I see that Denyse has taken time away from misinterpreting / misrepresenting decade old articles she found on google to visit our little home. Come on in Denyse! Would you like a cuppa? Don’t worry, there are no “Brit Toffs” here.
Listen, as you’ve stopped by, we’d like to have a quick chat about UD:
Frankly, we’re a bit disappointed. We were hoping for some design science to chew on, some CSI calculations to review. But instead we were saddened when we learned that neither Barry Arrington nor KairosFocus understand CSI. We’re going to give you a little time to get up to speed with the literature so that we can re-engage when you know the stuff. You don’t need to make up more acronyms like FIASCO: FOCUS on mainstream ID concepts. We may find fault with Dembski’s work but he was leagues ahead of where you are now.
Start here:
http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.06.Specification.pdf
There’s an EleP(T|H)ant in the room that you need to come to terms with. Perhaps when you understand the source material we can have a better chat (and therefore more posts).
We also note that UD has expanded to more general science denialism / Republican talking points. Are you sure you want to do that? Pretending to be a science blog was more entertaining.
Well thanks for dropping by. We’ll keep our ears to the ground and report back if scientists ever isolate the specific, “selfish gene”.
So Barry revives vitalism, and that merits a deep and kariosfocus length response? What’s next? Newton’s planet adjusting angels?
I think Timaeus is disappointed that no-one appears to take him seriously these days.
Well that escalated quickly. Petrushka is banned, and comments deleted.
My last question was whether a bg of chemicals having the exact molecular configuration of a live human would be treated differently from a random configuration.
That, apparently, is off topic.
It appears that Barry is back and in fine form. So much for the amnesty. The main difference between the new Barry and the old Barry is that the old Barry at least had the honesty to announce when he had banned someone. Now he just does it silently, giving the impression (to people like Timaeus and the other gullibles) that the ID ciritics do not have an argument and have run away.
My banning was fine form. Final warning, post deletion, and banning wrapped up in one.
The post deletion takes the cake. It went directly to his bag of chemicals question.
I merely asked if the bag of chemicals could be arranged in the form of a live human being.
You should know by now that any comment or question that calls into question Barry’s opinion is off topic. It makes it far easier for him to win his arguments.
Zachriel can’t be far behind you. Mark Frank, for whatever reason, is immune to the banhammer. Maybe that is because Barry always uses Mark as an example whenever anyone questions his banning motivations.
Barry is supposedly a lawyer and not just a bill collector. He should know the effect of telling the jury to disregard what they just heard or saw.
Lizzie might not approve this descent into peanut gallery mode but, as she’s on extended leave, what the hell… 🙂
Do we really think the amnesty thing (who didn’t predict it ending in tears?) was designed to increase ad revenue? I thought income was based on click-throughs and I’ve not yet been tempted.
But picking up on Allan’s link, I see Timaeus has damned me with faint praise.
.
Not sure whether it would be of interest to offer an invite to Timaeus. Oh, I see someone has.
link
Alan Fox,
I see the amnesty as a rare non-point mutation in the evolution of UD. They need to keep enough reality-based commenters around to keep the site live, but not so many that the regulars can’t dogpile and ignore how their arguments get shredded. It’s a delicate balance that requires continuous adjustment.
Barry let it swing too far toward the “IDCists getting their asses handed to them faster than they could make up new nonsense” side. Now it will revert to the “race to the bottom of the crazy” end of the spectrum for a bit.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Arrington is not overly charitable towards people who reject the conceptual basis of the “questions” he poses. He wants answers, after all — none of this thinking!
I’ve been trying to figure out the precise error in Arrington’s conception of “materialism”. As best I can see it, the error is something like “compositionalism” (not the best term): all of the properties of X can be explained in terms of the properties of the constituents of X. I suspect he believes this because compositionalism plays a role in Christian theology, where the intellectual and moral properties of persons are explained in terms of the properties of one of the constituents of persons, i.e. the soul.
