It is almost — almost — amusing but then quite sad to see how objectors to design theory play with logic and worldviews issues, then run away when the substantial issues are taken up.
Let me clip from the FFT, AJ vs Charles thread to pick up these matters, but to avoid making this utterly too long, let me point here on for the underlying questions of worldviews, first plausibles and self-evident plumb-line truths such as the first principles of right reason.
While we are at it, let us observe from the diagram on the right, how worldviews issues influence everything we do as a civilisation, and how the issue arises, on whether business as usual is a march of folly and needs to be turned from to move to a more sustainable, more sound alternative.
In our day, it is pretty clear that evolutionary materialistic scientism and its fellow travellers rule the roost, but that such is inescapably incoherent, self-refuting, self-falsifying and amoral, opening the door to ruthless nihilist factionalism.
So, it is a service not only to the ID community but the civilisation to say what is not politically corrupt today, the unmentionable fact that A is A.
So, now, let us proceed by clipping some posts in the relevant thread:
FFT5: The implications of the familiar extraordinary.
In this thread, there are arguments [posted] that . . . as an observable phenomenon . . . show that we are capable of significant choice and reasoning, i.e. we are responsibly, rationally, significantly free, conscious, en-conscienced, morally governed, communicating creatures. (Indeed, those trying to object are operating on the implicit premise that we are urged by conscience toward the truth and the right; and if we were not, this world would descend into a dark, chaotic ruin in short order. It is a good thing that something urges us on to the truth and the right.)
Locke, in Sec 5 of his essay on human understanding (and yes, I add scriptural references i/l/o his cites and allusions), aptly comments:
Men have reason to be well satisfied with what God hath thought fit for them, since he hath given them (as St. Peter says [NB: i.e. 2 Pet 1:2 – 4]) pana pros zoen kaieusebeian, whatsoever is necessary for the conveniences of life and information of virtue; and has put within the reach of their discovery, the comfortable provision for this life, and the way that leads to a better. How short soever their knowledge may come of an universal or perfect comprehension of whatsoever is, it yet secures their great concernments [Prov 1: 1 – 7], that they have light enough to lead them to the knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own duties [cf Rom 1 – 2 & 13, Ac 17, Jn 3:19 – 21, Eph 4:17 – 24, Isaiah 5:18 & 20 – 21, Jer. 2:13, Titus 2:11 – 14 etc, etc]. Men may find matter sufficient to busy their heads, and employ their hands with variety, delight, and satisfaction, if they will not boldly quarrel with their own constitution, and throw away the blessings their hands are filled with, because they are not big enough to grasp everything . . . It will be no excuse to an idle and untoward servant [Matt 24:42 – 51], who would not attend his business by candle light, to plead that he had not broad sunshine. The Candle that is set up in us [Prov 20:27] shines bright enough for all our purposes . . . If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do muchwhat as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly. [Text references added to document the sources of Locke’s allusions and citations.]
All of that is in the context of rebuking a lazy, sneeringly supercilious selective hyperskepticism that will scorn more than adequate warrant for ethical theism, because it shuns the premise of moral government: accountability on plainly recognisable duty, before our Maker, Lord, Governor and utterly just Judge.
But, that is a bit quick off the mark.
Let’s start with computational substrates, whether mechanically or electrically analogue or digital or neural network. For instance a ball and disk integrator as was used in tide table machines or naval gunlaying computers is clearly a cause-effect, blindly mechanical system. If it has a fault or is badly programmed, it will err, and it cares not, it is just like Monadology’s Mill-Wheels grinding away blindly. Leibniz:
[P]erception, and that which depends upon it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions. Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain perception.
There is no recognition of meaning, no perception, no purpose, just blind cause-effect chains externally arranged to yield the solution to certain differential equations. GIGO, and all that. Likewise, the old Pentium chip neither knew nor understood nor cared about the wired in errors that led to the early recall. And, a neural network is not in principle any different. (BTW this points to serious design inferences on the relevant hardware and software in bio-cybernetics systems, but that is a secondary point.)
The primary point has been highlighted by Reppert:
. . . 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 [C S] 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.
In short, a physicalist account of mindedness (much less, guidance by light of conscience) faces an ugly, impassable gulch.
In effect, rocks — even refined and carefully organised rocks — have no dreams; computation is not intentional contemplation.
At this point, evolutionary materialism and its fellow travellers — and nope you cannot properly, conveniently open up rhetorical daylight between some vague agnosticism and full-blown evo mat to deflect this — face an impassable gulch.
One, that brings out what was already highlighted: mindedness, consciousness, reasoned inference and conscience’s compass-pointing alike are all reduced to grand delusion on evo mat premises.
Grand delusion would collapse responsible, rational freedom and so falls into irretrievable incoherence and absurdity. Thence, the necessary falsity Pearcey and others have pointed to.
But in reality, rational, responsible, conscience-compass bearing consciousness is our first undeniable empirical fact. The fact through which we perceive all others.
This is the familiar extraordinary phenomenon, the pivot on which the project of building a sound worldview turns. In effect, unless a worldview is compatible with our being responsible, reasonable, conscience-guided and significantly free beings, it cannot even sit to the table for a discussion of comparative difficulties. It is silenced by being inconsistent with rationality. It is patently, irretrievably absurd and necessarily false. (Evo mat and fellow traveller ideologies, I am looking straight at you.)>>
So, we have to first face mindedness and the limitations of computational substrates.
FFT6A: Last evening, in FFT5, we looked at the familiar extraordinary; it is almost amusing to see how this has been almost studiously pushed aside. One hopes that the latest focus for hyperskeptical dismissiveness, heptades, will now settle down.
At this point, we have to deal with a key conclusion in 153:
. . . a physicalist account of mindedness (much less, guidance by light of conscience) faces an ugly, impassable gulch.
In effect, rocks — even refined and carefully organised rocks — have no dreams; computation is not intentional contemplation.
At this point, evolutionary materialism and its fellow travellers — and nope you cannot properly, conveniently open up rhetorical daylight between some vague agnosticism and full-blown evo mat to deflect this — face an impassable gulch.
One, that brings out what was already highlighted: mindedness, consciousness, reasoned inference and conscience’s compass-pointing alike are all reduced to grand delusion on evo mat premises.
Grand delusion would collapse responsible, rational freedom and so falls into irretrievable incoherence and absurdity. Thence, the necessary falsity Pearcey and others have pointed to.
But in reality, rational, responsible, conscience-compass bearing consciousness is our first undeniable empirical fact. The fact through which we perceive all others.
This is the familiar extraordinary phenomenon, the pivot on which the project of building a sound worldview turns. In effect, unless a worldview is compatible with our being responsible, reasonable, conscience-guided and significantly free beings, it cannot even sit to the table for a discussion of comparative difficulties. It is silenced by being inconsistent with rationality. It is patently, irretrievably absurd and necessarily false. (Evo mat and fellow traveller ideologies, I am looking straight at you.)
What sort of world do we have to live in for there to be creatures like us?
That’s rather like a point R W Hamming made in addressing a thought exercise that counter-balances one of the mythical paradigm cases of empirical investigation, the dropping of a musket-ball and a cannon-ball from the famous leaning tower of Pisa. And yes, the very same News who so many hyperskeptics sneer at brought this to attention:
Let us next consider Galileo. Not too long ago I was trying to put myself in Galileo’s shoes, as it were, so that I might feel how he came to discover the law of falling bodies. I try to do this kind of thing so that I can learn to think like the masters did-I deliberately try to think as they might have done.
Well, Galileo was a well-educated man and a master of scholastic arguments. He well knew how to argue the number of angels on the head of a pin [–> which is actually about location vs extension], how to argue both sides of any question. He was trained in these arts far better than any of us these days. I picture him sitting one day with a light and a heavy ball, one in each hand, and tossing them gently. He says, hefting them, “It is obvious to anyone that heavy objects fall faster than light ones-and, anyway, Aristotle says so.” “But suppose,” he says to himself, having that kind of a mind, “that in falling the body broke into two pieces. Of course the two pieces would immediately slow down to their appropriate speeds. But suppose further that one piece happened to touch the other one. Would they now be one piece and both speed up? Suppose I tied the two pieces together. How tightly must I do it to make them one piece? A light string? A rope? Glue? When are two pieces one?”
The more he thought about it-and the more you think about it-the more unreasonable becomes the question of when two bodies are one. There is simply no reasonable answer to the question of how a body knows how heavy it is-if it is one piece, or two, or many. Since falling bodies do something, the only possible thing is that they all fall at the same speed-unless interfered with by other forces. There’s nothing else they can do. He may have later made some experiments, but I strongly suspect that something like what I imagined actually happened. I later found a similar story in a book by Polya [7. G. Polya, Mathematical Methods in Science, MAA, 1963, pp. 83-85.]. Galileo found his law not by experimenting but by simple, plain thinking, by scholastic reasoning.
I know that the textbooks often present the falling body law as an experimental observation; I am claiming that it is a logical law, a consequence of how we tend to think . . .
This ties back to the view that mathematics is substantially the logic of structure and quantity, which we may freely explore because we are responsibly and rationally significantly free.>>
Again: What sort of world do we have to live in for there to be creatures like us?
What sort of world do we have to live in for there to be creatures like us?
This surfaces a key issue, that two truths x and y must be such that we never have y = NOT-x; that is in a coherent world all true statements — those that accurately describe facets of reality — will be mutually compatible. I note this, fully recognising that for many, this is actually quite a difficult point today; as, various ideologies have led to a conflation of truth with perception or opinion. Hence, a conversation I had today that turned on the concept, “my truth.” Language decay is an old problem, and Orwell pointed out what could be done through new-speak and double-talk. How many are two plus two, Mr Smith?
My answer was and is, that we already have perfectly adequate words for opinions and perceptions; so, there is no need to corrupt the meaning of the precious or even vital word, truth. The truth — as Ari noted long ago in Metaphysics 1011b — says of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.
This in turn brings us to the question of being and non-being, of possible and impossible being, of contingent and necessary being. Thus, of causal roots of the world, of reality. And it points to the issue of possible worlds: comprehensive enough descriptions of how things could be or are.
Impossible beings such as a square circle cannot exist in any possible world. As, core characteristics stand in mutual contradiction and cannot hold of the same thing, X, under the same circumstances. Here, squarishness and circularity.
By contrast, possible beings could exist in at least one possible world. Contingent ones would not do so in all possible worlds but would exist in at least one. I think, in 100 years there will be unicorns, as biotech will be there and people will be willing to pay to have one. Just as we seem to be seeing ever more miniature sized horses already.
Necessary beings must exist in any possible world, as they are frameworking requisites of a world existing. For instance, two-ness or distinct identity (equivalent) must be there for a distinct world to be. This is non-trivial, as distinct identity has three immediate corollaries: Law of Identity, Law of Excluded Middle, Law of Non-Contradiction.
That is, core logic is built into any possible world; including of course the logic of structure and quantity, i.e. mathematical realities. (NB: We already see here, a key reason for the awesome power of Mathematics in our world and especially in scientific work. [So much for the sneer that this thread has little or no relevance to Science.])
Back to us, as being able to significantly freely discuss our concerns responsibly and rationally, and having an inner compass-sense that insistently points to the truth and the right — conscience.
What sort of world must this be to allow such. and what must be in its frameworking structure?
First, we already saw that the denial of responsible, rational, significant freedom lets grand delusion loose and instantly ends in absurdity. Self-evidently, this is a world in which responsibly rational and significantly free, morally governed creatures are possible and in fact actual.
That’s already a huge result and it sweeps away all worldviews — their name is legion — that are incompatible with such creatures. This of course includes evolutionary materialistic scientism, its fellow travellers, radical subjectivism and radical relativism. (Cf. the chain of comments here on, above.)
