http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB
2,657 thoughts on “Elon Musk Thinks Evolution is Bullshit.”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Well, of course. Hard to imagine any usable theory that’s not underdetermined by observation. You need more than that, though. You need the available evidence to confirm the demon to the same extent as it does the tree. My view doesn’t allow that, but yours does–because it’s Cartesian in the sense that the basic evidence is sense-data from which we infer other stuff.
ETA: BTW, I wish you’d answer some of the questions I asked you in my long post (or the questions before that, or the questions after that).
Oh well, he says you’re wrong. And he also doesn’t like the Cartesian name-calling, because of the baggage it carries.
You could have tried discussing issues, rather than name-calling and making things up.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
(i) Descartes was one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived. It’s no sin being linked with him.
(ii) I think Keiths remains a little confused about his views on this subject–starting with the likelihood stuff and going right down to his last post, though, admittedly, not as confused as you are.
Also, it’s tough to figure out exactly where keiths is on this stuff because he doesn’t answer any questions.
If you had a clue you wouldn’t have to make up what I believe and claim.
Convenient for you. Not for those of us who care about getting things right, though.
Oh well, spin away. It’s what you do, if hardly well.
Glen Davidson
Oh I see, your “comparison” made to disparage me came from your ignorance.
I’d like to be able to pretend to be surprised, but hardly…
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson: If you had a clue you wouldn’t have to make up what I believe and claim.
If you weren’t so touchy, maybe someone might take an interest in that some day. In the meantime, I wouldn’t expect a ton of give and take. You’ll have to just have your beliefs and claims and assume they’re ok with everybody else. Because what in the world would be the point of trying to discuss anything with you other than to say, “Good job, Glen!”?
I don’t that it is actually what he (or any other conservative Christian) wants. What he wants is great communion with his god and “better Internet” (to paraphrase his earlier claim.) He and others want some of what the world is today without the “bad”, not realizing that there can be nothing of what the world “is” as we know it in this material configuration without the bad. It’s like wanting all the great things about food or wine (the taste, the nutrition, the ‘feel good’ effects) without any of the bad (the calories, the consequences of overeating or drinking, the hangover). It’s like insisting everyone will exist in the “perfect temperature”. The good and bad effects are both conditions of being able to experience food or temperature or whatever in the first place. And they continue to kid themselves with all sorts of similar nonsense. Like the claims of “eternal life”. Such a concept is not possible – there can be no such state as “life” without the contrasting state of “death”.
So FMM’s (and similar folks’ concepts of the afterlife) are truly just fantasies. There’s a better chance the afterlife will be like Middle-earth or Hogwarts than anything Christianity has dreamed up.
Don’t assume that I have the same position as keiths when I clearly don’t. That too hard for you?
I actually wrote stuff, and you didn’t bother with it, so shut up about me being “touchy” or whatever stupid fabrication you use fob off blame. I didn’t start out being “touchy,” you just made up shit as you went along, heedless of what I actually wrote.
Take responsibility for yourself rather than blaming others. Then a discussion might be possible. I’m not discussing your fabrications.
Glen Davidson
walto,
Last night we were in the middle of an exchange over what constitutes evidence for the demon hypothesis and the tree hypothesis. I was awaiting your response to my latest comment.
This morning, instead of responding, you were off on a tangent about the Cartesian theater, which neither Glen nor I are invoking. I declined to follow you on that tangent, which is why I didn’t respond to the questions you posed in that comment.
Could we get back to our exchange? You were asking about what constitutes evidence in support of the demon hypothesis, and I was explaining that the demon hypothesis and the what-you-see-is-really-there hypothesis are both unfalsifiable, and therefore that every observation is compatible with both hypotheses and supports each to an equal degree.
For that reason, the evidence does not favor the WYSIRT hypothesis over the demon hypothesis.
I’m guessing that you’ll disagree, but if so, why?
keiths,
Isn’t the claim that the tree is really there falsifiablr by, e.g. a guy with a hologram projector being discovered nearby?
