George Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his work, Metaphors We Live By, which he co-authored with Mark Johnson. In this six-minute interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn, he makes a powerful case against the very coherence of the notion that we have an afterlife.
For my part, I think Lakoff’s case against personal immortality is the strongest one I’ve ever seen, and I’d be interested to see how readers respond to it. I have a few brief thoughts, which I’d like to share.
Dr. Jeffrey Long is a radiation oncologist who has studied over 5,000 NDEs. In a video titled, “Can science prove the afterlife?”, he discusses cases of people born blind who claim to have experienced vision during their NDEs. The case of Vicki, which he mentions one minute into the video, is particularly impressive. (Dr. Long has also authored an article titled, “Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Their Reality” [Missouri Medicine 2014 Sep-Oct; 111(5): 372–380] which discusses these cases in the section titled, “Line of Evidence #3.”)
Lakoff would doubtless object that the very notion of disembodied seeing makes no sense, and that the accounts should be accorded no credence. NDE proponents might regard this rebuttal as a manifestation of materialist prejudice, but I think Lakoff has a point. If one is going to defend a doctrine of immortality, then one needs to be able to coherently state it. To his credit, NDE researcher Raymond Moody (who has a PhD in philosophy as well as an MD) recognizes this problem and squarely faces up to it in a recent interview hosted by Sergei Davidoff, on the About Freedom show. In his interview, Moody laments the fact that most people who attend public gatherings on NDEs have no desire to philosophize about survival after death. What they want is to hear more NDE accounts.
Two questions that NDE proponents need to tackle are: who is it that sees in an NDE, and what is it that they see with?
Who is it that sees? Is it the individual who’s clinically dead? That would be the most straightforward interpretation. Another possibility is that it is God who is doing the seeing, and that the clinically dead individual sees “with God’s eyes,” as it were. Perhaps it is only when we are dead that we are able to see in this way.
What is it that these individuals see with? The notion of a disembodied spirit seeing something seems to make no sense. Spirits don’t absorb or reflect light. The notion of “consciousness apart from the body” seeing, as Dr. Long proposes in his video, appears to be vulnerable to the same difficulty. Do these individuals see with an astral body, and not a soul? But in that case, why is it that blind people are unable to see, in everyday life, even though they presumably possess an astral body? The hypothesis that clinically dead individuals see with God’s eyes sounds more promising, but it raises a host of questions about God’s physicality (if He can see, then He must be in some sense physical) and His relationship with the cosmos, as its Creator. Perhaps Isaac Newton was on the right track when he described space as God’s sensorium.
I don’t claim to have any answers to these questions. Nevertheless, I believe they must be addressed. Until NDE researchers put forward a provisional model of the mechanics of immortality, their message will be rejected out of hand by many people of a scientific bent. Does anyone know of a book that proposes such a model? Over to you.
Nope. It’s the same (and as weak) as Daniel Dennett’s. Simply instead of Dennett’s “illusion” he has “metaphor”.
The logic is straightforward:
There is no valid evidence that P is true
We desperately need P to be true
We confect “evidence” that P is true even though we must misinterpret, distort, invent, or flat assert that P is true.
If P were true, valid evidence would be abundant. So we “don’t notice” this.
Thus, we conclude that P is true and reality-based arguments are “weak”.
What is P?
This question is important, because the kind of evidence depends on the kind of thing that P is.
Otherwise your approach is not scientific. For example, if you only trust a metal detector, then you will never find valid evidence for wood. It does not mean that there is no wood. It means that you are looking at the wrong kind of evidence.
In the other thread, you messed up emotional convictions with childhood experience and sensory attractions. Very big messup, probably hopeless to straighten out.
In this case, P is the proposition that some functional entity or device has some undying part that somehow lives on even after the body has decomposed, or the car has been crushed and recycled, etc. And I don’t accept that there is any evidence supporting this proposition. I’m aware that some people want or need or were trained that this proposition is true, and simply either cannot or will not accept otherwise.
If spirits of living creatures somehow survive their death, I shudder to think of the sheer number of beetles in heaven. Beetles who were never even aware of Jesus!
This is a good point. Those who claim some ability (or device?) that constitutes a “departed spirit detector” are scams. You don’t find psychics winning the lottery for the same reason you don’t find faith healers in hospitals.
Of course, emotional convictions derive directly from childhood experience and sensory attractions. So this is like finding a chemical distinction between the beer and the foam. However, I can understand that to cling to your belief system requires you to draw invalid distinctions. Probably indeed hopeless to straighten out.
I just watched the video. Like Lakoff, I argue that the soul, if it exists, is useless (just ask CharlieM, lol. We’ve been around this block a few times). However, I don’t agree with Lakoff’s reasoning. He argues that various faculties (vision, hearing, thinking, memory, etc.) are unavailable to the soul because it lacks the necessary neural hardware, but I don’t see why a soul should in principle be unable to do those things. After all, we’re talking about a supernatural entity that presumably isn’t limited by what would be possible if it were a physical entity.
My argument is based instead on the fact that 1) perturbations to the brain can affect these faculties, sometimes catastrophically; and 2) if the soul can do these things, then much of the brain (and body) is redundant.
