n a piece posted on the Discovery Institute website, responding to bad publicity surrounding the Wedge Document , the author or authors write:
Far from attacking science (as has been claimed), we are instead challenging scientific materialism – the simplistic philosophy or world-view that claims that all of reality can be reduced to, or derived from, matter and energy alone. We believe that this is a defense of sound science.
So there we have a one definition of “scientific” materialism: “the world-view that claims that all of reality can be reduced to, or derived from, matter and energy alone”.
Let me turn this round. If there are aspects of reality that impinge on our world that can NOT be “reduced to, or derived from, matter and energy alone”, that would mean that the law of conservation of energy would sometimes be violated. Matter would sometimes move in a manner unexplainable in terms of the translation of one form of energy into another.
This would be scientifically very interesting. It would also mean that such deviations should be detectable by scientific methodology. But, I suggest, if were to observe such deviations, it would merely falsify “materialism” in a very narrow sense – and it would tell us nothing about whether or not theism is true – it would merely expand our understanding of the world in the same way that anything so many discoveries in physics have expanded it over the last few hundred years, and particularly in the last hundred. Even if we were to find evidence for bodiless intelligences possessing pure “mind” powers, capable of creating “intention fields” to guide nucleotides into place, for instance, without any energy conversion involved, it still wouldn’t be outside science – we’d simply have to expand our understanding of the world to include beings other than ourselves (we’d have no a priori reason to assume they had our interests at heart, after all), and revise our ideas about the conservation of energy. Perhaps there are aliens who have mastered perpetual motion!
On the other hand, if there are aspects of reality that do not impinge on our world, and “reduced to, or derived from, matter and energy alone”, then that isn’t very interesting at all, and we won’t be able to apply the methodology of science to detect it.
So is it true (putting aside the paranoia that that DI document seems anxious to accuse Barbara Forrest of accusing the DI of, and which still seems to me abundantly apparent in the original Wedge document) that science has been hampered by a refusal to consider the possibility that the law of conservation of energy is sometimes violated?
Well, no, it isn’t. Einstein didn’t assume it, he elaborated it; Heisenberg didn’t assume it, he elaborated it. In other words it simply isn’t a foundational assumption of science.
I would say that the foundational assumption of modern science is simply that our knowledge of the world is limited by our ability to make predictive models, and that therefore where we cannot predict (at least probabilistically) we can only conclude that “we do not know”. This is neither a pro-theist nor an anti-theist assumption. What it does, however, is to place limits on what we can investigate scientifically: specifically we cannot test hypotheses that do not make differential predictions. Which is another way of formulating Popper’s falsification test.
That’s why my objection to ID has nothing to do with being a theist or a non-theist, or being a “materialist” culturally, or in any other sense. It’s to do with the lack of a testable predictive model. It is perfectly possible to test the hypothesis that something was designed and fabricated by an intelligent agent – even by a Divine agent – but only if we can make a predictive model. If the putative agent is entirely postulated to be unpredictable (and frankly it would be an odd Divinity who was – we can test perfectly good hypotheses about human, or even alien, intelligent agents), then we can’t test the hypothesis.
I personally don’t see any difference. I’ll have to see if I can find anything from ID literature that makes a connection.
In lieu of that:
Reductionism – IEP
Reductionism in Biology
It’s different because “reduced to” fails to capture the importance of the system itself.
You can “reduce” a building to rubble, and preserve all the bits, but it is no longer a building.
There are properties that the whole has that are not possessed by its parts, even though the parts are both necessary and sufficient to make the whole.
Jason Rosenhouse comments on a related DI statement.
Is there a fundamental difference between matter and energy?
I would suggest reality is spacetime. Which includes matterenergy. That’s my understanding of monism.
It’s impossible to say.
No one knows what matter is and no one knows what energy is.
Elizabeth, the two senses of “reduce to” are not the same. Please consult the supplied reference material.
EL:
No, EL. A rock is going through space and it is on a linear trajectory to miss a planet by a few hundred miles. Depending on the mass of the planet, the rock’s path may slightly deviate from the linear trajectory or the rock might bet sucked into the gravity well and crash into the planet. The only difference between the two trajectories, so to speak, is how strong the force of gravity is in the area the rock is passing through.
Gravity has altered the course of the rock. There has been no energy added by rockets or thrusters. Nobody had to remove a shelf.
EL: Can you tell me how any potential energy gets transferred to kinetic energy without simply describing the “before” and “after” states of matter?
Glad you finally asked. According to my copy of The Complete IDiots Guide to Physics, kinetic energy just is the energy an object has when it is in motion.