Next, we face the implication of the IS-OUGHT gap, on many levels. A world with moral government has to be such that OUGHT is well-rooted in the fabric and framework of reality. Post Hume et al and post Euthyphro et al, that can only be in the very root of reality, i.e. there must be a necessary being that so fuses IS-ness and OUGHT-ness, that they are inextricably entangled in the roots of reality.
What sort of being is capable of such?
The answer is utterly challenging, and I have long thought it is best posed in light of comparative difficulties and worldview level inference to the best candidate explanation.
We need to look at serious candidates (as opposed to something like a flying spaghetti monster, which will not be a necessary being — made up from bits and pieces, i.e. composite.)
There is just one serious candidate, after centuries of debate: the inherently good Creator God, a necessary and maximally great being, worthy of loyalty and the responsible, reasonable service of doing the good in accord with our evident nature (thus, the law of our nature).
This is not an arbitrary imposition, if you doubt, simply put up a viable alternative: ________ (this is after all comparative difficulties analysis).
Prediction: hard to do.
This also has a further highly relevant implication. For a serious candidate necessary being will either be impossible as a square circle is, or else it will be possible thus would exist in at least one world. And, as it would be a frameworking reality, it would be present in every possible world, including our own — an actual world. (And yes, I am not saying THE actual world.)
The God of ethical theism as described, is a serious candidate [e.g. NB’s have no beginning or end, are eternal]. This means that God is either impossible as a square circle is impossible, or he is actual. And decades ago, the problem of evils used to be trotted out to make that argument, but that option is effectively dead post-Plantinga and in fact post Boethius.
Then, too, if one claims to be an atheist or agnostic, s/he implies knowing good reason to doubt or dismiss the God of ethical theism as impossible even as a square circle is impossible. It would be interesting to hear what such a reason is: _______ (esp. post, problem of evils as a serious view as opposed to a handy piece of intimidatory rhetoric).
So, now, we are at a very important threshold, the God of ethical theism is on the table as a serious candidate necessary being, root of reality that grounds a world in which responsibly and rationally free creatures such as ourselves are possible and indeed actual.
That is a momentous turning-point, and it would be interesting to see if we will hear of the viable alternatives, including reasons why such a God is an impossible being.>>
Of course, these two blanks were never ever filled in cogently. So:
FFT6C: It is worth noting the unresponsiveness to 219 and 178 above, especially at the points where objectors were directly invited to put up alternatives.
We can take it to the bank that UD is obsessively monitored by denizens of a penumbra of hostile sites. Denizens, more than willing to pounce when they see opportunity.
In short, the above blanks left unanswered speak to yet another hovering ghost or three in the room.
Here, first, the point that there is no necessary appeal to design inferences and debates to build a case for ethical theism adequate to ground commitment to such.
Second, that the atheistical objectors and their fellow travellers have no cogent answer to the need for a necessary being root to reality, nor to the point that the God of ethical theism is a serious candidate to be such (by utter contrast with the cartoonish flying spaghetti monster etc), nor to the onward point that such a serious candidate will be either ontologically impossible [as a square circle is impossible] or else will be actual.
Third, they have no cogent answer to the significance of the point that just to have a real discussion, we must implicitly accept that we are responsible, reasonable, significantly free and intelligent beings under moral government. Not least, conscience is the compass within pointing to the truth, the right and our duties of care towards such. Undermining this dimension of conscious mindedness by implying it is delusional lets grand delusion loose in our minds, ending in shipwreck.
So, we can see that the evo mat scientism picture of the world falls apart, and that there is no need to go out of our way to accommodate it. It is self-referentially incoherent and so self-falsifying.
Nor, should we yield to the trend to corrupt the concept, truth. (That, too, is part of the benumbing and warping of conscience, as say Orwell brought out so forcefully in his 1984.)
The astute onlooker will also note that we have had a worldviews discussion, not one pivoting on parsing Bible texts. Though, I have noted that this analysis is compatible with at least one key summary argument in Scripture, one that points to this sort of analysis as valid on the whole if soundly done.
Let me clip:
Rom 1:18 For [God does not overlook sin and] the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who in their wickedness suppress and stifle the truth, 19 because that which is known about God is evident within them [in their inner consciousness], for God made it evident to them.
20 For ever since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through His workmanship [all His creation, the wonderful things that He has made], so that they [who fail to believe and trust in Him] are without excuse and without defense.
21 For even though [d]they knew God [as the Creator], they did not [e]honor Him as God or give thanks [for His wondrous creation]. On the contrary, they became worthless in their thinking [godless, with pointless reasonings, and silly speculations], and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory and majesty and excellence of the immortal God for [f]an image [worthless idols] in the shape of mortal man and birds and four-footed animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their own hearts to [sexual] impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them [abandoning them to the degrading power of sin], 25 because [by choice] they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen . . . .
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God or consider Him worth knowing [as their Creator], God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do things which are improper and repulsive, 29 until they were filled (permeated, saturated) with every kind of unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice and mean-spiritedness. They are gossips [spreading rumors], 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors [of new forms] of evil, disobedient and disrespectful to parents, 31 without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful [without pity]. [AMP]
The passage goes on to highlight how the warping of mind and conscience ends up in a topsy-turvy world that approves evil and by implication disapproves the good. That alludes subtly to another text, from the prophet Isaiah:
Isa 5:18 Woe (judgment is coming) to those who drag along wickedness with cords of falsehood,
And sin as if with cart ropes [towing their own punishment];
19 Who say, “Let Him move speedily, let Him expedite His work [His promised vengeance], so that we may see it;
And let the purpose of the Holy One of Israel approach
And come to pass, so that we may know it!”
20 Woe (judgment is coming) to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
21 Woe (judgment is coming) to those who are wise in their own eyes
And clever and shrewd in their own sight! [AMP]
This summary rings all too sadly true as we look out across the moral wasteland of our largely apostate civilisation that has so often deliberately turned its back on the truth and has refused to endure sound instruction. Instead, we have ever so often chosen to go out in the ways of cleverly constructed errors, leading many astray into ruin.
Given an onward exchange, I think I should note from Eta Linnemann on the undermining of theology:
Theology as it is taught in universities all over the world . . . is based on the historical-critical method . . . . [which] is not just the foundation for the exegetical disciplines. It also decides what the systematician can say . . . It determines procedure in Christian education, homiletics and ethics . . . . Research is conducted ut si Deus non daretur (“as if there were no God”). That means the reality of God is excluded from consideration from the start . . . Statements in Scripture regarding place, time, sequences of events and persons are accepted only insofar as they fit in with established assumptions and theories . . . .
Since other religions have their scriptures, one cannot assume the Bible is somehow unique and superior to them . . . . It is taken for granted that the words of the Bible and God’s word are not identical . . . the New Testament is pitted against the Old Testament, assuming that the God of the New Testament is different from that of the Old, since Jesus is said to have introduced a new concept of God . . . . Since the inspiration of Scripture is not accepted, neither can it be assumed that the individual books of Scripture complement each other. Using this procedure one finds in the Bible only a handful of unrelated literary creations . . . . Since the content of biblical writings is seen as merely the creation of theological writers, any given verse is nothing more than a non-binding, human theological utterance.
For historical-critical theology, critical reason decides what is reality in the Bible and what cannot be reality; and this decision is made on the basis of the everyday experience accessible to every person [i.e. the miraculous aspect of Scripture, and modern reports of miracles — regardless of claimed attestation — are dismissed as essentially impossible to verify and/or as merely “popular religious drivel”] . . . . . Due to the presuppositions that are adopted, critical reason loses sight of the fact that the Lord, our God, the Almighty, reigns. [Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology? (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1993), pp. 83 – 88 as excerpted.]
There is nothing in historical-critical theology that has not already made its appearance in philosophy. Bacon (1561 – 1626), Hobbes (1588 – 1679), Descartes (1596 – 1650), and Hume (1711 – 1776) laid the foundations: inductive thought as the only source of knowledge; denial of revelation; monistic worldview; separation of faith and reason; doubt as the foundation of knowledge. Hobbes and Hume established a thoroughgoing criticism of miracles; Spinoza (1632 – 1677) also helped lay the basis for biblical criticism of both Old and New Testaments. Lessing (1729 – 1781) invented the synoptic problem. Kant’s (1724 – 1804) critique of reason became the basic norm for historical-critical theology. Hegel (1770 – 1831) furnished the means for the process of demythologizing that Rudolph Bultmann (1884 – 1976) would effectively implement a century later – after the way had been prepared by Martin Kähler (1835 – 1912).
Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) . . . reduced faith to a leap that left rationality behind. He cemented the separation of faith and reason and laid the groundwork for theology’s departure from biblical moorings . . . . by writing such criticism off as benign . . . .
Heidegger (1889 – 1976) laid the groundwork for reducing Christian faith to a possibility of self-understanding; he also had considerable influence on Bultmann’s theology. From Karl Marx . . . came theology of hope, theology of revolution, theology of liberation. [Biblical Criticism on Trial (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2001), pp. 178 – 9.]
Another text has haunted me for months as I have pondered the path of our all too patently willfully perverse civilisation:
1 John 2:15 Do not love the world [of sin that opposes God and His precepts], nor the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world—the lust and sensual craving of the flesh and the lust and longing of the eyes and the boastful pride of life [pretentious confidence in one’s resources or in the stability of earthly things]—these do not come from the Father, but are from the world. 17 The world is passing away, and with it its lusts [the shameful pursuits and ungodly longings]; but the one who does the will of God and carries out His purposes lives forever.
18 Children, it is the last hour [the end of this age]; and just as you heard that the antichrist is coming [the one who will oppose Christ and attempt to replace Him], even now many antichrists (false teachers) have appeared, which confirms our belief that it is the last hour.
19 They went out from us [seeming at first to be Christians], but they were not really of us [because they were not truly born again and spiritually transformed]; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out [teaching false doctrine], so that it would be clearly shown that none of them are of us.
20 But you have an anointing from the Holy One [you have been set apart, specially gifted and prepared by the Holy Spirit], and all of you know [the truth because He teaches us, illuminates our minds, and guards us from error]. 21 I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it, and because no lie [nothing false, no deception] is of the truth.
22 Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed)?
This is the antichrist [the enemy and antagonist of Christ], the one who denies and consistently refuses to acknowledge the Father and the Son. 23 Whoever denies and repudiates the Son does not have the Father; the one who confesses and acknowledges the Son has the Father also.
24 As for you, let that remain in you [keeping in your hearts that message of salvation] which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning remains in you, you too will remain in the Son and in the Father [forever].
25 This is the promise which He Himself promised us—eternal life.
26 These things I have written to you with reference to those who are trying to deceive you [seducing you and leading you away from the truth and sound doctrine]. 27 As for you, the anointing [the special gift, the preparation] which you received from Him remains [permanently] in you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you. But just as His anointing teaches you [giving you insight through the presence of the Holy Spirit] about all things, and is true and is not a lie, and just as His anointing has taught you, [c]you must remain in Him [being rooted in Him, knit to Him]. [AMP]
In the end, that is the diagnosis, and the answer to the spirit of our age.>>
Now, why should we reject these diagnostic notes, given something like this from Plato 2350+ years past in The Laws, Bk X:
247, >>Plato, on the warping of the moral compass and where it leads a community i/l/o the collapse of Athens:
Ath [in The Laws, Bk X 2,350+ ya]. . . .[The avant garde philosophers and poets, c. 360 BC] say that fire and water, and earth and air [i.e the classical “material” elements of the cosmos], all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art . . . [such that] all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only [ –> that is, evolutionary materialism is ancient and would trace all things to blind chance and mechanical necessity] . . . .
