it can’t, then it is immaterial. But, then again, if it can’t be measured or observed then it can’t be said to exist.”
Yet, according to quantum mechanics, it is immaterial information that is what is constitutive, and is what actualizes, the material realm into being in the first place.
As John Wheeler stated, “every it — every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits.
It from Bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation;”
That immaterial information is what constitutive of, and is what actualizes, material particles into being in the first place is fairly easy to see with quantum teleportation experiments.
As the following article on quantum teleportation states, “In principle, however, the ’copy’ (atom) can be indistinguishable from the original, (atom that was destroyed)”
And as the following article states, “the transfer of quantum information is equivalent to moving the first particle to the location of the second.”
And as the following article states, “the photons aren’t disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Instead, it’s the information that’s being teleported through quantum entanglement.,,,”
It is also interesting to note that, since “the original (particle) has to be destroyed” in quantum teleportation because “you can’t ’clone’ a quantum state”, then this teleportation of quantum information, (immaterial information that is telling a ‘new’ particle exactly what to be), also lends fairly strong credence to the Christian’s contention that it is the immaterial soul of a person that is what is actually defining what the basic ‘form’ of the material body of a person will actually be.
As Asher Peres himself, when asked by a journalist if quantum teleportation could transport a person’s soul as well as their body, answered, “No, not the body, just the soul.”
Verses and quote:
Supplemental note;
Obviously off-topic (but it’s not like the topic is going to “move forward” due to materialists suddenly having an ontology-changing psychological breakthrough due to the precise chisel of the OP:)
Mr. Arrington said:
Depends on the monism.
I agree.
I recently read a very interesting article by Fermin Fulda (“Natural Agency: The Case of Bacterial Cognition). He argues for a distinction between constitutive explanations and enabling explanations: constitutive explanations specify what constitutes a phenomenon, allowing us to determine if the criteria for being a phenomenon of a certain kind are satisfied. Enabling explanations specify the causal dynamics needed to realize the phenomenon.
On that basis, Fulda argues for an ecological constitutive explanation of agency: an agent has goals relative to the affordances that comprise its environment. This allows us to be realists about teleology by construing teleology as an ecological concept.
This is distinct from an examination of the causal dynamics that enable biological agency from being realized.
I hope you do for your sake, and I hope you don’t for my sake.
Sad that elaborate philosophical arguments by men seek to obscure or hide obvious truths. And only truth matters, not what is meant to hide or obscure.
John 16:13
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”
“all the truth” not separates truths for this or that group or truths just for science and truths just for religion – ALL the truth.
Sorry guys, but we have to be really strict here, these fake attempts at “naturalization” cannot be allowed. If the naturalist wants to explain agent causality from matter, his starting point must be inanimate matter. The naturalist must start his attempt by studying a rock and/or a pile of sand and compose his explanation of agent causality from there. Sadly, we cannot allow the naturalist to have a starting point, such as bacteria, for which there is no naturalistic explanation.
De Nile . . .
@56
I think that Fulda, like Walsh and the authors of “Naturalizing Agent Causation,” think it’s good enough to describe what life is, in causal and thermodynamic terms, without worrying about how life got to be that way.
I can understand why you think that’s irresponsible, but for the time being, I don’t see any other way of proceeding: begin from life itself, and hope that maybe the problem of abiogenesis will be solved some day, and try not to worry about it too much until then.
PM1 @58
If reductionism is truly out of fashion, why not let psychology “naturalize” agent causality? Why start with bacteria? Why not start with humans?
Pyrrho
Of course. You are a materialist fundamentalist. Grit your teeth. Have faith. I hope that at least you don’t make fun of Appalachian snake handling religious fundies. You are, after all, their secular equivalent.
@Origenes@59
Very good question !
@59
I have nothing against humans. or psychology.
The interest in bacteria comes from a certain explanatory strategy: if you want to understand something, begin with the simplest example and proceed from there. Some philosophers are interested in bacteria because they seem to be (on some views) the simplest kind of agents.