Every one of the faculties Lakoff mentions can be disrupted by intoxication, by brain tumors, by degenerative neurological diseases, or by mechanical trauma. If the soul is responsible for cognition, why do Alzheimer’s patients lose the ability to tell time from a clock face? If the soul can see, why can damage to the visual cortex cause blindness? If the soul is the seat of morality, why can a brain tumor cause someone to start sexually molesting his stepdaughter? If the soul remembers, why can a concussion cause memory loss? If the soul makes us who we are, why can a brain injury alter someone’s personality? Even the will itself can be disrupted by disturbances to the brain.
The clear answer is that if the soul exists at all, it is not responsible for any of those functions. What then is left for the soul to do? It’s useless.
The second part of my argument concerns redundancy. If the soul can see, why do we have eyes, optic nerves, and visual cortices? If the soul can hear, why do we have ears? Why do we have all of this equipment if the soul is capable of carrying out all of these functions on its own?
Again, the answer is clear: we need all of that hardware because the soul, even if it exists, is incapable of fulfilling those duties. It’s useless.
vjtorley:
Presumably God sees everything at once. Since people experiencing NDEs don’t report this sort of “omnivision”, it can’t be that they’re seeing through God’s eyes, unless God is restricting their field of vision to a small portion of his own.
True, but is there any reason in principle why they couldn’t detect it without absorbing, reflecting, or otherwise affecting it? That would seem to take care of the problem.
Right. That’s related to the redundancy issue I mentioned above. If eye damage causes blindness, why can’t the soul take over? Is it because the soul always just happens to get “damaged” at the same time the eyes do? That’s implausible. The better answer is that the soul, if it exists at all, doesn’t possess the faculty of vision (or of hearing, thinking, remembering, etc.).
It’s true that he’d have to be capable of interacting with the physical world (or at least monitoring it), but that wouldn’t really require him to be a physical entity, would it?
Another reason I doubt the existence of the soul is because it is presumed to be the seat of the will. If that’s true, then when I decide to do something, it must be my soul that makes the decision. That means that if I decide to get up and walk to the mailbox, my soul is causing me to do that. Somehow the non-physical soul is reaching into the physical world and causing my body to behave differently than it would have if left alone. I would have remained seated, but my soul alters my brain’s operation, and the end result is that my body does what the soul wants it to do. Hence my trip to the mailbox.
The problem is that the brain and body are physical systems whose states evolve according to the laws of physics. If walking to the mailbox wasn’t already going to happen according to the laws of physics, given the initial states of my brain and body plus the environment, then my soul has to cause a violation of the laws of physics in order to get me to walk to the mailbox.
Something similar has to happen with every voluntary action that we perform, assuming the soul is calling the shots. And in general, we aren’t talking about small violations of the laws of physics. They’ll often have to be pretty major in order to alter what our brains and bodies are otherwise going to do.
It seems pretty unlikely that major violations of the laws of physics are continually occurring in our brains or bodies without anyone having noticed. Far more plausible that the will is a function of the brain, not of a non-physical soul. The decision to walk to the mailbox comes from the brain, and all of the subsequent action is driven by the brain sending out motor impulses, causing the body to move in the desired way. It’s all physical, with no violation of physical law required. The soul, if it even exists, is not involved.
If the soul can’t make decisions and drive behavior, then it is at best a passive entity just along for the ride. It can monitor the brain and body but can’t control either of them. Even that idea has problems which I can describe if necessary. The upshot is that the concept of a non-physical soul in charge of our decisions and what we do just isn’t plausible.
Note: I’m glossing over the question of quantum indeterminacy here for simplicity’s sake, but it doesn’t rescue the soul from the problem I just described.
Hi keiths,
Thank you very much for your thoughtful comments. It’s about 2:15 a.m. over here, so I’ll keep my responses brief and to the point.
1. Voluntary actions. I don’t think there’s a problem here, unless you see the laws of physics as determining our actions. I see them instead as constraints on our actions. For example, the law of conservation of energy and the law of conservation of momentum entail that the soul doesn’t influence our actions by pushing around neurons, but as I’ve argued before, there are other, more subtle ways in which it could affect the brain without violating any physical laws.
2. Your suggestion that the soul may be capable of detecting light without needing to be capable of reflecting it, struck me as interesting. I hadn’t considered that possibility.
3. You ask, “If eye damage causes blindness, why can’t the soul take over?” Perhaps one could argue that the role of the body, while united to the soul, is to act as a filter, but that certain kinds of bodily damage block reception altogether. Seeing without a filter is what we do after death. That need not mean seeing from a God’s-eye view, however. Even a separated soul might still have its own unique perspective.
That will have to do for now. Cheers.
Then again, there’s the materialist position that the “soul” is a perceived (and very complex) side effect of the combination of personal characteristics like intelligence, knowledge, preferences, memory, personality etc. Talking about this combination persisting after the machine stops is like talking about where the light went when the filament burns out. I think that all of these traits and aspects of a person require the ongoing physical function of being alive. If the “soul” can be said to persist at all, it lives on (to some degree) in the memories of others.
Hi Vincent,
You wrote:
Could you link to one of those arguments? I’m having trouble imagining a mechanism, subtle or not, by which the soul could achieve that. Let me explain that in two ways, first by assuming that the laws of physics are deterministic, and later by bringing quantum indeterminacy into consideration. I’ll be using the mailbox scenario I outlined in my previous comment.
I know you’re familiar with this stuff, but I’ll go into greater detail than necessary for the sake of any readers who haven’t seen or thought about this before.
