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.
Ah, so just like the theists “solve” the infinite regress problem by just saying it does not apply to their deity you “solve” your inability to demonstrate the reality of your claims by saying such demonstrations simply are not relevant.
There is a real world out there full of things we barely understand. Yet you want to invent untestable, irrelevant extras that don’t actually seem to have any entailments other then “If we simply accept what WJM has to say that will make him think he’s won”.
EL: gravity doesn’t add any energy to the rock that is otherwise on a non-collision course. It is said to have an effect on the energy already in the rock – the potential energy. Gravity doesn’t have to bring in air molecules or remove shelves or add rockets to get the rock to change course.
Intentional force is postulated as a fundamental force – IOW, it is competing with gravity as to what course the rock will take. No “potential energy” must be added to the system; like “gravitational potential energy”, we’re postulating that “intentional potential energy” has been embedded in the system since the beginning of the universe.
When the GPE of the rock interacts with a gravitational field, the rock changes course. When the IPE of the rock interacts with an intentional field, the rock changes course. Intentional fields are posited as being intentional – not deterministically or stochastically predictable. This means that the intentional field can move the rock any way it chooses, and do so by applying intentional force to the IPE of the rock.
The difference between gravity and intention is that the effects of gravity can be described deterministically. The effects of intention cannot.
Yes, they can! The effects of intention can absolutely be described deterministically.
Simply prove me wrong and *demonstrate* that they cannot.
OMagain said:
My theory is testable, and such research has been carried out for hundreds of years. If intention can affect matter, it is completely testable. If there are such “things” as intentionality fields, there would indeed be ways of assessing their effects on matter in experiments. If they exert such material influence in correlation to the unity and force of competing intents, that too would be completely testable.
BTW, I’d like to thank everyone contributing. This exchange has led me to think about some very interesting models wrt intentionality and a model for characterizing what it is and how it affects the material world.
Then the laws of the universe are violated at the moment your rock moves at the behest of your “intentional force”. That rock, when moving apparently under the influence of an imaginary force, will violate the law of conservation of mass and energy. It’s observable and testable, unless you admit this can only happen when nobody is looking.
Yes I am. I’m not a solipsist. I think there is real world out there. Don’t you?
And this is YOUR “fundamental error” William. No, we have more than the map. We have observations And what we do is we use the map (or, as I prefer it, the model) to predict our observations. When the observations correspond to the model, we know our model isn’t too bad. When they are a long way off, we know our model is a bit crap.
That’s the biggest piece of evidence against solipsism – it strongly suggest that there is a real and consistent world “out there” that we can make predictive models of.
You are confused. Yes, I make the working hypothesis that something exists and that it behaves in a way that we can predict. So we make a model (or a “map”) and see whether our predictions are supported. If they are, our initial assumption is supported. I don’t call my map “energy”, any more than I call my map of Scotland “Scotland”. But I do use the symbols on the map that denote Scotland “symbols that denote Scotland”. Ditto with the word, or symbol, for “energy”. It’s the thing in my model that denotes what I now know to be property of reality.
You were the one insisting that we could treat “intention” as a force like “gravity”. I’m just trying to get you to see the implications of that. Only you then inexplicably switched to treating it as a “form of energy” – with no announcement or anything.
I’m not telling you what properties your “intention” force/energy/whatever thing has to have. I’m trying to show you what the implications are for various hypotheses you might propose about it. But whenever I try to pin you down to one, you wander off on to something else, or wave your hands and say “there’s plenty of energy in the system” – which is no answer at all.
If it’s not predictable then you won’t be able to test whether it exists.
It’s almost the entire point of my OP.
But you’ve already said that it is – you’ve cited all those studies using Random Cascade Generators!
William, make up your mind!
Is intention a force or a form of energy?
Does it behave predictably or unpredictably?
What does “available …to intervene” mean? I can’t parse that. How does the intentional agent access the “potential” (energy?) And does use it deplete its store?
I know you think you are making sense, William, and that you are frustrated that I seem unable to understand you. But you are saying some objectively contradictory things, like saying intention is a force one minute and that it’s a form of energy the next, and that it doesn’t require energy because it’s like gravity, but that it’s not like gravity because it’s unpredictable, yet we can set up experiments to predict it!
Can you not see the contradictions in your position?
Ah, yes, the “I’ve already won and have won for many many years” gambit.
If? You mean you don’t actually know? Then what has the last N pages been about?