Generally speaking, I think there’s often value in considering seriously fairly extreme or radical views, because then it’s easier to identify a more moderate position once there’s something to push back against.
I am very much inclined towards the view that bacteria count as agents and that organisms are not machines. But if bacteria count as agents, then so to would all of life — fungi, plants, all the animals from the simplest sponges to the most complicated mammals — would all count as agents in some sense (though not moral agents).
This is the same mumbo jumbo “argument”( of Krauss )about nothingness . Funny that the same argument is made also for conscience. Nothingness and conscience must be the same thing then.
Sandy @63,
Nothingness is non-existence. Like the Easter Bunny. So, if the universe came from nothing, that’s the same as claiming it came from the Easter Bunny!
Here’s an old riddle:
What’s greater than God,
More evil than the devil,
The rich have need of it,
The poor have plenty of it,
And if you eat it you’ll die?
Answer nothing. And that’s what happens if you objectify nothing,
-Q
correction:
,,, “if
consciousnessthe quantum world is a different manifestation ofthe quantum worldGod’s Mind, then it, i.e. our consciousness, is alsopart of the physical worldthe result of God’s Mind.”.Or,
“if the quantum world is a different manifestation of God’s Mind, then it, i.e. our consciousness, is also the result of God’s Mind.
@65
There are no experiences and no beliefs without consciousness.
Consciousness is fundamental to our beliefs. It has to be, for if we hold beliefs not because we understand them to be true, but because we are compelled by a force beyond our control to hold them, then we cannot have justified beliefs. If we are not free, we are not rational.
If something else accounts for consciousness, if something else steers consciousness in its actions, then, for us, rationality does not exist.
– – – – – –
then rationality does not exist.
The fundamental components of reality currently seem to involve
• Information and logic
• Conscious observation/measurement
• Probability/mathematical fields, and
• Conscious choice/free will
• Plus, something that enables these and the interaction and instantiation of our perceived reality
Everything else that we consider “real” currently seems to result from these fundamental elements.
-Q
Epistemological priority need not be ontological priority.
“Epistemological priority need not be ontological priority.”
HUH? Any theory that denies that consciousness is primary, and that matter is derivative, in not only putting the cart before the horse, it is basically claiming that the cart, despite all appearances, is what is actually pulling the horse. 🙂
PyrrhoManiac1 @68,
I’ll see your ontological priority with
And I’ll raise you . . .
Bornagain @69,
Worse than that, some recent experiment in QM seems to support at least some degree of solipsism! Ugh.
-Q
Bornagain77/69
To be conscious is to be conscious of something. If this consciousness preceded any kind of physical reality how did it know it was conscious? Sounds like a lot of omphaloskepsis to me.
Seversky @71,
Aren’t you conscious of being conscious? Or do you need a cuddly toy to be conscious?
-Q
Querius @72
That is a brilliant phrase. Wow!
Seversky, besides being conscious of being conscious, i.e. introspection, which Querius eluded to, scientific evidence itself, from general relativity (Hawking, Penrose), special relativity (BGV Theorem), Cosmology (Big Bang), and Quantum Mechanics, (violation of Leggett’s inequality), all give strong support to the Christian’s contention that the infinite Mind of God must precede all material reality.
And Seversky, exactly what scientific evidence does the atheistic materialist, such as yourself, have to counter all those lines of scientific evidence supporting the primacy of consciousness, and to instead support the atheist’s claim that material particles somehow precede consciousness? Well, as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ itself strongly indicates, the Atheistic Materialist has exactly zero, nada, zilch, scientific evidence supporting his claim that material particles can somehow give rise to consciousness.
So basically Seversky, you, as a Darwinian materialist, are forced to hold a position for which you have exactly zero scientific evidence, and for which the Christian has several powerful lines of scientific evidence against.