Suppose the laws of physics are deterministic. I’m sitting at home wondering if I should go check the mailbox. If the soul is “in the driver’s seat”, there are two possible futures: one in which I get up and walk to the mailbox, and one in which I don’t. The soul controls which of those possible futures will actually obtain. There’s a fork in the road, metaphorically speaking, and my soul is deciding which path to take.
While all of this is going on, my brain, body, and environment are all changing. Let’s call them collectively “the system”. The system is physical, and so as it changes, instant by instant, it is occupying a sequence of definite physical states. Since we’ve assumed the laws of physics are deterministic, the physical state of the system at one instant determines the physical state of the system at the next.*
But in the mailbox scenario, there’s a fork in the road. That means that there is some instant for which there are (at least) two possible future states, with the soul determining which of those states actually occurs. However, the deterministic laws of physics dictate that there is only one possible future state. Thus, if the soul can “reach in” and alter the trajectory of the system so that it takes on a different state than was dictated by the laws of physics, it necessarily means that the laws of physics are violated at that point. I can’t see any way around that.
* Technically, what we’re calling “the environment” has to include the entire universe apart from the brain and body. Otherwise the state of the system at one instant doesn’t determine the state of the system at the next, because whatever is outside the boundary of what we’ve designated as the environment can causally influence what’s happening inside.
There’s a further subtlety concerning whether time is infinitely divisible. If it is, then there is no such thing as “the next instant”. Here’s why: Assume for the sake of argument (Hi, Flint!) that time is infinitely divisible and that there actually is such a thing as “the next instant”. That means that there are no instants between the current instant and the next instant. The current instant at time t1 is followed by the next instant at time t2, where t2 > t1. But what about the time halfway between t1 and t2? Since time is infinitely divisible, there must be an instant at that point. In other words, there is at least one instant between t1 and t2. That means that what we have been calling “the next instant” cannot actually be the next instant. That remains true for any t2 we pick that’s greater than t1. Therefore there is no such thing as “the next instant”.
(It’s analogous to the fact that for any given real number x, there is no such thing as “the next real number”, and to the fact that there is no such thing as “the smallest real number greater than zero”.)
The upshot is that if time is infinitely divisible, the state of the system is evolving continuously, not in discrete steps. However, the evolution is still dictated by the (assumed to be) deterministic laws of physics — given the current state, there is only one possible future, so the argument I laid out above still applies.
The argument above assumes that the laws of physics are deterministic, but we know that reality is actually quantum mechanical and that the laws of quantum mechanics are not deterministic. Later today, I’ll address how that affects the argument.
Flint:
Years ago I read a book by philosopher Owen Flanagan called The Problem of the Soul in which he makes the same argument: that the only defensible concept of a soul is one that is ultimately based on the physical, not on the supernatural, and cannot survive our bodily death.
The next question to tackle is whether quantum indeterminacy offers an opening for the nonphysical soul to influence the brain and body. I think the answer is no, for a few reasons.
The first is that quantum effects are small and tend to cancel each other out so that they rarely “bubble up” and have an effect at the macro scale. In other words, physics at the scale of neurons, brains, and bodies is virtually deterministic even if quantum mechanics allows for randomness at lower levels. If so, then by my earlier argument, there’s no opportunity for the soul to influence the brain without violating the laws of physics.
There are cases where quantum events do get magnified and have a noticeable effect at the macro level, such as when a single nucleus decays, emits a particle, and causes a Geiger counter to click. Or when an electron descends to a lower energy level in an atom, causing the emission of a single photon which our eyes can see (amazingly, the human eye is sensitive enough to detect single photons). It’s also possible via chaos theory that a chaotic subsystem in the brain could be nudged by a quantum event, changing the initial conditions enough to result in a large downstream difference in behavior. (This is the Butterfly Effect.)
It seems doubtful, though, that there are many such “magnification” opportunities available in the brain. They’d have to happen all the time in order to give the soul the second-by-second control it would need to carry out actions.
There’s also the possibility that the soul could influence enough quantum events simultaneously to generate macroscopic events despite the absence of magnification opportunities. However, it would require trillions of trillions of coordinated events in order to significantly affect the brain’s operation.
Then there’s the fundamental problem that quantum outcomes are random. If they’re random, they’re not controlled by the soul. And if the soul does control them, then how? And can it do so in a way that no one has noticed, especially if it has to coordinate trillions of trillions of events, all pushing a neuron or brain system in a certain direction that it otherwise would not have taken? While technically not a violation of the laws of physics, this would be so statistically improbable that it would appear to be such a violation.
I suspect that this is all barking up an imaginary tree. As though “the soul” was something that is concrete, that actually exists and can be measured in some way. But I seriously doubt that “the soul” is a thing. Rather, the soul relates to the mind the way the picture relates to the paint. When we look at pictures in an art gallery, we imagine we are looking at landscapes, people, flowers, etc. But no, we are actually looking at pigments arrayed on canvas. The picture emerges from our interpretation and appreciation. The soul is like that interpretation, it’s how our imagination experiences the activities of our brains. It’s a side-effect of consciousness.
Flint:
Like you, I think the nonphysical soul is imaginary, but (as we’ve been discussing in the other thread) that doesn’t prevent me from assuming for the sake of argument that the soul exists, and reasoning from there. It’s a common and useful technique of argumentation.
