Barry has a post up at UD that is on the same topic as one that I’ve had half written for a while now, but I thought I’d jump the gun and comment on Barry’s here, as it raises an important point, nicely and simply made: that, as Barry’s post-title puts it:
“If my eyes are a window, is there anyone looking out?”
Barry writes:
As we were winding our way through Custer State Park I became aware of myself looking through my eyes as if they were a window. I had a keenly felt sensation of what theorists of mind call the “subject-object” phenomenon. I perceived myself as a “subject” contemplating and having a reaction to an “object” (the beautiful scenery of the park).
Given their premises, materialists must believe the brain is a sort of organic computer, in principle very much like the computer on which I am writing this post. The subject-object problem is a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to this theory. Closely related to this issue is the idea of “qualia,” the subjective perception of experience (the cool blueness of the sky, the sadness of depression, the warmth of a fine sunset, the tangy-ness of a dill pickle).
Consider a computer to which someone has attached a camera and a spectrometer (an instrument that measures the properties of light). They point the camera at the western horizon and write a program that instructs the computer as follows: “when light conditions are X print out this statement: ‘Oh, what a beautiful sunset.’” Suppose I say “Oh, what a beautiful sunset” at the precise moment the computer is printing out the same statement according to the program. Have the computer and I had the same experience of the sunset? Obviously not. The computer has had no “experience” of the sunset at all. It has no concept of beauty. It cannot experience qualia. It is precisely this subjective experience of the sunset that cannot be accounted for on materialist principles. It follows that if materialist premises exclude an obviously true conclusion – i.e., that there is someone “in there” looking out of the window of my eyes – then materialist premises must be false.
The question in the title of this post is: “If my eyes are a window, is there anyone looking out?” The materialist must answer this question “no.” That the materialist must give an obviously false answer to this question is a devastating rebuke to materialism.
So, first of all:
Given their premises, materialists must believe the brain is a sort of organic computer, in principle very much like the computer on which I am writing this post. The subject-object problem is a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to this theory.
It is true, in a sense, that I think (“believe” is not a word I find very useful – “posit” would be better) that “the brain is a sort of organic computer”. It is certainly organic, and it certainly computes things (in my case, not very well, which is why I use a computer!) But I do not posit that my brain is “in principle very much like the computer on which I am writing this post”. If it were, then the “subject-object problem” would indeed be “a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to this theory”.
For a start, the computer on which I am writing this post receives all its input from human sources. My brain, in contrast, receives its inputs from all manner of external sources, and, what is more, depending on those inputs, “computes” a motor response which it sends to my body (my eyes, my neck, my torso, my legs) that changes the input. In other words, my brain is not (or not simply) a tool of some other intelligent agent, my brain is the “tool” of the organism that I call “me”, and which incorporates (literally incorporates) not only my brain, but my entire body, motor and sensory apparatus, digestive, circulatory and endocrine system and all. So the brain is not simply an information-processor, like the computer on my desk, but part of an information-gathering system – moreover, one in which the information to-be-gathered is itself an output of the system.
Secondly, as implied above, this makes brains a subsystem of a whole system that is most strongly characteristics by re-entrant feedback loops, in which not only is information processed, but in which the output of that processing is re-entered as input into the decision-making process as to what further information to seek. So if we want a materialist analog to the brain, we need to look at robots, not computers – i.e. things that can move their sensory apparatus as a function what information they need.
Ah, need. That’s another thing – organisms have needs (at its most simplest, to survive, but with all kinds of sub-needs, and epiphenomenal needs supporting that basic need – we should probably leave the origin of those needs to one side for now…) Organisms have needs, therefore they potentially have goals – outcomes that they seek, which we can also express as “desire, and take action to fulfill”. And those goals themselves are part of what the brain sets, and changes, in the light of new information.
