If Darwinism fails then supernatural causes are back on the table and should be included in science.
I do not think there can be a science of the supernatural.
I do not think that if Darwinism fails that supernatural causes will become acceptable.
If the hope of ID is that supernatural causes will be allowed back into science if they can only just get rid of Darwinism, ID is doomed.
The tools and methods of ID cannot differentiate a supernatural cause from a natural cause anyways.
Thoughts?
Compassion for animals would mean working to insure that they lived full and healthy lives as animals
Empathy for animals would mean working to insure they have all the same rights and privileges that I have.
That is how I see the difference anyway
peace
Right and Reid tells us that.
quote:
“If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the’ constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life,’ without being able to give a reason for them; these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd.”
end quote:
peace
Returning to the thought experiment
1) I think I could tell the difference between my wife and an exact physical replica
2) I don’t think that I could tell the difference between my dog and an exact physical replica
3) This hypothesis is in principle testable
4) Therefore supernatural science is possible.
peace
Sure. Animal emotions are very different from personal emotions, and for most animals emotions are nothing but instinctual urges and aversions. But animals still need to be conscious to experience them.
I don’t know, but I have yet to encounter a river, die or computer with a food preference. Also, I think you’ll have a hard time training a river to always flow left past an obstacle.
But I also believe that pet ownership is not slavery because humans take a unique position in nature, just like you. Why does that make me a hypocrit and not you? At least I don´t have to perform all kinds of mental gymnastics to deny that animals have consciousness.
Going by your definitions, I also have compassion, but not empathy, for animals. [*whew* that should get me off of the hypocrisy charge]. Do you think that we should ensure that other non-conscious entities (say computers) live full and healthy lives? If not, why do you make an exception for animals?
Instinctual and conscious are antonyms
Rivers die all the time in arid regions and computers have a preference for electricity over brown gravy.
All you need to do is make sure the right side is higher terrain. Seriously though training is just programing if you train a dog to do something he is not choosing to do it.
My contention that humans are unique is based on revelation what is yours based on?
I thought you did not assume that humans were special. I thought you shared walto’s view that such a position is “Utterly implausible”.
There are no mental gymnastics involved I simply don’t assume that animals are like me. I think it’s foolish to do so.
Yes I think that everything has a purpose and it is wrong to deny that purpose. It would be wrong to use a computer for a boat anchor for no good reason.
It’s not really an exception animals are different than computers so their purpose is different as well.
I would say that the more like me an entity is the more affection I tend to feel toward it.
I feel more affection for my dog than I do for my calculator but I don’t think I would feel more for a dog than I would for Data the android despite Data not being an animal.
I don’t have to assume consciousness for something to feel compassion for it.
Do you feel less compassion for people in persistent vegetative states than you do for dogs?
peace
Corneel,
I do apologize if I came on strongly to you.
It’s just that I have in the past been accused here of being a cruel and unfeeling monster because I assign more intrinsic value to my son than I do to my rat terrier.
Thank you for the interaction I always appreciate your point of view.
peace
I don’t think that’s true, but I see why you said that; instincts tend to be subconscious.
I would argue that “urge” and “aversion” are concepts that only apply to conscious beings though. Same goes for “affection”. Agree?
Those are figures of speech. That’s called “equivocation fallacy”, is it not?
Can I ask you what you mean by choosing? If the only distinction is it being conscious, it becomes impossible to distinguish it from predetermined switches.
Walto’s statement referred to the idea that non-human animals lack consciousness, which is a view I do share with him. It’s just that animals being conscious does not put them on equal footing with humans. My contention that humans deserve a unique treatment with respect to other animals is my personal decision. My choice, if you will 🙂
THIS is what I was looking for. Animals are much more similar to us than computers or robots are. This is what should be taken as a strong indication that they, like us, possess an inner life.
No problem. Discussions with you may be a bit surreal at times, but are never unpleasant. I always enjoy those interactions as well.
Not at all. I think the ability to act against your natural urges and aversions is pretty much what it means to be conscious.
affections are a little more complicated
I think that basically affections are simply natural inclinations toward something.
I love to eat there is nothing conscious in my affections toward eating. Sometimes I wish I could consciously change my affections in this regard but I can’t usually.