But generally, as i’ve indicated I do disagree that the two claims have the same footing, because on my view there is some kind of original justification for the tree hypothesis provided by my (ostensible) perceptual experience.
But I realized as I lay in bed last night that if one instead takes the epistemic power to reside in the belief that one is experiencing sense-data of a particular sort (as I believe you do, and as I’d thought that Glen does until being disabused of that supposition this morning), then I think your view that they’re equally warranted is correct. That is, you have to dump the sense data theory or you have no good reason to deny the demon–just as you claimed.
I mean, unless you either embrace phenomenalism (or some other form of idealism), or go for some sort of supernatural resolution in the manner of Descartes or FMM, etc.
So I make the choices if one takes the primacy of sense-data:
1. Phenomenalism
2. Indirect realism with reliance on supernatural help.
3. Your asterisk proposal–i.e., indirect realism with nothing to choose between the tree and any number of deception proposals.
OTOH, with my view, which Glen dubbed “the tree nonsense” (and which one might indict on the basis that it simply builds in the supernatural help) you get
1. Direct realism, with demon hypotheses just being idle worries with no evidence in their favor.
2. Indirect realism, with demon hypotheses just being idle worries with no evidence in their favor.
I prefer 1 both because I don’t think we make inferences to trees and because 2 becomes kind of a weird position if we have original evidence for trees, but that could be wrong and I will await Noe, Bruce, KN et al for further information on the topic.
walto,
No, because you must assume that your perception of the guy with the projector is veridical in order to demonstrate that your perception of the tree is not. It could be the other way around, or it could be that neither perception is veridical.
It’s the “original justification” idea that I’m having trouble with. What makes it “original” for one hypothesis but not for the other? To me, it seems like you’re saying “My intuition is that I’m seeing a real tree, not that I’m being fooled by a Cartesian demon. That intuition is itself evidence that I am in fact seeing a real tree and not being fooled by a Cartesian demon.”
But to count that intuition as evidence for what is being intuited, you need to have some reason for trusting the intuition, and I’m not seeing that reason.
Probably safer to talk about “sensory information” instead of “sense data”, since the phrase “sense data” has baggage associated with it, as KN points out here.
I would say that:
1. Our impressions of the world “out there” depend on the sensory information flowing into us. Different streams of sensory information produce different impressions.
2. The same stream of sensory information can be produced by different processes. A particular stream of sensory information is producing the particular visual experience I’m having right now (of that scrawny-looking tree in my front yard). That stream of sensory information might be produced by photons from the sun bouncing off the tree, being focused on my retinas, and creating nerve impulses that travel up the optic nerves to my brain, where they are processed; but it could also be produced by a Cartesian demon. The stream of information is exactly the same in either case, so there’s nothing in the stream that allows me to favor one hypothesis over the other.
3. My question for you: If there’s nothing dispositive within the sensory stream, where does the information come from that allows you to assert the truth of one hypothesis over the other?
walto,
I don’t understand the technical details either. I just quoted the paper to show that the Boltzmann brain question is not settled, contrary to fifth’s characterization.
Regarding the reddit quote, it seems fine as a defense of evolution against junkyard tornado arguments, but the Boltzmann brain problem is a different beast entirely.
To say that evolution can produce brains is not to say that quantum fluctuations can’t.
I thought the idea of the reddit response wasn’t to show that quantum fluctuations COULDN’T produce a ‘brain’ but to try to refute the claim that such a production was actually much more likely than a planet full of thinking human beings. That’s what FMM was asserting, I believe.
Again, I don’t know if it’s right, but I take the Boltzmann argument to be that because of what we expect from entropy, a quantum fluctuation ‘brain’ is much more likely. But that seems to me to assume a ceteris paribus condition, and the evolution argument attacks that.
On the other stuff, I really don’t have anything to say that I haven’t said already on his thread. If it’s not persuasive, so be it.
The main idea from Kant that I’m appealing to in this conversation is the interdependence of subjectivity and objectivity — what Jay Rosenberg calls “the Mutuality Thesis”. It’s quite separable from Kant’s idealism, which I do not share.