So no, Barry. I, as a materialist (and, it should be said, a cognitive neuroscientist!) do not “believe” that the brain is merely an “organic computer” that is “similar in principle”, to the one on your desk. I think it is radically different to the computer on your desk, not least because it does a heck of a lot more than “compute”. It is part of the system of tools that enables me, as organism, to survive, by not only computing what I have to do to reach those goals, but to compute those goals themselves, in the light of current information, to seek further information in that may result in further adjustment of those goals, and to select actions that will enable me to fulfill them.
So….
Closely related to this issue is the idea of “qualia,” the subjective perception of experience (the cool blueness of the sky, the sadness of depression, the warmth of a fine sunset, the tangy-ness of a dill pickle).Consider a computer to which someone has attached a camera and a spectrometer (an instrument that measures the properties of light). They point the camera at the western horizon and write a program that instructs the computer as follows: “when light conditions are X print out this statement: ‘Oh, what a beautiful sunset.’” Suppose I say “Oh, what a beautiful sunset” at the precise moment the computer is printing out the same statement according to the program. Have the computer and I had the same experience of the sunset? Obviously not. The computer has had no “experience” of the sunset at all. It has no concept of beauty. It cannot experience qualia.
Indeed, your computer cannot. That is because your computer is not an autonomous interacter with its environment, in which it controls and adapts its own goals according to its needs – indeed, it has no needs. We may need computers; the computer does not need itself – it does not need to survive.
It is precisely this subjective experience of the sunset that cannot be accounted for on materialist principles.
And so we have the non-sequitur:
- P1 Materialists think brains are computers
- P2 Computers cannot have experience
- C: Materialist principles cannot account for experience.
Not only is the first premise wrong (see above), but C doesn’t follow anyway, because experience is not simply a function of brains but of entire organisms.
So this is wrong:
The question in the title of this post is: “If my eyes are a window, is there anyone looking out?” The materialist must answer this question “no.” That the materialist must give an obviously false answer to this question is a devastating rebuke to materialism.
My answer is no, not because I think there is no-one “looking out” but because I don’t accept the premise that “my eyes are a window”. My eyes are not a window, they are simply the things I (qua organism) use for looking with, and I don’t “look out” of my eyes – I just look.
So there’s certainly someone looking.
Who it is will (probably) be the subject of my next post 🙂
I know exactly what feeling Barry is talking about. I have experienced – frequently actually – the sensation of “being within my own head looking out from my eyes”. But I certainly realize that this sensation is not, in and of itself, evidence that the “I” looking out is necessarily separate from the head or the eyes for that matter. As you note – the eyes are not a window. Certainly not in the sense of…say…a computer screen through which one can view a picture or video. They are a sensor, like a camera, that is capable of detecting and translating electromagnetic radiation within a given range into chemo-electrical impulses in the neural cortex. Those impulses are then translated into this perceived world by the “I” – or rather brain – in my head. But that “I” is not separate from these eyes or this head; they are a system and they are but a part of even more parts that make up that system.
And to mop up a few stragglers:
Nope. We clearly live in an indeterminate universe.
Nope. This simply does not follow. Barry has forgotten about learning – we may have evolved the capacity to learn (I’m sure we did) but that doesn’t “determine” what we learn or what we do as a result.
Nope, although it is possible. It may serve some function in social bonding
Indeed.
Nope. Writing plays didn’t either, but that’s not a devastating blow to the materialist creation myth either.
All scientific ideas start with a “just so story”. And a “just so story” the idea will remain unless it generates testable hypotheses. In fact, there is quite a lot of research into the evolution of laughter, which has generated some testable hypotheses. So we are already beyond the territory of “just so story”.
But to get that, Barry would have to move on from his idea that materialism = determinism.
Although in fact, I don’t think that whether or not the universe is deterministic or not makes a lot of difference, except in the most ultimately distal of causal accounts – so distal as to be useless. People are decision-makers and jokers, and fun-seekers, and beauty-lovers. None of that is at odds with Darwinian evolution. It certainly wasn’t an inevitable consequence of it, but once moving critters got going, fun was going to be had somewhere 🙂
Nope, still don’t understand.