[Thus, they hold] that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.-
[ –> Relativism, too, is not new; complete with its radical amorality rooted in a worldview that has no foundational IS that can ground OUGHT, leading to an effectively arbitrary foundation only for morality, ethics and law: accident of personal preference, the ebbs and flows of power politics, accidents of history and and the shifting sands of manipulated community opinion driven by “winds and waves of doctrine and the cunning craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming . . . ” cf a video on Plato’s parable of the cave; from the perspective of pondering who set up the manipulative shadow-shows, why.]
These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might,
[ –> Evolutionary materialism — having no IS that can properly ground OUGHT — leads to the promotion of amorality on which the only basis for “OUGHT” is seen to be might (and manipulation: might in “spin”) . . . ]
and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions [ –> Evolutionary materialism-motivated amorality “naturally” leads to continual contentions and power struggles influenced by that amorality at the hands of ruthless power hungry nihilistic agendas], these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is,to live in real dominion over others [ –> such amoral and/or nihilistic factions, if they gain power, “naturally” tend towards ruthless abuse and arbitrariness . . . they have not learned the habits nor accepted the principles of mutual respect, justice, fairness and keeping the civil peace of justice, so they will want to deceive, manipulate and crush — as the consistent history of radical revolutions over the past 250 years so plainly shows again and again], and not in legal subjection to them [–> nihilistic will to power not the spirit of justice and lawfulness].>>
But isn’t all this just an excuse to dress up right-wing fundy theocratic Christofascist totalitarianism in a cheap tuxedo?
Of Lemmings, marches of folly and cliffs of self-falsifying absurdity . . .
FFT7: But, isn’t the whole exercise of a pretended ID science an attempt to dress up dubious religion in scientific clothes, with intent to impose onward some sort of right-wing Christofascist theocratic tyranny that for instance robs women of their “rights” to their own bodies — and maybe would gaol them for even a miscarriage? Etc?
I am of course outlining a summary of trends of strawman caricature argument commonly encountered over the years.
A serious-minded glance above will rapidly demonstrate that the main discussion I have made so far under the FFT theme, has been PHILOSOPHICAL, not theological, first and foremost setting the worldviews comparative difficulties context for discussion. It is in that context that I then proceeded to show why evolutionary materialistic scientism and fellow travellers have been tried and found wanting as inherently incoherent, self-falsifying, necessarily false views. They cannot get us to a responsibly, rationally free, morally governed, warranting, knowing mind. So they fail the test of our being able to have a rationally guided discussion.
It will be quite evident above, that active objectors and those lurking from the penumbra of attack sites, have no real answer to this. That’s not new, I have seen that for years at UD and for decades elsewhere. Before me, the point traces back to the likes of Plantinga, C S Lewis and even leading evolutionary theorist J B S Haldane.
He aptly says:
“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.]
I invite the reasonable onlooker to scan above and see for himself, if there is a cogent answer forthcoming from the usual objectors or their backers across the Internet.
The truth will be evident, there is no non-incoherent evolutionary materialistic account of mindedness.
As for the associated amorality, radical relativism and reduction to nihilistic might and manipulation make ‘truth’ ‘right’ etc, that unanswered problem has been on record for 2350+ years, from Plato’s reflections i/l/o the collapse of Athens. If you want to see an example of the sort of misleadership that that toxic brew spews up, try Alcibiades as case study no. 1.
Resemblance to recent history is no coincidence, try out his parable of the mutinous ship of state.
Look above, to see if you can find a serious-minded grappling with such momentous issues and their implications. Try out the penumbra of attack sites. You will soon see why I have long been concerned about a civilisation-level march of ruinous folly that manipulates the public and democratic institutions only to lead us over the cliff. Luke’s real-world ship of state microcosm in Ac 27 should — should! — give us pause.
As one simple example I note that the right to life is the first, foremost, gateway right and so a civilisation that systematically dehumanises its posterity in the womb and warps medicine, nursing, pharmacy, law, law enforcement, government, education, media and more to promote and protect the holocaust of 800+ millions in 40+ years (and mounting up at a million per week now), is corrupting its soul through blood guilt, is utterly warping conscience to do so, and is wrecking the ability to even simply think straight and live by the truth and the right. It is setting itself up to be a plague upon the earth that morally taints the land, which will vomit us out.
If we do not repent of our bloody, soul-wrecking folly as a civilisation, we will ruin ourselves. And, whatever emerges from the bloody chaos and dark age to follow, will not see freedom as an important value, as liberty turned to libertinism and wicked, blood-guilty licence.
Yes, I am out and out saying we have become the enemies of sustainable liberty under just law that duly balances rights, freedoms and responsibilities.
If you want a personal motive, there it is. I come from a nation that wrecked its prospects for generations through irresponsible, wicked misleadership, agit prop, media shadow shows and blood shed. That includes a murdered auntie.
I know the hard way, that the lessons of sound history wee bought with blood and tears. Those who refuse to heed them doom themselves to pay the same coin over and over again in their futile folly.
(I have said as much, many times, but no. Those hell-bent on folly have to project garish caricatures unto those who dare stand athwart the path heading over the cliff and cry out, no.)
Anyway, the reader will simply not find a sober-minded response to such concerns.
After this, I set about a sounder foundation, several days ago now, which was of course studiously ignored. This was elaborated through pondering what sort of world has to be here for there to be creatures like us, then followed up.
All, studiously ignored in a rush to set up and knock over conveniently loaded straw men.
Let me clip key points from the last, FFT6C:
It is worth noting the unresponsiveness to 219 and 178 above, especially at the points where objectors were directly invited to put up alternatives.
We can take it to the bank that UD is obsessively monitored by denizens of a penumbra of hostile sites. Denizens, more than willing to pounce when they see opportunity.
In short, the above blanks left unanswered speak to yet another hovering ghost or three in the room.
Here, first, the point that there is no necessary appeal to design inferences and debates to build a case for ethical theism adequate to ground commitment to such.
Second, that the atheistical objectors and their fellow travellers have no cogent answer to the need for a necessary being root to reality, nor to the point that the God of ethical theism is a serious candidate to be such (by utter contrast with the cartoonish flying spaghetti monster etc), nor to the onward point that such a serious candidate will be either ontologically impossible [as a square circle is impossible] or else will be actual.
Third, they have no cogent answer to the significance of the point that just to have a real discussion, we must implicitly accept that we are responsible, reasonable, significantly free and intelligent beings under moral government. Not least, conscience is the compass within pointing to the truth, the right and our duties of care towards such. Undermining this dimension of conscious mindedness by implying it is delusional lets grand delusion loose in our minds, ending in shipwreck.
So, we can see that the evo mat scientism picture of the world falls apart, and that there is no need to go out of our way to accommodate it. It is self-referentially incoherent and so self-falsifying.
Nor, should we yield to the trend to corrupt the concept, truth. (That, too, is part of the benumbing and warping of conscience, as say Orwell brought out so forcefully in his 1984.)
The astute onlooker will also note that we have had a worldviews discussion, not one pivoting on parsing Bible texts . . .
It will then be no surprise to see that the grounding of ethical theism as a responsible worldview (by utter contrast with the radically self-falsifying and amoral evolutionary materialistic scientism and fellow travellers) does not turn on design inferences on empirical signs such as FSCO/I.
Evo mat scientism and fellow travellers are utterly incompatible with the responsible, rational freedom required to have a serious, fact and logic guided discussion seeking understanding of the truth. It rules itself out so soon as we must have a serious discussion.
We then address on comparative difficulties, how can we have a world with beings such as we are.
That takes us through the IS-OUGHT gap to issues of being and non-being and rootedness of a world with moral government. Which, repeat, is a condition of serious discussion.
That points to the only serious candidate for such a root, after centuries of debate. Candidate X was duly laid out, and the open invitation was given to put forth a comparable candidate Y that does not instantly collapse.
Silence.
Silence, for good reason: something like the flying spaghetti monster is simply not serious, never mind its appallingly common rhetorical use by those who should know a lot better.
Then, a second invitation to comparative difficulties discussion was given: part of X’s bill of requisites is necessary being. A serious candidate NB either is impossible (as a square circle is impossible) or it is actual.
The challenge was given, break X’s candidacy.
Silence, again.
So — as X = the inherently good creator God of ethical theism, a necessary and maximally great being worthy of loyalty and the reasonable, responsible service of doing the good in accord with our evident nature — it is clear that there is a very good warrant to adhere to ethical theism as a worldview.
Without even engaging design theory debates.
A point that needed to be put up on the table and warranted.
Which, it has.
That’s why at 220 and henceforth, I could freely write:
you will see the stage of argument in FFT6B just above. I wonder what our well-informed skeptical interlocutors will put up as alternatives? Especially, noting that THERE IS NO DESIGN INFERENCE in the argument to date, i.e. the design inference as such is demonstrably not an inherent, inextricable part of an argument to God as root of reality. Where, note, the case I am arguing here is not based in Scripture though it is compatible with it — truths will be compatible the one with the other. And of course, contrary to the talking points I heard today, the God of ethical theism is not automatically the devil, the author of evils and confusions.
Why then has there been such a hot debate over design, and why has it been laced with accusations about creationism in a cheap tuxedo and the like?
Simple: evolutionary materialistic scientism, from the outset in modern times [this is demonstrable historic fact], has tried to come up with a designer substitute that would plausibly put the creator-God out of a job. The idea is that if the world of life and onward the physical cosmos can be explained on naturalistic grounds, the perception of design can be dismissed while wearing the holy lab coat, and belief in God can eventually be made to seem to be the resort of the ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.
That rhetorical stratagem has worked and has become institutionalised.
But at a terrible price.
First, it is ill-founded and credibly false, erecting falsity as the yardstick for judging truth. Where, science first and foremost must seek to discover the empirically grounded truth about our world.
Ill-founded, as there are credible, empirically warranted signs of design, which are copiously found in the world of life and in the structure of the cosmos.
Design theory is the empirically and analytically grounded scientific investigation of such signs, which in fact are not too hard to find. Start with the algorithmically functional text in DNA and the execution machinery of the cell that puts it to work. (This points to OOL and OO body plans. Design is evident in the tree of life from the roots up.)
Likewise, the corruption of science from definitions and outlines of its methods on up makes blatant falsity into the yardstick to judge truth by. Truth cannot pass the test of agreement with relevant falsity, and so the ideological imposition of evolutionary materialistic scientism inherently corrupts a pivotal institution of our civilisation.
So, those who hope to build a sound future will be found on the side of needed reformation of tainted science.
In that context, freed science can then return to its true path.
Such is being ruthlessly resisted because it threatens entrenched worldviews and power interests in many institutions. But, the only way to defend institutionalised and fairly obvious falsity is by means that cannot stand the cold light of truth, facts and logic. That is why we find the distortions, strawman tactics, stalking, stereotyping and scapegoating.
All of which are utterly corrosive to liberty, not just academic freedom.
And so, the time has come to find where one stands, why, even as our civilisation descends into chaos, confusion, folly, bizarre agendas and outright blood guilt all around us.
We stand at kairos.>>
We are at kairos, in the face of a civilisation hell-bent on a march of folly. It is time to think again, soberly. END
Comments
jdk #263
OK, I see that I have misunderstood: the antecedent of your conditional, “IF a world-root being holds any ‘essential positions’ that we would consider morally relevant,” is the minimum condition for establishing OUGHTS in the world. I though that you were intending for offering further minimal conditions for establishing the truth of that statement, but now I understand and that confusion is settled, I think.
Ok, excellent.
I think this is the point where we are at:
HeKS: I think the details of the actual world may make it a logically necessary conclusion that the being responsible for this world has essential positions that would make the existence of an objective moral framework a logically necessary aspect of reality.
This is what I am interested in hearing about.
Ok, since we seem to be on the same page regarding the strictly logical aspects of the issue, I can move on to the empirical side.