Of course, if one accepts compositionalism in the first place, then emergentism will look like nonsense — which is precisely what Arrington thinks.
For a long time I’ve been struggling to understand what exactly Arrington and a few other regulars at Uncommon Descent mean by “materialism”. Though it’s hard to articulate clearly, there’s a deep disconnect between what they mean by “materialism” and what naturalists like most of us here believe, which is why they think that we are logically inconsistent.
Mark Johnson (Morality for Humans) describes what he calls “the moral law folk theory”:
1. Humans have a split nature — a unique conjunction of a mental or spiritual dimension and a physical or bodily dimension.
2. We are driven by our bodily needs to seek pleasures, but because these needs are not rational, there is a fundamental moral tension between our higher, rational selves and our lower, bodily selves.
3. Free will lies in overriding the bodily in favor of the spiritual, mental, or rational, which is why we can control our actions and be held responsible for them.
4. Moral constraint consists in universally binding moral principles given to us by some transcendent source (reason or revelation).
5. Morally right conduct consists in discerning the moral principles relevant to a given situation and having the strength of will to avoid whatever bodily temptations would incline us to disobey the moral law.
If one’s basic picture consists of the moral law folk theory, then of course rejecting the spiritual dimension of human existence — “materialism” in their sense — means that one thinks that selfish, bodily pleasures are all that there is, and that morality, choice, and responsibility are nonsensical. And this is what they think we should believe, were we logically consistent. Hence all the questions about why we don’t torture babies, etc.
It does not occur to them that one can reject the entire moral law folk theory altogether. They take for granted that a normal mature human being is metaphysically split, and then interpret us as rejecting one half of that split and retaining only the other half. They do not see the philosophical option of denying the split itself, which is what I think a philosophically adequate naturalism should do.
Kantian Naturalist,
Does their position on morality etc. apply to electrons, too?
Joe Felsenstein,
So far as I can tell, their view is that human beings are radically unlike everything else by virtue of our having a spiritual dimension and a physical dimension. Deny the first half of that, they seem to say, and there’s no way of understanding what makes a human being different from any other swarm of particles.
Can you say circular?
It’s not viciously circular, though. I mean, given a non-naturalistic world-view, it would be remarkable if they could do justice to a naturalistic world-view — after all, the non-naturalism is already at work in how they interpret other world-views!
If one’s basic picture consists of the moral law folk theory, then of course rejecting the spiritual dimension of human existence — “materialism” in their sense — means that one thinks that selfish, bodily pleasures are all that there is, and that morality, choice, and responsibility are nonsensical. And this is what they think we should believe, were we logically consistent. Hence all the questions about why we don’t torture babies, etc.
I’m so used to complaining about people who don’t make any effort to understand others that I’m taken a bit aback by the quality of your thought here. I’d love to know if any of the UD posters on this topic–StephenA, WJM, Barry–would agree with your description. Their garden walls make that unlikely, which is a shame.
My vote for the most stupid comment ever:
“By definition self evident truths cannot be demonstrated. “
Can anyone here guess who said this?
Someone at UD? Either Barry or Joe.
Acartia,
Taken out of context, it’s just a tautology. Not sure how that makes it stupid, unless all tautologies are.
In context, it means they are undeniable.
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t know why it even matters to me, but I find the incessant failure to miss the point on ‘materialist morality’ to be enormously frustrating. They point to a near-universal abhorrence to something, such as ‘Torturing-Infants’, and say: ‘There! There is objectivity!’. The genetic possibility is quite alien to them; to understand it might be a foot-in-the-door for all manner of genetically deterministic horrors. That’s incorrect of course; a genetic predisposition to protect children would not mean everything (or even, strictly, anything) else we do is subject to the same control.
