Jeff Lowder of The Secular Outpost debated Frank Turek 22nd september in Kansas. From this debate (video is not available yet), Jeff has compiled a narrated presentation of his powerpoint slides used in the debate, which I think now amounts to one of the strongest cases for naturalism and against the type of theism offered by the likes of William Lane Craig, I have seen to date.
It is long but if you are interested in this sort of thing, it is definitely worth a watch:
Hi Rumraket,
Thanks for posting this video. It’s quite meaty. I haven’t yet watched the entire thing, but I’ve skimmed it. A few preliminary thoughts:
(i) From what I can tell, Lowder doesn’t define the terms “mental” and “physical” in his video. He really needs to define these terms, since he insists that mental states are grounded in underlying physical states.
(ii) Lowder equates “objective” with “mind-independent.” This definition begs the question against theism. It would be better to define “objective” as “having properties which are irreducible to mental states.” An electron, for instance, may depend on God for its existence (if theism is true), but its properties (such as its charge, spin and rest mass) are not properties of God’s Mind, even if they are caused to exist by God’s Mind.
(iii) Lowder repeatedly asserts that if naturalism is compatible with the existence of X, then X can’t be used to argue against naturalism. This is a fallacy. Rather, one should say: if naturalism can explain the existence of X, then X can’t be used to argue against naturalism. If X is compatible with both theism and naturalism, but X is explained only by theism, then X surely counts as evidence for theism.
(iv) Lowder defends induction on the grounds that uniformity is intrinsically more probable than variety. Nonsense. Consider a straight line curve, exactly 1 unit above the x-axis, going from x = minus infinity to x = 0. Question: where does the curve go next? There are countless ways in which it could diverge from its hitherto straight course, but there’s only one way for it to continue on course. Antecedently, it’s infinitely more probable that the curve will veer off course at some point than that it will always remain on course. Similarly with nature. There are plenty of ways in which it could go off the rails at some point in the future, and a naturalist who thinks that will never happen is being unreasonably optimistic.
(v) Lowder argues that naturalism can explain the reliability of human reasoning regarding matters pertinent to survival, but fails to realize that naturalism cannot explain the reliability of our reasoning regarding naturalism itself, as belief in naturalism per se has no bearing on survival. Hence Lowder has no reason to trust his own argument.
(vi) Interestingly, towards the end of his video, Lowder acknowledges that consciousness counts as evidence for theism. Good for him. He does go on to argue that certain facts about consciousness are better explained by naturalism. Even if this were true, however, it would be of no use unless the naturalist were able to explain consciousness itself.
As I said, I’ve only skimmed the video, and it’s possible that Lowder may have answered one or two of my points. I’ll look at it in more detail tomorrow night. Anyway, I have to say it’s very methodical, and I appreciate the trouble that Jeffrey Jay Lowder has gone to. Hats off to him for that.
Hey Torley, thank you for your reply. I skimmed it and something stood out initially:
When you say that “belief in naturalism” has no bearing on survival, I would of course agree and so would anyone (well, up to a point, which is that if you believe God will constantly intervene to save your ass, you’ll probably get run over by a bus soon). But you seem to be conflating “belief in naturalism” with “the ability of naturalism to explain why our critical faculties work.”
Whether one believes in a god or that the natural world is all there is, if you fail to make the connection that the perceived increase in size of a large predator means it is quickly approaching you, you probably won’t make it.
Our critical faculties, on naturalism, would like the reliability of our senses, be largely the product of natural selection. In other words, if you consistently failed to cognitively identify black stripes on orange with “tiger” (or, “it’s getting bigger quickly” means it’s getting closer), you wouldn’t get to pass on your genes. Simply put, on naturalism, cognitive processes that are mostly inaccurate, mostly die before they leave descendants.
I don’t see the problem.
Derek Bickerton, in his recent “More Than Nature Needs”, puts the question as “why should we think that uniquely human cognitive abilities, such as self-consciousness and abstract thought, can be explained in evolutionary terms?” He calls this “Wallace’s Problem”, since Wallace was very concerned with this question. Wallace, as is well-known, concluded that natural selection could not account for human cognitive uniqueness.
Thus, while natural selection might well explain the reliability of the sorts of cognitive abilities that many animals have, it’s less clear whether natural selection can account for uniquely human cognitive abilities. And that includes the abilities used when we do science itself.
