ID Foundations, 21: MF — “as a materialist I believe intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random so for me that is not a third type of explanation” . . . a root worldview assumption based cause for rejecting the design inference emerges into plain view
In the OK thread, in comment 50, ID objector Mark Frank has finally laid out the root of ever so many of the objections to the design inference filter. Unsurprisingly, it is a worldview based controlling a priori of materialism:
[re EA] #38
[MF, in 50:] I see “chance” as usually meaning to “unpredictable” or “no known explanation”. The unknown explanations may be deterministic elements or genuinely random uncaused events which we just don’t know about.
It can also includes things that happen as the result of intelligence – but as a materialist I believe intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random so for me that is not a third type of explanation.
But, just what what is the explanatory filter that is being objected to so strenuously?
Let me present it first, in the per aspect flowchart form that I have often used here at UD, that shows it to be a more specific and detailed understanding of a lot of empirically grounded scientific methods of investigation.
Galileo’s leaning tower exercise, showing mechanical necessity: F = m*g, of course less air resistance. NB: He did a thought expt of imagining the light and heavy ball tied together, so on the “heavier must fall faster” concept, the objects now should fall even faster. But, shouldn’t the lighter one instead have retarded the heavier? As in, oopsie. The expt may have been done and the heavier may have hit just ahead, as air resistance is as cross section but weight is as volume. (HT: Lannyland & Wiki.)
One that explicitly invokes mechanical necessity as first default, then on high contingency rejects it — if a lawlike necessity is at work, it will produce reliably similar outcomes on similar initial circumstances, just as a dropped heavy object near earth’s surface has initial acceleration 9.8 N/kg due to the gravity field of the earth.
However, this does not cover all phenomena, e.g. if the dropped object is a fair common die that then falls to a table, it will tumble and settle to read a value from the set {1, 2, . . . 6} in a way that is close to the mathematical behaviour of an ideal flat random variable.
But also, chance and necessity cannot cover all outcomes. Not only do we routinely experience being intelligent designers — e.g. by my composing this post — but we often see a class of phenomena which is highly contingent but not plausibly accounted for on chance. For, if we see 500 – 1,000 bits or more of functionally specific complex organisation and/or information [FSCO/I], the needle in haystack challenge faced by the atomic resources of our solar system or cosmos will be overwhelmed by the space of possible configurations and the challenge of finding cases E from narrow and isolated target or hot zones T in such spaces, W.
Citing Dembski’s definition of CSI in No Free Lunch:
p. 148: “The great myth of contemporary evolutionary biology is that the information needed to explain complex biological structures can be purchased without intelligence. My aim throughout this book is to dispel that myth . . . . Eigen and his colleagues must have something else in mind besides information simpliciter when they describe the origin of information as the central problem of biology.
I submit that what they have in mind is specified complexity [[cf. here below], or what equivalently we have been calling in this Chapter Complex Specified information or CSI . . . .
Biological specification always refers to function . . . In virtue of their function [[a living organism’s subsystems] embody patterns that are objectively given and can be identified independently of the systems that embody them. Hence these systems are specified in the sense required by the complexity-specificity criterion . . . the specification can be cashed out in any number of ways [[through observing the requisites of functional organisation within the cell, or in organs and tissues or at the level of the organism as a whole] . . .”
p. 144: [[Specified complexity can be defined:] “. . . since a universal probability bound of 1 [[chance] in 10^150 corresponds to a universal complexity bound of 500 bits of information, [[the cluster] (T, E) constitutes CSI because T [[ effectively the target hot zone in the field of possibilities] subsumes E [[ effectively the observed event from that field], T is detachable from E, and and T measures at least 500 bits of information . . . ”
So, design thinkers reject the default explanation for high contingency– chance — if we see FSCO/I or the like. That is, we infer on FSCO/I and related patterns best explained on (and as known reliable signs of) design, to just that, intelligent design:
Accordingly, I replied to MF at 59 in the OK thread, as follows:
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>>> the pivot of the issue is now plain from MF at 50 above:
[re EA] #38
[MF:] I see “chance” as usually meaning to “unpredictable” or “no known explanation”. The unknown explanations may be deterministic elements or genuinely random uncaused events which we just don’t know about.
It can also includes things that happen as the result of intelligence – but as a materialist I believe intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random so for me that is not a third type of explanation.
Here we have the root problem, that for MF, design reduces to chance and necessity.
Also, I would not go along fully with MF’s definition of chance {“uncaused events” is a very troublesome concept for instance but my focus here is,} having identified that chance processes come about by two major known physical processes:
Chance:
Tumbling dice — a chaotic phenomenon thanks to eight corners and twelve edges interacting with uncontrollable surface roughness etc. (HT:Rosendahl, Flicker)
TYPE I:the clash of uncorrelated trains of events such as is seen when a dropped fair die hits a table etc and tumbles, settling to readings in the set {1, 2, . . . 6} in a pattern that is effectively flat random. In this sort of event, we often see manifestations of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, aka chaos, intersecting with uncontrolled or uncontrollable small variations yielding a result predictable in most cases only up to a statistical distribution which needs not be flat random.
TYPE II:processes — especially quantum ones — that are evidently random, such as quantum tunnelling as is the explanation for phenomena of alpha decay. This is used in for instance zener noise sources that drive special counter circuits to give a random number source. Such are sometimes used in lotteries or the like, or presumably in making one time message pads used in decoding.
In reply to MF’s attempt to reduce design by intelligence to the other two sources of cause, I suggest that this approach radically undermines the credibility of mind as a thinking and knowing function of being intelligent humans, in a reductio ad absurdum. (Cf my remarks here yesterday in reply to Dan Barker’s FFRF and my longstanding observations — in the end they go back to the mid 1980′s in answer to Marxist materialism as well as evolutionary materialism — here on.)
Haldane sums up one of the major problems aptly, in a turn of the 1930′s remark that has often been cited here at UD:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [[“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]
Let me clip my more extended discussion:
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>> 15 –> In short, it is at least arguable that self-referential absurdity is the dagger pointing to the heart of evolutionary materialistic models of mind and its origin . . . . [It can be presented at a much more sophisticated way, cf. Hasker p. 64 on here as an example, also Reppert, Plantinga and others] but without losing its general force, it can also be drawn out a bit in a fairly simple way:
a: Evolutionary materialism argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature; from hydrogen to humans by undirected chance and necessity.
b: Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws of chance and/or mechanical necessity acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of happenstance initial circumstances.
(This is physicalism. This view covers both the forms where (a) the mind and the brain are seen as one and the same thing, and those where (b) somehow mind emerges from and/or “supervenes” on brain, perhaps as a result of sophisticated and complex software looping. The key point, though is as already noted: physical causal closure — the phenomena that play out across time, without residue, are in principle deducible or at least explainable up to various random statistical distributions and/or mechanical laws, from prior physical states. Such physical causal closure, clearly, implicitly discounts or even dismisses the causal effect of concept formation and reasoning then responsibly deciding, in favour of specifically physical interactions in the brain-body control loop; indeed, some mock the idea of — in their view — an “obviously” imaginary “ghost” in the meat-machine. [[There is also some evidence from simulation exercises, that accuracy of even sensory perceptions may lose out to utilitarian but inaccurate ones in an evolutionary competition. “It works” does not warrant the inference to “it is true.”] )
c: But human thought, clearly a phenomenon in the universe, must now fit into this meat-machine picture. So, we rapidly arrive at Crick’s claim in his The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994): what we subjectively experience as “thoughts,” “reasoning” and “conclusions” can only be understood materialistically as the unintended by-products of the blind natural forces which cause and control the electro-chemical events going on in neural networks in our brains that (as the Smith Model illustrates) serve as cybernetic controllers for our bodies.
d: These underlying driving forces are viewed as being ultimately physical, but are taken to be partly mediated through a complex pattern of genetic inheritance shaped by forces of selection [[“nature”] and psycho-social conditioning [[“nurture”], within the framework of human culture [[i.e. socio-cultural conditioning and resulting/associated relativism]. And, remember, the focal issue to such minds — notice, this is a conceptual analysis made and believed by the materialists! — is the physical causal chains in a control loop, not the internalised “mouth-noises” that may somehow sit on them and come along for the ride.
(Save, insofar as such “mouth noises” somehow associate with or become embedded as physically instantiated signals or maybe codes in such a loop. [[How signals, languages and codes originate and function in systems in our observation of such origin — i.e by design — tends to be pushed to the back-burner and conveniently forgotten. So does the point that a signal or code takes its significance precisely from being an intelligently focused on, observed or chosen and significant alternative from a range of possibilities that then can guide decisive action.])
e: For instance, Marxists commonly derided opponents for their “bourgeois class conditioning” — but what of the effect of their own class origins? Freudians frequently dismissed qualms about their loosening of moral restraints by alluding to the impact of strict potty training on their “up-tight” critics — but doesn’t this cut both ways? Should we not ask a Behaviourist whether s/he is little more than yet another operantly conditioned rat trapped in the cosmic maze? And — as we saw above — would the writings of a Crick be any more than the firing of neurons in networks in his own brain?
f: For further instance, we may take the favourite whipping-boy of materialists: religion. Notoriously, they often hold that belief in God is not merely cognitive, conceptual error, but delusion. Borderline lunacy, in short. But, if such a patent “delusion” is so utterly widespread, even among the highly educated, then it “must” — by the principles of evolution — somehow be adaptive to survival, whether in nature or in society. And so, this would be a major illustration of the unreliability of our conceptual reasoning ability, on the assumption of evolutionary materialism.
g: Turning the materialist dismissal of theism around, evolutionary materialism itself would be in the same leaky boat. For, the sauce for the goose is notoriously just as good a sauce for the gander, too.
h: That is, on its own premises [[and following Dawkins in A Devil’s Chaplain, 2004, p. 46], the cause of the belief system of evolutionary materialism, “must” also be reducible to forces of blind chance and mechanical necessity that are sufficiently adaptive to spread this “meme” in populations of jumped- up apes from the savannahs of East Africa scrambling for survival in a Malthusian world of struggle for existence. Reppert brings the underlying point sharply home, in commenting on the “internalised mouth-noise signals riding on the physical cause-effect chain in a cybernetic loop” view:
. . . let us suppose that brain state A, which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, together cause the belief that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts . . . [[But] if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and [[so] we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be, the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur in virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions. [[Emphases added . . . ]
i: The famous geneticist and evolutionary biologist (as well as Socialist) J. B. S. Haldane made much the same point in a famous 1932 remark:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [[“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]
j: Therefore, though materialists will often try to pointedly ignore or angrily brush aside the issue, we may freely argue: if such evolutionary materialism is true, then (i) our consciousness, (ii) the “thoughts” we have, (iii) the conceptualised beliefs we hold, (iv) the reasonings we attempt based on such and (v) the “conclusions” and “choices” (a.k.a. “decisions”) we reach — without residue — must be produced and controlled by blind forces of chance happenstance and mechanical necessity that are irrelevant to “mere” ill-defined abstractions such as: purpose or truth, or even logical validity.