Nonetheless, to them, although flesh might be commonly descended (especially if you believe in Adam/Eve/Noah), souls cannot be. Therefore a universal which strikes at the heart of what one perceives as the soul cannot have anything to do with biology. One can lead them to the water, point to its wetness and refreshing nature, accept that it can drown … but all one gets back is “so you think people should just do what they like then, huh?”
Allan Miller,
I meant, of course, failure to get the point! D’oh!
Baxk in 2012 I did a literature search on Gonzalez and graphed the results. Probably more up to date than others. I’m not about to register at UD, so if someone who can could post the links it would be nioce.
Graph: http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y10/JonF/Guillermo-Gonzalez-publications_zps1fe6d076.png
Excel spreadsheet with list of publications: https://mega.co.nz/#!W5ABVLhC!ZsNCbEaAfIHNNd2F3nDEhSx7s380AAxKr3GhKsvk3Gk
(Because I followed the link to the “Christians should be eradicated?” thread at UD and noted that skram posted bad info on Gonzales’ publication numbers).
Allan Miller,
It is frustrating, and I don’t see the situation really changing any time soon.
For one thing, the moral law folk theory runs deeper than any explicit doctrine or account that one could give; it is a metaphor or cognitive frame that shapes how one sees the very domain one is trying to understand. It is a pre-understanding, you might say. We all have such metaphorical pre-understandings, and this is one of theirs. Given that the moral law folk theory. I don’t see how one could possibly accept anything like a naturalistic account of ethics.
For another, naturalistic ethics hasn’t really trickled down into the public sphere. The most well-known attempts — Dawkins and Wilson — are so crude as to be laughable. But the more sophisticated attempts by professional philosophers like Philip Kitcher, Mark Johnson and Owen Flanagan simply haven’t made their way into popular consciousness. This is partly because such books are not easy to read, but I think it has more to do with the economics of publishing and book-selling.
Science — even quantum mechanics and relativity — can be made easy to read, at least in the sense that a layman can judge the likelihood of applications like time travel or teleportation.
That something like ethics cannot be made easy to read sounds dubious.
I didn’t say that it can’t be. (Personally I find Flanagan and Kitcher perfectly easy to read, but I’m an outlier. BruceS has read Kitcher’s The Ethical Project and can comment on it.)
The very heart of the problem is that the university system in North America has institutionalized a system of incentives that systematically reward hyper-specialized research. It’s not just that professional philosophers can’t write for popular audiences (though there is that, too — it’s not in our training), but that writing for a popular audience is against our rational self-interest.
There are various attempts to get professional philosophy out of the Ivory Tower, but none of them have really gotten much traction yet. They remain fairly small and poorly-known, like The Stone in the New York Times (weekly opinion columns by philosophers), the Public Philosophy Network, a few philosophy magazines aimed at non-specialists like Philosophy Now, and I believe there’s a recent NEH-funded project along these lines that I heard about a few months ago but haven’t gotten involved in yet.
Name the author of the quote. The sequel.
“Mark, certainly a person can have a different opinion. And it is self evidently true that such person’s opinion would be wrong, “
Or this one:
UD Editors: And thanks for coming onto this blog and demonstrating everything that is wrong with this postmodern hell you people are busy building. As I’ve said before, don’t worry. I realize I am fighting a rearguard retreat. The center cannot hold. Your side will surely win (at least in the short to medium term), and you can come and mock me at whatever camp they put me after the round up all of the undesirables (assuming I live long enough to see the inside of a camp).
Hint; it might be the same person.
Wallowing in persecution fantasies. So brave.
socle,
UD Editors: And thanks for coming onto this blog and demonstrating everything that is wrong with this postmodern hell you people are busy building. As I’ve said before, don’t worry. I realize I am fighting a rearguard retreat. The center cannot hold. Your side will surely win (at least in the short to medium term), and you can come and mock me at whatever camp they put me after the round up all of the undesirables (assuming I live long enough to see the inside of a camp).