What does Barry think he/his brain does that cannot be a result of a myriad of different molecular interactions? (Even if those reactions cannot yet be identified and explained).
It seems strange for people like Denyse and Barry to maintain that although your brain is in your head, your “mind” is Somewhere Else. (Am I wrong about their position on this? It seems hard to imagine that they actually believe that, so perhaps I misunderstand them.)
If you are walking through your kitchen one day and happen to hit your head, hard, on an open cabinet door, and you fall down unconscious, is your brain knocked out, while your mind keeps on working, as it’s Somewhere Else?
I think the basic notion is Cartesian – that the brain is the interface between mind and body, so if it gets knocked out, your mind can’t control your body anymore (but may nonetheless hover around, resulting in an NDE when it gets back in).
The irony is that although it has some intuitive appeal, and might explain NDEs, it’s much more complicated than the simpler notion that we are whole organisms, not minds OR brains. It’s one of my pet bees (in bonnet) – people who “accuse” me of equating mind with brain. I don’t. I think minds are properties of whole people, not of brains, and brains are certainly not thing same as minds.
But what the “I” is is hard to pin down, and I guess it’s tempting to put the homunculus in there to represent it. I just drop the unculus part 🙂
I’ve simply lost my ability to take Arrington’s posts seriously enough to consider them worthy of response. But there are very interesting issues here in the philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of mind.
A few months ago I decided that “the mind/body problem” s a non-problem, and that the really interesting problem is “the person/brain problem.” The conceptual difficulty here is, how to describe neurobiological functions in such a way that both avoids the homunculus fallacy and explains the causal relations between neurobiology and personhood?
It’s one thing to explain what the person or organism does in terms what’s going on in its brain, quite another to attribute to the brain itself the states or processes of the person or organism as a whole, and avoiding the latter while pursuing the former is terribly difficult. Though we’ve largely gotten over Cartesian dualism, the Cartesian legacy persists in many ways — for example, in saying that is the brain (or one of its sub-systems) that perceives or thinks. We’ve gotten rid of the ghost in the machine, but now it’s part of the machine that implements a virtual ghost. That’s not really any better.
The correct view, though, is the one that Lizzie has been presenting here — one that starts off with the properties and processes of the whole organism (including human persons) and then relates what’s going on neurobiologically to what’s going on in the system as a whole. So it’s a part/whole problem rather than a problem of how to relate two different things to one another. Among philosophers of mind, what they call “cognitvism” — the thesis that cognition essentially consists of manipulating symbols according to rules — is the last bastion (as I see it) of the Cartesian legacy, but for about the past fifteen to twenty years it’s been contested by a variety of approaches that emphasize all the ways cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted. It’s really fascinating stuff — and much more interesting than correcting Arrington’s straw-man version of “materialism”.
What interested me about Barry’s post was the comments. For some reason I can no longer submit OPs here so I wrote it up on my own blog . The essential point is:
This group cannot understand the materialist case so they dismiss materialists as at best deluding themselves and possibly being deliberately deceptive because they want to show off. It amounts to “they are obviously wrong so the only interesting question is why do they say these things”. This is not a good basis for debate. In Barry’s case this has extended to banning arguments he believes to be “obviously” wrong from his debates (there are some UD regulars who do respect opposing views – most notably vj torley). What I cannot work out is how to engage with this mind set or if there is any point in trying to.
Theism is the most absolute expression of determinism.
So if a limb is amputated you may feel it as a phantom, but also know that it isn’t there. But if your brain is injured you may perceive that your limb is missing when it isn’t. Or you may lose the ability to remember or think about or imagine color. Where is the disembodied mind that should be able to realize that the I /O system is broken? Why in such cases does it appear that the mind itself is broken?
Why does making the body intoxicated also make the mind drunk?
Posting permissions restored! So sorry – I haven’t been keeping up with updating permissions since the hack.