(NB: The conclusions of such “arguments” may still happen to be true, by astonishingly lucky coincidence — but we have no rational grounds for relying on the “reasoning” that has led us to feel that we have “proved” or “warranted” them. It seems that rationality itself has thus been undermined fatally on evolutionary materialistic premises. Including that of Crick et al. Through, self-reference leading to incoherence and utter inability to provide a cogent explanation of our commonplace, first-person experience of reasoning and rational warrant for beliefs, conclusions and chosen paths of action. Reduction to absurdity and explanatory failure in short.)
k: And, if materialists then object: “But, we can always apply scientific tests, through observation, experiment and measurement,” then we must immediately note that — as the fate of Newtonian Dynamics between 1880 and 1930 shows — empirical support is not equivalent to establishing the truth of a scientific theory. For, at any time, one newly discovered countering fact can in principle overturn the hitherto most reliable of theories. (And as well, we must not lose sight of this: in science, one is relying on the legitimacy of the reasoning process to make the case that scientific evidence provides reasonable albeit provisional warrant for one’s beliefs etc. Scientific reasoning is not independent of reasoning.) >>
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In short, there is a major issue that materialism is inherently and inescapably self referentially incoherent, undermining its whole scheme of reasoning.
That is a big topic itself.
But, when it comes to the issue of debates over the meaning of chance and inferences to design which implicate intelligence, it is an underlying assumption that plainly leads to endless debates.
In this context, however, the case of 500 coins in a row on a table reading all H or alternating H and T or the first 72 characters of this post in ASCII code, strongly shows the difference in capacity of chance and design as sources of configurations that come from independently and simply describable clusters that are deeply isolated in a space of configs that are such that the atomic resources of our solar system cannot credibly search a big enough fraction to make it reasonable to believe one will stumble upon such configs blindly.
In short, there is a major and directly experienced phenomenon to be accounted for, self aware conscious intellect and related capacities we subsume under the term mind. And this phenomenon is manifest in capacity to design, which is as familiar as composing posts in this thread.
Such designs are well beyond the capacity of blind chance and mechanical necessity, so we have good reason to see that intelligence capable of design is as fundamental in understanding our empirical world as chance and as necessity.
Whatever the worldview consequences — and I think they are huge.>>>
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In short, it seems that one key root of objections to the design inference is the notion that intelligence needed for design in the end reduces to cumulative effects of blind chance and mechanical necessity.
Only, that runs into significant self referential incoherence challenges.
A safer approach would be to recognise that intelligence indisputably exists and indisputably exerts capacities not credibly observed to emerge from blind chance and mechanical necessity. Indeed, on inductive and analytic — needle in haystack — grounds, it is arguable and compelling that certain phenomena such as FSCO/I are reliable signs of design as cause.
Then, we run into the challenge that from its very roots, cell based life is chock full of such signs of design, starting with the genetic code and the size of genomes, from 100 – 1,000 kbits on up.
Then, the observed cosmos itself shows strong and multiple signs of being fine tuned in ways that enable the existence of cell based life on terrestrial planets such as our own — where fine tuning is another empirically grounded sign of being designed.
So, there are good reasons to extend the force of the design inference to the origin of cell based life and of major body plans for such life, and to the origins of the observed cosmos that hosts such life. END
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F/N: I must update by posting this all too aptly accurate debate summary by no less than UD’s inimitable WJM, done here on Christmas day as a gift to the blog and world. WJM, I CANNOT let this one just wash away in the stream of comments! (You ought to separately headline it under your monicker.) Here goes:
Typical debate with an anti-ID advocate:
ID advocate: There are certain things that exist that are best explained by intelligent designed.
Anti-ID advocate: Whoa! Hold up there, fella. “Explained”, in science, means “caused by”. Intelligent design doesn’t by itself “cause” anything.
ID advocate: What I meant is that teleology is required to generate certain things, like a functioning battleship. It can’t come about by chance.
Anti-ID advocate: What do you mean “by chance”? “By” means to cause. Are you claiming that chance causes things to happen?
ID advocate: Of course not. Chance, design and necessity are the three fundamental categories of causation used to characterize the outcomes of various processes and mechanisms. You’re taking objection with colloquialisms that are commonly used in mainstream science and debate. Here are some examples of peer-reviewed, published papers that use these same colloquialisms.
Anti-ID advocate: Those aren’t real scientists!
ID advocate: Those are scientists you yourself have quoted in the past – they are mainstream Darwinists.
ID advocate: I’m using the quotes the same way the authors used them.
Anti-ID advocate: Can you prove it?
ID Advocate: It’s not my job to prove my own innocence, but whatever. Look, it has been accepted for thousands of years that there are only three categories of causation – necessity, or law, chance and artifice, or design. Each category is distinct.
Anti ID advocate: I have no reason to accept that design is a distinct category.
ID advocate: So, you’re saying that battleship or a computer can be generated by a combination of necessity (physical laws) and chance?
Anti-ID advocate: Can you prove otherwise? Are you saying it’s impossible?
ID advocate: No, I’m saying that chance and necessity are not plausible explanations.
Anti-ID advocate: “Explanation” means to “cause” a thing. Chance and necessity don’t “cause” anything.
ID advocate: We’ve already been over this. Those are shorthand ways of talking about processes and mechanisms that produce effects categorized as lawful or chance.
Anti-ID advocate: Shorthand isn’t good enough – we must have specific uses of terms using explicitly laid-out definitions or else debate cannot go forward.
ID advocate: (insert several pages lay out specifics and definitions with citations and historical references).
ID advocate: In summary, this demonstrates that mainstream scientists have long accepted that there are qualitative difference between CSI, or organized, complimentary complexity/functionality, and what can in principle be generated via the causal categories of chance and necessity. Only intelligent or intentional agency is known to be in principle capable of generating such phenomena.
Anti-ID advocate: OMG, you can’t really expect me to read and understand all of that! I don’t understand the way you word things. Is English your first language? It makes my head hurt.
Comments
RDFish:
Just a brief answer for the moment. Maybe I can go into greater detail later:
When I say “consciousness”, I am referring to “that which we loose when we fall into a dreamless sleep, and regain when we awaken”. When I say “conscious thought”, I am referring to something that we consciously apprehend, that we are conscious of. You mean something different, apparently. In your view, it seems possible that I might have a conscious thought but not be consciously aware of having that thought – is that right?
Yes, it is correct. But, as you correctly assume later, I do not believe that in dreamless sleep we loose consciousness. The point is, consciousness is more basic that self-consciousness, or self-awareness. But it is true that self-consciousness is a more complete form of consciousness.
So in your view, a patellar reflex is non-conscious. Now imagine I’m feeling irritable and my wife asks what is wrong, and I say I’m not aware that anything is wrong. Then my wife reminds me that I’m probably annoyed by my mother-in-law’s thoughtless remarks, and I think about it consciously for a few moments, and realize that yes, that is why I am irritable. In my view, the subconscious annoyance is not conscious until I consciously reflect on it. In your view, I am conscious of everything like this all the time, whether I’m aware of it or not. Is that correct?
Yes.
Ok, I’m beginning to see that you really do consider that thoughts I am not consciously aware of are still conscious thoughts. This isn’t really analogous to macular/peripheral vision, because we can be conscious of both of those types of visual experiences, even though one is fuzzier. In contrast, we have no conscious awareness whatsoever of how we manage to generate grammatical sentences, yet you wouuld still call that ability conscious.
Yes. But I maintain that the macular vision example is quite good. We are usually "consciously aware" only of macular vision, and still we are "conscious" of the background vision. It is a question of degrees. In different states of consciousness, we can access distinctly the representations of the subconscious mind, for example. Dreams are exactly that.
I find your usage of the term a bit ideosyncratic, but as long as you make yourself clear we can use your sense of the word. You call “conscious” any mental activity of someone who is capable of being of conscious at all, even if the particular activity does not present in his/her conscious awareness. Is that correct?
Yes, if with "conscious awareness" you mean the specific state of consciousness that we could better name "waking consciousness".
Ok, so in your sense of the word we are conscious of everything we know, whether we consciously know that we know it or not.
I would say that we are conscious of everything that our "I" perceives and represents, whatever the "degree" of the perception.