The author even goes on to say:
There is no such thing as an unknown description or an unknown model. They simply do not exist. There is therefore no need to “rule them out.”
If people are going to claim that “naturalism” is the exclusion of the “supernatural” then they need to define what they mean by “supernatural.”
See Chapter 8 of Atheism and Naturalism.
Does anyone want to address how materialism and/or physicalism does not entail the non-existence of God (atheism)?
Or to put it another way, just what sort of god or gods are permitted given materialism and/or physicalism?
Indeed.
Nagel clearly rejects the position taken by Elizabeth.
Yes, he does. I reject the position taken by Nagel 🙂
It’s interesting, but his book suffers from being ill-informed in lots of ways.
I actually think this is an empirical question, not a philosophical one, so I’m not that enthusiastic about thinking of any one position as an “ism”.
I think the evidence is against Nagel.
In fact I was responding to WJM who said
So, Mung, at this point you believe we have a full understanding of reality, that there are no unknown models and therefore ID is justified on that basis in it’s claims?
No, I don’t think so actually.
And in any case WJM has yet to note that those existing naturalistic descriptions/models actually are. Also WJM does not to seem to want to take me up on my offer to help him prove that PSI exists and can be used to influence random processes.
It’s almost like WJM is not actually interested in the truth of his claims….
This is perfectly right:
I couldn’t have put it better myself. It’s the lack of a testable predictive model that’s the problem with ID. That criticism has nothing at all to do with one’s underlying metaphysical or epistemological presuppositions or assumptions. The whole debate about “materialism” is irrelevant to the respective merits of ID or evolutionary theory.
Elizabeth should also be applauded for calling our attention to the central equivocation at the heart of the ID movement, between “materialism” as a metaphysical doctrine and “materialism” as a cultural disease. Without this confusion, there wouldn’t be an ID movement.
Ultimately, the reason why the ID movement is “creationism in a cheap tuxedo” is because it shares with creationism this basic confusion between “materialism” as a metaphysical doctrine and “materialism” as a cultural disease. Only if one is starting off with that confusion could it make any sense to say that “Darwinism” is responsible for any social ills. (Whether any of these social changes are bad is itself a cultural and political question!)
This is not to deny that the argument from design has an ancient history that goes back at least to Plato, if not to Socrates himself. But I am pointing out that the argument gets infused with cultural and political significance, such that there can be an ID movement, under very specifically modern (and largely American) circumstances.
Again you miss my point. What did gravity alter the course of the rock from?
If you (i.e. an intentional agent) want to CHANGE/ALTER its trajectory from the one it would have taken in the absence of your intention, you DO have to find some energy from somewhere.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s take an almost deterministic universe, in which the only force that can alter the outcome is intention. First we run the universe in the absence of intention. We can run it several times, and get the same results each time, because the end state is the only possible outcome from the starting state. Each object moves through space governed by gravitational and other forces, their initial potential energy, put in at the beginning when we assigned each object its starting position, until every object is at the bottom of an energy well. That’s the end. Think of it like one of those random cascade generators.
Now, add intention. This time we will use the force of intention to change the outcome. To do so will have to provide the intentional agent with some source of energy, because s/he will have to accelerate some of the objects away from the trajectory they would have taken in the intention-free universe.
We could, for instance, provide her with a peashooter and some candy to give her enough energy to use it. But there will be an energy bill for changing the default trajectories.
Just as there is an energy bill for the trajectories the objects in the universe take in the intention-free version – but it’s all accounted for by the potential energy we give the objects when we start them off.
To take your random cascade generator – we provide energy for the balls to cascade through the pegs by lifting them to the top of the cascade, and providing the pegs. To move make them do something different, using intention, we have to provide additional energy to that we provided by lifting the balls and setting up the pegs.
No. That description is certainly required in order to explain the energy transfer. Not always sufficient, though. If the object starts in a stable state, i.e. in an energy well, e.g. on a shelf, then I need to account for the energy required to get it out of that energy well and on its way to a lower energy well. If you want to kick something from stable position in a higher energy state (e.g. a vase on a shelf) into a lower energy state (the vase on the floor) you need to add some energy (e.g. a cat).
Not to pile on, but WJM seems not to grasp the simple idea of the interface between reality and imagination. If WJM thinks spoon bending is real and Uri Geller was using the “intentional force” and not sleight-of-hand with pre-softened spoons, this could be investigated. The lack of an energy source, a discontinuity, would be a landmark observation. In the real world mass and energy are conserved. Demonstrating an exception might be a first step for ID research.