Think of it this way: spiders and beavers can reliably distinguish between obstacles and opportunities in their environments that are relevant for satisfying their goals. They can reliably classify stimuli as threatening, purposively avoid threats, etc. But they don’t formulate hypotheses, test them, evaluate the consequences of tested hypotheses, or conjecture about the nature of reality as a whole. No other animal has myths, religions, art, poetry, music, philosophy, or science.
The challenge for naturalism is therefore not to explain why reliable, conceptually structured sensorimotor abilities were adaptive, but to explain why human beings evolved capacities for self-consciousness, abstract thought, and rational argument.
Hi Rumraket,
I don’t dispute that naturalism can explain why our critical faculties work in general, but I see no reason why a naturalist should trust them regarding matters metaphysical. Lowder would have been more consistent if he had argued instead that naturalism is not a view which can be expressed as a proposition that can be evaluated as true or false. But he didn’t; he claimed that naturalism is (probably) true and theism is (very likely) false. That was tactically unwise.
vjtorley,
You mean naturalism must explain naturalism or else we should have no reason to trust it?
I would think that should be a criterion of a philosophically acceptable naturalism!
Oh, I guess my total lack of philosophical training is at display once again. It sounds circular to me
vjtorley,
But other than that, Rumraket is confident it ” amounts to one of the strongest cases for naturalism”.
Rumraket,
Of course not.
Because you believe the ability to recognize black on orange stripes is located somewhere in a gene, and is hereditary.
So all knowledge is in our dna. Wrong.
Start here:
You still won’t understand the problem, but maybe it will make you think.:
http://www.nature.com/news/fearful-memories-haunt-mouse-descendants-1.14272
It’s an interesting question, but it seems to me it’s the same underlying neural tissues responsible for reasoning correctly about approaching tigers, as the more abstract things like logic and metaphysics. I don’t see why we should think it would be more prone to mistake in metaphysics. In fact, I don’t see how the kind of reasoning involved in metaphysical subjects is qualitatively different from reasoning about whether there is food on the other side of the river and so on.
Regardless, it doesn’t seem like Theism offers anything superior in that regard. If the insinuation is that believing we can trust our faculties on naturalism requires blind faith, how is that any different on theism? You believe by faith that god has made it so. So here it’s simply that neither option offers any (higher) certainty that our critical faculties are generally reliable, but that in both cases we have no choice but to use the abilities we have or be forever stuck in a position of radical skepticism regarding reason.
No, I believe the developmental pathways for brain-tissue formation is (hereditary).
I agree that’s wrong. I don’t believe that.
Without presuming to speak for Torley, here’s how I see it.
We aspire, in philosophy, to understand how everything fits together. (This is of course impossible; it’s an ideal of philosophical understanding.) One of the things we want to understand is what understanding is. If understanding itself were omitted from our understanding what is the case, then our understanding would not be complete. This leads us to inquire into the nature of our cognitive abilities by which we understand anything.
Given that, we would then want to understand whether our understanding of our own ability to understand is consistent with our understanding of the world which we understand by way of those cognitive abilities.
Put otherwise: are our cognitive abilities themselves part of the world, or are they are somehow distinct from the world?
Even in antiquity, both sides of this question have had their able-bodied defenders: Plato and Aristotle vs Democritus and Epicurus, for example. And with the rise of modern natural science as authoritative for our understanding of the world, we see debates between Descartes and Hobbes, between Leibniz and Spinoza, and between Hume and Kant.
The rise of evolutionary theory and the cognitive sciences help resolve some of these issues, but they are not (yet) definitive.
Few would doubt that evolutionary theory and the cognitive sciences (circa 2016) allow us to understand why being able to reliably detect predators, food, and mates would have been advantageous for animals that had those abilities (and could afford the energetic costs of maintaining a large-enough brain).
But that said, it is still a separate question whether evolutionary theory and the cognitive sciences can explain humanly unique cognitive abilities, such as doing math, building boats, creating music, or musing about the underlying nature of reality.
And since naturalism itself is a product of those unique cognitive abilities, we do indeed want to understand, in naturalistic terms, how naturalism itself is even possible — let alone why we should think that the sorts of cognitive abilities that we take to have evolutionary origins and neural implementations are even so much as capable of deciding between naturalism and theism!
That said, I wouldn’t be a naturalist if I didn’t think that the prospects are rather favorable for a naturalistic explanation of human cognitive uniqueness! But it’s still an extremely difficult problem!
The difference is one between correctly classifying features of an environment relative to the satisfaction of species-specific goals (which all animals can do) and building comprehensive models of the underlying causal and modal structure of reality (which only humans can do).
Flies know when a hand is trying to hit it. It doesn’t require much in the way of connective brain tissue.
