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?
With the understanding that “Men” in the first sentence is not a reference to a gender but to humans in general I would say those are sentiments I whole heartily share.
I don’t know who wrote that quote so hopefully I did not just set myself up for a zinger.
I would say that the Puritans are one of the most misunderstood groups in all of history.
They certainly had their faults and were creatures of their time but most of what we think of as modern liberal democracy owes it’s origin to their thinking and the thinking of the equally misunderstood anabaptists.
Trying to negotiate life as a small community of believers in a wider world that was generally hostile to them led these folks to rediscover all sorts of things in the Bible that had been mostly forgotten for a millennium.
peace
Thanks. No zinger. Just stuff I’ve been thinking about.
Oh, and the quote is from A. O. Lindsay, who wrote a couple of great books on democratic theory (and was a believer).
Well shut my mouth!!!!! Who would have thunk it.
You should check out the lives and political writings of folks like Roger Williams and Isaac Backus
Here is a little verse from circa 1643 to wet your appetite
quote:
Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood;
Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good.
Of one blood God made Him, and Thee and All,
As wise, as fair, as strong, as personal.
end quote:
Roger Williams
That sentiment is nothing short of astonishing for the time
While you are at it.
I also suggest checking out the thinking of the Levelers and even the Fifth Monarchy Men. 😉
Just make sure you look at primary sources when ever possible. Like I said these folks are very often highly misunderstood.
peace
I have read some Lilburn and Cartwright. Also Ireton. I’m working on a book on democratic theory.
You are truly an enigma.
Good luck with the book. It sounds like you definitely are on the right track!!!!
peace
Thanks.
How do you eliminate the supernatural if you don’t know what the cause is?
Even more ,how can you eliminate supernatural causation for anything with an omnipotent deity ?
Would that demon would know mechanisms of evolution? Would it know populations genetics? The quote implies all it does know is positions of atomic particles (needs a QM demon 2.0, of course).
Would it know 2LT? Or any science theory involving macrostates?
Macrostates are the source of and home of causes in human science, except for fundamental physics, where there are neither macrostates nor causes, due to time reversibility.
According to the video I linked above, macrostates and their casual relations are the sources of the shortcuts to reliable knowledge that the demon would find so difficult to understand. This fact is related to the justification for non-reducibility in phil of science.
This is probably just me being dumb, but once you accept that you can build a person by assembling the appropriate molecules in a certain configuration, does that not mean that you also accept that persons are in fact reducible to physics?
I agree with all of that! I understand it to be Peircean ends of inquiry approach to truth, so I also agree pragmatism is part of discerning the nature of truth, and that truth is something that is in some sense grounded in the “right” methods of inquiry. (But not just method of inquiry: truth also depends on testing consistency of our theories of all lines of inquiry).
But I take another step which I believe you do not. I say we can use the success of science in making novel predictions from its theories as part of an argument for scientific realism. By ‘scientific realism’, I mean that scientific models say something true about the non-observable entities they postulate. I accept that they do and that they thereby latch onto something of the world “as-it-is”.
I believe from previous exchanges that you reject this and instead see science as only a tool for successful prediction which cannot tell us anything beyond the world as structured by human-dependent conceptual schemes.
Fitting real patterns into scientific realism is something I need to understand better from the philosophers who have tried to do so.
You are skating over the very real issue of the current limitations of our knowledge. Stating that something isn’t reducible to physics is a claim that we understand exactly what physics can explain, and what it cannot. This presupposes perfect knowledge that none of us possess. In the absence of that, we need to reserve space for potential future developments in our understanding of physics that might one day provide explanations that we today believe cannot exist.
This is not fanciful, it has happened before. Many times before. Many, many times before. We should learn from that, or forever be prone to making the mistake of the God of the Gaps.
IMHO, there is an even bigger problem with saying that “all causes are reducible to [fundamental] physics”. Namely, there are no causes in fundamental physics!
The laws of fundamental physics are time reversible and the usual understanding of cause is that it is asymmetric in time: the past caused the present and the present causes the future.
This gets complicated if you accept block universe/eternalism as your theory of the metaphysics of time because past, present, future all exist, so that time asymmetry becomes an issue. So you have to bring in macrostates, I think, to help define cause.
Macrostates are by definition not part of fundamental physics. So there are still no causes in fundamental physics, but for different reasons.
Having no causes in fundamental physics also means that we have to re-examine the “causal closure” arguments for physicalism and the relation of causal closure, if any, to methodological naturalism in science. But that is a different topic.
walto,
Is there an OP in that diagram and the related thinking?