EL said:
I most certainly do not. You’re the one missing the point. Entirely. I’m positing intentionality as a fundamental force, like gravity. Gravity by itself can change the course of the rock. And so, let’s say, intentionality by itself can change the course of the rock.
I need not explain where intentionality gets the energy to do this any more than you need to explain where gravity gets the energy to change the course of the rock. If you say gravity is acting on the potential energy of the rock, I can say intentionality is acting on the same thing. If you say gravity changes potential into kinetic, I can say the same thing.
You’re demanding that the force of intentionality provide something you do not require from the force of gravity.
Change it FROM WHAT?
No, rather it’s that you cannot explain it, not that you don’t need to.
WJM,
If you had the ability to describe what you are talking about mathematically your errors and misunderstandings would quickly become apparent.
You can say it, but the difference is you’ve no mathematics backing it up, unlike with potential energy etc. As you don’t understand the mathematics anyway this is not a big deal for you, but it does undermine your case somewhat when talking to those that do.
EL said:
Of course you cannot. Why? Because that is all those types of energy **are** – descriptions of before and after states of matter. They are nothing more than values of variables plugged into mathematical descriptions of behaviors reified as some actual “thing” that matter possesses. There are as many different kinds of “potential” energy as there are different kinds of before and after descriptions of various changes in states of matter.
If you need to reify the change of states/trajectories of matter under the influence of an intentional force, then you can say that intention affects the potential energy of the thing in question. Not necessarily by employing some intermediary energy, but directly as does gravity.
Nonsense.
The action and reaction can be observed. Regarding an “intentional” force, if you claim it as imaginary but having a real effect there will be an imbalance. An effect without an observable cause. Eminently amenable to scientific research. Just find us an example.
OMagain said:
Explain to me how gravity changes the potential energy of the rock into kinetic trajectory changes.
Actually it would be more apt at this point for you to explain how intentionality by itself can change the course of the rock. Your claim, you support it. Once you’ve done that I may consider your request.
I’m perfectly happy to accept William’s hypothesis, as a hypothesis, that there are things called intention fields, that provide energy gradients down which matter can role into an intended configuration.
But that would imply that there is a configuration that the matter would have taken in the absence of that field.
Just as there is configuration that the solar system would have taken in the absence of, say, Earth’s moon.
We can account for the moon, at least in theory, by tracing its trajectory back to an earlier state of the universe, when the arrangement of physical matter was such that the earth ended up with a moon. In other words, it traces back to the potential energy present in the configuration of the early universe.
But William wants us (or something) to be able to alter that configuration at will – in other words, to be able to opt between leaving the universe as is (on the trajectory it took from Big Bang) or altering it. And if we (or some other agent) want to exercise that choice, we’ve got to accelerate some matter in a manner in which it would not otherwise be accelerated.
So we need to find some energy to do this. It can’t be the potential energy of Big Bang, because that’s doing its unintended thing. So it must come from somewhere else.
I suggest it comes from food, for animal agents. And for a deist God it could be implicit in the starting configuration – it’s the potential energy s/he gives matter when s/he lights the touch paper.
But if William, or ID proponents want to propose an interventionist intender as the cause of, say, the first cell, or bacterial flagella, then there’s an energy bill to pay. That could help us find the designer, actually, and is one of the ways its done in forensics, archaeology and even SETI.
Did it burn when I suggested you don’t understand the mathematical underpinnings of your own claims William? There is a simple solution to that, of course. Can you think what it is?
Observation is not explanation. Observing that space-traveling rocks change course around massive objects is not an explanation of how massive objects cause potential energies to change into kinetic alterations of trajectory. Generating a model of a depressed space-time area around that object is just that – a model meant to describe the behavior of the phenomena. It is not an explanation of how the nearby mass changes potential energy into kinetic.
All of these are nothing more than modeled descriptions of observable state/trajectory changes of matter. If psi or intention or consciousness is shown to affect states of matter, it doesn’t require any extra energy from some “other” source. There’s plenty of energy in the system for such a force to act upon.
Same here! It’s how everything starts. The question is will William be making the effort to test it or not…
Demonstrate this. You know, with sums and suchlike. Start from a system in a known state (e.g. a single particle orbiting another in a stable orbit perhaps), calculate the energy in this system then perturb it with “intention” and calculate the energy in the overall system again.
Or not, as you prefer.
Oh, and William, perhaps you missed it but I offered to help you prove that Intention can change a random number generator. All you need to do is design the experiment. Would you like to do this or not? I’m happy to do the programming if you want to design the ‘experiment’.
You say if, don’t you know?
And here we are again, WJM pointing out that no, we don’t know why the laws of physics are what they are and therefore he should get a free pass on his ideas because he can’t explain why his claims are his claims, they just are!