One thing I do find extraordinary is the view held by Denyse O’Leary for one, and at least one of the commenters in the UD thread, that somehow brain plasticity is some kind of “problem” for a materialistic account!
It’s certainly a “problem” for the idea that a brain is “like” a computer but it’s precisely because we know a great deal about the material mechanisms of Hebbian learning that we know that the brain is not “like” a hard-wired computer (although there is no reason to suppose that we can’t make a soft-wired computer, and indeed, learning software involves virtual re-“wiring”).
But unlike our computers, there is no clear distinction in the brain between hardware and software – the brain is not the hardware on which software runs, although it’s possible that some dualists do think that that is the way it works, or possibly that “materialists” do.
But we don’t. Or at least this one doesn’t. It’s organic not just in the sense in which I think Barry used the word (made of meat) but organic in the sense that it’s a growing, changing, developing, adapting biological organ of the body.
Thanks for the link to the post by Billmaz. A good post.
“That is because your computer is not an autonomous interacter with its environment, in which it controls and adapts its own goals according to its needs – indeed, it has no needs. We may need computers; the computer does not need itself – it does not need to survive.”
Then experience is the result of the need to survive?
“We clearly live in an indeterminate universe.”
Then science is impossible. Termodinamic principles are only a guess.
Not a necessary result, but an important difference between us and desk-bound computers.
What I meant was that QM seems to indicate that the universe is indeterminate. Maybe not so clearly, though – I recall the Dutch physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft disagrees:
How a wave function can collapse without violating Schroedinger’s equation, and how to understand Born’s rule
but that’s way above my paygrade 🙂
I was looking through some SciAms, a year or two old, and came across a short article on the future of AI computing.
They had a good take on the kind of processor that would be good at pattern recognition and such, and ended by saying such a machine would not be good at math or symbolic logic.
The take home message is that brains are not at all like the current crop of computers. Brains integrate all input continuously for the purpose of managing real time behavior. They do not compute.
The architecture necessary for “experiencing” is not at all like that needed for logical operations.
I suppose the inability to be logical is evidence that Barry is human.
May you define “experience” then?
Lizzie:
What I meant was that QM seems to indicate that the universe is indeterminate.Maybe not so clearly, though – I recall the Dutch physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft disagrees:
How a wave function can collapse without violating Schroedinger’s equation, and how to understand Born’s rule
but that’s way above my paygrade
So universe is determinate or not? With all the same parametes we have to expect the same results or it depends of something not possible to define?
We have no reason to believe that the same starting conditions would result in the same outcomes. The slightest deviation in starting conditions will result in rapid divergence, and experimentally, the same initial conditions cannot predict outcomes at the quantum level.
there is always the logical possibility that quantum level phenomena are fully determined, but the evidence is against it.
Then science is no more than educated guess.
Science is certainly a series of educated guesses, the education being provided by feedback from previous guesses. The educated part is important though.
Bullshit. Stochastic processes are at the heart of much science and technology, including the parts that make your computer.
Are you trying to imply that casinos cannot make money unless they cheat?
Not just a series of educated guesses, but a converging series.
You cannot let the “guess” accusation go by without mentioning that sciences converges toward knowledge of phenomena.
I find this discussion interesting not so much for the content as for the style. (I’m writing a book on the hows and whys of engaging with irrational ideologies, so this is very much on my mind.) In particular, my first thought when I read Mr. Arrington’s post was that he does a very poor job of modeling the other side’s arguments. He either truly doesn’t understand them, is misrepresenting them as a strawman, or simply doesn’t care what “materialists” really think.
Of course, it’s a difficult thing for us all to do, whether or not we’re creationists. An economist once proposed an Ideological Turing Test to explore these issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_Turing_Test
I would love to see posters from this blog and UD do a joint, blind ITT to see whether either side is better at understanding and modeling the other side’s arguments. I doubt UD would cooperate though.