For example, let’s assume that the nonphysical soul exists and is responsible for cognition. Being nonphysical, we expect it to be unaffected by physical intoxicants. Therefore, we predict that people should reason just as well after downing a fifth of Bacardi as they do when sober. That prediction doesn’t fit with observation, and so we call into question the assumption that we made — namely, that the nonphysical soul exists.
keiths,
Hi keiths
How do you explain the NDE evidence that VJT posted?
Earlier I explained why the soul, if it exists, is unlikely to be able to control the body. I added:
I’ll describe some of those problems now.
The soul presumably has desires. If it has no control over the body, it cannot act on them. Imagine how frustrating that would be. You want to do something, but your body does something entirely different. Over and over. You can’t even voice your frustration, because you can’t control your diaphragm, lungs, and larynx. You hear your body saying things that you don’t even agree with, and it has extended conversations with other people that are at odds with your own feelings and thinking. You’re a bystander, not a participant. Those conversations are just your body talking to the other person’s body. Neither of your souls is involved. In effect, you and your body are separate persons, and your body on its own is doing all of the things you would expect a soul to be capable of. But if your body can do all of those things, what’s the point of having a soul?
Of course, we don’t actually have the experience of being helpless passengers in our own bodies. We control our voices and our actions. The passenger hypothesis is ruled out.
If believers still want to insist on the existence of a nonphysical soul, they face the problem I described earlier: how can the soul “drive” the body without violating the laws of physics? I’m looking forward to Vincent’s description of how the soul could drive our behavior through subtle means without, as he put it, “pushing neurons around” or otherwise violating the laws of physics.
The idea of a passive soul poses yet another problem for Christians. If the soul can’t control the body, it cannot be morally responsible for a person’s actions. How, then, does God judge the soul? Based purely on the soul’s thoughts?
vjtorley:
What would the body be filtering out, though, and why? Also, it’s clear from what we know about the visual system that there’s a lot more than filtering going on. There’s edge detection, motion detection, depth perception, and so on. That’s computation, not filtering.
colewd:
I haven’t watched those two videos — they’re pretty long, about an hour apiece. From what I’ve read about NDEs, though, my impression is that they’re just experiences created by the brain under extreme conditions.
Fighter pilots sometimes have out-of-body experiences and vivid hallucinations when high G-forces reduce blood flow to the brain, causing hypoxia. Something similar may be going on in the case of NDEs. Here’s a fascinating 15-minute Radiolab episode in which fighter pilots describe the experience:
Out of Body, Roger
The study induced out-of-body experiences in 40 of the volunteer pilots. In the piece, they interview three of the pilots, one of whom is the researcher who ran the study and used himself as a guinea pig. They also play audio of a couple of the centrifuge runs.
keiths,
Don’t ever change, keiths, as long as you can lol
Common, yes. Useful, not so much. I tend to think a useful argument is persuasive, and you will never persuade colewd that his soul is a figment of his imagination. Once again, we must contrast convictions based on facts and logic with convictions based on faith and emotional need. And I really can’t understand how you can pretend to “accept for the sake of argument” someone else’s emotional need, however capable you are at demonstrating how absurd the manifestations of that need might be.
Efforts like that invariably end with both parties feeling sorry for the other’s irredeemable resistance to the most self-evidently obvious enlightenment – and with both parties coming away thankful they do not suffer the other’s benighted foolishness.
Flint:
It’s common and useful to assume things for the sake of argument. In fact, it’s a ubiquitous style of reasoning in science. Think about how scientific predictions are made. In essence, you assume for the sake of argument that some hypothesis H is true, and you work out the implications of that — those are the scientific predictions of the hypothesis. Then you compare those predictions to actual observations. You do the same for competing hypotheses, and you judge each one based on how accurate its predictions are.
That, for example, is how general relativity was confirmed, through observations of Mercury’s precession and the bending of light under the gravitational influence of the sun. General relativity got the predictions right, and Newtonian mechanics did not. A huge vindication of Einstein.
As I noted in the other thread, swaying your interlocutor isn’t necessarily the only purpose (or even the primary purpose) of formulating and presenting an argument:
Flint:
I don’t. What I assume for the sake of argument isn’t their emotional need, it’s their belief. “The earth is flat” is a statement of belief, and I can make that assumption independently of anyone’s emotional needs.
Think of it this way: The earth’s flatness is a scientific hypothesis. It’s a piss-poor hypothesis, to be sure, but it qualifies as a hypothesis. It can be evaluated like any other hypothesis by drawing out its implications — its predictions — and comparing them to observations. You assume for the sake of argument that the earth is flat, and you see where that leads. No need to take anyone’s emotional needs into account.
Ditto for the intoxication argument I made above:
That argument stands on its own regardless of colewd’s (or anyone else’s) emotional need to believe in the soul.