Your dismissive tone leads me to think that you would have no trouble coming up with such trivial models.
As such, you may find this page useful when creating your single particle model for testing your intention idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodetic_effect
It’ll have some useful equations, as after all you want your simulation to be as accurate as possible, right?
EL said:
The solar system would be configured differently without the gravitational field of the moon affecting it. No “extra energy” was utilized by the moon’s gravitational field to act on the potential energy of the matter of the solar system to effect this change in trajectories/configuration. In the same sense, I’m proposing that the intentional field doesn’t require any extra energy – it uses energy assumed to be embedded in matter as potential.
For the sake of your apparent need to have an additional, intermediary energy, we’ll say that matter in the universe has intentional potential energy, and that intentional fields transfer that intentional potential energy into new states/trajectories consistent with force of the intention being applied and that matter’s particular level of potential potential energy.
That would certainly be empirically testable, and it would even accommodate why the intentions of observers appear to affect the results of experiments in some areas of research.
Nobody is asking you to explain your intention field William. A modeled description is just fine.
But if it changes the trajectory of objects from the trajectory they would have taken in their absence, then you need to account for the additional energy. Saying “there’s plenty of energy in the system” is sheer handwaving. No, there isn’t “plenty of energy in the system”. There is precisely enough to do what the universe will do in the absence of this field. If you add another field, you have to add more energy. It can be the potential energy at the start of the universe if you like, but then you don’t get intentional intervention.
OMagain is right about the math. If you could express this in the form of equations, you’d understand that you are missing a parameter.
For human intenders I’d be happy to accept the hypothesis that the energy comes from their food. But that doesn’t help you if you are positing some “pure” intentional field that isn’t attached to any kind of biological organism.
Yes, there was “extra” energy involved, as compared to the configuration had the system not been such that the moon was a result.
In that case why call it “intentional”? If it can’t change anything, where is the volitional aspect?
The point which you keep missing (and you really are missing it – because you aren’t even attempting to rebut it) is that what you are proposing is something that CHANGES the system so that the outcome is different to what it would have been had your intention field been absent. For gravity that is easy to do – a universe without a moon would have started with less potential energy than a moon with one.
But you want optional universes – one in which the intender chooses not to alter the world, and one in which the intender does alter the world. And the world that is altered is going required an energy input relative to the one that is not altered, because the unaltered world is going on its merry way, dropping from energy well to energy well until all is Heat. If you want to alter that process you need to input some energy, or at least move it around from somewhere else. That’s fine if your intenders are biological. It’s not so easy if they aren’t.
OK, but in that case all the intention happens at the start. Intenders can’t change it once it’s going. Only God has intention, under your scheme, and can’t alter stuff once it’s started.
No, that would not be testable. It would simply be a deist proposition, which we can’t test from within the system.
We could however test a different proposition, which is that people, say, generate intention fields that can move matter. We know they generate electromagnetic fields that can do that (as well of course as just using their muscles). In which case we could, for instance, get them to do it in a PET scanner and monitor their glucose metabolism while they did it.
But, as I keep saying – that won’t help you with an interventionist but non-biological intender, which I think is what you need if you want to invoke divine (or other) intervention to account for the first cells or a bacterial flagellum.
EL said:
I’ve accounted for it the same way gravitational theory accounts for it. The field acts on the potential energy of the mass and transfers it into kinetic trajectory changes.
I must not understand what you mean by “intentional intervention”. If the matter in the universe is described as imbued with intentional potential energy, then intentional agencies can affect that matter accordingly, intervening in a path that would otherwise be determined by non-intentional interactions of forces, matter and energy.
Which “two senses” are not the same? In any case, I stick with my view that it is a poor word because it does not capture the idea that the properties of a whole are not possessed by its parts, and that therefore systems can only be properly understood as systems.
The number of times people have told me that consciousness is impossible under “materialism” because “under materialism” we are “reduced to” “a collection of chemicals”.
Not so. We are very specific configuration of chemicals and our conscious capacity, I would argue derives from the configuration. It cannot be understood without reference to the configuration. The word “reduced” is a major barrier to that understanding.
And using a word like “reduce” completely
EL said:
Where’d it come from?
OMagain,
Perhaps that’s already the case.
It’s simulations all the way down.
Show your working.
From the potential energy of the universe at its beginning.
Yes, but you have not accounted for its potential energy. That is the problem you have to face – because you want intenders to intervene to alter the trajectories determined by the initial configuration of the universe, you need to find an energy source outside that initial configuration to pay the bill.