If I get hit on the head, or get a dose of general anaesthetic, it seems to me I “lose consciousness” – I subsequently have no conscious awareness of anything at all. But according to you, I really shouldn’t say I have “lost consciousness” or I’ve “become unconscious”, but rather I should say “I am now conscious in a different way”.
Well, although it is more difficult to demonstrate it for dreamless sleep or coma or anaesthetics, I do believe that we still are conscious in those states. I believe that the "I" never disappears. It only perceives different things. There are many reasons to believe that, but we could discuss them later.
Ok, you’ve been quite clear. In your way of speaking, there is no such thing as losing consciousness – everybody is conscious all the time, no matter what. Now, here is my preferred definition of consciousness: “That which we lose when we fall into a dreamless sleep, and regain when we awaken”. I find that definition to be clear to everyone, but it doesn’t fit with what you mean by that word. So, I will ask you: Given that “it is consciousness all the way down”, and that we are conscious even in a dreamless sleep or coma, how exactly would you define the word “conscious”?
The existence and continuity of the "I" is a conscious state. Our fundamental intuition is that we exists, and that we exist consciously. In that sense, full self-awareness is the highest way to be. But I am not thinking so much of the "waking state" self-awareness, which is very limited, but more of the awareness in mystic experiences :)
Except obviously dFSCI is not a reliable indicator of human design, since humans clearly did not design the original human. The issue at hand is what exactly (if anything) is dFSCI a reliable indicator of? It is of course a reliable indicator of the ability to create dFSCI, but that is an empty statement. You say it is a reliable indicator of the activity of some conscious entity, but in your sense of the word “conscious”, this might not actually mean what most people mean when they talk about “conscious experience” or “conscious awareness”. Instead, it might be something that isn’t even aware that it is conscious, right?
No, dFSCI is "a reliable indicator of human design", because, apart from biological information, everything in the world we know of, exhibiting dFSCI, has been designed by humans. I would definitely call that a relaible indicator.
The original human is part of biological information, so it is part of the only exception.
I would say that the ability to generate dFSCI seems to be an indicator not only of consciousness, but also of intelligent and purposeful consciousness. Indeed, we have the example of animals, which are probably conscious, and yet cannot usually generate dFSCI, certainly not so easily as humans do. The human faculties which are certainly implied (casually or not) in human design are the ability to represent meaning and purpose and to output forms which have meaning and purpose. That is very simple indeed. Would you deny that, when I write a software, I am conscious of its purpose and of how it works? You say that we are not conscious of how we generate language. That may be true, but we are certainly conscious of its meaning and purpose before outputting it. IOWs, as I have said, the form which is outputted to the designed object is first represented in consciousness, and its meaning understood and recognized as desirable. That is the source of my assumption, perfectly reasonable, that those conscious activities are linked to the design process, and that dFSCI is a reliable indicator of those conscious activities.
Except whatever you are inferencing to by analogy must necessary be radically different from a human being! Very central to the notion of what it means to be a “human being” is our astronomically complex physical machinery – the very things that ID attempts to explain. Unless you are positing that the Designer you infer is similar to human beings in that it is a complex organism, then whatever it is, it is something very much outside of our empircal understanding. And for that reason, it is not possible to warrant an inference that this Designer is similar to human beings in other ways. For example, we have no reason to assume the Designer has conscious awareness, or sensory perceptions, conscious beliefs and desires, emotions, and so on.
Yes, radically different, and yet very similar, in the capacity to have conscious representations of meaning and purpose, at least according to my theory. And meaning and desire are certainly in the range of our empirical understanding. You see, mine is a theory. An explanation. Everything is a theory, in science and out of science. Mine (ID) is a scientific theory. It makes some assumptions, it makes inferences, and it explains things. And it is, at present, the best explanation for biological information. You may be happy with a "we don't know" attitude for biological information and for dFSCI. I am not. I try to explain them.
That is an assumption, not an inference based upon our empirical knowledge.
As I have tried to explain, we make assumptions to build theories which make inferences that explain data. We cannot go anywhere without making assumptions. Inferences are the result. Assumptions are the building blocks of theories.
The way I’m using the term here, if consciousness is not causal, then it cannot have an important role (or any role at all) in the design process. In other words, for all we know, a philosophical zombie might be capable of design. (If you are not familiar with philosophical zombies, just read about them on Wiki or something).
IMO, nothing which is not conscious is capable of design. I will stick to that assumption until facts show me differently. I am very satisfied of how that assumption explains data.
But there is tremendous doubt about how we think – in fact, we really have no idea how we do it! Just because human beings are conscious of their desire to build an airplane, say, before they do it, does not mean that ANYTHING – even somethign unimaginably different from a human being – would necessarily be conscious of their desires and intentions. This is my point.
Doubts are always welcome. I am not in search of absolute truth. I am in search of good explanations. I keep my good explanations, and I am very interested in doubts about them.
Virtually all of my discussions here eventually reach this point. In fact, I do not believe it is possible to justify the claim that ID is an empirically based theory without appealing to religious experiences and to so-called paranormal phenomena such as ESP or NDEs. There’s nothing wrong with taking these into account, but I would insist that this be acknowledged much more explicitly: Without evidence from religious experience and paranormal research, ID has no empirical support to suggest that the ORIGINAL complex physical organisms could have been designed by a thinking, conscious being.
I do acknowledge that explicitly. Religious experiences and NDEs are important empirical data. I definitely base much of my map of reality on them, and all other empirical data available.
I do indeed believe that questions of origins of the universe and of life must be answered by “We do not know”. That is the only intellectually honest response. However, I do NOT put all of our knowledge in the same uncertain category! We know a tremendous number of things – people from all over the world, from different cultures and religions, agree on a vast amount of scientific knowledge. Still, some questions remain unanswered, and these questions include the BIG QUESTIONS of origins.
I beg to differ. While the question of the origin of the universe has certainly philosophical and religious connotations that necessarily are beyond scientific thinking (which does not mean that we must not try to answer it, or at least to have some scientific approach to it), the question of the origin of life is completely different. OOL (and its evolution) happens in the universe, in time and space. It absolutely requires some scientific explanation. We cannot avoid that. And if the explanation really requires consciousness as part of itself (as I do believe), then consciousness, as any other empirical fact, must be part of that explanation.
IOWs, a question about something (the origin of biological information) which happens in space and time cannot, in principle, "remain unanswered".gpuccio
December 27, 2013
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I do indeed believe that questions of origins of the universe and of life must be answered by “We do not know”. That is the only intellectually honest response.
I somewhat agree and disagree. The answer is, "we do not know for sure, but some answers are more believable and coherent than others, and some faith statements have higher expected value or certainty equivalence in science, technology and spirituality." That is an intellectually honest and pragmatic answer as well.scordova
December 27, 2013
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Hi gpuccio,
Mainly, I see that you still argue about consciousness as pertaining only to waking consciousness, and not including all other states of consciousness. That is completely different form my use of the word, so it is obvious that some misunderstanding arises.
To be more clear, I consider “conscious” any event that is in some way represented in the perceiving “I”, whatever the mode and intensity and clarity of the representation. I consider “non conscious” events those that are not, as far as we know, represented in a perceiver. In that sense, consciousness implies the existence of a perceiver and of things perceived, while pure objectual events are, as far as we know, only events, and not representations in an “I”.
When I say "consciousness", I am referring to "that which we loose when we fall into a dreamless sleep, and regain when we awaken". When I say "conscious thought", I am referring to something that we consciously apprehend, that we are conscious of. You mean something different, apparently. In your view, it seems possible that I might have a conscious thought but not be consciously aware of having that thought - is that right?
The problem is not if something happens “in the body”, but if it is perceived by the “I”. Probably, a lot of the contents of our conscious representations come from our body (but not all, I believe). Still, when it is represented in our perception, it becomes a conscious event. Other bodily event are never represented, so they can be completely “non conscious”.
So in your view, a patellar reflex is non-conscious. Now imagine I'm feeling irritable and my wife asks what is wrong, and I say I'm not aware that anything is wrong. Then my wife reminds me that I'm probably annoyed by my mother-in-law's thoughtless remarks, and I think about it consciously for a few moments, and realize that yes, that is why I am irritable. In my view, the subconscious annoyance is not conscious until I consciously reflect on it. In your view, I am conscious of everything like this all the time, whether I'm aware of it or not. Is that correct?
The subconscious mind is, IMO, consciousness. It is called “subconscious” because the modality and intensity of representation is different from our “waking mind”, but there is our “I” perceiving things just the same. A simple example could be the relationship between macular vision and background vision. They are different, but they are modalities of vision just the same.
Ok, I'm beginning to see that you really do consider that thoughts I am not consciously aware of are still conscious thoughts. This isn't really analogous to macular/peripheral vision, because we can be conscious of both of those types of visual experiences, even though one is fuzzier. In contrast, we have no conscious awareness whatsoever of how we manage to generate grammatical sentences, yet you wouuld still call that ability conscious.
I find your usage of the term a bit ideosyncratic, but as long as you make yourself clear we can use your sense of the word. You call "conscious" any mental activity of someone who is capable of being of conscious at all, even if the particular activity does not present in his/her conscious awareness. Is that correct?
If something is subconscious, for me it is part of consciousness just the same.
Ok, so in your sense of the word we are conscious of everything we know, whether we consciously know that we know it or not.
I am conscious in my sleep, only differently.
If I get hit on the head, or get a dose of general anaesthetic, it seems to me I "lose consciousness" - I subsequently have no conscious awareness of anything at all. But according to you, I really shouldn't say I have "lost consciousness" or I've "become unconscious", but rather I should say "I am now conscious in a different way".
But the big iceberg which is all the rest of us is much more, and it is consciousness all the way down.