If the Mutuality Thesis is true — and I recognize I haven’t given much argument for it here — then it is not true that “we don’t have much choice but to use our ‘inner selves’ to consider the ‘world'”. And that is because we don’t have any privileged access to our own inner states in contrast to which the external world is merely problematic. Instead, our access to our own mental states and our access to the physical world are interdependent — you can’t have without the other.
There is in fact a serious issue right here, as to whether it is true that brains construct inner representations of the world and whether we have direct access only to those representations and not what they are representations of.
As far as I can tell, there really is Cartesian theater problem lurking here. On the account you seem to be offering, the function of brains is to construct inner models of their environments, and then somehow we can “see” these models but we can’t “see” what they are models of.
Who is the “we” who can see these models? And how do we know that we have immediate, non-distorted access to the neural representations? Is there a homunculus looking on at the neural representations, like a submarine captain trying to determine the shapes, size, and speed of canyons, enemy craft, and torpedoes by interpreting displays from sonar? Maybe it’s the community of cognitive scientists who function as homunculi here?
I do not mean this as a term of disparagement, but this is pretty much the kind of view that Michael Wheeler calls “Cartesian cognitive science”. It relies on the input-processing-output metaphor drawn from computational theory (in particular, of Turning machines) that inspired the first few generations of cognitive science.
What you take to be a fact about how brains work has been contested by some practicing cognitive scientists for about thirty years — ever since Varela et al. published The Embodied Mind in 1991. There’s a very recent new collection, The Pragmatic Turn in Cognitive Science, that brings together new work in this area. Brains do process information (as well as many other things), but they aren’t Turning machines.
That much seems right to me, but we disagree about how to understand “the senses”. You seem to think of “the senses” as passively taking in _____, generating sense-data, and then that all being processed. It’s a completely internalist procedure, and the result is that “the world” is inside the skull and the world is unknowable.
Whereas I take the view that brains are generating action-guiding representations for regulating motor control, and the play of energies across sensory surfaces generates information then used to modify the action-guiding representations. On this view, brain activity is explained in terms of the dynamical processes that causally yoke brains to bodies and to environments. There’s no internalism, no Cartesian theater, and no epistemological divide between the world-as-experienced and the world-in-itself.
It depends if we’re doing epistemology or philosophy of mind. In philosophy of mind, yes, the semantic content and epistemic activities of sentient animals are ontologically prior to the semantic content and epistemic activities of sapient animals. But if we’re doing epistemology, it’s precisely the latter that is at work in reflecting on the conditions of knowledge. We can and must do both, but we also need to be careful about which we’re doing when.
Keiths,
As with my reply to Glen, so here too: there’s a difference between epistemology and philosophy of mind. In epistemology, my only concession to Cartesian skepticism was that skeptical worries are indefeasible. (Though also idle.) Though since Descartes himself undertook to refute skepticism, the view here is perhaps better thought of as Humean skepticism rather than Cartesian skepticism?
That’s a different issue from the Cartesian thesis in philosophy of mind, the thesis of the priority of inner experience over outer experience. It is true that Descartes entangles these issues, and gives us the logical priority of the inner over the outer as the methodological foundation for his strategy of overcoming skepticism.
Point is, one can concede in epistemology that certain skeptical worries are indefeasible, and also think that the priority of inner experience over outer experience is false in philosophy of mind.
walto,
I’m also strongly inclined towards direct realism, though my theoretical influences differ from yours. I find Coates’s arguments for critical realism intriguing but not ultimately convincing. I agree with him that there’s both an occurrent and dispositional component to perception, and that the occurrences in sensory consciousness are necessary for distinguishing between perceiving and thinking.
But I am not happy with his conclusion that the occurrent, sensory component is “inner” in a non-question-begging sense, let alone that experiences (full stop) are “inner events”. I find his critique of relational direct realism more glib than intended (since it is intended as a deadly serious refutation).
Looking for stuff on direct realist criticisms of Coates, I found work by Kenneth Hobson. Might be worth your while. I haven’t read any of his papers yet myself.