As long as you are exploring this sort of stuff why not go back to the very beginning and check out 1st Corinthians.
The word for church really means something like congress.
The first Christians really saw themselves as forming a sort of world government in exile like the free French in WWII. It was to model and establish and extend the reign of the Messiah on earth. Each individual church was to be an outpost of that radical new government.
This was to be government where everyone is completely equal is yet everyone has different gifts and purposes as appointed by God.
A good chunk of 1st Corinthians is an attempt to nail down how business should be conducted in that governing body.
Here is a little taste
quote:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
(1Co 12:12-27)
end quote:
peace
Since I never made that claim I don’t see the relevance of your answer. My point is that resorting to the ‘supernatural’ as an explanation for something that is currently unexplainable by physics is the God of the Gaps fallacy, and the correct position to take would be to simply declare its origin as unknown.
No it only presupposes the law of non-contradiction. Physical and spiritual are opposites.
Now it’s theoretically possible that we could come to find that the spiritual (or the physical) does not exist but the spiritual will never be reduced to the physical.
That is logically impossible
peace
I don’t accept that you can build a person by assembling the appropriate molecules in a certain configuration. If you could that would mean a person is reducible to physics.
That does not prohibit a person from existing when the appropriate molecules exist in a certain configuration.
peace
Again it’s not about explanation it’s about being not reducible. These are not the same thing
peace
Sorry for lack of clarity in my response. It was meant as a direct reply to FMM’s reply that you were commenting on. I directed it you not because I disagreed with your point, but rather because I thought there was another, deeper issue with FMMs claim.
But it does imply that merely getting the molecular configuration correct is insufficient to create a person. Yet that is all that happens in the teletransportation scenario (it is less clear in the original Thomas Reid quote).
This is why I supposed that you expected Kirk to be dead on arrival.
Exactly how strange and unexplainable does life have to become, in your estimation, for it to be not a fallacy, but rather a reasonable conclusion?
Some would say the origin of life is proof enough of some outside force. The big bang? But ok, some are stubborn and want to reject that, so what is next? the consistency of physical laws? Nope, some still won’t budge. Consciousness? Na, just because we can’t explain it…still no.
Fine tuning of the universe? Well, maybe its because there are infinite universes.
The DNA code? Its a code, but maybe its a natural code…
So now, we have quantum mechanics. What natural explanation is there for that, other than it is? That’s not strange enough for some to say, Gee, that is so beyond our imagination, it should at least give us pause for thought. And then it goes further, quantum entanglement, over vast swaths of the universe! That’s still not supernatural enough for some to say, wait a minute, isn’t this what we would have called the supernatural 500 years ago? Wouldn’t that be something like the footprint of a God?
But then, there are skeptics. For them, nothing will ever be enough. Just like if the stars aligned to spell out God, some have suggested that still wouldn’t do it for them. In that case, it seems many are so willing to ignore EVERY evidence, and just say, well, just because we can’t explain why God is sitting right in front of me and telling me he is God, that doesn’t mean it is real. I could just be a computer simulation, made to think it is real…
So for many, no evidence will ever be evidence.
Maybe. The main thing to think about there is whether “one person, one vote” ought to suggest that people are equal or votes should be “declared equal.” I think it’s interesting that if one starts from the Protestant “we’re all God’s chillun”–indeed his priests–so we all must be equal” you can “derive” both that votes should be equal and that they must not be considered equal! That’s the fun thing, and that’s what I wanted FMM to comment on from his Protestant perspective (which, I take it isn’t too far from some of the earliest democrats during Cromwell’s time).
I guess the stuff regarding “interpersonal measures of intensity” that comes in there can be tied in to the discussion here about pragmatism, scientific realism, etc., etc. Because, you know, everything is related to everything else. I mean, once you take a position in philosophy, you’re bound to be stuck with lots of seemingly other positions everywhere else–whether you realize it or not. And then you may really not like one of the new things you’re seem stuck with, so you have to start the “reflective equilibrium” game.
I just hope that the “real truth” of these matters doesn’t come down to the stuff you’re reading in fundamental physics and philosophy of science! Maybe that I don’t think so comes from my aversion to studying that!
A. I take it that if Xs are all reducible to physical laws and physical entities then Xs are reducible to physics. So if there’s nothing funny about the molecules making up Kirk (or a facsimile that’s a person even if not Kirk) and they’re put together without any magic, you’ve reduced persons to physics. (But if this perfect facsimile ISN’T Kirk, it seems there must be something magical about personal identity, even if we can make persons through science. That’s weird and why the Reidian/Parfitian thought experiments are cool.)