Hi keiths,
Back again. You wrote:
In a comment on a recent post of mine, I outlined the following scenario:
In a subsequent comment, you replied that my proposal leaves too many questions unanswered:
I think the problem here is a conceptual one on your part. You seem to think that it’s an a priori truth that causes must be either deterministic or random, or a combination of the two. This is a mistake. It is indeed an a priori truth that causes must be either deterministic or non-deterministic, or a combination of the two. However, I think you’re making an illicit slide from “non-deterministic” to “random.” You might like to have a look at philosopher Paul Herrick’s article, “Job Opening: Creator of the Universe – A Reply to Keith Parsons”, where he describes the logic of personalistic explanations:
Another possible obstacle to your belief in libertarian free will is that you seem to conceive of it as involving an agent A who somehow creates this state of affairs, which we call a choice (let’s call it C), where C is distinct from A. This seems to generate an infinite regress: if we call C free (in the libertarian sense) because A’s act of bringing it about was a free act, then does this act require another free act that brings it about, to make it free? The correct way of viewing choice is that it’s a composite state of affairs that exists partly within the agent and partly outside the agent. The father’s act of making the sled includes a states of affairs originating within the brain (see this diagram for what happens inside the brain when someone makes a voluntary movement, and see this article in Frontiers in Neurology (2022 Feb 21;13:834217. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2022.834217) for further details) but terminating outside his body in the construction of a sled. In this case, the state of affairs C thus includes a description of the agent himself, as well as his external environment. Thus it is a mistake to think of A as making C happen, or as causing his own choices. How can I push my own brain? Rather, what we should say is that brains are physically and biologically open-ended entities which are capable of orienting themselves towards various different goals. When a person’s brain selects a long-term goal, it refashions itself in the process.
In other words, perhaps we should question the philosophical distinction between “me” and my voluntary mental acts. If my acts are just me in a certain mode, then we can escape the regress.
You also wrote:
I’m happy to inform you that according to the latest scientific findings, it seems that quantum effects within the warm, wet environment of the brain are indeed real. Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is a very no-nonsense person who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but in a recent video, titled, “Brain Really Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds,” she acknowledges that Roger Penrose was right on this point, although she’s skeptical of Penrose’s (and Hameroff’s) claim that these quantum effects create consciousness:
The scientific paper she cites is here.
You also objected to the supposition that we may still have a soul, even if it cannot act on the body:
I think you have a valid point here, although I have heard some New Agers suggest that the real libertarian choices we make are those made between our earthly incarnations, when we select which family we’ll be born into, which body we’ll come back in, and what we’ll do in our next earthly life. What happens on earth happens according to the laws of nature. I suppose that’s a consistent view, but it rescues free will at the cost of disregarding the most powerful evidence for it – namely, the feeling we have, at various points in our lives, that we really do make life-changing choices between two paths, either of which we could take. If the supposition I described above is correct, then all of our choices have already been made. (I should mention that other New Agers who believe in reincarnation hold that even though we choose which family we’ll be born into, our choices on earth are not made in advance, and what happens to us on earth is not pre-determined.)
I would also agree that you made a telling criticism of the “filtering hypothesis” when you remarked:
I think your criticism is a valid one. Clearly, there’s a lot of philosophical work to be done, as I acknowledged in my OP.
Regarding the evidence I presented for NDEs, you wrote:
I listened to your 15-minute podcast, and I agree that out-of-body experiences, by themselves, prove nothing, and that they could have a physical explanation. However, veridical perception of remote events while having such experiences is another matter. There is intriguing evidence for such experiences, discussed in a video titled, “Do Near Death Experiences evidence the Afterlife?” where philosopher Dr. Nathan Hawkins interviews Dr Max Baker-Hytch, who presents evidence for such experiences in a seven-minute segment of this video, from 8:09 to 15:43.
This needs to be checked out.
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for that detailed reply. There’s a lot to tackle, so I’ll do it piecemeal as time permits.
You wrote:
I’m not clear on the distinction you’re drawing between “random” and “nondeterministic”. I searched the Herrick article and I don’t find either of those terms, and while I understand what he means by “personalistic explanations”, I’m not seeing how it implies a “random” vs “nondeterministic” distinction. Could you elaborate?
Regarding the sled example, Herrick states that “a loving action by a loving father makes perfectly good sense in itself, which is why no further explanation is needed.” He’s right that it makes sense, but all it explains is why building the sled was one of the choices the father considered. It doesn’t explain why he selected that choice over the others available to him. Later in that section of the paper, Herrick notes that the father could have, for instance, freely chosen to watch TV instead of building the sled. That decision could also “make perfectly good sense”, for example if the father’s favorite TV show was starting and the sled could be built later. Making sense therefore can’t be the thing that explains the father’s choice of one over the other.
Herrick seems to acknowledge this:
If those factors aren’t causally sufficient, then what does explain the father’s particular choice? If it’s truly a free choice (in the libertarian sense), then there is no set of factors that determines it. Libertarian free will requires that there are possible worlds that are absolutely identical up to the point of decision but diverge afterwards. Antecedent conditions therefore cannot factor into which of the alternatives the father selects. That includes things like the father’s personality, how much he loves his children, his mood that day, etc. Yet libertarians want to claim that it is the father who chooses. How can it be the father’s free choice if absolutely nothing about the father influences it? It’s free, in the sense that nothing constrains it to one alternative over any other, but it isn’t really the father’s choice. You might as well flip a coin, or roll a die, or employ some other stochastic process. That’s why I say it’s random.
Note that the father’s characteristics and other antecedent conditions do factor into the range of choices that he considers. For instance, as a loving father, he presumably rules out the option of going outside and shooting his children, one by one. It’s determined by his character. But the libertarian view of free will requires that there is some final choice between the remaining alternatives that is not determined by his character or by anything else having to do with him or the universe.
vjtorley:
Be careful here, because “choice” has more than one meaning. It can refer to an act of choosing (“he made his choice”) or the thing chosen (“his choice was chocolate”). The former is not a state of affairs, but the latter is. A choice in the former sense is something that a state of affairs makes possible, but it isn’t the state of affairs itself. The latter is a state of affairs, and the agent brings it about by choosing.