I mean that to “intend” something implies that we choose between options. The existence of options is therefore a prerequisite for the exercise of intention.
A deist God could choose between many options when selecting the world we know, at the beginning, and configure the starting state in a manner that will result in his/her intended trajectory of events, i.e. given it the configuration of potential energy s/he that will produce his/her desired result.
However, if, during the unfolding of that world, s/he changes her mind, or wants some of her creatures to be able to alter the trajectories determined by that initial configuration, s/he needs to be able to add some additional potential energy mid stream. For instance, if s/he wants to prevent a meteor from destroying a school until after school is out (in response to prayer, for instance), then she needs to add some potential energy to the meteor to slow it down a bit, maybe by moving a bunch of air molecules closer together to increase friction temporarily. Those molecules have to be given a kick out of their energy wells to do so – and this requires additional energy not supplied at the starting configuration.
Same with people: if you want people to be able to choose to alter the world, then they have to be able to alter the configuration of the world from the one that was pre-ordained by the initial configuration. So additional potential energy needs to be found. That’s perfectly possible of course – and we do it all the time. We can even, potentially, divert meteors. But we know how to pay the energy bill.
Your intention field may also do the trick – if it’s real, we will be able to see whether the exercise of intention on the Random Cascade Generator is associated with increased brain metabolism.
But to be worthy of the name “intention” it must involve an actual choice between two options – leaving things as they would be without the exercise of intention, or intervening i.e. altering the outcome in accord with you rintended results.
I note that you have changed from postulating that intention is a force to postulating it as a form of energy – did you mean to?
I will assume yes. If you described the “matter in the universe” as “imbued with intentional potential energy then we should be able to detect that energy when it is used to move something, and measure the depletion of its source. Do you think we are all born with a fixed amount of the stuff?
Or do we create it whenever we intend something? In which case does it violate the First Law of Thermodynamics? Or do we get it from somewhere else? In which case, does an immaterial intender violate the Second?
Elizabeth,
@ William
And with all Lizzie’s options, in the event that you decide to clarify your “hypothesis” enough so that it coincides with one of them – or maybe when you do clarify, it will be another option), any of them should be testable, if they hypothesize real effects.
ETA clarification on who I was directing the comment et.
I missed this.
No they are not. The referent and the signifier are not the same thing. The map is not the territory.
Why did you only quote my “no”, not the rest of my response? I followed it with:
Which is rather important. You are still missing the point that in order to CHANGE the world you have to overcome the forces that would otherwise produce the outcome you don’t intend.
But the math has to work, William, otherwise the map won’t predict the territory. You are omitting a value.
A mathematical model of the world has to make verifiable predictions. You can’t just arbitrarily change the parameters or the operators to suit your fancies. As OMagain has said: if you want to rewrite the math, go ahead and rewrite the math. Then test it to see if it still predicts observation.
It would help of course if you didn’t keep flipping between proposing intention as form of energy and proposing it as a force.
Try writing an actual equation for a simple system, as OMagain suggests, whose outcome will depend on the application, or not, of an intentional force.
Elizabeth, the alternative is Last Thrusdayism. Alter spacetime so that the desired outcome is seamless. I’ve conceive a fantasy story with this in mind.
I would like to read it 🙂
But it’s not testable. Which gets me back to my actual position vis a vis science:
ooh me me pick me!!!!!
Okay here are a few:
I’m sure there are more!
Easily said. Evidence indicates they are lying.
BZZZZZT!!Thanks for playing. She specified “collision course”. You specified “miss a planet> . Are you capable of detecting the difference between a collision course and a non-collision course?
Start again.
EL said;
Unfortunately, EL, this is the fundamental error you keep making. You are only assuming there is “territory”. All you have to work with is the map. IOW, you are simply assuming something exists that accounts for the way matter behaves. You make a map of that behavior and call it “energy”. Your insistence that there is “actual energy” there that “must be accounted for” is a mistake of reification – reifying a map as “territory”.
This is the problem you have when you attempt this description of intentional forces acting on intentional energies:
You’re insisting that the description of the intentional behavior of matter be describable in the same manner as the description of other kinds of behaviors – as a course of deterministic or stochastic interactions set by the initial configurations. But that is exactly how I propose intention is different; it is is neither deterministic or stochastic. It’s not predictable nor can behavior of matter be described in the same manner as non-intentional forces and energies. It is intentional The intentional potential would be available for intentional agents to intervene in the otherwise deterministic and stochastic patterns of behavior.
Can you give an example of how “intention” acts, such that it might be observable? If you can’t suggest an example, how is what you are writing different from just making stuff up?