In your story, humans would only need about as much knowledge as a fly to avoid tigers.
Your story is a fairytale.
Which is a leap of intelligence so large, that natural selection couldn’t possibly account for this huge advance.
Kantian Naturalist,
Great stuff, thanks so much.
Yes, that was Wallace’s conclusion as well.
Why would this require qualitatively different reasoning? Drawing connections and inferences about the relations of objects is the same whether those objects are conceptual or abstract, or concrete and material. Put another way, I don’t believe there is any difference. In fact it appears to be an invented problem, a purely semantical distinction.
Why couldn’t it? You say it couldn’t possibly do that. How do you know that?
Sounds definitive, any ideas of how and when this leap occurred?
Because flies know how to keep away from horse tails.
It doesn’t require much.
That is the conclusion that IDists make about just about everything related to evolution.
I do not have a fully reasoned and adequate response, but I have my rule of thumb response, which comes from the movie, Dead Poets Society.
Poetry was invented by men in order to get laid.
I’ve heard something similar said about purpose brains. that they got so large due to competition to get laid. It’s not a proven fact, but it is not unreasonable to think that brains are, to some extent, peacock tail feathers.
The relevant difference isn’t between flies and humans, but between great apes and humans.
Humans have three times the cranial capacity of an ape of our body size. But what we we want to know is how a three-fold expansion of brain size is correlated with the ability to make music, prove theorems, and test theories.
Of course, that’s the point. if all that was required of humans was the ability to stay away from danger, animals have had that ability since flies.
If the evolutionists are so convinced that an eye from a small worm is a good enough template to carry on to human eyes, why wouldn’t they also think that the ability of a fly to stay away from danger is a good enough template to work for humans as well. Why would we need so much more.
How many layers between a fly and a human do you need to learn about danger? Aren’t you already 99% of the way there with a fly? Imagine the advances for avoiding danger that come with being a hummingbird.
When Jeff is able to provide examples of Coded Information which is complex and instructional/specified found in epigenetic systems and genes, and irreducible , interdependent molecular machines and biosynthetic and metabolic pathways in biological systems that have most probably natural origins, let him present them to us. Before , all his efforts are a meaningless waste of time.
You might have to couple that to language and to brain plasticity, but I fail to see how there’s anything in our present abilities that seems truly surprising if we consider brain size, language, and brain plasticity. It seems to me that musical ability exists in “animals” (not symphonies, but certainly some beautiful trills from wrens, for example), and if we have language we almost certainly have at least some logic, thus theorems do not seem especially miraculous.
Of course the origins of much have not been exactly explained (language abilities, for one thing), any more than the course of evolution has been explained fully. But it’s one thing to say that there are many gaps in our knowledge, and quite another to act as if there’s some glaring mystery out there, as if somehow these are especially great problems. I can’t see that they are, there are many similarities between non-humans and humans, and while the whole of human society greatly outstrips animal societies according to several measures, that doesn’t seem unexpected once language allows much more widespread transference of knowledge and understanding, in the context of brain plasticity.
Yes, science continues, and I don’t see any show stoppers for it, nor answers to music and theorems (for example) that seem to be beyond our capacity to relate to brain phenomena.
Glen Davidson
Thank you for basically conceding the point. Reasoning can be done by brain tissue, even very little of it. And it would be subject to natural selection, since flies being swatted leave less offpsring.
Reasoning, not knowledge. This isn’t about natural selection producing knowledge, but the ability to reason correctly. Whether there is reason to believe reasoning itself is trustworthy on naturalism.
My point is that reasoning, whether simple reasoning done by flies, or more complex reasoning done by humans, is basically due to natural selection.
Humans have more brain tissue than flies, yet in may respects it’s qualitatively the same tissue. If fly-reasoning is generally correct, after all they do seem to manage correctly inferring when hands will hit them. So at least superficially, adding more brain tissue does not entail reasoning suddenly getting unreliable.
Right, this is coming from the guy who believes he has an immortal dad who loves him and created everything, who had himself sacrificed to himself so he could forgive us all for something someone else did before the rest of us were born, and who will make him live eternally in complete happiness in an undetecable spirit-dimension called paradise, in a second life that comes after he dies.
But I’m the one with a fairytale? The irony.
Other than living organisms?
GlenDavidson,
Precisely. Language evolution is the key.
What are needed here are analyses of abstract thought and self-consciousness showing that they are underpinned by language and plausible explanations of how language evolved.