Would any of the posting-privileged here like to take an unblinded stab at it, drafting an argument from the creationist perspective? I think it would be an instructive exercise, whether or not it’s a success. (See, for example, this post: http://www.popehat.com/2013/05/23/ideological-turing-test-mainstream-liberal-democrat-edition/ The commenters there judged the experiment a failure, in that the author couldn’t convincingly replicate liberal democratic arguments, but it provoked a lot of interesting discussions.)
Lizzie,
You are talking about the normal scientific process of hypothesis/falsification May be you do not understand the difference if as Petrushka said “We have no reason to believe that the same starting conditions would result in the same outcomes. The slightest deviation in starting conditions will result in rapid divergence”
then there is no way to posit an hypothesis as the same initial conditions do not allow us to make any prediction.
As above, science is an iterative series of educated guesses and tests of their validity. Science does not produce TRVTH. It produces increasingly accurate models.
Your conclusion does not follow. The ability to predict depends on the system being predicted.
Long term weather cannot be predicted, but the casino’s take at the roulette wheel can be predicted. The aggregate behavior of electrons in a transistor gate can be predicted. The aggregate behavior of neutrons in an atomic pile can be predicted.
It would be nice that evolutionists talk in that way instead of saying “evolution is a fact” or “it would be perverse to withold provisional assent”. I would agree that ToE is an increasingly acccurate model.
It’s difficult to draft an ID or creationist argument because there are so many different ones.
1. There is the traditional interventionist view of god as a human-like entity (we are made in his image) capable of thought and emotion. He mostly lets things go according to natural law, but occasionally performs miracles. As the creator he creates natural law, ans as the deity, he occasional intervenes. I think this is close to the common understanding of many Christians and Jews.
2. There is the deistic or near-deistic creator, who builds the clock and winds it, but does not intervene. The clock is perfectly self-regulating. This seems to have been a common understanding among early scientists. The quest was to understand the mechanism.
3. There is the mystical understanding in which god’s consciousness continuously creates and instantiates reality. We are god’s thoughts, and intervention is seamless and undetectable. For those who ask how non-material interacts with matter, it’s all the same stuff. Thought stuff.
I could go on.
I suspect that it’s mostly the last — that he (and the other UD participants) — just don’t care what “materialists” really think. I doubt any of them have actually looked at what Churchland or Dennett have said. But I also think that the plausibility of their position depends upon its being construed as the only alternative to a view so crude and silly that no one could actually hold it. That’s how they reassure themselves of the credibility of their own position. If they were to take the time to actually engage with contemporary philosophy of neuroscience, they’d have a much more difficult time articulating their opposition. But that involves hard work, and why bother doing the hard work when one can bloviate (or ‘blogviate’?) so effortlessly and not be called out on it?
In all that cases you are assuming that given the same conditions you are going to have the same results. If you are coherent with yourself, that given the same conditions there is no reason to expect the same result (“We have no reason to believe that the same starting conditions would result in the same outcomes. The slightest deviation in starting conditions will result in rapid divergence””) Then given the same roulet, the electrons the same neutrons can give different results.
If they give the same results you have two options, you are right and you were lucky to find the same results or you were wrong and all of them are determined, given the same conditions always we are going to have the same results.
One could as a thought experiment try to imagine two systems starting at exactly the same quantum state, but that isn’t an option in real life.
What you seem unable to fathom is the possibility that prediction depends on whether we are discussing aggregate behavior or dynamic systems.
petrushka,
Yes, but that’s the case with any such test–there are a lot of positions to choose from. Would you like to pick one and try? Or maybe just focus on one or two of the kind of broad-tent arguments made at UD?
Kantian Naturalist,
I tentatively agree with everything that you’ve said, although I’m not any more familiar with your references than the UD crowd seems to be. I’m not much of a philosopher, but the tract that comes most to mind when I read Arrington’s post is Frankfurt’s book (and paper?) On Bullshit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
The tiniest book of philosophy ever, and one of the few that made a lasting impression on me.
Would Barry then argue that Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder) multiple “minds” share the same window?