C is a state of affairs that occurs as the result of the agent’s choice. It’s a freely chosen result, but it itself isn’t a free act of choosing. So as far as I can see, the regress you’re asking about doesn’t actually involve C.
Your question really amounts to “can we just freely choose, or do we have to …freely choose to freely choose to freely choose?” My answer would be that we can just freely choose, for the same reason that we can simply start to do something. We don’t have to “…start to start to start to do it.”
The construction of the sled amounts to a sequence of states (of affairs), but the choice itself is not a state or a sequence of states. The choice happens at the “fork in the road” where there is more than one next state possible.*
I agree. The relevant state of affairs includes both the agent and the environment.
If A isn’t making C happen, then who (or what) is? This is supposed to be A’s free choice, after all. How is it A’s free choice if A isn’t bringing about C?
If you can’t “push” your brain, then how are you going to bring about the brain states that lead to the action you have chosen to do? At some point, the father’s brain is at a “fork in the road”. Going in one direction results in a sequence of brain states leading to sled construction, and the other direction results in a different sequence of brain states. If the father doesn’t determine which path is taken, then he isn’t making a free choice.
Doesn’t the brain refashioning itself amount to the person “pushing” their brain in a certain direction? Once I’ve selected a particular long-term goal, my brain follows a different state sequence than it would have otherwise.
* That’s oversimplified, because the act of choosing can extend over time, in which case the process involves a sequence of states. My point is that for it to be a (libertarian) free choice, there must be a “fork in the road” at some point in that sequence.
vjtorley:
That’s fascinating, and surprising! Thanks for the Hossenfelder video.
From watching it, though, I’m not clear on whether those quantum effects actually cause nondeterminism at the level of neuronal firing. Do you know? And if they do, how often? Seems like it would have to be pretty often for this to be a viable way for a soul to get the brain into a desired state. And then there’s the question of mechanism. How would the soul “get its fingers” into these quantum events and manipulate the outcomes?
vjtorley:
Is that feeling actually evidence for libertarian free will? Suppose libertarian free will didn’t exist and the world were actually deterministic. In that case, how would you expect our conscious experience to differ from the way it is now?
I can’t see a reason for it to be any different. We would still have the experience of assessing a situation, evaluating alternatives, assembling reasons, making decisions, and acting on those decisions. Yes, the outcomes of all of those processes would be determined before we started, but we’d still go through with them and we’d still experience them. And the final decision would actually depend on those outcomes, even though they were all predetermined.
If I evaluate a situation and choose action A because of reason R, where R is some characteristic of the environment, it’s still coherent to say that if reason R didn’t obtain, I would choose a different action B. It’s a counterfactual claim, and it could never be true in our world since our world is (assumed to be) deterministic and R is therefore necessarily going to hold. It is nevertheless true to say that in another possible world where I was exactly the same but the environment was different, so that R didn’t hold, that I would choose B. In either world, the choice is the result of the deliberative process and depends on its outcome, and it would feel that way. Even if it was all predetermined.
Sigh. One last attempt. I have said, repeatedly, that intellectual convictions are subject to modification through rational argument (using logic and evidence), and emotional convictions are not. You continue to present scientific, fact-based claims and then show how you can prove a point through contradictions. And I continue to insist that we are, very explicitly, NOT talking about scientific claims. Yes, yes, yes, I agree that this the mode of argument you present is both common and useful in matters of science. Religious faith is not a matter of science, and therefore this mode of argument is inappropriate and useless. Religious faith is not a nail; you must set aside your hammer and select a better tool.
I’m still curious about the motivation but resigned to not getting an answer.
Regarding falsification:
Sober on Popper and evolution
Flint:
You and me both.
We are talking about factual claims: that the earth is flat, that the Christian God exists, that the number of primes is finite. We want to know: Is it a fact that the earth is flat? Is it a fact that the Christian God exists? Is it a fact that the number of primes is finite? All three factual claims can be addressed by assuming for the sake of argument that they are true and reasoning from there.
By the way, “the earth is flat” actually is a scientific claim (as well as a factual one). It’s a claim about physical reality, and it can be (and has been) adjudicated using the methods of science.
And in theological matters, and in philosophical matters, and in mathematical matters. And in matters having to do with car repairs, per an example I gave earlier. And in a bunch of other contexts, not just scientific ones.
Faith claims and factual claims aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s true that someone can believe by pure faith that the earth is flat, but it’s also true that “the earth is flat” is a factual claim. It’s a nail, and the hammer works just fine. Ditto for the other two claims. It’s perfectly fine to assume them for the sake of argument, regardless of whether your interlocutor believes them by faith or not.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that an argument is appropriate and useful only if it sways your interlocutor (or has a chance of doing so). For the third time:
The target of my argument is the claim that the Christian God exists, and my argument is successful if it’s sound and refutes the claim. The fact that colewd happens to believe the claim is incidental, and his reasons for making the claim are irrelevant.
Suppose I come up with a fallacy-ridden argument that actually manages to change colewd’s mind. Does that mean I’ve succeeded? No, because swaying colewd wasn’t the goal. Constructing a good argument was.
Well, there’s an answer, I guess.
keiths,
Hi keiths
Could these claims also be defined as evidence based claims? Facts being the evidence that the conclusions are based on?
colewd:
They’re factual claims because they assert facts, regardless of what they’re based on. Factual claims can be evidence-based, but they don’t have to be. They can also be based on faith, intuition, tarot cards, or a host of other things.