But you write, “Again, I’ve indicated what some of these details are,”
The only details that I remember you offering was about people feeling that their moral sensibilities were connected to some deeper reality. My reply to that was first, that not all people feel that way, and second, more broadly, there are good (I think better) explanations for that then assuming those feelings are accurate.
So, I actually listed a number of different empirical considerations, and I think that in the one you've cited you may have slightly misunderstood my intention (BTW, I don't mean to just keep saying that I think you're misunderstanding me, but these are obviously kinda complex and subtle issues we're talking about here, so it's easy for some of those subtleties to get lost in the mix).
Let me repeat the empirical considerations that I listed earlier:
From #178: You speak of the potential lack of OUGHTs in the world on the basis of the possibility of a world-root IS that simply doesn’t care about outcomes in the world it produces. This seems problematic on numerous counts. To begin with, the initial conditions for the origin of our own universe appear to have been very finely-tuned to allow for a specific outcome, namely the arrival of intelligent life. I and many others here would say that further fine-tuning took place at the level of our solar system and planet for the same purpose, and at all these levels to make the universe scientifically discoverable to the intelligent life that would ultimately come to exist here. We also see some manner of intervention in the origin of life and at various other points on the path to intelligent human life. We also see a need for involvement in the creation of a rational mind capable of having thoughts that are about things and capable of rational deliberation and deducing conclusions on the basis of the contents of premises, all of which necessarily implies an aspect of the mind that goes beyond the merely physical. We also find that these minds not only have thoughts about moral issues, but a sense that these thoughts are connected to a deeper reality, and perhaps most telling, that we feel a deep-seated compulsion that we OUGHT to do what we BELIEVE is good, whether or not we happen to be correct in discerning the moral status of some particular behavior. I say that this last point may be the most telling, because even if there is disagreement about what courses of action really are good, the sense that we OUGHT to do whatever the good is is universal, except among those that we would consider to have some kind of mental or emotional pathology. And, of course, in the case of Christians, we believe there is historical evidence supporting the resurrection of Christ from the dead.
All of these factors, individually and collectively, suggest a world-root IS that is anything but disinterested in the outcomes taking place within the reality it has produced. Instead they strongly point to a cause for existence that cares about intelligent life and about the moral behavior of that life.
Let's break those up into a list of items that is slightly easier to visually digest...
1) In producing the physical universe, this being finely-tuned the initial conditions of its origin to an unfathomable degree in such a way that future intelligent life would able to exist within in it. This fine-tuning was necessary but not sufficient for the existence of such intelligent life.
2) Several hundred other conditions needed to be met in our own solar system and planet in order to sustain intelligent life.
3) The fine-tuning of the initial conditions and the constants and quantities of the universe goes beyond what is needed for the bare existence of life and extends into the even more narrow subset required to make the universe discoverable to that life.
4) That cosmic fine-tuning for discoverability would be mostly useless were it not for the fact that our own solar system and planet also meet a variety conditions to make the universe discoverable to intelligent life living here.
5) There is ever-increasing evidence that intervention was required in the origin of life and other steps on the path to intelligent human life.
6) The rational intelligent mind as we experience it seems utterly incapable of being reduced to the purely physical mechanisms of the brain (if you doubt this, I'd be happy to point you to the kinds of comments consistently made by those scientists and philosophers who do reduce it to the brain to show that they are thereby forced into downgrading the mind into something wholy unlike human experience and totally lacking any basis for rational thought). This means that direct intervention was in some way required to produce minds capable of free rational thought, having thoughts that are about things and of arriving at and judging the validity of conclusions based on the contents of premises.
7) These minds have a number of distinct and independent thoughts and powerful intuitions about moral issues that work together in an interlocking network. Perhaps we might break down this network into the following constituent parts:
a) Beliefs about specific moral issues or propositions
b) The powerful intuition that there is a deeper moral reality that moral beliefs should be in harmony with ... that moral error is possible.
c) The powerful sense that whatever the real moral good happens to be in any given scenario, we should not only bring our beliefs into alignment with it, but we should actually act in accord with it.
d) A conscience that actually bothers us and which sometimes even leads to negative physiological reactions when we act contrary to our own moral beliefs and fail to do what we think is the real moral good, with the severity of the response depending on the severity of the transgression.
Now, let me just return for a moment to part of your comment relevant to 7b. You said:
The only details that I remember you offering was about people feeling that their moral sensibilities were connected to some deeper reality. My reply to that was first, that not all people feel that way....
First, I want to point out the distinction between 'a' and 'b', where your comment here combines them. I wasn't saying that people necessarily feel that all of their own specific personal moral beliefs were directly rooted in a deeper reality, but rather than in addition to having specific moral beliefs, they also had the powerful intuition of a deeper truth that moral beliefs should ideally be aligned to and that moral error is possible (and undoubtedly they feel that some of their specific moral beliefs are properly aligned to that).
Second, I would contest your general point. I have had countless discussions with people who claim not to believe in objective morality, but they inevitably end up making statements and acting in ways that show that at a deeper level they really do feel that there are things that are really right and really wrong and there is some objective obligation to act in accord with those things. There are very few people who REALLY don't believe in objective morality and REALLY are not governed in any way by intuitions about their existence, and we typically call those people psychopaths and/or sociopaths. In my experience, if you spend long enough talking to someone who claims to reject objective morality they will eventually passionately express some concept they insist we ought to adhere to or course of action we ought to take that is literally incoherent if objective morality doesn't exist. These are moments when those powerful moral intuitions manage to overcome their intellectual denials (and just to be clear, I'm not necessarily accusing these people of lying about their intellectual beliefs, but more of allowing an ideological stand to delude them into consciously denying what subconsciously they can't help but accept).
Now, I've listed here at least 7 different activities/interventions in which this being would be implicated (though the count would be higher if you break up the individual aspects of moral life, as we likely should). Each one of these very strongly indicates that this root-level being holds a variety of essential positions that we would consider morally relevant - and we can ultimately get into the weeds on those if you like - but really only one is necessary. If we look back to the first couple, about producing a physical reality that required very precise fine-tuning and intervention at multiple levels in order to make intelligent life first possible and then actual, that, by definition, indicates interest and care in the outcome of intelligent life.
A being that produces, sustains, precisely fine-tunes and intervenes in a situation to ensure the viability of an outcome, cares about and assigns importance to that outcome by definition. Any being that produced a universe like ours cares about and values the existence of life as an outcome according to any way would define that concept. Allow me to paste in the definition of "care"
carenoun
1. the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something.
2. serious attention or consideration applied to doing something correctly or to avoid damage or risk.
verb
1. feel concern or interest; attach importance to something.
2. look after and provide for the needs of.
Every one of these meanings is met to one degree or another, and this is what I meant when I was saying that it seems necessarily true by definition that the being who produced this world has essential positions we would consider morally relevant ... or at the very least one such position. I meant that if we agree that this being took and takes certain actions that have already been stipulated, then those actions, by definition, demonstrate a care for intelligent life according to any definition of "care" that we might choose to use. And if this is the case, then, at the very least, we can be secure in saying that a concept like "intelligent life has value" or "intelligent life is worth caring about" or something of that sort necessarily forms part of the backdrop of reality and constitutes an objective moral truth or value. I think we can get quite a bit further than just that, but this is somewhere to start and I'm outta time :)
Take care,
HeKSHeKS
May 2, 2017
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CR, until you get first principles right there is no basis for a reasonable discussion. That is why I again point out: "you have been unable to comment in this thread without relying on distinct identity and its immediate corollaries, LOI, LEM, LNC. That should be a clue. These are not on trial, you are." I have no onward time to waste on trying to have a reasonable discussion with one who rejects the first principles of right reason, hopelessly contradicts himself then tries to proceed as though nothing has seriously gone wrong. KF
PS: On April 3, 2015 here at UD, WJM rightly put the matter this way:
If you do not assume the law of non-contradiction, you have nothing to argue about. If you do not assume the principles of sound reason, you have nothing to argue with. If logic is not assumed to be a causally independent, authoritative arbiter of true statements, there’s no reason to apply it. If you do not assume libertarian free will, you have no one to argue against. If you do not assume morality to be an objective commodity, you have no reason to argue in the first place. If you do not assume mind is primary, there is no “you” to make any argument at all.
To attempt to have a reasonable discussion under those circumstances is a futile task.kairosfocus
May 1, 2017
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@KF
I wrote:
Furthermore, you keep providing concrete examples of criticizing the very things you claim are immune to criticism by selecting identity, etc. as examples of supposed self-evident truths. Again, if this does not represent criticism, the what is it?
KF
NO RESPONSE
And I'm side stepping?critical rationalist
May 1, 2017
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CR,
Nope, you are side-stepping what must be in place for you to open your mouth, oops, for even a you to be there, distinct identity. Again:
you have been unable to comment in this thread without relying on distinct identity and its immediate corollaries, LOI, LEM, LNC. That should be a clue. These are not on trial, you are. And beyond, you seem to be still stuck in an outdated understanding of inductive reasoning, the part that anchors us to the real world. As just one little issue try this: on factual adequacy, coherence and balanced explanatory power, which is the better explanation, that emeralds are green or that they are grue? And, what colour are emeralds in the dark or buried deep underground or when no one is looking? Extending, which is better, the three laws of thermodynamics or the concept that oh perpetuum mobiles exist, we just have not discovered them yet or maybe the laws switch from time to time so at some future date such will work.
Your whole scheme turns on suppressing a first undeniable truth and is therefore utterly self contradictory. The ex falso quodlibet principle warns us that such systems then lose ability to track true consequences implied by true premises. They become dangerous and generally error-riddled.
You need to go back to basics and set little errors at the beginning right to be able to go on to anything of consequence.
Until you do that you are liable to be stuck in a situation of using error as yardstick, which is a test the truth cannot pass. As, the truth already corresponds to reality so it cannot conform to relevant error.
KFkairosfocus
May 1, 2017
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CR @270:
Origenes: Suppose that Da Vinci created a self-replicating system “Mona Lisa”. Why would Da Vinci as the creator of that self-replicating system not serve an explanatory purpose wrt the existence of that system?
The recipe that would be present in the painting would be the proximate cause.
There are several candidates for the title ‘proximate cause of the self-replicating system’: the parts of the self-replicating system, the first-time-assembly-instructions (how to assemble the system for the first time, which is different from the ‘recipe’ for autonomous self-replicating) and, of course, the builder of the self-replicating system (here Leonardo da Vinci).
In my book, Leonardo is the proximate cause of the coming into existence of the self-replicating system. He is the one who makes the decision to build it. Neither the ‘first-time-assembly-instructions’ nor the isolated parts have this decision power.
However, it should be clear to anyone that each of the listed candidates serves an explanatory purpose wrt the existence of the self-replicating system.
You are just being silly when you keep denying this obvious fact.Origenes
May 1, 2017
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@KF,
Again, we can adopt the position that has, up to this moment, stood up to criticism most effectively. This is all I need to comment.
According to the stance of critical preference no position can be positively justified but it is quite likely that one, (or some) will turn out to be better than others are in the light of critical discussion and tests. This type of rationality holds all its positions and propositions open to criticism and a standard objection to this stance is that it is empty; just holding our positions open to criticism provides no guidance as to what position we should adopt in any particular situation. This criticism misses its mark for two reasons. First, the stance of critical preference is not a position, it is a metacontext and as such it is not directed at solving the kind of problems that are solved by adopting a position on some issue or other. It is concerned with the way that such positions are adopted, criticised, defended and relinquished. Second, Bartley does provide guidance on adopting positions; we may adopt the position that to this moment has stood up to criticism most effectively. Of course this is no help for dogmatists who seek stronger reasons for belief, but that is a problem for them, not for exponents of critical preference.