The “if” again. They’ve been doing similar research for hundreds of years and you are still at the “if” stage?
Great. So another book of woo on the horizon?
You unwillingness to face the fact that your inability to do the maths invalidates your entire case is quite astounding.
In that case it is must make predictions. You can’t test things whose effects you can’t predict.
Yes, it would.
Excellent 🙂
It’s the Dembski tatic. Throw something out there, see in what ways people destroy it, refine your idea. It just means it was half baked to being with.
Moved rule violating post to Guano. Remember the good faith rule.
Sort of like evolution….
You have it backwards. William decides first what to believe and then what to cherry-pick from reality to support that belief in conversations like this. He does not need to “test” this intentionality concept – why would you need to test that water is wet or fire is hot? If he believes it, by definition it’s real.
No, the only thing going on here IMHO is for William to strengthen his argument to the point at which lay people cannot dispute it and then write a book about it.
That’s a plus then. I’ll look forward to seeing your model, especially the bit dealing with the interface between the realm of the real and the realm of the imaginary.
(Note to self: keep plugging the “real/imaginary” meme. It’s bound to catch on eventually.)
Alan Fox said:
There are no “laws” that can be “violated”. Physical laws are descriptions of the regular behaviors of matter. They are not prescriptive. If matter behaves in an unexpected manner, it only means that models of the behavior of matter are incomplete.
I have not postulated any such “violation”. In order for the rock to move in an unexpected manner, all it takes is an X force to be acting on an X potential, which is the same exact description for gravity and gravitational potential.
You and EL act as if it’s impossible to notice some new behavior and then find it necessary to postulate a new form of energy to account for that behavior. When they found out that the universal expansion was accelerating, did that unexpected behavior mean that the laws of physics were being “violated”? Of course not. It just meant that the current models were wrong or incomplete. To account for the unexpected acceleration, scientists invented “dark energy”. Gee .. where’d they find all that extra energy? They didn’t. All they found was an unexpected behavior that needed to be accounted for.
What about the gravitational clumping we’ve observed that violated prior big bang theoretical simulations based on observable mass? Oh … well .. there must be a lot more mass than we originally thought. Let’s invent some to account for the clumping and call it “dark matter”. Where’d all that extra matter come from? Wouldn’t adding it violate conservation of mass and energy? Of course not – we don’t know how much mass and energy there is; we don’t know what all forms mass and energy may take; we may not know all the forces and potential energies there are (if we’re just going to ride the reification train here).
I’ve proposed no violations of anything. I’ve proposed an as-yet unaccepted force (intention) acting on an as-yet unaccepted potential (IPE) to account for certain unexpected behaviors of matter that appear to correspond to intentions.
Try to get this through your head, Alan: potential energy is not something people discover and then find out how it works; it is a conceptual commodity used to describe state and trajectory changes of observable matter. You might as well call it “magic”. IOW, for the force of gravity to change the trajectory of a rock, we conceptualize a corresponding capacity for the rock to be acted upon by the force – we call it gravitational potential energy. EL’s insistence on my showing where this energy “comes from” is laughably misconceived. Such energies are conceived of (read: imagined) in order to explain behavior; they are not required, actual things you must have in hand in a certain amount before you account for the behavior.
Such postulations of energies and energy transfers are descriptions of the behavior, they are not an **explanation** of the behavior.
EL:
It does make predictions. It predicts certain outcomes that correspond to intent and otherwise would be contraindicated via other natural forces and stochastic expectations.
Which is exactly what psi REG and other kinds of research do and which some results support.
You would say that, given you have no understanding of the mathematics involved in what you have only read lay-person descriptions of.
That’s not a prediction.
If you dispute my claim that it is not, simply describe how you could confirm or disconfirm your ‘prediction’!
Yes, we’ve been over that. You failed to acknowledge the sloppyness of the majority of the trials you mentioned. PSI effects vanish the harder you look.
If you really think a random number generator can be changed via PSI then you’d be jumping at the chance to take me up on my offer to code such a thing.
How hard would it be to give a specific example?
That’s fine, then. So what did you mean by:
To establish cause and effect empirically, you change your putative causal variable (in this case intention) and see whether it results in a change in your putatively predicted variable (the deviation from zero of the mean end point of the Random Cascade).