Fantasy it may be–especially the idea that there’s any bravery in pushing a scam–but there’s always some hope for understanding in a creationist who self-labels as “undesirable.” Because, yeah.
Glen Davidson
Acartia,
Hyperbole is contagious.
“Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty Darwinist!”.
It’s actually kind of remarkable that Arrington doesn’t realize that liberals just want to mock conservatives in the public sphere and curtail their political power through democratic means. It’s a bit disturbing that anyone could have such paranoid fantasies.
In case anyone is interested, the thought that it is not self-evident that 2+2=4 doesn’t require any affiliation with “postmodernism” — only a bit of familiarity with 20th-century mathematical logic. (Briefly, it is not self-evident because it can be proven. But since I don’t want to go on yet another rant about the Myth of the Given, I’ll stop here.)
Invoking the “self-evident” claim is just lazy thinking.
I was going to ask a few questions about self-evident truths in mathematics earlier, so since you’ve brought it up, maybe I can convince you to continue a bit farther.
My understanding is that 2 is defined to be 1 + 1 (i.e., the successor of 1), so wouldn’t 1 + 1 = 2 actually be an example of a self-evident truth?
And are there any self-evident truths other than the axioms and definitions that you set?
*Edit: I think of axioms not as “self-evident truths” really, but clearly they are unprovable.
I don’t see it quite that way. My understanding is that given the concept of a number and the successor rule, it logically follows that 1+1=2. But since that’s a logical consequence of the foundations of arithmetic, it’s not “self-evident”. If it were self-evident, it couldn’t be proved!
That aside, I myself have a fairly complicated set of ideas about “self-evidence,” so I think that self-evidence is correct in some ways and incorrect in others. There are a lot of ambiguities here that need to be clarified, and the notion of “self-evident truth” tends to conceal those ambiguities. I won’t go into all the details, but I think there are some old threads on TSZ where I explore this more carefully. Bottom-line: depending on what one means by ‘self-evident’, there are either lots of cases or none.
There’s an old thread on “self-evident truths” here.
Well, I suppose it depends on what you assume to begin with. I know that Russell and Whitehead famously prove 1 + 1 = 2 as a theorem in Principia Mathematica, which agrees with your view.
And after searching through stackexchange, it seems there is some debate over whether 2 = 1 + 1 is a definition or a theorem even if we start with the Peano axioms, but I think your view prevails among the experts.
On the other hand, what if we take 1 + 1 = 2 to be an axiom from the start? There’s nothing stopping us from doing that, AFAIK.
I haven’t thought about this much, but right now I don’t see thah the concept of “self-evident truth” has much significance in mathematics specifically.
The only thing stopping us from doing so, as far as I can tell, would be a pragmatic preference for having as few axioms as possible.
I don’t think so either, but then again, I don’t see much significance for “self-evident truth” in ethics, either. I’m fairly critical of the entire concept; that’s one of the reasons why there’s no love lost between me and Arrington.
Well, Barry’s choice reveals him to be empathy-blind.
I think he is technically a psychopath, but I find that word misleading and unacceptable. What seems evidently true is that believers in objective morality are that way because they are empathy-blind and cannot imagine an autonomous person behaving well toward other people — not because they fear punishment, but because they want to.
I wish I had a more euphonious word. I model empathy-blindness after color blindness. It implies a person unable even to imagine empathy. The neurons don’t exist or are not connected. They require an external agent to define morality and to enforce it. You see this when they discuss the terrible things they would do if they were not restrained by religion.
petrushka,
Slightly more charitably, they don’t see how empathy could do the kind of work for “grounding” morality that they insist upon. They seem to want some kind of argument that would convince the empathy-blind person to avoid harming others. By my lights, this is a weird sort of excessive rationalism — they want reason to do something that it cannot do. Aristotle, who understood the role of feelings and passions in our moral life, knew better than that.
I don’t think I’m being uncharitable. Being empathy-blind is not a moral failing. It’s not a character flaw, any more than is color blindness.