Furthermore, you keep providing concrete examples of criticizing the very things you claim are immune to criticism by selecting identity, etc. as examples of supposed self-evident truths. Again, if this does not represent criticism, the what is it?critical rationalist
April 30, 2017
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CR, you are side-stepping the outright self-contradiction corrected above and are failing to face the fact that apart from implicitly relying on distinct identity you cannot even comment. It is impossible to deny or dismiss distinct identity (thus its corollaries LOI, LEM, LNC) without implicitly relying on it. Start with the use of distinct letters, sounds or the like. Self evident.You would be well advised to revisit the positions you keep on taking up heedless of such challenges. KFkairosfocus
April 30, 2017
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@KF,
Again, nothing in your comments indicate how what you call self-evident truths is incompatible with ideas that we currently lack good criticism of. For example…
I suggest to you that you try to comment without implicitly relying on distinct identity, starting with alphanumeric characters. When that proves impossible, try to speak without doing the same. Oops, impossible again, try to think without having distinct thoughts. Double oops.
These are examples of trying to take an idea seriously for the purpose of criticism. Having singled out identity from all other candidates requires criticism, etc. If they are not examples, then what do they represent? You have simply failed to address this at all.
And beyond, you seem to be still stuck in an outdated understanding of inductive reasoning, the part that anchors us to the real world.
I’ve made distinctions between inductivism and conjecture and criticism. Merely choosing to call the latter the former, just muddies the water. As for Abduction…
Abduction is formally equivalent to the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent (or Post hoc ergo propter hoc) because of multiple possible explanations for b.
Nor am I just focused on naive induction, as that lets it off far to easy. People here have…
- Assumed the contests of our theories come from observations. (Excluding some unobserved causes, but not others)
- Implied it’s possible to extrapolate observations without first putting them into an explanatory theory, (#239)
- Attempted to use probability to choose between theories
- Assumed some ideas are not subject to criticism (self-evident)
And that’s just the ones I can think of of the top of my head.critical rationalist
April 30, 2017
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You are not making sense. Suppose that Da Vinci created a self-replicating system “Mona Lisa”. Why would Da Vinci as the creator of that self-replicating system not serve an explanatory purpose wrt the existence of that system?
The recipe that would be present in the painting would be the proximate cause. Having da Vinci just copy it there as an authoritative source doesn't explain that information.
And, why on earth, should anyone think that Da Vinci was born with that knowledge? Are you again conflating ‘explanation’ and ‘ultimate explanation’?
Explanations have reach. Any explanation for the knowledge da Vinci possessed would extend beyond da Vinci and the paining. This is why I keep pointing out that you are confusing induction with an explanation.
I wrote in a comment above....
A narrow band transmitter would only be the result of explanatory knowledge, which has enough reach to, well, reach beyond the planet of origin so we could detect it. By reach, I mean the ability to solve problems beyond the exact situation originally encountered. Only people can create explanatory knowledge by conjecturing theories about the world works in an attempt to solve a problem, criticizing those theories and discarding errors we find. We are universal explainers. This is contrast to non-explanatory knowledge, which are useful rules of thumb, which have limited reach. So, yes, our explanation for the growth of knowledge is relevant in determining the significants of such a discovery.
The idea that some other species would also value prime numbers is yet another explanatory theory that primes should have use not just to themselves, but to other people even in environments they have never observed before. That is reach.
The reach of explanations is what has allowed us to make rapid, open ended progress.
So, either you have not presented an explanation, or you're trying to arbitrarily limit its reach.critical rationalist
April 30, 2017
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@UB
I wrote..
The Mona Lisa is a piece of art, not a template replicator. It does not contain a recipe (the knowledge) of what transformations of mater are necessary to make a copies of itself from raw materials. As such, that recipe was external to the paining, like a car built in a factory. The proximate cause of an organism is that knowledge, as the entire cell is constructed anew during replication.
You wrote..
A template replicator does not contain a recipe of itself. A recipe entails a symbolic relation between a medium of information and its referents within a system. In the study of self-replicating systems that have open-ended evolutionary potential, this is the central observation. It is virtually impossible to read the literature on such systems and miss this point.
First, exchanging “template replicator” with whatever term you would like to use instead does not result in the Mona Lisa containing the knowledge of how to make a copy of itself. Is there some other term you would prefer to use instead?
Second, In the context of the paper I referenced, the term “template replicator” was used to distinguish a specific kind of replication that was necessary to perform accurate copies. Namely, that the replicator vehicle is not copied, but a “recipe” is used instead. Had the vehicle itself been copied, any damage or construction errors in the vehicle would be present in the copy. Nor could there be error correction after the copy was made. This is a key point in explaining how accurate self-replication is compatible with no-design laws. No such knowledge is present in the Mona Lisa.
It is important to remember that in classical physics, all interactions between physical objects are lawfully determined by the exchange of energy and rates of exchange of energy. However, the unique organization of a semiotic system specifically establishes rate-independent control over this ubiquitous physical reality, thus allowing the production of effects that would otherwise never occur in a wholly rate-dependent system.
Replication in the paper was first expressed in constructor theoretic terms in which the constructor itself is abstract, then specially applied to biological organisms. This is because constructor theory is concerned with what transformations are possible, which are impossible and why - which would entail physical theories - principles - that constrain what is possible. This includes breaking down biological replication into construction tasks, subtasks, etc. until we end up with subtasks that are not specific to design and/or occur spontaneously. This avoids an infinite regress, which is what you seem to be referring to.
3.1 An accurate constructor must contain a replicator
A task T being possible means that for any given accuracy (short of perection) the laws of physics permit an approximate constructor capable of performing the task to that accuracy.
Consider a possible, non elementary task T and an object F that can perform T to a high accuracy (8) ?. For instance, T could be the task of constructing a car from generic substrates and F a generalised car factory, including all the processes converting raw materials such as iron, etc., into a car.
The approximate constructor F executes a procedure - a recipe - to perform the task T to accuracy ?. I will show that F must include a replicator and a programmable constructor; and that the recipe must have a hierarchical structure and be instantiated in the replicator.
No-design laws contain no good constructor for T, such as F - neither in the elementary interactions, nor in the generic resources. Hence the recipe used by F to perform T must be decomposable into steps (not necessarily sequential) that are allowed by no-design laws. That is to say, sub-recipes - procedures to perform sub-tasks that are executed by sub-constructors contained in F. To avoid infinite regress, two conditions must be fulfilled. (8)It is the subsidiary theory that provides specific measures of accuracy.
One is that the subtasks be non-specific to T. For instance, when T is the task of constructing a car, the subtasks are those of constructing sub-parts of the car - e.g., door handles, windows, etc. Hence, the constructor F must include two parts: One – which I call V – performs T blindly, i.e., subtask by subtask, and it is non-specific to T, because so are the subtasks. The rest of F – which I call P – is specific to T and instantiates the recipe for T: it specifies the sequence of the subtasks, thus controlling V. Hence F can be described as a programmable constructor, V , programmed with a program P having the same logic as the recipe: it has a modular structure P = (p1, p2, · · · , pN ) where each instruction pi takes values in an information variable and tells V which sub-task to perform, when, on the substrates(9). V is non-specific to T because it must also be capable of executing other programs - different combinations of the elementary units pi. For example, a car factory contains robots executing sub-recipes to construct the car’s doors. These robots contain sub-robots to construct handles, windows, etc., which could be used to construct other objects than cars.
The other condition is obtained by applying the same reasoning recursively to the subtasks. If they, too, are non-elementary, they require a recipe that is decomposable into non-specific sub-recipes. The base for the recursion - for T to be performable to that particular accuracy - is provided by the elementary sub-recipes of the recipe for T being elementary tasks - which can be performed by (approximations to) constructors that are available in nature, as generic resources.
Note that these elementary sub-tasks need not be specified in the recipe: they are implicit in the laws of physics. For instance, the elementary steps in the car recipe are tasks like, say, “oxidise the aluminium coating”, and occur simply by leaving the substrate exposed to air.
Under no-design laws, any (approximation to a) constructor wears out after a finite time. Therefore F, to perform the task T to the accuracy ?, must undergo a process of maintenance, defined as one whereby a new instance of F - i.e., of P and V - is brought about, from generic materials, before the former one stops working. In the case of the car factory, this is achieved by replacing old subparts of the robots, assembly lines, etc. and by preserving the programs they run.
To avoid an infinite regress, implementing the maintenance must not in turn require the recipe P for T. Also, the design of the recipe P cannot be in the laws of physics. Thus, the only other possibility is that the new instance of P is brought about by blind replication of the recipe P contained in the former instance - i.e., by replicating its subunits pi (that are non-specific to T). We conclude that, under no-design laws, the substrate instantiating the recipe is necessarily a modular replicator: a physical object that can be copied blindly, an elementary subunit at a time. In contrast, V - the non-specific component of F - is constructed anew from generic resources.
Moreover, under no-design laws errors can occur: thus, to achieve high and improvable accuracy, the recipe must include error-correction. In the car factory, this includes, say, controlling the functionalities of the subcomponents (e.g., fine checks on the position of doors, wheels, etc.). Hence the recipe P must contain information about the task T, informing the criterion for error detection and correction.
The information in the recipe is an abstract constructor that I shall call knowledge (without a knowing subject [26]). Knowledge has an exact characterisation in constructor theory: it is information that can act as a con- structor and cause itself to remain instantiated in physical substrates. Crucially, error-correcting the replication is necessary. Hence the subunits pi must assume values in a discrete (digital) information variable: one whose attributes are separated by non-allowed attributes. For, if all values in a continuum were allowed, error-correction would be logically impossible.
IOW, from what I can gather, what you referring to as rate-independence would be subtasks in the constructor theoretic terms. The specific mediation would itself be knowledge. Again, this open-endedness is acknowelged in the paper.
3.2 The logic of self-reproduction
I shall now apply the results of section 3.1 to self-reproduction, to conclude that no-design laws permit an accurate self-reproducer, provided that it operates via what I call, adapting Dawkins’ terminology [7], the replicator- vehicle logic.
A self-reproducer S (of the kind (2)) is a constructor for its own construction, from generic resources only. From the argument in 3.1 it follows that for S to be a good approximation to a constructor for another S, it must consist of: a modular replicator, R = (r1,r2,...,rn), instantiating the recipe for S (the elementary units ri have attributes in an information variable ?, corresponding to instructions); a programmable constructor, the vehicle V , executing the recipe blindly, i.e., implementing non-specific sub-tasks.
The recipe instantiated by the replicator R must contain all the knowledge about how to construct S, specifying a procedure for its construction. Note, however, that the recipe is in one sense incomplete: as remarked in section 3.1, the recipe is not required to include instructions for the elementary tasks, which occur spontaneously in nature. These are indeed relied upon during actual cell development - they constitute epigenetics and environ- mental context. As remarked by George C. Williams, “Organisms, wherever possible, delegate jobs to useful spontaneous processes, much as a builder may temporarily let gravity hold things in place and let the wind disperse paint fumes”, [29].
Under no-design laws, maintenance and error-correction are necessary for a high and improvable accuracy to be achieved; and in self-reproduction, crucially, it must be S only that brings about the new instance of S. Therefore, since the maintenance cannot be performed by the laws of physics either, because of the no-design conditions, it must be executed by S. As in the general case of section 3.1, maintenance must be achieved via copying the recipe and constructing the vehicle V . These are enacted, respectively, by two sub-
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constructors in the vehicle, C and B, which implement the replicator-vehicle logic that von Neumann discovered, [15].
In the construction phase B executes R to construct a new vehicle V :
N =? (V,W).
In bacteria B includes the mechanisms for constructing the daughter cell, such as the ribosome which uses DNA instructions (translated into RNA) to construct proteins. Blind error-correction is possible via checks on the sub- tasks of the recipe; however, construction errors are not propagated, because the new vehicle is the result of executing the recipe in the replicator, not a copy of the former vehicle.