I never said that Wallace’s Problem couldn’t be solved — I just think that we should recognize the magnitude of the challenge, and then solve it!
This is basically the trick question that creationists often ask. “Can you give me an example of natural processes giving rise to something as complex/beautiful/interesting as LIFE? ” If I could, the questioner would just call it LIFE, and would disqualify the example.
In other words, when you have a set of properties that appear to be unique to living things, then it is dishonest to ask for examples of non-living things that have those properties.
You realize it’s pretty easy to out-smart a fly right? Well maybe you don’t have that experience. There are clearly many organisms much smarter than flies. Which implies there’s a pretty significant advantage to evolving greater and greater intelligence, since the types of problems of survival you can solve would be much more difficult.
So while flies probably can’t reason much about where to find food if their local resource runs out, organisms with increasingly more complex brains can draw increasingly more complex inferences and connections about where more food might be located. And no it’s not JUST about food of course, but how to avoid predators, where to find mates, how to attract them, fight off rivals etc. etc.
You seem to be insinuating that a fly with human intelligence would do no better than a fly.
There are lots of commercial applications for any robot or computer system that can engage humans verbally.
Google has spent a lot of time and money on computerized translation.
Basically, they have punted. Their best systems pretty much copy the work of human translators, sentence by sentence. This works pretty well, because there are hundreds of thousand of books that have been translated, providing a vast library of stuff to copy and paste.
I don’t see much evidence yet of systems that understand human language.
Out of interest, do you ever wonder where the Intelligent Designer/god came from? Presumably that designer is operating on a higher plane then mere irreducible, interdependent molecular machines and biosynthetic and metabolic pathways in biological systems, so if complexity like that requires a designer where does the designers design come from?
Seems to me you give as an answer for the origin of all those molecular machines but that answer is no answer at all as it’s origin does not need to be explained. Conveniently.
I don’t know is the first step on your new journey, padawan.
Welllll the latest results for some translation types are almost as accurate as human translators. Stuff has just kicked up a notch.
https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html
https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/google-claims-ai-breakthrough-machine-translation/
How can it not be accurate if they copy and paste human translations?
But can it carry on a conversation? I haven’t heard that it can.
The goal seems to be a commercial translator that doesn’t sound stupid. Not to understand what is being said.
My answer is a derail of the topic, but since you asked…..
Who or what created God ?
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t77-who-created-god#1348
The creator is a self existing power. That’s unfathomable to the finite mind. Nonetheless, there are wonders of a caliber the time and coincidence argument is hard pressed to attempt to contain. Some may ask, “But who created God?” The answer is that by definition He is not created; He is eternal. Definition of eternal: permanent, unending. Eternal, endless, everlasting, perpetual imply lasting or going on without ceasing. That which is eternal is, by its nature, without beginning or end. He is the One who brought time, space, and matter into existence. Since the concept of causality deals with space, time, and matter, and since God is the one who brought space, time, and matter into existence, the concept of causality does not apply to God since it is something related to the reality of space, time, and matter. Since God is beyond space, time, and matter, the issue of causality does not apply to Him.The cause of the universe must have been non-material because if the cause was material / natural, it would be subject to the same laws of decay as the universe. That means it would have to have had a beginning itself and you have the same problem as cycles of births and deaths of universes. So the cause of the universe’s beginning must have been super-natural, i.e. non-material or spirit—a cause outside of space-matter-time. Such a cause would not be subject to the law of decay and so would not have a beginning. That is, the cause had to be eternal spirit.
5 Easy Steps to refute naturalism
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1877-easy-steps-to-refute-naturalism
God is not complex
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1332-god-is-not-complex
That does not seem to be your answer. But nonetheless, how do you know it’s your eternal spirit and not some other religions?
There are many commercial pressures towards that goal currently. And much new tech: http://qz.com/806321/open-ai-reddit-human-conversation/
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602153/this-supercomputer-will-try-to-find-intelligence-on-reddit/
this is incredibly bad thinking: Morphology isn’t behavior and life is often risk / reward. The subject matter is too hard for you I think, Phoodoo.
And now you get away with not having to explain anything nor any need to even understand what needs to be explained. Nice work if you can get it I suppose.
Chatbots/intelligent agents that you interact with and which understand what would be relevant or helpful are the next big thing. Coming soon to an app near you….
that would be another topic again….. i think we should go back and stay ontopic ?
Well, yes and no. There are many animals that are much more intelligent than flies. And there are also many animals that do perfectly well with the intelligence of flies or much less. (How much intelligence does an earthworm really need, after all?)