Here is a snipit on affections from Jonathan Edwards another rock star philosopher who was contemporary with Reid
http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/religaffect/rapt1sec1.html
check it out
peace
If it’s not the potential for consciousness and our status as Imago Dei that makes humans special then what is it exactly?
Our opposable thumbs our street smarts??
a Mannequin is more like us than a ham sandwich should that be taken as a strong indication that they, like us, possess an inner life?
I would say that it’s not consciousness that we share with nonhuman animals but our own status as animals.
peace
If you are not willing to put up with some apparent surrealness you will never move past the small echo chamber of your own worldview.
I enjoy our discussions as well
peace
If you mean the review by Haag: I don’t think he quite understood what I was aiming at in my article. In fact I feel unfairly reviewed. That’s surprising to me because I respect Haag very much as a scholar and as an expert on Sellars.
I think that Jonathan Edwards treatment of religious affections should be required reading for this conversation.
http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/religaffect/ratoc.html#toc
From the book
quote:
Affections that are truly spiritual and gracious, do arise from those influences and operations on the heart, which are spiritual, supernatural and divine.
end quote:
If that is true then the context of this conversation (supernatural verses natural) behooves us to understand the difference between truly spiritual and gracious affections and those that are not.
In the book he details how to do just that
peace
That is true only if you assume that the affects of personal choice are undetectable. I see no reason to make that assumption. Even if I’m wrong and consciousness is empirically undetectable that does not mean it does not exist.
You might want to check out the conversation surrounding my “method”
peace
No one who owns a rat terrier could ever be accused of being a cruel and unfeeling monster, you must be mistaken.
That idea was just entertaining theatre based on the old Zoroastrian idea of good vs evil, a typical example of our human obsession with false dichotomies. Whether it enlightens at all, if you assume the logical possibility of producing identical copies, I see no logical barrier to producing identical copies of a live human (of course they would have to be created simultaneously and would only be identical at that instant and diverge from then on).
But as I said, I don’t think we learn much from the exercise.
🙂
Good grief!!!
Alan Fox,
Again, imagine that we use Asimov’s idea of a universal duplicator. (Asimov gave it to traders as a tool to produce goods not humans). Given an original, we can churn out exact copies of any artefact. We use Captain Kirk as the original and produce a perfect copy.
Ist person POV, both Kirks are the original and the other the copy. They both have identical memories, experience, etc. The machine operator knows who the copy is unless he takes his eyes off the pair or fails to mark them in some way. Anyone else who didn’t see (I imagine two photo booths, one occupied initially, then both) cannot tell them apart in any fashion other than asking the operator.
Still don’t know what we learn from this.
ETA PS
I’m reminded of Dennett’s dismissal of Chalmers’ philosophical zombies.
That possibility alone means that the supernatural should not be ruled out of science.
peace
Whilst the “supernatural” remains invisible to detection, unentailed, unhypothesized, science has no tools for investigation of the subject. It has to remain in the realm of philosophical speculation.
Dennett is a hack, anyone who would posit that consciousness is an illusion deserves ridicule. That a philosopher can make such a blatantly illogical claim and get away with it is testament to something on our society I’m just not sure what
Illusions can only occur when a being is conscious.
I’m not sure why that needs to be said out loud
LOL
peace
How do you know it’s invisible to detection?
In this thread I hypothesized that I could tell the difference between my wife and an exact physical replica.
You said that it’s possible to create such a replica.
I say let the experimentation begin.
peace
Consciousness! Another undefined philosophical concept!
Me neither. Your presuppositionalism is showing. 🙂
Less talk and more action. You’ve waffled through many threads claiming you can distinguish such things. Do it rather than claim it.
ETA than
In this case the presupposition is that the law of non-contradiction continues to be valid.
peace
As a Dennettian intuition pump, we can use these thought experiments to throw doubt on philosophical definitions of personal identity as being psychological continuity.
Philosophers call thought experiments involving Star Trek transporter accidents ‘fission’.
Whether you value such philosophical argumentation is of course another matter.
Fission at SEP:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/#Fis
Come on fifth! Let’s see some action.
1) Produce the exact physical replica and I will
2) What would it take to convince you that I did do it?
peace
BruceS,
I see that. I’m just not convinced philosophers have learnt from neuroscience (apart from KN and Dennett). Because something is hard or intractable to explain physically is not carte blanche to claim “supernatural!”.
fifthmonarchyman,
Your claim, your job. (Or admit you got nothing!)