Yes, the problem is that you differentiate subjectivity and objectivity in the first place. Why? What’s the basis? How do you know that there’s an outside, or even an inside? I don’t doubt that we construct an outside and an inside, and I do depend on it pragmatically, but I don’t see how it exists there for the taking, or is a fundamental fact that we can even construct.
No, they’re the same thing–at least until we start to categorize them differently. You want to make them interdependent, as if there is an unproblematic inside, but also an unproblematic outside (in the end, I don’t know how your position differs from naive realism, although it very well may do so). It’s not even that the “outside” is problematic, it’s that the whole thing is problematic (at least can be), really. I realized only later that I invoked Kant to say that the inside is an issue, when his point was really that the outside is the issue (although he didn’t put it that way)–that’s because I don’t really see the difference between inside and outside except as a kind of convention. I only wrote “we don’t have much choice but to use our ‘inner selves’ to consider the ‘world’” (important scare quotes) because that’s conventional language, not because I think that there’s an outside at all, except as idea.
That’s the greatest problem I have with what you’re saying, that for you there’s some sort of interdependent subjective and objective, an inside and an outside, and I’m just saying that it’s all just psyche, mind, etc. I don’t really doubt that we’re interacting with others, especially in order to meaningfully construct an “inside” and an “outside,” a “subject” and an “object,” but in the end it’s brain interactions to “inputs,” the latter of which may be “internal” or “external.” I don’t know the difference between “internal” and “external” inputs, except via learning–at least that is how it seems to me.
Retinotopic map. It’s right there in the visual cortex, and we can be made to “see” things in spatial orientation if the right nerves are stimulated. That it’s necessary to have this representation I doubt, but it’s still there and important to visual information processing.
No, that’s not it at all. I think it’s more than slightly likely that we “seeing” an image in the retinotopic map is what generates (via electric fields) visual consciousness in the first place. How else could it be? Nothing is looking at the retinotopic map, it’s not replicated elsewhere as a kind of “reading” of the data in the retinotopic map (that we know of, and there seems little scope for anything that large and important being discovered), it just is there interacting with visual information. Even if visual consciousness is produced in some other manner (flow of charged particles, or quantum or something else, although I think quantum stuff (other than what we know exists) is virtual magic), surely there isn’t much chance of visual consciousness being produced elsewhere, simply because only in the retinotopic map is all of the information needed for that information-intensive consciousness.
No one is seeing it, consciousness of visual information arises from the interactions themselves, which produce the “one” who is not seeing it so much as being constituted by the interactions. That’s one reason I really dislike the Cartesian charge, as it makes no sense when I see the “self” (to the extent that means anything here) is actually constituted by the interactions, rather than anything “viewing it all.” The only thing that comes close to viewing it is what I suspect are “downstream observations” abstracted from vision, that I expect are recognized by other areas of the brain.
I thought the point was that it very well may be distorted. Stick electrodes in it, or drugs. In any case, the retinotopic map is certainly no exact representation of the visual field, as it wraps around the topography of (some of) the visual cortex.
No, you’re the one who has someone viewing the “outside.” I don’t. It’s all just mind/brain for me, constituting the self via brain interactions.
It’s up to you, it’s your projection onto me. Lord knows, I recognize almost nothing of what I think in what you imagine I do.
It might be better if you didn’t just make up what you think I believe.
What inspires you to imagine that it would be my view?
Since I never thought they were, that’s rather irrelevant.
The senses are anything but passive, sense-data isn’t generated without processing, and “processing” has to be understood according to the brain and how it operates, and not treated like a computer program. That said, I’m not going outside of actual physical causality in understanding anything. The brain is not directly privy to anything.
It also doesn’t follow from anything I wrote, just your prejudices.
Oh I see, I don’t understand such things happening? More mind-reading, too bad it’s so bigoted and so wrong. You don’t know what I think, you just make it up according to your prejudice.
Yeah, whatever. I’m sure you’re very proud of your view that you ungraciously deny to myself based upon your ignorance and prejudices about what I think, but the fact is that sometimes there are substantial inputs into sensory activity and sometimes the process can be rather passive.