I’m not sure what the test entails. I have used those opening statements a number of times in discussions. I have tried to make them neutral and not-derogatory. Then I have tried to elicit some expansion of them from the other side.Sort of like an adult conversation.
Usually, about that time, I get banned.
So I haven’t been able to build a clear picture of a creationist or ID argument. It seems to me that there isn’t any detailed picture. The main thing they want is to assert that life, the universe and everything is the result of thought and planning. I don’t see any interest in the details of when or where or how or why.
From where I stand the only model that clashes with science is the one that posits numerous interventions or miracles.
We are discussing if the univere is determinate or not, so if we can predict events given the initial conditions then it is determinate or we are lucky. You have to choose one, cannot be both true. Or maybe you want to go for sometime it is determinate sometimes it is not.
Blas:
When you talk about doing the same thing twice, who is doing the experiment twice?
That’s not as trivial a question as it sounds!
Let’s say the universe really does run over and over again, giving the same “result” over and over again (we don’t know that it doesn’t). That would mean that every time it runs, I make the same decisions, with the same outcome, and have the same experiences.
Does that make those decisions any less decisive, any better informed,
the experiences any less vivid? After all, all we are privy to is our own past, and our imagined future. Time is merely the axis on which we plot the succession of events. Perhaps there is no time – perhaps, the dying woman that I will surely become already exists in some other time-plane, and the newborn I once was still exists. But that makes no difference to me now – because I am not privy to that information.
In fact, I suggest that “I, now” is best described as everything that is not “someone else or at me at some other time”. My “qualia” are only unique to me because I am not privy to yours. If “I” were to become privy to yours, all I would know or remember is you and your qualia, and no longer know mine! We might all be the same “soul”, flitting from brain to brain, body to body, only ever knowing or remembering what the currently inhabited “brain” knows and remembers and forgetting everything else!
But what would that mean? It would be indistinguishable from the more parsimonious idea that there is no such additional “soul”. The “I” that is me is simply what this organism, currently typing these words, knows and remembers and does, including knowing that I am me. The one called Lizzie.
Some people call consciousness an “illusion”. I think that’s silly. It’s not an “illusion” at all, any more than vision is an “illusion”, even though we know from vision science that what lands on our retinas is nothing like the scene that we observe, not least because it doesn’t jerk around 8 times a second as we move our eyes. It’s a perfectly useful percept. An extremely useful percept, in fact, and has the clever property that the percept is of a person having a percept 🙂
Another way of phrasing what I am trying to say is that from the human perspective, nature at its most fundamental level is indeterminate. We cannot, even in principle, predict the future in detail.
This does not rule out science. It does not even rule out prediction. We can make profoundly detailed predictions of some kinds of phenomena. In fact, our very best science involves stochastic phenomena.
I mentioned the casino. Our ability to run casinos as profitable enterprises depends on indeterminacy. No one would go to a casino if the management knew in advance the outcome of every toss of the dice or spin of the wheel.
And yet, casinos are profitable.
It certainly is possible for the universe to be indeterminate and still allow us to make predictions. Consider the casino.
It’s an interesting challenge and there’s an incentive in addition to simply honing one’s arguments. There’s been a dearth of new material from the intelligent design creationists of late, but clearly the demand still exists. Anyone capable of articulating any of the IDC’s myriad, mutually contradictory, arguments stands a good chance of getting a book contract with one of the sectarian publishing houses.
The next Dembski could be here at TSZ as we speak.
Off course a good materialist scientist! 🙂
Lizzie:
Some people call consciousness an “illusion”.I think that’s silly.It’s not an “illusion” at all, any more than vision is an “illusion”, even though we know from vision science that what lands on our retinas is nothing like the scene that we observe, not least because it doesn’t jerk around 8 times a second as we move our eyes.It’s a perfectly useful percept.An extremely useful percept, in fact, and has the clever property that the percept is of a person having a percept
You are going a little to fast. I asked for two things that you have to make explicit to me so I can understand what you said in that last sentence. According to you are really indeterminate the universe? If yes what you mean by consciussness or even you Lizzie is just an opinion depending of what each of us had the chance to perceive. So there is no more discussion, not even truth doesn´t exists, logic is an illusion.