In a word Seversky, you are in the realm of blind faith, not science. In fact, you are directly opposing what the scientific evidence itself is saying.
The irony is that you, and other Darwinists, will often claim that you are all about being ‘scientific’, but in the end, and in reality, it turns out that you, and other Darwinists, are not being scientific at all, but that you have far more blind faith than any Christian I have ever met. Indeed, I would rate your ‘blind faith’ in atheistic materialism somewhere along the line of being on the level of ‘snake handlers, or perhaps even on the level of suicide bombers..
correction,,,, “introspection, which Querius alluded to”
Sorry Querius, I certainly did not mean to imply that you were trying to ‘elude’, i.e. evade or escape, anything Seversky said when you pointed out the obvious fact that you don’t need a cuddly toy to have the mental property of introspection. 🙂
@70
I don’t understand this response. Are you suggesting that “cogito, ergo sum” is a statement of the ontological priority of individual self-consciousness?
I ask because Descartes would absolutely deny that individual self-consciousness has ontological priority. It has epistemological priority (or more specifically: what has epistemological priority is the fact that one cannot deny the existence of one’s mental states). But for Descartes, the only being that has genuine ontological priority is God.
PM1 @76
Descartes’ cogito is about one’s existence. It is not: “I think, therefore I have individual self-consciousness”, and it also not “I think, therefore I cannot deny the existence of my mental states”. It is: “I think, therefore, I exist.”
1. I think
2. In order to think I must exist (from nothing nothing comes).
Therefore,
3. I exist.
@77
Sure, but Descartes also establishes that his existence (along with the existence of contingent things) is completely dependent on the existence of God, whereas God does not depend upon anything else for His existence. That’s what it means to say that God has ontological priority.
PM1, microcosm-facets principle of mutual support and interaction. He rercognises that he is experiencing self aware reflection even as he doubts: I doubt, but only what is a self aware going concern can do so. So, he exists as such a going concern. Huddling next to a fire, he is doubtless further aware of his contingency, crying out for necessary being root of reality. So, the epistemological-logical is filled with ontological import. KF
KF
I hold that we can leave “self-aware reflection” out of Descartes’ line of reasoning:
I doubt, but only what exists can do so. Put differently, in order for me to doubt, I must exist. Or, “I doubt, therefore, I exist.”
Querius at 72,
I think a cuddly toy would be helpful, but only in this case. 🙂
@79
No disagreement from me, obviously, as far as explicating Descartes is concerned.
The only point I wanted to make is urging a distinction between what we take to be the starting-point or ‘foundation’ of our epistemological reflection and what we take to be the ultimate causal principle of all things in our ontology or metaphysics. Thus for Descartes, the cogito has epistemological priority whereas God has ontological priority.
Bornagain77 @75,
Heh. Yes, I knew what you meant. As Alexander Pope once wrote, “To err is human . . .” And, of course, to err is also to exist, even at the expense of your epistemological accident, which is beyond the real capabilities of Seversky’s cuddly toy.
Thanks,
-Q
Origenes @77,
Exactly Touché!
-Q
Kairosfocus @79,
Yes, and that’s why I couldn’t make sense of PyrrhoManic1’s assertion.
Maybe I’m missing some nuance. What first came to mind was Paul Tillich’s famous assertion about the “Ground of all being,” so it seemed to be the converse. But I honestly don’t know what PyrrrhoManiac1 had in mind with his reference to “priority.”
-Q
@85
I was using the phrase “ontological priority” to refer to whatever it is in our ontology that is (however one wants to put it): most fundamental, real, ultimate, that which grounds and explains everything else, etc.
By contrast “epistemological priority” refers to the starting-point or presupposition of our inquiry into whatever it is that will count as real, valuable, beautiful, good, etc.
The former is the terminus ad quem of philosophizing, the latter is its terminus a quo.
For this reason, it is one thing to say that consciousness is the fundamental epistemological starting-point for all inquiry, and quite another to say that consciousness is what is most fundamentally real.