In the copy phase, the blind replication of R is performed by C, a copier of the information variable ?:
C
This happens by replicating the configuration of R blindly, one elementary unit at a time. It follows that C is a universal copier for the set of replicators consisting of elementary units drawn from ? (a property called heredity [32]). Error-correction can happen blindly too, for instance via mismatch-repair. In bacteria this phase is DNA replication and C includes all the relevant enzymes in the cell. (10) For the two phases to perform maintenance, the recipe for the vehicle V , instantiated in the replicator R, must be copied in the copy-phase. This requires the elementary instructions of the recipe to be (sets of) the elementary units ri of the replicator. In bacteria they are the codons - triplets of the elementary units of the replicator (the nucleotides), coding for the building blocks of proteins (aminoacids).
The replication of each sub-unit ri constitutes a measurement of which at- tribute ri holds, followed by constructing a new instance of it. Since the replicator R must contain all the knowledge about S, the attributes in ?, of which R is made, must be generic resources, so as to require no recipe (other than R) to be constructed from generic resources. I call a modular replicator such as R whose subunits are made of generic resources a template replicator. A DNA strand is one: the information variable ? is the set of nucleotides - they are simple enough to have been naturally occurring in pre-biological environments.
(10)I do not model details irrelevant to the self-reproduction logic (e.g. DNA semi- conservative replication).
[diagram]
We thus see that the two maintenance phases achieve self-reproduction, as they amount to bringing about a new R, by copying the former R, and a new V , by construction - controlled by R. Thus, self-reproduction is stable precisely because copying and construction automatically execute the maintenance of S, by replicating the recipe and re-constructing the vehicle before the former instance of S wears out; and they permit error-correction. For arbitrarily high accuracy, both phases implement elementary sub-recipes that are non-specific to self-reproducers, and do not bear design. Therefore arbitrarily accurate self-reproduction is permitted by no-design laws, provided that the latter allow replicators - i.e., information media.
Rewriting the copy phase, (3), as
[diagram]
to highlight that C executes R, we see that a template replicator has a special property. It instantiates a recipe for its own construction from generic resources only (C does not need to contain any additional recipe to construct the subunits of R: it blindly copies the pattern, subunit by subunit; and the units are generic resources). This is unique to template replicators. No other object could be a recipe for the construction of itself to a high accuracy. For the argument in section 3.1 implies that an instance (or a blueprint) of an object is not, in general, a recipe for its construction from generic substrates. A 3-D raster-scanner provided with an instance of, say, a bacterium could not re-produce it accurately from generic substrates only: without a recipe containing the knowledge about the bacterium’s structure, there would be no criterion for error-correction, resulting in a bound on the achievable accuracy. Likewise, an entire organism could not self-reproduce to a high accuracy via self-copying: without the recipe informing error-correction, an “error catastrophe” [30] would occur. This also provides a unifying descriptions of the two phases: the replicator R is a recipe for another instance of itself, when instructing C; a recipe for the construction of another vehicle, when instructing B. Overall, it instantiates the full recipe for S - see the figure 3.2.
R is an active, germ line replicator [7], because instantiates all the knowledge necessary to achieve its own replication. It is a consequence of the above argument that high-fidelity replication is possible under no-design laws too, provided that there is a vehicle that performs blind copying and error-correction.
Figure 2: The logic of self-reproduction An accurate self-reproducer (top of the figure) consists of the replicator R (blue outline) and the vehicle V (green outline) - which contains the copier C and the constructor B. In the copy phase C copies the replicator R - C[R] (red outline) acts as a constructor. In the construction phase B executes the recipe in R to build a vehicle from generic resources N - B[R] (red outline) acts as a constructor. Finally (bottom) the copy of R and the newly constructed vehicle form the offspring.
Moreover, for the replicator to preserve its ability to be an accurate replicator across generations, its vehicle must be reproduced too - together, they must constitute a self-reproducer. Hence self-reproduction is essential to high-fidelity replication under no-design laws.
critical rationalist
April 30, 2017
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CR: da Vinci being “just born” complete with the knowledge of what transformation of matter are necessary to a copy of the Mona Lisa from raw materials serves no explanatory purpose.
You are not making sense. Suppose that Da Vinci created a self-replicating system “Mona Lisa”. Why would Da Vinci as the creator of that self-replicating system not serve an explanatory purpose wrt the existence of that system?
And, why on earth, should anyone think that Da Vinci was born with that knowledge? Are you again conflating 'explanation' and 'ultimate explanation'?Origenes
April 30, 2017
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CR, you have been unable to comment in this thread without relying on distinct identity and its immediate corollaries, LOI, LEM, LNC. That should be a clue. These are not on trial, you are. And beyond, you seem to be still stuck in an outdated understanding of inductive reasoning, the part that anchors us to the real world. As just one little issue try this: on factual adequacy, coherence and balanced explanatory power, which is the better explanation, that emeralds are green or that they are grue? And, what colour are emeralds in the dark or buried deep underground or when no one is looking? Extending, which is better, the three laws of thermodynamics or the concept that oh perpetuum mobiles exist, we just have not discovered them yet or maybe the laws switch from time to time so at some future date such will work. KFkairosfocus
April 30, 2017
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CR ,
The Mona Lisa is a piece of art, not a template replicator. It does not contain a recipe (the knowledge) of what transformations of mater are necessary to make a copies of itself from raw materials.
I am reluctant to step back into a conversation with you, but you keep saying things that are so demonstrably false. Since I now know that you are up-in-your-head and immune to evidence and reason, I will respond to your comment only for any interested readers of the thread.
A template replicator does not contain a recipe of itself. A recipe entails a symbolic relation between a medium of information and its referents within a system. In the study of self-replicating systems that have open-ended evolutionary potential, this is the central observation. It is virtually impossible to read the literature on such systems and miss this point.
In a recipe system like DNA, one set of objects (the codons) serve as symbolic representations, while another set of objects (the aminoacyl synthetases) independently establish what is being represented.
This system of discontinuous association is a fundamental requirement in semiotic systems. It is what establishes DNA as an actual medium of information. It is specifically this discontinuous association that enables the physical independence required for the medium to actually specify all the different referents that are needed to organize the system.
It is important to remember that in classical physics, all interactions between physical objects are lawfully determined by the exchange of energy and rates of exchange of energy. However, the unique organization of a semiotic system specifically establishes rate-independent control over this ubiquitous physical reality, thus allowing the production of effects that would otherwise never occur in a wholly rate-dependent system.
A template replicator, on the other hand, does not establish a medium of information, does not contain representations, has no referents, and is physically incapable of open-ended evolutionary potential. Every interaction that takes place in a template replicator is fully rate-dependent, and is thus incapable of producing the effects of a recipe. One of those effects, of course, is organizing a recipe.
CR willfully conflates these two entirely different physical systems. He then avoids the issue by citing others who also conflate the systems, and no amount of evidence is allowed to interfere. But the physical facts remain. The symbol-matter paradox is not resolved by ignoring it.
His response is always the same; post-modern bafflegab, irrelevance, and assumption. How do I know this? Because, until he is prepared to acknowledge the issues, he has no alternatives.Upright BiPed
April 30, 2017
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@KF
CR, your problems demonstrably start with first principles of right reason. I suggest to you that you try to comment without implicitly relying on distinct identity, starting with alphanumeric characters.
As I’ve pointed out several times before, nothing in the above is incompatible with what you call self-evident truths being ideas that we currently do not have good criticisms of. For example, why did you pick identity as an example of a self evident truth out of all possible ideas? Because you quickly tried to criticize it and came back with none.
Pointing out that Identify is useful in all of our other explanations is a criticism to the idea that it is false.
Furthermore, we have criticisms of identity in the new riddle of induction, which I’ve referenced before.
Grue and bleen are predicates coined by Nelson Goodman in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast to illustrate the "new riddle of induction". These predicates are unusual because their application to things is time-dependent. For Goodman they illustrate the problem of projectable predicates and ultimately, which empirical generalizations are law-like and which are not.[1][2] Goodman's construction and use of grue and bleen illustrates how philosophers use simple examples in conceptual analysis.
There can always be a future observation that would conflict with properties we use to identify something as one thing or another.
We can say that someone is “grue” if it is green until some time t, such as 2050, in which it is blue. While these are not terms we use in everyday life, they still accurately represent the problem of whether a property can be projected into the future based on past observations.
All of the observations of an emerald to date support it being both green and grue.
What then makes some generalization lawlike and other accidental? This, for Goodman, becomes a problem of determining which predicates are projectable (i.e., can be used in lawlike generalizations that serve as predictions) and which are not. Goodman argues that this is where the fundamental problem lies. This problem, known as Goodman's paradox, is as follows. Consider the evidence that all emeralds examined thus far have been green. This leads us to conclude (by induction) that all future emeralds will be green. However, whether this prediction is lawlike or not depends on the predicates used in this prediction. Goodman observed that (assuming t has yet to pass) it is equally true that every emerald that has been observed is grue. Thus, by the same evidence we can conclude that all future emeralds will be grue. The new problem of induction becomes one of distinguishing projectable predicates such as green and blue from non-projectable predicates such as grue and bleen.
critical rationalist
April 30, 2017
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HeKS, to be able to reason, a being must be free, self-moved, not driven by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity. But freedom is just that, not a force. It does not enforce itself or regulate itself. The free being has to be self-governed, if it is to consistently act rationally and soundly. That self-government is inherently moral, and should be based on truth, diligence, the right, coherence, consistency and more. The level of existence of the self-moved and free is inherently that of moral government. And this then points to the world-root as the source. The notion of rationality and logic and soundness being amoral is a grave error. KFkairosfocus
April 30, 2017
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to HeKS at 261.
OK, I see that I have misunderstood: the antecedent of your conditional, "IF a world-root being holds any ‘essential positions’ that we would consider morally relevant," is the minimum condition for establishing OUGHTS in the world. I though that you were intending for offering further minimal conditions for establishing the truth of that statement, but now I understand and that confusion is settled, I think.
I also understand your point that the existence of these essential positions is the key element, irrespective of whether people know them well or thoroughly, or whether the world root cares whether we a moral duty to adhere to them. As you write, the issue is "establishing that there are certain things that really are morally right and others that really are morally wrong, whatever those turn out to be and however it is that we get to know about them."
So we'll focus on the statement "the world-root being [of our world] holds ... essential positions that we would consider morally relevant."
Note: I added [of our world] because I think several people have said that might not be true of some possible world, but it true of this world, and my position is that it is logically possible that this world has no OUGHTs at the root-level.
So, I understand when you say that you are not claiming to prove by pure logic, from first principles, so to speak, that "ANY world-root being MUST have morally relevant essential positions."
Rather, I understand and agree with you position that
The only way I think you could possibly argue for the logical necessity that this being has morally relevant essential positions is by starting with what exists and working back to the type of being that is logically necessary to explain what actually exists.
With all that said, to establish the ground we have covered, I think this is the point where we are at:
I think the details of the actual world may make it a logically necessary conclusion that the being responsible for this world has essential positions that would make the existence of an objective moral framework a logically necessary aspect of reality.
This is what I am interested in hearing about.
But you write, "Again, I’ve indicated what some of these details are,"
The only details that I remember you offering was about people feeling that their moral sensibilities were connected to some deeper reality. My reply to that was first, that not all people feel that way, and second, more broadly, there are good (I think better) explanations for that then assuming those feelings are accurate.
You also write, "it may come down to definitions, in the sense that this world-root being would have carried out actions that indicate morally relevant essential positions by definition."
I am very leery of arguments "by definition", because usually the definition being offered just implicitly includes the conclusion one is trying to establish. So I'm interested in the details of whatever definition you might offer.
I understand, I think, all that you have to say about skepticism. I am a strong agnostic about the matters we are discussing, and am a careful skeptic about claims in general. As I have often stated, I would rather live with uncertainty than believe things that are not true.