If you can’t predict intention, you can’t do the experiment. You have to be confident that when you tell your participants to “intend” the balls to go left that that is what they will do, and when you tell your participants to “intend” nothing, that that is what they will do.
You also need to be confident that when some intends something they will create an “intentional field”. Otherwise, it would be an unintentional intentional field!
So it needs to be a well-behaved phenomenon. It must be “deterministically or stochastically predictable”. Which you just told me you posited they were NOT.
I agree about laws of the universe being descriptions of models based on our observations. It doesn’t really matter whether one calls these regularities laws or properties What matters is we can observe deviations from expected if they happen.
If wishes were fishes…
Next step is to find your unexpected phenomenon.
So if I intend to flip heads five times in a row and I actually do so, that’s an indication of intent? But if I fail, should I conclude that my intent was, well, not intentional enough? Or should I conclude that my intent was overridden by some other intent which I could not otherwise detect, but it must be there because I didn’t get the 5 heads when I intended to do so?
EL said:
This is all 100% a misrepresentation (unintentional, I assume) of what has occurred. I proposed intention as a force or law at the beginning, then refined that through discussion to a force. After repeatedly responding to your insistence that the energy had to be accounted for by explaining why this is a charade of reification, I agreed to account for it the same way gravitational models account for how spacebound rocks are affected: by postulating a corresponding potential energy embedded in the system. Just as you have the force of gravity acting on the gravitational potential energy of the rock, we can postulate that a force of intention acts on some “intentional potential energy” of the rock.
As far as predictability, I said it’s not predictably like gravity in terms of deterministic predictions, but rather that it is predictable in terms of conforming to the intention of the intentional agency at the expense of natural-behavior expectations, which is exactly what such REG research does and indicates.
None of this has occurred “from one minute to the next”, and in context can be seen as a refinement of my argument and (as a means of getting around what I think are intransigent cognitive biases on your part wrt reifications of descriptions) conciliatory additions, such as potential energy from the beginning of the universe, in order to perhaps bridge that gulf to get you to see that your “added energy” requirement was a nonsensical objection.
Therefore your claim stands or falls on the quality of the REG research, don’t you agree? If that is excluded, you have no physical evidence for your claims at all right?
Rather then rely on results whose veracity has already been disputed, why don’t you start afresh? For example, we could write a program that would test the idea that random numbers can be affected by intent. Were you to design such a program then I could certainly implement it. That way there is no way your results could be disputed, if the code was available for all to inspect (and it would be). So while the studies you’ve mentioned have not convinced all, this would be an opportunity to revisit that work afresh, no?
EL:
You’re still insisting this model act like the models of behaviors of things it is decidedly not. It will not be “well behaved” in terms of stochastic or deterministic forces and interactions because intentionalized matter doesn’t behave that way. That’s what makes it different and unpredictable in terms of those other kinds of “natural” force/energy models.
It is predictable on its own terms and according to its own model, which may (and apparently does) include both competing conscious and subconscious intents. It requires a different kind of research heuristic and set of protocols.
For example?
It is not nonsensical, William, to point out the flaws in your ill-conceived concept of “intention”. If your “intention” both is “not-of-this-world” and interacts in this world, then there must be some point at which the imaginary becomes real. Imagine (heh) God playing football in a league match. When he* kicks the ball, what do we observe?
*Because, when all said and done, football is a man’s game!
*runs for cover*
Given your extensive use of “if” and other conditional qualifiers, you seem to swap from talking about your idea as if it’s been shown to exist to how you could show it exists.
At this point it would be useful if you would get specific. How would you test this? What would be the claim, specifically? What is the null hypothesis?
If William could do the math….
Alan Fox said:
Where did I assert this as part of my intention hypothesis?
I have only postulated intention as a fundamental force that acts upon intentional potential energy embedded in the system like any other potential energy; and that the behavior that marks the effect of the force is when matter moves in accordance with intentions and outside of other natural-law/stochastic process expectations.
As far as I know, I haven’t asserted that any of that lies outside of the system as, although I’ve expressed a personal belief that there is more to reality than the physical universe. That personal belief is not part of this proposition.
You haven’t proposed a hypothesis. All I have read is stream of consciousness. I’m hoping you will at some point.
Alan Fox,
I’ll take that to mean that you cannot support your mischaracterization and retract it.