I’m not suggesting that anyone here is making the mistake of conflating those two things — only indicating that there’s a temptation here to be avoided.
Origenes @80,
Interesting line of thinking. It seems to me that “doubt” is more of a matter of free-will choice than cogent reflection.
• However, my poodle, seems to be making a choice when I call and he doesn’t come (perhaps doubting that I have a treat in hand this time), B.F. Skinner notwithstanding.
• One of our kids used to enjoy trapping our family cat in an ethical dilemma. When she was scratching and meowing to be let inside, he’d open the door and call the cat. She’d take two steps and then suddenly stop halfway through the door, realizing that, while she actually wanted to come inside, the act of obeying a human calling her was a gross violation cat ethics. Her choice dilemma proved her existence.
• Seversky’s cuddly toy (hat tip to Relatd) is significantly more challenging, however. His cuddly toy might have some form of panpsychism, but it has no way of expressing this and Seversky has no way of testing whether it’s simply his imagination . . . or not. What Seversky might be able to claim is that his cuddly toy, being necessary for consciousness, is actually a form of quantum entanglement that enables his own very existence!
-Q
PyrrhoManiac1 @86,
Thank you for your clarifications.
Unlike Seversky’s cuddly toy, which might define his ontological priority, Seversky’s epistemology likely preceded its manufacture. So here’s where I’m getting with all this silliness:
From the repeatedly verified experiments in quantum mechanics, it appears that what we CHOOSE to observe/measure, collapses the wavefunction (a mathematical probability of existence at a specific position in space and time) into a mass-energy particle. That alone is highly provocative!
Before our choice, this particle existed entirely a probability curve and has been experimentally verified that it’s subject to constructive and destructive interference with other probability waves EVEN FOR ONE SINGLE PARTICLE. Similarly Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle regarding conjugate variables (such as position and momentum) demonstrate that our CHOICE of which to measure and to what degree limits our knowledge of the other! Quantum entanglement also supports this concept (Bell’s Inequality demonstrates that there are no hidden/unknown variables in this relationship).
While your warning to not conflate epistemology and ontology is noted and appreciated, quantum mechanics brings them much closer together than philosophers have ever known or are at all comfortable in acknowledging. It might turn out that these actually converge at a point outside of time!
So back to your assertion noting that
. . . indicates that they’re independent. But in QM, they are clearly not!
And what was apparently revealed to an uneducated first-century Galilean fisherman in this regard is also highly provocative:
John 1:1 famously states, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God . . .
John 4:24 states, “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
Some food for thought.
-Q
PM1@
Descartes would agree with you, I suppose: one’s existence is undoubtedly true and therefore has epistemological priority and God is prior in being and therefore has ontological priority.
Querius @87
1. I doubt that I exist.
2. In order to doubt that I exist, I must exist.
Therefore,
3. I exist
I doubt that I exist, therefore, I exist.
Querius at 88, that is a pretty sweet and concise run down of the high points in quantum mechanics.
If I might add Zeilinger’s comment towards the end of his Nobel lecture to your high points,
Verse:
A priest who teaches a Philosophy class had a student walk up to him:
“I don’t exist.”
Priest: Do you want a grade for this class?
The student said, “Yes, I would.” And he suddenly existed.
This is like suggesting empirical criticism is meaningless because empiricism (the philosophy of science) is false.
Empiricism was an improvement because it emphasized empirical observations. But it got the role those observations play backwards. Theories are tested by observations, not derived from them.
Yet criticism via empirical observations is still alive and well. We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water.
In the same sense, the materialism Barry keeps referring to was as useful improvement, but incomplete, as empiricism. The idea that we must be either a materialist in this outdated sense or supernaturalist is a false dilemma.
For example, we can bring Information into fundamental physics via constructor theory. Specifically, instead of trying to start with some initial conditions and dynamical laws, we can ask what must the laws of physics allow and disallow for information to be possible? It ends up, very specific physical transformations must be possible tasks, while others must be impossible tasks.