Ok, you've been quite clear. In your way of speaking, there is no such thing as losing consciousness - everybody is conscious all the time, no matter what. Now, here is my preferred definition of consciousness: "That which we lose when we fall into a dreamless sleep, and regain when we awaken". I find that definition to be clear to everyone, but it doesn't fit with what you mean by that word. So, I will ask you: Given that "it is consciousness all the way down", and that we are conscious even in a dreamless sleep or coma, how exactly would you define the word "conscious"?
My empirical point is that human design comes from conscious representations, and that dFSCI is always connected, in known cases, to human design.
That’s why I can certainly say that dFSCI is a reliable indicator of human design.
Except obviously dFSCI is not a reliable indicator of human design, since humans clearly did not design the original human. The issue at hand is what exactly (if anything) is dFSCI a reliable indicator of? It is of course a reliable indicator of the ability to create dFSCI, but that is an empty statement. You say it is a reliable indicator of the activity of some conscious entity, but in your sense of the word "conscious", this might not actually mean what most people mean when they talk about "conscious experience" or "conscious awareness". Instead, it might be something that isn't even aware that it is conscious, right?
But, when I use that point to infer conscious design for biological information, which was not probably designed by humans, I am making an inference by analogy. Biological information is the only other class of objects exhibiting dFSCI, togehther with human designed objects.
Except whatever you are inferencing to by analogy must necessary be radically different from a human being! Very central to the notion of what it means to be a "human being" is our astronomically complex physical machinery - the very things that ID attempts to explain. Unless you are positing that the Designer you infer is similar to human beings in that it is a complex organism, then whatever it is, it is something very much outside of our empircal understanding. And for that reason, it is not possible to warrant an inference that this Designer is similar to human beings in other ways. For example, we have no reason to assume the Designer has conscious awareness, or sensory perceptions, conscious beliefs and desires, emotions, and so on.
The problem is, as you say, which of the features of humans is really necessary to generate dFSCI?
I assume that it is the presence of conscious representations, and in particular of the experience of meaning and purpose.
That is an assumption, not an inference based upon our empirical knowledge.
In the particular case of design processes, it is rather obvious that the conscious representation themselves, whatever their origin, have at some point an important role, maybe causal, maybe not, in the design process.
The way I'm using the term here, if consciousness is not causal, then it cannot have an important role (or any role at all) in the design process. In other words, for all we know, a philosophical zombie might be capable of design. (If you are not familiar with philosophical zombies, just read about them on Wiki or something).
At some point, they precede the design process itself, and they already contain the form to be outputted to the object. The child represents his home in his mind before drawing it on the paper. So, if the problem is how the information arises, there can be no doubt that it arises before the design process, in the conscious representation.
But there is tremendous doubt about how we think - in fact, we really have no idea how we do it! Just because human beings are conscious of their desire to build an airplane, say, before they do it, does not mean that ANYTHING - even somethign unimaginably different from a human being - would necessarily be conscious of their desires and intentions. This is my point.
Now, it is perfectly possible, in principle, that a physical brain is necessary for that to happen. After all, humans, who are unfortunately our most available example, have a physical brain. If that were true, we should reasonably think that biological information was designed by beings with some very complex physical brain.
But it is also possible that non physical beings are capable of having meaningful representations, without the need of a physical brain. That is exactly what I think, and I believe that there are many empirical supports to that assumption, including many religious experiences and the phenomena of NDE.
Virtually all of my discussions here eventually reach this point. In fact, I do not believe it is possible to justify the claim that ID is an empirically based theory without appealing to religious experiences and to so-called paranormal phenomena such as ESP or NDEs. There's nothing wrong with taking these into account, but I would insist that this be acknowledged much more explicitly: Without evidence from religious experience and paranormal research, ID has no empirical support to suggest that the ORIGINAL complex physical organisms could have been designed by a thinking, conscious being.
If you want to keep it at the “we don’t know” level, that’s fine for me. In the end, we really know nothing with absolute certainty: human knowledge, whatever it is, is always relative. Scientific knowledge is no exception.
I do indeed believe that questions of origins of the universe and of life must be answered by "We do not know". That is the only intellectually honest response. However, I do NOT put all of our knowledge in the same uncertain category! We know a tremendous number of things - people from all over the world, from different cultures and religions, agree on a vast amount of scientific knowledge. Still, some questions remain unanswered, and these questions include the BIG QUESTIONS of origins.
Merry Christmas to you, gpuccio!
RDFish/AIGuyRDFish
December 27, 2013
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RDFish:
Well, you have been very clear about what you think. I can accept many of your points, and disagree with many others. But in general I find your comments reasonable, and I am satisfied.
Still, maybe some further clarifications could be useful, because perhaps I have not completely clear some of my points.
Mainly, I see that you still argue about consciousness as pertaining only to waking consciousness, and not including all other states of consciousness. That is completely different form my use of the word, so it is obvious that some misunderstanding arises.
To be more clear, I consider "conscious" any event that is in some way represented in the perceiving "I", whatever the mode and intensity and clarity of the representation. I consider "non conscious" events those that are not, as far as we know, represented in a perceiver. In that sense, consciousness implies the existence of a perceiver and of things perceived, while pure objectual events are, as far as we know, only events, and not representations in an "I".
Given my position, I find rather strange some of your statements. For example, you say:
"If I understand you correctly, you are saying that some (“non conscious”) reasoning occurs in the body (presumably in the brain, the rest of the CNS, the enteric nervous system, and so on), while other reasoning occurs not in the body, but only in the subconscious mind? If that’s what you mean, can you say how you might actually decide when reasoning does not occur in the body?"
The problem is not if something happens "in the body", but if it is perceived by the "I". Probably, a lot of the contents of our conscious representations come from our body (but not all, I believe). Still, when it is represented in our perception, it becomes a conscious event. Other bodily event are never represented, so they can be completely "non conscious".
The subconscious mind is, IMO, consciousness. It is called "subconscious" because the modality and intensity of representation is different from our "waking mind", but there is our "I" perceiving things just the same. A simple example could be the relationship between macular vision and background vision. They are different, but they are modalities of vision just the same.
You say:
"Your distinction between non-conscious and subconscious, then, requires clarification: If something is subconscious, it does not present in conscious awareness; in other words it is not conscious."
I hope I have clarified that. If something is subconscious, for me it is part of consciousness just the same. It is a represented event, only it is represented in the subconscious mind, and not in the "waking mind". Obviously, it would be better not to call the "waking mind" simply "conscious mind", but the common use is that.
You say:
"Well, it appears that your notion of “design” does indeed entail consciousness, which I think is an empirically unsupported assumption. When I talk in my sleep, I generate novel, grammatical, meaningful sentences without conscious awareness."
Again the same problem. I am conscious in my sleep, only differently.
You say:
"In that case, when I am working on a math problem that I cannot solve, and the answer comes to me (as people tend to say) when I’m thinking about something else entirely, or singing in the shower, how did that cognition take place? How do you know that consciousness is required for cognition when so much cognition demonstrably occurs without conscious awareness?"
Again. Many things that come to the "waking mind" come really from deeper strata of consciousness. The waking mind is only the point of an iceberg: it is the small part which is above a specific "threshold" of representation. But the big iceberg which is all the rest of us is much more, and it is consciousness all the way down.
You say:
"Ok, let’s be very clear here. Your definition of “intelligence” includes conscious awareness. I agree that your defintion is meaningful, and ID’s explanation invoking “intelligence” using your definition is not a vacuous tautology. I also believe, however, that ID has no empirical basis upon which to claim that the cause of biological CSI was conscious."
Well, here and in your following reasoning you have an interesting point, and I can happily concede that you are in part correct.
Let's see better what the point is.
My empirical point is that human design comes from conscious representations, and that dFSCI is always connected, in known cases, to human design.
That's why I can certainly say that dFSCI is a reliable indicator of human design.
But, when I use that point to infer conscious design for biological information, which was not probably designed by humans, I am making an inference by analogy. Biological information is the only other class of objects exhibiting dFSCI, togehther with human designed objects.
The problem is, as you say, which of the features of humans is really necessary to generate dFSCI?
I assume that it is the presence of conscious representations, and in particular of the experience of meaning and purpose.
You object, correctly, that there are many different positions about what could allow humans to have the ability to design things:
"Maybe our brains do account for all of our mental abilities (thought), and follow just the physical laws we already understand (like, say, Pat Churchland believes). Or maybe our brains account for thought but require exotic physics that we don’t yet understand (like, say, Roger Penrose believes). Or maybe our brains are necessary for thought but not sufficient (like, say, David Chalmers believes). Or maybe our brains are not necessary for thought at all (like, say, Angus Menuge believes). Maybe consciousness is causal, or maybe epiphenomenal…."
OK. That is all very good. But I want to explain better my position.
In the particular case of design processes, it is rather obvious that the conscious representation themselves, whatever their origin, have at some point an important role, maybe causal, maybe not, in the design process. At some point, they precede the design process itself, and they already contain the form to be outputted to the object. The child represents his home in his mind before drawing it on the paper. So, if the problem is how the information arises, there can be no doubt that it arises before the design process, in the conscious representation.
Now, it is perfectly possible, in principle, that a physical brain is necessary for that to happen. After all, humans, who are unfortunately our most available example, have a physical brain. If that were true, we should reasonably think that biological information was designed by beings with some very complex physical brain.
But it is also possible that non physical beings are capable of having meaningful representations, without the need of a physical brain. That is exactly what I think, and I believe that there are many empirical supports to that assumption, including many religious experiences and the phenomena of NDE.