I’m sure that I’m not being nice enough for Walto or yourself, but neither of you has any right to make up a bunch of stupid shit about what I believe.
Oh, no kidding. You think I don’t?
Doesn’t change the fact that there’s no direct knowledge of “the tree.” And it’s you who think that the “subjective” and “objective” matter, and that the interdependence of “inside” and “outside” means something, rather than the nothing that I think it is. I don’t think there’s an epistemologic divide either, the trouble is that it just means that we do know the reality of brain processes and not the reality of what is (say) represented in the retinotopic map. We also don’t know the brain via abstractions, representations, and symbols in the brain, meaning that much of the brain is neither more nor less directly understood than is “the tree.”
So? That has no relevance to what I wrote.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
I tried to engage you sympathetically and respectfully, but given your condescending tone, I’m breaking off all further engagement and putting you on ignore.
Well good, maybe you’ll quit projecting stupid and false positions onto me.
You were neither sympathetic nor respectful. You can’t be that and make up a bunch of false positions that you ascribe to me. Learn some decency. We could discuss things if you cared about what I actually think, rather than assuming that I believe some really stupid shit that is nearly the complete opposite of what I actually believe.
But it’s better for you to ignore your gross misrepresentations of my position than to actually deal with the fact that you were extremely unfair, in your estimation. That hardly speaks well of you.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
Reading this, I can see that my attributions of Cartesianism to you were utterly wrong. Mea culpa.
You really are touchy, though: I wasn’t meaning to insult you and I’m sure KN wasn’t either–even if we got your position completely wrong. In my own case, the pigeon-holing you into a view i’d seen more often was mostly due to laziness and incomplete attention. Sins both–but not of malice.
Well, the thing is that I really have studied this stuff, and it is more than a little insulting to end up being accused of harboring simple-minded ideas when I’m actually trying to discuss such matters.
OK, not out of malice. The water under the bridge is pretty much downstream by now, in my view.
Glen Davidson
Do you connect your ‘no inner-no outer’ take with any particular philosophers? I get a little Quine or Neurath vibe reading it myself, but I’m not sure those guys looked at the brain architecture stuff that closely.
Thanks for that tip. Never heard of him. Glancing at one of his papers he looks like he attacks coates from a disjunctivist perspective. Interestingly, while my own philosophy is about 3/4 mimicry, one thing I don’t see eye-to-eye with hall about is his disdain for the causal theory of perception. Attacks on that theory are common from disjunctivists, but I don’t think hall, one of the founders of intentional realism, would have been entirely sympathetic with those guys had he lived to read their stuff. He makes the causal theory an example of the genetic fallacy, since knowing runs along an entirely separate course from physical causality. But I’ve never been convinced by that criticism…. and you’d have to say that I’m an extremely sympathetic reader. 🙂
I see connections between my position and the positions of each of those posting here.
I find myself rooting for each of you at different times. It’s really quite fascinating and enjoyable.
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
Right. Philosophy, like politics, often makes for strange bedfellows.
(But I thought we’d agreed that you’d always root for me!!) 😉
I would second that. It’s easy to assume that just because a person sees things differently or expresses them in a different way than you that they are somehow unschooled or benighted.
I for one need to work on not doing that.
peace
I get that, but–believe it or not, I never think of Descartes as simple-minded. He was a genius, and I’m a fan! That I think he was wrong about this or that likely just means that I’M wrong!
I’m trying to figure why direct realists are supposedly hostile to causal theories of perception. Why can’t my relation to a perceptual object be both directly intentional and causal at the same time? Isn’t that just how lived embodiment is?