From [this paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7439) on the philosophy and motivations of constructor theory…
>> In the constructor-theoretic conception, the initial state is not fundamental. It is an emergent consequence of the fundamental truths that laws of physics specify, namely which tasks are or are not possible. For example, given a set of laws of motion, what exactly is implied about the initial state by the practical feasibility of building (good approximations to) a universal computer several billion years later may be inelegant and intractably complex to state explicitly, yet may follow logically from elegant constructor-theoretic laws about information and computation.
While, the entire enterprise of the current conception has been fruitful, the decision to make the initial conditions fundamental is not, well, fundamental to science or physics. In fact, it excludes entire aspects, including ones Barry is referring to.
>> The intuitive appeal of the prevailing conception may be nothing more than a legacy from an earlier era of philosophy: First, the idea that the initial state is fundamental corresponds to the ancient idea of divine creation happening at the beginning of time. And second, the idea that the initial state might be a logical consequence of anything deeper raises a spectre of teleological explanation, which is anathema because it resembles explanation through divine intentions. But neither of those (somewhat contradictory) considerations could be a substantive objection to a fruitful constructor theory, if one could be developed.
It’s unclear how this reflects the materialism Barry is railing against. Yet it does not reflect some kind of supernatural dualism, either.
And there is the example of the universally of computation that emerges from a very specific set of computations. There is “no room” for this universality in the atoms of a computer made of transistors or wooden cogs. Yet, this universality emerges none the less.
There is no non-physical information any more than there are non-physical computers.
>> Since all known laws of motion are logically reversible (the initial state of any isolated system is entailed by its final state, as well as vice versa), an irreversible computational task on a computer’s memory M is a reversible one on some M ? W , where W is an additional substrate that carries away waste information. So for present purposes we can confine attention to reversible computers, namely constructors some of whose substrates are interpreted as reversible information- processing media. Such a medium can be defined in purely constructor-theoretic terms: it is a substrate with a set S of at least two states such that for all permutations (i.e. reversible computations) ? on S, [ diagram ]
>> Theories of information and computation exist in their own right, independently of theories of particular physical systems, because there exist substrate-independent truths about the physical world – which, again, have their natural expression in constructor theory. The interoperability principle for information is one: If S1 and S2 are reversible information-carrying media satisfying (9) with S = S1 and S = S2 respectively, then S1 ?S2 is a reversible information-carrying medium with S as the set of all ordered pairs {(p,q) p?S1,q?S2} (see 3.9 below). In particular, this implies that for any medium, if its states S satisfying (9) are used to store information, copying that information to (a blank instance of) any other medium of the same or greater capacity is a possible task.
>> The most important kind of abstract constructor is knowledge. Knowledge is information which, once it is physically instantiated in a suitable environment, tends to cause itself to remain so: it survives criticism, testing, random noise, and error- correction. (Here I am adopting Popper’s (1972) conception of knowledge, in which there need be no knowing subject.) For example, the knowledge encoded in an organism’s DNA consists of abstract genes that cause the environment to transform raw materials into another instance of the organism, and thereby to keep those abstract genes, and not mutations or other variants of them, physically instantiated, despite the mutation and natural selection that keep happening. Similarly, the ideas constituting the abstract constructor for preserving the ship of Theseus would have had to include not only some relatively arbitrary information about the historical shape of the ship, but also knowledge of how to cause Athenians to preserve those ideas themselves through the generations, and to reject rival ideas.
Again, I fail to see how bringing information and knowledge into fundamental physics in this way is problematic in the sense Barry is implying. Yet they both requires specific physical transformations to be possible tasks, while others must be impossible tasks.
They say it’s important to pick your battles. Apparently, Barry has picked an artificially narrow, outdated version of materialism to attack because that’s the only battle he can win?