They can even be based on nothing. If I assert that Eisenhower didn’t have bacon for breakfast on April 20th, 1955, that’s a factual claim. I’m asserting that in reality, Eisenhower didn’t have bacon for breakfast that day. Is it an evidence-based claim? No, because I have absolutely no evidence to support my claim. It’s based on nothing.
Note that although that claim isn’t evidence-based when I make it, it could still be evidence-based when someone else does. Suppose a historian makes the claim and backs it up with records kept by the White House chef. Then it’s an evidence-based claim for the historian, but not for me. Whether it’s an evidence-based claim thus depends on the person making it, but either way it’s a factual claim.
The point I’m trying to make to Flint is that it’s perfectly legitimate to address a factual claim using the type of reasoning I’ve employed in this thread, even if the person you’re addressing believes it on faith.
Flint,
I have another couple of points I want to make regarding the suitability of this style of argumentation.
You wrote:
The mere fact that a belief is held by faith does not necessarily mean that the person holding it is unswayable. There are thousands of counterexamples, including me. People who once believed by faith but were swayed by evidence and reason to become apostates.
So even if you were right that this style of reasoning is inappropriate when addressed to someone who is unswayable, it doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t address it to someone whose claim is faith-based. They might be swayable, like I was.
Second point. Even if my argument doesn’t sway colewd — and we all know it won’t — it still forces him to confront an issue that he perhaps hasn’t considered before: Why does God send those Mongolians to hell when it isn’t their fault that they weren’t exposed to the gospel? William Lane Craig estimates that 25% of people in the world have never heard of Christ. That’s an awful lot of hellbound people.
Now, colewd can try to argue that the scriptures don’t really say what they clearly say about being saved. Many Christians have tried. But at least he’s thinking about the issue and trying to find ways around it. That wouldn’t be the case if I’d simply said “Oh, Bill’s belief is based on faith, so it would be inappropriate to challenge it with this style of argument.”
keiths,
What do you mean by believing something on faith? How is that different than believing something based on evidence?
colewd:
Believing something that isn’t warranted by evidence and reason. One example is what we’ve been talking about in this thread: the idea that God (assuming he exists) is perfectly loving. That belief flies in the face of the evidence, so it’s a matter of faith.
It’s night and day. Warranted vs unwarranted.
Note that there are some subtleties here. For example, someone may cite evidence in support of their claim, but if the evidence is suspect or the reasoning is poor, the claim isn’t warranted.
Hi keiths
The problem is everything you cite is subjective based on your own analysis. I would argue that all our conclusions require some level of faith.
Flint wants to assert that his analysis is superior because he uses “reason” vs “faith”. I would argue all conclusions based on reason also require faith.
Your argument that God is not perfectly loving requires an equal perspective as the creator of the universe has.
I would argue that the sacrifice of His own son as he asked Abraham to do in order to reconcile with humanity was the ultimate act of love.
colewd:
If all you’re saying is that we can’t be absolutely, 100.0% certain of our conclusions, then I agree. I even did an OP on that once.
That doesn’t put every claim on an equal footing. Not by a long shot. “Microwaves warm food” is a claim based on evidence and reason. “Bob Hope was an alien” is not. It requires a hell of a lot more faith to believe the latter than it does the former.
Why, then, do you and other Christians claim that God is perfectly loving? You don’t have an equal perspective with the creator of the universe. If it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander.
Neither of us sees things from God’s perspective. We have to go with what’s available to us. I go with the evidence, and the evidence points away from the claim that God (if he exists) is perfectly loving.
colewd:
Suppose you’re right. What’s stopping God from showing even more love by revealing the gospel to the 25% of people in the world who have never been exposed to it, and who otherwise will be damned, according to the Bible? What’s stopping him from showing more love by eliminating cancer, or rape, or floods? If he’s perfectly loving, his love should be inexhaustible.
The Trinity and the alleged sacrifice sounds a lot like something from a Heinlein story.
All you Zombies.
petrushka:
The Trinity and the Atonement, what a combo. God, who apparently has dissociative identity disorder, tortures himself to death in order to convince himself not to send the people he has created, whom he loves with a perfect love, to an eternity of torment. Except that he’lll still send you there if you don’t suck up to him in the proper way. Because he loves you, and nothing demonstrates love like eternal punishment.
keiths,
We keep circling back to your own subjective perspective. This is fine but far from a coherent strategy that argues against Gods existence.
colewd:
There’s nothing subjective about cancer, rape or floods. Those things are real. Would you inflict those on someone you love? I wouldn’t, but your God does. That requires an explanation, and Christians have yet to come up with a good one.
I know you want God to be perfectly loving, but the evidence unfortunately points in the opposite direction. You asked earlier about the distinction between faith-based and evidence-based claims, and here is a clear-cut example: “God is perfectly loving” is a faith-based claim, lacking evidential support, while “God isn’t perfectly loving, assuming he exists at all” is an evidence-based claim.
What’s incoherent about it? The problem of evil is widely recognized by both atheists and theists as one of the most serious challenges to traditional theism, if not the most serious. Christian apologists acknowledge this, as I noted in another thread:
keiths,
What is subjective is human explanation why these exist in Gods kingdom. Thanks for citing Craig, Stott and Kreeft. There theistic arguments come down to trust in Gods greater plan. Here is a short bible project video that reviews evil and Gods answer to dealing with it.
colewd:
That approach amounts to assuming your desired conclusion, then finding excuses for why the evidence doesn’t support it. Good reasoning goes in the opposite direction. The conclusion drawn is the one that best fits the evidence, with no excuses needed.