The second thing I need to know is what do you call a “perception”? The peception of the sky is the electromagnetic energy in the blue wave lenght exciting the external electrons of the rhodopsin and the following depolarisation of a chain of neurons?
petrushka,
And when your prediction is always correct you call that luck?
Sorry! I got carried away 😮
I don’t know – physicist generally say yes, but at least one says no. My own view is that it isn’t critical to how we understand consciousness or experience or decision-making. At the most it just adds a little stochastic noise. Which could be a good thing.
If you like. But an informed opinion is a valuable thing! My opinion is that I am a conscious person called Lizzie. It seems to fit the data 🙂
No, I don’t think logic is an illusion, and I think that “truth”, although it has many meanings, is a perfectly valid concept.
Ah, no – My “perception” of the sky is that it is blue. Actually, grey, right now. But someone with slightly different perceptual apparatus (a colour-blind person, for instance) might have a different “perception”.
I think Michael Denton put forward a self-consistent proposal in Nature’s Destiny.
Mentioning him in an ID discussion results in anything from a blank stare to open hostility.
I’m pretty much convinced that behind the mask of most ID proponents is the core belief that we are not kin to monkeys. Axe and whatshername seem to have struck gold by questioning common descent.
There are lots of flavors of ID, but I think they all have in common the idea that humans are specially created.
Either by poof, or by inevitability.
Give me a specific example that troubles you. I have mentioned casinos and nuclear reactors as examples of predictable systems that have indeterminacy embedded in their core (literally).
Evolution is an example of a dynamic system in which indeterminate variations are subjected to positive and negative feedback. The system can be modeled, but like the weather, it’s long term direction cannot be predicted.
The same can be said of people, or of any system that learns.
Yes, this appears to be what drives them. Dembski was reasonably clear about that in his posts at BioLogos a while ago. He referred to the idea a “human exceptionalism” and indicated that it was a core belief in his theology.
Blas, this is dumb. I know you have language issues, but I think this problem is just you failing to think it through.
Think about flipping a coin. We confidently (scientifically!) predict that it will land either heads or tails, but we can’t predict which because – as far as we know – even given the exact same conditions for the flip, the resulting way it falls is random.
So, it’s undetermined. Indeterminate in advance.
Yet it’s also predictable. You have to admit, you know the coin will predictably fall either head OR tails (with a vanishingly-small degree of possibility it may land on its edge) BUT NOT suddenly in midair turn into a teapot pouring hot tea all over your wrist.
So it’s predictable. Predictable within some defined range of results.
This is why you have a computer that works. This is why you have electric power that works when you turn on the switch (at least, usually). This is exactly why science works.
Any attempt to pretend that science does not work because (so you say) “things cannot be both indeterminate and predictable”, truly is dumb.
Actually, I neglected to mention the most important core belief of ID proponents, and that is belief in an immortal soul. That’s really what drives the no kin to monkeys belief.
Fear of death lurks behind every ID argument. It’s palpable..
When they say “materialism,” it means materialists believe that people die. Really dead. All the rationalizing and all the philosophy are all fronts masking what’s really troubling them.
You can do much better than that. You can predict that the results will have a predictable pattern. In fact you can depend on it. You can depend on it to the point that you can make a living predicting that the results of coin tosses will have a predictable pattern.
Similarly you can depend on the stochastic behavior of gasses prevents all the molecules from congregating in one spot within a container.
Failure to understand what is meant by indeterminacy is just laziness.
On my view, that causal sequence goes a long way towards explaining the perceptual experience, but it is not the same as the perceptual experience. The perceptual experience is undertaken by the whole living animal in its transactions in its environment. The causal sequence is not.
petrushka,
See? Productive discussion already. 🙂