If you want to keep it at the "we don't know" level, that's fine for me. In the end, we really know nothing with absolute certainty: human knowledge, whatever it is, is always relative. Scientific knowledge is no exception.
But I still maintain that the most reasonable explanation for the continuous emergence of dFSCI in humans is that their conscious representations allow them to superimpose a completely original stratum of experiences (meaning, cognition, purpose, feeling) to objective events. That stratum originates in consciousness, not in the events themselves. And, miraculously, it gives us the power to organize events, and to obtain things that we desire. It seems that, in some way, our subjective experiences are the masters of objective reality.
A merry Christmas to you.gpuccio
December 27, 2013
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RDF:
Right out of the Darwinist debate tactics book, and I spoke about abusive behaviour patterns on your part in previous threads.
Start here: when MF imposes a priori materialism and refuses to entertain the empirical fact of designing intelligence, that deadlocks any possibility of reasonable discussion due to a priori question begging.
Next, on the underlying inherent incoherence of evolutionary materialism, you can start from Haldane, and go on from there:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]
Finally, a rock has no dreams and cannot be deluded to imagine that it has. One who is self aware and conscious cannot be wrong about that, even if he is deceived in part of just what he is.
So also, computation is a blind physical cause effect process dependent on the organisation of hardware and software, limited by GIGO. This is qualitatively distinct from conscious, reasoned thought on ground-consequent relationships that are conceptual and insightful not blind.
Before accepting the emergence of the latter from the former or even the origin of the former by blind chance and mechanical necessity, there should be an actual observed demonstration. Which, I am highly confident, there has never been nor is such in prospect.
KFkairosfocus
December 27, 2013
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KF,
RDF: On track record, I first serve you notice to be on civil and reasonable behaviour in this thread.
The reason I don't respond to you is not because I am uncivil or unreasonable. Rather, it is because you are unable or unwilling to make cogent arguments. Take a cue from gpuccio here who disagrees with me, but is clear and smart and argues in good faith. Merry Christmas!RDFish
December 27, 2013
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Hi gpuccio,
Thank you for your good arguments, which allow me to make some important clarifications.
And thank you!
a) I believe that you use the word “unconscious” in a very ambiguous way (not your fault, it is commonly used in a very ambiguous way). Now, I would suggest to differentiatebetween the word “subconscious”, which I would use for all the activities of the subconscious mind, and the term “non conscious”, which I would use for all the activities in the body (or more specifically in the nervous system) which are not represented at all to consciousness.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that some ("non conscious") reasoning occurs in the body (presumably in the brain, the rest of the CNS, the enteric nervous system, and so on), while other reasoning occurs not in the body, but only in the subconscious mind? If that's what you mean, can you say how you might actually decide when reasoning does not occur in the body?
I believe that all subconscious activities are represented, although only a small fraction of them is represented in what we usually call “the conscious mind”, which corresponds more or less to the main waking consciousness. Therefore, all representations are conscious eventa, some opf them in the “conscious mind”, most of them in the “subconscious mind”.
I don't understand this. First of all I wouldn't say that "activities" are represented; I think it is more clear to say that we have mental representations, and our mental activities (call these thoughts, reasoning, cognition, and so on) use these representations. For example, somehow I have a representation of the concept "dog" in my mind, and when I consciously think about my dog this representation is consciously in use. However, if I turn a corner and am suddenly faced with a vicious dog, I do not experience a conscious deliberation regarding what I'm faced with and what I ought to do; instead, I find myself reacting without conscious thought at all. Before I know it (as people tend to say) I find myself running away or protecting my face or whatever I might do in that situation, and those actions are indeed rational, but they are not consciously initiated.
Your distinction between non-conscious and subconscious, then, requires clarification: If something is subconscious, it does not present in conscious awareness; in other words it is not conscious.
b)That said, the fact remains that some bodily, and neural, activities may not be represented at all, not even in the subconscious mind. At the same time, the final results of those activities can be represented. In that sense, thye computational activity would not be a conscious representation, while its result is a conscious representation. Tha can be true, for instance, of some very basic reflexes.
I would make a distinction between a "very basic reflex" (e.g. a patellar reflex or a pupillary reflex), which does not involve perceptual analysis or the generation of a rational response) from other actions taken without conscious deliberation that do involve reasoning (such as my response to the dog).
Reasoning is always a conscious (or subconscious) representation. But it is possible that pre-programmed resonable algorithms may take place without any conscious representation at all. But that is not “reasoning”. In that case, our physical body is just working like a computer, but we are not representing its activities, although we may well represent their final outcome.
It is very hard to imagine how all of the complex rational behaviors we exhibit without conscious deliberation could be "pre-programmed", unless you think that "pre-programming" is actually tantamount to full-blown intelligence (which I know you do not agree with). How do you account for the fact that people can in various circumstances make complex plans, generate grammatical sentences, solve math and engineering problems, and do all sorts of other things without consciously being aware of their deliberation?
Don't misunderstand me: I do not believe that people reason the way computers reason. It is clear that we do not understand how people reason at all. Nor can we say that conscious awareness is entirely epiphenomenal or perceptual - but neither can we say that it is causal and necessary for particular types of mental abilities. I believe these questions are fascinating and currently unanswered, and may (or may not) yield to investigation in the future.
About the causal role of consciousness, I will very simply state that I need no philosophical resoning about causality for my model of ID, which is completely empirical.
I take this to mean, then, that your model of ID does not entail that the "design" you believe explains the existence of biological CSI necessarily involved conscious thought? If that is your position, then we might have very similar views.
Whenever a specific form is purposefully outputted to a material object, and that form comes from a conscious representation, that process is called “design”.
Well, it appears that your notion of "design" does indeed entail consciousness, which I think is an empirically unsupported assumption. When I talk in my sleep, I generate novel, grammatical, meaningful sentences without conscious awareness. These sentences are complex and functional - i.e. they contain CSI. They are not "pre-programmed" in the sense that I consciously thought them up and memorized them for reciting later. Rather, I designed them, but not consciously. (In fact, we are not conscious of the design process we use for generating sentences even when we're awake! Nobody understands how we do it.)
The object which has been shaped is called a “designed object” and the conscious agent who outputted the specific form to the object is called a “designer”. We call the whole process a “design process”.
I greatly appreciate your willingness to pin down these definitions. But by including the word "conscious", empirically speaking, it is impossible to know if any other designer could exist unless it possessed the particular neural systems that we know are required to support consciousness in human beings. Don't misunderstand me: I am not claiming that these physiological correlates of consciousness are sufficient to support consciousness! In other words, I am NOT arguing for materialism. Rather, I am pointing out that empirically speaking, the operation of these neural systems appear to be necessary for conscious thought. This doesn't prove the matter, of course, since there may be other sorts of conscious entities that do not require similar neural mechanisms. We just do not (yet) know what the actual necessary and sufficient conditions for conscious awareness are.
We do, however, have reason to believe that mental abilities (planning, problem solving, and so on) requires complex mechanism in order to store and manipulate information, which (as far as we know) invariably requires physical instantiation.
To apply that definition, we need no abstract model of causality. We simply need to assess that a conscious representation is the source of the form imposed to the material object. IOWs, an experience of meaning and purpose in the consciousness of an agent does precede and explain the form in the object.
You may have misunderstood my point about causality: I am saying that we are not empirically justified in saying that our conscious awareness causes (or is necessary to) our design abilities. When I am designing a program and I consciously decide to use a hash table to store information, it is possible that this decision was made independently of my consciousness, and I became conscious of this after the fact.
RDF: You are free to define “intelligence” however you’d like, but most definitions used in studies of human and animal cognition do not refer to consciousness.
GP: Their problem. I wouyld say: why am I not surprised? The general attempt at excluding consciousness from maps of reality is one of the sad consequences of reductionist scientism.
Well, I'm not a reduction scientismist, and don't wish to exclude it. I wish we understood more about consciousness, and I am fascinated and encouraged by the fact that consciousness research has undergone a resurgence. So I insist that we neither pretend that we know consciousness is epiphenomenal or not relevant, and I also insist that we don't pretend that we know consciousness is critical and causal. The fact is, nobody knows what consciousness per se is or what it does. We just experience it. This statement infuriates lots of people here (like KF and WJM), but it is a clear and obvious truth.
You can define intelligence as you like, but it is intelligence no more. There is no intelligence without consciousness, because intelligence is about cognition, and cognition is a conscious experience.
In that case, when I am working on a math problem that I cannot solve, and the answer comes to me (as people tend to say) when I'm thinking about something else entirely, or singing in the shower, how did that cognition take place? How do you know that consciousness is required for cognition when so much cognition demonstrably occurs without conscious awareness?
The concept of “meaning”, which is fundamental to any cognition, is just a conscious experience. You cannot define meaning without any reference to conscious experiences.
I'd like to see how far we can get without complicating it further by talking about meaning (the so-called problem of intentionality), which I also think is an unsolved philosophical problem.
Of course, intelligent concepts can be “frozen” into algorithms for computational purposes, but that is not intelligence at all, only an intelligent output of conscious intelligence. A computer does not understand meaning. For it, all bits are bits, indeed only physical states.
Let's say that the word "understanding" entails conscious awareness; using that definition we agree computers understand nothing. However, a very reasonable definition of "intelligence" might be "the ability to learn, reason, and solve novel problems", and under that particular definition, computers clearly can be intelligent.
RDF: Another thing most people do not realize is that simply defining intelligence as “The ability to generate complex, novel form and function (or ‘CSI’)” renders ID’s claims to be vacuous tautologies. (What is responsible for the CSI we observe in biology? Why, the ability to generate CSI of course!)
GP: Absolutely not! You have it all wrong here.