B. I’m not sure FMM put what I think he wanted to say here quite right. Those two sentences may both be true, but they’re not “contrary.” Descartes didn’t think persons could be reduced to physics either.
Yeah, that’s good. Thanks.
I find life strange and unexplainable enough as it is.
I am not a fan of positing ever more and more convoluted explanations without actually providing the evidence that they are more than mere conjecture. I much prefer an honest statement of ignorance, coupled with continued searching for possible explanations backed up with real evidence.
I don’t know. As a geologist I have come to accept quite a lot of very incredible things (deep time, plate tectonics, mountain bulding to name a few) on the basis of the evidence, so I am not too worried that there is a limit to what I would accept – if the evidence is there.
What would evidence for the supernatural look like? Do we have any of it? Could there be other explanations for that evidence? Would those be more or less likely than positing some supernatural (which basically means undefined) origin? How could we tell the difference?
Those are the sort of considerations we should think about.
Right, that’s the basic driver of my philosophical study program: how to have a consistent set of views aligned with my vague intuitive preferences for naturalism, scientific realism, non-reducibility between the various sciences.
Does “intensities” in your quoted phrase refer to relative strength of personal preferences?
I don’t think fundamental physics has any interesting role. Persons and their agency are all emergent and it seems to me that the stuff in your diagram is in turn partly dependent on and even perhaps emerges from the (normed?) actions of agents.
I don’t believe that persons can be reduced to a bottom up build from molecules. You also need to add the plan for how to organize. Such a plan can only be learned from studies of higher level sciences, including the social sciences and philosophy (eg moral and political).
Of course, I am assuming you are not relying the time-honoured route for building people, ie conception and birth and encultured development.
I wonder if the notion of authority you are talking about can somehow be related to the purported authority of science within its domain of knowledge. I’ll wait for the OP if you do it to expand on that thought.
I did learn of an interesting book which discusses authority in knowledge based on the workings of Wikipedia. Podcast and book link here
https://newbooksnetwork.com/thomas-leitch-wikipedia-u-knowledge-authority-and-literal-education-in-the-digital-age-johns-hopkins-up-2014/
Yes, or whatever you take to be important in improving social situations–say happiness or satisfaction of desires or whatever.
I don’t remember mentioning authority at all and I don’t know exactly what you’re asking here.
I thought Parfit says fissioning shows there cannot be a consistent notion of personal identity, only of persons. So no duplicates of Kirk if that includes the notion of personal identity.
In any event, the fundamental physics that we currently accept prohibits exact duplicates of quantum state (no cloning theorem). A possible workaround would be to claim that some set of macrostates (each a collection of quantum microstates) would suffice to build a person similar to Kirk.
But then there an argument that there is key quantum-level information in neural connections and processes, meaning exact duplicates would still be impossible since the impossible quantum level cloning would be needed. Lacking such quantum level cloning, there may be detailed differences in eg memories or dispositions.
I realize this appeal to quantum state assumes supervenience on the physical, but I only need some sense weak enough to still allow non-reducibility because of issues in previous post.
The problem is not in the theoretical,but determining what is irreducible because it is supernatural and what irreducible because we do not yet have the necessary tools and knowledge.
Oops, misread the printing in your title. ‘Majoritarianism’ needed mr google now that I see what you actually printed. But after absorbing that wiki definition, would it not involve some story of how elected bodies gain their authority?
That’s a good, info-rich post, Bruce, with a lot of stuff I either don’t understand or know very little about (or both) in it. But I take that it represents how someone who has taken the time to study these matters in light of current physics is likely to respond to FMM’s personal identity thought experiment. I’m not sure what to conclude from it though–assuming everything in that synopsis is dead right–regarding the results of this “test.” So it would be interesting to me for you and FMM to hash out what, again assuming all this stuff about what “quantum cloning” can and cannot do is correct, ought to be inferred about the supernatural, God, or whatever the hell the “test” is supposed to suggest.
I’ll stay tuned, hoping to see that conversation.
But if a member is added or removed is it still the body of Christ?
Yes, that’s a fair assessment of my view.
I should add that I did not always think that way. This view comes from studying human cognition. For there to be the kind of truth that you want, we would need truth receptors. So maybe ask the biologists and physiologists to find them. But I think they will tell you that they do not exist.
Yes, we do have a tendency to ascribe truth where it does not belong — such as to scientific theories. This is all part of social consensus building. I don’t have a problem with that. However, in my opinion, philosophers (or, at least, analytic philosophers) ought to take a stricter view of truth.