Except that you are still avoiding my key point: if intention must involve a choice between two directions in which the world will subsequently travel – the default unintended direction and the intended direction, then you cannot account for the energy required to DEFLECT matter from the trajectory it would OTHERWISE have taken by appealing to “potential energy” already in the system! That energy must come from somewhere else. It’s not that I’m giving a pass to gravity that I’m not giving to intention. It’s that you have explicitly involved a concept for which options are a prerequisite. Gravity doesn’t have options! It will do what it will do.
If you want to exercise an option, you have to counter the forces that will otherwise implement the default. Invoking a new concept called “intentional potential energy” is useless. It just muliplies entities still further!
But what if it isn’t? What if the “intransigent cognitive biases” are yours, and that my requirement is not “nonsensical” at all?
Because it isn’t. It’s actually high school physics. If you want to deflect something that would otherwise have gone somewhere else, you need some energy to do the deflecting – either to power the deflector (switch on the field) or move it from somewhere else (e.g. tow in a big magnet).
Perhaps this will help
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
What observations are not currently satisfactorily explained, and how does your intention hypothesis explain them? How will you test it?
What you have is an idea. When you meet certain requirements then it may become a hypotheses. Words have meanings. Using them accurately can only be of benefit.
I agree fully with Alan. I don’t think you are using the word correctly. You don’t have a hypothesis, you have an idea that might one day become one, sure, but it currently is not.
Do you have a null hypothesis? What is it? Sample size?
I suggest that this is gobbledygook. Gravity doesn’t “act upon potential energy”. It acts (at least at a Newtonian scale) on objects with mass. My vase (which you keep ignoring) on the shelf is being acted on by gravity while it is on the shelf. What is stopping it falling to the floor is the shelf. The shelf maintains its potential energy and stops it being converted to kinetic energy. So the vase is sitting in a little “energy well” and in order to convert that potential energy into kinetic energy I, or my cat, has to give the vase enough energy to escape its energy well.
Then gravity will continue to act on the vase, only now, by virtue of the fact that it has been knocked sideways by the cat, using the cat’s breakfast energy, it is no longer prevented by the shelf from moving. So it crashes to the floor, turning its potential energy into kinetic energy, then into sound and heat.
If you want intention to act as a force, intermittently (and it has to be intermittent, otherwise it will be UNintentional force) then either you need energy to move the force-field emitter around, or to switch it on and off.
Gravity can’t switch on and off, so if it wants to smash my vase, it needs to enlist the help of my cat.
It started out so well, but over time small tweaks to the designers creation became near constant. This had the unavoidable effect of eventually boiling the universe due to all the intentional energy used to make all those changes as the system is one way. So chuck it away and start over, and this time remember – less is more!
Reducing a building to rubble is not the same sense of “reduce” as a reductionist explanation or reductionism. Seriously.
You’re equivocating over the word “reduce.”
No, I’m choosing to use a different word to avoid risking other people equivocating.
BTW Mung I responded to your challeng:
WJM, you are right on so many things in this thread. Keep up the good fight.
It’s pretty clear to me though that many of your critics don’t really understand what you’re saying and that’s a real problem in trying to carry on the debate. Until those things get cleared up I’m afraid there’s little hope of progress.
Well, that’s certainly true! However, those critic are not at all persuaded that William does either.
Hi Elizabeth, yes I read that post.
Materialism is about the kinds of entities that are or can be real. As such it excludes any entity that might be called God in the conventional sense of the word, and that would include most of your examples if not all.
Any “god” would have to be:
1. Material
2. Wholly within the space-time universe.
I’m a bit puzzled how someone could not know that this is what materialism entails.
Well, it depends on your definition of “materialism”. And, indeed, on “material”.
ETA: and “real”.
Then this is doubly ironic
Apparently it simply means that fields don’t exist. If you’d been reading the thread you’d know this! The universe consists of more then inelastic billiard ball type particles and this proves theism apparently!
For instance?
Mung, Buy his book(s)!
Do you accept that there is a distinction between sense and perception?
What do you mean when you say “we have observations.” We do not have observations. An observation is not something that is shared by different subjects.
I would like to know how you are defining those words.
I would distinguish between sensory input – what is registered by our sense organs – and the model we make of the world based on that data, which I would call perception, and which involves much more than the sense data alone.
But I don’t know if that is what you mean by those words.
An observation can be corroborated by different observers. And yes, we do have observations. People report that they observe something. Their report is the report of an observation.
IDists sure do push science along. There is no puddle they won’t try and and muddy,how many have they brought clarity to?