Intelligence is simply the ability of having conscious cognitions about meaning. One of the abilities of intelligence is to generate original CSI.
Ok, let's be very clear here. Your definition of "intelligence" includes conscious awareness. I agree that your defintion is meaningful, and ID's explanation invoking "intelligence" using your definition is not a vacuous tautology. I also believe, however, that ID has no empirical basis upon which to claim that the cause of biological CSI was conscious.
Human beings generate CSI, are conscious, and have complex brains. You choose to believe that anything which generates CSI must also be conscious, but not necessarily have a complex brain. Others choose to believe that CSI can be generated without a complex brain or consciousness. I, however, point out what I think is obvious: NOBODY KNOWS what is required to generate CSI. Perhaps consciousness is necessary, perhaps not. Perhaps complex physical information processing systems such as our brains are necessary, perhaps not. Anyone who says they know for sure is just mistaking an assumption for an empirical fact.
First of all, I have never been a fan of the idea that ““design” is the complement of chance/necessity”. I don’t believe that. I simply believe that design (the intervention of a conscious agent in outputting forms to objects) can generate dFSCI, while chance and necessity cannot.
And this is precisely where we disagree. What a pleasure it is to debate with somebody who can say what they mean, so we can pin down what we disagree about!
My view is that nobody knows if chance and necessity is sufficient to produce CSI (or dFSCI or whatever). Perhaps "necessity" - physical law - is much weirder than we think, and there is something about physics itself that accounts for the rise of complex form and function, but does not involve consciousness (as humans experience it). After all, physical law is much weirder than we can actually understand already.
Maybe our brains do account for all of our mental abilities (thought), and follow just the physical laws we already understand (like, say, Pat Churchland believes). Or maybe our brains account for thought but require exotic physics that we don't yet understand (like, say, Roger Penrose believes). Or maybe our brains are necessary for thought but not sufficient (like, say, David Chalmers believes). Or maybe our brains are not necessary for thought at all (like, say, Angus Menuge believes). Maybe consciousness is causal, or maybe epiphenomenal....
We just do not know. Nobody does. And that is the reason that ID is not an empirically-based claim. You don't have the empirical science to substantiate your belief that design requires consciousness. And without that, your claim that design accounts for biological CSI becomes vacuous.
Cheers,
RDFish/AIGuyRDFish
December 27, 2013
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RDFish:
You say:
For me the answer is: nobody knows. Rather than debate your idea that computers cannot generate certain classes of novel designs or plans, I would be happy to get your acknowledgement that the claims and assumptions of ID (that “design” is the complement of chance/necessity, for example) do indeed rest directly on the answer to this question.
First of all, I have never been a fan of the idea that "“design” is the complement of chance/necessity". I don't believe that. I simply believe that design (the intervention of a conscious agent in outputting forms to objects) can generate dFSCI, while chance and necessity cannot. My belief is not derived from any idea that design is a "complement" of something. I derive my conviction from the simple empirical fact that designed things exhibit (sometimes) dFSCI, while non designed things never do that. IOWs, dFSCI is a reliable tool to identify the output of design processes, with 100% specificity (and low sensitivity).gpuccio
December 27, 2013
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RDFish:
You say:
Another thing most people do not realize is that simply defining intelligence as “The ability to generate complex, novel form and function (or ‘CSI’)” renders ID’s claims to be vacuous tautologies. (What is responsible for the CSI we observe in biology? Why, the ability to generate CSI of course!)
Absolutely not! You have it all wrong here.
Intelligence is simply the ability of having conscious cognitions about meaning. One of the abilities of intelligence is to generate original CSI.
The ID theory is not what you say. It is completely empirical, and it is more or less as follows:
a) We define design. (See previous post). Please note that the definition of design, and its direct recognition, have nothing at all to do with CSI or its subsets, like dFSCI. I see a child drawing a geometric form, and the child tells me that this is his home. I have enough information to recognize that the drawing is a designed object (a conscious representation in the child is the source of the form on the paper). CSI or dFSCI have nothing to do with that. The designed origin is ascertained directly, without any inference from the properties of the designed object.
b) We observe that designed objects (in the above sense) have sometimes a special property, CSI or dFSCI.
c) We observe that no non designed object in our known universe has that property.
d) There is only one category of objects (biological objects) where we can observe tons of dFSCI. The origin of those objects is not known directly. The prevailing theory (neo darwinism) is not supported by any facts. For those objects, we can infer design as the best explanation.
More in next post.gpuccio
December 27, 2013
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RDFish:
You say:
THANK YOU, gpuccio, for pointing this out. I have spent hundreds of hours on these forums trying to convince people that mentalistic terms are ill-defined, and people endlessly talk passed each other because nobody will even attempt to provide rigorous definitions for these terms.
You're welcome :)
And:
I think you’ve even understated the case, but THANK YOU again for pointing this out.
Again, you're welcome :) :)
And:
You are free to define “intelligence” however you’d like, but most definitions used in studies of human and animal cognition do not refer to consciousness.
Their problem. I wouyld say: why am I not surprised? The general attempt at excluding consciousness from maps of reality is one of the sad consequences of reductionist scientism.
You say:
Intelligence can be defined behaviorially, as a catalogue of mental abilities (the ability to learn, solve novel problems, use language, and so on) or it can be defined functionally, by specifying the methods by which an intelligent entity accomplishes these mental tasks (by particular sorts of deterministic or stochastic algorithms, by unconscious reasoning, by conscious reasoning, by the action of immaterial res cogitans, and so on. And as I point out below, these methods may or may not be mutually exclusive).
You can define intelligence as you like, but it is intelligence no more. There is no intelligence without consciousness, because intelligence is about cognition, and cognition is a conscious experience. The concept of "meaning", which is fundamental to any cognition, is just a conscious experience. You cannot define meaning without any reference to conscious experiences.
Of course, intelligent concepts can be "frozen" into algorithms for computational purposes, but that is not intelligence at all, only an intelligent output of conscious intelligence. A computer does not understand meaning. For it, all bits are bits, indeed only physical states.
More in next post.gpuccio
December 27, 2013
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RDFish:
You say:
We know that we have conscious perceptions (of some things and not other things), and we know that we consciously apprehend our own thoughts – our selves. What nobody knows is what causal role (if any) consciousness plays in determining our behavior. People who are not familiar with philosophy of mind, and with experiments in cognitive science (by Wegner, Libet, and others), often refuse to entertain the possibility that by the time we become conscious of our decisions, they have already been made, but it is clear that the causality of consciousness is an open question.
I will not go into detail about the problem of "decisions". I am ready to accept that many of those that are usually considered "decisions" take place in the subconscious mind, and are then rationalized as conscious choices. My personal model of free will is much more subtle, and it includes the whole of our consciousness, at all levels, and it critically depends on our "attunement" with a "moral background" which is known by us through intuition. Many of our "free decisions" are therefore very different from what we usually consider "free decisions". The main free will, IMO, is in how we react, in our consciousness, to what happens to us.
About the causal role of consciousness, I will very simply state that I need no philosophical resoning about causality for my model of ID, which is completely empirical.
What I need is simply my definition of design, which is simple and can be easily applied to empirical contexts.
My definition of design is as follows:
Whenever a specific form is purposefully outputted to a material object, and that form comes from a conscious representation, that process is called "design". The object which has been shaped is called a "designed object" and the conscious agent who outputted the specific form to the object is called a "designer". We call the whole process a "design process".
To apply that definition, we need no abstract model of causality. We simply need to assess that a conscious representation is the source of the form imposed to the material object. IOWs, an experience of meaning and purpose in the consciousness of an agent does precede and explain the form in the object.
More in next post.gpuccio
December 27, 2013
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RDFish:
Thank you for your good arguments, which allow me to make some important clarifications.
You say:
Whether or not consciousness is “primary” (not sure what that means, really), it’s clear that unconscious representations do exist. We react unconsciously to many complex stimuli in ways that require reasoning, and since reasoning requires representation, this shows we need not be conscious of our mental representations in order to utilize them in reasoning.
I don't agree with you. For two important reasons:
a) I believe that you use the word "unconscious" in a very ambiguous way (not your fault, it is commonly used in a very ambiguous way). Now, I would suggest to differentiatebetween the word "subconscious", which I would use for all the activities of the subconscious mind, and the term "non conscious", which I would use for all the activities in the body (or more specifically in the nervous system) which are not represented at all to consciousness. I believe that all subconscious activities are represented, although only a small fraction of them is represented in what we usually call "the conscious mind", which corresponds more or less to the main waking consciousness. Therefore, all representations are conscious eventa, some opf them in the "conscious mind", most of them in the "subconscious mind".
b)That said, the fact remains that some bodily, and neural, activities may not be represented at all, not even in the subconscious mind. At the same time, the final results of those activities can be represented. In that sense, thye computational activity would not be a conscious representation, while its result is a conscious representation. Tha can be true, for instance, of some very basic reflexes.
Reasoning is always a conscious (or subconscious) representation. But it is possible that pre-programmed resonable algorithms may take place without any conscious representation at all. But that is not "reasoning". In that case, our physical body is just working like a computer, but we are not representing its activities, although we may well represent their final outcome.
More in next post.gpuccio
December 27, 2013
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RDF:
What nobody knows is what causal role (if any) consciousness plays in determining our behavior. People who are not familiar with philosophy of mind, and with experiments in cognitive science (by Wegner, Libet, and others), often refuse to entertain the possibility that by the time we become conscious of our decisions, they have already been made, but it is clear that the causality of consciousness is an open question.
Not quite.