So, to be very clear (and redundant), I am not arguing that the root-level of our world doesn't have essential moral positions. I am arguing that it is logically possible that the root level has no such essential moral positions.
Also, I understand that as far as personal action goes (as opposed to careful logical discussion as we are engaged in), people are more than just rational beings, and that we combine logical understanding, consideration of evidence, emotions and other aspects of our psychology, and so on, when we reach decisions about how to act, and on a practical level, what to believe.
And I understand your point that whether you prove your point to my satisfaction really shouldn't matter: it's my business to assess all the evidence and arguments and make my own decisions about what to believe.
But, you write,
In other words, if you were attempting to approach the issue as unbiased as possible and looking at the evidence, what conclusion would seem more reasonable, and is the issue important enough that it would warrant action on your part if it were true? In still other words, we should be aiming for Moral Certainty, not Absolute Certainty.
Well, first, I am "attempting to approach the issue as unbiased as possible and looking at the evidence", and have been for over 50 years, as my interest in this topic goes back to my high school days.
Also, I understand that almost always expecting absolute certainty about a position is unrealistic, but in this discussion I wouldn't say I am aiming at "Moral Certainty": rather I am aiming at some level of "understanding" certainty.
So, to summarize, I'd like to hear more about what you think the evidence and arguments are, aiming for a reasonable level of certainty, that the root-level of reality contains essential moral positions? More to the point, why do you think it is, again with a reasonable level of certainty, impossible (or at least extremely unlikely to be true) that the root-level of reality has no positions.
And, for the record, the position I have posited as an alternative is that the IS of the world accounts for our existence as truly free, rational creatures, and that it is up to us to decide what norms we wish to establish for ourselves and in the society around us.jdk
April 30, 2017
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HeKS, I (again) point to the requisites of rationality, which will be foundational to a coherent cosmos rather than a chaos. Namely, responsible, rational freedom, with diligent carrying out of a sound framework for the cosmos. Our own being bound under moral government is closely tied to our being rational thus responsibly free also. KFkairosfocus
April 30, 2017
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jdk #253
My comments are going to have to come in snippets for the time being because I just don't have much time. (EDIT MADE AT THE TIME I FINISHED WRITING THIS COMMENT: I failed in my intent to write a brief snippet of a comment)
I’m just trying to return the discussion to the topics I think we are focusing on, which are, I think
....
b1) your counter statement that there exists minimal conditions necessary to establish the presence of an objective moral framework as a logical necessity, and
b2) your offer to explain what they are...
Regarding this point, about what the minimal condition is to establish the existence of an objective moral framework as a logically necessary part of the backdrop of reality, I've already said what it is, you've quoted it, and you've said you accept it. Let me repeat that here:
HeKS: IF a world-root being holds any ‘essential positions’ that we would consider morally relevant, THEN it would necessarily produce a world where those morally relevant essential positions form part of the backdrop of reality.
I’ll agree to that. The question is whether the antecedent of that statement is true.
Let me just remind you that the point I was making here was that, unlike people often claim, it is not necessary to show that this world-root being actively cares about the actions of humans in order to establish that there is necessarily an objective moral backdrop to reality. All that is necessary is that this being itself holds certain essential positions that we would consider morally relevant. Establishing that this being cares in some fashion about human behavior might be important in establishing that humans have moral duties, but it is not important in establishing that there are certain things that really are morally right and others that really are morally wrong, whatever those turn out to be and however it is that we get to know about them.
So that is the condition in the conditional argument that would establish the existence of an objective moral framework as part of reality if it turned out to be true. I have commented on this condition being "minimal" because it involves less than many people seem to typically think.
Now, to continue the other part of your 'b2'...
b2) your offer to explain what they are as well as what the arguments and evidence are that establish that those minimal conditions are met.
So again, to be clear, I haven't claimed that you can prove this as a matter of pure logical necessity, and by "pure logical necessity" I mean starting at the beginning, with only the being, and proving as a matter of logical necessity that ANY world-root being MUST have morally relevant essential positions. At present I don't that's true, though perhaps someone could convince me. The only way I think you could possibly argue for the logical necessity that this being have morally relevant essential positions is by starting with what exists and working back to the type of being that is logically necessary to explain what actually exists. And as I recall, the comment I made entering this discussion was that I didn't think it was obvious that it wasn't logically necessary that the being responsible for this actual world meet the conditions necessary to make the existence of an objective moral framework logically necessary.
Was that statement confusing? I think so. To reword it (though I don't know if this will be much better): I think the details of the actual world may make it a logically necessary conclusion that the being responsible for this world has essential positions that would make the existence of an objective moral framework a logically necessary aspect of reality. And, again, I've indicated what some of these details are, and I will address them further when I have a moment, but it may come down to definitions, in the sense that this world-root being would have carried out actions that indicate morally relevant essential positions by definition.
But now I want to come back to your 'a' point, because I think it might the most important underlying issue of all.
a) it is not logically impossible that this world has no objective moral value, as described by the non-material root-level of reality that I have posited as a possibility
I like having discussions about logical possibility, impossibility and necessity. They are interesting and mentally stimulating. For people committed to logic, they also force us into at least a minimal necessary worldview and take others completely off the table if we want a worldview that is rational at its core, which is a place where I think the materialists routinely fail (or refuse) to look. But the fact of the matter is that we don't live our lives only according to absolute logical necessity. If we acted only when in possession of absolute certainty we would mostly never act at all. I'd like to paste something I said here in another discussion about selective hyper-skepticism, not because I'm saying that this trait necessarily applies to you (it doesn't seem to me so far that it does), but because in the process of discussing that mindset I said some things relevant to the point I'm currently making:
Normal skepticism is generally equitable and a good thing. It applies a reasonably consistent demand for warrant across the board before some claim of fact or some argument is accepted. It prevents one from being credulous, but allows one to believe what is reasonable to believe once one has received a reasonable amount of supporting evidence and/or argumentation. There’s obviously some subjectivity here in terms of what one person considers to be a sufficient or reasonable amount of evidence or argumentation vs another, but the typical idea is that one is willing to believe if they’ve received sufficient evidence to bring about Moral Certainty rather than requiring Absolute Certainty. In other words, enough to warrant action or acceptance by a person who is not heavily biased.
Conversely, hyper-skepticism ... is virtually never equitable. Rather it is highly selective. Selective Hyper-Skepticism results when one requires a much higher degree of warrant in order to accept things that they prefer weren’t true. It most often comes up when worldview issues are at stake. It’s the application of a double-standard where one demands sufficient evidence to support absolute certainty (which is generally impossible) on certain facts they’d rather not have to believe, but they are willing to accept a much more lax standard of evidence and argumentation on matters of a very similar profile that don’t threaten their worldview.
So, the point I'm making here is that, as interesting as this conversation is and as much as I'm enjoying it, if I'm ultimately unable to prove to your satisfaction that the root-level being must meet the condition of having morally relevant essential positions as a matter of logical necessity, that really shouldn't matter. The more important question should be whether the evidence we have available to us makes the conclusion sufficiently likely to make action on your part warranted. In other words, if you were attempting to approach the issue as unbiased as possible and looking at the evidence, what conclusion would seem more reasonable, and is the issue important enough that it would warrant action on your part if it were true? In still other words, we should be aiming for Moral Certainty, not Absolute Certainty.
In some obvious ways, this question becomes especially poignant given the subject matter we're discussing, because only if objective moral values and duties exist would you have any kind of obligation to make decisions based on the truth value you assign to the content of any claims.
More as I have time.
Take care,
HeKSHeKS
April 29, 2017
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If I may presume to interject (feel free to refuse, both of you), you are saying it is tangential, CR.
If I understand your concluding paragraph correctly, adducing that knowledge exists, on its own, as it were, without reference to any intelligence, you seem to be making the same mistake as the materialists who claimed that, observations in the double-slit experiment could be made by a camera, instead of by a human being, thereby countering the notion of the observation being necessarly subjective, i.e. by immediate, human corporeal agency.
Whereas it has been pointed out that any and everything intelligible would be meaningless without personal, human cognition, i.e. in this case, setting up the equipment and interpreting the data captured by the camera.
It goes back, I think, to Planck's observation :
'Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.'
And the more extended quote :
'All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. . . . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.'Axel
April 29, 2017
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HP, agreement, with all due respect, is not a criterion of correctness nor is its absence a criterion of error. In the case of objectivity of moral government, even objectors implicitly appeal to the binding nature of duty to truth, right, sound reasoning etc. This is a clue. Further to this, such pervade the reasoning process and urge themselves on us even when we do, say, a bit of math and send the clear message of binding duty. Either that is merely a subjective perception or it is the voice of a compass sense that detects a real fact beyond delusion. If delusional, we are talking of a pervasive delusion undermining mindedness including rationality in general. A point actually made by many advocates of evolutionary materialism, who seem not to realise that they have just blown up the project of rational discourse and plunged into absurdity. It is therefore reasonable to hold that our sense of being under moral governance is reflecting an objective reality . . . something BTW which was never seriously questioned until the otherwise demonstrably self refuting evolutionary materialist worldview became a significant issue. Indeed, to be rational, we need to be responsibly and rationally free and all the evo mat ideologies founder on trying to squeeze rationality out of a blindly mechanical and/or stochastic computational substrate. All of this, I already pointed out above. the real issue is, what sort of world do we inhabit, to be responsibly, rationally significantly free? KFkairosfocus
April 29, 2017
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CR, your problems demonstrably start with first principles of right reason. I suggest to you that you try to comment without implicitly relying on distinct identity, starting with alphanumeric characters. When that proves impossible, try to speak without doing the same. Oops, impossible again, try to think without having distinct thoughts. Double oops. In short, you need to deal with a fatal foundational flaw before you have any basis to say anything. It's not rocket science -- as the No Ko's seem to be struggling with -- to see that. KF
PS: The living cell is not a template replicator, but is a metabolising automaton that incorporates a molecular nanotech von Neumann kinematic self replication facility.kairosfocus
April 29, 2017
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@KF #242
Again, I’m suggesting that people are confused about how we make progress, not that we do not make progress. Choosing to call conjecture and criticism “induction” doesn’t help. Yes, I’m suggesting we can be mistaken about how we create knowledge. We can be mistaken about what we’re doing or unaware of a deeper unification that underlies that process.
From the Wikipedia article on Abductive reasoning….
Abductive reasoning allows inferring a as an explanation of b as a result of this inference, abduction allows the precondition a to be abduced from the consequence b. Deductive reasoning and abductive reasoning thus differ in the direction in which a rule like " a entails
b" is used for inference.
As such, abduction is formally equivalent to the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent (or Post hoc ergo propter hoc) because of multiple possible explanations for b.
For example, in a billiard game, after glancing and seeing the eight ball moving towards us, we may abduce that the cue ball struck the eight ball. The strike of the cue ball would account for the movement of the eight ball. It serves as a hypothesis that explains our observation. Given the many possible explanations for the movement of the eight ball, our abduction does not leave us certain that the cue ball in fact struck the eight ball, but our abduction, still useful, can serve to orient us in our surroundings. Despite many possible explanations for any physical process that we observe, we tend to abduce a single explanation (or a few explanations) for this process in the expectation that we can better orient ourselves in our surroundings and disregard some possibilities. Properly used, abductive reasoning can be a useful source of priors in Bayesian statistics.
@KF #243
Definition of criticism
Again, I’ve referenced this by presenting a definition of knowledge that does not require a knowing subject. You seem to be having difficulty taking yourself out of the equation.
Knowledge is information that plays a casual role in being retained when embed in a storage medium. The critical test is that it solves a problem. Specially, it can play a causal role in being copied into the next generation.