In looking at human cognition or at animal cognition, I look at the problems an organism faces and the methods available to solve those problems. And truth is nowhere involved in that. Yes, I need to make use of truth in my own descriptive methods. But I see no role of truth between an organism and its world. I see only pragmatics. Or to say all of that differently, I use truth in my thinking about this, but there is nowhere that I can see where it is useful for the organism to use our truth. The organism has to make do with whatever decision making ability it has, and that amounts to pragmatics.
I guess I should add that pragmatics arise from biology. “Survival of the fittest” is pragmatics at work.
No. Truth doesn’t require that anybody knows it–or even believes it.
Roughly 230,000 would have to be added or removed as discussed elsewhere.
My current assumption is that you could build a person that way. That is to say, the Star Trek transporter could, in principle work.
To say that a person is reducible to physics would require, in addition, that physics can tell us which configurations of molecules would work. And I don’t see physics as able to do that. So, in my view, a person is not reducible to physics.
I think reducible to physics is shorthand for no supernatural component.
Agreed. It can be just like any other human invented god. And philosophy can be just another human invented religion.
I don’t think you’ve quite got this right because of an ambiguity in the term “invention.” Consider a painting. It was made by a human being. But that doesn’t rob it of its objectivity. You have a thought, that thought is an event that has happened in the world. You may have made it, but it has been made. So neither the painting nor the thought is like a “human invented God”–They exist, the God doesn’t.
In the case of truth, nobody is inventing anything. If the painting exists, it’s true the painting exists. If the God does not exist, it’s true that the God does not exist.
We have criteria that we can, at least in principle, use to determine whether the painting exists.
The criteria come from humans.
We do not have such criteria for the existence of God. Humans who talk about God have not been able to get their act together well enough to establish criteria.
That’s basically Plantinga’s EEAN, but without God to give us mechanisms for truth outside of evolution. The latter is the version put forwards by Donald Hoffman.
The counter would be an IBE to truth-seeking since it is needed for organisms to be successful in finding affordances in the world and in avoiding predators or other dangerous situations. Such a mechanism does not have to be perfect, just more reliable that not. For how can it be reliable unless it tracks something real? That gets you everyday realism of observables (affordances).
Given that, one then one argues the the processes of science build on that to extend it to unobservables postulated by theories.
I agree such an argument is still a work in progress. But it would beg the question to assume it is impossible from the start.
Of course, I agree that issues of the nature of truth are philosophical, not scientific. I may have said that myself from time to time…
FWIW, I’ve have read arguments that scientists who seek truth will be more successful in creating scientifically-recognized theory that those who merely seek predicative success, but those arguments are not particularly popular as far as I know, so I won’t try to rehearse them.
I don’t know what definition of religion allows you to classify philosophy that way. As best I can tell, you use the word as a synonym for things you dislike.
All agreed. And helps make my point about truth, actually.
But it’s actually NOT a truth that anybody sensible wants. It’s a kind of truth that Neil uses to beg the question against there being any such thing as truth.
Not really. I mean, he couldn’t use it as a synonym for anchovies or Nazism or identity politics or bad movies. He’s just saying that philosophy is no better than religion because he thinks only his own version of what the world is like is acceptable and he doesn’t think he’s doing either philosophy or religion. But he actually IS doing (mediocre) philosophy.
That only requires pragmatism. It does not require truth.
I’m not denying that there is such a thing as truth. I am only denying that it is human-independent.
Fair enough. One needs to flash out the IBE to show why continually adjusting conceptual schemes based on action and feedback adjusts our schemes in a way that statements made frommeet a philosophical standard for truth. Truth, that is, in some sense of referring to/latching onto something real in the everyday world.
The stuff KN and I discuss regarding accuracy norms for mental representations addresses similar issues.
I am not sure if success semantics for truth/accuracy works for those philosophical approaches to truth. That is one approach that I think is consistent with the Peircean/consistency model of truth I mentioned before. But I worry it may circular for this IBE (success = truth because truth leads to success!). So work to be done to go that way.
Finally, just to connect the dots as I see them, that IBE I mention is related to the one that I think was referred to in the my previously-linked article as a counter to the “Worst Argument in the World”.
I think both arguments stink, if that helps clarify where I am coming from on the issue.
Seems to be a version of the truth-relativism discussion in the fact/opinion thread: if it is true for you, then it is true.
As a possible counter to that purely subjective version of truth, one could I suppose try an appeal to common. intersubjective conceptual schemes as taking you beyond individual relativism. But then, you are still stuck with relativism for standards of fact versus opinion (or for measurement of successful prediction if one tried successful prediction as a way out of that form of relativism).