Coates follows Sellars in thinking that the only intentionality is conceptual. In one sense this is right, in so far the motor intentionality described by Merleau-Ponty that we share with other animals is explained by action-guiding conceptual representations that underpin recognitive and discriminative behavior. There are, after all, quite tight linkages between intentionality, normativity, conceptuality, and modality: concepts can be applied correctly or incorrectly, purposes can be achieved or thwarted, possibilities can be realized or not. But there are many different kinds of conceptual representations, the linguistic ones being late arrivals on the biological scene.
some interesting reading if you are so inclined
http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/what-are-the-odds-we-are-living-in-a-computer-simulation?intcid=mod-latest
walto,
Well, it might be persuasive if your account of “original justification” is persuasive, but I haven’t seen such an account in this thread. Hence the questions I raised in my last comment:
And:
keiths,
The best I can do to answer this request is to give a little quote from Hall, from whom I took this theory. In his Our Knowledge of Fact and Value, he has a chapter on the correspondence theory of truth, in which he is very strict about separating truth from confirmation. In the following chapter he talks about coherence being what generally provides evidence. But there’s a problem with a coherence theory of verification that he thinks he must respond to:
I’m afraid I can’t do any better than that–which is why I’m waiting for Bruce, Noe, and KN to fill in the blanks.
KN,
If your epistemology is inconsistent with your philosophy of mind, you have a problem.
Your only concession? That’s the whole shebang! If you concede the indefeasability of “skeptical worries”, then you are a Cartesian skeptic.
They’re certainly not epistemologically idle. The only sense in which they’re idle is that we can get away with ignoring them most of the time, particularly when we aren’t doing epistemology.
Within epistemology, they make all the difference.
KN, to Glen:
No, because the construction of an inner visual model is part of the seeing process itself. The entire process doesn’t repeat itself downstream of the model. It doesn’t need to, because part of it — the construction of the model — has already been done.
In other words, you are being misled by your use of the same word — “see” — to describe both the entire process and the part downstream of the model.
Granted, but then it’s up to others to argue that it’s inconsistent for me to affirm the indefeasibility of skeptical worries while denying the priority of inner experience over outer experience.
By that, I mean the idea that our self-awareness is a given, that our sensory states are exactly what they appear to us to be, and that the philosophical task is to see what else, if anything, we can know on this basis by logical deduction from this presumed evidence base.
That idea, quite central to Descartes but also to Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Russell (sometimes), the early Carnap (but modified in light of his reading of Nietzsche), and Quine (sometimes), is what I am objecting to here.
I take something like that idea to be at work in the idea that we somehow have privileged access to our our sensory intake from the world, but have no epistemic access to the features of the world that cause that sensory intake. It also underpins the metaphor of the brain as a computer that is fed sensory information, performs operations on it, and then produces outputs.
Technically, a Humean skeptic, but who’s counting?
I suppose that depends on how much one thinks skepticism matters to epistemology in the first place.
OK, that might be a fair characterization of how I was misled into worrying that Glen has a homunculus problem in his philosophy of mind. But it doesn’t alter the underlying disagreement between our points of view.
As I see it, as energies impinge an animal’s sensory receptors, the activation of those receptors conveys information about the underlying real causal and modal regularities of the world that is then used to revise the action-guiding representations being generated by the organism’s cognitive systems (which supervene largely on, though not necessarily completely on, cortical and subcortical structures). Thus, while the affordances detectable by an electric eel are not those detectable by a brown bat or a human, in all those cases the animal is perceiving and responding to information about the causal and modal structures of reality in itself.
The difference that makes a difference is that we humans are not epistemically locked into merely detecting affordances and acting with regard to them, but can also, under very rare conditions, also catch glimpses of the hidden causal and modal structures of the world.
Put somewhat otherwise, I treat the affordances and solicitations of sentient animals as “phenomena” and the hidden causal and modal structures of reality as “noumena”. Empirical science gives us noumenal knowledge.
KN, to Glen:
Passivity isn’t the issue.
Sensory information flows into us from our environments, and it’s the only information we receive about those environments. This remains true regardless of our level of activity or passivity.
Suppose I’m looking at an object and trying to identify it. I’m receiving a stream of sensory information, and it’s the only information I’m receiving about that object. I now move a few feet to the left to look at the object from a different angle. The stream of sensory information changes, but it’s still the only information I’m receiving about that object.
I have moved in order to alter the sensory information I am receiving, but I am still utterly dependent on that sensory information in forming my impression of the object. (Which of course leaves me vulnerable to any distortion, alteration or manipulation of that information.)
keiths,
I would almost agree, but put the emphasis in a slightly different place, to give that conception a strong twist towards metaphysical realism.