For example, when someone drives over a bridge, that represents criticism of the knowledge of what structure would be necessary to support a vehicle. However, the driver or the car is just trying to reach their destination and this was not intentional.critical rationalist
April 29, 2017
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@Origenes
It is utter madness to say that Leonardo da Vinci serves no explanatory purpose wrt the Mona Lisa.
Yes, we've been over this before. You're comparing oranges to apples.
For example, let me fix that for you...
da Vinci being “just born” complete with the knowledge of what transformation of matter are necessary to a copy of the Mona Lisa from raw materials serves no explanatory purpose.
The Mona Lisa is a piece of art, not a template replicator. It does not contain a recipe (the knowledge) of what transformations of mater are necessary to make a copies of itself from raw materials. As such, that recipe was external to the paining, like a car built in a factory. The proximate cause of an organism is that knowledge, as the entire cell is constructed anew during replication.
Furthermore, da Vinci had great flexibility in depicting a woman artistically. He could have used Surrealism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Photorealism, etc. Accuracy is not necessarily a goal of art, because its purpose is to evoke response from the viewer.
In addition, we have explanations for how da Vinci brought about that painting. Part of that includes the concepts of beauty, especially during the early 1500s, the the female form, etc. Designers start out as raw materials that are adapted into biological structures, such as arms, legs, nervous systems, etc., which allow them to manipulate the physical world. Human beings created the knowledge used to make pigments, develop panting techniques. etc. Knowledge grows via conjecture and criticism.
It is utter madness to hold that one could “more efficiently state” that the Mona Lisa “just appeared, complete with that knowledge already present.”
Let me fix that for you as well...
It is utter madness to hold that one could “more efficiently state” that the Mona Lisa “was just painted", complete with the knowledge of how to make a copy of itself from raw materials already present.
This would be like saying Mona Lisa came off da Vinci's easel with with the knowledge of how to make copies of itself from raw materials, despite da Vinci not possessing that knowledge. Or da Vinci being "just born" with that knowledge already present.
However, since the Mona Lisa doesn't actually contain a recipe of how to build a copy of itself from raw materials, saying that recipe was "just painted" with it isn't applicable either. It's not present there.
IOW, you don’t seem to understand the argument being presented.critical rationalist
April 29, 2017
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@Origenes
You wrote:
In the context of the design inference, there is no dichotomy between past experiences and explanatory theory. Intelligence, as a cause, explains the presence of complex specified information in life.
I wrote:
I fail to see how merely choosing to call inductivism an “explanation” helps because, in the context that you’re using the word, it means the same thing.
You wrote:
I am not “choosing to call inductivism an ‘explanation’”.
You’re claiming there is no difference between inferences from past experiences and explanations, when it comes to intelligent design. They are equivalent. What else is that other than choosing to call inductivism an explanation?critical rationalist
April 29, 2017
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The subject of objective vs subjective morality is certainly one that creates a lot of discussion and emotion. However, I don't see how it can develop into any consensus. I believe in objective morality because that is what I was taught from a young age. But I can also understand the perspective of those who think that it is subjective. After all, it would be hard to look at the world and see a universal objective morality.
I think the one thing that both sides would agree with is that humans, for whatever reason, have a sense that we have certain "moral" obligations. To me, the big question isn't whether there is objective universal morality. It is where our sense of "moral" obligation comes from. Is it designed? Is it the result of evolution? Is it possibly a combination of both?hammaspeikko
April 29, 2017
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I see: I agree that disagreements about moral values is not a logical proof that objective moral values don't exist, and I understand the epistomology vs ontology distinction.
I'm just trying to return the discussion to the topics I think we are focusing on, which are, I think
a) it is not logically impossible that this world has no objective moral value, as described by the non-material root-level of reality that I have posited as a possibility,
b1) your counter statement that there exists minimal conditions necessary to establish the presence of an objective moral framework as a logical necessity, and
b2) your offer to explain what they are as well as what the arguments and evidence are that establish that those minimal conditions are met.
These are things that I think are next topics in this discussion.jdk
April 29, 2017
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jdk @250
Thanks, HeKS. I read the section Arguments Against Objective Morality, where you conclude that “the most common arguments against the existence of objective morality that do no simply assume Materialism carry no logical force whatsoever.”
However, I don’t think your post accomplished what you say it did.... quite a bit of your post was about why the theist would expect there to be a lack of uniformity among people, about moral judgments, given in the context of theism itself
....
But these are all arguments for logical possibility, not logical necessity: possible explanations that are consistent with a belief in Christian theism.
The response to that argument in my post was not in any way intended to prove the existence of objective morality as a logical necessity. The purpose was to show that the existence of different moral views does nothing to prove that objective moral values and duties do not exist. There is no logical conflict between the existence of objective moral truths and the failure of humans to grasp them all perfectly. The argument is, in fact, a confusion between Moral Ontology and Moral Epistemology. (I should also point out that the comments go into this argument in quite a bit more depth)
So, again, when you say:
I don’t think your post accomplished what you say it did
I have to disagree. All I say/said it accomplished was to show that 1) there is no logical contradiction between the existence of objective moral values and duties and the existence of different moral opinions, and 2) that the simultaneous existence of both is specifically expected under Christian theism. (Note that Bible quotes in that article were not being used to prove the truth of anything to a non-Christian but merely to show the lack of conflict between Christian expectations and the state of affairs pointed to in the argument against objective morality)
I'm hoping I'll have time to get to more today but I'll have to see.
HeKSHeKS
April 29, 2017
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So here is where I think we left off:
You have written,
IF a world-root being holds any ‘essential positions’ that we would consider morally relevant, THEN it would necessarily produce a world where those morally relevant essential positions form part of the backdrop of reality.
I'll agree to that. The question is whether the antecedent of that statement is true.
You have also said that there are "minimal conditions necessary to establish the presence of an objective moral framework as a logical necessity", and offered to explain what they are as well as what the arguments and evidence are that establish that those minimal conditions are met. That is the part I would like to hear about.jdk
April 29, 2017
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Thanks, HeKS. I read the section Arguments Against Objective Morality, where you conclude that "the most common arguments against the existence of objective morality that do no simply assume Materialism carry no logical force whatsoever."
FTR: [https://uncommondescent.com/atheism/does-it-matter-what-we-believe-about-morality-a-guest-post-by-heks/]
However, I don't think your post accomplished what you say it did.
If you have time and the interest to make your arguments again here and discuss them, I would be interested. I don't want to respond deeply, however, to an old post that was in another context. However, I will say that quite a bit of your post was about why the theist would expect there to be a lack of uniformity among people, about moral judgments, given in the context of theism itself: the fall, quotes form the Bible, and statements such as,
That there happen to be differences of opinion over what really is “the good” in some cases, even among theists, only highlights why the theist can reasonably expect some form of moral direction from the Creator of material reality and the ground of moral truths if the theist is right in thinking that such a Being exists, for why would he create a material reality that includes a moral dimension and cause to exist intelligent moral agents such as our ourselves who feel the moral prodding of a conscience if he does not care that we live according to the moral values and duties that he grounds. And if he cares, why would he not aid us in understanding his desires?
and
The more important one is that this state of affairs [various cultures having some similar moral values] is expected under theism because it is believed that God implanted in humanity a natural grasp of his moral laws.
But these are all arguments for logical possibility, not logical necessity: possible explanations that are consistent with a belief in Christian theism.
Unless you can show that other explanations for mankind's moral behaviour are logically impossible, all you have done is establish that theism is one of the explanations on the table, which I don't deny.
I have proposed a non-materialistic root-level of being who doesn't have any essential moral positions, and a world in which human beings, as free, rational creatures, create cultural normative expectations and rules based on our own understanding of, and in attempted harmony with, our social and individual nature and needs. The fact that there is some commonality across cultures (but perhaps less than you might expect if you have a broad understanding of different cultures, primitive and modern) is not surprising, because we do have some common human needs. On the other hand, the vast variety of cultural norms is also not surprising, because we are dependent on learning, as opposed to instinct, for most of the understandings which structure our behavior.
So the question at hand in this discussion is different than your prior post. Our topic is not "can theism explain the wide range of beliefs in the world". If you assume such things as a caring God, the fall, etc. then of course you can explain the wide range of beliefs.
However, our topic is if you don't assume such things, but do accept a non-materialistic root-level as I have proposed, can one also explain the wide range of beliefs, including the moral norms and sensibilities, without their being any logical contradiction? Is it logically impossible that our world is like this?
I don't think your previous post addresses that question.jdk
April 29, 2017
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jdk,
Just quickly...
P.S. to HeKS: I took a quick look at the first part of the first link you provided, and quickly saw that it wasn’t too relevant to our discussion. I am positing the existence of a non-material root-level of reality, not a materialistic atheism. Therefore, I hope we can just continue our discussion as it is going and not confuse it with other perspectives.
I understand the difference between the position you are positing here an the one I primarily addressed in that first article. However, that article does address the specific objection you raised to the existence of objective morality, which is the fact that people have differing opinions on moral issues. That argument is also addressed in the comment thread.
You can find this covered in the article under the subheading, "Arguments Against Objective Morality"
HeKSHeKS
It is almost — almost — amusing but then quite sad to see how objectors to design theory play with logic and worldviews issues, then run away when the substantial issues are taken up.
FFT5: The implications of the familiar extraordinary.
In this thread, there are arguments [posted] that . . . as an observable phenomenon . . . show that we are capable of significant choice and reasoning, i.e. we are responsibly, rationally, significantly free, conscious, en-conscienced, morally governed, communicating creatures. (Indeed, those trying to object are operating on the implicit premise that we are urged by conscience toward the truth and the right; and if we were not, this world would descend into a dark, chaotic ruin in short order. It is a good thing that something urges us on to the truth and the right.)
Locke, in Sec 5 of his essay on human understanding (and yes, I add scriptural references i/l/o his cites and allusions), aptly comments:
All of that is in the context of rebuking a lazy, sneeringly supercilious selective hyperskepticism that will scorn more than adequate warrant for ethical theism, because it shuns the premise of moral government: accountability on plainly recognisable duty, before our Maker, Lord, Governor and utterly just Judge.
But, that is a bit quick off the mark.
There is no recognition of meaning, no perception, no purpose, just blind cause-effect chains externally arranged to yield the solution to certain differential equations. GIGO, and all that. Likewise, the old Pentium chip neither knew nor understood nor cared about the wired in errors that led to the early recall. And, a neural network is not in principle any different. (BTW this points to serious design inferences on the relevant hardware and software in bio-cybernetics systems, but that is a secondary point.)
The primary point has been highlighted by Reppert:
In short, a physicalist account of mindedness (much less, guidance by light of conscience) faces an ugly, impassable gulch.
In effect, rocks — even refined and carefully organised rocks — have no dreams; computation is not intentional contemplation.
At this point, evolutionary materialism and its fellow travellers — and nope you cannot properly, conveniently open up rhetorical daylight between some vague agnosticism and full-blown evo mat to deflect this — face an impassable gulch.
One, that brings out what was already highlighted: mindedness, consciousness, reasoned inference and conscience’s compass-pointing alike are all reduced to grand delusion on evo mat premises.
Grand delusion would collapse responsible, rational freedom and so falls into irretrievable incoherence and absurdity. Thence, the necessary falsity Pearcey and others have pointed to.
But in reality, rational, responsible, conscience-compass bearing consciousness is our first undeniable empirical fact. The fact through which we perceive all others.
This is the familiar extraordinary phenomenon, the pivot on which the project of building a sound worldview turns. In effect, unless a worldview is compatible with our being responsible, reasonable, conscience-guided and significantly free beings, it cannot even sit to the table for a discussion of comparative difficulties. It is silenced by being inconsistent with rationality. It is patently, irretrievably absurd and necessarily false. (Evo mat and fellow traveller ideologies, I am looking straight at you.)>>