And there are nevertheless many animals that do perfectly well with brains much smaller than those of primates, let alone great apes.
In other words, if you look at the history of life on this planet, there’s no general trend towards larger brains. The trend towards larger brains is one specific trend, and it happens to be of interest to us because it leads to us. But from a biological point of view, there’s nothing privileged about brains.
As I see it, if we want to understand brains as adaptive, then brains are going to have to be treated just like every other adaptation: as a solution to a problem posed by the niche that the organism occupies. This means that there will have to be specific ecological circumstances, specific problems posed by the environment, in which having a large and metabolically expensive brain is adaptive.
What we need here is an ecological theory of cognition, one that explains why some animals develop large brains and others don’t, and also explains under what conditions the arms race between predators and prey becomes a cognitive arms race.
One particular approach that I find helpful is the predictive processing model developed by Chris Frith, Karl Friston, and Andy Clark. The basic idea is that brains are organized in terms of bidirectional multilevel hierarchies: there are many different levels of neuronal assemblies, and information flows from the periphery to the center (exteroceptive and proprioceptive sensation) and back out (motor impulses). But unlike the standard stimulus-response model, the cognitive cycle begins with a top-down prediction or expectation about what sensations to receive. The information being conveyed by the senses is a prediction error signal: it tells the brain how erroneous the prediction was.
One of the many nice features of the predictive processing model is that it gives us an answer to the ecological question: a larger brain will be adaptive just in case it is necessary to generate complex predictions and revise them quickly in an environment that is heterogeneous and variable — many different parts, with varying degrees of stability and instability, so that the organism can’t rely on a few Good Tricks (like being able to detect carbon dioxide emissions given off by animals, which is how mosquitoes find their targets).
But since having a large brain is energetically costly, and the thermodynamic books have to stay balanced long enough for the organism to reproduce, it only pays to have a large brain if the organism can also extract the nutrients it needs from the environment. Prey species often have smaller brains than predators, in part because it doesn’t take much predictive power to find a twig and in part because most of the animal’s metabolism goes into extracting nutrients from the leaves and grasses it consumes.
But suppose — just suppose! — that you had an animal that had to deal with the social environmental complexities of being a primate and the physical environmental complexities of being a social carnivore. Such an animal (purely hypothetical, of course!) would have to solve all its ecological problems at the neurocomputational level because the primate body-plan doesn’t contain the materials for fast running, excellent senses of hearing and smell, or sharp teeth and claws. If having a larger brain could somehow allow some odd sort of ape to compensate for the absence of traits found in ungulates and carnivores — well, then you might have something really interesting.
As to whether such a hypothetical creature might be found in the natural world – that, as they say, is an exercise left to the reader.
Fancy versions of ELIZA.
I do not wish to suggest that these programs are trivial. I think AI will eventually emerge from commercial applications iterated with university research.
Traits that Rumraket wants you to believe they possessed at one time, but they lost them, because…..
Well, he is still writing his fairytale. He needs to figure out how to write about how they survived between the time they lost the features using physical skills to find food, and gained the skills to use mental skills to find food. I guess it needs to happen quickly. A pack with half of the apes using their claws to get food, and half using a calculator doesn’t sound like it would get along very well. Hopefully this state doesn’t need to wait a few million years. That seems like a lot of acrimony.
GlenDavidson,
Evolution of the gaps.
Why does your side complain about God of the gaps, when you have no problem using evolution of the gaps.
I don’t agree the problems needed to be solved are trivial. Other apes have language, they just don’t write things down. But they still rely on brute strength and their physical skills to find both food and mates (do monkeys care how handsome they are?). We brag about how closely we are related to chimps, nearly identical DNA! Yet look at the huge difference in how mates are selected. We select more like tiny brained birds then we do like monkeys. We even sing more like tiny brained birds. Nothing is smooth in the transition between us and monkeys.
OMagain,
I doubt they are as good with Chinese as they claim. Comparing it to a perfect translation doesn’t even really make sense, as there is no such thing.
If that were anything at all like how evolutionary processes worked, you’d be right to find them ridiculous.
But what does that mean? We have to assume that if natural selection is real, that there is a long process of some members of a pack possessing traits that others don’t. How big these differences is left to one’s imagination. They can’t be too small of a difference, or how could it convey any meaningful advantage.
So there should constantly be a flux of some with a noticeable advantage of some kind. Yes this doesn’t seem to be something we can observe much.
So you need a pack of apes where some care about their looks and singing ability and some just grab food off a branch, and punch the skinny ones around.