The information that is impinging on one’s retinas conveys information about the real properties of the object qua target of perceptual and conceptual abilties, just because it has causally interacted with the processes that constitute that object. The photons striking the retina have the frequencies that they do because they’ve interacted with the reflectance properties of the surfaces from which they are being re-emitted.
That information about the causal structures of the world is actively sampled by the subpersonal cognitive machinery as predictive neural models are tested against the world so that the animal’s actions will be generally successful. (If the causal power of the animal don’t mesh sufficiently well with how the world really is, the action is not going to be successful!)
In other words, while Sellars was quite right to affirm (along with Darwin, Dewey, etc.) “we were given our perceptual abilities, not for ontological insight, but to enable us to find our way around in a hostile environment,” it is also true that systematic reflection on what our best science tells us about those perceptual abilities does yield ontological insight.
I suppose I am less moved than you are by the possibility that an evil genius could take away the world, leave the information as having the exact same structure, and the brain would use it in the same way. For that to be the case consistently, the evil genius would be the causal and modal structure of the world, only no one would ever be able to tell, even in principle. Differences that make no difference to any possible conduct are hard for me to take seriously.
quote;
For, until the wisdom of men bear some proportion to the wisdom of God, their attempts to find out the structure of his works, by the force of their wit and genius, will be vain.
and
The wisdom of God exceeds that of the wisest man, more than his wisdom exceeds that of a child. If a child were to conjecture how an army is to be formed in the day of battle–how a city is to be fortified, or a state governed–what chance has he to guess right? As little chance has the wisest man when he pretends to conjecture how the planets move in their courses, how the sea ebbs and flows, and how our minds act upon our bodies.
and
When we contemplate the world of Epicurus, and conceive the universe to be a fortuitous jumble of atoms, there is nothing grand in this idea. The clashing of atoms by blind chance has nothing in it fit to raise our conceptions, or to elevate the mind. But the regular structure of a vast system of beings, produced by creating power, and governed by the best laws which perfect wisdom and goodness could contrive, is a spectacle which elevates the understanding, and fills the soul with devout admiration.
end quote:
Thomas Reid
😉
peace
Kantian Naturalist,
I find it curious that you are not able to describe the presumption of “evolution” very accurately. In evolution you are not “given” anything for a purpose, instead you accidentally acquire something because life is very sloppy, like you accidentally acquire the ability to see. It then just so happens that this accident is somehow useful to the one that got the accident, more useful than all the blind ones scrambling around in the dark (I wonder how the others managed as long as they did, the millions of years that evolution takes and all, but that’s the story).
If that is what one is gullible enough to believe of course.
fifthmonarchyman,
I didn’t say Reid wasn’t a devout theist. But he didn’t rely on God to get him out of epistemological quandaries. That’s a virtue.
I would disagree
again quote:
For, until the wisdom of men bear some proportion to the wisdom of God, their attempts to find out the structure of his works, by the force of their wit and genius, will be vain.
end quote:
That sounds like pure presuppositionalism to me
peace
fifth, quoting Reid:
I find it curious that you criticize someone as wrong, but your own alternative is nonsense.
Sure it is.
That’s an example of the passivity that I see as a problem.
Perceiving involves action. Okay, you allow some (but too little) of that action with your mention of “move”. But then you discount it’s importance in your last sentence.
That is like saying that we can do science without laboratories and without experiments. But the labs and experiments are how we learn about the causal structure of what we are studying.
We do not use the received information alone. We also make heavy use of the actions that we take to elicit that information.
In other words, you have no understanding of evolutionary theory. Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle.
Neil Rickert,
What is nonsense?
Kantian Naturalist,
You mean in evolutionary theory “we were given our perceptual abilities, not for ontological insight, but to enable us to find our way around in a hostile environment”?
We were given these abilities huh? Given by what or whom?
Look up ‘metaphor’ in the dictionary.
Not sure why you are so against such a thing, given that your position is precisely that.