I have another thread a method and a multiyear observation of weather forecasts contrasted with recorded temperatures devoted to just that.
I’m just interested to know if you think that is sufficient and if not why not.
forecasts are not exact physical replicas of actual temperatures but perhaps they will suffice.
peace
Again, something is not supernatural simply because it’s inexplicable by known physics.
It’s supernatural if it is not reducible to physics
peace
I don’t think you demonstrated anything regarding ability to distinguish the history of patterns from their current state. Did I miss something? Can you link or summarize?
First give me something and I can then tell you whether it approaches “sufficient”.
That makes no sense. The whole point of the thought experiments is whether distinguishing exact replicas is logically possible. Science says there is no way to distinguish two particles (such as two electrons) from each other. Extrapolate that to two identical configurations of particles. When do we hit a limit that there is some difference?
ETA PS
And there is no way to tell the age of a particle. For a stable particle, a proton, say, it might be the product of a nuclear decay an instant ago or existed since the dawn of the universe. No way to tell when things are ageless and identical.
Of course. The onus is on anyone to demonstrate the existence (or the impinging on reality) of the supernatural. That would be fun and, for me, would require quite a bit of re-evaluation. I remain open to the possibility of being disappointed.
I am just now laying the ground work with the method. Before I can post results we need to be in agreement as to what if anything it proves.
It does not work that way. I want to pin you down so that you can’t move the goalposts after the fact.
I would say it has to do with the concept of computability
Some things can’t be modeled exactly no matter how you try. One of them is human consciousness.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.0126.pdf
If as you say a human can be physically modeled exactly then it necessarily follows that there is something to human consciousness that is not reducible to physics.
peace
Why? What does my agreement matter? And how can I tell you what something proves without seeing it?
You need to read more philosophy. Many philosophers are well acquainted with neuroscience and their philosophical projects are about how each can inform the other. That includes phil of mind, phil of language, phil of free will, etc
Well, how can you demonstrate that something that doesn’t produce any sort of ripple in the universe exists? As soon as anything is amenable to scientific observation and experiment, in my book it’s not “supernatural”, it’s a real phenomenon.
That seems to be an insurmountable paradox.
Perhaps I should also ask what neuroscientists currently working in the field regard as useful input from philosophers?
Sort of like natural selection you mean?
Not at all.
“Exactly” seems new.
That’s just false. Dennett doesn’t think that consciousness is an illusion.
Some philosophers who use neuroscience in their work: Andy Clark, Bryce Huebner, Tad Zadwidzki, Jesse Prinz, Kathleen Akins, Karen Neander, Shaun Gallagher, Tony Chemero, Dan Hutto, Alva Noe, Adina Roskies, and Gregg Caruso.
You’d have to ask them! It depends on whether they are interested in the philosophical issues of neuroscience and whether they have the time to develop that interest. But I can tell you that quite a few neuroscientists have read and learned from Dennett, Churchland, Clark, and a few others. And I know one neuroscientist who thinks very highly of Neander’s The Mark of the Mental.
Maybe you should take the time to work out what Dennett actually means. While I don’t agree with him, his claim is not the obvious nonsense that you take it to be.
You think the statement that some organisms leave more offspring than others, and that this has the effect of increasing the frequency of alleles they carry in the population, is untestable speculation? Fascinating.
Yup! If 4 out of 100.000 of the the offspring in the population survive, how does one test that natural selection did it? This would be fascinating…🤔
Good question. I’m not familiar enough with the field to answer: I’d want to look at number of joint papers, joint conferences, books which incorporate both and are meant to be read by both.
I suspect you’d find that the day-to-day “problem-solving” work is less influenced that the work which sets overall direction and research programs. Quick thoughts: Free will by eg Libet, all the work on consciousness which was respectable in philosophy long before in science, work on the nature of embodied language.
Well, they ARE considered the BIG TWO, I believe.
Kantian Naturalist,
Yeah, but for some here, there’s just the two of you.
Only conscious beings can love to do something. You are constantly substituting words by their synonyms, but it doesn’t matter one iota. To love, to hate, to have urges, to have aversions, to feel affections,to feel inclinations all require the ability to consciously perceive things.