What we first and foremost, easily know is this, as WJM has aptly put it:
If you do not [acknowledge] the law of non-contradiction, you have nothing to argue about. If you do not [admit] the principles of sound reason, you have nothing to argue with. If you do not [recognise] libertarian free will, you have no one to argue against. If you do not [accept] morality to be an objective commodity, you have no reason to argue in the first place.
The attempted reduction of conscious mind to computation runs straight into the problem of GIGO limits, multiplied by that of trying to write software out of non-foresighted noise [aka chance variations] incrementally culled by subtracting out less successful varieties, with credible upper coordinated mutation limits being about 6 - 7 bases at a time, with the pop genetics challenges that implies leading to impossibly long times to generate a human with linguistically based reasoning ability from some chimp like ancestral animal. The jumped up ape thesis is highly dubious as an explanation of mind, and runs into the self referential incoherence problems as highlighted in the OP.
Going further, this is somewhat tangential.
The root issue is that -- as cited in the OP -- MF has revealed that there is a controlling a priori that deadlocks discussion. namely the attempt to reduce or assert reduction of design by intelligence to blind chance and mechanical necessity. The FSCO/I limit of 500 - 1,000 bits then becomes decisive and decisive against.
This is multiplied by the incoherence as was also pointed out.
Going on:
You are free to define “intelligence” however you’d like, but most definitions used in studies of human and animal cognition do not refer to consciousness.
So what?
Sez who?
On what basis ought we to accept their asserted authority in the teeth of self evident truths that consciousness is an undeniable reality and that in our experience thereof, we have no good reason to deny any major faculty of mind as generally suspect or delusional? (For if we do, there are no firewalls in the mind, and we face an infinite regress of Plato's caves, reducing to absurdity. better to lock out the "worm" or "virus" before hand than to let it in.)
We know from the inside that we are conscious, reasoning knowing, deciding, morally governed intelligent creatures. Whether or no the definitions that are knocked about make explicit reference tot he fact, that is the fact to be explained. Where GIGO-limited computation is no explanation for coherent, logical, reliable reasoning ability.
And of course the hard problem of consciousness remains there, unmoved by assertions, assumptions and materialist just so stories.
Fundamentally, computation, a physical causal process not materially different from Leibnitz's mill wheels grinding against one another, is a blind mechanism, hence GIGO. Intelligence, conscious intelligence is NOT blind and the ground-consequentr relationship is simply not to be equated to cause-effect ones.
This leads to the sort of self referentially incoherent implications of evolutionary materialism as announced.
And that is before we get tot he point that we live in a contingent cosmos that is fine tuned for the sort of cell based C-chemistry aqueous medium life we enjoy. That points beyond itself to a necessary, minded, awesomely powerful and immaterial being as its best explanation.
So, we have good reason to see mind as prior to matter, and as constituting matter.
On embodied minds, I simply point to the Smith two tier controller model, that posits an in the loop I/O processor intimately coupled to a supervisory controller. I note Smith is a researcher in the field.
Quantum level interfaces of influence can be suggested as a mechanism by which an immaterial mind could affect a material brain-body loop, if that is what one wishes to debate. I suspect thought hat there is merit in not locking oneself down to so-called Cartesian Dualism. That is, there are options out there, starting with hylemorphic dualism. And yes we are also in the province of issues in metaphysics, there is an inevitable intersection.
I say, we start form fact no 1, our experience of ourselves as conscious, minded intelligences who routinely do things a cosmos full of blind chance and necessity across its thermodynamic lifespan cannot plausibly do, especially generate FSCO/I such as in your post.
Then, it is reasonable to keep mind on the table, by not allowing ideologically imposed a priori materialism to question-beggingly lock it out. And if there are institutions dominated by such ideologues wearing lab coats that want to insist on such lockouts as we see in the cited clip, all that tells us is how deep and how extensive the rot is.
Time for a fresh beginning.
High time.
KFkairosfocus
December 27, 2013
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RDF: On track record, I first serve you notice to be on civil and reasonable behaviour in this thread. KFkairosfocus
December 26, 2013
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MF:
In the OP and onward links the incoherence of evolutionary materialism is not merely "assumed," it is SHOWN. Shown from several directions in fact.
Let me clip the simplest, shortest, from J B S Haldane:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]
This is but one problem, where a rock has no dreams and computations built on what comes from rock are GIGO limited, so they are not self-explanatory -- apart from the problem of writing themselves out of noise. As you will recall from the problems with versions of the Pentium chip that led to recalls, a hardware, firmware or software bug is always a possibility with computation.
Multiply that by the problem that such devices and software are relevant examples of FSCO/I, which on solid empirical and needle in haystack analytical grounds has but one explanation, design, in a context that FSCO/I beyond 500 - 1,000 bits exceeds the reasonable blind search capacity of the solar system or the observed cosmos, through chance and necessity.
And we have not even begun to bridge from computation to consciousness and rationality and knowledge yet.
The ground-consequent relation is a logical one as TGP points out echoing C S Lewis and many others. Such is not in any way inevitably connected to the physical cause-effect one that drives mere computation. Otherwise GIGO would not be a significant challenge in design and development of computational devices, their firmware and their software.
What is to be grounded is conscious designing mind, and in light of GIGO a material substrate . . . even granting for argument "emergence" . . . simply does not account for it.
The reductionist attempt fails, and it fails again because of the incoherence as pointed out by Haldane and so many others.
To have any right to the reductionist assertions you have made, you need to first answer the bridge from computation to consciousness [a notoriously hard and unanswered problem] and you need to answer the incoherence of evolutionary materialism. beyond, you have to face the implications of our being under moral government and our living in a contingent fine tuned cosmos, entailing a necessary, awesomely powerful and immaterial mind as the best explanation.
KFkairosfocus
December 26, 2013
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Hi gpuccio, (@26)
a) Consciousness is primary. That is the main point. Consciousness means that subjective experiences and representations exist. All we know, we know through subjective representations.
Whether or not consciousness is "primary" (not sure what that means, really), it's clear that unconscious representations do exist. We react unconsciously to many complex stimuli in ways that require reasoning, and since reasoning requires representation, this shows we need not be conscious of our mental representations in order to utilize them in reasoning.
The fundamentals of human experience, cognition, meaning, purpose and feeling, are all subjective experiences, and cannot even be defined objectively, least of all explained. For all those experiences to exist, a “subject”, an “I”, which represents and perceives is necessary.
We know that we have conscious perceptions (of some things and not other things), and we know that we consciously apprehend our own thoughts - our selves. What nobody knows is what causal role (if any) consciousness plays in determining our behavior. People who are not familiar with philosophy of mind, and with experiments in cognitive science (by Wegner, Libet, and others), often refuse to entertain the possibility that by the time we become conscious of our decisions, they have already been made, but it is clear that the causality of consciousness is an open question.
b) “Mind” can mean many things. The word can be referred both to consciousness and to some of its contents.
THANK YOU, gpuccio, for pointing this out. I have spent hundreds of hours on these forums trying to convince people that mentalistic terms are ill-defined, and people endlessly talk passed each other because nobody will even attempt to provide rigorous definitions for these terms.
c) “Intelligence” is not well defined, too.
I think you've even understated the case, but THANK YOU again for pointing this out.
But I think we can agree that it usually describes some particular functions in conscious experiences, especially those which are linked to cognition and meaning.
You are free to define "intelligence" however you'd like, but most definitions used in studies of human and animal cognition do not refer to consciousness.
Intelligence can be defined behaviorially, as a catalogue of mental abilities (the ability to learn, solve novel problems, use language, and so on) or it can be defined functionally, by specifying the methods by which an intelligent entity accomplishes these mental tasks (by particular sorts of deterministic or stochastic algorithms, by unconscious reasoning, by conscious reasoning, by the action of immaterial res cogitans, and so on. And as I point out below, these methods may or may not be mutually exclusive).
Another thing most people do not realize is that simply defining intelligence as "The ability to generate complex, novel form and function (or 'CSI')" renders ID's claims to be vacuous tautologies. (What is responsible for the CSI we observe in biology? Why, the ability to generate CSI of course!)
The real problem is: can non conscious algorithmic processes generate all the outputs of a conscious intelligence?
Yes, I agree, this is pretty much The Central Problem! In fact, this problem is utterly central to the entire project of Intelligent Design Theory!
For me, the answer is: definitely not. And I have evidence of that. There is at least one kind of output that non conscious algorithmic processes cannot generate: new, original dFSCI.
For me the answer is: nobody knows. Rather than debate your idea that computers cannot generate certain classes of novel designs or plans, I would be happy to get your acknowledgement that the claims and assumptions of ID (that "design" is the complement of chance/necessity, for example) do indeed rest directly on the answer to this question.
Cheers,
RDFish/AIGuyRDFish
December 26, 2013
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I am afraid the demands of real life mean I don't have time to answer all these comments properly. So I will pick up on Box's two key sentences:
Why is that consistent? Do you assume that the immaterial is also subjugated by natural law?
I don't assume it - but I don't assume not either. Why shouldn't the immaterial (if it exists) be subject to natural laws - (possibly not yet discovered)?Mark Frank
December 26, 2013
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MF @ 19. It seems to me that what you cannot possibly explain is that brain chemistry follows physical laws but thought follows the laws of logic and the particular language being used to think. IN PRINCIPLE, it is impossible for you to explain any particular arrangement of symbols that encode meaning by reference to physical laws. The key word in that last sentence is encode. The information is encoded in the physical substrate but it is not the physical substrate. The physical substrate is explained by physical laws but the fact that the symbols are arranged as they are or that they mean anything is simply not the domain of physics. Information is in the domain of mind. That is to say, free will and intentionality, both of which are required for the use of language in generating thoughts/information.