If you assume that God is perfectly loving, then of course you’ll conclude that he’s perfectly loving. It makes no difference whether he actually is perfectly loving. Your conclusion therefore says something about you, but nothing about God. All we learn is that you really, really want God to be perfectly loving.
What about any inconvenient evidence against your conclusion, like the fact that God is responsible for more than 200,000 deaths in the 2004 tsunami? You can wave it away by saying “Who are we to question God? We just need to trust in his greater plan.” Evidence, schmevidence. You’ve assumed that God is perfectly loving, and nothing is going to sway you from that belief. No matter how much contradictory evidence piles up, you can just wave it away with the same excuse.
Anyone who sincerely seeks the truth won’t do that. They won’t assume their conclusion. They’ll follow the evidence wherever it naturally leads instead of either a) twisting it to fit a preordained conclusion or b) making excuses for why it doesn’t fit that conclusion.
Suppose you were considering this question with no religious preconceptions whatsoever. Given the vast amount of evil and suffering in the world, what would be the more likely explanation? That God is perfectly loving, or that he isn’t? It’s pretty obviously the latter, isn’t it? It’s only your Christian preconceptions that are keeping you from drawing that obvious, straightforward conclusion.
That video is pretty lame. First, it doesn’t address natural evils such as earthquakes, floods, droughts, diseases, and so on. Why does God cause or permit those? The video doesn’t say.
It blames humans for evil, but it never asks the obvious followup question: who’s responsible for creating those humans? If God is omniscient, he knew before he created them exactly what each person would end up doing during their life. He chose to create them anyway. That makes him responsible for the evil they do.
God sends Jesus on a cleanup mission, but that doesn’t undo the fact that God created the mess in the first place.
keiths,
There is evidence that God is perfectly loving as he sent his only son to suffer die on the cross and reconcile with man. Reasoning here as you are requires you do have Gods perspective and you do not. What you do is cherry pick evidence that suits your conclusion.
I agree with this but without free will there cannot be love as love is a choice. What we hear is “the problem of evil” and the solution is what most the bible is about. Without free will this all could be avoided but now are we really human?
colewd:
Even if that were true, it wouldn’t demonstrate perfect love. Don’t overlook the word “perfect”. “Perfect” means “perfect”, not “perfect except for killing 200,000 people in a single tsunami, letting a 19-year-old kid burn to death in Gaza, creating worms that invade children’s eyes, and countless other horrors”. If someone you loved was burning to death right in front of you, and you had the power to save them without endangering yourself in the slightest, would you refuse? That’s what your God does. Does that strike you as “perfect love”?
You’re undermining your own argument. If I need to have God’s perspective in order to judge that he’s not perfectly loving, then you need to have his perspective in order to judge that he is. You don’t have that perspective, so why are you making your claim? It’s a double standard.
Christians have a bad habit of giving God credit for the good things in the world but letting him off the hook for the bad things. That’s not what you do when you seek the truth. It’s what you do when you’re trying to defend religious dogma.
Why would I cherry-pick? Everyone knows there’s a mix of good and bad in the world. That’s all I need to make my case. No cherry-picking required.
keiths:
colewd:
As I’ve argued elsewhere, free will as conceived by Christians* (libertarian free will) is incoherent and cannot exist. But let’s put that aside and assume that it is possible.
In that case, why can’t God give us the freedom to love or not to love without giving us the freedom to do evil? After all, free will doesn’t mean you can do absolutely anything. No matter how much we want to, we can’t choose to flap our arms and fly. If this restriction doesn’t deprive us of our free will, then why would it matter if we were restricted from doing evil?
Does God himself lack free will since he cannot do evil?
If we were restricted from doing evil but otherwise allowed to make free choices, would that deprive us of our humanity? If the ability to choose evil is a necessary part of being human, what does that say about Jesus, who supposedly never sinned? Christians claim that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. If so, the ability to choose evil cannot be a necessary part of being human.
You might argue that Jesus could have chosen to do evil, but that he didn’t because of his nature. In that case, why doesn’t God make us all like that? What’s so great about having a sinful nature?
Also, the idea that free will justifies evil leaves the problem of natural evil untouched. Earthquakes aren’t a requirement of free will. Why does God allow them?
The Bible doesn’t solve the problem, it makes it worse. Wiping out all of humanity in the Flood doesn’t demonstrate perfect love. Neither does ordering the genocide of the Canaanites or allowing Satan to torment Job, and those are just the tip of the iceberg.
* Arminians, anyway. Calvinists don’t believe in libertarian free will, but they do believe in compatibilist free will.
It is evidence of perfect love from a Creator of the universe who you believe you can judge from the well.
I think the evidence based on the sacrifice of HIs son is strong so I have no basis to doubt this claim.
My tentative answer is the the development of man kind required complete autonomy in decision making between us and God. To your point he did promise to soften our hearts.
One of the most interesting questions I have seen so far. Need to ponder.
Jesus in human form was Devine and was driven to do the will of the Father.
Natural evil (not sure this is a thing) is part of the probabilistic nature of the universe which is a part of enabling free will. Developing humanity is enhanced by dealing with probabilistic problems.