Reason is all they have.
I find that in practice, a claim that such-and-such is a “self-evident truth” is, essentially, a declaration that one has no valid reason for supposing such-and-such to be true. In semantic terms, such a claim works out as being interchangeable with, and indistinguishable from, “Because I said so, that’s why!”
Such as, such and such is self evidently designed.
I detect a significant hardening of tone at UD latterly. There is no little fury among those weighing on the ‘objective’ side, because of what they imagine the subjectivists to be saying (despite the fact that – as a subjectivist! – I know they are being horribly misinterpreted), or the social evils they imagine will be visited if … well, if someone who mattered actually held the subjectivist position! So much so that, when ‘Lilly’ weighs in with a gentle comment about loving one’s neighbour, I could just hug her!
My impression is that they finally lost patience with being – in their own minds – patient and tolerant. Bully Arrington seems to have little time for the gentler Christian virtues like compassion and humility and I’m a little surprised that the detente with atheists and materialists lasted as long as it did.
As for the debate about subjectivism v objectivism, I see that as having very little to do with the ontological status of moral belief and everything to do with establishing their version of Christian morality as the objective one. I noticed on a couple of occasions when I asked the question, the sense of them pretending they hadn’t heard was almost palpable. I wanted to say I was pretty sure that ISIS and Boku Haram think their versions of morality are the objective ones but I very much doubted that they and Arrington would agree on what was self-evidently true morally.
The sad thing is that they are proud of raising the drawbridge at Castle Arrington. They don’t see that their exclusionism compared to the open-door policy here and at AtBC is a far more eloquent testament to their sense of weakness and vulnerability than any words of ours.
Some thoughts have come to mind and I’ll put them in the form of questions:
At what age in a person’s life does ‘truth’, or anything else, become ‘self-evident’?
Can newborn babies differentiate ‘true’ and ‘false’?
Is anything ‘self-evident’ to a newborn baby?
Can newborn babies calculate or understand 1+1=, 1+1/5=, 49-27=, or any other math?
If a newborn baby were shown a piece of paper with 2+2=4 or 9×9=81 written on it, would they understand it and think “Yeah, that’s self-evident.”? How about if the piece of paper had E=mc2 written on it?
If an adult were shown a piece of paper with an equation written on it in a script that they have never seen and and that is very different from what they have ever seen, would they understand it and say “Yeah, that’s self-evident.”?
If something is ‘self-evident’, can it be learned, unlearned, or altered in any way in a person’s mind?
Is something that is ‘self-evident’ something that cannot be learned?
If something is learned, is it ‘self-evident’?
SeverskyP35,
Yep. They seem to think they can change the world (or keep it the same, as necessary) by shouting at it, slamming the door if it disagrees. I think the gentler commenters tend to drift away, leaving the Angry Brigade to hector and demonise.
Allan Miller,
And the UD IDiots obviously believe that most or all of the people of the world read UD and that bouncing their shouts around that sanctuarial echo chamber will garner millions or even billions of supporters for their (wedge) agenda.
Creodont2,
I think it is “self-evident” what the answers to most of those questions is going to be. And there are indeed perfectly good reasons to be deeply suspicious of the concept of “self-evident truth”.
On the other hand, there seems to be something right about the following:
– if one has mastered basic arithmetic, then it seems self-evident that 2+2=4;
– if one has normal vision and has mastered basic color-concepts, then if one is looking at a red object, it seems self-evident that one is looking at a red object;
– If has basic empathy and a rough command of moral concepts, it seems self-evident that a world with less cruelty is better than a world with more cruelty.
These examples suggest that there is something right about the concept of “self-evident truth” — the real trouble begins when, under the pressure of Agrippa’s Trilemma, one appeals to these kinds of innocuous self-evidence to do heavy lifting in epistemology.
Kn: your self evident examples are not even immune to trivial falsification.