The big issue in biology, from a non-biologist mind you, is that some, many, most? biologists think they can reduce biology to chemistry and physics. But biology is all about information and information reduces to mind, not physics. Anyway, not that this will change anyone's mind or even that it is additional light but I would be interested to hear how it is that you think physics explains, i.e. "causes" information.tgpeeler
December 26, 2013
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Mark:
There is a difference between:
1) Intelligence is a blend of the determined and random
2) Mind is something immaterial
It is perfectly consistent to believe both (as it happens I believe 1 and not 2). Objections on the lines of “consciousness is primary” are not relevant to 1.
Yes and no. Just some thoughts:
a) Consciousness is primary. That is the main point. Consciousness means that subjective experiences and representations exist. All we know, we know through subjective representations. The fundamentals of human experience, cognition, meaning, purpose and feeling, are all subjective experiences, and cannot even be defined objectively, least of all explained. For all those experiences to exist, a "subject", an "I", which represents and perceives is necessary.
b) "Mind" can mean many things. The word can be referred both to consciousness and to some of its contents.
c) "Intelligence" is not well defined, too. But I think we can agree that it usually describes some particular functions in conscious experiences, especially those which are linked to cognition and meaning. In that sense, intelligence is an aspect of the mind. This is important, because it implies both algorithmic (or random) computations and processes, and conscious representations of meaning and purpose. So, if defined in that sense, intelligence implies consciousness, but it can also imply algorithmic processes that, in themselves, could also be not conscious.
The real problem is: can non conscious algorithmic processes generate all the outputs of a conscious intelligence? For me, the answer is: definitely not. And I have evidence of that. There is at least one kind of output that non conscious algorithmic processes cannot generate: new, original dFSCI.
You will not agree, and we have been there many times. The fact remains that all that we can observe and all reasonable arguments in no way support the emergence of new dFSCI from non conscious algorithmic processes. On the contrary, new and original dFSCI is generates in tons everyday by human agents, through the process of design, where conscious representations output form and purpose to external objects.
The only reasonable explanation for that is that conscious representations, and in particular the experience of meaning and purpose, are essential to generate new dFSCI.
So, to sum up my points:
1) Intelligence is a function which absolutely needs conscious representations, and the experience of meaning and purpose, even if it certainly can use algorithmic processes in its representations and activities.
2) Consciousness cannot be explained in objective terms (which is not exactly the same as saying that it is immaterial, and is a much more empirical statement).
3) Therefore, consciousness is primary to intelligence. Intelligence cannot exist without consciousness. Algorithmic processes are only "frozen intelligence". They can reproduce some aspects of the intelligent process, but not all, because they are not conscious.gpuccio
December 26, 2013
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ayearningforpublius:
Good to hear from you.
Take heart and be of good cheer.
(It helps that I occasionally get unsolicited statements of support and affirmation in my email inbox from some of those onlookers I speak of, I hope you do the same.)
KF
PS: I reiterate my standing offer to host as UD headlined posts thoughtful articles by those looking on, and if you are a darwinist and want to make a more satisfactory stab at the darwinism support essay challenge here than I in the end promoted to headlined status and used [cf. here], that goes double. If you don't want to use a name or a web handle, I am perfectly willing to attribute good old Contributor X, or even X1, X2, . . . Xn.kairosfocus
December 26, 2013
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WJM, I have clipped your typical dialogue here, and added it to the original post for this thread. You ought to separately promote it to a full post! (Fair warning, if you don't within the next 24 hours, I will.) KFkairosfocus
December 26, 2013
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Hey Box,
Don't over think this.
It's possible to believe that everything is pre-determined yet to also hold that mind is a real thing. That is the position of Calvinists.
The Explainatory filter is simply looking at physical chance and physical necessity verses design.
A Calvinist would hold that the design mode of the filter is completely constrained but just that it's not constrained physically.
A completely deterministic robot could in theory produce artifacts that would make it through the filter if those artifacts were not reducible to (physical) chance and (physical)necessity.
That is the beauty of the filter it does not make metaphysical claims it only looks at what we can perceive and makes explicit the sort of categorizing we do everyday.
On the other hand the self defeating aspect of MF's position is not the determinism it's the inferred denial that his mind is a real thing. Materialism is the issue here not determinism
That is as least how I see it.
peacefifthmonarchyman
December 26, 2013
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F/N: Wiki on GIGO:
Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) in the field of computer science or information and communications technology refers to the fact that computers will unquestioningly process unintended, even nonsensical, input data ("garbage in") and produce undesired, often nonsensical, output ("garbage out").
That is computing hardware and software are both critically dependent on sound design to function.
Where, notoriously, the development of such entities is a major and challenging design task, as I can fervently testify from experience on both sides of the hard/soft partition.
KFkairosfocus
December 26, 2013
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Box: very well summarised. KFkairosfocus
December 26, 2013
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MF:
Thanks for your comment.
However, merely asserting the difference does not answer the problem as outlined.
Surely you are aware that a rock has no dreams, and so also GIGO-limited computation based on complex functionally specific organisation of elements is not equal to self-aware, conscious reasoned thought and credible knowledge. The origin of that latter mind is what is to be accounted for and as the OP outlines, that is a serious and in fact intractable problem for evolutionary materialism.
When the mind is effectively reduced to or grounded in cause-effect chains in neural circuits, the problem of transforming computation into consciousness jumps out. The further problem of accounting for the credibility of mind jumps out. And int eh background lurks the problem of accounting for FSCO/I on blind chance and mechanical necessity. As Haldane and many others have summarised, this then leads to self referential incoherence.
Further to this, you have still not eliminated design, an inherently pruposeful and creative exercise of mind that easily surmounts the 500 - 1,000 bit FSCO/I threshold for the capacity of blind chance and mechanical necessity [remember here set by treating every atom in the solar system or the cosmos as an observer making observations every 10^-14 s, the fastest rate of chemical rxns . . . you can set up a string of 500 or 1,000 fair coins as the model item to see the scope of the required config space to be scanned to catch target zones with FSCO/I . . . ], one that is as common as the posts in this thread including your own.
So, the issue in the OP stands unmet, doubly so:
(i) mere assertions notwithstanding, you have not cogently answered to the self referential incoherence of evolutionary materialism, and
(ii) you have not accounted for how blind chance and mechanical necessity can successfully eliminate design as a fundamental causal factor.
KF
PS: Note as well, the issue in the OP is not, mind is immaterial, but that effective mind (of whatever nature) does not credibly emerge from the material without intelligent direction, and that the characteristic products of mind, thought, reason purpose and design cannot credibly be accounted for on blind chance and mechanical necessity under evolutionary materialism, which is self-refuting, thus the imposition of this as an a priori reduction of intelligence and design to chance and necessityis a deadlocking begging of the question.kairosfocus
December 26, 2013
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MF #19: There is a difference between:
1) Intelligence is a blend of the determined and random
2) Mind is something immaterial
A huge difference indeed, if “determined” is understood in the usual way; i.e. matter and energy determined by natural law.
MF #19: It is perfectly consistent to believe both
Why is that consistent? Do you assume that the immaterial is also subjugated by natural law?
MF #19: (as it happens I believe 1 and not 2).
We know.
MF #19: Objections on the lines of “consciousness is primary” are not relevant to 1.
Yes they are.
1. Consciousness is primary to matter (external observations).
2. Consciousness presents itself as immaterial.
3. There is no materialistic theory that accommodates consciousness and its properties.
4. Consciousness is about downward causation while the matter is about upward causation.Box
December 26, 2013
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It is not every day that an OP is about me!
There is a difference between:
1) Intelligence is a blend of the determined and random
2) Mind is something immaterial
It is perfectly consistent to believe both (as it happens I believe 1 and not 2). Objections on the lines of "consciousness is primary" are not relevant to 1.Mark Frank
December 26, 2013
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Folks:
A Merry Christmas to one and all, not too much of turkey and pudding or the bottled spirits of cheer!
I think this thread responding to MF's key admission is pivotal -- it's not just a "suspect" deduction or "quote mining" by those notoriously accused of being "ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked" by Dr Dawkins and ilk any more.
Beyond this point, all exchanges and debates here at UD must be informed by this understanding that we are dealing with issues of ideological a prioris that lead objectors to the design inference to even conceive that intelligence and design do not exist in their own right. So, of course it is impossible to detect that which per the a prioris must not exist.
Let's go back to the Galilean principle that ideas relevant to our empirical world should be subject to empirical test. That way, we can at least avoid begging questions.
And, at philosophical level, let us at least be willing to accept that here are alternative serious worldviews that can be compared on comparative difficulties across factual adequacy, coherence and explanatory elegance and power (neither simplistic nor an ad hoc patchwork).
Anyway, a happy Christmas to all.
KFkairosfocus
December 24, 2013
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In order to understand the atheist we just have to reach inside ourselves. Whenever we doubt our beliefs it is our "inner atheist" who is the cause.
Mine is a sociopathic nihilist, beyond fear of death, who preys upon my deepest and dearest longings. A kindred spirit to Susan Blackmore who's sole purpose in life, after she became a 'sceptic', seems to be to bereave people of their vulnerable believe in life after death.
I've chosen to fight the devils inside me. Alternatively one can embrace them - like Susan and her ilk do.
This reminds me of a line I once read, I forgot the name of the author:
"Father are there devils inside me? Yes my son, they are tremendous and abundant"
>> Merry Christmas to all! <<Box
December 24, 2013
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Quoth the materialist:
. . . intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random . . .
And thus every individual who acknowledges intelligence as a real, separate phenomenon need never again be intimidated by the materialist 'logic' or for holding a contrary viewpoint.
It is this kind of stuff that makes it possible to be an intellectually-fulfilled non-materialist. :)Eric Anderson
